Category Archives: Moonbats

Prog Taqiyya

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According to Islamic scholars, taqiyya is “is a precautionary dissimulation or denial of religious belief and practice in the face of persecution.” Muslims are forbidden to deny their faith, but there are exceptions and one of them is when the Muslim is living in a place where persecution of Islam is common. In order for Islam to spread, the adherents have to be alive, so allowing for this exception makes sense. The implication here is that the faithful Muslim works like a fifth columnist, recruiting in the shadows, while hiding his faith.

Of course, this doctrine is open to interpretation, so some sects have interpreted it to mean that all lying is acceptable, if it can be argued that the lie is in service to Islam. If the faithful Muslim can use deception to help the faith, then lying is not only acceptable, it is admirable. The effect is Islam can easily become an ends justifies the means political and cultural movement. This is what we see with Islam in the West, where Imams preach against their Western hosts in the mosque, but go on television and say the opposite.

This habit of mind is something we see with modern Progressives whose hive mindedness has evolved to the point where lying to outsiders is not only acceptable, but a goal in itself. Every election, Progressives fill the airwaves with things they know are lies. In fact, they tell lies that they know everyone else knows is are lies. The practice of lying in the election process has become something like a religious practice for them. The point of the lying is not to conceal or deceive, but to demonstrate their worthiness to the cause.

The academic quality to the lying turns up in all of the Progressive fads. We saw that in the madness of the Kavanaugh hearings. The definition of sexual assault, a nonsense term in itself, has been stretched to mean just about anything, by people who seem to take pride in making the language meaningless. When you see a young feminist loon howling about being assaulted, the look on her face usually suggests she is proud to have found some way to stretch the meaning of the terms to include some new nonsense.

The thing is, the sheer volume of lying has had the effect of concealing in plain site the fact that the Progressives never speak the truth about anything. In fact, speaking the truth has become a crime of sorts. Professor Amy Wax is thinking about suing her school, because they accused her of making up what is a plainly obvious fact. If the school is correct about what she said, they could release the data and show that she is wrong. Instead, they lie, refuse to produce the data and then accuse her of lying about the data.

It used to be that the Left either exaggerated to make their points or used clever euphemism to obscure the truth. For example, the illegal immigrant was an undocumented worker. This sort of soft, fuzzy language was the result of modern managerialism, where garbage men became sanitation engineers and janitors became facility management specialists. Applying the same sort of rhetoric to political discourse was natural, but at least there was some connection to reality, even if it was tenuous.

Where they are now is that the lie is the point. This became obvious when the Clintons arrived on the scene. They would lie for sport. Even their allies were baffled as to why they would lie when the truth would serve them better. It’s not hard to imagine a person like Hillary Clinton ordering a turkey sandwich for lunch and when it comes to the table, swearing she ordered something else. There’s no purpose in the lie other than to do it and be seen doing it. Clever lying is now an end in itself with the American Left.

This cult of mendacity is not without antecedents. The Frankfurt School was a series a clever intellectual constructions that advanced a political agenda by scrambling the relationship between public policy and observable reality. From it was born the notion that the point of academic activity is to disrupt, overturn and challenge anything that resembles accepted policy. Read through the stuff coming from the multicultural rackets and the whole point of it is to turn being a public nuisance into an academic specialty.

The permanent revolution of Marxist radicalism became a permanent assault on reason by cult-Marx intellectuals. In politics this then became a game of shameless lying to not only advance an agenda, but to increase the status of the liar. The more absurd and ridiculous the fabrication, the greater the applause from the Progressive crowd. In fact, it is no longer possible to identify a Progressive agenda. It is a dadaist performance that is rapidly becoming an anti-agenda. It’s mendacious nonsense as a  public display of piety.

Invasive species are a danger because the ecosystem they invade is not prepared to deal with the foreign threat. The oriental logic of the Frankfurt School may have had the same effect in the liberal tradition of the West as the presence of Burmese pythons has had in the everglades. Instead of being taken over by this alien mode of thought, the Western liberal tradition has been driven mad by it. The result is an intellectual movement that celebrates complex dishonesty and fabrication for no purpose other than for aesthetics.

The Knock At The Door

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I used to tell people all the time that if you have a chance to listen to Greg Cochran speak, you should take it, as he is probably the smartest person you will ever hear. Cochran has excelled in two fields, physics and anthropology. The former requires a very big brain in order to gain entry. In the case of anthropology, many of the people in the field are crazy or sociopaths. To be an exception and contribute to the stock of human knowledge, requires a rare combination of curiosity and blinkered indifference to social pressure.

Cochran has contributed three very important ideas that may not be correct, but they open up new avenues to understanding human evolution and biological diversity. In the book The 10,000 Year Explosion, he and his partner, the late Henry Harpending, explained how agriculture and human settlement accelerated human evolution. This explains local differences in skin color, eye color, hair texture disease resistance and other genetic differences in human populations. It also explains personality and cognitive differences.

