Note: The comments have been getting bombed by Ukrainian bots, which is why moderation has been so immoderate. This was part of the public relations campaign around the recent offensive. It is slowly abating, but for now moderation will remain tight to prevent a flood of nutty comments.

In the old television series MythBusters, there was a scene where the crew was doing something disgusting. The setup of the show was to explain the “myth” they were testing then follow them along as they set up their tests. A big part of the show was sight gags, so this meant putting the hosts of the show in foolish situations. In one of these setups, the camera is following one of the hosts and he looks at the camera and says, “there is no dignity in show business.”

It was a memorable moment because we live in an age where performers are treated like conquering heroes. For most of human history, performers were at the very bottom of the status ladder. They were treated worse than slaves in many societies, as it was assumed that people willing to humiliate themselves for the entertainment of others were people of low moral standards. If someone has no respect for himself, then he is unlikely to respect the standards of society.

Today the opposite is true. We worship celebrity. The Republican Party is running three celebrities in big elections this year. Hershel Walker, the former football star, is running for Senate in Georgia. Doctor Oz is running for Senate in Pennsylvania. In both cases, their reason to be in the race is they are famous. In Arizona, Kari Lake was a local TV anchor before running for governor. Her party switching suggests she is willing to do anything for applause and your vote.

Of course, politics in a liberal democracy is just entertainment. It is like the talent shows where the viewers are asked to vote for the performer they liked best, but only after hearing the opinion of celebrity experts. Naturally, most people follow the lead of the celebrity experts, which is why they are there. Politics works exactly the same way, except the celebrity experts are called pundits. Their job is to shape public opinion around the two party system.

That line about there being no dignity in show business still applies. It is why our politicians look more like carny trash than serious adults. The coin of the realm is attention and eventually, you have to degrade yourself to get it. People who have no qualms about making themselves the object of mockery just to entertain the masses will be naturals in the political game. Politics in a democratic system naturally selects for people willing to trade their dignity for applause.

This is most obvious in the pundit class. These are people who dream of one day being an extra on a good television show. In other words, unlike the people who run for office, these people think even less of themselves. It is why their opinions can easily change from one election to the next. If this season the smash hit is angry black guy, then they will sign on for a role in angry black guy. If next season the show is strong female, then they will audition for that show.

You see this with so-called conservatives. Fifty pounds ago, S. E. Cupp played the role of naughty female libertarian on Fox. She would show a little skin, put on the glasses and repeat libertarian lines about socialism. That show closed so she is now playing the role of matronly MAGA hater on CNN. Many of the people in this

declaration of war against Trump voters switched to being Trump supporters. There is no dignity in show business, so they had no trouble with it.

There is a funny thing about a world of no standards. In addition to drawing in people willing to play any role just to get on stage, it seems to draw in people who seem to enjoy degrading themselves in public. Self-declared super genius Tom Nichols is probably the best example. He seems to get a weird thrill out of making an ass of himself in public. It does not appear to be just about getting attention. He really likes to humiliate himself on-line.

Just look at the first line of that Twitter post. “In forty years of studying Russia the thing I always struggled to get my arms around is that this remarkable and immense nation, a source of cultural and scientific genius, is also so riven by ignorance and insecurity that it is incapable of living in peace with the world.” This is a man who lives in a country that has been at war with the world for most of its existence. His cult is responsible for more dead people than Genghis Khan.

That whole series of posts is like someone had decided to lampoon the Trotsky cult we call neoconservatism by conjuring an absurd character that embodies an exaggerated version of its qualities. That ridiculous person then does ridiculous things to highlight the absurdity of his group. Tom Nichols is the Mr. Bean of neoconservatism and he is thrilled to play the part. One gets the sense that if Bill Kristol says the role could use some clown nose, Nichols is dressing as a clown.

It is possible that Nichols is so devoid of self-awareness that he does not see the absurdity in his act. In fact, this is a possible clue to why many celebrities seem to think highly of themselves, despite what they do for a living. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, thinks she is a world historical figure. It could be that a total lack of self-respect rests on a total lack of self-awareness. If you cannot tell when they are laughing at you rather than with you, then it does not matter.

The Founders never imagined that the country they were creating would one day lead to rule by circus freak, but they understood the risk of democracy. They knew that a system that relied on the shifting opinion of the masses would attract those who are good at appealing to the masses, but not good at governing. We see this today as our political system looks like a bad TV show. It is full of people who are good at getting public attention, but they are not good at anything else.

What no one anticipated is that rule by circus freak has degraded all of society, along with the people on the stage. To sit in the crowd, applauding as a man humiliates himself for your amusement, debases you as much as the performer. You cannot seek to raise yourself up from your base condition when you are simultaneously cheering for others to reduce themselves to their base condition. In a democracy, we all sink into the ooze together because there is no dignity in democracy.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Last month, conservative media was buzzing about a British pick up artist being banned from the internet. On the same day, all of his social media accounts were shutdown and his payment processors dropped him. Conservatives noticed this incident because the victim did not look white. It turns out that he is half-black, so for American conservatives he is an ideal victim. It is the DR3 exception to the “they are private companies” principle of conservatism.

