Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Springtime For Grifters

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One of the most amusing and revealing disasters in the book publishing business was the Naomi Wolf blunder of 2019. She was doing the rounds to promote her forthcoming book on the treatment of homosexuals in 19th century England. Given the topic, she expected to be given a hero’s welcome at every stop on her promotion tour, but instead she found out the premise of her book was nonsense. Here is a summary of the radio interview that made her famous for the wrong reasons.

Ms. Wolf is a good reminder that the establishment is loaded with grifters on both sides of the political spectrum. From this side of the great divide, the grifters of Conservative Inc. are most obvious, but they are pikers compared to the Left. Since the Left feeds on an array of identity groups, the opportunities to peddle nonsense are greater and more necessary, so they have a wide range of hucksters, conmen and so on. The mass media is just a platform for the left-wing grift-o-sphere.

What makes the Wolf story interesting is that it not only reveals the fraud of the political Left, but the bankruptcy of academia. This nonsense book Wolf wrote is based on her doctoral thesis at Oxford. In other words, the basic errors she made in reading the historical documents were not caught by her advisor or the thesis review committee that eventually granted her a title based on this pile of nonsense. They just rubber stamped the work, because the subject matter fit their agenda.

The real tell here is that Oxford not only did not rescind her doctorate or demand she revise her work, they never acknowledged it. They did not punish her thesis advisor, a person calling himself Stefano-Maria Evangelista. According to his website at the university he is still in good standing as an academic. Taken together, this says that the academy has no standards whatsoever. Ms. Wolf could have written her thesis with finger paint and it would have been approved as long as it had the right title.

Another amusing and revealing aspect to this is the early reviews of the book that are still up on Amazon. Note that Amazon deletes books and pages when the topic vexes the bigots over at the SPLC, but they leave up a complete fraud like the Wolf book. To their credit, the publisher pulped the book, but that did not stop reviewers from slobbering over it as if it is a lost work of Rousseau. One reviewer called it a “moving work of creative scholarship” which is a nice touch.

Like the academy, the book publishing business is packed to the gills with grifters and conmen, operating in a system that has no ethics. From this side of the great divide, the planks of wood pumping out books for Conservative Inc. are the most obvious, but the book publishing world mostly serves the Left. It is every bit as corrupt and value free as every other aspect of official society these days. The only thing that matters is that the fashionable opinions of the moment are echoed by the writers.

Of course, what makes the grift-o-sphere run so well is the total lack of shame on the part of the people running the various grifts. This is an under-appreciated aspect of what is happening in the West. One reason the people in charge are unmoved by public outrage is they have no conscience. Ms. Wolf’s Twitter profile, for example, features her discredited and unpublished book. Harold Bloom described her as Dracula’s daughter for good reason.

Again, this is something that is familiar on this side of the great divide. Mike Cernovich has become the universal example of the sort of sociopathic liar that inhabits the right side of the political spectrum. No matter how many times he is caught posting a whopper on-line, he keeps promoting himself. Normal people are embarrassed when they are caught in an error, much less an outright lie. The grifter, on the other hand, sees no difference between the truth and lie.

The truth is, this sort of behavior is far more common on the Left than on the Right or on this side of the great divide. Naomi Wolf is just one amusing example. There are thousands of people like her working a grift on left-wing audiences. Blacks, gays, Jews, trannies, socialists, you name the group on the Left and there is an army of grifters making a good living peddling nonsense to these people. It is fair to say that the Left is just a carnival of nonsense sold by carnies to the true believers looking for grace.

Grifters are a part of human society, but we seem to have entered into a unique phase in which the grifter is ubiquitous. Not so long ago, the book business had standards and the media did fire people for getting things wrong. Politicians went to jail for crimes and even rich people feared the law. The collapse of standards, combined with material excess seems to have resulted in a blossoming of grifters, like the sudden appearance of mold on an old piece of food. It is springtime for grifters.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Dangerous Escapism

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Montesquieu famously explained that each system of government has a principle that animates the people within that system. In a democratic republic, the citizens, and presumably the office holders, are driven by the willingness to put the interests of the community ahead of private interests. While every society of sufficient size has factions, the interests of those factions come after the interests of the republic. This is the framework of what dissidents call civic nationalism.

Since the middle of the last century or so, this view of politics has been the exclusive domain of the Right. The Left slowly embraced the partisanship of interest group politics during the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. First it was the array of interest groups in the old New Deal coalition that dominated politics into the 1970’s. That has given way to what we call identity politics today. Meanwhile the Right has stubbornly held to the abstract concepts of republican virtue and civic duty.

One result is that a standard item in the toolkit of Official Conservatism has been the argument against identity politics. Initially, as the Left embraced race politics, this was mostly an argument against pandering to blacks. As the array of identity groups in the radical coalition has expanded, it is now a generalized argument against appealing to the self-interest of groups based on their professed identity. The claim is identity politics is bad for the country, as it pits one group against another.

Tucker Carlson is probably the most vocal opponent of identity politics. He does a bit against it as part of his standard act. The other night, according to this Breitbart piece, he warned people about what will happen when the military is fully woke on identity politics. He asked, “what if the current lunacy turns out to be more than a passing phase? What if woke race obsession is not a fad, but instead an incurable brain virus that’s infected our country’s entire leadership class?”

