Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Conservative Whores

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Note: The weekly Taki post is up. This week I respond to a critic who took me to task for saying mean things about libertarianism. Behind the green door there is the Sunday podcast on some news items of the past week.

Turning Point USA is one of the many grifts from Conservative Inc. aimed at corralling young people into the pointless enterprise of modern conservatism. It is the creation of the late William T. Montgomery, a former marketing guru. He decided to turn Charlie Kirk into the modern day Billy Ray Valentine of conservatism. The result was Turning Point USA, a campus group that holds events around the country. They host 6 National Summits and 8 Regional Conferences each year.

The most recent event, which was staged in Florida this past weekend, ended in a bit of controversy when TP-USA decided to ban someone named Brandi Love. She was scheduled to address a group of teenagers as a VIP. Brandi Love, in addition to being a distinguished contributor to conservative publications, is also a retired porn actress who advertises herself as such on-line. She now uses the skills that made her a star in the oldest profession to be a star in the second oldest one.

TP-USA knew who she was before they extended the invitation and they provided her with VIP access as an honored guest. Clearly, they saw nothing wrong with having an over-the-hill porn star promoting her work to teenagers. The reason they shifted gears is they were getting mocked for it by their critics on the Right. Their critics had a field day with it as another example of how TP-USA is just another grift peddling degeneracy in the name of conservative values.

In fairness to the organizers of TP-USA, they probably assumed there was nothing wrong with having an aging porn actress at their event. After all, the Federalist website has her as a featured contributor. Sean Davis, one of the founders of the site, must think she is acceptable for young people. His partner, Ben Domenech, made this clear on Twitter over the weekend. Later he blamed anti-Semites for getting her booted, which sets up an interesting moral dynamic.

It is these sorts of things that suggest the universe has a sense of humor. Brandi Love is the prefect representative of conservatism. She is an old whore well past her prime, desperate to keep what little audience she can. Of course, conservatism is also an old whore well past its prime willing to degrade itself for attention. When you look at it objectively, Brandi Love should have been the keynote speaker. She is the near perfect representative of the conservative movement.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this, but it points to the primary reason that conservatism was a complete failure. It was always hollow. Despite all their pretensions, they never really stood for anything. Conservatism was nothing more than a way for the unpopular kids to get a chance to sit at the cool kids’ table. The reason they welcomed an old porn actress to their ranks was to show the cool kids they were not a bunch of stuck up prudes. They liked degeneracy too!

Beyond that, it shows that the people running TP-USA know they have nothing to offer, so they have to rely on gimmicks. Last year they got grief for having scantily clad bimbos with t-shirt guns on stage like it was spring break. They are not offering young people a chance to be a part of something important. They are offering them a chance to get drunk and have easy access to whores. Clubs in Ft. Lauderdale have more dignity than to use these tactics to get attention.

Of course, we live in an age in which conspiracy theories turn out to be previews of tomorrow’s news, so you have to wonder if this was really an error. TP-USA has been pushing degeneracy to young people since its inception. They used to have promiscuous homosexuals speak to college audiences to promote sodomy. That is how Nick Fuentes got famous. He got his fans to show up at events and ask people like Charlie Kirk why he thought anal sex was a conservative principle.

Given the times, one can be forgiven for wondering if the whole point of this operation is to be the other side of the sandwich for young people. One side is left-wing antiwhite politics, while the alternative is libertine degeneracy. It is not as if this old porn actress tried to crash the party. People at the very top of the organization reached out and invited her as a VIP. It is impossible for them to claim they did not know who she was, as that is the only reason anyone knows who she is.

It is a good example of how the market corrupts. The people running this group are sure that the marketplace must always decide. That means they measure their own efforts in terms of box office. The more tickets they sell, the better they think they are doing, even if they are peddling smut to teenagers in order to do it. They probably think this was a good result, as it got them some unearned media. Conservatism submitted to the marketplace and became just another carny act in the process.

The good news in all of this is TP-USA seems to be collapsing. Their event was lightly attended, and their on-line shows had crickets as a soundtrack. Despite the fact that young people today are terribly naïve, they still retain the ability to see through these efforts to exploit them. Yesterday men peddling nostalgia for an age that will never return are not going to get far with young people worried about being hated minorities, even if the sales pitch is festooned with smut.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Historical Fiction

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“The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable” is an old Soviet era joke about the party’s habit of rewriting history to serve the current moment. Like so many things Soviet, it applies well to the current American regime. Not only do they rewrite the past, but they also magnify events from the past to make them seem like they just happened yesterday. They diminish more recent events so they seem distant. The old communists were amateurs compared to liberal democrats.

The rewriting of history is best done by people who have a certain historical outlook and a facility for language. It is a unique sort of sociopathy that allows them to create highly complex models of the past that are decorated with well-established facts, but are otherwise filled with distortions and outright fabrications. Erasing a man from a picture and banning any mention of him still leaves a hole. Rewriting the man’s history, weaving it into the story of the opponents solves two problems.

You can see how this works in this hysterical screed from the left-wing propaganda site the Bulwark. At this point it is inaccurate and dishonest to put the neoconservatives on the political Right. They agree with the establishment Left on everything except some foreign policy items. They actively make war on the establishment Right. Of course, they are even more hostile to dissidents, nationalists, and populist than the most deranged lefty. Neoconservatives have returned home.

Putting that aside, note the natural way in which the writer builds an intellectual framework that fits the needs of the moment. Within in that framework are all of the usual bogeymen that haunt the minds of these people. We have various internet characters who have tormented them. There is the Russian conspiracy hoax and the foaming at the mouth Trump hatred. Of course, Evangelicals are in there. The only thing missing from the list of bad actors is Tsar Alexander III.

