Author Archives: thezman

Holiday Creep

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When I first started working as a kid, one “bonus week” during the school year was Thanksgiving. I got to work on Friday and Saturday, rather than just Saturday. All businesses were open on the Friday after Thanksgiving, not just retailers. Almost everyone worked that day, because for hourly workers, you had to work the day before and day after a holiday to get paid for it. Companies that hired kids for part-time work would have set aside menial jobs just for the part-timers to do on that Friday.

That is not true today. I have no clients that open on Friday. Even my clients that do business internationally give their US people off the Friday after Thanksgiving. Many manufacturers that run two shifts will close Thursday and the first shift on Friday. It has become, for most Americans, a four day holiday. In fact, it is starting to become a five day weekend, as many people use their personal time to take Wednesday. This year, the traffic on the interstate was busiest Tuesday night rather than Wednesday.

Something similar is happening with Christmas. I have noticed this year that my e-mail traffic has slowed to a trickle and the commute to the office is light. The kids are still in school, but lots of people are using accumulated personal time to make a short week. Or, maybe two short weeks. Since Monday is the holiday, people are using two vacation days this week and three the next week. Christmas and New Year’s Day have made for a two week period where nothing much gets done, as many people are off on holiday.

When America had a manufacturing base, it was not unusual for employers to close the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, as that was when maintenance was performed, inventories were done and so forth. While the lines might have been idle, the office people were still working and many of the production staff were in doing other things. The line workers were forced to use their vacation time if they were not called in for inventory or maintenance. Otherwise, this time of years was business as usual.

Employers gave workers off for Christmas Day, but they were expected to work a full day on Christmas Eve. Again, as a kid, I had off from school at this time so it was a chance to earn some money. The years when Christmas was on a weekend, it was not a paid holiday, unless you normally worked on weekends. That day before and day after stuff applied to Christmas too. The really generous employers would send their office people home after lunch on Christmas Eve, often after a company paid-for lunch.

Holiday creep in America is mostly due to technology and leisure. Despite our troubles and our looming problems, we are a rich country by the standards of world history. The fact is many people in offices today are performing nonsense work anyway. The amount of money spent on compliance with government regulations, industry quality standards and mitigation against litigation is substantial. The hens in the HR department could be replaced by robots if not for the need to police the ranks for multicultural violations.

Even nonsense takes a holiday. That is another aspect of this. Around the Imperial Capital, they used to announce on snow days that only essential personnel needed to report to work. Everyone chuckled because they knew it meant all government workers would be home, as none of them were essential. Now, they say “Federal workers are to use liberal leave or telecommute.” It is not just the government though. Lots of work in the dreaded private sector is busy work, so giving people more time off is often a net benefit to business.

There is also the fact that attitudes are changing. When America was run by white men, people were defined by what they did for a living. Not working meant you were not needed, which meant you were unimportant. In a world run by hormonal white women, everyone is defined by their latest autoethnographic postings on Facebook. Quality time at home with the cats is now a sign of status. Personal time off, flexible work hours and the ability to “work” from home are the new status symbols of American society.

The reason this is possible is we are a post-scarcity society. Even our poor people are fat and over indulged. Drive through the West Baltimore ghetto next Monday and you will see empty cartons for game consoles, big screen TV’s and other luxury items. Jamal may be headed to court next week, but he is going to get a season of NBA 2K18 in before he has to report to prison. We are a society where work is less and less important, because we have an excess of everything. There is a limit to how much stuff people want to buy.

Whether or not the creeping holiday phenomenon is a good thing is hard to know. Some things are both good and bad or neither. Most people reading this were trained to think hard work built character so a desire to work was a sign of good character. That is a perfectly sensible belief in a world of scarcity. In a post-scarcity society, one where automation is increasing taking over human labor, maybe those sentiments about work are counter productive. Maybe the way forward is self-actualizing leisure.

Regardless, it is a short day for me as I am taking Friday off to have a four day weekend.

Privileged Identity Exploration Model

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Twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in an education camp, run by a lesbian and a Ghanaian. We had been force marched to the camp by our company’s human resource department. Everyone in the camp was white, but most of inmates were women. The point of the exercise was to lecture us about discrimination and racism. I came very close to being sent to the hot-box for pointing out to the Ghanaian that he chose to leave a black country and come to America. He was welcome to return, if he did not like it in America.

All joking aside, the funny part of the exchange was that the Ghanaian obviously never thought much about what he was doing. The company offered him this cushy gig where he spent a few hours a month lecturing white people about racism. It was better than working so he never bothered to think it through until I confronted him. The poor guy was so upset by the experience that he quit being the diversity counselor. It turned out that having the whip hand on whitey was more work than he was willing to do, so he quit.

