Author Archives: thezman

The Right Side of History

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When I was in Dublin, I had a lot of fun watching the BBC and SkyNews, mostly because they were still in shock over Brexit. It was as if they learned that the Loch Ness Monster was real. They just could not come to terms with the new reality. Every segment circled back to the vote and how it was the worst thing to happen since Dunkirk. They talked about Brexit in the same way people talk about life altering tragedies. At one point, someone even said, “I’ll never forget where I was the day I heard the news of Brexit.”

The interesting thing was that they were so sure that Brexit would be a disaster that they were starting to pretend that the disaster was happening, even though nothing had changed since the vote. At the time, the markets were up and the economic indicators were all pointing in the right direction. There was also the fact that the vote changed nothing. It will take years to implement Brexit, assuming it ever happens, which is unlikely. Still, the people on the Beeb were sure doom was at hand.

That’s the power of belief and a reminder that all the flapdoodole we associate with the Left is not based in facts and reason. It is something closer to a UFO cult, where the members, from time to time, become convinced of some great event that is about to occur. When that event does not happen, they go through a period of confusion and sadness, like how normal people mourn an untimely death. The difference is the Progs rally together to recast the event into a new great cause with its own doomsday cult attributes.

You can see that in this hysterical tirade by Mathew Julio Yglesias. He both Voxsplains the current crisis and provides a standard around which his fellow moonbats can rally.

The country has entered a dangerous period. The president-elect is the least qualified man to ever hold high office. He also operated the least transparent campaign of the modern era. He gave succor and voice to bigoted elements on a scale not seen in two generations. He openly praised dictators — not as allies but as dictators — and threatened to use the powers of his office to discipline the media.

You could be forgiven for thinking he was writing about Barak Obama, but that would require a level of self-awareness unacceptable in a religious cult.

He also has a long history of corrupt behavior, and his business holdings pose staggering conflicts of interest that are exacerbated by his lack of financial disclosure. But while most journalists and members of the opposition party think they understand the threat of Trump-era corruption, they are in fact drastically underestimating it. When we talk about corruption in the modern United States, we have in mind what Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny define as “the sale by government officials of government property for personal gain.”

This is from a guy who supported Hillary Clinton. It once again points out a feature of the Left and something you always see with the hive minded. They cast onto their enemies all of the things they fear about themselves. Membership in a mass movement is about self-abnegation. The adherent wants to obliterate his sense of self and replace it with the identity of the cause. The result is all the things they despise about themselves become the first things they assume about their enemies. Their bogeyman is always a reflection of themselves.

What we are seeing with the Trumpening is the same thing the Brits saw with Brexit. These people were absolutely convinced that they were riding the warm thermals of history, like gentle little butterflies drifting from one flower to the next, until they reached the valley of the chosen. It’s not that they cannot accept losing. They did not think losing was a possibility. These events are dis-confirmation of their most important beliefs. It turns out that history has no right side, after all, and that’s the cornerstone of the Progressive faith.

The tantrums and warnings of doom are just a way for the faithful to rally together to support one another as they figure out how to reconfigure the prophesies to fit the new reality. It is no different from what has been observed with UFO and doomsday cults. The believers become convinced X is about to happen and X will confirm all of their beliefs. When X does not happen, they are faced with the prospect of their beliefs being proved false. That was election night for the American Left.

What we are seeing now is the leaders of the cult trying to rally their members to provide mutual support. Focusing their attention on the alleged evils of the other side takes the focus away from the dis-confirmation. If they can muster their numbers, they can will their way through the crisis and reorganize their beliefs to incorporate the dis-confirmation into the narrative. In time Brexit and Trump will become part of the struggle myth that motivates the faithful to keep fighting. After all, they are on the right side of history.

The Dissidents and the Media

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Back in the 80’s, one of the more irritating things about following politics was watching stupid Republicans walk onto liberal news programs and get ambushed. It was if they were just made aware of the fact that the Left never plays fair. It was not just Republican politicians. Conservative chatters would also fall into these traps. It was very frustrating until I figured out that it was all a show. The “conservative” was hired to play a role in the drama. George Will, in private, thought you people were gross and disgusting.

This model persisted through the 90’s and it was only when Fox News came on-line did we see some fair treatment of people outside the Progressive orbit. Even there, the obsession with being fair often resulted in being stupid. Exactly no one gives a crap what Juan Williams has to say about anything. Yet, FNC felt they needed to decorate the set with him. Even so, it was just one outlet among many so the prevailing model was a Progressive gang-up on anyone not professing the One True Faith.

