Blood Sucker Economy

Posted on May 21, 2024 by thezman

Last week brought news that the iconic restaurant chain Red Lobster has filed for bankruptcy protection and has started closing locations. The chain is mostly known for being a cheap night out for people in the suburbs and businessmen stuck near a suburban business park. The people hired to write about business for regime media, people who know nothing about business, have rolled with the usual lines about how casual dining was devastated by the pandemic.

The joke online is that Red Lobster’s all you can eat shrimp deal cost them millions because diversity would sit there for hours eating shrimp. The restaurant admits it was a disaster for them, but the real reason the chain has failed is that it was taken over by gangsters who made it into a bust-out. The gangsters in this case are private equity investors who bought up the chain. This bankruptcy is part of fleecing the dumb money that still remains trapped in the enterprise.

The way these scams work is the private investors swoop in and buy a property that is asset rich but cash poor. That is, they have things of value, but those things are not generating enough revenue to meet expenses. Sometimes the enterprise is profitable but needs cash to expand or maybe reorganize itself to shed poorly performing assets and expand into more profitable areas. Private equity comes in with attractive terms and an army of experts to reshape the enterprise.

In reality, they usually sell the assets in deals that have the buyer lease back the asset to the company in order to raise quick cash. Other times the asset is pledged as collateral in a similar sort of debt arrangement. The result is the enterprise quickly raises cash to pay the investors with a healthy profit but is left stripped of its assets and often holding a lot of debt. This is what happened here. The new investors sold the real estate in lease-back deals that are now expiring.

It is a good example of how so much of our economic output is just moving money around in circles. It is the old joke about a stranger coming into a little town to rent a room for the night. Nothing of value has been created by investors buying up this restaurant chain. It simply became a vehicle for them to lure in new money to pay them a profit for their investment, while all along knowing that the end result would be these new investors getting a haircut in bankruptcy proceedings.

The argument in favor of this sort of dealing is that all of the parties involved are sophisticated enough to know the risks. The real estate investors that bought the properties and then leased them back knew the risks or at least they should have known the risks, as it is their business to know the risks. This is all true, but it obscures the fact that this is not genuine economic activity. This is not how an economy should function, but it is the core of the American economy now.

This is not without consequences. Travelers now have to check out the type of plane they could be boarding, because Boeing planes are falling apart. As with Red Lobster, the blame is placed on diversity, which is not entirely without merit, but the real culprit is the vulture capitalism that has come to define elite economics. Boeing is no longer in the business of building better airplanes. It is in the business of creating financial transactions for the benefit of the investor class.

What we see with Boeing has been happening with the military industrial complex for the last three decades. They are no longer in the business of building practical weapons that can be used by the American military. Instead, they are in the business of creating complex transactions for the benefit of insiders and investors. One result is an F-35 fleet that looks great parked at an air field, but it is too dangerous to fly. Meanwhile, Russia and China make weapons for war, not investor profit.

A root of this growing problem in the American economy is the notion that anything that can be shown to turn a profit is normatively good. The usual suspects are going to ruin the town of Harpers Ferry with a development project that will make them money, but come at the expense of the residents. They can do this because they went to the state and showed it will turn a profit, so everyone fell in line. No doubt promises of insider access to those profits were included in the pitch.

The reason profit is a good thing in an economy is it is supposed to spur innovation that results in new products and greater efficiency. Profit is a means to an end, not an end in itself from a macroeconomic perspective. When profit or the quest for profit results in planes falling from the sky or communities being harvested for their social capital, then profit or the quest for profit is bad for society. It is why we used to hunt down and punish corruption and fraud. Note we no longer do that.

An economy is about making things, fixing things, and inventing things, which is no longer the way to get rich in America. Instead, as Peter Theil explained in his book, the path to wealth is finding a way to game the system. You find a flim-flam like the Red Lobster scam or you game government to let you make electric cars that no one needs or wants. The blood sucker economy is not about making things, fixing things, and inventing things. It is about robbing the people who do those things.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Digital Man

Posted on May 20, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the farcical nature of the young online right, a post about the looming summer of hate that is upon us and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Since the dawn of the digital age there has been commentary about the impact the digital age will have on society. Mostly it comes from how we will do things as technology seeps into every nook and cranny of life. Little attention has been paid to who will be controlling things. It has always been assumed that the social structures and selection pressures within them will remain the same, so the new technology will simply be a new tool for the old ruling class.

In the most general sense this is clearly not true. The oligarchs that rose up out of Silicon Valley are a different breed of oligarch from those who rose up in the last decades of the industrial revolution. The latter were the product of an American empire on the rise while the former were the product of an empire at its peak. The industrial age oligarchs were a part of creating the American empire while the tech oligarchs were taking advantage of an existing empire.

Putting aside the nature of the new oligarchs, the nature of the managerial class that actually runs the empire has changed as well. The type of person who slithers his way up into senior positions is different from the old managerial elite. The top officials in government a generation ago, for example, were the product of different selection pressures than those of today. A generation ago, deeds still counted for something in the competition for status within the meritocracy.

Look around at the people running foreign policy now and you cannot help but notice that they are not exceptional at anything. It is one of the things that makes a guy like John Mearsheimer jump off the screen in the geopolitical debate. In addition to having been right about most things over the last twenty years, he is an immensely talented, intelligent, and confident man. By comparison, Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland come off as dull and confused.

As technology has changed society, the selection pressure for the managerial elite has also changed. The legacy pressures that produced a guy like Mearsheimer have been replaced with new mechanisms that produce men like Blinken. These pressures start much further down the development cycle than the institutions. It reflects the changes in the culture brought about by technology. All along the way, technology plays a role in how men acquire status within the social system.

