Author Archives: thezman

The Death of Hollywood

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I was listening to sports radio off the internet the other days and I kept hearing ads for the fall television lineup from CBS. The sport station is affiliated with CBS Sports, so they do cross marketing of their content. Like most people, commercials of all kinds are just background noise to me most of the time. Maybe radio ads have some sort of subliminal effect, but my suspicion is they are just a waste of money. I barely listen to the content. Like most people, radio is just background noise for me.

Anyway, I was about to turn off the radio and do something else when they were going through the “great new shows” on CBS. Having dropped television, I stopped to listen to the promos out of curiosity. I cannot remember the last time I followed a network TV show like a sitcom or serial drama. Probably Seinfeld 20 years ago. Anyway, the ad was long and ran through a list of shows, describing each one in exited tones. What was striking is that each sounded more horrible than the next. Here is the list.

I cannot help but notice the number of shows dedicated to defending the realm. Some of the shows could be anything, but twelve are clearly about agents of the state defending the state against the bad people. Most of these are shows about the sorts of people our social media overlords are trying to create on-line. That is, they use their super goodness powers to magically identify the crime-thinker. Rather than having a tough guy doing the hard work of policing the streets, its a dork using brain waves to zap the bad thinkers.

Looking at the other networks, it is a slightly different trend. ABC shows are mostly about unconventional families, non-whites and women. Fox is full of blacks and race mixers, but with a low-brow comedy theme. NBC is heavy on the fire department shows for some reason. Maybe they struck a deal with CBS. Again, these are shows about defending the realm against threats. If you were observing America from another planet, just using television, you would think America is riddle with crime and fire bugs,

As a cord cutter, I have no occasion to see any of these shows, so I could be all wrong about the quality and content. I just know that the only network show I hear mentioned in my daily life is Big Bang Theory. I do hear plenty of people talk about shows they follow on cable or service providers like Amazon and Netflix. Maybe the people I interact with on a daily basis are not the typical network TV viewers, but my guess is the audiences for network shows have shrunk quite a bit over the last decade.

My other hunch, and I may be off base on this, but I suspect these shows are written by women or at least have lots of female writers. Shows like The Good Fight and Madame Secretary are obviously aimed at cat ladies. The latter was clearly an infomercial for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. It is a safe bet they had shows written about how the main character wins the White House, so they could retool the show to be about the wonderfulness of having the first female President. Thank you, Donald Trump.

On the other hand, the apparent crappiness of television shows could simply be a part of the general crappiness of the mass media culture. The movie business is suffering from a season of awfully expensive flops. So much so the whole business model is being called into question. Bad movies are getting yanked from theaters and the theaters are offering incentives to people to watch the bad movies. Maybe it is just a blip, but the big studios are treating this like a sea change in the business. Something big is happening.

Maybe it already happened. The last time “everyone watched” a network show was probably the 90’s with Seinfeld or maybe the Simpsons. When was the last time you heard someone use a pop culture referenced to a sitcom or network drama? What is happening to the movie business, may have happened to network TV and no one noticed because of the cable shows and cord cutting phenomenon. Put another way, the root cause of all of these phenomena may be a change in who runs the media business.

It could also be the radical feminization and politicization of the business, rather than the product. The sexual harassment hysteria gripping both Hollywood and the news entertainment rackets suggest the cat ladies are staging a final takeover. Someone named Mark Halperin is the latest male to be hurled into the void by the ladies. The general awfulness of our mass media could simply be the result of diving off the talent and replacing it with social justice warriors and their crazed enablers.

I watched the HBO series Rome recently. It was on about ten years ago and covered the period from the rise of Julius Caesar to the triumph of Octavian over Antony. It was a big budget affair with lots of well done costumes. The story, on the other hand, was mostly about the catty women and their intrigues. That and overly long sex scenes that were unrealistic and stupid. Feminists love this stuff, which is why every tackle-faced cat lady in America camped out to see the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Gray.

I have argued on and off for a while now that we are at the end of a great cultural cycle. The old culture that was born and flourished in the 20 century is dead. We still have the structures and institutions from that era, but they are husks of themselves. There is no cultural energy to animate them and give them vibrancy. The collapse of Hollywood may be a sign of it. Movies and TV are artifacts of the last century. Like zombies, these institutions shuffle along, searching for brains, but they are finally collapsing into dust.

We’re Out Of Enemies

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One of the stranger things about our public discourse the last couple of decades is the constant call for unity. The black hats on the political stage are always described as divisive or polarizing. The white hats are the “uniters”, bringing people together. Whenever something happens, like a disaster or shooting, the news is full of stories about how the community is united in response. Usually this means some sort of ceremony with candles and the local leaders officiating a ritual intended to show unity.

Of course, the fetish for unity is a Progressive thing. Often it takes comical turns, like when public opinion is running hard against some Progressive cause. Then the public is described as “divided over the issue.” A suitable bad guy is found and scorn is heaped on him by the media for his divisiveness. On the other hand, when opinion is slightly in favor of the Progressives, then we hear that the public is nearly unanimous in their support. This is followed by calls of unity, which means the opposition should surrender.

The classic example of this was homosexual marriage. State after state held referendums on the issue. The public voted against it. After every defeat, the media reported that a divided electorate narrowly opposed gay marriage. Then the one time it passes, a deluge of press claiming a tidal wave of support in favor of homosexual marriage. It was so convincing, the Supreme Court decided that voting was too much a bother and unilaterally declared gay marriage a sacrament.