What made it most infuriating is that so-called conservatives would go on moonbat networks and do taped shows. The producers would then cut up the recording to make the conservative sound nutty or unresponsive. When confronted, the so-called conservative would admit to knowing it was a setup, but they would say they did it to try and change minds. In reality they were just taking the check. The boys and girls from Official Conservatism™ on the payroll of PBS and CNN were taking a dive on purpose so they could get paid.

It’s why the Tea Party was doomed from the start. When guys like Dick Army got involved, you knew it as a con. More important, the organizers were clawing each other’s eyes out trying to get on TV. These were not people motivated by a cause. They were motivated by the desire to be famous and hang around green rooms with the Lefties they saw on television. Those are people easy to corrupt so it was just a matter of when, not if, they sold out their people, which most promptly did for short money.

What has always been encouraging about Trump is he seems to get this. He has done almost no taped interviews and he avoided private interviews with news sites like the NYTimes and Washington Post. In the former case, he knew they would edit the hell out of his interview because he saw it first hand doing his TV shows. In the latter case, he knew these people were not honest. They lie on spec and giving them a private interview would only enable them make up fake news about Trump.

Trump’s live events were big enough to require coverage, but he put the media in pens so they could not pretend to be talking to Nazis and Klansmen in the crowd. The only thing they could do was show the video and moan about it. You also note that Trump uses lots of hand gestures when speaking. He never used to do this, but I suspect he started doing it because it makes editing impossible. As you can see in this Breitbart story, editing is now the main tool of the media.

National Public Radio ombudsman/public editor Elizabeth Jensen has recommended that the taxpayer-funded radio news service bar future live interviews of conservatives who may have controversial views, following an interview Nov. 16 with Breitbart News’ Joel B. Pollak.

Pollak, who serves as Breitbart’s Senior Editor-at-Large and In-house Counsel, defended its Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon from false and defamatory claims of antisemitism and “white nationalism.” He also turned the tables, pointing out that NPR has “racist programming,” including a story that called the 2016 election results “nostalgia for a whiter America.”

 

NPR listeners were apparently outraged that anyone from Breitbart News had been given an opportunity to defend the website and its chairman.

 

In her response, “Listeners: Two Recent Interviews Are ‘Normalizing Hate Speech’,” Jensen concluded that the live format had allowed Pollak to get the better of host Steve Inskeep.

 

She suggested that future interviews be taped: “In addition, in my opinion, these interviews should not be done live. Inskeep is an excellent live interviewer, but live interviews are difficult, especially when there is limited time. A little contextualizing never hurts.”

In other words, live interview make it hard to fake the interview. In the Reagan years, the press complained that Reagan sat for few taped interviews and he preferred giving speeches to be covered live. Trump seems to have learned this and taken it to another level with the use of social media. What he was able to do is keep the media on the wrong foot, always playing defense, even when they thought they had him, like with the fake bimbo stories. By being unpredictable, he was impossible to script.

It’s a good lesson for the Dissidents doing interviews on Lefty media. Avoid anything that is taped and only do live interviews. Supporting media that supports you has a corollary. Don’t support media that is at war with you. If you are at an event, just ignore the people with cameras and microphones. When you see people claiming to be prominent members of the alt-right, for example, begging to be on CNN or FNC, it is a safe bet that they are just in it for the money and you would be wise to tune them out and drop them from your rotation.

We Still Have A Word For It

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I’ve always been a skeptic of Facebook, mostly because I don’t understand how they make money. I mean, I know how they make money, but I don’t know why they make money. It’s just a crappy platform for the technologically inept to post pictures of their cat. Facebook charges companies a fee so they can put ads next to the picture of your cat, but why those companies do it is a mystery to me. The whole thing depends upon ordinary people being interesting and looking at those ads, which no one does.

You can’t cheat an honest man and the companies buying ads on Facebook are not Boy Scouts so it is no wonder that Mark Zuckerberg has been hustling them.

Mark Zuckerberg has a credibility problem.

The tech mogul’s Facebook just admitted to finding more “bugs” in the way it measures ads — and once again, those bugs benefited Facebook.

The social-networking giant said Wednesday it has found numerous errors in the ways it calculates how many people view its ads, artificially inflating their perceived value to advertisers and publishers.

Key metrics that Facebook has exaggerated include the weekly and monthly reach of marketers’ posts, which got inflated by 33 percent and 55 percent, respectively, as the site improperly included repeat visitors in its figures.

Elsewhere, Facebook admitted to exaggerating the number of full views that video ads received, as well as time spent by users reading fast-loading “Instant Articles” for publishers including The Post and the Wall Street Journal, both of which are owned by News Corp.

Facebook insisted that the messed-up metrics — which followed the company’s admission in September that it had inflated its reporting of video viewing times to advertisers by as much as 80 percent — didn’t affect billing to publishers and advertisers.