All of this is designed to dirty up the Claremont Institute, which is the only establishment Right operation to take seriously the crisis of the present. They operate American Greatness and the site American Mind. Of course, they have been willing to look at Trump and the movement that carried him to office in a serious way. Michael Anton was one of the first establishment figures to make the case for Trump in 2016. This is why the fevered minds of neoconservatism despise them.

The psychopathic hyperventilating is amusing at a certain level, but it obscures the really important nugget at the start of the screed. “The Claremont Institute was founded in 1979 by Peter W. Schramm, Thomas B. Silver, Christopher Flannery, and Larry P. Arnn, all students of Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa.” Then just a bit later, “Jaffa’s work on Abraham Lincoln was groundbreaking, and can be credited for recovering a sense of Lincoln’s intellectual seriousness.”

It is easy to skip over that as the cult of Lincoln has become a fixture in both the establishment Left and the establishment Right. Both left-liberals and right-liberals claim Lincoln as their own. National Review trots out Lincoln every time the left-liberals are banging them over the head about race. You see, Lincoln was a Republican, so it means it was right-liberals who saved America from slavery! They do the same ridiculous thing with MLK, even though he was a Marxist.

Forgotten is how this cult of Lincoln was created and who created it. That person is Harry Jaffa, who should go down as history’s greatest fabulist. He is responsible for what is known as the second founding thesis. You see, the real founding the country was not with the Constitution. That is just words on paper to solve practical issues facing the newly independent colonies. The real founding of the country, the moral and spiritual founding, was with the Declaration of Independence.

According to Jaffa, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” is the primal roar of the new people, a new concept of a people. The Founders wanted America to be a land of universal equality. That was the ideal they setup for themselves. The Constitution fell short of that because of the needs of the moment.

The Civil War, however, was not a continuation of a cultural dispute dating back to the English Civil War or even a war over slavery. It was the second founding. The old errors and sins of the first founding were washed away with the blood of millions so America could continue toward that original ideal. Slavery was abolished and the Constitution was modified. Those modifications have been used ever since to alter the country in pursuit of the founding ideal contained in the Declaration.

This is also where we get the proposition nation stuff. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” You see, that original rhetorical flourish was actually a call to create an entirely new type of nation, a proposition nation based on ideas, rather than people. It is not hard to see the mischief that has come from the embrace of this rewriting of history.

In a slightly different context, John Derbyshire noted that some people have an unnatural skill at creating “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content”. Harry Jaffa and his followers were such men. For that matter, Strauss falls into this camp as well, but that is a topic for another day. Because the second founding idea provided the right-liberals with a fig leaf over the race issue, it has become their creed.

That does not change the fact that this is nonsense, but like Stalin rewriting history, it is powerful nonsense. In fact, the current antiwhite pogroms aimed at extirpating all signs of whiteness are rooted in this. The advocates justify their cultural genocide on the grounds that it is part of this process to reconcile America with its long failure to live up the original idea. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are really just modern day manifestations of the Founders, dreaming of a proposition nation.

At the core, the dissident project is about peeling back the layers of lies and fabrications like second founding theory. History is a story of a people and our story has been rewritten by strangers who see us as enemies. Correcting the record is not just an exercise in trivial exactitude. It is about re-centering a people on the foundation of their past so they can once again reach for the stars. If the folks at the Bulwark want to know “what they hell is happening” there is the answer in a nutshell.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

The Time Warp

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One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis. Their views of the world remain the same as they were at some point in the past. For some it is always 1985 and the biggest fear is the commies will get control. Some are locked in 1968 where they are trying to keep corporate interests from crushing the working man. These people live like modern people, but their worldview remains in the world of the past.

From the perspective of dissidents, the most obvious of these groups are the civic nationalist types. Long time users of Gab have suddenly been made aware of these folks after Trump and Trump fans were dumped from Twitter. The J21’er is a person who signed up for Gab in January of 2021. They decorate their profile with patriotic symbols and far too much information about themselves. Politics for them is right out of a civics textbook from the late 1980’s.

These people are not just lost in the past. They have plenty of examples in the media who are right there with them. This post in the American Conservative is a good example of the type. It is a long piece about the future of conservatism that reads like it was written in 1992. No mention of immigration, the  most important issue facing the world at this time. No mention of race and racial politics, which has convulsed the country since the end of the Obama administration.

The writer is a regular at the site so it is safe to assume his views reflect those of the editorial staff. It links to many other sites that wave the conservative flag, so it is in tune with the sensibilities of that old tribe. This is the right world to use as they exist like an isolated tribe in the Amazon, unaware of the world that exists outside their remote villages. This is one of the links in the post. It is a debate about conservatism by people who should be in a museum exhibit about the 1990’s.

It is not just a phenomenon of the legacy Right. The BreadTube phenomenon is an example from the Left that parallels the one on the Right. These are people promoting things like socialism, communism and anarchism, but from the perspective of the 1970’s when such topics were actually discussed by adults. They want to steer young people away from identity politics, but they also want to combat what they call “far-right extremism” that appears on YouTube and other places.

This is where you see the time warp. The people they consider to be far-right are people like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson. Not only that, they stick to an old 1970’s liberal view of politics when the Left was sure their ideas were so convincing, they could engage with their opponents and win every time. Like their analogs on the other side, they seem to have missed the last couple of decades. They are unaware of the fact that people get fired from their job for holding the wrong opinions.

Of course, the establishment Left itself is trapped in a time warp. The people banging on about structural racism and white supremacy also bang on about the dangers of corporate media and corporate power. They do so on global corporate platforms, often from the corporate offices. If people actually wore the labels of their supporters, the street protestors would look like NASCAR drivers. Their little outfits would be festooned with corporate sponsors. “This riot brought to you by Amazon!”