He then showed a clip of some television performers talking about what Joe Biden should to do to have a diverse administration. Carlson then went on to explain that the people being given spots in the administration are not qualified for the posts, in the sense they have the skills to perform the stated duties. Instead, they are being given jobs to tick boxes on the ideological tick list. He then asks what would happen if the woke warriors take over the military.

It is never fully explained, but the viewer is supposed to come away thinking that this would be very bad. Instead of transgender fighter pilots being selected based on their skill, they would be selected based on their choice of sundress. Instead of based black guy getting promoted for his ability, woke black guy will be promoted because he is really into his blackness. Girls will be installed into special forces units to satisfy the desires of Nth wave feminist, rather than on their ability to fight.

Carlson does not put it that way, but he carefully avoids the implications of what he is saying, as he likes living in a mansion. The truth is, a military composed of the sorts of people the Left says are the future will be a disaster. The promotion of female officers is already showing up in incident reports. The military brass is well to the Left of the American public and they are fully committed to diversity. It is just a matter of time before that institution looks like the rest.

The fact is, Carlson is peddling the same civic nationalist fantasy that conservatives have been peddling for generations. In the face of identity politics, they preach a weird combination of individualism and a sacrifice to principles the other side rejects. His “what if” question is about thirty years too late, as it has been happening since the 1990’s and is accelerating. The real question that needs to be discussed openly is how does one live in a world defined by identity politics?

So far, the stock response from conservative like Carlson is the same answer they have been giving for generations now. That is, white people in general, but conservative whites in particular, have to pretend this is not happening. If they just carry on as if that old republican virtue is the best, eventually the other side will tire of their fads, see the results and return to the civic nationalist fold. In response to the radical advances on every front, civic nationalism has become a cargo cult.

Worse yet, it is a call to docility. The civic nationalist argues that eventually, the truth of radialism will catch up to them and all the good citizens really needs to do is wait for reality to slit the throat of radicalism. Instead of matching the Left’s anti-white rhetoric with pro-white rhetoric, which would be really bad according the civic nationalists, white people just need to embrace their individualism and soon enough things will go their way. UFO cults have greater self-awareness.

At some point, the dumb idea stops being dumb and becomes dangerous. We live in an age where public figures, elected officials, brag about withholding the Covid vaccine from whites in the name of racial vengeance. Not long ago this sort of rhetoric was considered a white nationalist conspiracy theory. How long before some unthinkable racial assault on whites is the new fad among the ruling class? Refusing to accept this reality, as is common with civic nationalist, is suicide.

This would be fine if it was a private form of suicide. If civic nationalists, like Tucker Carlson, simply focused on the work product of the Left, leaving the rest to the imagination of his viewers, that would be fine. Living within the constraints placed upon him by his employer, but seeding the minds of his viewers with the reality of their situation, would be a great service to his people. That’s not what he is doing. He is explicitly telling his viewers to lie back and take it, promising it will be over soon.

Civic nationalism, like libertarianism, is now a form of escapism. It allows the believer to stand on the sideline, not only believing it is the moral high ground, but certain that what is happening on the field will go his way. The principles of a republic, not only have no place in a majority-minority society, they are a dangerous narcotic that prevents the user from accepting reality. Civic nationalism and its traveling partner libertarianism are more dangerous than the identity politics they claim to oppose.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Doctor Stupid

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There is an old line about how some things are so stupid that only educated people are willing to believe them. Sometimes it is phrased as the smartest are the ones who believe the dumbest things. It is one of those aphorisms that is often used to dismiss arguments or ideas that are unpleasant. Most clichés and sayings are conversation enders, not conversation starters. On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth here and you see it in this gem from a Dr. Rachel Pope.

As we know from the great Doctor Jill Biden, there are a lot of very stupid people walking around with the label “doctor” in their profile. Another good rule is that when confronted by someone insisting you call her doctor or she puts that title in her social media profile, you are most likely dealing with a stupid person. It is not always the case, as there are smart jerks in the world too, but people who wave around their titles like this tend to be narrowminded and remarkably insecure.

In this case, it appears to be warranted. The claim that there is no genetic basis for skin color is laughably ridiculous. There is a genetic basis for all observable human characteristics like skin color and eye color. That is why we have no cases of two Irish parents giving birth to a Chinese baby. Children look like the people who made them, because they inherit the genes of the people who made them. Things like skin color, eye color, facial features and so on are all genetic.

This is not complicated stuff. Five minutes on a search engine gets you hundreds of studies explaining what is basic high school biology. If Dr. Rachel Pope is so haunted by multicultural taboos that she cannot bear to think of race differences, she could find studies like this one that examine the genetic basis of African skin color. You see, all of the gene combinations for skin color were present in humans from the start, so she could claim that skin color is a genetic response to environment.

If that first tweet was not embarrassing enough, she follows on with a truly deranged claim that there are no indigenous people in Britain. By her definition, there are no indigenous people anywhere. Humans did not spring from the soil by magic and they did not stay in one range. The story of humans starts with populating every nook and cranny of the planet. When people with an IQ about room temperature say “indigenous people” they mean those who settle a place first.

Of course, where Dr. Rachel Pope and her coreligionists in the denialist cult reveal the depth of their stupidity is when they insist race is skin color. The only people who insist this are the people in the science deniers cult. People familiar enough with the human sciences to accept the great diversity of man know that race is a general shorthand for a large basket of measurable human traits. These baskets of traits largely conform to the big geological divides on our home planet.