This stuff is not new. It appears to be the business model for Facebook. This video from a couple of years ago sounds a lot like what is in the NYPost story.

Of course, we have a word for this. It’s called fraud. There was a time when something like this would have resulted in the executives at Facebook being led out in chains. Advertisers should be walking away and the stock should be tanking, but that’s not the modern age. Robbing your customers and vendors is just the way it is done at this level. You never give a sucker and even break or smarten up a chump. Ours is a grifter culture where everyone is running a scam.

Beyond Left and Right

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The late great Eric Hohher observed that a mass movement can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. This is often misread, but what Hoffer had in mind was that the movement needs an enemy. It can live without a great cause, but it has to have an enemy. The struggle against evil allows the movement to create its own origin myth and justify its failures as sacrifices. It is why the Progressives have been so good at inventing new monsters to slay. Without monsters, they have no reason to exist.

The modern American Right, in contrast, was never good at inventing bogeymen, because it was always a Progressive heresy. By that I mean the Buckleyites eventually came to accept all the assumptions of the Progressives with regards to the human condition. The difference was they had a different devil to confront. Theirs was the Red Menace and the its Soviet sponsors. What kept movement conservatism moving was the fight against the commies, even when they ceded all the important philosophical turf to the Progressive.

An example to see this is the recent column by National Review editor Rich Lowry. National Review is the flagship publication of the American conservative movement. In theory, at least, they describe the boundaries of what is and what is not conservative, by defining the principles of modern conservatism.

President Barack Obama won’t explicitly say that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely it is what he believes.

The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital H. During the 2008 campaign, he declared that John McCain “is on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a generous touch — allowing for the possibility that McCain might get right with History at some future, undetermined date).

Obama has returned to this phrase and argument obsessively throughout his time in office. It is deeply embedded in his, and the larger progressive, mind — and indirectly contributed to the left’s catastrophic defeat on Nov. 8.

The notion that History takes sides ultimately traces back to the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and borrows heavily from the (genuine and very hard-won) moral capital of the abolitionists and the civil rights movement. Obama is given to quoting Martin Luther King for the proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is deemed to be on “the wrong side of history” by progressives is always loosely associated with the opprobrium directed toward the Southern Fire-Eaters and the defenders of Jim Crow.

Now, Lowry is no one’s idea of a deep thinker so he can be forgiven for not seeing the the ridiculousness of the highlighted section. If Progressives have all this moral capital from their past fights over race, then they are by definition on the right side of history. How could it be otherwise? That’s the logical end point of Lowry’s assertion that the Left was on the side of angels in the great moral crusades of the last two centuries. It would be bizarre for Progressives not to use such a thing as a weapon. They see it as an obligation.

There’s something else there. Lowry goes out of his way to kowtow to the Left on the issue of race. What he is doing, even if he does not know it, is signally his submissiveness to his moral superiors. These are the words of the loser letting his betters know he is not going to be any trouble. Lowry is letting his alleged adversaries know that he agrees with them on the big issues and that there is no need to question his belief in orthodoxy.

The orthodoxy is the New Religion with its three pillars of egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. The only real quibble the Official Right has with the people in charge is how to go about turning the New Religion into public policy. It is probably why they are obsessed with restarting the Cold War and waging a Crusade against the Muslims. Official Conservatism™ needs a devil. Otherwise, it becomes just another school of thought among Progressives.

There’s always been a problem with the New Religion and that is it clams run head long into objective reality. The sort of spiritual egalitarianism preached by the intellectual forebears of Progressives was perfectly sustainable as it was impossible to disprove. The modern version of it is hilariously absurd. Boys are not the same as girls. Nature does not bestow her gifts equally and this scales up to group differences. People tend to notice that the NBA is all black and the best lawyers have a precious metal in their name.

This is the central issue of our age. Our betters insist that all men are equal, full stop. Filling up Cologne with Arabs changes nothing about Cologne because people are the same everywhere and culture is a myth. Everyone else recognizes this to be dangerous nonsense. Thousands of generations of evolution have resulted in a planet full of people with different skills, culture and attitudes. Sweden is the way it is because it is full of Swedes, instead of Arabs.

The determination of our rulers to stamp out large parts of observable reality is what is eroding their legitimacy. This is why Official Conservatism™ has failed. It has no response to the ongoing crisis that is the inevitable result of the New Religion. It has become a mass movement afraid of offending anyone, therefore it is left with gooey platitudes about principles and its role in public life. It’s why it is difficult to tell the Right from the Left these days. They believe all the same stuff now.