A simple way to think about how this works may be to think about the broad categories of young males that existed in the analog age versus the digital age. The three buckets for young males were the gymnasium, the library, and the playground. The first was for the jocks who were attracted to structure and competition. The second was for the bookish who were attracted to learning and knowledge. The final category was for the typical young male who generally like socializing.

In the analog age, the managerial elite drew from the gymnasium and the library, the doers, and the thinkers. The American empire was the product of men who produced new ideas and those who found a way to make those ideas into reality. The oligarchs who rose up in the industrial age used their wealth to underwrite the scholarly and cultural side of the house. Libraries, universities, and cultural centers naturally attracted investment from the new oligarchs.

The digital age changed how young males live and as a result it changed how the social systems selected for talented young males. That playground group suddenly had new toys to use in their socialization. Instead of kicking a ball around, they participated in highly structured and highly complex digital gameplay. Instead of sorting social standing on the playground, it was done in the virtual world of gaming, online chat rooms and social media. Most important, these became valuable skills.

Look around at the public square and the biggest influencers are not old smart guys or highly accomplished guys, but young guys raised online. None of them were jocks or even played sports. Many have no accomplishments at all in the meat space. They are not experts in a cognitive field. On the other hand, they are not the basement dwelling weirdos their critics claim. They enjoy competition, just the online version. They know things that are important to success online.

The new generation of social influencers are an extreme example of a process that has been going on since the dawn of the microprocessor revolution. Technology changed the value relationship between these three male roles. The skills useful on the playground, now the virtual playground, have become more important than the skills acquired in the gymnasium or the library. The critics in the 1970’s were correct when they said it was the nerds who would eventually rule.

Now, some will say it is the longhouse, the feminization of society that is the root of this transformation, but it looks more like it was technology that made the longhouse possible by changing the selection pressure away from knowledge and deeds to the social skills of the digital space. Because so much of what makes up digital society is useful only because we pretend it is so, it means it is not subjected to the crucible of practical necessity, so convincing everyone it matters is what counts.

Social media is a great example of something that people think is important only because everyone they know thinks it is important. Imagine you refuse to go on these platforms and just live your life in meat space. Then someone starts a viral campaign against you on Twitter. What happens to you? Nothing happens because you will remain blissfully unaware of it. In other words, Twitter matters to the people on Twitter because they pretend it matters.

From childhood on up, the skills that are the most useful in the digital world are not those acquired in the library or the gymnasium. It is the weird, androgynous social skills learned in the digital playground. These define teenage social status and then professional status. Now we are seeing them define managerial class status structures, including the managerial elite. What powers the longhouse is the microprocessor that changed the people in the longhouse.

Not only are the skills from the gymnasium and the library falling in status, but the playground skills have changed as well. The digital playground is not like the analog playground where you can get punched in the nose for violating the rules or challenging the wrong guy. On the digital playground your character dies and you respawn at a lower level or maybe you have to create a new character. There is never any real consequence to failure on the digital playground.

This is where feminization comes into the discussion. It has been assumed that the feminization of society is the product of the feminist movement, the explosion of women in the workplace or the number of single mother households. In other words, generations of men raised by women made men soft. In reality, it is at least one and maybe two generations of men socialized like girls on the digital playground that has made the longhouse a natural home for the new man.

In fairness, not all males have been raised on the digital playground. Young men still play organized sports and they still read books. The real playground still exists where young boys learn how to be young men. Elite culture, however, no longer selects for the traits learned in these areas. Instead, it is the traits acquired on the digital playground that offer the pathway to the higher reaches. By the standards of the digital age, Nick Fuentes is the quintessential digital man.

The New Jew Thing

Posted on May 16, 2024 by thezman

The one thing the critics of Elon Musk have right is that after his takeover of Twitter, now stupidly called X, the amount of anti-Jewish material has increased. Not all of it should be called antisemitic, as much of it is anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, but the antisemites have been given far more room to operate. Musk restored the man who has to be the current frontrunner for the Jerusalem Post’s antisemite of the year award, Nick Fuentes, to the platform recently, which has had the predictable results.

No doubt, Elon Musk simply thinks these things will sort themselves over time and there is no reason to stifle speech in the name of guarding the feelings of those who are always on alert for a discouraging word, but it is also true that it has resulted in far more genuinely antisemitic content on the platform. The question is whether this is just a burst of energy due to newfound freedom or does it reflect a change in attitude regarding Jews and their place in American society.

The place to start is this post by someone calling himself Will Chamberlain and the response from someone calling himself Aaron Renn. The former is a Jewish political activist, and the latter is a Protestant involved in religious activism. The topic of the exchange is something the great John Derbyshire observed a million years ago when he wrote a review of Kevin MacDonald’s infamous book. Derb introduced the idea of the “Jew Thing”, which afflicts right-wing people.

It is true that for some reason a certain segment of the right is susceptible to the Jew Thing and when exposed to it they go crazy with it. For most it is a short fever that eventually breaks leaving them with an additional set of tools to help understand what is happening in the world. For others it becomes a lifelong obsession that takes over their life in the same way that drug dependency can take over a life. They wake up thinking about Jews and go to bed thinking about Jews.

That may be what is happening with the volume of anti-Jewish material we see on Twitter, now stupidly called X. This subculture has some room to breathe on a big public platform, so it is party time. This happened in the olden times when social media was called Usenet and there was little moderation. In fact, this subculture was a pioneer in building online communities. Don Black built one of the first genuine online communities back in the early 1990’s and it is still going.