Another idea, one that has received less positive press, is Cochran’s theory that homosexuality must be caused by something outside of evolution. For example, a pathogen that sets off a chain of events in the womb resulting in the child being a homosexual. Cochran points out that the observed level of exclusive homosexuality means genes cannot be the cause of homosexuality.The fitness cost of genes ‘for’ homosexuality being too great. Natural selection would have eliminated the gene.

His “gay germ” idea is controversial and it could be completely wrong, at least in the case of homosexuality. It’s utility is really in how it changes thinking about human disease and the treatment of those diseases. Take something like Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers have spent decades laboring under the assumption it is genetic, but have had little success in finding any proof. Well, what if the cause is something like a pathogen that sets of the process in the brain? What if cardiovascular disease is caused by pathogens?

That’s a huge and controversial idea, but it probably is not the one that most scandalizes the moral authorities. Cochran is most infamous for his work on Ashkenazi IQ. A dozen years ago, he and his partner Henry Harpending published The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. In it they argue that Ashkenazi ████inherit higher verbal and mathematical intelligence than other ethnic groups, on the basis of inherited diseases and the peculiar economic situation of Ashkenazi ████in the Middle Ages.

The paper is controversial for three reasons. One is the heretical idea that IQ is a real thing that can be measured. Worse yet, they claim intelligence is heritable, which means it is largely immutable. Smart parents have smart kids. Both ideas are against everything we believe and probably a direct threat to our democracy. It’s not who we are. Only very bad people think that human diversity is the result of biology. Everyone knows that racism is the cause of all the bad differences, while diversity is the cause of the good differences.

That’s bad enough, but the most outrageous aspect of the paper is that it focuses on the special people and that’s not allowed. Even mentioning them in a direct way is justifiably forbidden now. After all, the Nazis started noticing these people, talking about their “group differences” and before long the Holocaust! The fact that racists and white supremacists often reference this paper is proof enough that it should be banned, the authors forced to confess and then they should be hurled into the void as a lesson to others.

If further proof is needed, this post on Greg Cochran’s blog should be enough. The post itself is just one sentence long, but in the nearly 200 comments, Cochran counter signals Holocaust skeptics so hard he probably sprained something while banging away at the keyboard. Clearly, it is the sign of a guilty conscience. At the minimum, it suggests he is worried that the morality police will be coming for him soon. He hopes that his outburst can be presented at his trial and he will be given a reprieve. Good luck with that pal.

All joking aside, the post and the comments are a hilarious bit of Boomer posting. Ron Unz is an eccentric guy and he is prone to conspiracy theories. It’s hard to know how much he believes them. He could just find them intellectually titillating, like reading a very clever crime novel.  I get the sense that he is fascinated by the fact there is an official narrative and it is ruthlessly enforced. Almost all Americans struggle with the bit of reality. Either way, the worst you should say about Ron Unz is that he is a harmless weirdo.

Casual indifference is never allowed in a theocracy, at least with regards to the moral codes. You are either enthusiastically on the right side of the question or you are an enemy of the faith. There can be no middle ground. Maybe Cochran is worried that the authorities will be coming for him soon, so he is hoping to inoculate himself against charge of insufficient signalling against antisemitism. Like a lot of Boomers, he still thinks we live in a rule based society and that you can appeal to reason when defending yourself.

He would deny this and probably threaten to punch me in the nose for suggesting it, but false consciousness is common with many old white men. Just look at the comment thread in that post. Why are people in 2018 so worked up about something that happened 80 years ago in a foreign country? The cultural and ideological processes of the neo-liberal age blind people to their own motivations. You can be sure that the people commenting on that post felt great about it, but they never bothered to wonder why.

All that aside, they will be coming for Greg Cochran soon enough. If he is lucky, the non-binary, gender non-specific persons of uterus from the campus committee on inclusion will only require him to wear a dunce cap on campus. Maybe they will make him recant what he said about Cordelia Fine, peace be upon her. It’s only a matter of time and appeals to reason will have no impact, because we live in an unreasonable age, ruled by ridiculous people. One day, there will be a knock on the door and they will have come for Cochran.

The Warning Signs

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An axiom of this age is that the Left always projects onto others the things that it is either doing or planning to do. A good rule is to listen to what they are saying, assume the opposite, and then try to piece together what they are doing. It is the Opposite Rule of Liberalism and it is an iron law of modern life. An obvious example is their howling about election interference. As soon as they started howling about Trump colluding with the Russians, you knew that it was the Left colluding with someone to rig the election.

This is due to something Eric Hoffer noticed about people who join causes. The fanatic is driven by self-loathing. They are attracted to causes, because it allows them to swap their hated identity with that of the group. It is also why they tend to jump from cause to cause, often contradicting previous opinions. Progressivism is a secular religion that is really just a dog’s breakfast of causes. Today it is all about trannies, non-whites, and the never-ending vagina monologue from white women, held together by a hatred of white men.