The great fight that is shaping up is between one side that insists, despite all the evidence, that all humans are equal in every way. it is only the differences in culture that result in differences in people. For our purposes, economics is in the culture bucket. The other side says man is naturally hierarchical and that groups of humans have unique attributes suited for where they evolved over thousands of generations. This means that different people will have different cultures, different gifts and different liabilities. This is why people naturally self-segregate.

Observable reality is on the side of the latter.

We Need New Words

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I was in the Imperial Capital yesterday and that meant sitting in traffic for long periods. I tuned into talk radio and some guy was going on about how Trump is not a conservative. He was not being critical, he was simply making a point. The people who hold the rights to Official Conservatism™ have declared Trump outside their club. A caller claimed that Trump is a liberal because that’s the only other option, if you are not a conservative. I was not paying close attention, but there’s no denying that Trump does not fit into either bucket.

Of course, most people don’t fit neatly into either bucket and that’s mostly because the labels have meanings that no longer make sense. Hillary Clinton is a liberal, a Progressive! That’s supposed to mean she is a socialist that wants to take from the rich and give to the poor. Not only does she live like royalty, she had the backing of the nation’s billionaires, as well as the billionaires from other nations. It’s a very strange world where the socialist is the preferred candidate of the Billionaire’s Boys Club.

That’s one of the many things revealed about this recent election. The party of the working man is no such thing. They are the party of government hoping to rally the not working men to their banner. When Democrats talk about “working families” they really mean welfare queens with five kids from five strange men they met at a party. This has been true for a long time, but it is now so blazingly obvious that even the staunchest of union men have to accept it. Still, the Democrats retain the label “party of the working class.”

I’ve written a lot here about the ridiculousness of calling the modern Right “conservative” on the grounds that they have managed to conserve nothing. When looked at in the tradition of Western conservatism, it is even more ridiculous to keep calling these people “conservative.” Bill Kristol, for example, is just an old school liberal with a propensity for violence. The National Review crowd is a Buckley Mystery Cult at this point. It’s impossible to tease anything out of that dog’s breakfast of assertions that resembles a political philosophy.

Even the terms Right and Left have outlived their usefulness. Most people don’t know the origin of these terms and just assume they mean Socialist versus Capitalist or Liberal versus Conservative. Like so much else about Western politics, these terms come down to us from the French Revolution. The aristocrats sat on the right side of the Assembly and the commoners sat on the left side. Ever since, radicals and trouble makers have co-opted the term “Left” because they want to pretend they are on the winning side of history and champion of the people.

Calling modern Progressives “the Left” turns history on its head. Progressives are the champions of privilege and advocate what amounts to the return of active and passive citizenship. They and their attendants will be the active citizens while the rest of us, including whoever happens to wander in from who knows where, will be the passive citizens. The only difference is the 18th century aristocrats were honest about what they wanted. The modern aristocrat prefers to lie about his intentions.

Of course, the trouble makers on the alt-right are hardly the defenders of the status quo. They can’t even be called supporters of the status quo ante. The examples from history are simply used as a critique of the current year and the people fond of saying “current year.” The alt-right is thoroughly modern, drawing on information from genetics and cognitive science, while the Progressives are still stuck in the age of blank slatism, that is both anti-science and regressive. It is the Progressives who cannot get past 1955.

As the great Walter Williams was fond of saying, the radicals are the people arguing for the rollback of the welfare state. The radicals are the ones arguing for the ending of foreign adventurism. The radicals are the ones questioning the prevailing orthodoxy on race, sex and culture. The people being purged from social media would have been much more at home with the Jacobins than the defenders of the Ancien Régime. Given their skepticism regarding global capitalism, many of the alt-right would be better termed alt-left.

It may not seem important to fret over labels and terminology, but language is the primary tool of war. Progressives weaponized the word “racist” to the point where it became a Medusa head they could wave around, turning their opponents into stone. Even mentioning the word race causes so-called conservatives to cry. If this thing that is rumbling through the West is something bigger than a minor disruption in the force, we’re going to need new words and labels that work to the benefit of the new radicals.

More important, sabotaging the verbal weaponry of the other side. The new twitter feature that lets users block key words is a no- so subtle attempt to ban certain words and phrases. After all, if you ban the word, you ban the idea  behind the word. That’s just as good as banning the person behind the idea. The challenge for the trouble makers will be to evolve an esoteric way of saying the same things. Winning the war of words is just a proxy for winning the war of ideas. One is a reflection of the other.

Blog Update

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It was my plan to do one of these on a monthly basis like other sites, but time gets away from me and I forget to do it. I think the last one of these was in the summer, but I’m too lazy to look. It was well before the election so I’m guessing summer. Most sites seem to do these monthly to go along with fund raising, which makes sense. If you are asking for money, providing readers with some idea of what they are supporting is a good idea. Anyway, with the election over it feels like a good time to do it.