Amusingly, the regime media felt the need to address the issue, probably for the same reason so-called conservatives noticed the story. An iron law of the new religion states that any time a nonwhite cries out, it must be noticed. The New York Times helpfully stepped in and solved the problem. They noticed his banning but spent the bulk of the article explaining how his white half caused his black half to violate all of the important rules of the one true faith.

The racial part has another angle. Andrew Tate made the fatal error of turning up on banned shows like Alex Jones. Tariq Nasheed is every bit as “misogynistic” as Andrew Tate and he adds in wacky conspiracy theories. He makes Alex Jones look like a piker when it comes to the conspiracy stuff. On the other hand, he is viewed as left-wing, mostly because of his over-the-top hatred of white people. He gets to hate women as much as he likes on social media as a result.

Putting aside the racial angle, the stunning part of the coverage was that no one dared ask how these allegedly independent private companies came to the same conclusion within minutes of one another. It is quite a coincidence. If this had rolled out over a period of weeks and one platform held the line, then you could argue that it was mostly a case of monkey see, monkey do. In this case, it looked like a coordinated effort, yet no one asked who was coordinating it.

Of course, it is possible there is no coordination at all. The people running these tech firms are all alpha clones from the Central Hatchery and Conditioning Centre of the managerial state. They all believe the same things about themselves and the world they see themselves destined to manage. No one has to tell the prison guards what to do when they see an inmate scaling the wire. Like a school of fish, these people could be naturally reacting to what they see.

They could also have set up a clearinghouse for dealing with this stuff. That has happened in the past. They created an ad hoc committee to coordinate hiring in order to suppress wages. They also like to outsource this work to the same two companies, the SPLC and the ADL, which can do the coordination for them. It would be interesting to hear what they have to say about his, but to date no one in the media has raised the issue with them or to a politician.

It is not just the Silicon Valley companies illegally and immorally colluding to violate the civil rights of Americans. It appears the banking cartel is colluding to undermine the Second Amendment rights of Americans. They may also be pressuring others to follow on with their own measures. UPS is getting into the act. As we see with tech censorship, there is a whole lot of coincidental timing to this. It is almost as if there is someone working behind the scenes coordinating it.

One possible hand in this is the regime itself. We now know that the Biden administration works with Twitter to ban opponents. We also know they send the FBI to social media companies to threaten them if necessary. They sent a group of goons over to Facebook to tell them to censure the Hunter Biden laptop story. Given the grotesque authoritarianism of the regime, it should not shock anyone if we learn that they have created an unofficial Ministry of Truth.

This brings us back to that key question. Why is it that no one in the mass media, even so-called conservative media, ever asks about the coordination? Why is it no one noticed that the streaming platforms appeared to be ready with a public relations campaign right after the George Floyd incident? The next day they all had reworked their interface to promote pro-black content. You would think at least one person would wonder out loud about who is organizing this stuff.

One reason is fear. Every day that Haitian halfwit is sent out by the Biden regime to do a song and dance routine in the pressroom. She is an angry simpleton reading from a script so this should be easy money for a snarky reporter. Ask a question that makes her look more foolish than normal and you get fifteen minutes of fame. The only one who dares utter a discouraging word is Peter Doocy from Fox News and his questions are a great example of pulling your punches.

The reason the rest of them nod along pretending that the moron reading answers from a book is perfectly normal is they do not want to lose their job. Jean-Pierre could literally be flinging her poo at them and they will treat her like a queen. They say there is no dignity in show business. It is even more true in political show business. In tyrannical politics, groveling is the coin of court. No one in the media dares look up from their groveling for fear of losing their access.

The other reason is that none of them think to ask about who may or may not be behind what looks like coordination. It is the Pauline Kael effect. She was the crackpot film critic in the 1970’s who is allegedly said that Nixon could not have won because she did not know anybody who voted for him. The quote used is not real, the real quote is actually worse, but the sentiment is very real. The Cloud People live insular lives in which everyone has the same attitudes.

From the point of view of the managerial class, it is perfectly sensible for the tech oligarchs to censure speech. It is the responsible thing to do. They are baffled as to why anyone is upset by this. Not only are they not offended by censorship, but they would also be shocked if these firms were not coordinating their efforts. It is why they mount pressure campaigns against holdouts. Teaming up to suppress speech is really just a good example of political unity when you think about it.

When you step back and look at what is happening, it is remarkable. Managerialism in the West has achieved something that the Bolsheviks and Nazis were never able to accomplish at their peak. The operation of the managerial class is entirely informal, a habit of mind, rather than a set of rules. The communists and fascists had to rely on physical compulsion to maintain control. That requires a set of rules that can be enforced quickly by the regime.