Unity was not always a fetish for our rulers. In my youth, I had to sit and listen to civics lectures from Boomer instructors about the glories of raucous democracy. The whole point of democracy was for the people to have a civilized argument in order to gain a majority around a position. The change seems to have happened in the Clinton years. Anyone who opposed the Clintons was accused of dividing the public. As is true of so many of the problems in the current crisis, the roots of this unity fetish are in the Ozarks.

On the other hand, maybe this berserk desire for unanimity of public opinion on every matter is a sign of something else. The outbreak does coincide with the end of the Cold War. The very real risk of nuclear annihilation kept the American political class under control and it justified doing what was necessary to keep a lid on public dissent. Of course, the public was more than willing to enforce a high degree of conformity, in order to avoid giving the Russians an edge. The Cold War was a unifying and stabilizing force.

Before the Cold War, there was the Second World War. The Great Depression was probably the last time when conditions were ripe for disunity. When the ruling class is unable to keep the people fed, the people are willing to entertain new rulers. On the other hand, it offered the Yankee ruling elite an opportunity to purge the ruling class of heretics and dissenters. The days of guys like Calvin Coolidge getting far in politics were ended with the New Deal and the political realignment ushered in by Roosevelt.

In reality, the last time our ruling class did not have some exogenous thing to justify imposing a high degree of unanimity on the public, and on the ruling class, was the late 19th century. That was after the Civil War, so there was no need for unity. The North had conquered the rest of the country. The South was obliterated economically and culturally, so they were no threat. Appalachia was always too disorganized to be a threat to the Yankee establishment. Unity was the default situation.

The point of all this is that it has been a long time since America has not had something that was useful for rallying public support. The holy war against the Muslims should have been an easy replacement for the Cold War, but our rulers are so infected by the PC virus they could not declare the crusade. Instead, they lost two pointless wars of choice and invited millions of Muslims to settle in our lands. The promised clash of civilization has instead become a clash between the Dirt People and the Cloud People over Islam.

That may be the reason our betters are forever going on about the need for unity. These weird rituals after ever terrorist attack are intended to summon the magic spirits that will restore the unifying order of old. The candlelight vigil after every shooting or riot suggests that the deep state actors behind these things are the candle makers. Every Progressive in America spends the following day passing around pics on social media, of people “uniting” to fight the latest outrage, almost always at a candlelight vigil.

There is also the fact that all mass movements need a devil. The Cult of Modern Liberalism is no exception. It is why John McCain built his career around the pitch of a “cause greater than ourselves.” His great cause over the last several decades was the nutty idea of spreading western liberal democracy to the Muslim world. Other Progressives have gone all in on stamping out biological reality. The ghost of Hitler and Bull Connor, of course, are always handy bogeymen for our Progressive rulers.

America was never intended to be united culturally or spiritually. The Founders understood that the original colonies had different characteristics, due to the different founding populations. It is why they maintained the sovereignty of the states in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. America was supposed to be a collection of states and cultures, which cooperated economically and for common defense, but otherwise existed independent of one another. It is why they wanted a weak national government.

What we may be seeing is the end of the long historical cycle that began in the 19th century, with the Hartford convention, and ended with the Cold War. The 19th century saw the northern states rise economically and culturally, to eventually dominate the rest of the nation. Events in Europe provided handy enemies against which to rally the public and beat back any challenges to Yankee hegemony. We have run out of plausible bogeymen with which to scare the public. As a result, America is returning to its nature.

This could be the root cause of the endless calls for unity. The pleas for unity are, in effect, demands to maintain the status quo. Along side the endless laments from the media about the decline of old media and the rise of alternatives, you have a ruling establishment in a long twilight struggle to maintain its status and power. Perhaps in the fullness of time, the Yankee domination of America will be seen as a long cultural cycle, with its own civic religion, national epic and origin myth.

The Future of White Nationalism

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At American Renaissance, I was introduced to an old guy from VDare, who seemed to experience the world strictly through the search functions of his phone. Someone told him about my site and the first thing he did was search for the site name and “white nationalism” to see if I had opinions on the subject. His first hit was a post where I called white nationalism the dumbest thing going. He tried giving me the business about it and I gave it right back to him. I will forever be off the VDare Solstice card list as a result.

In fairness to him, he was a good sport about it. In fairness to me, my criticism of white nationalism is mostly about aesthetics. That means it comes with baggage and that baggage is not easily overcome. When most Americans hear “white nationalism” they think of shitless rustics complaining about the coloreds. Getting modern whites to overcome the cult of anti-racism is hard under ideal conditions. Having Cletus as your sales rep makes it impossible.

That’s something the white identity people need to accept. For generations, Progressives have tightly associated racism with the South. The good white/bad white thing that John Derbyshire discusses is based entirely on this image. Bad whites shop at Walmart, like domestic beer and hate black people. Despite the fact that blacks have been moving back to the Old Confederacy for decades, black culture holds that the South is still aggressively racist.

Even if you can somehow get past the image problem, white nationalism is not some new concept developed by the alt-right. It has a history and it has a lot of veterans of its prior iterations. Those people are still kicking around. The web site Storm Front, in addition to being an FBI honey trap, is the home of the old White Nationalist guys, who used to follow guys like David Duke. If you borrow the language and symbols of these guys, you are inviting them and their ideas into your thing.