There are many new readers and new commenters since the last time. According to the traffic stat gizmo, my estimated readership is just shy of 80,000. That’s close to double in the last few months. It has been a steady rise too so it is not as much of an election effect as I would have guessed. Then again, I did not do a ton of stuff on the election. This also corresponds with the growth of my twitter and Gab accounts. I’m an infrequent tweeter, but I do link my posts there so it is mostly organic growth.

Speaking of twitter and Gab, JohnRivers, who comments here from time to time, promotes wackos like myself regularly on twitter and he has a big following. Well, had a big following. They whacked him this week as Twitter purges all the icky mean speakers in order to make twitter a safe space for snowflakes. Gab is getting better and better and I highly recommend joining and following JohnRivers. Following RickyVaughn is a must, mostly because the kid is hilarious when he starts in on a gentle little snowflake.

Interestingly, the number one way in which people are coming here is Google. I guess people see links on twitter or Facebook, google the blog and then land here. These are direct hits on posts too. Facebook is the second most popular referrer, which means someone is linking my stuff there. I have a Facebook page, but only so the little buttons at the top of posts work. I never go on Facebook and I have not visited my page since I setup the account. In fact, I may not have logged on since I set it up.

Interestingly the most popular post remains this one, which says a lot about the number of alt-right and alt-right sympathizers. The next most popular post is this one and that says a lot about what was on the minds of sympathizers in the run up to the election. I’ve always suspected that some portion of the electorate looked at Clinton and wondered if the woman was not so much corrupt, but just not very bright. The crooks and grifters surrounding her saw an easy mark with access to power. I don’t know and I no longer care. The witch is dead.

The volume of comments has gone up and and we have new faces since the summer. More than a few times I have seen posts on twitter about the quality of the comments here. In fact, one of my twitter followers says the comments are often better than the blog posts. I do not take that as an insult. Another follower told me that my comment section is a bit intimidating. I’m not entirely sure I follow, but I suppose some people refrain from commenting when they see a regular that is on top of his or her game.

I’ve received inquiries about donations and I have no plans to do anything on that front. I like money as much as the next guy, but there’s a level of effort involved with setting up donations and I don’t have the time. If I was looking to make this a full-time paying job then it would be different, but that’s not the plan. That’s mostly because I don’t see how anyone makes a living as a blogger. Honestly, I always wonder how people like Steve Sailer and Stacy McCain make it work. There’s a bit of economics there that eludes me.

My hate mail has gone up as well. Before the election, I was getting a regular stream of claims that my sort was finished. The right side of history was coming for me. After the election, not so much. In the last few days the hate mail has mentioned Steve Sailer and Steve Bannon. I read the former and never heard of the latter until this week. I see there’s some sort of conspiracy theory involving the two being peddled by that crackpot Glenn Beck. I must be stepping up in the world. I welcome my inclusion in the conspiracy.

That’s it for this update. I thank everyone for reading, linking and mentioning the site.

Getting Right

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Vox Day posted something the other day that was particularly wrong in some important ways. This bit is what caught my attention.

As John Red Eagle and I chronicled in detail in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, conservatism has not only failed, it was always doomed to eventual failure by virtue of its very nature. It was an attitude and a defensive posture, not a coherent ideology or an identity, and it lacked positive objectives, so it never had any hope of resisting the relentless ideological onslaught of the Left.

The first thing I think he has very wrong is to call Official Conservatism an attitude. That’s pretty much the opposite of reality. Official Conservatism is a collection of policy items held together by a pose, which is just a sales strategy. Things like low taxes and limited business regulation are policy goals. The stuffy smugness you see from big foot conservatives is a pose, a sale pitch they think helps sell their proposal. It is intended to inoculate them from being called simple minded by the Progressives.

This is in sharp contrast to the traditional American conservatism which is, in fact, an attitude or a temperament. It is a set of preferences that Michael Oakeshott spelled out a million years ago in his essay On Being Conservative. “To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed
to make certain kinds of choices.” In other words, conservatism is a disposition.

This is why Buckley-style conservatism could never outlive its age. It was tied to a specific set of public polices that only made sense in the context of the age in which they were conjured. In the Cold War, business friendly taxes and regulation, along with a muscular defense policy make perfect sense as a rebuttal to the dominant Progressive ideology. Once the Cold War ended, the justifications for Buckley-style conservatism ended. It became a body with no soul to animate it.

That touches on the another error in the Vox post. Buckley Conservatism did not fail because it lacked an ideological underpinning. It failed because it had one, or at least tried hard to fashion one, out of the collection of policy goals we associate with Official Conservatism. As Russell Kirk observed, “conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.” Put another way, Buckley built a movement that he dressed up in the garb of of conservatism.