That last bit may sound awkward, but it is a good way of understanding how it is we have so much diversity in the human animal. If one hundred thousand years ago a group of aliens scooped up a few thousand humans and transported them to another planet, those humans would have adapted to their new world. They would no doubt have evolved unique characteristics because their world required it. No one would pretend that they are not different from earthlings.

It turns out that humans are the product of mating decisions made by their ancestors going back a very long time. Evolution worked on humans just as it does on everything else on the planet. When people migrated to a new environment, they quickly began to adapt to that new environment. The reason Africans have a genetic defense to malaria, but Scandinavians do not, is malaria is not present in the north. Thousands of generations of adaptation are why we have so much human diversity.

What makes this strain of stupidity carried by Dr. Rachel jaw-dropping is the people afflicted with it never shut up about diversity. From the comfort of their whites-only enclaves, they harangue the rest of us about diversity. The term “white privilege” has become a passphrase for these people. Yet, if race is not real, then white is not a logical construct, as it assumes race is real. Similarly, diversity cannot exist if there is no genetic basis for the human differences, we call race and ethnicity.

This brings us back to the beginning. The denialist is always someone who is educated, but also strangely stupid about the obvious. They tend to have inflated credentials in fields that are not particularly taxing. Archeology is a little better than education or psychology, but it is not a STEM field. There is a sense that their credentialism is a defense mechanism rather than a trophy case. That is also why they fall for every nutty fad popular with the modern intelligentsia.

Biological denialism, the refusal to accept the observable and measurable differences in humans, may be the ultimate expression of the aphorism at the start of this post. It is an idea so stupid that only pseudo-intellectual poseurs believe it. It signals to the rest that the person believing it is willing to accept on faith whatever nonsense is running through that particular subculture at the moment. It is an act of submission, showing that the person will never question the tenets of the subculture.

That is an important aspect of the modern intelligentsia. Membership is not just about holding the right beliefs. Those are important, but they change quickly, so what is most important is the willingness to accept the most absurd beliefs. The man who starts wearing a dress, claiming he believes he is a woman must be met by his fellows with absolute acceptance. That is the point of the pronoun stuff. When you address the guy in the sundress as “them” you are a true believer.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Elect

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Note: Lots of additional material this week. Over on Taki I have a post up about the great holiday movie It’s a Wonderful Movie. Behind the green door I have a post up about the YouTube/Livestream subculture. For those looking for some soothing sounds of reasonable analysis and conversation, here is some of that.

A recurring feature of the government Covid efforts is the people issuing various public health edicts violating those edicts. The self-righteous lectures about mask wearing from a sanctimonious politician are followed by pics of that politician going around without a mask at some swanky event. Restaurants all over the country have been closed, but special exceptions are always made for the politicians. These stories of official perfidy have become a staple of the outrage media.

One of the more amusing examples was from Rhode Island where the governess there has been carrying on like an overprotective mother, demanding that everyone stay home for the holidays. Meanwhile she is getting tanked up with other hens at a wine and paint party. The latest is the coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, who has been telling people to stay in hiding for the holidays. Meanwhile, she had a big family bash at one of her mansions over Thanksgiving.

Of course, these stories are waived around as examples of the hypocrisy and sense of entitlement common in the political class. There is an assumption that the people contradicting their own lectures know the lectures are nonsense. They know the mask wearing and other rules are ridiculous. They just like playing dictator. In contrast, these stories are sometimes presented as examples of how these people think they are above the rules, as if they are members of an aristocracy.

The latter is probably closer to the truth. The fact is, few people in elected office have the smarts to know if any of these policies make sense. It is monkey see, monkey do with these local politicians. They see a politician in another state getting noticed for an innovative torment and they race to match it. We live in the age of gesture politics, which means showing you care is all that matters. Covid allows these tiny tyrants to show they care by imposing restrictions on the rest of us.

What we are seeing is the results of the managerial class that formed up in the last century, having become class aware. These people see themselves as more than just experts tasked with managing society, the economy, education and so on. They are now an indispensable class, the fulcrum of society. There is no aspect of society that is off-limits to their machinations, because in their understanding of themselves and their role in society, no area of society can exist without their attention.

Therefore, you never hear any mention of constitutional liberties or constitutional rights when they are holding forth on their latest Covid edicts. You will also note that with some rare exceptions, political alignment has made no difference. Politicians of both parties have been participating in the orgy of rulemaking in response to Covid. What we have seen this year is the mask drop. The political divide in America is no longer Democrat and Republican, but the managerial class and the rest of us.

This new class awareness comes with a strong moral component. They see themselves as an elect, chosen by the people, based on merit, to manage society. It is why they often carry on as if what they are doing is a great burden. Like a mother saying “this will hurt me more than it will hurt you” when disciplining her child, the new elect carries on as if their duties are a great burden. Every new lecture, every new edict, comes with the sense that they are sacrificing for the community.

It is the old Calvinist concept of the predestination of the elect, secularized and democratized, into an obtuse form of entitlement. From the outside, these people look like self-important poseurs, oblivious to the damage they are causing. From inside the managerial class, they see themselves as heroes of a great cause. They are selflessly battling the Covid monster in order to save our democracy. The fact that no one voted for any of this is completely lost on them.

Another Christian element to this is the conflict over free will. On the managerial side, they no longer believe they are accountable in any formal sense. Governor Cuomo can cause the death of thousands of old people, but he is not responsible. On the other hand, some guy tries to keep his business open and he is accused of being a super-spreader, the angel of death. The elect has received grace, while the rest are condemned to suffer the torments that come for the damned.