What happened in the old days is self-segregation. People with narrow interests, built communities around those interests because they did not want to interact with people who did not share their interests. It also meant that people dedicated to opposing certain topics, built walls and fences around their communities to keep out the people they claimed to oppose. That is probably what will happen with Twitter, now stupidly called X, once the harpies discover the block option.

There is another option. One obvious difference between this wave of the Jew Thing and prior waves is this one is much younger and simplistic. In the old days, people afflicted with the Jew Thing would spend much of their time working out the details of the Jew Thing, often by reading books written by fellow sufferers or by interacting inside those narrow online communities. They spent only a small portion of their time proselytizing to the masses about the Jew Thing.

This new wave is the opposite. It is not an intellectual movement. These are not people reading and discussing Kevin MacDonald. They are not writing long rebuttals to Nathan Cofnas, as they have never heard of him. Instead, they spend their time posting the early life of everyone they think may be Jewish in the timeline of everyone they think needs to hear the news about the Jew Thing. In other words, this wave may not be bigger, but it may be much louder.

Again, most people who catch the Jew Thing recover and simply come away with an understanding of how group loyalty works inside a pluralistic society. In a way, the Jew Thing is like Covid, in that those who recover, and most do, come away knowing that it will not kill you but the people warning about it certainly will, so it is best to be on your guard at all times. This may be what happens with the people currently caught up in the current epidemic of the Jew Thing.

Of course, this could be another symptom of late phase empire. The most famous outbreak of the Jew Thing was in the last century when the old imperial order in Europe collapsed in the wake of the Great War. Once the old mental frameworks collapsed, people could look around and see things they never saw in the past. This stunning emergence of reality and the chaos brought about by the collapse of the old order led people to embrace new narratives.

That could be what is happening now. The American empire is in decline and people feel that things are no longer in good order. Young people, as is always the case in societal decline, feel the tremors of collapse first. That could explain why this new epidemic of the Jew Thing is hitting the Zoomers. The world is not as they were trained up to expect and this disconfirmation is resulting in a disassociation with the old ways, opening the mind to the Jew Thing as an alternative framework.

Another thing that supports that last possibility is that the regime seems to be struggling to contain this outbreak. In the past, they would have pressured Musk into cracking down on this material and we would have seen a coordinated campaign to purge the afflicted from the public square. The ADL forced Musk to visit the pile of shoes, but it did not take, which suggests something has changed. Maybe this epidemic is more than just a replay of the past and something new is happening.

The Cosmo Right

Posted on May 15, 2024 by thezman

A regular feature of the internet age is the emergence of what is called a “new right” that is supposed to supplant the “old right.” This is largely due to the collapse of Buckley-style conservatism over the last twenty years. The assumption is that the failures of mainstream conservatism and its dwindling demographic must lead to its demise and its replacement by a new, more contemporary right. As a result, there have been a lot of hats thrown into the ring from alternative rights.

What may be emerging as the real threat to win the competition is something that has yet to name itself. The recent hit piece on the publisher of Passage Press, the group responsible for rehabilitating Steve Sailer, led to a gathering of online friends and acquaintances in support of the publisher. This is the online character known as Lomez, who has written for Claremont sites and has a big following on Twitter. He is part of a loose network of influencers that could be called the Cosmo Right.

That is the first place to start with understanding this collection of people emerging into a movement of sorts. They are cosmopolitan in the old bourgeois sense of the word, as they often live in or around the trendy cities. Maybe they went to a college that is near a trendy city or they worked at a company in a hipsterville. Maybe they just like to hang out in places like Austin. It is not so much about location when it comes to their cosmopolitanism, but their attitude.

These are people comfortable in and around the people David Brooks called bourgeois bohemians or Bobo’s. Brooks described them as highly educated people who enjoy the aesthetic of the creative world but pay for it by successfully maintaining a position in the competitive modern economy. Twenty years ago, when he wrote his book about these people, the Bobo’s were a white couple who lived in a gentrified part of the Five Burroughs but had jobs in Manhattan.

This potential new right that is forming up seems to be mostly people who have drifted in and out of that world. They come from generally upper middle-class backgrounds, went to college, and entered a profession. Finding the meritocratic world stifling and sterile, they have been looking around for something more fulfilling and that is not limited to their lifestyle. Their politics are the result of waking up from neoliberalism and then searching about for alternatives.

A representative example is the Blaze writer and commentator Auron MacIntyre, whose book The Total State reads like a personal journey out of the world of conventional politics into the wilderness of dissident politics. Instead of going down the usual rabbit holes which is so common when people get red-pilled on politics, he has maintained a foot in the world of conventional politics, often normalizing ideas that first gained traction in the shadows of dissident discourse.

This gets to the natural trendiness with this new scene. This new right is composed of people comfortable in a world that is often defined by trends, so they do not get swept up in whatever is happening at the moment. In other words, this is a conservatism of disposition, rather than of ideology. Scan the posts of the site IM1776 and you get a Russel Kirk vibe from it. The focus is not on a political agenda, but more on analysis and the proper positioning of politics with the personal.

This is also a millennial demographic. Zoomers get a lot of attention due to their shenanigans online and their skillful use of digital media, but this new scene is almost exclusive to people from the millennial cohort. Like the Zoomers, they come from the suburban middle-class, but unlike the Zoomers they went onto college and got jobs in the above ground economy. Their politics are the result of that experience in the world of practical things, rather than the internet fever swamps.

Another interesting and novel aspect is that this ad hoc collection of people can be described as post-national, post-racial and post-regional. They are all what Leonard Jeffries would call “ice people” but there is no emphasis on it. It is a lot like the old paleo-conservatism in that there are a lot of secular Jews and conservative Christians from mainstream sects. You also see a mix of people from different regions with a regional focus, but not exclusively so.