The point is that you can often get a sense of what the Left is up to by watching where they are casting the accusatory eye. That’s why this story is interesting. Fake twitter followers are a well know phenomenon. It is fairly obvious that many B and C level media personalities buy twitter followers. It would not be shocking to learn that lefty sites like the Daily Beast and Estrogen Post buy followers for their contributors. Are there really close to one hundred thousand people following this person? Seems unlikely.

Anyway, the fact that the NYTimes is focusing on fake YouTube views when their cult is waging an all-out assault on dissidents on-line, probably means that the view counts for lefty YouTube stars are fake. Just how fake is hard to know but given the “by any means necessary” attitude of the Left, there is no reason to think they would be restrained. Keep in mind that the NYTimes was buying traffic from Chinese click farms around the same time they started reporting on the phenomenon of fake followers in twitter.

Perhaps more ominously, this post from the Carlos Slim Journal, demanding Trump be dragged from office and hanged in Lafayette Park suggests the Left’s war on civilization is just getting started. Most people will focus on the rank hypocrisy and dishonesty, but the real focus should be the warning. The Left organized a wide scale conspiracy to rig the last election. The FBI and DOJ are currently running a wide scale conspiracy to hide their ongoing efforts to remove Trump from office and stonewall Congress.

As much as our side jokes around about Pinochet, it is the Left that may be plotting a coup in order to install an authoritarian government. Just look at the organized effort to ban people from the financial system. David Horowitz has just been un-personed by MasterCard and Visa. In the modern age, if you want to wage a civil war, gaining control of the banking system is the first step. Then you take over the internet. Without money or a means to reach a mass audience, fighting back in a civilized way is impossible.

That last bit is important. Most people are willing to fight the good fight until it means coloring outside the lines. That is the water’s edge for most of the people the Left sees as their enemy. It is why the Left is always trying to provoke or invent a backlash. It provides them with cover to scare the normies and use any means necessary to “defend our democracy!” As is always the case, the Left seeks to turn civilization’s virtues into vices they can exploit to undermine society. Your reasonableness is their best weapon.

The thing to understand with the Left is that they are reactionary. Team Obama produced the scheme to rig the last election and when this became apparent to Team Clinton, they reacted by howling about “Russian hacking.” In other words, they immediately began to project their own hated activities onto others. Remember that it was the Left that started the Fake News idea, only to have people point out that the lefty news organs were nothing but fake news. The same was true of the AstroTurf chants over the Tea Party.

What all of this most likely means is that the Democrats are quietly working on their plans to impeach Trump as soon as they gain control of the House this fall. They have upped Pelosi’s Thorazine dosage so she does not blab about it during interviews, but the Left can’t help but get ahead of themselves, hence the NYTimes post. The plan is to impeach Trump in 2019 and then count on the NeverTrump loons in the GOP to join in and force the Senate to remove him. Given the nature of the GOP, this is a good bet.

This is a bit of a meandering post, but the basic point is that it is a mistake to take the Left’s chanting at face value. It is not just that they lie. Ideologues always lie. It is that they are psychologically incapable of concealing their actions. Again, that old self-hatred gets the better of them and they start dropping hints via projection. For two years now, the Left has been trying to convince us that Trump is a dictator, who plots with foreign agents to “harm our democracy.”  That should be read as a warning about what comes next.

That is what puts the Left’s howling about a civil war in perspective. They have been waging a civil war on the rest of us for a couple of years. They have normalized the idea of using public companies to strip people of their right to participate in public debate. They have normalized the idea of stripping people of employment due to their politics. They are now the proscribing people because they hold the wrong opinions. Banning people from using breathing is next. The only thing missing is a coup and a dictator.

The Faith Of The Left

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The reason the Left has gone from triumph to triumph is that they are not motivated by reason, but rather by a quest for salvation. The social issues that they champion, regardless of any practical considerations, are always cast in moral terms. The issue itself is immaterial. It is being on the right side of the issue that matters. Politics is an endless series of tests they must pass in order to remain on the path of the righteous, leading to the promised land.

This story about Obama’s reaction to the election is a good example.

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

This is a recurring theme with the American Left. It is the reason they embraced the term “Progressive” as their preferred label. They start with the unspoken belief that the story of man is written. It is the duty of the righteous to live it. It is why “being on the right side of history” comes up so often. The struggle as between those on the side of the great historical force and those who are standing in the way of it. The righteous are always looking forward and moving forward.

It is also why they think of the past as a dark age dominated by sinners. There is no romanticism on the American Left, because the past is by definition further away from the glorious future. Instead, the past is filled with monsters that were either slain by the righteous, or locked away, but ready to return at any moment. For example, they remain forever vigilant about the return of Nazis, as if they still exist. In the mind of the American progressive “Nazi” is just another name for Old Scratch.