There are two problems with this. One is many of these guys were not the best people or the most stable people. Stepping way outside the moral framework is never easy, but it is a lot easier if you’re crazy. It’s also easier if you have nutty ideas that no one takes too seriously. Even the most generous evaluation of White Nationalism 1.0 says it was mostly a reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. It never came up with a plausible way forward politically or culturally.

Again, even if you manage to rehabilitate the language and symbols, you cannot get past the fact that prior efforts were a failure. A pretty good rule of life is that failure is assured if you follow in the footsteps of previous failures. It’s why adopting Nazi symbols is stupid.  Associating your thing with failure is just bad marketing. It also tends to attract people who find some sort of satisfaction in losing. New movements need need language and new symbols.

Putting all of that aside, prior iterations of white nationalism always suffered from the fact they were reactionary. At their very best, they could only offer a critique of the prevailing order. They had nothing to offer as an alternative, beyond demands to wind back the clock. Reactionary movements always fail in the long run for the simple reason that yesterday can never follow tomorrow. Even if everyone agrees the current arrangements are not working, what comes next is never the past.

There’s something else that prior white nationalists movements never got right. They assumed that a majority white nation was a given. If they could just get a majority of whites on their side, they would win the political battles over race. America is 70% white at the last census and will be majority-minority in a few decades. The issue today is not about keeping America white. That horse has left the barn. The question before us today is how whites will survive as a minority population.

That means the math is not about 50% plus one. Whatever comes to define white identity in the age of identity politics will have to appeal to and serve the interests of the vast majority of whites. That can’t just be a visceral hatred of nonwhites. Whites in America are low in clannishness. Old fashioned tribal signaling against the next tribe is not going to work. What comes next has to be an ideology that promotes a positive identity offering a promising future.

That’s probably the most encouraging thing to come out of the Charlottesville protest over the summer. The people involved began to appreciate the need to build new symbols and use new language. Even guys like Andrew Anglin are pushing his people to drop the Hitler images, beyond obviously satirical stuff. Mockery of taboos and irreverence for social norms has a place, but it can’t be the focus of a political movement, if it is going to draw in the skeptical.

The irony here is the New Left went through a similar problem. Before they were able to start the cultural revolution, they existed as an ad hoc counter-culture. The old commies from the CP-USA days tried to glom onto it, but the new radicals correctly saw that as a bad idea. They eventually purged their ranks of the old guys and their old ideas. Now, the cultural movement that seeks to destroy the New Left and the Baby Boomer culture is going through a similar process as it organizes itself.

Civic Religion

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Proponents of the propositional state often make the claim that America is held together by a civic religion. Usually, but not always, the argument in favor starts with the first line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The emphasis is on the bit about all men being created equal, from which flows the ideals of political liberty, equality before the law, democracy, etc.

It is wise to start with Lincoln, as there is no evidence that the Founders were fond of the idea or even aware of it. Rousseau coined the term in 1762 and many of the Founders would have read his work, but there is no evidence they embraced the idea. In fact, they largely rejected the idea of a unifying state, as a cultural force. Their words and actions contradict the modern interpretation of “all men are created equal” so it is impossible to argue they intended it as currently interpreted. Lincoln is a much better starting point.

That said, it is doubtful Lincoln or anyone alive at the time would have embraced the idea of civic religion. The first guy to talk about America having a uniquely religious quality was Alexis de Tocqueville, but he did not think Americanism was a civic religion or anything close to it. He thought America’s uniquely Christian nature is what allowed for a diverse people to form a single nation. For a 19th century American, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War, the idea of a unifying creed would have been laughable.

The earliest mention of America having a unique civic life, held together by something resembling a religion, is by Chesterton. He wrote that America was “the only nation founded on a creed” and was “a nation with a soul of a church.” This observation was probably not unique to Chesterton. Europeans have always viewed Americans as being moralistic and impractical, with regards to the affairs of state. This is something our rulers encourage. Just look at the war on terror. It is entirely framed in moral terms.

The fact is the idea of a civic religion and an American creed is a fairly new one. The guy credited with promoting it is sociologist Robert Bellah. He formalized the concept in a 1967 article titled “Civil Religion in America.” According to Bellah, “Americans embrace a common civil religion with certain fundamental beliefs, values, holidays, and rituals, that transcend their chosen religion.” It is what allows a diverse people to fight under the same flag, cooperate economically and maintain a multi-ethnic society.

As is often the case, theories of history require the wholesale rewriting of history. That is what has happened with the civic religion claims. The most generous interpretation is that this new civic religion was born after the Civil War, as a result of the North defeating the South. The “new nation” that came out of that was formed around this new creed. That is reasonable, but it also disconnects us from the Founding and the Founding documents. What it means is that the Constitution is largely meaningless.

A less generous reading is that this was part of a marketing campaign by certain elements in 1960’s America to de-legitimize the dominant American culture. After all, this was the peak of the cultural revolution when the New Left had embarked on its long march through the institutions. It was also around this time that Congress began to fling open the borders and invite the world into the country. If America is not a nation of Americans, but a concept, why not invite in the world, so they can learn the concept too!

The ahistorical nature of the civic religion is not troubling to the believers because they simply want to believe, as long as the civic religion serves their purpose. For Buckley conservatives, libertarians and others, the language of the civic religion is useful as an argument against the Progressive ruling class. It lets them stand in opposition on moral grounds, but also accept defeat, without violating their principles, which they claim are rooted in their Americanism. It is the political get out of jail free card.