The attempt to create an ideology that could coexist with a despairing acceptance of the human condition, meant that the movement would always be riddled with cracks. Just as important, because it was a political movement, it was always willing to toss aside that which it found politically inconvenient. It’s why the Buckleyites purged so many people over the decades. Guys like Steve Sailer were shipped out because they were politically inconvenient, not because they were wrong about what was happening in the culture.

Inevitably, an ideology demands that the adherent accept things that are in direct contradiction with observable reality. That’s both the attraction and the defect of ideology. Those with a conservative temperament were always going to be skeptical of the projects championed by the Official Right. Public policy is about accepting less than perfect trade-offs. In the Cold War, the threat of the Soviets enforced a degree of accommodation. When that ended, the divorce was inevitable.

The interesting thing about what is happening is that the guys calling themselves “conservative” are fighting against what is, in fact, the reemergence of the old traditional conservatism. The mild isolationism, practical nationalism and biological realism are just the old ideas that were once common in America, before the ideologues gained the upper hand in the 20th century. All those fringe types the Buckleyites purged, turned out to be a majority and now the Buckleyites are looking like a collection of fringe weirdos.

That’s the other thing Vox has wrong. The alt-right is not an ideology and it is never going to be one. As soon as guys like Vox are able to create one, it will cease being of any interest to anyone outside it. The reason this thing they call the alt-right works is that it is not an ideology. It is just a long series of inconvenient observations repeated daily on social media and elsewhere. Posting FBI crime stats on Facebook is not the makings of a mass movement. It is the undoing of one. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

National Populism

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If you were of an intellectual after the Great War, you would have formed your thoughts and opinions in the shadow of what was the most horrific cataclysm to strike the civilized world since the collapse of the Roman Empire. J.R.R. Tolkien, for example, fought at the Somme in the Great War. The images of which were in his mind as he wrote his legendary work, The Lord of the Rings. Not only would the images of the war be always on your mind, the causes of the war would also be at the center of your thinking.

If you were an intellectual in France after the Second World War, you would have developed your moral philosophy in the shadow of two massive industrial wars that very nearly extinguished civilization. It is nearly impossible for modern people to imagine what life was like for Europeans, and to a lesser degree Americans, following two civilization wrecking wars. It was not the physical devastation that haunted the minds of Europeans. It was what caused it that haunted the people of the West.

After the Great War, people on both sides of the conflict blamed their leaders for the bloodbath. Germans soldiers thought their leaders had stabbed them in the back and brought shame on Germany. The French soldiers largely agreed with them, even though France came out as the victor. If you had fought in the war, it was hard to find a reason for it and benefit to it, regardless of which side you were on in the fight. Winning looked a lot like losing. Intellectuals blamed the people in charge for the disaster.

After the Second World War, it was no longer possible to just blame the leaders. The people in charge in the Second World War had lived through the Great War. Many had fought in the trenches. Many had dedicated their lives to preventing such a thing from happening again. Neville Chamberlain is vilified today, but he was not alone in thinking that any peace was better than war. Yet, within a generation, Europe was in rubble after another industrial war that killed millions. There had to be a reason.

The thinking classes settled upon nationalism. For the last half century the belief among the ruling classes is that national identity always ends in conflict. In a world with nuclear weapons, national conflict is annihilation. Therefore, blunting national identity and nationalism has been the the raison d’être of Western ruling classes for half a century. It is what has driven the integration of Europe into a single political entity. It is what is behind things like the World Bank, global trade deals and the IMF.

It has become an article of faith that open borders and unlimited migration are the ultimate solution to the problem of nationalism. If people are free to move around as they please and homogeneous communities are diluted by foreigners with no allegiance to local customs, there can be no national identity and therefore no threat of nationalism. It is why European leaders cling to mass migration in the face of local opposition. They see the opposition as the problem they are trying to solve.

It is why Western intellectuals are scrambling to figure out how to blunt the rising tide of discontent all over the West. Brexit was the first big jolt to the system. The election of Donald Trump is is the second. The next year is promising more body blows to the status quo. The Italians got to the polls next to vote on a referendum that is largely seen as a proxy vote on the European project. In France, Marie Le Pen is suddenly looking like a possibility. Then there are populist uprisings all over like the recent one in Catalan.

The thing is, there are two brands of nationalism The Germans and the French were not driven to slaughter one another because French truffle hunters hated German watch makers. The people of France did not care about the people of Germany until their leaders insisted they care. Millions of men were called to battle by leaders appealing to their sense of national duty and their patriotism. Europe was not dragged into two wars by populist movements. It was dragged into two wars by the greed of its rulers.