This is the new cosmopolitanism that may be the result of the demographic changes sweeping the Western world. The old racial categories no longer work because it is no longer a world of black and white. The majoritarian outlook no longer works as there is no longer a natural majority. The response to multiracial neoliberalism may be a cosmopolitan conservatism rooted in classical Western attitudes. The answer to the new Mercurians will be new Apollonians.

There is also the fact that it is young and educated. These are not people with warmed over political agendas from the past, but young, educated men reexamining the past for the foundations of a new political foundation. That means it is less a political agenda than a cultural movement. There is a cool factor growing up around these people on social media, which brings in new voices and new ideas. That gives this new scene a vitality missing from prior new right initiatives.

Of course, this could just be another ripple in the river that is the political in the mass media age. This is not the first effort at creating an alternative to the shuffling husk that is Buckley-style conservatism. The difference here is that this emerging new subculture is not a deliberate creation. Unlike Hazony’s newfangled nationalism, the Cosmo-Right is an organic thing that is emerging gradually. Therefore, it may have more staying power because it is not built to replace anything.

Pseudo-Intellectual Posers

Posted on May 14, 2024 by thezman

An aspect of modern politics that does not get discussed is that it is less about the practical things politics is supposed to address and mostly about esoteric and abstract ideas that have meaning only because we pretend so. Look at the current crop of campaign ads and the candidates may as well be running against the bogeyman or in favor of the good juju. Without the party labels, it would be impossible to know anything about the candidates.

This was not always the case. The old joke about politics was that every candidate ran around promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot. The point was they all had plans about how to increase material prosperity. Even though no politician speaks to anything specific these days, the economy remains the top issue with voters because the prevailing assumption inherited from the past is that politics is supposed to be about practical things like fixing potholes.

One reason for the shift in political rhetoric is that the public square has become the domain of clever midwits playing word games with one another. Public discourse is now controlled by credentialed experts who have no idea how anything works, other than the complex game of relationships that defines the managerial class. That means they are good at constructing complicated intellectual structures that are useful in rhetorical jousting but have no connection to reality.

One result of this is that mainstream politics rests on the false choice. The “sides” in any debate struggle with one another to see who can impose their false dichotomy on the debate in order to gain the moral high ground. One way this is done is to conjure a nightmare scenario from the other side’s proposal and then claim the choice is between that nightmare and present reality. Alternatively, they will conjure a glorious fantasy out of their ideas and compare that to present reality.

A good example of how this works is this post at the libertarian site Lawn & Liberty that wags the bony finger at people on the right who have praised the crime policies of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Crime has plummeted in El Salvador since they began rounding up the gangs and putting them in isolation. The government has effectively cut the gangs out of society and placed them in a facility from which there is no communication to the outside world.

What the writer of that post is doing is pretending that it is possible to build a civil libertarian paradise in El Salvador. That is the ideal against which he is measuring the highly effective policies of Bukele. This is the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have the rough, but effective justice used by the government to address the crime problem and on the other hand we have this magical reality where there is no crime and no rough justice to deal with crime.

This line gets at the problem. “It’s easy to see why so many on the right have become enamored with Bukele. They too lack basic respect for rules and institutions. They, like him, are largely unanchored by any coherent set of ideas or philosophy.” It is the old joke about libertarians saying, “Sure, the policy works in the real world but does to work in theory?” The writer cares more about his precious abstractions than about the thousands of lives saved by these policies.

What is not so obvious is that his definition of “coherent set of ideas or philosophy” is normative one. Bukele has a coherent set of ideas. It starts with doing what works to solve the crime problem. He identified the problem, evaluated various ways to address the problem and settled on that which creates the best result. That is about as coherent as one can get from public policy, but because it violates the writers sense of moral justice, he flings his poo at the policies.

This false choice modeling of modern political rhetoric gets to another reality that lies at the heart of our politics. All of it is progressive. The various camps, conservative, libertarian, liberal, and so on are all operating within the larger progressive framework which is built on the assumption that the future must be a glorious one as we in the present are compelled to work toward that glorious future. G. Patrick Lynch, the author of that piece, is no different than Ocasio-Cortez in this regard.

The reason that many Americans, mostly those who used to identify as conservative or right-wing, admire what Bukele is doing is the practicality of it. Our political space is littered with discount preachers like G. Patrick Lynch, waving their bony fingers at us while listing off our sins. The stage is packed with dreamers who conjured creative visions of a glorious future that work only in the minds of the dreamer. What we lack are men willing to use the state to solve actual problems.

In the end, the reason that things seem to be coming apart is that our politics are dominated by bourgeois posers who have no practical knowledge, so they spend their days conjuring clever word games to play with one another. The point is never to solve a problem, but to establish one side or the other has the king of the moral high ground, which exists only in their imaginations. The moral high ground is just a place in the stands, far away from the action.

The Great Panic

Posted on May 13, 2024 by thezman

Ever since the Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023, the American empire has been convulsed by increasingly deranged tremors. The Israelis adopted a policy that on the surface makes little sense. All it has done is poison relations with the Arabs and much of the world. In America, both political parties have gone nuts in response to the attacks, Israel’s response, and the reaction to that response. Peak madness may be Lindsey Graham suggesting Israel uses nukes on Gaza.

Graham, of course, is trying to show he is the most Zionist of Zionists in a party that makes Likud look dovish. Elected Republicans are obsessed with Israel to the point where even pro-Israel supporters are suffering from severe cringe. Here is Ted Cruz claiming that no one came to the aid of Jews in the Second World War and that Israel has had to go it alone. The logic here is that you are either on the side of unconditional support for Israel or you are Hitler.