Notice in that Times piece that the Trump voters are described as “left behind” rather than unhappy or in disagreement. In other words, the people voting for Trump did so because they were sad for having been left behind by the righteous. Voting for Trump was a cry for help. It is tempting to see this as part of Obama’s narcissism, but in reality, his narcissism is also the result of this deep belief in the flow of history. He was chosen to lead the faithful, so of course he is a narcissist.

You will notice that Progressives are forever warning about some attempt to “turn back the clock” and return us to a former state of sin. It resonates with Progressives, because for them, the eternal quest for salvation means going forward, breaking away from the degraded past. Trump’s “turning the clock back” is viewed as the wages of sin. Obama thinks he tried too hard to deliver his people to the promised land. The result was the great leap backward into Trumpism.

American Progressives are the purest form of true believers because they have disconnected their beliefs from practical considerations. Therefore, they are immune to facts and reason. When you examine the language they use to describe politics and culture, you see the extreme mysticism. Obama does not even really know what “left behind” means, but he is sure it is a bad thing. For him, it is a purely a spiritual issue to be thought of in those terms.

The error the Right has made for generations is to think it is possible to prove the Left wrong, and therefore force them to abandon their agenda. That is like thinking you can disprove sections of the Koran and cause the Muslims to abandon their faith. In fact, efforts to do so will always be met with a fierce defense of the faith. Practical arguments always embolden the righteous, as it confirms their belief in themselves as moral agents in a holy cause. Your irrational resistance is proof they are on the righteous path.

It is why the Left have been so effective since the end of the Cold War, but also why it has become so extreme and bizarre. Defending socialism meant ceding authority to objective data like the unemployment rate or GDP growth. That served as a check on the more unhinged elements. Once free of these objective measures, it became a race to produce the most extreme and bizarre identity group to champion. Lacking a limiting principle, and untethered from practical reality, the Left got increasingly extreme.

While it looks like the Left is headed for some sort of crack up, it is important to remember that people have to believe in something. The reason conservatism was such a flop is it never tried to appeal to this aspect of man’s nature. It was the ideology of the bookkeeper. No matter how fat, dumb and happy, people will always yearn for the eternal. If there is to be an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, it is going to have to offer an alternative to those who desire to be on the side of angels.

Prince Rupert’s Revenge

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There was a time when it was possible to have cordial and even friendly relations with people on the Left. I spent many hours debating my lefty friends over drinks, about the defects of various central planning schemes. Anyone my age or older remembers the way these debates would go. One side talked about economic justice for the working class, while the other side talked about the glory of free markets. Usually, the “right-winger” would bring up the Soviets.

Often, one side or the other would get mad, but it was rarely personal. People get hot in political debates, mostly because we are social animals. Conflict with people inside our group vexes us. It makes us uncomfortable. That was the thing. Liberals and non-liberals could operate in the same peer group. The reason is the Left and Right back then, agreed on the goals. Both sides wanted prosperity. The Left believed socialism produced plenty, while the Right believed a rising tide lifted all boats.

Thinking back, a strange thing happened in the 1990’s, with regards to my own debates with lefty friends and acquaintances. The debates in the 90’s were almost all about the peculiar personal lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Right was always scandal mongering and the Left was conjuring novel defenses for the degeneracy of Bill Clinton and the personal corruption of Hillary. These revolved around Red Team/Blue Team scat fights, that had little to do with policy or ideology. It was just ritualized tribal warfare.

That changed instantly with the 2000 election. All of my lefty friends and acquaintances went insane overnight.  They hated Bush with the intensity of a fanatic. The wars made it impossible to have a discussion with the Left. Granted, many of us were naïve about the lunacy of the neocons, but the Left’s opposition was never more than shrieking madness. How does one debate someone who thinks Halliburton controls the weather and attacked New Orleans?

I remember thinking my lefty friends would return to sanity after Bush left office, but that never happened. A few stopped foaming at the mouth, but for the most part, they crossed into a realm from which there is no return. In the Obama years, they went from one peculiar fad to the next. One week it was homosexual marriage, while the next week it was claims about sex being a social construct. There’s simply no discussion, much less debating, these issues with them.

Looking back, it’s useful to think about the fight between the Left and the Right as a set-piece battle on an agreed upon battlefield. At the center of both sides was economics. The Right had religious archers and the constitutional conservatives on the flanks, but the center of the army was formed around economic issues. Similarly, the Left had race hustlers, second and third wave feminists on the flanks, but their main line troops, the center of the line, were economic Utopians.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had an enormous impact on the ruling classes of the West. In America, it meant the center of the Progressive army broke and fled in all directions. The flanks, however, the racial justice warriors, the gender dragoons and exotic identity battalions rushed into the center, forming a new main line of the Left. The Right, despite carrying the day, was too busy setting up battlefield trophies to notice that the Left had reformed around sexual and racial fanatics, so they promptly surrendered.