There is also the old radical sensibility at work too. The radical always imagines herself as the vanguard of the people. She is free from responsibility, because her actions are intended to create the conditions for revolution. She can blow up women and children in a terrorist act, because her intentions are pure. She is not judged by the death and destruction she causes to the innocent, but by her fidelity to the cause and her willingness to sacrifice on behalf of it.

This turns up in the Covid edicts. These petty tyrants take pleasure in punishing the non-compliant, as it provides an opportunity to show how much they care. Like the radical bomber, they rationalize the damage they are doing, imagining themselves as the shock troops of social revolution. The great reset stuff and the build back better jabberwocky is the beacon on which they have fixed their gaze. They are leading us to salvation and nothing can stand in their way.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Purpose Driven Life

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An underappreciated aspect of human society is that humans in large communities need a set of common beliefs. Large society in this context means anything larger than the Dunbar number. Once you get to that number, law codes and a way to enforce them are a necessity. One tool to do this is a common set of beliefs held by most of the members. This provides a mechanism for those rules to become a habit of mind, a shared reality we would think of as culture.

A simple example of this is a taboo against an activity. Let’s say a poisonous berry grows in a part of the forest. The people may develop a taboo about eating anything or even entering that part of the forest. Perhaps they evolve a legend about one of their gods cursing the place or prohibiting people from entering it. Once enough people believe this, it becomes part of the law code of society and it is enforced by collective action against those who break the taboo about entering that area.

It is a crude example, but we have many such examples in the modern day that are not much different from that crude example. For example, Americans remain convinced that eating fat will anger the health gods. There is no science behind the Standard American Diet, but most Americans accept it as true. They don’t think about it. It is just part of the shared beliefs they grew up with and live within, so they accept it as true. We accept all sorts of behavior and environmental nonsense on faith.

Now, it should be noted that the shared beliefs do not have to be accepted by everyone in a society for them to work. Going back to our sacred bit of the forest example, it is not necessary that everyone accept the myth. It just has to be a critical mass that accept it and is willing to act on it. Unless there is an equally compelling reason to resist the myth and the reason is held by a sufficient number of people, a minority belief will become the majority belief in practice, if not spirit.

It is not too hard to find examples of this form of minoritarianism. American history is riddled with causes that were championed by a minority. The proliferating set of taboos related to the Covid beliefs held by the ruling class are a great example. A tiny number of people, relative to the population, deeply believes in these Covid taboos, so they have launched a crusade against Covid. America looks like a weird Muslim country now, because lots of people joined this new belief.

That is another aspect of shared belief. It appears that another prerequisite for large human society is a sense of shared purpose. The answer to why we are here and what is the purpose of our lives is answered within that shared set of beliefs. “My life has meaning because I am part of this great cause of my people” is a highly efficient way of enforcing group behavior. The best rules are those eagerly enforced by a set of true believers whose purpose in life is to enforce compliance.

Move backward through popular politics in America and you see one holy crusade after another driving the political debate. Today it is driven by Covidians. Before that it was driven by white liberals thinking Obama was Jesus. Before that it was driven by the war on terrorism. When the Baby Boomers had kids in school the crusade was to fix the schools so everyone could be educated. Go back further and we had a war on drugs and, of course, the great crusade against the evils of communism.

American history has been one crusade after another. The great battle between good whites and bad whites exists because it fills that need for a purpose. In the albescence of some external foe, the good whites keep their crusading skills sharp by going to war with the bad whites over some moral cause. This not only gives purpose to their lives, but it also reinforces those shared beliefs about who they are and why they exist. The reaction from the bad whites serves much the same purpose.

If you observe the Covidians for a bit, you see this need for purpose. The HBD community, for example, rushed to be the early adopters of the new faith, sensing it was a way back into the community of the respectable. It was not a conscious decision on their part. They did not vote on their secret e-mail list to become Covidians. It was the result of a shared desire to be rehabilitated and restored to polite society, along with the general sense that their purpose in life is to inform the rulers on the human sciences.

The same can be said for the women volunteering to be the mask police in every community in America. The natural role of women has been so reduced in status that this artificial role of Covidian den mother has become highly appealing. Mothers have been far less emotional about things like mask wearing and social distancing than the army of unattached, childless females. The reason is they have kids to scratch that maternal itch, so being a Covidian den mother has little appeal.

The fact is, human societies need shared beliefs. One aspect of that shared belief is a shared purpose. Most people, certainly not all, need that space labeled “purpose” to be filled by society. This is especially true of childless females. It is also true for males with no male role to play. Stripped of natural sex roles, this need for purpose is filled with causes that give purpose to life. The people wearing masks in their cars are not sheep following orders. They are believers looking for a god.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Lift Up Your Eyes

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It is hard to believe, but the British government is now into the fifth year of negotiations with the EU over withdrawing from the union. The Brexit referendum passed in June of 2016 and since then there have been two new Prime Ministers and one national election, all driven by the issue. Of course, there have been lots of promises to get the deal done, but it has been one delay after another. They have just announced another delay in order to keep negotiating a deal that will never come.

To provide some perspective on all of this, consider the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War. The war was one of the most devastating and complex events in European history. After all sides were exhausted from war, a conference was arranged for the belligerents to hash out their differences. A total of 109 delegations arrived and it took two years. In other words, one of the most complex treaties in history took less time that these Brexit negotiations.