One reason for this, of course, is the power of AIPAC. Thomas Massie has opposed the blank check to Israel, so AIPAC has launched both a smear campaign against him, but also a television campaign in his state. AIPAC has been threatening politicians around the country with what could best be described as a “stand with Israel or you get two in the hat” marketing campaign. The only thing missing is a pic of Kennedy slumped over in the car as his wife tries to keep his head together.

The madness is not contained to the street level politics. The normally sober minded David Goldman, the man behind the Spengler column in the Asia Times, posted a crazy rant about Christian Nationalism at the Claremont site, American Mind. In that post he seems to suggest that Christians do not deserve their own nations and must worship Israel if they want to survive. It is a bit of mask dropping that you only ever see from fringe players in the diaspora.

All of this raises the question as to what is happening here? The large and well-funded philosemitic ecosystem seems to be shaking itself to pieces. The trigger for this lurch into madness was the Hamas attack, which the people in this ecosystem demand be treated like a world defining event, when in reality it was just another reprisal in a long running blood feud between the Arabs and Jews. For some reason, it is not seen as such by these people. Instead, it is an inflection point.

One reason for this is the changes inside Israel. The old guard is reaching its demographic end point. Since its founding, Israel has been controlled by Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from the diaspora. The other Jewish tribes, particularly the Mizrahi, have been spectators. The Mizrahi are the Jews who have always been in the Middle East, as opposed to those who migrated with the Roman Legions into Europe. Mizrahi is a modern term that means “eastern.”

The dominance of westernized Ashkenazi Jews has meant that Israeli politics has reflected the politics of the American empire. One side has taken the dovish view of Arab relations, and the other side has taken the hawkish view. Further, Israel diplomacy has followed American diplomacy. This has made it easy for the Israelis to deal with the rest of the world diplomatically and provided some limits on Israel behavior. Now that the Mizrahi are ascendent, this dynamic is changing.

The Mizrahi have now entered government and are taking over what has been the political right in Israel. They have an agenda that starts with the removal of the Arab populations from “Greater Israel” which is why the expression “from the river to the sea” is so controversial. The Mizrahi also demand the return to Talmudic law and the building of the third temple, which means destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Mizrahi back Netanyahu, who needs them to survive politically.

This changing of the guard inside Israel explains the crazy response from the Israelis, in the teeth of global opposition. It does not explain why the Israelis seem willing to offend their supporters in America. Normally, the protests we see in the West would have led to strong pressure from whoever is occupying the White House to tone down the violence and address the optics. Instead, we have both parties demanding total, unconditional obedience to the Israeli cause.

That gets to a different problem. Project Ukraine has brought to light some hidden truths about the Global American Empire. One is that the vaunted American war machine is a paper tiger. Western wonder weapons were supposed to scare the Russians into submission, but instead they have been a colossal failure. Further, all of the predictions about how the war would unfold and how Russia would respond to Western efforts have turned out to be fantastically wrong.

Project Ukraine is looking like the Varian Disaster for the American empire. This is having a profound impact on the internal politics of the empire. After all, the people responsible for this catastrophe look a lot like the people who are mismanaging the unfolding catastrophe in the Levant. It is not hard for even the most dimwitted to make the connection because the people running foreign policy routinely claim primary allegiance to Israel.

There is also a changing attitude in the general public. Thirty years ago, Washington would not have had to do these marketing stunts to whip up support for Israel, because the public supported Israel. The public has clearly changed. The long allergy to thinking about the role of Jews in these foreign projects is gone and now you see things in the public square with regard to the role of Jews in politics that would not have seen the light of day a few decades ago.

This does not mean Americans are becoming antisemitic. It just means as ethnic and racial awareness break through the forcefield of mass media menticide, awareness of both Israel and Jewish influence in politics is growing. People notice that Ben Shapiro cares more about Israel than America. They are noticing that public officials love Israel more than they think about their alleged constituents. Just compare Nick Fuentes to Kevin MacDonald and you can see the change.

Taken together this explains the panic we are seeing. The erratic behavior and weird mask dropping are the result of the sudden awareness that the old arrangements with regards to Israel and the Jewish people are falling apart. Just as the American empire is reaching its denouement, the Jewish century is also reaching an end. As the world transitions to a multipolar order, the internal politics of the West must change with it in order for the West to survive.

For people whose lives were constructed around the old order being permanent, this emerging new order is causing panic. In fact, much of what makes up elite Jewish identity depends on the old imperial order remaining in place. That means the multipolar world and the new American politics are a mortal threat. The panic we are seeing, whether genuine or purchased as in the case of Republican politicians, is the result of the great change that is about to sweep the American empire.

Little White Pills

Posted on May 9, 2024 by thezman

When was the last time you changed your mind? Most likely the answer takes some time as humans tend not to change their opinion on things that much and when they do, it happens over a slow period. Most people on this side of the great divide did not wake up one day and decided to abandon their old worldview. People slowly came to realize that the old way of looking at things was not working and then all of a sudden, they noticed lots of other people noticing the same thing.

That has always been the reality of the red pill experience. It is not so much that the person getting red pilled is going through a sudden transformation but that they are suddenly noticing lots of other people who are on the same road. Almost everyone in the dissident space came here by first running into a writer, YouTuber or social media character that articulated what they were thinking. Then it was another and another until the person was firmly in the dissident camp.