Listen to the people behind the Critical Race Theory stuff and they carry on as if it is 1955 and the imaginary Jim Crow stuff is real. They claim to be fighting the racism of whites and the oppression of the white power structure. They are weirdly unaware of the fact that none of this ever existed or exists today. Everyone with the least bit of power is on their side. Their people they are attacking are without any representation in the halls of power. For the antiwhites, time stopped in 1968.

Some of this is just human nature. People stubbornly cling to old ways of thinking about things out of habit. There were still supporters of the Whigs long after they had disappeared into the past. Ideology provides structure and a way to understand the world, so abandoning it is difficult for some. Until they find a suitable replacement, they stick with the old views. We see this with the Trump phenomenon. Many jumped on it simply as a way out of conservatism.

Then we have demographics. White people are the oldest tribe in tribal America now, so whites are going to be slower to adapt to the new reality. The fans of Ben Shapiro are old people mostly. He is what they hoped the future would be like and what they imagine it was like in their past. For someone who is 70 years old, it is tough to accept that all they fought to preserve will be washed away. The dream of returning to the civic nationalist paradise is better than facing present reality.

Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. The people locked in these time warps will eventually return to this part of the timeline. Again, you can see this on Gab. Many of those J21’er have quickly adapted to their new home. Every time a bell rings a new dissident is born and every day the bells are ringing, thanks mostly to the behavior of the ruling class. The behavior of the government the last year has collapsed many of these time bubbles.

Something similar is happening on the Left. Jimmy Dore, for example, is a man who considers himself on the Left. Yet, he is every bit as skeptical about the radicals as the typical dissident. Glenn Greenwald is another good example. Matt Taibbi is another guy who is having an awakening. These are people looking around and coming to the realization that their old views on things no longer track with reality. The old Left is starting to have their own red pill moment.

Political transformation is like the old line about bankruptcy. It is slow at first, often glacial, then it happens all of a sudden. The individual begins to break free from their time bubble and then all off a sudden they have their awakening. As is always true about the behavior of people, some are too timid to look up. They fiercely cling to their ole ideas like a dog with a bone. Their fight to remain trapped in the past is a weird sort of conformation. Some people will just be lost to time.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Monsters

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Note: This week’s Taki post is related to today’s post, but it is a more high brow look at the subject of ideological fanaticism. There is a podcast up behind the green door which delves into the same topics.

Arguably, the first casualty of the antiestablishment uprising that began toward the end of the Obama administration was David French. Unlike most of Conservative Inc., French was too dumb to avoid mixing it up on-line with the smart kids who create clever memes and troll establishment media figures. He became the poster boy for what came to be known as the cuckservatives. As Tucker Carlson noted, French is the sort of person who can only exist in the world of non-profit Conservatism.

What makes a dullard like David French stand out in the bland nothingness that is the conservative intelligentsia is his unbridled narcissism. Most of Conservative Inc. knows they are just overly paid time-servers lucky to have comfortable lives. That is why they make sure to never say a discouraging word. David French, on the other hand, imagines himself to be a world historical figure. He does not believe in much, but he firmly believes in the importance of David French.

That may seem like a bit much, given that he is a dumpy old bald man with the voice of Mickey Mouse and the IQ of Goofy. Remember, this is a man who serious thought about running for president in 2016. That’s right. He spent a month doing a Hamlet routine at NRO over whether he should run an independent campaign to block Trump in the general election. Only a narcissistic fanatic could imagine himself going from C-list pundit to national political figure.

This is what brought French to the attention of most people. Prior to his embrace of smarmy anti-Trump crankery, he was just the guy you skipped over when scanning a conservative website. He was the nobody’s nobody. Then he piled into the clown car known as the NeverTrump movement. His obnoxious blend of narcissistic fanaticism and comical mediocrity made him the face of conservatism. For many, David French became the prime example, of what went wrong with the Right.

This over-the-top zeal was not a new thing. Back in 2010 when he was promoting himself as the most Bible-believing Christian on earth, he and his wife flew to Africa and brought back an African child. You see, his version of Christianity told him he had to go and save the world. Sure, it meant stepping over any number of orphaned kids in his own backyard, but all the cool people were adopting Africans, so America’s greatest Christian could not settle for a local orphan.

Ever since he has been waving the kid around to remind us of his goodness. Here we have a piece in the far-left site The Atlantic, where America’s greatest Christian, a Chris-like figure himself when you consider it, tells us we are letting him down. Here he is on NPR, repeating the same slanders. You see, owning an African was not the boon to his career that he imagined, so it must mean America is full of bigots. America is just not good enough for a benevolent figure like David French.

Now, the CRT debate offers him a chance to wave around his trophy kid and lecture the rest of us about his goodness. Here he is arguing in The New York Times that the people who oppose Critical Race Theory are bigots. To prove he is America’s messiah, he partnered with a black guy who hates white people, a Jewish guy who claims Trump is actually Hitler and a mulatto who hates himself. You see, America’s leading Christian is uniting the races in the war against the bigots.

In that Times essay, they claim that banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory and its variants is wrong because we are supposed to have an open society. This demands an open debate of ideas. French writes, “These laws threaten the basic purpose of a historical education in a liberal democracy. But censorship is the wrong approach even to the concepts that are the intended targets of these laws.” Just a few days later he was cheering the removal of Nicholas Fuentes from Twitter.

David French regularly reminds us that in addition to being America’s leading Christian, he is also the William F. Buckley of this age. He is the voice of conservatism fighting against the dark forces of intolerance and populism. Say what you will about Bill Buckley though, he would have noticed if his biggest fans were on the Left, but the praise and applause is all that matters to French. To the narcissist, attention and praise are the narcotic of their existence. The source is unimportant.