The managerial class has created a culture which maintains their power. The reason the Biden White House is sending goons out to rough people up is that from their point of view it is the moral thing to do. Those old rules against doing such things do not register for them, because they lie outside the managerial morality. For the same reason no one asks any Andrew Tate was targeted by the tech giants, no one wonders if roughing up political opponents is against the rules.

For those familiar with the intellectual history of radicalism, we have arrived at a rather ironic moment. The West is now controlled by a culture of compulsion. The reason the people in the institutions exist is to compel behavior. The point of the nutty fads and grotesque violations of liberal norms is to force people, at the very minimum, to tolerate that which should never be tolerated. Ours is a society evolving around hierarchical humiliation rituals that have no practical purpose.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week is a post that has little to do with the headline of it. Sunday Thoughts is back behind the green door. SubscribeStar and Substack.

A feature of this age is lots of talk about the future, but not in the practical sense as was the case in the past. A century ago, industry would promise labor saving devices to make material life better for regular people. Today, the managerial elite talks about the future in vague terms, sometimes awful and sometimes glorious. In the future, we will go about in self-driving electric cars, unless Gaia burns creation to a crisp over the use of fossil fuels and inappropriate pronouns.

The fact is the managerial elite does not speak in specifics about the future because they do not have a clear vision for it. The only thing they are sure of is they will be in charge of it and as such, it will need their constant attention. Like the members of a committee, the managerial class can only imagine the next meeting. The future is always more of them doing what it is that makes them possible. As a result, the future they work towards is more of an aesthetic than a real place.

For example, the long running war on manufacturing in the West is not about the practical issues related to making things. It is mostly about removing these things from the view of the managerial elite. Note that in the 20th century the corporate office moved from where actual work was done to a corporate campus. The manager did not want to hear, see and smell the work. Something similar is happening in Western society where work is moved to the periphery.

This was a big part of the drive to ship manufacturing to low cast places like Asia and South America in the last century. Business took the incentives to leave, but those incentives were created by the managerial elite. The refrigeration maker did not lobby for trade deals that would force him to move his plant to Mexico. Those trade deals were made and business responded. Those ugly eyesores were then removed from the sight of the people who manage the world.

Now that some of this is coming back onshore due to the trade wars, supply chain issues and other problems, those businesses get stuffed on the fringe. Not a single voice in the managerial elite calls for rebuilding cities by rebuilding their manufacturing base or even encouraging reshoring back to the cities. Instead, the reshoring is going on in exurban industrial parks hidden from the sight of the rulers. The plans for the city, real or imagined, do not include the laboring classes.

The global crisis is due in no small part to this sensibility. The reason the violent Trotsky cult called neoconservatism keeps insisting Russia is nothing by a big gas station run by peasants is it has to be for the Great Reset to work. In order for the EU to be the leisurely playground imagined by the managerial elite, it is needs lots of cheap energy products from Russia. That can only happen if Russia knows its place and operates a giant gas station staffed by peasants.

Similarly, China is supposed to be a giant industrial park staffed by disposable people who all look alike to the managerial elite. The things that make the world look ugly and smell bad, like making steel, batteries, solar panels and Apple products, need to be made and made cheaply, but who wants to see it being made? No one in the managerial elite, so it gets sent abroad. China’s place in the scheme is to be a giant industrial zone for peasants to make cheap consumer goods.

Agriculture is coming under the same pressure. The push to end the growing of food in Western countries looks like madness. It is driven, however, by the same aesthetic that shipped manufacturing abroad. The beautiful people of the future do not want to think about how their food gets to their plate. Things like animal rights and bizarre dietary claims are just cover for an aversion to facing the reality of the food chain. They indulge these fads because they promise to hide the truth of life.

For European elites, this means food production gets shifted east to the Slavic lands and South to the MENA. In America, it means food production gets shifted south to Latin America and even China. This changing of the food supply is not better in a practical sense, but in an aesthetic sense. It is out of sight so therefore the managerial elite is not troubled by it. The corporate campus of the New World Order will be separate from the work that is required to maintain it.

The rise of the corporate campus in the last century was not driven by practical needs, but by the aesthetic of the people running the company. The guy who worked his way up from the bottom had been replaced by professional managers, trained at the best colleges and universities. The owners were now fund managers. This new breed of corporate manager did not want to be close to the work. In fact, she resented it as a reminder of why the business existed in the first place.

It is not unusual for the managers in a modern corporate office to not know how the company makes money. Few corporate managers have had a hand in making their products or delivering their service. The exception are the firms that work as middlemen in the new economy. Many managers work in areas that have no relationship to the business of the company. There is a physical and psychological gap between those who labor and those who facilitate labor.