The other thing that I recall about the camp was a women with a last name that looked like an eye chart. She was pretty and very polite, but she did not like being in diversity camp one bit. She tore into the lesbian about the fact it was just an excuse to lecture white men, which at the time was a keen observation. The prevailing opinion at the time was that the diversity movement was just a cover for giving blacks jobs they could not do, in order to make the company brochure look good. This gal saw where it was heading right away.

Here we are in the current year and that’s a reality that most everyone has figured out, even if no one bothers saying it. In fact, the casual acceptance of this reality is quite remarkable. The most under represented group in America now is white men. Look around the college campus, the government office or the workplace and that is the reality. One-legged trans-black Elvis impersonators have a box they can tick, but the straight white man has no box. This is the thing everyone knows, but no one dares mention in public.

All mass movements need a bogeyman, but the anti-white crusaders are struggling to find examples of evil white men, who are oppressing the the good people. Sure, the perverts, who decorate the news of late all look white, but, well, you know. Larry David tried to point this out, but we are so far down the taboo cul-de-sac that it is impossible to turn back. The white women will keep yelling “he touched me” until the last white-looking man is driven from the media, even if it is starting to look like a scene from Schindler’s List.

That’s what I suspect is at the root of the white privilege nonsense. Rather than locate an actual bad white man and haul him into the public square to be pilloried, they have invented this miasma they call “privilege.” It’s not actually privilege, as in a special right or immunity from certain laws. Instead it is a mysterious force that can only be realized through a set of sacred rituals. A shaman of sorts, usually called a diversity counselor, guides the white person through the process so they can see their privilege.

That’s what you see in this article about Privileged Identity Exploration Model being used at universities, to help white people overcome their whiteness, so they can engage in social justice causes. It’s a lot like brainwashing, where the initiate is forced to deny reality to the point where they no longer trust their own eyes. Instead, they accept whatever the cult leader tells them. It’s also reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, where intellectuals were forced to confess to crimes that they did not commit, because they did not exist.

It is easy to be offended by this stuff. That’s intentional. As Theodore Dalrymple observed about communist regimes, the point is to humiliate.

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Modern society is riddled with special privileges. We even have a term in the law, protected class, which is the name for groups that have special rights. The trouble is those special set-asides and carve-outs only make sense if there is the evil white man lurking around every corner. The stunning lack of evil white men has forced these people to create a mystery version, one that only exists in the imagination of the offender, after they are properly coached in the Privileged Identity Exploration Model.

I should note the Maoist flavor to all of this campus activism. It is rather stunning just how similar the social justice warriors are to the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. What that suggests is the non-whites launching these campaigns on campus see themselves as the victors of the culture war. Their aim now is to solidify their position by sweeping up the remaining pockets of resistance. Mao Zedong did not launch the Cultural Revolution from a position of weakness. He thought he was working from a position of strength.

Strangely, that’s the glimmer of hope. While the Red Guards were running wild, reformers were quietly organizing to put an end to Maoist communism. These reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, took over after the death of Mao and set about the task of rooting out Maoism. Five years after Mao died, the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”.

Professor Sherry K. Watt should enjoy her time on campus.

Elephants

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Watch a TV show or movie from the 60’s or 70’s that touched on current events and you are likely to see a character mentioning something about Africa. Biafra was important for a while. Eritrea once got the attention of Americans. Zaire was another African country that turned up in popular media. Read anything about Progressive politics from the era and African causes were all the rage. The New Left was deeply into liberation movements and Africa was where the last European colonies were gaining independence. Africa was cool.

Of course, the 1980’s brought South Africa to center stage for the America Left. It was the easiest way to be pro-black, without having to move to Oakland. Lefty could be super-pro-black, from the safety of the college campus or Hollywood studio. In one of life’s little ironies, one of Mel Gibson’s biggest films featured him fighting South Africans, who were portrayed by actors obviously directed to act like Nazis. Everyone knew South Africa was going to be the example that proved Africans could run a first world country.

No one talks about Africa very much these days. On the college campus, the word “de-colonization” still pops up in papers, but it is now used by mentally unstable feminist academics in their howling about white men. No serious person talks about colonialism or what happened to the former colonies. Even South America is ignored by the American commentariat, other than to praise the wonderfulness of immigration. What used to be called the Third World has largely been forgotten by our Progressive rulers.

The reason for this is Africa, in particular, stands as proof against everything the modern Left says about the human condition. There are no success stories in Africa. Botswana is the closest you get, but it remains one of the poorest places on earth. The rest of Africa is a collection of failed states and basket-cases. Sierra Leone, for example, is no longer able to maintain its water supply and power grid. Nigeria is in a low-grade civil war with Muslims and Zimbabwe is the glaring example of the African failed state.