The bigger problem with this civic religion stuff is the problem with civic religions in general. If they mean anything, they end up in a blood bath. The reason is a religion has rules that are non-negotiable. For example, you cannot be a Catholic and support abortion on demand. In order to be a member in good standing, you have to be in line with the teachings of the religion. Otherwise, you are a sinner, and maybe even a heretic. No religion can tolerate heresy among its members and remain an active religion.

In theory, you can quit a religion and join another one. You can also not participate or maybe just do the barest minimum to keep everyone off your back. You cannot realistically quit your country and join a new one. You cannot become agnostic as a citizen. Similarly, the leaders of the civic religion cannot easily exile you for heresy. The result is usually concentration camps or worse. That is why all other efforts at building a civic religion have ended up in wholesale murder. It is the only practical way to handle dissent.

There is another problem with the civic religion idea, which is particular to America. This has never been a country with a single culture or even a single people. The founding of the colonies was by distinct groups of English. New York City was not even founded by English. If you read the book American Nations, it does a pretty good job of describing the different cultural groupings of the country. Imposing the cult of Lincoln on the nation sounds good to the ruling class, but it has never sat well with the rest of the nations.

This cult of Lincoln promoted by our betters has another defect and that is they are compelled to impose it on the world. This seems to be another problem with all civic religions. The French exported radicalism around Europe. The Soviets exported Bolshevism around the world. The American empire is the story of imposing the American creed on every nation of the world, always against their will. Civic religions, like all religions, do not seem to play nice with other religions, seeing them as competitors.

That is why America has gone from a republic full of active Christians to a “meritocracy” at war with anything resembling Christianity. A century ago, Progressives were Christians, who were Progressive reformers. Then they were Progressives, who could also be Christians. Then they were just Progressives. There was a time when “liberal Catholic” was a real thing, but no one can chase two rabbits at once. Eventually, the American civic religion won out and is now being imposed on all of us, by force.

The best you can say about the supposed civic religion of America is that it is what the ruling class uses to keep the plates spinning. There is something to say for economic progress and domestic peace. It is not, however, natural or normal, and therefore it must eventually yield to reality. That is what we are seeing today. Americanism is a luxury item for an America that was 80% white and free of economic and political inequality among the white population. That is not today so the civic religion is losing its salience.

Why I Am Not A Libertarian

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I have been asked by a few people to comment upon this speech given by Hans-Hermann Hoppe at the 12th annual meeting of the Property and Freedom Society. The PFS is an Austro-libertarian organization founded by Hoppe, for the purpose of promoting libertarian ideas. This conference is like the Burning Man of libertarianism. The heavy weights of the movement tend to show up at this thing and give speeches. Undoubtedly, my past comment about libertarians is what has prompted people to forward this to me.

Before watching the speech or reading the text, I was struck by a ridiculously small bit of nostalgia. Libertarianism, at least in the US, is a dead movement. Talk to alt-right types and they are mostly former libertarians. Many of them were Ron Paul supporters. That was their gateway into politics. For the last decade, libertarianism has been hemorrhaging adherents, mostly to the dissident movements, but some have become mainstream conservatives. Hearing the name “Hoppe” felt like a blast from the past.

This is a topic some in the alt-right discuss, but mainstream debate assiduously avoids any discussion of the libertarian implosion. Fox News, for example, still has a stable of libertarians. Conservative sites like NRO keep a few around like Sloppy Williamson and Chuck Cooke. There are some think tank people, who seriously discuss a fusion of Buckley Conservatism, neo-conservatism and libertarianism, but that is mostly whistling past the graveyard. All three of those movements are headed to the ash heap.

Unlike many people in this thing, I did not make the trip here from libertarianism. In my teenage years, I read Smith, Locke, Hobbes, Bastiat, Mill and some others. Then I was exposed to libertarianism, but I was never swayed. By that point I had seen enough of the world to know that most people would never go along with it. Blacks need structure or you get Somalia. Some Europeans have a strong drive toward clannishness. Stupid people, of course, could never make it work. Libertarianism is a smart white guy thing.

My observation, as an aside, is that libertarianism was most popular with upper middle-class white guys from the suburbs. There, things seem to work and the non-whites they experience are mostly like them, just not white. Poor people, like me, get to see the diversity of life up close and in person, at a young age. I suspect that exposure to this reality is why so many nice suburban white boys have embraced the alt-right. To paraphrase the old gag, an alt-righter is a libertarian who has been mugged by diversity.

Putting that aside, the impossibility of libertarianism has always been my biggest problem with it. You see it in the Hoppe speech. He points this out early in his talk. Even if you assume libertarianism is a possible form of human organization, how do you get there from a non-libertarian starting point? How do you maintain the libertarian order? Hoppe correctly points out that most libertarians ignore these questions. Many, he calls them fake libertarians, embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism as a way to dodge the issue.

Even Hoppe, at least in this talk, ignores the first question. Instead, he focuses on the second question, by way of an example of two neighbors. One is abiding by the rules of the libertarian paradise, while the other is not. He then concludes that there must be a mechanism to physically remove the bad neighbor. In order to have such a mechanism, without violating most of the rules of libertarianism, you have to have a society of people with common heritage, language and culture. Perhaps even an ethnostate.

That still presents a problem. Let us assume you have an ethnostate with a common heritage and belief system. Even in the narrowest ethnic groupings, there is enough variety of personalities, to guarantee some members will not cooperate with the libertarian rules. To police this requires either an Übermensch or a society composed mostly of them, so that when they act in concert, they can police the ranks, yet never be tempted by the power that permits them to police the ranks. A land of angels, rather than men.