The nationalism that is sprouting up between the paving stones of globalism is nothing like the ruling classes imagine because it is organic. Human beings are tribal, clustering together with those who share a common biology, ancestry and heritage. The flood of migrants sponsored by the ruling classes looks like an invasion at the street level so people at the street level are responding. The fact that their leaders not only refuse to help, but actively aid the invading foreigners, is not going unnoticed but the public.

A century ago, the nationalism of the West was a top down phenomenon. National socialism was embraced by large swaths of the political and intellectual classes. Mussolini was celebrated in America as a model for Progressive rule. The virulent nationalism that is blamed for the great wars was always a ruling class phenomenon. It simply exploited the public’s sense of civic duty and national identity. Blaming low-church nationalism for the Nazis is blaming the the gun for the murderer.

National Populism is a bottom up phenomenon. The people organizing resistance to the globalists are doing so out of self-defense. AfD is not planning to invade Poland. The alt-right is not looking to invade Mexico and claim it for the United States. UKIP is not interested in rebuilding the Empire. The populist movements of the West are simply a response in self defense to global elites that no longer respect the people over whom they rule. They are the backlash to the relentless front lash of multiculturalism.

The logical end of these populist movements is that everyone goes back to where they belong to live in peace. Unlike the nationalism of a century ago, National Populism is not ambitious. It is mildly isolationist and inward looking. A century ago Western rulers were swollen by excessive pride. Today, populist dissenters are simply interested in crawling out from under a half century of shame, heaped upon them by people who claim to be their betters. National Populism is nothing more than the a return to normalcy.

Data Driven Nonsense

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When I was a young man starting out in the world, I was once given an assignment for the marketing people. The job was to gather up and detail the costs of various marketing programs. For some reason they did not track these things in the accounting system. That meant I had to rummage through filing cabinets pulling out invoices and then tabulating the results in a spreadsheet. My guess is I was given the task mostly because I was the only guy who could use Lotus 1-2-3.

I gathered up all the data for the periods in question and put together a report. Out of curiosity, and to be a suck up, I created s chart that showed the impact of various marketing efforts on sales. I even factored in things like the number of peak sales days in a month and adjusted the results to reflect these variances. What jumped out to me was that marketing did nothing for sales. I then expanded the data range to include previous years and it was more obvious. Our marketing was a waste of money.

I was young, but I was not an idiot so I gave the VP of marketing the numbers without my analysis. He then used them in his presentation, in which he claimed to be the key to the company’s success. I sat watching it waiting for someone to point out that he was full of baloney, but no one did. What I realized was everyone believed in these types of marketing schemes. They had to work because everyone did them. The VP of marketing liked his job so he told everyone what they wanted to hear.

The point of this walk down memory lane is that people have been using data to lie to one another long before we had cheap database software and Chinese quants cranking out reports. My bet is the first modern humans to migrate out of Africa had a meeting where Grog held up a skin, with marks on it, that he claimed was proof that slow food and fast women were just over the horizon. Data analysis is often just another form of magic that we use to grease the wheels of life.

This always comes to mind when I hear political types talk about their data operations. Reince Priebus is running around saying it was the GOP data operations that got the Trump vote out on Tuesday. He was on the radio claiming that his team “knew what people ate for lunch, when they went to work and how they voted in the past” so they could target these voters and get them to the polls. He made it sound like they had studied all of us since birth so they could maximize their vote.

This is nonsense. Trump had none of this stuff in the primary and he poleaxed everyone in his way. His “ground game” was to go on TV and radio and be interesting. Then he went on Twitter to give reporters something to ask him. In the general, he preferred the old fashioned whistle stop tour. Instead of a train, he flew around on his plane and did stadium shows near airports. His campaign was lean and mean, avoiding the trap of hiring an army of experts. Trump was outspent something close to 5-to-1 when including outside groups.

The fact is people buy stuff because they think they need it. They buy your stuff because they think it is cheaper or they think it has high status. I have a $200 Windows phone because it does everything I would want to do on an iPhone. My friends all have iPhones because they think it makes them look smart and hip. No amount of analytics are going to get me to buy an $800 iPhone nor will it make the cheap mobile phones hip and trendy.

Similarly, people vote for a few reasons, one of which is tribal loyalty. I know people who will never vote for a Republican, even if the Democrat is an ax murder. No amount of data analysis is going to alter that reality. The persuadable, on the other hand, can be persuaded if the candidate is appealing and offers them something they want. Similarly, the loyalists will turn out if they like their candidate and he has something to offer. Again, big data has nothing to do with it.