Note that it is not always an economic gap. A hard working tradesman or a small businessman has a better material life than the corporate manager, but he lives in a different cultural, physical and psychological zone. The self-employed plumber with a couple of men working for him is not going to be playing golf with the assistant strategy director or the corporate success coach. These are people who do know one another or even know of each other’s existence.

This is the world the managerial elite is working toward. They do not need to know why plugging in the Tesla makes the red light inside turn green. They do not need to know how their soy latte came into being. The messy and unpleasant things about human existence have been moved off to the periphery. They just exist and no one needs think too much about how they work. The managerial class is liberated from the human condition because they no longer have to witness it.

This works fine as long as the bulk of Western people are fine being converted into a massive servant class, mingled in with foreigner imports. This works if Russia is happy to be a giant gas station run by peasants. As long as China is fine being an industrial park that makes no demands on management, it is all good. In other words, if the peasants never get any wild thoughts in their heads, the world imagined by the managerial elite is a glorious place.

It remains to be seen if such a world is possible. The Russians are not happy being a giant gas station run by peasants. The Chinese think their culture and civilization is more than a polluted industrial zone. Even the Indians seem to be tiring of their role as call center to the West. On the other hand, the managerial elite is smart and ruthless, mostly ruthless, so they cannot be discounted. These are people selected for their ability to impose their will on their host.

In the end, the future will be decided by who, not how. This may be the great flaw in the managerial system that has evolved to this point. A system that places all value on clever verbal tricks to control how things are done may not be much of a match for people who can actually do things. Baring some détente between the managerial elite and the rest of the world, like that which happened between labor and management in the 20th century, the crisis is headed for conflict.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week is a late take on the Biden speech from Hell that is getting the memory hole treatment. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are new posts behind the green door. SubscribeStar and Substack.

There are a lot of ways people on this side of the great divide describe the difference between one side and the other. The term “red pill”, borrowed from the Matrix movies, is the most popular term, but it has lost much of it meaning. People will talk about their awakening, but the term “woke” is now owned by the crazies and therefore indicates mental illness rather than political awareness. Another popular term is “based” but like “red pill” it has been overused.

These terms generally focus on the race issue, which is more accurately stated as the biology issue or biological realism. The main bridge over the great divide is the acceptance of biological reality with regards to sex, ethnicity and race. People on this side of the great divide accept reality, with regards to the human condition, as it appears and reject the various social constructs of the orthodoxy. This makes sense as it is the most obvious and easiest to grasp.

There is another aspect to the phenomenon of waking up to the reality of the world and choosing to live in the truth. That is the nature of modern society. It takes a while, but people who make the journey to this side of the divide eventually come to figure out that the biology issue is the leaves of the tree. The root of the tree is the vast managerial system that allows a tiny minority to wield power. We do not live in a liberal democracy, but rather in a large imperial corporate state.

A useful example to illustrate the point is this long post in the Claremont Review of Books by Christopher Caldwell. As John Derbyshire has pointed out, Caldwell is a skillful social critic who has a knack for making important insights in such a way that the average reader can grasp them. He is a man who lives within the system even though he is a critic of the system. Unlike most mainstream pundits, he does not spend his days signaling against the people on this side of the divide.

Therein lies the important bit. Despite his ability and willingness to critically analyze the system in which he lives, he remains a man of the system. He is on that side of the great divide, not this one. The tell is the default position. Christopher Caldwell assumes his compatriots are mostly working from good intentions and mostly trying to get things right, even if most are highly partisan. Therefore, he can trust their depiction of events in the Ukraine and build his analysis accordingly.

In the second paragraph, he states, “Since June, thousands of computer-guided artillery rockets have been wreaking havoc behind Russian lines.” People on this side of the great divide who have bothered to follow the war will see this as material placed in the Post and Times by military contractors. The so-called “wonder weapon” narrative has been a running joke among those relying on more trustworthy sources. Even the Ukrainians have started to mock this claim.

Right after the wonder weapon narrative, is the narrative that claims Russia is a gas station run by peasants. “With western European help, Washington has used its control of the choke points of the global marketplace to impoverish Russians, in hopes of punishing Russia.” The sanctions regime has made the world poorer and the Russians have not been spared, but it has been an inconvenience. The claims from the Post and Times about the Russian economy are nonsense.

Noticeably lacking is the perspective of the Russians. The official narrative says that the Russians are reactive cavemen with no ability to think long term. That is what Caldwell assumes to be true, because his friends in the system say it is true. The truth is Russia, China and India are the long term planners. It is the West that wakes up every morning, reacts to what is happening and then gets busy fabricating new narratives so they can win the media war that day.

Because Christopher Caldwell is firmly rooted on the other side of the great divide, his analysis is inevitably controlled by it. Like the people from the movie living in the matrix, he is basing his understanding of the world on a general falsehood. He rests his analysis on a fabricated reality that serves the interests of the system but is no more connected to reality than a science fiction movie. His analysis is true as long as the rules of the system remain unchanged, which is impossible.