Although libertarians never put it this way, and Hoppe does not in his speech, the underlying assumption is that libertarianism can become a civic religion. That way, a common moral code can do a great deal of the policing, but also give temporary license to deal with those who refuse to respect the libertarian culture. Addressing the problem of the bad neighbor becomes a civic virtue. On the other hand, civic religions have given us the Terror, the Holocaust, the Holodomor and the Cultural Revolution.

Of course, there could be no risk of something like that happening in the libertarian paradise. The reason is it would require cooperation. Getting two libertarians to agree on splitting the lunch bill is impossible. That is because no two libertarians can agree on the definition of libertarianism. Academic communism had this problem. This suggests a defect at the core of the ideology. That defect, of course, is that there is no way to make it square with objective reality, particularly the biological reality of humanity.

In defense of Hoppe, who has always been willing to examine the criticisms of his ideology and adjust to them, when necessary, he takes seriously the arguments from the alt-right and allied movements, with regards to race and ethnicity. He also takes seriously the reality of politics. Theory is worthless unless it can inspire a practical political agenda with real influence in society. He goes onto to list a bunch of agenda items he would like libertarians to embrace. Most are a hat tip to the biological realists.

Watching the speech, I got the feeling I was listening to a eulogy. I doubt that was the intent, but that is how it felt to me. The universalist ideology created by Murray Rothbard and others was a creature of the 20th century. It is utility was always in its value as a critique of communist and socialist economics. The 20th century was largely a debate among white people about how white people would transact and regulate commerce with one another. That is a settled argument now, so libertarianism is no longer relevant.

Ranting About The Cult

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This week, I seem to have a bit of an obsession with the Progressives. I think dealing with Civic Nationalists this week had me thinking about their spiritual masters more than usual. I’m also working on another project that has me thinking about Lefty in a serious way. Regardless, this week’s show is heavy on the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. I’m getting better at hitting the exact mark on each section. That brings me joy. There is also a bonus track on Gab, where I talk a little about reparations. If you are not on Gab, you should be. Despite their flaws, they are the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.

For this week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the 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

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Vegas (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 12:00: The Uncertain Past (Link)
  • 22:00: Girls Science (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: A Ramble About The Cult (Link)
  • 42:00: What Comes Next (Link)
  • 47:00: Press F For Respects (Link)
  • 52:00: Female Trouble (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Gab Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Narcissistic Altruism

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One of the great unanswered questions of our age is why Western rulers are obsessed with importing tens of millions of unassimilable foreigners into their lands. In the US, the conventional wisdom among immigration patriots is that one side of the political class wants cheap votes, while the other side wants cheap labor. In Europe, the theories range from female hysteria to poorly conceived economics. The one common thread is that across the West, the ruling elites appear to be trying to crash their cultures.

The trouble with these reductionist theories is they do not make much sense at the individual level, so they cannot very well scale up. For example, the cheap labor argument does not hold up very well when you examine it. Helot labor is great for the business owner, just as long as he is the only guy doing it. When every landscaper is using Aztec workers, there’s little benefit to the landscaping companies. That is not to say there is no benefit, but does it warrant the suicidal drive to import Mexico into the US?

In Europe, the cheap labor argument makes less sense. Depending upon who is counting, between 80% and 90% of migrants are on public assistance. Even if these migrants wanted to work, there is little demand for low-IQ unskilled workers. Even if there was some demand, the labor laws in Europe would make it impossible to hire them. One of the vexing problems the Euros have are restricted labor markets, which prevent the sort of labor mobility we have in the US. There’s just little demand for cheap foreign labor.

The cheap voter argument is a better one, but even so, the returns are spotty. In the US, Latin voters have been unreliable. They have low turnout numbers, relative to other groups. Unlike blacks, they are not easily agitated into rushing out to stage big protests or shoot white people. There is also the fact that they tend to cause the white vote to coalesce around white candidates regardless of party. That or it results in white flight, as we see in California. So far, open borders have been a disaster for white Democrats.

A similar result has been seen in Europe. The Brits are the example closest to the US for obvious reasons. Open borders have destroyed the party that advocated for it. On the continent, the anti-Euro movements are entirely driven by the immigration waves triggered by Merkel. Even docile countries run by cat ladies and cucks are starting to see the rise of nationalism and anti-immigrant parties. Exactly no where is immigration helping the political class. Yet, the ruling class is universally in favor of open borders.

The fact is, there are no good political or economic arguments in favor of mass immigration. In some places, the arguments have some plausibility, but even the best nuts and bolts arguments in favor of elevated immigration levels do not justify the high political and cultural costs. Yet, our political classes have an unshakable loyalty to foreign migrants. In every Western nation, the smart political play is to oppose high immigration levels. In many countries, banning all immigration is overwhelmingly popular.

There must be something else at work, beyond money and power. Even if we extend the bounds of the ruling class beyond the elected class and their attendants, there is no upside for the elites. Why is Mark Zuckerberg berserk for high immigration? He is even in favor of importing Muslims. The same is true for Hollywood people. They get nothing from open borders, other than fewer job opportunities. Ditto the mass media. About the only thing the self-actualizing classes get from open borders is domestic labor.