We see this with support for Israel. For a long time, the default position for most white people was to support Israel, mostly for American reasons. Americans love the underdog and Israel seemed like the underdog. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the Israelis had to fend off the much larger neighbors, often working together. The fact that Israel somehow beat the bigger opponent tickled the American respect for the small dog that has the heart of the big dog.

That changed starting with the Bush years. After being pummeled and denigrated for a couple of decades by the American war machine, Americans look at the Arabs as hapless nitwits and Israel as a protectorate of the American empire. The Jews are no longer the plucky underdog, so when they attacked the Palestinians, many Americans wondered if they should be cheering for the people of Gaza. As a result, support for Israel has plummeted over the last six months.

There are still people who think it is 1985 and that Israel is “fighting for its survival” but those people are strange anachronisms. This has in turn damaged the Republican Party as they roll out anti-speech measures thinking these prohibitions against criticizing Israel are popular with their base. Instead, most GOP voters are reacting in the same way they would if Mike Johnson showed up for work wearing a denim leisure suit and sporting a massive afro.

It is not that people are suddenly reading Mein Kampf and becoming antisemites or that they accidentally clicked on a Nick Fuentes video and were red pilled on the reality of Zionism in America. What happened is the tectonic plates of American perception have been slowly moving with regards to Israel for decades. The events in the Levant confirmed these changing perceptions and when people noticed this in other people, a critical mass of new opinion has formed around Israel.

We may be seeing something similar with regards to white identity. The other day, Ann Coulter was a guest on a podcast hosted by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to do the normal stuff. Coulter opened by stating right up front that she would not have voted for him, despite agreeing with him on many things, because he is an Indian and she does not want to be ruled by Indians. She went on to say that America is a white country and should remain so.

The normally unflappable Ramaswamy was poleaxed. He probably expected Coulter to attack Trump, as that is her current act. He would then defend Trump, as he is a Trump surrogate on the campaign trail. Instead, he was told by a very white woman that she would never vote for a very brown man. To his credit, Ramaswamy did not begin to shriek about racism, but then again, Indians are the most ethnocentric people on earth so at some level he certainly understood her position.

The remarkable thing about this exchange is not that she said it, but that there has been no reaction from the kooks. Further, the sissies of conservatism have not raced off to their fainting couches. In fact, there has been little reaction at all to what in the near past would have been a John Derbyshire moment. A few members of the kook squad have tried to make this a thing, but so far there are no mobs forming up to demand Coulter be cancelled from her various media gigs.

The important thing here is not so much that Coulter said what she said or that it has not resulted in a lynching. The important thing is that millions of normies heard a familiar voice say it is, in effect, okay to be white. It is one of those crystalizing moments for the suburban peasant when he realizes that lots of other people are thinking the same thing and that it is okay to think such things. The ground just shifted but in reality, the ground shifted long ago, and Coulter simply acknowledged it.

Like the changing views on Israel, the changing views on whiteness are the result of the winners overplaying their hand. The Israel lobby has made itself so obnoxious that it has turned natural sympathy into skepticism and even antipathy. The triumph of diversity has now normalized racial tribalism among white people. This Ann Coulter moment has confirmed to millions of normies that it is not only okay to be white, but it is a necessity of their politics now.

The Looming Chaos

Posted on May 8, 2024 by thezman

There is an old expression in politics that roughly says the most successful politicians are blessed with the right enemies. William Weld, a long time Massachusetts politician, was enormously gifted, until alcoholism got the better of him. He could have reshaped state politics and become a national figure, but he ran into the far wilier Billy Bulger at the local level and the more powerful duo of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy at the national level, so he never lived up to his promise.

We seem to be seeing the opposite with Donald Trump, who has better political instincts than most seasoned professionals, even though his only political experience was at the very top of the game eight years ago. Imagine a fighter stepping into the ring for the first time and the opponent is the reigning world champion. Then imagine that guy winning, and you see the enormity of 2016. Since then, the system has thrown everything at the man, and he is still going.

The main reason Trump continues to move toward the Republican nomination and a general election rematch is he is blessed with the best enemies. The two Federal court cases are now stalled indefinitely. In both cases, the reason for the delay is the chief inquisitor appointed by the Biden administration is proving to be an incompetent fanatic who cannot stop lying to the court. In the most recent example, he was forced to admit the FBI tampered with evidence and lied about it.

A smarter, more sober minded prosecutor would have used the process to tangle Trump up in a myriad of potential scandals that both drained his resources and created a black cloud over his campaign. Instead, the deranged Jack Smith thought he could get into a street fight with a guy who prefers street fights. In the fullness of time, Jack Smith will be remembered as one of Trump’s dumbest adversaries. The guy has managed to turn the power of the Federal government into a liability.

Then we have the locals who seem to have been drawn from central casting if central casting is located at the diversity department of a mental asylum. In Georgia, Fani Willis turned herself into a living argument against affirmative action. In New York, Alvin Bragg has managed to make a sham trial into a daily platform for Trump to do what he does best, which is walking around New York City, sweet talking the locals, who line up every day to see The Man fight the man.

The question is where will all of this lead. It is a mortal lock that Trump is convicted of whatever it is they claim he did wrong. It is also a guarantee that the third world judge sentences Trump to jail time. He has threatened Trump with jail over Trump talking publicly about the court case. This judge is stupid and insane, so we are most likely going to see a situation in which the Secret Service faces off with the State of New York about how to jail a former president.

It remains to be seen how this plays with the public, but no one in power actually cares about public opinion. They just use it as a fig leaf. It is safe to assume that the people running the Republican Party would love to dump Trump, so this might be their chance to remove him from the ballot. The trouble is, that means the end of the party and even the dullards of Conservative Inc should be able to see it. Then again, “conservative” is just the long spelling of “retarded.”