No one talks much about Africa for this reason. Whenever it pops into the news, the American media handles the topic like a skunk at a garden party. They crinkle up their noses, get through the story and then forget about it. American troops are conducting operations in Niger and no one seems to care. It is why the end of Robert Mugabe has largely been ignored. Rhodesia, as it was called under white rule, was a great Progressive cause 40 years ago. Now it just another story of Africans discrediting the narrative.

You see, Africa is the example that counters everything our Progressive rulers believe about the world. If the blank slate is true, then Africans should have made great strides in closing the gap with the white world. If things like “institutional racism” were real things, Africa should be racing toward modernity now. If colonialism was the reason these places were so backward, a half century of freedom should have gone a long way toward curing the effects of the white man. Instead. everywhere Africa is worse than a half century ago.

The response from our Progressive rulers is to just ignore Africa. You see it in this National Review article on the end of Mugabe’s rule. The authoress is young, so she was poached in the warm liquids of multiculturalism her whole life. Her struggle to explain the decline of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe reads like a person trying to disarm a bomb while blindfolded. She not only avoids the elephant in the room, which is race, she leaves the reader with the impression that there is no such thing as elephants. Race does not exist.

That is why Africa stopped being important to our Progressive rulers. It is why the efforts of George Bush to do something about AIDS in Africa was largely ignored. You cannot talk about Africa without talking about race and race realism. Those are taboo subjects, so the whole continent may as well not exist. Bring up the subject in a room full of Progressives and watch their reaction. You will not see fear. It will be confusion. The subject has been purged from the catechism, so it no longer exists. Africa is not cool anymore.

That is why Africa should be a central topic on this side of the river. It is the easiest way for the normie on the other side to begin his journey. It is a topic where the facts are so stark, it is easy to understand the basics of human biodiversity, evolution and the cognitive differences between groups of humans. The group characteristics on display in Africa, also look like what Americans see on their televisions. There is also the great divide between East and West. The Dark Continent is a living museum of human evolution.

Africa is also a useful lever against Lefty. Most of what our Progressive rulers say is some sort of moral posturing. Talking about the most important graph in the world is a good way to turn that against them.  A good rule of life is to always focus on what Lefty is trying to ignore. It usually means they fear the topic. Africa is the biggest elephant in the room right now, in terms of demographics. Lefty wants you to believe there are no elephants, so it is a good time to fall in love with the elephants.

The River’s Edge

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Reorganizing a bookshelf, the other day, I found a book that I was sure I had read a few years ago, but I had no memory of it. Looking it over, I realized I never did read it, so I put it in the queue. For some reason, I read a lot more in the winter than the summer, so I can knock out a book every few days. The book in question is Why Nations Fail, by economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. It was a big seller back in 2012 when it came out. That is probably why I bought it, but for some reason I never read it.

The book starts out describing the city of Nogales, which straddles the border between Mexico and the United States. The authors point out that the part of the city on the US side is fairly safe, well organized and reasonably prosperous, for that part of the country. The part of the city on the Mexico side is riddled with corruption, rocket high crime rates and grinding poverty. They quickly point out that the demographics of both halves are about the same, so the only possible explanation for the difference is the institutions.

What they do not mention is that the Mexican half of Nogales is attached to Mexico, a land full of Mexicans. The American side is attached to a country not full of Mexicans, at least not yet. Nogales is an hour south of Tucson, which is more than 50% white. Arizona is now 60% non-Hispanic white and only about 4% black. Further, the Hispanic population is mostly the El Norte variety. In other words, it is good demographics that results in those good institutions. They do not go there. In fact, they never go there.

The book runs through a bunch of examples of how institutions can make or break a society. They even travel back in time to examine how events like revolutions or wars broke old bad institutions, allowing for good institutions to flourish. The English Civil War comes up multiple times, to explain how the Industrial Revolution started there first. They spend a considerable amount of time talking about colonialism, to explain how the bad institutions created by the West, forever crippled their former colonies.

Again and again, the authors work backwards from present economics, through politics and history to arrive at institutions as the first cause. As a survey of world history, it is interesting. The authors even accidentally make the point that serendipity has a huge role in history. They call this “critical junctures” and use a bunch of examples where a country’s elite chose poorly, but they can never ask the question, why did they choose poorly? Instead, they just treat that as the river’s edge, never bothering to go further.

In fact, that is the reason for the title of this post. The image that kept coming to mind while reading this book is of a group of explorers trying to find their way out of a valley. They keep ending up at the edge of a river. Instead of wading over to the other side, they wander around, sure that there must be some other way out. In this case, the river is culture. The authors stop at culture, never wondering what is beyond it, not because they fear what is on the other side, but because they do not seem to think there is another side.

That is what is so weird about this book. Usually, there is at least one section where the author goes to great pains to acknowledge the arguments from biological realism, but vigorously dismiss them as bad-think. That never happens here. Instead, it is as if the authors have never considered the possibility that Africa is the way it is because it is full of Africans. Instead, they just repeatedly make the point that poor countries have corrupt institutions, while rich countries have more open public institutions.