A curious thing is happening to this new center of the Progressive battle line. Their moral certainty about the innate equality of man and his infinite malleability, is crumbling in the face of scientific reality. The release of David Reich’s book is the latest direct hit on Boasian anthropology. The response from the soft sciences, which has been a key intellectual authority for the blank slate Progressives, looks like a panicked flight from the battle field. They simply have no answer to science.

The tent pole holding up modern Progressivism is the assertion that all humans are essentially the same and that the observable differences are trivial. All of the Left’s arguments spring from that belief. It’s why they insist the magic of white privilege is the reason black crime is so high or rape culture is why girls don’t go into STEM fields at the same rate as boys. In other words, magic is a plausible answer, as long as reality is ruled out as an option. Biological realism explodes the center of Progressive theology.

That’s what we see happening all over the human sciences. Twenty years ago, some guy in a cardigan could claim that racism was learned behavior and their was no biological basis for race. He could be held up as an intellectual authority and therefore, a moral authority. Genetics is undermining the intellectual authority of those preaching cultural anthropology, multiculturalism and the blank slate. The main line of the Progressive army is suddenly looking like a bunch of primitives chanting oogily-boogily.

It’s tempting to say I’m getting ahead of myself, but we have millions of people relying on DNA services to map their ancestry. Genetics is promising new cures for disease and soon, people will be able to get their intellectual destiny for $50. It will not be long before some clever fertility lab begins offering bespoke artificial insemination, using donors with desirable traits, based on their genetics. People are becoming habituated to the idea that humans are different, because of biology, not culture.

The question, of course, is where does the Left go now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, what we call Progressivism was mostly a Protestant crusade. In the 20th century, they shifted to embracing  the economic utopianism of socialism, with racial and sexual politics as side acts. For the last three decades, the dream of sexual and racial utopias has been the dominant theme of the Left. Once the blank slate is broken on the wheel of biological reality, what comes next?

The answer could be nothing. There are many currents to American history, but the dominant one is what John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War. It is our inheritance from the mother country. The story of America has been the good whites and bad whites, the Roundheads and Cavaliers, fighting for control of the country. It’s also a conflict of visions, where the Roundheads always embraced extreme egalitarianism, while the Right has embraced the natural hierarchy of man.

The Eternal Hive

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The late Joe Sobran produced the metaphor of the insect hive to describe the group behavior of the Left. It was a useful way of describing the spontaneous cooperation that has always been a feature of the Left. It is the dominant feature. Progressives will suddenly flock to an issue, all chanting the same lines and howling the same protests, as if they are a trained army of lunatics unleashed on the rest of society. It is a behavior that looks coordinated, but it is spontaneous and instinctive.

The most recent example of this was the reaction to the Dylann Roof shooting at the black church. All of sudden, as if commanded by a super villain from a secret lair, the Left began chanting in unison about the Confederate battle flag. Even the sober minded had to wonder if this was not a planned effort. Within a few hours we went from indifference to Confederate symbols to roving bands of lunatics toppling over statues and digging of Confederate graves.

Imagine the sort of person, who, upon hearing about a shooting, immediately thinks it is time to topple over a statue in their local park. What sort of person sees their coreligionists howling and then begins howling uncontrollably? Imagine what it is like to have no agency, in terms of how you react to public events. Presumably, there is something stimulating these people. Perhaps the swarm behavior releases endorphins, freeing the adherent from the torment of reality for a while.

It is an important question. A generation ago, progressives were programmed to swarm over economic issues. Socialism still provided the general framework of their imagined utopia, so they regularly launched into assaults on business, claiming to defend the interests of the working class. Yet, when socialism collapsed, progressives quickly shifted from socialist utopianism to sexual and racial utopianism. The same people who used to put Darwin fish on their Subaru, now howl about racism.

Sobran was correct to point out that progressives have the same reaction to perceived threats as bees when they fear a threat. The resulting attacks are not indiscriminate, but they are excessive. The progressive has a binary view of the world, where those inside are allies and those outside are enemies. In this regard, progressivism functions like cult, where the focus of the adherents is always on a devil. The difference is their devil is a shapeshifter, taking on new forms to fit every occasion.

It is tempting to assume that a pattern must have some causal agent, some intelligent force behind it. It is the nature of man to confuse cause and purpose. In fact, this is why efforts to oppose the war on the culture have always failed. The defenders assumed an intelligible purpose behind the actions of the Left so they invested their time in defeating those arguments. In reality, the cause of progressive rage was always a biological response to what the group has determined to be a threat to the hive.

Another way the Left functions like a hive is how individual members react to being cut off, even temporarily, from the hive. A lefty in a room full of people it perceives as hostile will become very passive. Reverse the roles and put a normal person in a room full of progressives and they will attack him relentlessly. It is why far left TV shows have a narrow, but loyal following. It is how the isolated Progressive can connect with the other members of the hive. These TV shows are the televangelists of the Left

This is probably why the Left has become obsessed with purging dissent. Social media now supplements the pheromones used to synchronize behavior. Twitter and Facebook are becoming neural pathways for the hive, so that far flung members can pick up cues from other members. “Trending on Twitter” is becoming a way for progressives to know what they are supposed to like and, more important, what they are supposed to hate. Right wingers on social media scramble the signal.