Of course, as Farage points out, this is all a ruse to prevent Brexit from ever happening, at least not in the way the people expected. They will keep dragging it out until they sense the political winds have changed, at which point they have a second referendum in which the vote is rigged and they get the vote they want. Alternatively, they will cook up a deal that is basically a sham. The Brits will be subject to all the same rules, just administered under the name of Brexit.

This should be familiar by now. The Trump administration was basically just a four-year delaying action as the ruling class engineered the election fraud. There was no legislation on any of Trump’s signature issues. He got no wall money and he got no deal on immigration. Of course, nothing happened with the FBI’s seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. At every turn, both parties conspired to prevent the Trump administration from moving their agenda forward.

From the perspective of the people who actually run things, these tactics are wonderful displays of democracy. Sure, most people think democracy means the will of the people, as expressed at the ballot box, is enacted in legislation, but most people are wrong about this. In reality, democracy is where the people endorse the preferred option of the ruling class. That way, the people in charge don’t have to take responsibility for their actions and face the wrath of the mobs.

This is not just a right-wing complaint. The Pretender Biden is about to be installed and the Left is already grumbling. Instead of filling his administration with trannies, angry unmarried females and other assorted kooks from the valley of the woke, the new administration will be staffed by flunkies and coat holders there to do the bidding of global capital. All of those people who volunteered for the Colored Revolution in 2020 are going to find out they were conned.

This reality will not matter much, as the Republicans will wave the bloody shirt, demanding their voters support the party. The same people who spent five years penning “Never Trump” columns will shamelessly demand that you vote for some block of wood because she is less odious than the Democrat. You see that in Georgia where all of the usual toadies are claiming that the two Republican stiffs running for Senate are all that stand between freedom and communism.

At a certain level, you have to admire the shamelessness. One of those stiffs is an open borders fanatic who promises to turn the state of Georgia into a mix of Sinaloa and Africa by flooding the state with migrants. In other words, the guy who promises the exact opposite of what GOP voters have been demanding is supposed to be the last line of defense against the Democrats. While the GOP is begging for votes, they are literally promising to genocide their own voters.

All of this, of course, is the reality of liberal democracy. There is an old expression that no people have ever erected a statue in honor of a committee. The point being that it is bold men leading their people who are remembered. The corollary to that is no one has ever faced the wrath of the mob by voting present on a committee. A rule or policy that seems to appear ex nihilo from the liberal democratic system may infuriate the public, but they have no target onto whom they can focus their anger.

Think about it. How did we end up with pornography being pumped into the mobile devises of our children? When was this vote taken? Who decided that pornographers were a protected class, but pro-life advocates were not? How did we end up with tranny story time? You can go down the list of indignities imposed upon us and not find a single name you can attach to it. The truth is, the people responsible for it hide in the shadows of liberal democracy, so they never have to answer for it.

There is an old expression about the gold bugs that goes like this. “If your rulers are so corrupt that you need hard money to control them, your rulers are so corrupt that they will find a way around the hard money.” It is a nice corollary to the old expression, “Locks keep honest people honest.” In other words, good people need rules to help them avoid temptation and channel their good intentions. In contrast, bad people not only ignore the rules, they are constantly seeking to undermine them.

The old Joseph de Maistre line about people getting the government they deserve gets thrown around a lot in democracies, as a way to blame the people for the sins of their rulers, but there is another implication. The people can, if they can lift up their eyes and take a look at who is ruling over them, decide that they deserve better than the ruling class they have and take action. Numbers still matter and if enough of the public has had enough of their rulers, they can get new rulers.

Just as the slave must first look his master in the eye as an equal, before he can revolt against his condition, people must first come to terms with the fact that their rulers are rotten to the core. This is the prerequisite to getting new rulers. People need to see that it is not that they have the wrong rules to control their rulers. The problem is they have the wrong rulers. In other words, instead of focusing their wrath on the system, they focus their wrath on the people responsible.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Power Of Bad Ideas

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Dissidents tend to think of politics as the driver of social change. Elections have consequences, as the winners get to shape public policy, which guides the cultural evolution of society. There is some truth to it, but in reality, politics, as in elections and campaigns, are the product of social change. The real action is upstream where attitudes are formed and morality is structured. Convince people that something is morally wrong and this belief will turn up at the ballot box.

This is why the ruling class maintains a death grip on mass media. This is their primary vehicle for shaping public attitudes. Convince 70% of the public that wearing a rag over their face is a good idea and suddenly they are open to a wide range of claims by the politicians in the next election. They will support the side pushing for more restrictions and mandatory vaccines. It is the art of the nudge, which is the primary weapon in a modern liberal democracy. It’s rule by suggestion.

This is why success in dissident politics lies in getting people to question their assumptions about politics. The current example is the assumption that the only way to effect change is through voting. Lots of people who agree with dissidents on most things keep voting harder thinking that will get the result they want. These people are so convinced of this they often get angry when the truth is pointed out to them. The power of bad ideas is a wildly underestimated force in politics.

Another bad idea that has haunted the Right for generations now is the idea that the media should be independent. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, conservatives have been moaning about liberal bias in the media. They are not wrong about this observation. Even media that positions itself on the Right tends to parrot the party line on important issues. Go on Fox News and suggest the restoration of free association and they have you arrested.