For instance, the authors write stuff like “World inequality exists because during the 19th and 20th century some nations were able to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution and the technologies and methods of organization that it brought, while others were unable to do so.” The implication of this is that the Industrial Revolution just happened by magic in England, instead of Botswana. The best they can muster is to point out that the English Civil War accelerated the end of feudalism in England, compared to the Continent.

One of the more comical bits is how they try to explain why Western nations did not fall back into despotism, like European colonies after independence. The answer is what they describe as a virtuous cycle, which is a special brand of magic that makes sure only white countries maintain open institutions. The serendipitous magic creates the inclusive institutions and then the magic of virtuous cycles keeps the magic flowing. Of course, there are the vicious cycles that work the opposite, but only on non-white countries.

It is tempting to think that the people on the blank slate side of the river know the truth, but they just prefer to carry on with the blank slate fantasy. In individual cases, which may be true, but a lot of people honestly believe that all people are the same everywhere, despite the mountain of evidence to contrary. Instead of reality causing doubts in their beliefs, they do like Acemoglu and Robinson. They invest all of their time and energy looking for the magic cause that explains reality, without contradicting the blank slate.

The result is we have this great divide in the West. I use the image of a river separating two groups of people. On the blank slate side of the river, they will come to water’s edge, but they never look across it, much less contemplate crossing it. On the other side, the biological realism side, the people wait patiently for the others to cross over, shouting words of encouragement to them. Every once in a while, a ferryman reaches the blank slate side and then picks up some people and brings them across the river.

We could use more ferrymen.

No Going Back

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The other day, someone on Gab said there was a time when he thought PJ Media was an edgy site on the Right. It seems a bit ridiculous now, but the venture was a radical thing a dozen years ago. Charles Johnson, this one, not this one, was the lead on exposing Dan Rather’s scheme to pass off the forged George Bush National Guard documents. That was big stuff in 2004. Bloggers in their pajamas, working from their basements, were able to take down the mainstream media and finish off the career of Dan Rather.

That was the birth of PJ Media, which was originally called Pajamas Media, owning the insult hurled at bloggers by CBS news executive Jonathan Klein. He was the guy who tried to brush off the critics by calling them losers sitting around in their pajamas. Like the word “deplorable” it quickly became a badge of honor. In retrospect, that incident was the start of alternative media and alternative politics. Initially it was a reaction to the excesses of liberal media, but as is often the case, it took on a life of its own.

Today, PJ Media is not edgy in the slightest. It serves an audience that still enjoys the old partisan hooting that was popular through the Bush years. That is true of all the sites that popped up in response to the liberal media’s attack on Bush. All of the edgy guys hired by outfits like National Review have become safe and boring. It is hard to imagine it today, but Jonah Goldberg was once the bad boy of National Review. A dozen years ago, snarky hipster conservatism was a thing. All the hipsters sold out or just got boring.

There is a lesson here. These first generation alternative media operations followed a pattern that has been observed in the third world. In Africa and South America, the colonies gained their independence and the assumption was they would either emulate Western style governments or implement some local version of democratic rule. Instead, the post-colonial rulers adopted the exploitative institutions that the old colonial powers had used to control the colonies. What worked for Britain worked for Siaka Stevens.

In other words, the first generation of right-wing alternative media sites fell into the same habits as the operations they were challenging. They could get an audience by challenging the legacy media, but in order to monetize that audience, they decided they had to adhere to the same moral framework as the legacy media. That meant running off anyone that colored outside the lines and assiduously avoiding taboo subjects. In a short time, they were the same sorts of moral enforcers for the Left they had criticized at the start.

One of the telling aspects about the Trump phenomenon was just how over-the-top many of these first wave alt-media types were in their opposition to Trump. Guys like Erick Erickson and Glenn Beck were such rabid Trump haters, it was assumed they were being paid to do it. PJ Media had a gaggle of unhinged Trump haters on their site. Red State turned itself into such a clown show, they endorsed Hillary Clinton. The hipster conservatives of a decade ago were now the squares wagging their fingers at the kids.

There are a couple of lessons here for the people forging ahead with alt-tech as well as alt-media. One is that to be an alternative, to truly challenge the status quo, the nature of the alternative has to be incompatible with the nature of the orthodoxy. Otherwise, the big fish devour the little fish, so the little fish of alternative media get gobbled up. This is why Andrew Torba is adamant about his stance on terms of service. He has correctly discovered that to be a challenge to Twitter, Gab has to be a break from the orthodoxy.

That is something the Left quickly understood in their march through the institutions. What was set up to keep the old WASP elite in power, could easily turn them into shaggier versions of the people they replaced. That and those institutions failed to defend the old guard against the radicals. The Left has systematically altered the institutions of American life to maintain their dominance. The Left did not just march through the institutions. They altered them, like a virus alters the host’s healthy cells to replicate itself.