Even though observed patterns may not have a central control mechanism, they must have a cause. In the case of progressives, it is clearly something biological. Even those who manage to leave the cult, never really lose the hive mindedness. Like reformed smokers, they usually direct this instinct to criticizing their former hive mates. You never see a former progressive activist, living a quiet life alone somewhere. When Lefty leaves the hive, it is to serve another queen.

Most likely, this behavior traces back to the dawn of man. A deep, emotional commitment to the group would have evolutionary advantages. Status within the group would be higher for those who were most ferocious in defending the group. Well into the agricultural age, the leader of a people was often the best warrior. Perhaps this small group instinct manifests in an organized society, as social fanaticism. In all times and all places, the reformer imagines himself protecting the weak from the strong.

Fanaticism has its utility. The Greeks figured this out when observing that warriors were most ferocious when fighting on their own land. When advancing into foreign lands, they became more conservative. A focused, controllable fanatic is useful in war. Similarly, organized religions can never have a shortage of those willing to risk it all to spread the good word. More than a few zealots ended up in the cannibal’s pot, but there were always more zealots ready to convert the cannibal.

This innate hive-like behavior of some elements of society has obviously not been a detriment to progress. The thing is though, there has always been a transcendent set of limiting principles, operating like a leash on the fanatic. Christianity, for all its faults, puts hard limits on what people can do to one another. When that is removed, the zealots are free to attack perceived enemies without restraint. Like Africanized honeybees, utopian socialists have slaughtered millions they saw as threats.

The key insight of Sobran was that the hive-like behavior of the American Left was not caused by socialism or radical ideology. The relationship reversed. The hive-like behavior was a constant, a part of the American biology. When the socialist paradise collapsed, the Left switched to sexual and racial utopianism. That means when the current rage heads burn what is left of society, only to not arrive at the promised land, they will find some new fantasy to embrace. The Hive is eternal.

Things Are Looking Up

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A pretty good rule of politics is that your enemies will always give you terrible advice. It is a lesson the so-called conservatives and Republicans have never learned. The Left offers them advice and they jump at the chance to take it. The corollary to this is you know you are doing something right when your enemies try to steal your issues. The Tories figured out that UKIP was getting traction on immigration, so they moved right on the issue and offered a referendum on Europe. It worked, even though it tanked Cameron’s career.

We have not seen much of that since the start of the populist revolt led by Trump in the GOP primaries. In fact, the GOP went the other way. The higher Trump’s polls rose, the more they rejected Trump’s issues. It was a weird thing, but the Republicans are not called the stupid party by accident. Even after he won, his own party is struggling to come to terms with the new reality. The Left, in contrast, is good at politics, so seeing some rumblings on the their side about adopting nationalist themes is interesting.

Across the Western world, center-left parties are in trouble: In Germany, Austria, France, and the Netherlands, social democrats have suffered historic electoral defeats. Right-wing populists, meanwhile, have scored a series of victories, including Trump’s election, the vote for Brexit, and the continuing erosion of liberal democratic institutions in Hungary and Poland.

But while many people take for granted an inherent contradiction between nationalism and left-wing politics, there simply isn’t one, either historically or philosophically. Throughout the 20th century, progressives mobilized for social justice most successfully when they spoke in the name of national solidarity rather than focusing exclusively on class-based interests or on abstract notions of justice. Left-wingers often cite the adage that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel — and with good reason. But it is important to also remember that a deep sense of national commitment underpins the egalitarian institutions we hold dear.

The historian Michael Kazin put it mildly when he wrote that patriotism “is not a popular sentiment on the contemporary left.” The influential British left-wing commentator George Monbiot has equated patriotism with racism: To give in to patriotism, he writes, is to deny the plain truth “that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington.”

Yet in giving up on appeals to national solidarity, the left has forgotten the basic political argument that served it so well in the past: that out of the ties that bind together our national communities emerges a deep commitment to the well-being, welfare, and social esteem of our fellow citizens. This recognizes a basic moral intuition: We have deep and encompassing obligations to those we consider our own, based on a shared sense of membership in a community of fate — or more simply, based on our shared national identity.

American Progressives are pegged as fanatical ideologues, but that misses an essential feature of the American Left. They can turn on a dime and reverse course if it has practical value. In the Clinton years, Bill Clinton scoffed at homosexual marriage. Even Obama seemed to be revolted by the idea. Yet, they spun around on a dime and embraced the whole rainbow collation of sexual deviants when it suited them. Hillary Clinton ran her 2016 campaign on the not so subtle theme that she was an old lesbian.