That may be the key to it. I’ve pointed out before that the self-actualizing class may prefer Spanish landscapers, as it avoids them having to see blacks raking leaves, while singing old fashioned negro work songs. It also avoids seeing downscale whites, who remind them of the tenuousness of their position. Asian and Caribbean domestics not only avoid those problems, but everyone can pretend they make better workers in those roles. The Korean nanny is like a tiger mom for hire. It makes the deception more palatable.

The underlying cause here may be narcissistic altruism. It is generally assumed that altruism is selfless, while narcissism is selfish. That may not be the correct framing, as lots of people do charity work because it makes them feel good. Similarly, lots of self-absorbed people commit public acts of piety because it makes them look good and elevates their status. The guy funding the museum and demanding his name be over the front door is not acting from pure selflessness. He wants glory too.

It has always been known that men often become more religious as they grow older, often returning to the religion of their youth in a serious way. The pattern is not as obvious with women as they are much more likely to stay in their church as young adults. Young mothers will often get involved with their church for family services and socializing with other mothers. Men, on the other hand, often have a religious awakening in their middle years and not only return to their religion but do so with vigor.

George Vaillant was a researcher at Harvard and did a 50 year study on men, tracking them from their teens to old age. One of the areas he studied was altruism and he found that as the men aged, their altruism increased significantly. This was not simply due to selflessness. Helping others becomes increasing rewarding as we age. Neuroimaging has revealed that helping others brings pleasure to the person providing the help. Altruism activates brain centers that are associated with selfish pleasures like sex.

Organized religion, obviously, provides a ready made structure into which this selfish desire to help others can flow. Not only does organized religion have structured charity, but it also comes with a spiritually rewarding purpose and generations of others who have followed the same path. The female desire to provide charity is funneled into activities that support the community the church serves. The late onset male altruism follows on providing money and intellectual capital to society-strengthening altruism.

Again, this is not pure selflessness. When you volunteer at your church, you feel good about it, because the pleasure centers of your brain are stimulated. It could simply be that as we age, the vanity of youth is no longer effective. To get the same pleasure from life, that desire for selfish pleasure (sex, wealth, status), is redirected into other areas like church participation and charitable giving. Doing good makes the person feel good for having voluntarily done a good work on behalf of their fellows.

The collapse of organized religion, particularly among the Cloud People, is leaving them with no structured outlet for this normal human impulse. The reason a Lyndsay Graham cares more about Dreamers, than his fellow South Carolinians is he feels like he is helping those who need help. It is why John McCain spent the last three decades chanting about “causes greater than yourself.” Without a structure into which his narcissistic altruism could flow, he searched around for causes and purposes, most of which were destructive.

Now We Know

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One of the mysteries of the election campaign has been the ongoing Russian hacking conspiracy nonsense that was forced on us by the Democrats after the election. The absurdity of it should have been enough to get the story laughed off the stage. Even if the Russians had meddled in the election, which happens all the time. The Chinese invested heavily in the Clintons during the 1996 election. Israeli maintains massive lobbying efforts in the US, including campaign operations. It is the nature of empires.

Even if it was just a distraction to shift the focus from the problems of the Democrats, it is a one week story at best. Yet, it went on and on, forcing Trump to appoint a special prosecutor to chase ghosts and phantoms that could not possibly exist. My hunch was that maybe some FBI insiders were simply using the fake scandal as a pretext to circle the wagons and protect their own. Former director Comey seems to be exposed six ways to Sunday for the way he handled himself in the job.

Well, we may now have an answer. It may simply have been the old Progressive tactic of preemptively accusing others of something they are doing. The Hill is reporting that the FBI had stumbled onto a plot that looks a lot like bribery by the Russians to get the Clinton’s support in their efforts to grow their nuclear business inside the US. This goes back to when Cankles was working for Obama as Secretary of State and had the authority to approve foreign energy deals, like selling uranium to Russia.

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.

Assuming the evidence presented is accurate, it looks a lot like the sort of frauds the Clinton crime family has been running since their days in Arkansas. Hillary has always had a thing for the old fashioned graft rackets. This is where the Clintons grant favors from the government in exchange for cash. In order to avoid bribery charges, they always use a cutout of some sort. In Arkansas, it was campaign contributors who laundered the cash for them. In the 90’s, Chinese money flowed into the campaign.

The Clinton Foundation has always looked like a money laundering operation. The whole point of money laundering is to make the transactions seem legitimate. The smarter drug dealers in Baltimore will have a cash business they move their drug proceeds through in an effort to hide the source of their income. Famous people have foundations so they can use it to hire friends, family and supporters, but get a tax break. Politicians put their family on the campaign payroll at inflated salaries so they can keep some of the cash.

That is what the Clinton Foundation was for initially. The millions Bubba was getting from speeches and back dated transactions would go tax free into the charity. The Clintons would take a salary, but the foundation would pick up a lot of their expenses, like travel and security. It would also be a nice patronage system for future campaign workers and contributors. The Foundation was always a front operation. It was never intended to do any charitable work, which is why it has done no charitable work.

The thing with Hillary Clinton is that all of her scandals are about money. Going back to Arkansas, everything she was mixed up in was a money scheme of some sort. Bill was always getting jammed up with sex. It is reasonable to think he got into politics for the easy access to women. Hillary, on the other hand, has always been about the cash. That is why the Russians were willing to bribe her. They knew she would play ball if the price was right. That is what this looks like. Old fashioned pay for play.

This brings as back to the Russia probe.