That is another lesson. The people in charge are well aware of how they gained their position. They are not about to make the same mistakes as their predecessors. When Siaka Stevens gained power in post-colonial Sierra Leone, one of the first things he did was destroy the rail line between Bo and Freetown. The reason is it crippled the economy of his primary political rivals. Even though it damaged the nation’s economy as a whole, what mattered to Stevens is it helped him stay in power. The Left thinks the same way.

What that means for alternative media and alternative tech is they have to remain independent and hostile to the orthodoxy. A guy like Richard Spencer, racing to be on liberal media when they call, is going to be destroyed eventually. He is not as clever as he thinks and Lefty plays for keeps. The same holds for technology. Again, Gab is a good example of how to do it right. They are building their own financing mechanism so they do not have to sell their souls to the Silicon Valley oligarchs.

Finally, the PJ Media experience says something else. Even as these first wave populist outlets were absorbed by the blob, the audience continued to grow. This is another lesson of history. Once people break free from the old intellectual and moral restraints, they do not go back to the old ways. We are in the midst of an intellectual revolution, where the old modes of thought are challenged by new modes of thinking about politics, society and the human condition. Old media has the money, but new media has the numbers.

In the end, it is always about the numbers.

The Winter Of Our Discontent

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Old man winter has come to Lagos on the Chesapeake. Northern Europeans would often describe the world on the other side as a bleak winter-scape. It makes sense. For them, winter was the scariest time of the year. There was the cold and people huddled indoors, spreading their germs. The food situation in winter was, until recent, a constant concern for northern people.

That said, I generally like winter. When I lived in New Hampshire, the cold quiet nights were strangely pleasant. It’s always very quiet when the temperatures dip down near zero at night. I don’t mind the snow either. Shoveling has become less fun in my dotage, but the exercise is good for me so I don’t mind it. I’m not sure I could live in a place without some chance of an honest winter.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android phone 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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

The Rackets

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There was a time, back in the 1990’s, when it was fun to read the American Spectator magazine. Three things stick in my head about it. One is the fact that they would fail to print some months or it would be late. They always had money trouble. The other thing was the irregular size of the thing. Of course, in the 90’s, the distinguishing feature was the Clinton-hating. The only person who hated the Clintons more than R. Emmett Tyrrell, was his financier, Richard Melon Scaife. Those two really hated the Clintons.

I think the last time I bothered to subscribe was maybe a decade ago. I hit the website once a week, but a search through my logs tells me I have never posted about anything contained in the American Spectator. The only writer I recognize while scanning the site is Ben Stein, who I am glad to see is still alive. For some reason I was under the impression he was dead. Apparently, it remains popular. I checked the Alexa rankings and it is ranked #13,562 in the US. That means it is as popular as the most read alt-right web sites.

That is a good entry point for understanding the commentariat. The Spectator is actually owned by a 501(c)(3) named The American Alternative Foundation. That appears to be a trade name. The real name is The Alex C. Walker Educational and Charitable Foundation, founded in 1968. A look at their tax returns says they have about nine million in assets and they take in about half a million in contributions. There are no paid employees listed on the tax return, so it is probably run by family members of the founders.

The interesting thing is the foundation’s mission, according to the website, is to promote environmental cleanup in Pittsburgh. How the American Spectator fits into that is a mystery, but it is a reminder that that these sorts of organizations take on a life of their own, usually becoming something the founder never intended. The reason for that is they are vehicles for rich people to funnel money into activities that they would just as soon not see their name attached. Then there is Robert Conquest’s Second Law.

Anyway, that is one reason publications like the American Spectator survive, despite not having many paying subscribers. They exist as a platform to promote ideas popular with rich people. It is not just the underlying funding mechanism. It is the nexus of not-for-profit think tanks and educational outfits. For example, here is a story that I spotted in the Spectator the other day, about the decline in test scores. This is an increasingly popular topic with the people highly skilled at not to noticing things.

At first blush, it looks like the sort of banal political blathering that makes up most of the commentariat. “We have to fix the schools” is one of those phrases that has become a bit of joke on the Dissident Right, but it remains wildly popular with Progressives and Conservative Inc. One reason for this is it helps finance that nexus of non-profits and unread publications that keep an army of liberal arts majors in six figure positions. The article in question was produced by an outfit calling itself the American Principles Project.

The American Principles Project is a 501(c)(3) think tank founded in 2009 by Robert George, Jeff Bell, and Frank Cannon. According to their mission statement, they are organized to promote immigration reform, education reform and religious liberty. I will note that what they mean by immigration reform is open borders. The foundations Latino Director is former Bush hand Alfonso Aguilar, who argued after Romney lost that immigration restriction positions would cost the GOP the 2016 election. Ooops!