Notice also how Caldwell just accepts that the reason Washington has been meddling in Ukraine is they seek to promote democracy. Again, this is a conveniently self-serving claim from the people running foreign policy, but it has no basis in fact. The same people eagerly excluding vast numbers of Americans from the political system are certainly not spreading the hope and joy of democracy. Caldwell assumes the best from his friends in the system, so he accepts their claims.

None of this is to suggest Caldwell is a bad person or that he is stupid. It is that he lives in the false reality of official orthodoxy. On that side of the great divide, these things are true because they are necessary for the current narrative. On this side of the great divide, these things are false because they are false. It is the motivation behind these false narratives that is the starting point for dissident analysis, which results in an entirely different view of the war and the world.

That is what it means to be a dissident. The people who are constantly droning on about reality being a social construct are living in a social construct. Theirs is a world where things are true because the rules of the narrative require them to be true, but once the narrative is no longer operative, the rules change. It is how the people threatened violence against those refusing the Covid vaccine can so easily shift to blaming the whole fiasco on the people who criticized it.

Perhaps the better way to put it is that the last stop on the train that carries people to this side of the great divide is the understanding that the genuine crisis in the modern age is the contradiction between reality and official orthodoxy. To return to the movie trope, freedom only comes from destroying the matrix. There is no reform within it, because there is no reality within it. The myth of the modern age is that the modern age is in anyway attached to the reality of the human condition.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Anyone who has been through a breakup, like a divorce or the dissolution of a business partnership, knows they take on a life of their own. There is rarely one thing that sets the relationship off on the path to destruction. It is the accumulation of small things that build to an undefinable point where the relationship shifts from natural cooperation to natural opposition. Actions that used to build cooperation suddenly become points of contention until the two sides realize the relationship must end.

This is the dynamic in which most civic nationalist now find themselves with their old partner the “founding documents.” For longer than the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, the civic nationalist has looked at his citizenship as defined by the partnership with the founding of America. The Declaration and to a lesser extent the Constitution have been his life partner. These documents and the mythology that has been created around them are what make him whole.

These documents, along with the founding itself, exist within the larger definition of America that the civic nationalist will defend with his life. There is some variation in that some of them still promote the melting pot idea while others are in the creedal camp, but all of them are married to the general concept of America. They will defend America from critics on all sides, mostly from the Right, of course, but they will even make some noises about defending their love from the Left as well.

The problem is America does not love them anymore. Those founding documents, the marriage certificate of the relationship, no longer matter to America. The reason America keeps them locked away and rarely mentions them is they are just not that important because the relationship is not that important. America is ready to move onto to the new vibrant stage of its life. That means leaving behind the old phase, the marriage to the civic nationalists.

Like a jilted lover, the civic nationalists cannot accept it. Here is an example in a legacy publication defending the Declaration. The elevation of the Declaration over the actual founding documents of the country was the result of a prior rough patch in the relationship during the last century. The Caesarism of Roosevelt needed to be addressed, like an infidelity in a relationship. The solution was provided by Harry Jaffe, a second rate scholar who peddled bromides to third rate thinkers.

There was no way to square what the progressives had done in the first half of the twentieth century with the text and spirit of the Constitution. There was no way to challenge them as they controlled the important bits of society. The solution was to embrace a form of Jacobinism. America was now defined, so the theory goes, by the egalitarian spirit of the Declaration. This also allowed them to embrace the tyrant Lincoln as their new Moses.

The new vision of America the civic nationalist created in response to the authoritarianism of the new regime was made to look like tradition by rewriting the founding history. The real founding document was the Declaration. The Constitution was an imperfect compromise to get started. The Civil War was an effort to address the big flaws to bring the document in line with the Declaration. The Gettysburg Address was a restatement of the genuine founding ideal.

This is utter nonsense, but it kept the relationship going. Like the cuckold who convinces himself the wife is taking night classes at the university so she can get a better job once the kids are in school, the civic nationalists occupied themselves with the Lincoln fantasy. Meanwhile, the America they loved was getting busy with every left-wing fad that came out of the academy. She was no longer even trying to pretend that she cared about the relationship with the civic nationalists.

There are some civic nationalists who see the problem. They hope to refashion the relationship around something they call common good conservatism, which creates an open marriage between themselves and the Constitution. America can still carry on with the latest thing, as long as it does not threaten the marriage. The common good civic nationalists will step in to enforce discipline when needed. They imagine the cuckold finally gaining the courage to call his wife home.

In fairness, there are some within the civic nationalist space who sense that the relationship is over and it is time to move on. They mostly focus on the old originalism idea embraced by the legal wing of civic nationalism. Originalism seeks to elevate the text of the Constitution over legal aspirations to the contrary. The problem is they are left to defend a document that was flawed from the start and has been butchered by previous efforts to minimize it.