It is tempting to dismiss David French as just another a public buffoon, but there is something darker at work here. French not only waves the African kid around like a bloody shirt, but he clearly worries more about her future than the future of his natural born white children. He has never been moved to write a long essay about his concerns for their future as minorities in nonwhite America. His position on CRT suggests he does not think about them at all. They don’t serve the cause.

It is difficult for normal people to understand the mind of someone who uses their children as props in their narcissistic fantasies. Similarly, it is hard for normal people to understand the mind of the those who enthusiastically commit atrocities in the name of their cause. These are people who thoroughly confuse their own identity with that of the cause they serve. Their narcissism tells them that everything they do is justified, because they are a world historical figures.

Critical Race Theory is by definition cultural genocide. This is the appeal to the sorts of people who think starting over from a clean slate is the best course. The people who look at every human tragedy as a chance to advance their cause and thus advance their own heroic story are the sorts of people who think the death of a million people is nothing more than a statistic. They are not just consumed by ideology, but driven by a narcissistic fanaticism that excuses all excesses.

C. S. Lewis famously wrote that “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” The sorts of people who torment us for our own good do so with the approval of their own conscience. That is what we see with the antiwhite fanatics pushing things like CRT. Guys like French have no trouble slamming the oven door shut because he never stops believing in his righteousness. History’s greatest monsters were all driven by this same certainty.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

The Custodial State

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One of the weirder aspects of the Covid panic was how every corporation decided they needed to do their duty with regards to panic. In many respects, they were the primary fear mongers, as people interface with corporations multiple times a day, while it is possible to tune out the government. For most people, the yammering meat sticks in the media are just the background noise of life. The corporation, on the other hand, is the safety rails of their life, guiding them as hey go about their business.

Shortly after the politicians declared mass panic, every retail chain was busy putting up signs, setting up social distancing protocols and training an army of harpies to lecture people about the need to be safe. The banal overhead music was replaced with endless chants about how much they cared and wanted you to be safe. Those declarations were followed by the robot voice telling you to obey the latest edicts from the CDC about social distancing and dousing yourself in alcohol gel.

The weird part about it was not that it was right out of dystopian science fiction movies where people live in high tech penal colonies. What was weird is no one noticed that we were suddenly thrust into high tech day care centers. The fact that corporations would take the lead was just expected. Something similar happened with the antiwhite pogroms launched after George Floyd. It was corporate America leading the war on white people through ads, TV shows, sporting events and movies.

Again, the remarkable thing about this is not that corporate America is hyper-political now, but that everyone just accepts it without notice. Here is a story by Matt Taibbi about YouTube censoring someone named Bret Weinstein. He walks through the travails of Mr. Weinstein and other Covid skeptics who have been harried by faceless censors on social media platforms. It is a weird blend of passive-aggressiveness and technological superficiality. It is Kafka meets Hal 9000.

The thing that Taibbi does not mention is why these companies suddenly think it is their duty to police what people say. All of the heads of these tech firms regular say they have a duty to police what people say on their platforms. The retail chains that decorated their stores with Covid stuff took the same stance. They were doing their duty by pushing you around in their stores. It was not profit or the satisfaction of their shareholders at the top of their list. It was your safety.

We have gone from a world where private companies should have the right to regulate what happens in their firms because property rights are essential, to a world where they must regulate what happens because the public good demands it. In the blink of an eye, all of corporate America is of one mind on all issues and they volunteer to be on the front lines of the fight over those issues. America is now a massive daycare center run by corporations acting like matronly old hens.

It turns out that C. S. Lewis got it exactly right when he said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

The custodial state turns out to be worse than the authoritarian state imagined by Orwell, because there is no face to the enemy. In 1984, it was Big Brother who ruled with an iron fist for his own sake. In the custodial state it is an invisible network of mother hens with unlimited resources. With one hand they dispense the pleasures of life and with the other hand they grab you by the scruff and make sure you eat your broccoli before leaving the table. All we see is the hand, never the face.

Because they are faceless, there is also no way to appeal to their humanity, their sense of fair play or the rules they claim to follow. When YouTube bans you from their platform, they issue a form of “Because I’m your mother and I say so” when you try to appeal their decision. When the bank shuts down your bank account, they make sure to inform you that this hurts them more than it hurts you. Declaring themselves a selfless nanny of the custodial state makes it all right.

The custodial state is the sensibilities of women armed with the weapons and power created by men. This is what lies behind the popular lunacies of Critical Race Theory, wokeness and white fragility. Every one of these is pushed by a thousand perfumed hands as a way to show how much they care for all of their children. Stripped of the Marxist jargon, it is nothing more than a mother standing over her children telling them to play nice and share their toys with one another.

In the Assemblywomen, the 4th century BC playwright Aristophanes described a world in which the women of Athens gained control of the government. Before long the city fell into a chaos that is familiar to us today. Men were wearing their wives’ clothing, ugly women were demanding that men see them as attractive and, of course, everyone was supposed to share their good with the community. In short order the normal rhythms of Athenian life give way to the chaos of female tyranny.

Aristophanes never explained how it ended, because it was just assumed that no such thing could last very long. That was what made the play a comedy. America will soon find out how a gynocratic custodial state ends. Maybe modern people are happy to sink quietly into the darkness of infantilization. Rather than take up their posts in the adult world, they prefer to live like children, a modern Eloi. The collapsing fertility rates and increasing dependency suggest the end of us is a form of crib death.

“‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure— had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”

–The Time Machine

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

The Projectionists

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People often join mass movements as a way to replace their own hated identity with that of the group. They immerse themselves in the movement or cause, losing themselves in the identity of the group. Their sense of who they are gets blended with the cause so that they are one with it. It is why their life is quickly organized around the cause they are in at the moment. Not everyone does this, of course, but every mass movement has true believers, people who become one with it.

This is why the true believer reacts to all criticism of the movement as if it were a physical attack on their person. They treat all opposition to their cause as a violent threat, because from their perspective, it is an attack on their person. Once who they are is indistinguishable from the identity of the group, any criticism of the group becomes a threat to their very existence. It is why reasoning with a true believer makes them more belligerent and hostile.

Another consequence of this fusing of identities is that the true believer tends to project onto others the things he hates or fears about the group. Since the very nature of the true believer precludes self-examination, it also precludes a critical examination of the cause they have joined. For the same reason they look at criticism of the group as an attack on their person, they cannot criticize the group. Instead, they project these faults and fears onto some external entity.

A good example is this post from the neocon website the Bulwark. The neocons, of course, have been driven berserk by Trump and the rise of populism. They were sure their scaly tentacles were so tightly wrapped around the Republican Party that it was nothing more than their personal golem. Then Trump comes along and shatters that certainty by sweeping the primaries. Not only that, but he also pointed the finger at them as the reason for why things have gone wrong in America.

This is a good bit of evidence that whatever it was, neoconservatism had transformed into a weird political cult. The first generation had practical reasons for the transition from Trotskyists to Buckley conservatives. They saw that the American Left was getting cozy with the Soviet Union. It was not so much their flirtation with communism, but their friendliness with the ancient enemy in the East. The neocons dropped their own communism and became libertarian Cold War hawks.

The following generations, on the other hand, were not so clever. Bill Kristol, for example, has been wrong about everything for thirty years. He thought Dan Quayle would make a good second for Poppy Bush. He though Sarah Palin would make a good second for John McCain. Quayle and Palin were decent people trying to do the right thing, but their appeal to Kristol was that he believed he could outwit them, which meant they were not the sharpest tools in the toolshed.

Putting that aside, you really see the cult-like aspect in this post. It is pure projection of neoconservative defects onto their enemy. The post’s subhead says it all. “Claiming to love America while believing that it is broken and that many of your fellow citizens are your enemies.” These are people who spent the last six years claiming that Trump and his voters need to be exterminated on the grounds that they are evil. Bill Kristol wants to genocide the “lazy” white working class.

Later in the post we get this gem, “In his public addresses, President Biden has made a conscious effort to speak to all Americans. Donald Trump, by contrast, typically reverts to the language of us-versus-them…” This is the sort of thing you get from someone who is no longer engaged with reality. It is also the way a cult member projects the defects of his cult onto enemies. The hive-minded neocon is projecting the things he most despises about his cult onto the enemies of the cult.

The transformation of neoconservatism into this bizarre hyper-violent subculture raises an interesting set of questions. Was it always a blood-soaked political cult obsessed with bringing about the end times? On the other hand, is this what happens when a bespoke identity cult loses its primary purpose? After all, neoconservatism was built for the Cold War, so when that ended, their purpose ended. Like a hive who loses its queen, the remaining members of this cult buzz around in anger.

There is another angle here. The first generation of neoconservatives went through a period where they aggressively attacked their former host. It was as if they were trying to purge themselves of the old identity to make room for the new one. That could be what we are seeing here. The current neocons are shedding their old conservative skin in order to grow a neoliberal skin. This will allow them to attach themselves to what they think is the permanent new order in Washington.

Additional support for this the tone and language in their posts. Note that in the past they differentiated between “Trumpists” and conservatives. Increasingly they conflate the terms, using them as synonyms. Note also they are not trying to reconcile with their old allies in Conservative Inc. Instead, they have retreated into their own ghettos while they go through the transformation. The next chapter of neoconservatism will take place within the neoliberal order, they hope.

It is an interesting phenomenon to behold, if you can avoid being emotionally drawn in by their projection. Perhaps that is another reason that cults project their hatreds, fears, and insecurities onto others. It is a distraction. The endless feverish attacks on alleged enemies draw the eye away from what is happening in the cult. That old self-loathing, the desire for self-abnegation, at the root of the true believer, results in a group behavior that always seeks to distract from what is happening in the cult.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

The Show Goes On

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One of the weird aspects of liberal democracy is that the state takes every opportunity to celebrate itself. Every public event has rituals before the event where members of the state are marched out to be cheered by the crowd. Sporting events have a weird North Korean vibe to them. July 4th has always been a chance for the office holders to celebrate themselves. This year, the F.B.I. decided to hold a parade in the city of Philadelphia to let us know they are always on the job.

Patriot Front is the latest carnival act to get a chance to perform on the big stage of democracy, at the direction of the usual suspects. They are based in Texas, but decided to hold a parade in Philadelphia over the long weekend. Allegedly, they got a permit from the city, but their event looked ad hoc. They showed up, danced around just long enough to get media attention and a reaction from locals. Then they got back in their vehicles and headed for parts unknown.

Some will no doubt say it is unfair to assume these guys are just another honeypot cooked up by the secret police, but that is the way to bet these days. The Oath Keepers are looking like they were created by the secret police a decade ago. This exhaustive deep dive by Darren Beatty into the origins of the group and the dodgy nature of the founder should cause everyone to rethink the authenticity of these groups. The best you can say about any of them is they are led by unstable people.

The Oath Keepers are not an outlier. The Proud Boys, which was started by Gavin McInnes, went from goofy fan club to paramilitary operation. Instead of drinking beer and celebrating western chauvinism, they were rolling around in the dirt with Antifa and other state-sponsored extremist groups. It turns out that the guy who took over the group was a “serial informer” for the secret police. This is  pattern with these groups that goes back a very long way. It is the default position.