The thing is though, the issue is not bias. The real issue is the nutty idea that the media could or should ever be independent and neutral. This has never happened since the printing press and it never should happen. In liberal democratic politics, all participants are partisans, which means all media must be partisan as well. Therefore, independent and neutral media is media that does not exist. This is why right-wing media tends not to exist, as it is trying to be neutral and independent.

A similar problem exists with the courts. For generations the normal people in America have been lectured by conservatives that the courts must be independent of politics and be neutral in the application of the law. How an explicitly political institution, one defined by our politics and maintained by the political system, could be independent of our politics is never explained. The fact that the court has never been independent is an important fact often ignored by dissidents.

The truth is, what we really want as dissidents is a court packed by people who think we don’t go far enough in beating back the darkness of liberalism. The same is especially true of the mass media. This is one reason the Left has won every battle with conventional conservatism. They convinced their opponents to hold up independence as an ideal for media and the law, while they wage a savage partisan fight. A good bad idea is one that the other side accepts and you ignore.

Of course, this is the key bad idea that has been at the heart of American cultural decline for generations. The Left fully embraces partisan politics, while decorating it with the frosting of objectivity. The Right, in contrast, embraces objectivity while decorating it with the manure of righteous contempt for partisanship. One side appeals to reason, while promoting superstition. The other side works hard to make the reasonable side feel like a trip down to the local solid waste disposal plant.

Being right about things should matter, but what should always matter more in politics is advancing your interests at the expense of the other side. The ultimate goal of politics is to wipe them from the field. If that means being wrong, deliberately wrong, then that is the cost of being right in the end. This is how all right-wing politics should function, but instead it obsesses over minutiae and squabbles about how many angels can dance on the head of the free market utopia.

A simple mental exercise is to imagine what would happen if tomorrow 90% of white people saw freedom of association as a sacred and inviolable right. Your right to decide with whom you associate and with whom you do not associate is so important that speaking against it is a disqualifier. All of a sudden, racial set asides take on the morality of pederasty. Anti-racism sounds like mental illness. Simply correcting one terrible idea would radically alter our politics.

This is the power of bad ideas. One terrible idea, like anathematizing free association, can have enormous downstream consequences. It is why effective politics needs to aim further upstream and attack those bad ideas at the source. Getting people to question their assumptions about voting, for example, rattles the system at its foundation, because the foundation of the system is bad ideas. Start to erode the power of those bad ideas then suddenly politics becomes a different game.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Conspiracy Land

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Note: The Monday Taki post is here and there is a post behind the green door from the weekend.

Something that seems to be a part of every revolution and great period of social unrest is that a cloud of suspicion descends on the society. The people, through distrust and ignorance, no longer understand or trust their rulers. The rulers, because of insularity and obstinance, no longer understand what is happening in their society. There may be factions in the public that view one another with suspicion, so they are not able to properly evaluate one another, adding to the chaos.

One thing that happens when people can no longer trust their rulers is they are ready to believe anything. The French Revolution and Bolshevik revolution, for example, had periods where crazy rumors rocketed around society. We are seeing this today with the QAnon stuff and the election lawsuits. The former was mostly escapism for unhappy people on the left-side of the bell curve. The latter was escapism for the civic nationalists who are one step from exiting the system.

In both cases, the role of these rumors and wild theories is to distract from the reality on the ground. People really wanted to believe Trump was the answer to the failing system, so they were willing to accept increasing ridiculous explanations for his inability and unwillingness to follow through on his promises. The people into this stuff are not sitting around compulsively cleaning their weapons, surrounded by stocks of MRE’s. They are highly engaged citizens who believe in the system.

Suburban civ-nats are not the only people indulging in escapism. The cosmopolitan loyalists have their own Harry Potter version of reality. You see it in this ridiculous video put out by the Tubby Tyrant of the Tidewater. Hogan is backed by the Chinese Communist Party and the neoconservatives, who think they can slither back into power and it will be the Bush years all over again. Republican escapism is built on the idea that everyone will just forget about the last four years.

You see, in this fantasy, Trump is expelled from their midst and the people rally to their banner, prepared to return to a world of old fashioned toadyism. Those sober-minded Republicans will be at the helm again, promising tax cuts for billionaires and endless wars for Israel. After all, that’s what Edmund Burke and Reagan would do. Of course, their masters promote the idea, as you see in this post. Ross Duothat’s role is to promote conservative’s official role in the farce of politics.

You’ll note that no where in that post or any of the writings of these people is there any consideration for why any of this is happening. That Duothat post should have been accompanied by this picture. While lots of white people are no doubt indulging in fantasy in the face of the massive corruption we are seeing, they are doing so for a deeper reason than just escapism. There are real problems that are not going to be papered over by installing the Pretender Biden.

Reality avoidance is not just for the little people. The reaction to the Covid-10 pandemic by members of the plutocracy is another form of escapism. Bill Gates sees himself as a trusted wise man in modern society. He has been out front promoting the latest fads on the coronavirus virus. Why a retired computer executive thinks he is an expert on pandemics is a mystery, but a bigger mystery is why he thinks the world at large trusts his judgement and advice on this issue.

This is probably the most remarkable aspect of the pandemic. The people in charge are completely unaware of the fact that hardly anyone believes them. Even the people wearing their masks to bed think the rulers have botched things. We’re not seeing public surveys on the handling of the pandemic, as it would be a waste of time and it would contradict the fantasy. The people at the top really think they are beloved by the public and it is a small bunch of hooligans causing trouble for them.