The hard cold truth is that the America the civic nationalists claim to love is not around anymore and she is never coming back. In fact, she never really existed. It was a creation of the last century. The America of the founding died at Gettysburg and was buried in Reconstruction. It took two wars in the 20th century to create a replacement, which maintained the trappings of the original, but was fundamentally different from the republic fashioned by the Founders.

The crisis of the present is not over the strains in the old relationship with the America imagined by the civic nationalists. It is the result of the America formed in the 20th century having no rationale in the 21st century. The America of the civic nationalist is dust in a grave, left untended in the 19th century. Not only is she never coming back, but she also cannot be replaced with anything similar. Like the cuckold whose wife has left for good, the civic nationalists need to move on with their lives.

Whatever comes next is going to be fashioned by those who close the door on the past and accept the present, along with what future can be made of it. There are lessons to be gleaned from America’s past. There are lessons to be gleaned from the Franco-Prussian War and Revolutions of 1848. Those lessons only matter if they are put to use understanding the present in order to create a future. That future is not going to include the founding documents moldering away in a museum.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

An enduring question on this side of the great divide is over the motivation of the Cloud People as they go about their war on the Dirt People. Is there some grand plan behind the war or is it some weird instinctual thing? Are they motivated by base instincts like money and power or is it something spiritual? There is the “deep state versus emergent behavior” angle but also the simple question about whether these people have the self-awareness to grasp what they are doing at all.

For example, the war on Russia was launched six months ago and at the time it was clear to most people that the cost to the West would be high. The question was about the cost to the Russians. Given the dismal history of economic sanctions and the public utterances of Russian leaders, sober minded people saw the sanctions regime as a high risk and extremely low reward gamble. That quickly became an all risk and no reward strategy that was doomed to fail.

Despite the obviousness of it all, the West kept doubling down on the program as if they were on the right side of history. Now people are getting gas bills in Europe that are five and ten times normal. Europeans are posting their utility bills on-line as a desperate effort to get attention to the issue. For reasons no one has bothered to explain, Western media is not treating this as an important story. They are not grilling Western leaders on the situation or even asking them questions.

Are these people just so cut off from reality that they simply do not know what is happening in their countries? Is someone like Liz Truss so insulated from reality that she is unaware of things called electric bills? Since no one has bothered to ask her about the issue, it is possible she does not know. It seems crazy but staggering ignorance would explain why this is happening. The Cloud People do live vastly different lives from the Dirt People.

That does not explain the media silence. Scan the British media and you would come away with the impression that there is no economic crisis. It is all stories about the royals, local celebrities and childish political drama. The German media has bland stories about the latest ten point plan from the party. Those are stuffed in between press releases from the Gaia cult like this one. They worry that people freezing to death in their homes this winter could anger Gaia.

What in the world is going on here? The worst economic catastrophe to befall Europe in generations is being ignored. Is this a strategy by the Cloud People or are they just so cut off from reality they do not see this as a big deal? This lunatic from the German Church of Gaia wants to tax meat at a time of soaring food costs. Is this nut so ideologically blinkered that he does not see how this looks? Normal people will be forgiven for thinking he is a deranged sadist.

This is where another motivation creeps into the picture. Maybe what lies behind all of this is a seething hatred of the Dirt People. The reason they are not focusing on the crisis is they are showing restraint. In private they are laughing at the prospect of Dirt People heating their homes with candles this winter. Those shop owners going out of business gives them a sexual thrill. This crisis is the revenge of the Cloud People on the Dirt People for not dying off during Covid.

That last bit is further proof that vengeance may be the real motivation behind these abusive polices we see in the West. It was clear from the start that the Covid polices were something of a tantrum by the Cloud People. They made people humiliate themselves with masks and social distancing out of spite. The vaccine mandates now look like an attempted genocide. Deaths among the young and healthy are at frighteningly high levels across the West.

There have been times in history when the people concluded that their rulers were corrupt, stupid or tyrannical. In the furor leading up to the revolt the rabble-rousers would caricature the rulers as ruthless and vindictive. In reality, the rulers were either incompetent or simply unlucky. In order to properly revolt, the people needed to be convinced that their rulers were more than just stupid. They were bad people who deserved what was coming to them.

We may be experiencing the first example where a ruling class is evil, but the rabble rousers among the ruled cannot bring themselves to accept it. It is the mirror image of the revolutionary model where all restraint is lost among the ruling class while the people desperately try to maintain the status quo. The people at the top have all the money and power, which for some reason has led them to revolt against the system that makes their status as elites possible.

The other side of this revolution in the clouds is the placidity of the Dirt People in the face of this war of extinction. Perhaps this is what has driven the ruling class into a murderous rage. No matter how hard they try, they cannot rouse the people to defend themselves or their culture. The rage is not exactly at the people, but at the ruddy sunset of the West. Modernity has made the people so feeble; they can no longer defend themselves from predators.