The essential tool of all secret police operations is to use unstable informers to infiltrate the target group. The reason this works is outsider politics tends to attract people just looking for a home, many of whom are unstable. Go to a Libertarian Party event and it feels like the day room of a local insane asylum. One of the results is people organizing outside the system will encounter a lot of crazies. They get used to seeing them, so the one that is actually an informer slips through.

A good example of how this works is the Bolsheviks. A fellow named Roman Malinovsky was a prominent Bolshevik before the revolution. He was also an agent of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. He was able to become close friends with Lenin and Stalin, two highly paranoid and suspicious men. Malinovsky even setup Stalin so he could be arrested at a social event. He was so good at his work that even when everyone was in jail but him, they still did not think he was a spy.

Malinovsky was always the most enthusiastic supporter of the cause. This is what won him notice from Bolshevik leaders. He was a guy who never deviated from the party line, however it was being expressed by the leaders. It was why Lenin could not accept that he was a spy, even when the evidence was clear. It is always hard to distrust the guy who is your most loyal supporter. Eventually he was betrayed by his ex-mistress and the Bolsheviks had him killed.

Another reason the secret police find it easy to infiltrate outsider groups, especially those claiming to be on the Right, is that they are usually run by stupid people who never learn from the past. Look at this Patriot Front outfit. The “flag and costume” act has been a failure in America going back to George Lincoln Rockwell. The general public find it weird and off-putting. The only thing these antics do is isolate the group from normal society, making them easy targets.

What did the Patriot Front people think they were doing? They already managed to get themselves put on the terror watchlist. If they were hoping for attention by the Feds, they need not worry. Was anyone in Philly going to be impressed with this stunt and say to themselves, “You know, I think I may consider becoming a fascist”? Was this event going to bring them positive coverage from the media? As Jason Köhne noted, the only thing it did was drag young men further into the abyss.

Politics in a liberal democracy is a drama run by the ruling class. Think of it as a big stage on which politics is acted out for the masses. In America, this means the Left opens the show by demanding action against some threat to “our democracy” or demanding action to defend a victim group. Their fluffers go into the crowd to get the audience excited for the next drama. The actors perform the familiar story, sometimes combining the two into a single story.

At this point, the so-called conservatives waddle onto the stage in their comfort-fit chinos and golf shirts. They dismiss the claims of the Left, either claiming they are  exaggerating or that the issue is just not important. The crowd is encouraged to boo and hiss at them, which causes their knees to shake. Before long, some of them break ranks and join the Left in jeering at their old colleagues. The crowd keeps booing and the conservative are eventually run off the stage.

Every once in a while, for reasons science has yet to explain, the conservatives do not start to shiver and quake. They hold their ground. This is when the the spotlight illuminates the right side of the stage and we see the Hitler outfit. Over the sound system comes, “Who in the crowd will perform this vital role?” Sure enough, some idiot from a group fond of weird flags runs up on stage, dons the costume and begins to strut around on stage as the crowd throws rotten vegetables.

This is what the Patriot Front did over the weekend. They also took credit for defacing the statue of the blessed George Floyd, peace be upon him. These guys are performing a vital role in the political drama. This is why the Feds are endlessly trying to coopt and create groups that will perform this role. It turns out that the supply of idiots willing to do this without prompting can never meet demand. The secret police make sure the supply is always there so the show can keep staggering on.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

The Kakistocracy Is Real

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An easily ignored aspect of the Tucker Carlson spying story is just how ham-fisted this caper was executed, regardless of the reason. Carlson is a relentless critic of the regime, but his audience is relative tiny. His average total audience is roughly 3 million people per night. Even if every night is a new crowd, that is an audience of 15 million in a country of 330 million people. He may be the biggest name in cable news, but the reality is, cable news is a low impact medium.

This was always the lesson of the Trump phenomenon. The entirety of the mass media, including the so-called conservatives, aligned against Trump but he was able to win the nomination and the general election. These are people who were sure they were the king makers in national politics. This TV carny comes along and walks right through their lines as if they were not there. Then he turned them into objects of ridicule and mockery by calling them childish names.

If the intelligence agencies were what they imagine themselves to be, they would see that Tucker is never going to be much of a problem. They could just ignore him, like most everyone does, or they could use him. Carlson is one of the few serious people on television, but he is still on TV. He wants ratings, so a shrewd intel operative could feed him some juicy tidbits that serve the interests of the regime. Instead, they are in a petty spat and making him the sympathetic victim.

These sorts of thumbless capers raise an important issue. Our managerial elite is rapidly getting dumber. This is plainly obvious in the military side. Sure, rural peasants armed with Russian surplus were able to defeat the US army in the 1960’s, but that theater negated the primary American advantage at the time. Armor and advanced transport are useless in a jungle. Air dominance is not terribly effective against guerilla tactics in urban and jungle conditions.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military could exploit every technological advantage against a poorly equipped and trained opponent. In Afghanistan, the US faced off against a Bronze Age opponent. After two decades the white flag has gone up and the Taliban will take over this autumn. In Iraq, a ragtag force of insurgents led by a cleric came close to defeating the US army. The final peace looked more like a concession by the US, as Iraq is now an Iranian client.

The gross incompetency of the military is not unique. The entire managerial class is suffering from a rapid decline in intelligence. The truth is the system evolved for an adult population of the last century. It reflected the demographics of the population as a whole, but also the demographics of the ruling class. Over the last couple of generations, the people taking up positions in the system are significantly dumber, reflecting the changing demographics of the country.