To some degree, it really does not matter what anyone thinks, other than the people in control of the institutions. They have the monopoly of force, so they can impose their reality on the rest of us. We see this with the election. The media and tech oligarchs are erasing any questions about the election and will carry on as if the Pretender Biden is a wildly popular hero of the people. They are even trying to sell him to religious people as a “church-going Catholic” who also believes in infanticide.

The thing is though, and this is the great irony of liberal democracy, is that the system needs the fantasy of self-rule to operate. The middle-class has to believe that their votes matter and the market place is always right. These efforts to suppress public debate in order to repress skepticism over the official narrative do more to undermine that fantasy of self-rule than the wild rumors. QAnon believers will keep believing the plan is still real. Take that away and the scales fall from their eyes.

This is why social unrest comes with wild rumors and conspiracy theories. The dynamic of distrust leads to various forms of escapism, which creates a barrier of confusion between the rulers and the ruled. The people at the top, rather than face their own role in the crisis, indulge in their fantasies. The people at the bottom look for explanations as to why things are not as they were promised. The desire to impose an official narrative creates more distrust, leading to more conspiracy theories.

House slaves like Ross Duothat hope that the escapism is a substitutive for real action, but the ongoing street theater says otherwise. The far Left was promised a revolution, so they will not play along with the fantasy. Now the populist Right is getting a taste of street radicalisms and they like it. A new populism is being born in the streets during these election protests. Lots of unhappy people in the streets, feeling the rush or revolt, will have time to share their theories with one another.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Plague Jab

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Note: Last night I watched the classic bad film Reefer Madness. The review and commentary is behind he green door.

In ordinary times in ordinary countries, the prospect of a vaccine for even a nuisance ailment like the Chicken Pox would be welcome news. After all, one measure of society is the technology to improve human health. In a technologically advanced society, members not only live longer, the quality of life is better. An extra 20 years as a feeble old man is not exactly a reward for a life well-lived. Therefore, the promise of a Covid-19 vaccine next year should be welcome news.

As with everything else, it seems, the news of a possible vaccine just reveals how deranged and bizarre life has become in the West. The majority of Americans are highly skeptical of the vaccine. If people were honest, you would find large majorities unwilling to take the vaccine at all. Even in the medical professions, where faith in their own skill is beyond reality, close to half distrust the vaccine. It does not help that the rulers feel the need wrap the vaccine question in their racial madness.

That is the first gate in the vaccine story. Since few people have the knowledge or aptitude to assess the risk involved in a medical treatment, it comes down to how much they trust their doctor, the drug companies and the system. If your doctor has always been prudent and reliable, then you trust his judgement. If your doctor has an unpronounceable name and looks a lot like the guy working at the convenience store, you are less likely to trust his judgement.

In the case of the vaccine, there is no reason at all to trust the government. They have simply lied too often about too many aspects of this virus. Compounding it is their communications organs have been staffed by demented sociopaths who lie for the sheer pleasure of it. The only way anyone we could trust the media is if they are the first to be inoculated. Even then, it would probably be a fake vaccine, so we would need some way to ensure they are getting the real jab and not a fake.

This is why the vaccine will be mandatory. Another aspect of liberal democracy is the rulers respond to well-founded distrust of them with coercion. In this case, we will be getting the Orwellian freedom passes. In the U.S. they will have some bland bureaucratic name because our managerial elite is functionally illiterate, but the Brits retain their pithiness, despite it all. As a result, these new internal passports proving you are up to date on your Covid jabs will be used to compel compliance.

What does this mean as a practical matter? What they are plotting is a system where everyone is issued an innocuous looking card with a vaccine stamp and date. When you get your booster shot, you get a new stamp with an expiry date. Oh, you are unaware of the regular booster shots required? You see? This is why this vaccine is a miracle. It will require you to give Big Pharma a check several times a year. Your doctor at Acme Hospital System Inc. will also be getting her beak wet.

If you think you can just blow this off, think again. For starters, there will be a massive public relations campaign to shame skeptics. Old people will be shown lining up for the jab and famous people will demand you get the jab. Soon, private business will demand proof of the jab before they accept you as a customer. Want to fly on a commercial airline or ride public transport? Papers please. Want to attend a public event like a sporting match? Papers please.

What this will become is the terms of service for citizenship. In fact, it will probably be baked into terms of service edicts. If you want to use Netflix you will have to prove you are up to date on your jabs. Of course, Big Tech will be there to make this simpler with tracking software for your now mandatory smart phone. That paper card they will be issuing will be replaced with an app for your phone that will be required if you want to function like what passes as a normal adult.

If this sounds a lot like fascism, you would be right. This idea vexes the anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, because they demand fascism only mean cool uniforms and camps for people they don’t like. In this age, it will mean dreary clothing styles and camps for the people the managerial class does not like. It’s also going to mean the implementation of technology to control every movement of the population. You cannot organize a proper resistance if you cannot organize at all.

One novel aspect of managerial fascism is the promotion of cranks and kooks to discredit legitimate opposition. Over the next six months, the media will promote kooks insisting that the vaccine is a mind control devise or that it alters your DNA in order to make you docile and compliant. These paranoids will be promoted, because most people will dismiss them. This tarnishes all resistance to the new regime. It is a tool of managerial fascism that works every time.