Bernie Sanders did a lot of damage in the 2016 primary because he had a reputation for left-wing populism. You can be sure that he regrets abandoning his closed borders position that he held for decades. There’s a good bet he would have done much better if he had embraced a halt to immigration as a way to help the working class. The alt-right guys will tell you that some of guys came to their thing from the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrat coalition. You can bet Democrats have noticed this as well.

None of this should suggest the Left is about to go alt-right, but when old liberal warhorses are on the ropes, because the “New Americans” are voting for their own, you can be sure there is some soul searching going on now. The math says the coalition of fringes only works if the fringe types are just a supplement to the core white vote that has always voted Democrat. Once the fringes decide they want to be in charge, and they have the numbers to make it happen, there’s no room for whitey at the top of the party.

It’s hard to know where this will go. The Left is committed to identity politics and to open borders, but that does not mean they cannot find a way to adopt populist and even nationalist language. On the other hand, the Left has pivoted on issues when practical politics demanded it. Regardless, It really does not matter from the point of view of populists and nationalists. If the other side is trying to figure out how to steal these issues, it means these issues are working. It means we’re doing something right.

Warring With The Cult

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Last weekend, Richard Spencer tried to hold his annual conference. The vehicle Spencer uses to run his alt-right thing is the National Policy Institute, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit based in Montana. This is a standard thing to do these days, for any sort of activism. It allows rich people to quietly fund activities and take a tax deduction for it. It also gives solo acts a way to fund their activities, without having to keep a day job. Once a year, Spencer has a conference and dinner for the people interested in his efforts.

Last year was the infamous Heil-gate episode, where Spencer’s imprudence got himself in trouble. Since then, Progressives have been working hard to un-person him and anything he touches. That linked video has 2.8 million views for a reason. As a result, he was unable to book the Reagan Building for his event, which is a violation of Federal law, but the people in charge think the law is for suckers. They do what they want. As a result, Spencer was forced to find another venue for the event.

A weekend conference organized by white nationalist Richard Spencer was shut down after the owners of the Maryland farm he rented discovered he was behind the event.

The think tank that Spencer leads, the National Policy Institute, hosted the conference for about 100 people at Rocklands Farm, a winery and events venue in Montgomery County. Spencer said in an interview that a third-party logistics company contacted Rocklands Farm on behalf of the National Policy Institute this month and didn’t reveal that white nationalists were affiliated with the event when they booked it. The company told the farm’s management only that it was a “corporate” gathering, according to Spencer.

The conference started about 11 a.m. Sunday and was scheduled to continue until 8 p.m. Caterers at Rocklands Farm served brunch, and participants recapped 2017. At about 4 p.m., Spencer said, someone working the event learned that Spencer was there, and management told everyone to leave.

“We didn’t lie, we didn’t deceive, and we certainly did not break any rules while we were there,” Spencer said. “We had sharp words and were obviously disappointed, but there was no confrontation of any kind.”

The farm refunded the group’s money after asking it to leave.

The owners of Rocklands Farm didn’t comment on the incident beyond a statement on their website Monday, which says it proudly does “business according to family values, including welcoming people of all backgrounds, race, ethnicities, cultures, and religions.”

If you go to the source article, the picture of Spencer they use is from his thing at the University of Florida. OK. Stock photos are standard stuff in the news business. Then they use a picture of a black protester from that Florida event. That has no place in a story about something entirely different and 3,000 miles to the north. It is an important lesson that no one on our side can seem to get through their thick skulls. The people in charge are perfectly willing to lie, cheat and steal to win. They are not bound by any rules.

Putting that aside, the highlighted portion of the story is illustrative. This is the sort of the stuff Gentry Conservatives wave around claiming they have their principles, while the winning side is riddled with hypocrisy. The winning side, however, just shrugs, because as far as they are concerned, that quote is the model of logic. That is the nature of cults and the people inside them. The rules and tactics of the cult are the model of moral perfection and timeless logic. You not getting this is proof that the adherents are anointed.

Cults have an internal language that only the members fully understand. The zombie who issued that statement knows that “family values” means the cult’s definition of family values. By “people of all backgrounds” they just assume it excludes people outside the cult. The people outside the walls are not really people. They do not exist as a flesh and blood humans. It is the same reason the Puritans had no trouble burning Indians and chasing Anglicans off into the wilderness. They did not see them as human.

I will also note that the Washington Post story is not an actual news story. The Five W’s could have been done in a paragraph, which by the conventions of news reporting make it not worth doing. It was a non-event. That is why the bulk of the story is folklore and legend now popular with the cult. There is the Charlottesville reference, the preening and pleading of the fearful restaurant owners and so on. This is written as a cautionary tale for other cult members. “Beware! If you are not vigilant, the Nazis will show up at your door!”