This is where Trump’s luck may come into play. The guy thrives on chaos and what will happen this summer with regards to the nomination is chaos. In other words, his opponents are creating for him the conditions in which he does best. By doing nothing more than existing, he will put party leadership in a vice. One jaw is defending him against rogue state courts and the other jaw is the people who call the shots in Washington, demanding the party remove him from the ballot.

It gets better, or at least more amusing. Joe Biden is clearly a mess physically and mentally, which will not get better with time. The other day he was leaving the White House, and it appears he soiled his diaper. Even former NFL players are laughing about Biden’s physical and mental health problems. Biden’s growing incoherence will not be helped by black sports stars making diaper jokes about him. The precious black vote follows the lead of their black stars.

The solution to the Biden problem is to remove him from the ballot at the convention and swap in someone new. Biden is told to stand aside at the convention, maybe have him deliver one last speech in which he “graciously” steps aside for someone new, who then picks a running mate that is not the butt of jokes. In other words, the solution to the Biden problem might be the chaos option. Upend the whole race at the last-minute hoping that something good arises from the chaos.

None of this should lead anyone to think Trump will win the general election or be allowed to assume office. The people in charge have other more effective ways to block Trump if these efforts fail. The way to bet right now is that the Republican Party removes Trump from the ballot at the convention, as he will be sitting in a jail somewhere in New York or maybe under house arrest. Even so, that will be just one log on the bonfire of chaos that is coming.

In the end, Trump is lucky in that he is getting exactly what he needs to thrive politically, but what he is, and always has been, is a wrecking ball. His role in the late empire political process is to fulfill another old expression, those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason. Trump makes the managerial class insane, which results in chaos, the thing on which Trump feeds. That cycle of chaotic madness is now heading to a climax this summer.

Who Says?

Posted on May 6, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the odd neo-romantic subculture that exists among the young online right, a post about how the Germans were right about the liberating nature of work and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

There is a famous line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which one of the characters asserts that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. This has been resaid many ways and attributed to many people, but the original is from Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist. For most of human history, the answer to the question, “Who says?” has been God, maybe the gods or perhaps a holy man who everyone agrees has some connection to the gods.

When someone said you should not do something, that question, “Who says?” was baked into the statement, along with its answer. You should not speak ill of the gids because the gods will exact revenge on you or maybe the authorities, fearing the wrath of the gods, will punish you. The answer to the question of who says you should or should not do something was always the same. it was some concept of the supernatural or its manifestation in the natural world.

In modern times, we do not appeal to the gods. You should not drive your car recklessly in a school zone because the government says you should not do that, and they have men with guns to arrest you if you do it. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is the government. Every prohibition in our lives comes with an assumed answer to the question, “Who says?” That answer is almost always the government or its agents.

The government is not a god or claims connection to the gods, no matter what the politicians have to say about it, so who says they have the authority to decide how fast you can drive and where you can do it? In theory, it is we, the people, who decide these things through the democratic process. We created government and the process by which men hold power and they make the laws. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is us, the people.

Of course, it does not stop there. If the government enacted a rule that says you must beep your horn when you see an orange-colored vehicle, no one would be satisfied with the answer “the government says you must do it.” It is a stupid rule and people would want more than that as an answer. In fact, some people might argue that the law is invalid because it requires people to do what they would otherwise would not do and for no reason that can be deemed in the best interest of the people.

In other words, the horn beeping law would fail to satisfy the question of “Who says?” because there has to be something more than just “because we say so” as an answer in order to satisfy the question. In the case of speeding around school zones, the real answer to the question is the safety of children. We prohibit reckless behavior around schools because we value the lives of our children. More important, we feel compelled to protect the safety of children.

Instead of something ridiculous like beeping the horn when you see an orange-colored car, pretend the law says you cannot teach women to read. The argument is that once women learn to read, we end up in the Aristophanes cycle. That is a good and valid reason for the law, but some would argue that it is more wrong to deny women the basic rights nature grants all people. Women have a natural right to exercise their minds by learning to read and using that knowledge to improve their lives.

What the critics of the prohibition on female literacy are saying is that it is not enough that the laws reflect the general will and have a practical purpose. There is some universal standard of justice against which the laws are measured. The horn beeping law is not just invalid because it is ridiculous. It is invalid because it unjustly compels people to act for no reason other than the state has the power to force them to beep their horns whenever they see an orange car.

A more serious way to think about this is with the waves of laws being pushed by Republicans regarding prohibited speech and thoughts. It is the official policy of the Republican Party that you should not think poorly of Israel, and you should not be permitted to criticize Israel. In fact, Republicans now think the one group of foreigners that should be deported are critics of Israel. The question they are never asked is, “Who says we should ban criticism of Israel?”

Most people would say it is rude to say mean things about Jews or Israelis, just as it is rude to make fun of fat people or homosexuals. No one suggests we deport people for telling jokes about fat people. In other words, there must be some other reason for the extraordinary emphasis on being rude to Israelis. It cannot simply be that we have all agreed that it is wrong. If there is no reason given, then it must be assumed that no reason exists, so there is no answer to the question.

Obviously, everyone knows the answer here. The massive Israeli lobby is bribing these people to pass these laws. Marco Rubio owes his political career, and thus his luxurious lifestyle, to a Zionist billionaire car dealer named Norman Braman. Rubio has been in the pocket of the neocons his entire career. Most Republican officials have a similar backstory, so this is why they want to strip what remains of your speech rights and ban large swaths of the Christian Bible.