If you look at their tax filing, you will see they take in a couple million a year in grants and donations. This is enough to pay six “scholars” an average of $140,000 per year, plus expenses. One of the scholars appears to be Maggie Gallagher. Double and triple dipping is a common practice in the think tank game. Having a spot at a foundation, plus a contract with a cable outlet and a range of side projects, means even a C-list chattering skull can live a comfortable life, without having to work hard.

Normal people wonder why the media is so corrupt and the answer lies in the financial arrangements. Cable news channels exist only because cable monopolies exist. The monopolies exist because they are sold by the government. The rich people who own these channels hire people to extol the virtues of rich people. The think tanks and foundations provide the content and experts, so the news presenters can have an easy time celebrating the rich people. It is a closed loop designed to close off alternatives.

The same is true on the print side of the media. The small sites like the Spectator cannot afford to pay writers, so they let think tanks post their agit-prop on their site, posing it as commentary. This helps promote their causes and it helps promote the people, who can decorate their CV with a long list of publications that have found their work so compelling, they just had to publish it! The media, at all levels, is a racket financed by monied interests in order to promote the policies and programs that are good for rich people.

There is a lesson here for the alt-right. The reason the people in charge are so desperate to demonize critics and declare their issues taboo is they want to scare away the financial support. There are a lots of rich people who sympathize with the alt-right, the Dissident Right and immigration patriots. What they need is a way to support the people they wish to support, without it being very obvious. That is the reason the 501(c)(3) was created. The political class wanted to conceal their money laundering from the public.

Lessons of Identity

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One of the remarkable things about identity politics is that the only group of humans not embracing identity politics are modern western white people. That is not entirely accurate, as some elements of the white population embrace identity politics. It is just not white identity politics. The groups that do embrace some form of identity politics, seem to look for groupings that are, to one degree or another, anti-white. That is the reality of identity politics. It is not just a thing whites do not do. It is something that only anti-whites do.

You see this in the election results from Alabama. Blacks hate white people and they have been trained now to see Trump as the face of white America. Blacks in Alabama correctly saw the election as a referendum on Trump and raced out to vote for the other guy. You can be sure that few of them had the slightest idea about the other guy. They just saw famous blacks supporting him, so they went out and voted their skin. The preliminary numbers show that black turnout was up compared to 2016. Blacks like identity politics.

“Bible believing Christians” were largely responsible for Moore winning the primary, but they have proven to be an easily manipulated identity group. They will vote for “their guy” but at the first hint that their guy does not tick all the right boxes, they will abandon him. In contrast, their guy can be a flaming liberal like a Jimmy Carter, or warmongering neocon like George Bush, and they will flock to the polls for him. The primary identity of “Bible believing Christians” is their desire to be embraced by the people in charge.

Homosexuals are another group that revealed themselves in this election. Matt Drudge was campaigning against Moore from the start, simply because Moore is old school on the sodomy issue. That is the definition of single issue politics. In that David French post I wrote about yesterday; he had a section on the gay stuff. National Review is now run by a homosexual activist, Jason Lee Steorts, who ran off Mark Steyn for repeating a fifty year old gay joke. Gays are homosexual first, everything else a very distant second.

The funny thing about identity politics in America, something the alt-right guys talk about frequently, is that whites are the only definable group that does not engage in identity politics. If every identity group in America was asked to send a representative to a flag convention, whites would be the only group not present. If someone did show up, he would have no idea what sort of flag to wave. He would probably just take one of his “I’m So Sorry” t-shirts and wave that around. No one would find this the least bit remarkable.

When it comes to politics, at least, the only definable feature of white identity is self-sabotage. That was on full display in Alabama. Moore was cast by the Left and the so-called Right as the white identity candidate. They were not explicit, but that was the message they wanted to send. White voters responded to this by staying home. The political class will spend the next year crowing about the result. They should be proud of their work. It is no small thing to get a far Left candidate elected in Alabama.

The biggest lesson of the Alabama race is something that the Dissident Right has been discussing for years now. The American political class has evolved to thwart anything resembling identity politics among majorities. Cosmopolitan globalism cannot work unless the population is deracinated and atomized. The whole point of our politics is to prevent anything resembling a transcendent majority to counter the power of the semi-permanent political class. Social democracy only works if everyone is at one another’s throat.

That is a big reason the political class has locked shields against Trump. It is exactly why they despise Bannon. While Trump is not a white identitarian, he fully grasps the importance of demographics. Bannon is viewed by the political class as a white nationalist in a tricorn hat. As long as America is majority white, any hint of white identity is seen as a mortal threat to the system. They are not wrong about that. If whites start voting their skin, both parties collapse and we end up with a vastly different ruling class.