In evidentiary affidavits signed in 2014 and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to assist the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money laundering and kickbacks that were both directed by and provided benefit to more senior officials back in Russia.

“As part of the scheme, Mikerin, with the consent of higher level officials at TENEX and Rosatom (both Russian state-owned entities) would offer no-bid contracts to US businesses in exchange for kickbacks in the form of money payments made to some offshore banks accounts,” Agent David Gadren testified.

“Mikerin apparently then shared the proceeds with other co-conspirators associated with TENEX in Russia and elsewhere,” the agent added.

The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.

Both men now play a key role in the current investigation into possible, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. McCabe is under congressional and Justice Department inspector general investigation in connection with money his wife’s Virginia state Senate campaign accepted in 2015 from now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe at a time when McAuliffe was reportedly under investigation by the FBI. The probe is not focused on McAuliffe’s conduct but rather on whether McCabe’s attendance violated the Hatch Act or other FBI conflict rules.

The connections to the current Russia case are many. The Mikerin probe began in 2009 when Robert Mueller, now the special counsel in charge of the Trump case, was still FBI director. And it ended in late 2015 under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired earlier this year.

There are a number of possibilities here. One is incompetence. Her team may have started the “Russian hacking” chant without realizing that it would lead back to this deal. That is another trait of Hillary Clinton. She screws up everything she touches. Going back to her days on the Watergate committee as an entry level staffer, her career is one foul up after another. The only thing she has done well is stay married to Bill. That is how she stays out of jail and how she keeps getting shot to run another fraud.

The more likely answer, though, is the old Progressive habit of accusing others of the very thing they are doing. In this case, she was willing to do business with the Russians, so she just assumed the other side was too. Perhaps it is evidence of a guilty mind or maybe it is something else, but Progressives have a habit, an instinct, for accusing their enemies of crimes committed by Progressives. It muddies the waters and that may be the sole purpose. It is another way of shifting the focus.

The other possibility is what we see with corrupt police precincts. The dirty cops know that cops do not like ratting on one another. They also assume that everyone has something they would not like to see exposed to the public. The result is everyone keeps their mouth shut until something goes very wrong. Washington is a sea of corruption, much of it dealing with foreign money. The Democrats may be working on the assumption that no one in the political class wants this investigation to go anywhere.

Of course, if you want to go super 4-D chess, deep state conspiracy mongering, then maybe this was the target all along. Rosenstein knew all about this old case and maybe he wanted another bite at the apple. That is far fetched, but not outside the realm of the possible. Team Trump has a funny habit of being a few steps ahead of everyone on the controversial stuff. It would certainly be poetic if this is how Clinton ends up in an orange jumpsuit, waddling around a federal prison.

The Proposition

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The other day, a long time reader and frequent commenter made the argument that America is a “propositional nation.” This is a popular assertion, one that has no basis in American history, but popular nonetheless. Its popularity on the Right is largely due to neocons peddling it as a part of their efforts to redefine and co-opt the Right. It has also been useful in justifying open borders and endless military adventures. These days, the biggest fans of this idea are the Civic Nationalists.

The argument is that America is an exception among nations because it is organized around a set of ideas and principles, rather than blood and soil. The foundation of the proposition comes from the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To be an American means accepting those claims.

Over the years, lots of smart people have pointed out the errors in the propositional nation argument. The fact that the Declaration has no legal standing and that it is full of obvious contradictions should be enough to kill the idea. The Founders had plenty of time to figure out how to bake the argument into the founding documents but were never inclined to do so. The “proposition” is nowhere in the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The proposition is nowhere in their deliberations or commentary on them.

There is, of course, the fact that America was a Christian nation at the time of the Founding. The men who wrote and signed off on “all men are created equal” rather obviously did not believe it in the modern, secular sense. They were Christians so they believed that only two people were ever created, everyone else was born. They certainly did not think people were born equal. To believe that all people are equal in the corporal sense or the political sense is to believe that reality is a social construct.

The Founders were not academics in a gender studies department. They were practical men of their age. They crafted practical legal documents, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to establish the political order of the new country. The men who wrote the Constitution did not craft a metaphysical framework, so the people would behave in a virtuous manner. They assumed a certain type of people with a common morality and common culture. They accepted reality and built a political order to reflect it.

Even so, nations create their own myths and legends in order to bind themselves together emotionally, as well as practically. Rather than dismiss the “propositional nation” idea, let us take it at face value and say we accept that whatever the origins, America of today is a nation of ideas. The glue that binds one American to another is a common belief in that mythological founding creed. Regardless of race, religion or national original, you can be an America as long as you accept and believe in the civic religion that defines America.

The implication is that no one is born an American. You cannot be born in agreement with a proposition. At some point, you reach an age and level of understanding that allows you to accept the deal on offer. This assumes that the deal is offered, and that is the underlying assumption of the propositional nation. It is available to anyone. You get to be an American as long as you accept the organizational ideas that make up the civic religion of America. That is not the law or present reality, but that is the theory.

The other side of this coin is that you can stop being an America as soon as you no longer accept the national creed. For example, if you do not accept that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” then you are not an American. If the propositional nation is going to be anything more than lip service, the proposition better have some teeth. That means someone like former President Obama, who is an atheist and rejects the idea of natural rights, is not an American and he never was.

The bigger implication of the propositional nation is that it argues against having a country at all, at least in the physical sense. Rejecting the blood and soil definition of a nation does not stop at the blood. If America is just a collection of people, who agree on the same set of principles about the nature of man and his political relationship to other men, what is the reason to maintain a physical space? The clear implication of the propositional nation is that the physical aspects of the nation are, so to speak, immaterial.