Regardless of the reasons, the revolution in the clouds will continue until the Dirt People can be roused from their stupor or they simply succumb. One way or the other, the revolution can only end with the death of the Cloud People. Surely, they must see this, which means that is the ultimate aim. Self-abnegation is the highest virtue of the new religion and one way or another, they will achieve it. The only question that really matters is if they will take Western civilization with them.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it a visit to an old topic that deserves a better airing. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are new posts behind the green door about various things.  SubscribeStar and Substack.

Spengler famously described a civilization as having a birth, life and then a decline into death, much like the life of man. One of the features of decline is the elite stops being elite in term of talent and ability. They may sit atop society and hold power over the people, but they are no longer a genuine elite. They simply hold positions in a system created by those who came before them. They are the inheritors of status that they did not earn and they lack the ability to earn.

This reality is becoming increasingly obvious as we see highly credentialed morons stagger from one blunder to the next. Europe is about to go into a modern version of the turnip winter because European leaders picked a fight with Russia, the primary energy supplier to the continent. The people leading Europe do not decorate themselves like African potentates, but they are every bit as ridiculous. They are like children wearing their parents clothes, pretending to be adults.

The decline of the elites has become so obvious that even some former neocons are starting to notice the problem. Victor David Hanson has a piece in American Greatness bemoaning the decline of the elites. He clings to his old civic nationalists beliefs, so that has left him in a no man’s land of sorts. He cannot take the trip over the great divide, but he cannot sign onto the latest thing. He is left to argue that better people at the top would somehow fix the system.

What civic nationalist critics fail to see is the elite incompetnace is a product of the system, rather than a plague upon it. The crisis in the West is not caused by failed leadership but rather the elites are a product of the same forces behind the general crisis in the West. A bourgeoise culture evolved in the 20th century that naturally leads to a flattening of talent. The elites seem mediocre because bourgeoise society, taken to its logical end, is the celebration of mediocrity.

One part of it is democracy. The core assumption of democracy is that all opinions are equally valid, if not equally correct. The former is a moral claim while the latter is an empirical claim. The problem is you cannot suppress a moral claim with a factual one, so bad opinions can flourish like weeds alongside good ones. Before long it is impossible to tell the good from the bad. In fact, any effort to pull the weeds from the garden is met with howls of protest.

Of course, democracy in the modern sense is only possible in a society with a large middle-class, like post-war America. Prior to the war, egalitarian notions had little purchase in American society. Men were equal before God and equal before the law, but few people confused that with equality of talent. Nonwhites were systematically excluded from everything important because whites naturally assumed they lacked the ability to perform the duties of citizens.

The great explosion of middle-class life after the war changed that view. In a world where most white people could expect a nice house in a nice neighborhood and their kids would have a better life, natural equality started making sense. As the bulk of white Americans entered the material sameness of middleclass life, they began to adopt the spiritual sameness of bourgeoise life. When the observed differences were the result of effort, it is not a big leap to egalitarian civic nationalism.

Late 20th century America became a bourgeois-ocracy. Middle-class values dominated not just the popular culture, but elite culture. The world of deeds gave way to the world of clever words. When the plumber’s house is not that much different from the lawyer’s house, there has to be something other than material prosperity to distinguish the lawyer from the plumber. The result was a growing collection of soft things, moral signifiers to distinguish people within the bourgeoise space.

As an aside, the drive to impoverish the middle-class is not the result of a ravenous elite seeking to enrich itself. It is the result of an insecure elite trying to create distance between itself and the vast middle-class. Think of the college student that comes home with a nose ring and blue hair. The point is to put space between herself and her family with the exaggerated gesture. Our sophomoric elites are doing the same things, except you will eat bugs and walk to work.

Putting that aside, this need to distinguish oneself within a system that champions sameness is part of what drives the current thing. People within the elite of a bourgeois-ocracy struggle to distinguish each other within the elite. The reason they rush from one weird fad to the next is the fear of melting into the bland, gray nothingness that is bourgeoise culture. They are not weird for material gain or even spite, but out of fear of being smothered by the great nothingness.

This excellent essay in First Things about the intelligent is pre-revolutionary Russia gets at an aspect of this phenomenon. In a world where deeds count for very little, the only thing left is posturing. In pre-revolutionary Russia, liberals were happy to sign on with the radical terrorist, even though they were often the victims. The reason is the pose was a way to signal their existence. They sided with radicals because that let them stand apart from the crowd.

The modern intelligent, with her pronouns in her profile, is simply hoping to create barriers in the gray nothingness. On the one hand, it signals moral status within the gray nothingness of bourgeois life. On the other hand, it creates the sense that there is a moral barrier to entry. The gross people at Target do not use the proper pronouns, while the cool people using Instacart never deadname anyone. The meaningless gestures are supposed to give meaning in an otherwise meaningless culture.