Finally, there is a tendency for many on the Dissident Right to think that identity politics is an inevitability. That is the lesson of history everywhere except the white world. Rhodesia and South Africa had white ruling classes. In both cases, whites were just as enthusiastic about fighting one another as in maintaining their position. Rhodesia is no more and South Africa is well on its way toward a white genocide. Even as the bodies stack up and the black parties become more blood thirsty, whites refuse to embrace their identity.

In fact, this is the lesson of Europe. The Mongols and Muslims both found that Europeans were not incredibly good at uniting for a common purpose. Serendipity and geography were the great enemy of these invaders. On the other hand, Europeans have been spectacularly proficient at making war on one another. It is entirely possible that the competitive evolutionary pressures that advanced the cognitive skills of whites, compared to other racial groups, also makes them unable to cooperate with one another across ethnic lines.

An expression I am fond of using is “You learn more from your failures than from your successes.” For the people promoting identitarian politics, last night was a reminder that the people in charge are really good at pitting one group against another. They are especially good at pitting one group of whites against another, so they will fink on their own guys and harm their own interests. Most of the whites who stayed home, rather than vote for Moore, will be out blaming the whites who voted for Moore in the primary.

It is also a reminder that Trump is not particularly good at being President. He is not just an imperfect vessel for populist politics. He is a cup with a hole in it. It is not all his fault, as he is a saddled with a party that is just an extension of the Democrat Party. Last night should be a reminder that this is a long game. Trump will be impeached or voted out of office. His utility was always as a way to discredit the system and damage the Republican Party. That means it will only get uglier, but it is what must be done to break the system.

America’s problem is not demographics. It is the white people currently in charge.

The Life of Bugmen

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I take some pride in having pegged David French as a nutter as soon as he started turning up in so-called conservative publications. In all candor, I came to that conclusion before there was hard evidence to support the claim. He just reminded me of every fanatic I have ever met. He had the crazy eyes and the fanatic’s tendency to go overboard. The lack of an internal governor is the hallmark of the fanatic. Now, of course, French is well known as a NeverTrump loon, with a bad habit of wrapping himself in the flag.

In addition to being a crank, French is a good example of the soulless bugman that is now a feature of Conservative Inc. These are establishment men, who stand for nothing, because they traded away whatever integrity they possessed for a small salary and place in the system. In addition to peddling conspiracy theories about President Trump, they are now tasked with convincing conservative voters to vote against their own interests. Now, that means voting for Doug Jones over Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race.

The trouble is there has never been a starker choice for conservative voters. Roy Moore is staunchly pro-life, while Doug Jones wants to put abortion mills in the nation’s grammar schools. Moore is an immigration patriot, while Jones is an open borders absolutist. Moore is a social conservative, while Jones embraces the Progressive social agenda. Of course, the big issue is that Moore will be a reliable vote for Trump’s judicial nominees, while Jones will be another vote against anyone to the right of Chuck Schumer.

This glaringly obvious set of facts presents a problem when trying to convince conservatives to not vote for Moore. The first card played by the bugmen is always to dismiss the target as unqualified. That was the game they played with Trump, dismissing him as a reality TV star. In the case of Roy Moore, they keep insisting that he has wacky ideas about the law and government. Unsurprisingly, that is the first point in that French column. David French is not clever enough to be anything but ham-handed in his work.

If they cannot use their claims to authority as a means to dismiss the target, they resort to character assassination. This was the tactic they tried on Trump, by trying to paint him as a sexual predator and abuser of women. Somewhat comically, the bugmen played this card on Moore, planting absurd stories about him from 40 years ago. Bugmen lack a spine, as well as a soul, so they just assume everyone is as weak-willed as they are, when it comes to standing up to pressure. They always get this wrong.

In the end, the only thing left for these guys is to lie, and that is the one thing that comes naturally to them. Somewhat amusingly, French finishes his column with:

Anyone who tells you that your choice is limited to pro-abortion Doug Jones or an incompetent, unfit apparent child abuser like Roy Moore is simply lying to you. If you are a faithful conservative, you can write in a different name or stay home. You can reject the choice served up by the plurality of Alabama GOP primary voters and simply say, “If you want my vote, you have to do better.”

Elections in America are almost always binary choices. This election is a binary choice between the Democrat and the Republican. If conservatives listen to the bugmen and stay home, Jones will win. That is how it works. The inescapable logic of French’s argument is that he wants Jones to win. He lacks the guts to say it, but that is what he is doing. The whole point of his effort against Moore, and the work of other bugmen his handlers have deployed, is to damage Moore so that Jones is able to win the election.

That is the irony of these efforts. Conservatism is, if nothing else, a practical acceptance of the world as it is. The choice in an election is between two less than ideal options. If there is ever a time when you have the perfect candidate in a race, it means you are dead and are in heaven, where you get to vote for Jesus Christ. On this earth, the choice is always between two flawed men. French’s argument, in addition to being childish and stupid, is the exact opposite of the conservative position with regards to political choices.