I suspect Trump’s reluctance to sign off on the big data operations, in his campaign, was due to the fact he has spent his life sitting through presentations in which clever guys tried to baffle him with data. Early in his career, he was the guy doing the baffling, as he convinced bankers and investors that his projects were going to make money.  Over a long career he has figured out that the basics of sales are immutable and the rest if just window dressing.

That’s not to say that all data analysis is nonsense. Steve Sailer has used publicly available voting data to analyze the lunacy of Official Conservatism™. It’s just that big data is not terribly useful in selling a candidate or a political party. Hillary Clinton allegedly had the greatest data team in the history of data teams. She had Google, Faceberg and Twitter working with the DNC to aid her data team. She lost because she is an awful person with nothing to offer.

But, that’s not what the data says, or at least it is not what the quants analyzing the data will say it says. Instead, they will work for the next year building after action reports loaded with jargon from statistics and demography, that will prove she just needed a bigger data operation and more “granular analysis in real time.” In 2020, the one-legged Latina lesbian the Democrats offer up against Trump will have the best data team and ground game in the history of mankind.

Celebrate Today, Fight Tomorrow

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Like most everyone, the election result left me in a state of mild euphoria for the last dozen or so hours. It’s mostly due to the fact I stayed up half the night watching the results. I’m usually in bed by midnight so being up past two made for a challenging day. Even so, it feels pretty good to see the good guys win once in a while. It feels even better when you are proved right. I put Hillary at 46% for this election and she came in a tiny bit higher, but well below 50%. I said all along that the status quo must break 50% to carry the night.

Now, I look forward to the Triumph. In January, Donald Trump will enter the Imperial Capital in a four horse chariot, wearing a laurel crown and painted toga. Behind him, in chains and rags, will be the members of NeverTrump. The great enemy of the people and the threat to the republic, Hillary Clinton, will be displayed in a wheeled cage so the citizens can throw rotten vegetables at her. After the festivals, the proscription lists will be posted around the city and the NeverTrump loons will be thrown into a pit.

Yes, victory feels good.

That said, this is not the end. It is just the beginning and the road from here to a safe and healthy country is long and full of perils. A political class that is willing to tolerate festering carbuncles like the Clintons, is perfectly willing to close ranks and do everything it can to destroy the Trump presidency. A nation willing to vote for a woman with the ethics of Pol Pot is a nation willing to stand aside and let the political class stymie any attempt to reform the broken system. Cautious pessimism is the right outlook today.

The thing Trump has working for him is that the ruling class is truly stunned at the result of the election. This is a black swan event for them. This is not just a media phenomenon. Kelly Ayotte is staggering around Manchester New Hampshire with her panties on her head, asking people if they know where she lives. She went all in on rejecting Trump and now she is out of a job. The politicians that listened to their party leaders and distanced themselves from Trump were all punished at the polls. The world is upside down.

That’s what makes Trump so frightening to the political class. It’s not that they threw everything at him and he won. That can happen. Political athletes are skilled at beating the odds. What’s frightening about Trump is that he is the nullification of conventional politics. He ran an old school campaign and ran it like a business, instead of a jobs program for the political class. He ticked none of the boxes the experts say you must tick. He rearranged a political map everyone said could not be changed. Trump is scary man right now.

The thing that scares the political class more than anything is that Trump had coattails. It was an article of faith among the political class that Trump would hurt down ballot candidates. He was a badge of shame on the GOP, akin to slavery, and they would not recover for a generation. Instead, Trump boosted candidates who embraced him and his success probably saved the Senate and may have saved the House. Everything the political class believed on Monday was proved false on Tuesday.

One reason Trump exists and is the next president is that the political class is long overdue for reform. The reason the political class is a dumpster fire is the public has lost its civic morality. That cannot be fixed with one election. That cannot be fixed by one man in one job. What ails the country is not a missing comma in the tax code or the regulatory code. The political culture in Washington has to change and that happens when the American culture changes.

Another reason Trump is the next president is a lot of people were willing to say what is not supposed to be said. Good men have sacrificed much in an effort to stem the cultural slide. Pat Buchanan, Steve Sailer, Paul Gottfried, John Derbyshire and others have given up a lot to be right in an age when being right can often be dangerous. There’s also the social media trouble makers like Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers. Telling people, who hate you, things they don’t want to hear, takes commitment and guts.

Today is the start if the long war to try and save the nation and our culture. Join the H. L. Mencken Club. Go to an American Renaissance event.  Kick in a few bucks to a Steve Sailer beg-a-thon. Tune into an Anthony Cumia show. Be a John Derbyshire listener. Tell the screeching harpies in the office that maybe giving women the vote was not such a great idea. Sign up for a Gab account. Speak the truth in a world where speaking truth is a revolutionary act. Be a man with nothing to lose.

Celebrate now. Tomorrow we go back to the war.