What the Covid-19 panic has revealed, and continues to reveal, is the managerial elite has no respect for things like the rule of law, individual liberty or any of the other foundation items of consensual government. To protect democracy, they will rig the election process. To keep us free they will strip us of our rights. In the name of inclusion and diversity they will exclude anyone who disagrees. What we are seeing is that the real plague on our society is the ruling class.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Outsider Moment

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For generations, the source of conflict in the American political system is that it represents a small slice of the American people. The Yankee elite that rose up in the aftermath of the Civil War, later joined by Jews in the 20th century, represents not only a narrow cultural slice of American society, but a narrow economic slice as well. Since the end of the Cold War this has become acute. In 30 years, there have been three major reformist movements attempting to broaden the ruling coalition.

It seems like a lifetime ago, but Ross Perot was in many respects the prototype for Donald Trump’s 2016 run. Perot ran as an outsider, on the back of his folksy observations about the federal government. Despite being very rich, he was clearly a man of the lower classes. His picaresque presentation was very appealing to a large portion of the population open to populist appeals. If not for his enigmatic personality, he probably would have won the White House in 1992.

Of course, what opened the door for Perot’s 1992 run was the Buchanan challenge to George H. W. Bush in the Republican primary. When asked why he was running against Bush he said, “If the country wants to go in a liberal direction, it doesn’t bother me as long as I’ve made the best case I can. What I can’t stand are the backroom deals. They’re all in on it, the insider game, the establishment game—this is what we’re running against.” That should sound familiar.

Both of those efforts to broaden the establishment coalition to include the majority of white Americans failed, but they set up the 2016 Trump run. While it is clear that the Perot and Buchanan efforts failed in their mission, it is too soon to know if the Trump effort is a failure. The cracking of important institutions like the media and now the voting process will have consequences into the future. Perot and Buchanan focused on the people, while Trump focused on the system itself.

What we have seen thus far in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War is two of the three ways people can attempt to broaden the ruling coalition. Both are reform efforts that start outside with the desire to end up inside. Perot wanted to bring in new people, who would represent the broader public. Buchanan and Trump both wanted to reform the system by reforming one of the parties. Buchanan wanted a genuine right-wing party, while Trump wanted a populist party.

The third way, of course, is the purely outsider movement. This is when the unrepresented create an alternative outside the ruling coalition. They either peacefully compel the ruling elite to acknowledge their interests or they replace the ruling elite, and the system they rule, with a new elite and a new system. This is exactly what happened with the American Revolution. A new elite replaced the old elite and created a system that worked for them to replace the old system.

This is what makes the current moment so dangerous. Within one generation three efforts to broaden the ruling coalition have failed, while the condition of the unrepresented has declined. Just as important, the number of people feeling threatened by the status quo has increased. In the 1990’s, reformers were speaking for the white working class. Today, it is the broader middle-class that is becoming increasingly radicalized by the intransigence of the ruling class.

Another subtle point of comparison between now and that previous revolutionary moment is the divide between the reform from within crowd and the emerging outsiders, rallying around the election fraud. Ann Coulter took a swipe at Nick Fuentes over his criticism of some things she said. Coulter’s Tory instincts got the better of her and she inadvertently confirms the Fuentes criticism. Despite her reformist rhetoric, Queen Ann has always been a loyalist.

Another little glimpse of this divide is in the Ed Dutton interview of Steve Sailer last week, in which the election was a topic. Sailer strangely says that he has seen no evidence of election fraud. This is something you hear from other old paleocons and it reflects that old loyalist instinct. They cannot question the integrity of the system, as their goal has always been to join the system as a reformer. Therefore, their faith in the system is unshakable. It is civic nationalism in a nutshell.

Finally, the other bit of comparison is that the Founders did not view themselves as radicals or revolutionaries. The Declaration itself is a bourgeoise document filled with objectivist rhetoric explaining their actions.  Even at the point of the break, they sounded like men willing to meet the crown halfway. Certainly, many of them knew this was impossible and saw this moment coming for a long time, but the need to show they were forced into this position was important to them.

That same instinct is turning up in the election protests. The young people out on the streets in state capitals are using the language of reform, but are clearly ready to make a break with the system entirely. They are young and enthusiastic, so they may not see it, but the logic of their arguments can only lead to a rejection of the system as being illegitimate. If the voting system is fraudulent, then the results of it are fraudulent, making this government the fruit of a poisoned tree.

It is tempting to dismiss what is happening as heat of the moment rhetoric that will fade as passions fade. There is some truth to it. The establishment will rehabilitate some former Trump supporters like Coulter, putting them back on television. Others will temper their rhetoric in the hope of being rehabilitated. The media will try to surround the remnant in a cone of silence. The ruling class will apply the same ointments they used the last time they suffered a populist outbreak.

The trouble is, the causes of this last populist outbreak have not gone away and they promise to get worse. The fundamental problem that existed at the end of the Cold War exists today. That is, forty percent of Americans have no representation in either political party and as a result have no voice in government. The number is certainly larger, but blacks and most white liberals are so easily deluded with ceremonial tokens they imagine themselves as vital parts of the ruling coalition.

The Declaration of Independence was at the time and is today a very radical document, which is why our rulers don’t mention it much anymore. A couple of generations ago it was the center piece of civics instruction. Today it has been replaced by critical race theory and other nonsense from the multicultural fever swamps. Even so, the message still resonates today. Whenever any form of government ceases to represent the will of the people, it is the right and duty of the people to abolish it.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.