The crisis in the West is not due to faulty elites. The elites are the product of a long decline into a bourgeois-ocracy. The replacement of the vertical relations with horizonal ones was always unnatural and unnatural things cannot last. The mediocre elites are just the natural result of mediocre people spawned by the socio-political culture that values mediocrity over greatness. Nature selects against the mediocre and therefore the bourgeois-ocracy is trundling to its natural end.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

One of the consequences of partisanship is that it insulates the partisan from the rest of the world to the extent that their reality is deranged. They only know what the others in their group know and that is limited to what is best for the group. Civic nationalists decry partisanship for this reason. It makes objective truth impossible. Radicals, of course, embrace partisanship because they reject objective truth. It is why modern radicals literally speak of their truth.

The funny thing about partisanship is both sides are correct. Politics is about friends and enemies, which leaves little room for objectivity. In politics you want to advance your interests or the interests of your side. That often means doing so at the expense of those viewed as enemies. If the facts say you should yield in deference to your opponent, then you have no choice but to reject the facts. Otherwise, you lose and that undermines the point of politics.

The reality of politics in a participatory system is that the winners and those with some chance to win must be partisans and reject objective truth. The outsiders, those seeking to crack the nut of the political dynamic, must embrace what they claim to be objective truth, in order to wedge open the door of politics. In other words, appeals to truth are just another partisan tool. It is the outsider who can embrace objective reality, because he has no skin in the game of politics.

An example of this is this New York Times opinion piece by two extremist law professors calling for the abolition of the constitution. The very first sentence in their piece is a lie designed to advance their agenda. “When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong.” Liberals so rarely lose in court that when it happens, it is literally news for months, as we see with abortion.

The point of the lie is to butter up the intended audience with a bit of flattery to let them know the writers are fellow partisans. “We keep trying to use reason on these odious monsters, but they are immune to reason, so here is what we do.” In effect, the partisan statement at the start is an appeal to abandon objectivity. The next sentence makes that exact demand and the next paragraph explains why. What they mean by “rejecting constitutionalism” is the rejection of objective truth.

Of course, in order to make that work logically, they have to provide a definition of “constitution” that is itself a lie. These legal scholars from two of the most important elite academies in the empire claim that a constitution is about “setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass.” You see, it is just an arbitrary set of “super rules” that were made up out of convenience. Most likely, the people behind it were bad people, being from the past and all that.

The argument in favor of a constitution has always been that it is a formalization of the superstructure of society. For any human grouping to hold together it must first answer the question, “Who are we?” The answer to the question must be filled out by a set of rules that define the answer. A constitution is what complex societies create to define themselves as a people. In one sentence the liberal tradition is discarded and relegated to partisan whimsy by these two radical legal scholars.

The rest of the piece is an argument in favor of overthrowing what remains of the liberal order and instituting what amounts to fascism. They imagine a totalitarian model of the law based on the tyranny of the majority. They make no effort to explain why fifty percent plus one is a sacred number. That is the partisan mind. The partisan never puts thought into analyzing his own statements of faith. Words exist for purely partisan reasons, to signal the who? whom? of politics.

Interestingly, the people chanting democratic phrases, while claiming to appeal to the will of the people, make clear that who decides is what matters. “Liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.” The basic argument here is not against constitutions, but about who makes the rules. Objectively, this is a purely anti-democratic argument.

That is why the Left is immune to claims of hypocrisy. They can easily allow contradictory claims exist in their mind, as long as both claims advance the partisan agenda of their group. On the one hand they can demand democracy and on the other demand tyrannical control of the law. Both claims are useful in the partisan game of politics, so both can exist in the same toolbox. For the partisan, the contradiction makes reaching for the right tool easier.

Here is a great example. “No matter how openly political it may purport to be, reclaiming the Constitution remains a kind of antipolitics. It requires the substitution of claims about the best reading of some centuries-old text or about promises said to be already in our traditions for direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands.” The first sentence is self-contradictory. The last sentence is a promise to impose the values of a tiny minority on the population, in the name of democracy.

From the outside, the partisanship of Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, the authors of the piece, is monstrous. The only end is a bloodbath. These two are making the same basic claim as Pol Pot. The thing is, they are correct about one thing. It is who decides that matters, not how they decide. Constitutions must always be about who decides, first and foremost. This ensures the laws maintain this relationship between the rulers and their people.

That was the critical mistake of the Founders. It left open the door for others to decide and that is what led to the nightmare of the 20th century and the current crisis. At the other end of this crisis will be the answer to who decides going forward. Will it be vengeful aliens or the founding stock? In the end, the point of politics is not words on a paper but who puts the words on the paper. Ironically, that is the one objective truth that every partisan can accept.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.