Moral nullities like French like to bang on about their principles. He has the habit of posting pictures of himself from when he was a rear echelon guy in Iraq. It is a cheap tactic he learned from John McCain. He is the type of guy Ralph Waldo Emerson had in mind when he wrote, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” That is because the talk of principles from bugmen like French is just another tool of the trade. His job is promoting the interests of his masters. That is the life of every soulless bugman.

The Fourth Stage Of American History

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Over a century ago, Robert Lewis Dabney noted that Northern Conservatism never conserves anything. It makes a show of resisting whatever Progressive fads are currently popular, but in the end, it always gives in and eventually, embraces the fad as a principle of conservatism. He was probably not the first to note this, but his description remains the most famous, among those who traffic in taboo thoughts. His description of conservatism as a shadow that follows the Left is a great image that captures their nature perfectly.

The Dissident Right often uses a version of Dabney’s description to describe the modern conservative movement. What gets lost is the fact that Dabney was describing northern conservatives. This geographic split has been erased from the modern mind, as the people who won the Civil War slowly, but surely, erase everything but the history of the North from the nation’s memory. That last bit is critical. One of the distinguishing features of 20th century American conservatism was its Yankeeness.

One reason for this, of course, is that Progressivism is rooted in the North. In fact, it has been pretty much confined to what Colin Woodward called Yankeedom. This map is useful for understanding the demographic contours of American regionalism. Those dark blue areas are where Lefty walks the streets unmolested. It only makes sense that the loyal opposition would be located in the same areas. The colleges and universities growing the next generation of Progressives, also produce their conservative analogs.

There is another angle to this. There were fifteen presidents before Lincoln. Six of them were from Yankeedom or the Midlands. The rest were from the Tidewater or the South. Virginia used to be called the Cradle of Presidents because seven pre-Civil War presidents were from there. Only one post-Civil War president, Woodrow Wilson, has been from Virginia. Of the thirty since the war, twenty-five have been from Yankeedom or from the Midlands. There have been nineteen from parts of the country that fall into the dark blue portion of that linked map.

Since the Civil War, America has been dominated by one region of the country. It stands to reason that politics would be rooted in this region as well. Because Progressives, in various manifestations, are dominant in the North, they have been the driving force in America politics and culture as a whole. Naturally, any reaction to this would be culturally rooted in the North as well. Put another way, politics in America has been a lover’s quarrel between the two halves of Yankeedom since the Civil War.

This arrangement probably would have collapsed a century ago, but world events interceded to lock things in place. The Great War, the Depression, World War Two and then the long nuclear stand-off with the Russians locked things in place. With the nation at risk, any effort to upset the domestic political arrangements would be quickly swatted down. The reason our politics are in a flux now, with the old arrangements collapsing, is there is no longer an exogenous force to lock things in place. Normalcy is returning.

This is why the gap between Progressives and the Buckley Conservatives seems so small all of a sudden. The stand-off with the Soviets was not just a military and political conflict. There was a moral and philosophical conflict. That magnified the differences because it cast them against the backdrop of the larger dispute between Eastern authoritarianism and Western pluralism. Once that backdrop was gone, what was left was two sides squabbling over trivial items and competing for the love of financial backers.

It is also why politics turned into a screaming match after the Cold War ended. There were no big areas of dispute, so they had no choice but to pretend that the trivial differences between the two sides were enormous divides. That was the crucial insight of the Clinton people. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by bellowing about how Bush the Elder did not know how grocery store scanners worked. Clinton, Bush and Obama were basically the same guy, but the political class carried on like they were polar opposites.

What all this means is that we are in the transition period between the third and fourth phases of American history. The first phase was the Colonial Period that lasted up to and included the Revolutionary War. Then there was the Constitutional Period that lasted until the Civil War. The third period was the Yankee Imperium, which lasted from the Civil War through the end of the Cold War. What comes next is debatable, but it is clear that the rest of the country is going to have a say in the political life of the country.

One thing that is certain is that the political arrangements, both formal and informal, will change as the nation transitions to what comes next. The great centralization of power over the last century to implement the Yankee moral vision domestically and build out the empire around the world is not made for a world of identity politics, regionalization and an empire in retreat. We have legal and political institutions for white people to manage disputes between white people. Those are useless in a majority-minority country.

One final thought on this. These phases of American history have been punctuated by violent conflict. The people who settled and founded the country were not gentle, passive souls. The Colonial Period ended in War. The Constitutional Period ended with the Civil War. It is reasonable to think that this transition period will have its violent elements before we settle into that fourth phase. We live in a low violence time, so civil war is unlikely, but the coming years will most likely feature harsh, regional disputes.