This IQ decline will only become more acute in the next decade. The great Baby Boomer retirement will hit the civil service harder than the dreaded private sector, because the civil service is much older. The average age of the private workforce is roughly 35, depending upon who is doing the measuring. Similarly, the average age of the government workforce is 50. The leadership class is even older. In other words, the people running the system are geezers, not long for the world.

This is most stark in politics. Joe Biden is so old he has been in office longer than most people have been alive. The leadership of both parties is close behind. Pelosi, Schumer, McCarthy, Hoyer and McConnel reflect the sensibilities and the mating decisions of the disappearing past. Their replacements, Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Tim Scott, and so on, reflect the rapidly approaching future. Repeat this throughout the civil service and you can see the problem. The kakistocracy is real.

This decline in IQ is evident in the current upheaval. The great Progressive awakening of the 1950’s and 1960’s was driven by idealism. They really thought they were going to create a better world. It was also driven by the big change in the ruling class. Jews had taken up positions in the post-war ruling elite. They were making their mark by leading many of the cultural revolutions, like civil rights. Self-interest played a role, but social justice has always been a part of the Jewish cultural outlook.

Today, the revolts we see look like a cargo cult. They are reenactors playing parts they heard about in school. They think if they can replay the events of the past, the past will come alive and the great do-over begins. They are led by a carnival of simpletons and lunatics who mostly like smashing things and making noise. Antifa and BLM are the short bus passengers in the story of street activism. None of what we are seeing makes any sense or has any point. It is just mayhem for the sake of it.

The institutions of a society are the tools of the people running the society, designed for their use over the course of time. The institutions of America were made for people a full standard deviation smarter than today’s rulers. Those tools were also created with certain cultural assumptions missing from the current class. The next generation of rulers are the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey compared to the men who created the tools used to run the empire.

It will not end well.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

The Secret Police

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Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the panopticon, which is a type of prison designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The system allows all prisoners to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. The image that comes to mind is of a single eyeball in the sky that is always scanning for rule breakers. The key is the uncertainty. You never know if you are being watched by the guards of the prison.

This is a powerful image that always comes to mind when people realize that their rulers are spying on them. It is the wrong image. America is not a panopticon, but a synopticon. This is a concept conceived by Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen that means surveillance of the few by the many. Mathiesen belonged to the prison abolition movement which advocated for the elimination of prisons and prisons systems in favor of anarchist inspired alternatives.

The world in which we live today is one where everyone is spying on everyone, except the rulers, all the time. The local business installs cameras outside the warehouse to prevent vandals from defacing the walls with graffiti. Those cameras record everything and store it on the cloud. The owner is told the video stays on the cloud for seven days, but in reality, it is there forever. It just gets moved to a different database, accessible by the security state whenever they think to use it.

All around us, the vast network of recording devises uploads data to various databases that are harvested by the secret police and stored in their systems. Americans don’t think we have secret police, but Americans also think their votes count. The main feature of liberal democracy is it keeps the people living in a fog of self-delusion about who is really in charge of society. That is what we see with the secret police. They have no name and no location, so they do not exist for most people.

One of those people is not Tucker Carlson, however. His organization was visited by someone claiming to be a whistleblower. This person provided information to them from their texts and e-mails that could only be known by Team Tucker. The claim was that the NSA was using its super-duper spying tools to harvest their data. The idea was to find something they could use to get Tucker fired and then place it in the media. This is something the FBI does when framing people.

Like most Americans, Tucker takes his rulers at face value. If the government is spying on someone, it is in an official capacity from an official office. That is not how the secret police work in the American synopticon. The secret police are instead a loose network of fellow travelers that occupy positions inside the large institutions, both private and public. It is a secret society in which the membership is informal and rooted in shared beliefs and access to information.

In the case of Tucker, it is unlikely that the NSA was using its super-duper listening tools to gather up his e-mails. Whether such a thing exists is debatable. This data exists in databases both private and public. There is no need to sniff every packet on the internet in real time when millions of people volunteer to capture, collate and store the data on private systems. When those systems are maintained by people in the loose network that makes up the secret police, getting access is never difficult.

A good example is the insurrection hoax. The banks and mobile carriers were quick to volunteer their services to the hoaxers in the inner party. They provided mobile phone data and credit card data without being asked. All of a sudden, within hours of the event, the FBI and DOJ were getting waves of information about people who may or may not have been at the event. In the synopticon, the FBI is reduced to errand boys when it comes to framing enemies of the system.

In the case of Tucker, this is probably an operation not aimed at Tucker, but at his fans out there in flyover country. The secret police send this guy to tell Team Tucker that they are spying on him. They probably got some stuff from Google or Apple to use as a prop in this little drama. It is entirely possible the operation is being run out of Silicon Valley and the FBI official they are using is just a fellow traveler. His credentials as a high-ranking government agent adds authenticity to the caper.

Of course, Tucker ran straight to the camera to report on what happened, because that is what you do if you are a journalist in a democracy. There is the value of the self-delusion maintained by liberal democracy. If Tucker saw himself as a subject in an authoritarian surveillance state, he would have evaluated this event from that perspective and kept quiet about it. He would have assumed they were targeting him, hoping he would blab about it on television.

Now, if this operation is not about spying on Tucker in order to get him fired, then what is the point of it? The primary tool of control in both the panopticon and synopticon is psychological, not informational. The theory is that the uncertainty and lack of privacy instills submissiveness. The prisoner, never sure when he is being watched and what is being watched, begins to assume his captors are always watching and know everything about him, even his innermost thoughts.