None of that changes the basic problem. This crusade against anti-Zionism and antisemitism have to answer the same question that all prohibitions must answer, which is “Who says?” Being anti-Zionist might be viewed as rude to Jewish people and anti-Zionist are often rude to everyone in their presentations, but whoever says they must be muzzled must answer the question, “Who says?” Who says these people must be silenced and by whose authority are they being silenced?

This is a long trip to the basic question that lies at the heart of the current crisis and that is the question of authority. In the anti-Zionism debate, the problem is the same as with the horn blowing example. The answer to the question of “Who says?” is “the government says so” but that is not adequate because who says the government has the right to police your opinions? The only possible answer to that question is us, the people, and no such authority has been granted.

The question of authority always resolves to two possible answers, which is the collective will or the supernatural. The natural rights crowd will say the authority is nature, arrived at by reason, but that is just a way of blaming God while pretending he is no longer around. Once God is removed from the set of possible answers to the question “Who says?” we are left with our collective will, which means whomever we choose to be the final authority.

In the end, the response to all new demands for censorship and prohibitions against thoughts or actions must be “Who says?” Who decided that being rude to Jewish people is the worst sin? When was this decided? Who says we have to pretend crime is not what it is? Unless and until the scolds can answer these basic questions of authority, they have no legitimacy. An unjust prohibition is no prohibition at all, but merely an invitation to social conflict to the benefit of outsiders.

Burn Baby Burn

Posted on May 2, 2024 by thezman

For the last few weeks, protests have raged at some elite colleges between anti-Zionists in support of Gaza and Zionist in support of Israel. At Columbia University in New York City, the protests essentially closed the college. The cops were finally sent in yesterday to clear the pro-Gaza camp, but at this point there is probably no point in trying to resume the spring semester. At other colleges, police continue to battle with protestors in an effort to restore order.

The protests provide some insight into what is happening among the Cloud People and also some insight into how the Dirt People see the Cloud People. It has been a long time since factions of the anti-white coalition that makes up what we call the left have squared off against each other. As a result, the Cloud People are struggling to grapple with what is happening. Usually, it is easy for them to pick sides, as the protestors are always targeting Dirt People.

The first thing worth noting is that the pro-Gaza protestors are not white. It is anti-Zionist Jews and nonwhites, with a smattering of upper-middle-class white girls from the grievance studies programs. The pro-Israel side is primarily Jewish students organized by the network of anti-BDS organizations that exist on every campus. As a result, the pro-Gaza side uses the antiwhite language they have been trained to use against the mostly Jewish protestors on the other side.

One result of this is the bellowing about antisemitism has had no effect on the protestors or their supporters among the faculty and media. This is has been the most powerful magic in American politics for so long that no one remembers a time when it was not otherwise, but the magic seems to be fading. Amusingly, this has the conservative commentariat chanting “antisemitism” even louder, sort of like how English speakers shout at foreign fast-food workers.

One reason for this is the youth are not as white as they used to be due to the deliberate demographic changes over the last half century. This is especially true on the college campus where antiwhite activism is now admissions policy. Those nonwhites and post-whites trained up to hate whitey now look at the people carrying Israeli flags and repeat the classic Jared Taylor line, “They look huwhite to me.” It would take a heart of stone to not laugh at this development.

There is a serious element here. Young people are nowhere near as supportive of Israel as in the past, due mostly to demographics. Support for Israel remains strong with old white people, but support declines rapidly after the boomers. There is also an antisemitism fatigue setting in with whites. Decades of crying wolf has had the natural impact on the culture. People are tired of the complaining from people who have done better in America than any other group.

There is another angle here. The shuffling husk that is the conservative movement has been trying to do what it exists to do, which is get white people to focus on the how and why, rather than the who and what. They shout about the pro-Gaza side being communists and antisemites, so their aging followers will focus on that rather than the fact these people do not belong here. They do not want you to notice the two alien tribes from the Levant fighting it out on the college campus.

That is why they jumped on the image of the “frat boys” supposedly “defending” the American flag at UNC. It was a staged photo by the usual suspects because this sort of boomer bait always works to distract middle-class white people. The “frat boys” were part of some anti-BDS operation. They were also waving around an Israel flag, but that was trimmed from the scene. This sort of thing is a reminder that conservatism exists to distract white people from what is happening.

The fact is none of the people involved in these protests should be in the country and that is what people should notice. Thirty percent of the undergrad student body in Columbia is foreign. Less than half of the student body is classified as white and half of those identify as Jewish. If you are the typical white person, Columbia University may as well be located in another solar system. It is not just a foreign place. It is an alien place that rests on hostility toward you.

These protests not only suggest fractures in the antiwhite coalition, but they suggest the Potemkin opposition in American politics is losing its grip. The Republican response to these riots was to pass a bill banning parts of the Christian Bible and stripping you of your right to criticize foreign governments. The Antisemitism Awareness Act is probably the most vulgar and depraved piece of legislation to ever pass the House, and it passed with overwhelming support from Republicans.

The Republicans passed this, in part, because they are trapped in 1985. They still think their voter base cares more about Israel than anything else. The idiot who dreamed up this monstrosity is right out of central casting. He is the typical clueless zombie that gets recruited into Republican politics, because he is biologically incapable of noticing what is happening all around him. The GOP is the party of feckless, clueless goofballs who can no longer play the role for which they exist.

In the end, these protests matter to Dirt People only in so far as they indicate problems among the Cloud People. None of these people are on our side and all of them would lock shields with the other side if asked to put on their Antifa and BLM outfits in order to terrorize white people this summer. The hope is that both sides of these protests are committed to the theory of escalatory dominance. After all, revolutions often grow out of the cracks in the ruling coalition.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Badder Thoughts