Finally, the nation of ideas cannot be a nation of permanent ideas, unless the Founders were gods, who handed these ideas down to us. Agreements among men, even deeply principled agreements, are open to revisions over time. That is central to the propositional nation argument. It is how the promoters get around things like slavery, limited suffrage and indentured servitude. If the propositional nation evolved, it means it will keep evolving into the future. That is the Progressive argument in favor of a living Constitution.

To return to where we started with this post, the commenter stated that you cannot have a nation without a common set of organizing principles. This is obviously false but let us assume nation in this context is limited to those with a consensual government. If those principles are arrived at by consensus, it means they were arrived at by men. The nature of that consensus and therefore the resulting principles must spring from the nature of the men who forged them. In other words, we are back to a nation of men, not ideas.

LA Confidential

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A popular topic of conversation on the Dissident Right is the imagined future the Cloud People have planned for us. The word “Brazilification” gets thrown around a lot. Going by mass media, the future will be populated by hairless, caramel colored mulattoes and Asians. That’s unlikely, but the majority-minority future is inevitable. That means America will be a very different place in another generation. Just look how fast Los Angeles went from being surf city to a sprawling version of Tijuana.

Digging around in Baltimore City arrest data last week, I got curious about what other cities had exposed their arrests data to public download. There’s not a lot of consistency, as this appears to be a new project. My guess is some company has figured out how to game the Federal grant system and they are helping cities upgrade their IT systems with Federal dollars. Anyway, I found a data set from the Los Angeles police department that is pretty big. It is their arrest data going back to 2010.

Los Angeles is a city of 3,884,307 people. Since the start of 2010, the LAPD has made 1,146,393 arrests, which is roughly 450 arrests per day. That’s an interesting figure, given that LA has a relatively low homicide rate of 6.7. Baltimore has a murder rate nine times higher, but an arrest rate just 10% higher than Los Angeles, when adjusting for differences in population. Maybe it is just the nice weather that makes people less inclined to homicide one another. Or, it could be the population mix. Here are the demographics of LA.

Los Angeles not only has a relatively small black population, it has a much larger Asian population than you see in most cities. In fact, Los Angeles is an interesting mix, because it is one of the few majority-minority cities. It’s also a large city so the sample size is very big. A boutique college town with lots of diversity is not going to tell us much about our multicultural future, despite what the Cloud People may think. Here’s the break down of arrest per population group.

The law abiding Asians make up for a lot of black crime when you look at the data. The cool thing about the Los Angeles arrest data is they go further than most cities in identifying the ethnicity of the offender. That’s probably something we will see everywhere as America gets less white. The old way of counting white and non-white only made sense when America was mostly white. In the Cloud People paradise, every group gets a classification in the system. Here’s a break down of Asians into their known groups.

Of course, the fun begins when we start to look at homicide numbers. Here’s the break out of murder related offenses by race

What’s interesting is that Hispanics are not over represented in overall arrest data, compared to their share of the population, but they are over performing in the violent crime area. That’s probably due to the drug trade, but that is a guess. The arrest breakout also helps when trying to parse Hispanic whites from non-Hispanic whites in national crime figures. Of course, the old familiar pattern of black violent crime is present in the LA numbers. Blacks are 10% of the population and 36% of murder related arrests.

Here’s the break out by age.

Here’s the arrest by day. It seems that warmer areas have a flatter curve on this for some reason. Maybe cold weather alters police behavior in some way or maybe criminals prefer mild weather. At some point, once I have a enough data from different regions, I’ll do a degree day calculation on arrests to see if there is a correlation. That would maybe say something about police habits.. Doing the same day for day of the crime would maybe say something about the behavior of criminals. Or maybe not.

One interesting thing in the LA data is the number of old people in the arrest data. There are 48 arrest records for nonagenarians. Two were homicides, which is incredible. Even more amazing is 15 arrests were for drunkenness. Maybe this is not so odd, as alcohol related offenses are the third most common arrest code in the system. Drugs are number two with Miscellaneous being the top reason to arrest someone. This is a pattern I saw in the Baltimore data. The arrests codes are not well maintained or enforced.

Here is a break down of arrest codes.

What becomes clear when looking at the Los Angeles crime data is that de facto segregation is a fact of life in a majority minority city. When you break it out by race and area, you don’t have to know a thing about LA to see the pattern. The other thing is Hispanics bring elevated levels of crime, but not the rates you see with black. It’s one reason the Cloud People like Hispanic migration. They get all the benefit of a servant population, without the headaches that come with Africans.

The other interesting thing about Los Angeles is that it is majority-minority, but whites control the political system. Look at the city council. It’s mighty white for a place with just a 30% white population. The truth is, Hispanics are not a group with a real identity. That’s just a made up thing by Progs. Mexicans from the north have little in common with Guatemalans or even Mexicans from the south. This makes forming a unified coalition that can punch commensurate with its weight nearly impossible.

That’s another reason the Cloud People have no fear of migration. So far, it has not cut into their authority. If anything, it makes it easier for them to deal with blacks and troublesome whites. Progs are diluting black influence in their coalition with Hispanics and they are replacing the white working class with them. The Hispanic laboring class makes fewer demands and is far less organized. They may not be reliable voters, but they are cheap voters, relative to working class whites. That’s the way it works for now.