This has always been a key feature of the secret police. They want their targets to think everyone and anyone could be a spy. Since the ruling class sees every white person in America as a potential threat, the secret police are trying to make sure every white person knows they are being watched. Getting Tucker, a guy who thinks UFOs are real, to play along in this drama is not terribly difficult. Millions of white people who watch Tucker are now thinking they are under surveillance.

In every corrupt regime, the secret police are a symptom of the rot, but they also reflect the nature of the ruling class. The KGB in post-war Russia was highly bureaucratized, reflecting the nature of the regime. They slowly began to ignore organized crime, as that was hard to address, and focused on trivial crime. On the other hand, the Okhrana, which was the Tsars secret police, was a highly personal operation. It was ad hoc and relied on individuals to infiltrate enemies of the Tsar.

In a liberal democracy like America, no one really knows who is actually in charge, so no one knows the nature of the secret police. There are formal institutions, just as we see in politics, but those institutions never do what the people want, which is what you see with elected officials. Just as with elected officials, there always seems to be a hidden agenda with the security forces. It is as if there is an invisible hand on the levers of power that is only known by what it does.

Just as the secret police reflects the nature of the system, it also gives us a sense of the system’s overall health. The more threatened the ruler, the more willing he is to use explicit force to intimidate his opponents. The confident ruler is willing to play cat and mouse, often for his own amusement. We saw this with he Tsar as century ago, where he was willing to be more explicit in the use of violence. The less secure he was in his position, the more willing he was to shoot people.

What we are seeing today is an effort to public intimidate opponents. Torturing political prisoners in secret DC jails and now advertising a domestic spying operation suggest genuine fear in the system. They really do believe that Trump was put in office by a secret conspiracy against them. This paranoia and fear is driving the explicit use of force by the rulers. That invisible hand is moving from the shadows, into the open and becoming more obvious in order to intimidate the enemy.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Words Are Keys

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It is a popular joke among the worst people that the best people need to find a minority to endorse their preferences before they can express them. In this context, the “best people” are the poohbahs of Conservative Inc. No matter how obvious or justified their position, so-called conservatives need to prove they are the best people by searching high and low for a “person of color” who agrees with them. Candace Owens has gotten rich by blessing the positions of conservatives.

It is the slave mentality, of course. The master is always projecting pride and power, as those are the things he values. He is the master, the man in charge, so he places the most value on the things that are useful to him as the master. The slave, on the other hand, is obsequious and submissive. The slave tries to express his will through quiet subversion, always conscious of the master. In American politics, conservatives are the slave, always displaying their submissiveness.

You see this with the growing controversy over Critical Race Theory. Conservative Inc. was silent on the issue until a black women stood up against it at a local school board meeting in Virginia. You could hear the sighs of relief echoing around Washington as conservatives finally had their champion. This antiwhite pogrom aimed at white children was no longer antiwhite, it was racist! Ever since, the conservative panjandrums have been piling in the company Lincoln with the DR3 tags.

Even Chris Rufo, the Andy Ngo of CRT, has struggled to accept the reality of his own reporting on the issue. He has been trying hard to make this about racism, rather than the long war on white people. He has personal reasons for it, but it is clear that he really believes what they say about white people. That is, if two or more white people get together outside the presence of nonwhites, they will immediately start planning for the new camp system in the Fourth Reich.

That last bit may seem like an exaggeration, but it is the root of what drives things like Critical Race Theory. Another person desperate to tone police, while riding the wave of controversy, is Karlyn Borysenko. She was sent in by the usual suspects to tell white people that the term “antiwhite” is very bad. Here she is with Patrick Casey explaining that the term antiwhite promotes white solidarity and white positivity. In this clip, she says that this always leads to genocide.

In fairness to Rufo, he seems to have figured out that he was speaking to no one by making CRT about racism against nonwhites. The parents flipping out about this stuff are all white. The people in the crowd cheering them on are white. He seems to have settled for a middle ground of implying that it is antiwhite racism. Scott Greer seems to be happy with that phrasing as well. The Wall Street Journal is fine with this new, oblique way of framing the issue.

As was brilliantly pointed out yesterday, the R-word can only apply to whites, so this new formulation is nonsensical. When someone on the Left hears the phrase “racism against whites” she hears Charlie Brown’s teacher. Racism can mean only one thing and that is prejudice plus power. In the fantasy world of the Left, the only people with power are white people, so they are the only people who can be racist. As is always the case with the Left, compromise is suicide.

The reason for this is that the Left is a hive, dividing the world into those inside the hive walls and those outside the hive walls. This is reflected in their language. There are words and concepts that can be used as weapons against their enemies and then there is language used by the enemy, that justifies attacking them. When the say language is violence, they really mean it. It is either a justification for their use of violence against outsiders or a call to violence against outsiders.

This is why the word “antiwhite” is so powerful. The Left has no way to redefine it as a slur against their enemy. Worse yet, when they attack their enemy for using it, they confirm the definition of the word. The biggest problem for them is the word strips them of moral authority. When the Left finger-wags about something like racism, they do so as the moral authorities on the issue. Cast as antiwhite, they immediately become just another snout at the trough of the culture war.

The Left has always relied upon informational asymmetry. They operate as pure partisans, while the other side is objectivists. That is, the Left wants to win every fight and the Right wants to find the correct answer. If the Right ever embraces partisanship, then it becomes a genuine fight. Since numbers matter, keeping white people chained to simpleminded individualism has been key. The word antiwhite is a key to unlock the chains and that is terrifying to the Left.

This does not mean the war is won just because the Left is on the defensive over Critical Race Theory. As Joe Sobran pointed out a quarter century ago, “The white
man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And superiority excites envy.” It is only when white people come to terms with this reality will they abandon the slave mentality and begin to assert their power again. This minor slave revolt over CRT is merely a hint of what lies ahead.

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