It is why it is useless to bother engaging with these people at any level. It is better to imagine them as a colonizing tribe of aliens. There is no middle ground, no room for agreement, because their reason to exists, their core identity, is based on wiping out all non-believers. Anything that even hints at compromise, is seen by the cult as a direct threat to its very existence. That is why they take so much pleasure in stalking guys like Spencer around and preventing him from living a normal life. It is what defines them.

The War On Reality

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

–Philip K. Dick

That is a popular saying on the Dissident Right, because it stands in stark contrast to the dominant ideology of our age. The people who rule over us think reality will yield to wishful thinking. In fact, they deny reality exists as an objective, measurable thing. That’s where the idea of social construct arises. Our betters are sure that what we foolishly perceive as reality is just an illusion, an artifact of cultural conditioning. If they can convince enough people of this, then observable reality changes.

This is the true divide in the West and why civic nationalists are in the same ideological set as Progressives. They accept these assumptions about reality, just with some reservations. The Dissident Right, in contrast, rejects this entirely. Reality, particularly biological reality, is transcendent and independent of human observation. The world as we observe it is quantifiable and measurable. More important, it is largely immune to any tinkering we can do in the short run.

This is most true when it comes to human biology. John Derbyshire did a whole presentation on this at AmRen from the perspective of race. Race realism is just a subset of biological realism. The natural differences between the sexes, IQ differences and personality differences are other aspects. It is why “improving your mindset” sounds laughably ridiculous to someone like me. Your “mindset” is a product of your biology, your genetic makeup. You can no more change it than make yourself taller.

The fact that reality is undefeated, besting all comers, does not stop the cult that rules over of us from continuing to make war on biology. This story is the latest example of how they will destroy the military trying to prove that sex is a social construct.

A number of U.S. Army drill sergeants at Fort Benning, Georgia, have been temporarily suspended from their duties following allegations of sexual misconduct with trainees, the Army base said on Wednesday.

Investigators looking into an initial sexual assault allegation by a female trainee against a drill sergeant at the fort uncovered other incidents of alleged sexual misconduct, prompting a wider investigation, the base said in a statement.

A spokesman declined to say how many drill sergeants had been suspended as part of the investigation, but the statement indicated it was more than one.

Cracking down on sexual assault has been a priority for several years in the U.S. military, which reported in May that anonymous surveys in 2016 found that 14,900 service members experience some kind of kind of sexual assault in 2016, from groping to rape. That was down from 20,300 in 2014, according to the surveys, which are conducted every two years.

People who accept biological reality know it is a lethally stupid idea to have male drill instructors working with female trainees. Men like women, especially young women and they are wired to use every trick in the book to gain access to females. Setting up a situation where males have power over young females in this way, invites the sort of thing the military says they are trying to stop. Having girls in the army is debatable, but if you are, they need to be protected from the males.

Of course, females are wired to seek the attention of high status males. In boot camp, there is no one with higher status to the recruits than the drill instructor. That’s the whole point of the arrangement. The idea is to break down the recruits and build them back up into soldiers. Putting a male in charge of females is going to have the females competing with one another for the attention of their instructor. This is ground floor biology. Even the most disciplined males will be tempted at some point to say yes to the offer.

Again, this is not a new thing. The people putting males in charge of female recruits are the same people putting girls on Navy ships and then acting surprised when the girls get knocked up at sea. Currently, 16% of deployed females aboard ship are pregnant. You cannot serve on a Navy vessel while pregnant so it means these females are reassigned to shore duty. Overall, females in the Navy are 50% more likely to be reassigned to land duty than males, so it is not just pregnancy. It is biological reality.

This means that just about every ship in the fleet has a readiness problem, due to the lack of trained personnel. The Navy has a rule requiring every ship to be at least 25% female, so that means vessels cannot be deployed, because of the shortage of female sailors who are not pregnant. This 25% rule was just implemented. That’s why the pregnancy rates have gone up. It also means the rising pregnancy problem did not result in a reevaluation of the policy. Instead it was met with a new effort to prove that biology is not real.

The thing with the new religion is that it is always at odds with its stated goals. The simple solution to the pregnancy problem is to require all females to be on Norplant. This solves the pregnancy problem. Not only is this never suggested, doing so would set off howls from the cult about sexism. The reason is that such a requirement would require accepting biological reality. Instead of solving the problem or at least mitigating it, the cult prefers to wage a losing battle against biology, destroying the military in the process.

There is a reason reality is undefeated.

Better Living Through Suicide

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Religions tend to set limits. Those limits come with the force of God or some spiritual force that transcends man. Otherwise, a religion would be nothing more than man-made rules enforced by the strongest. This is why laws in most of the world are rooted in the dominant religion of the region or country. The local religion is a list of restrictions and limitations placed on the believers. Naturally, when it came time to form a government and write laws, they relied upon the laws and rules of their religion.

This may seem rather obvious, but the concept of the limiting principle is easy to take for granted. This is a core feature of most religions and it easiest to understand by considering our laws. Take two people who are not robbing banks. Just as long as both are not robbing banks, neither is more or less of a bank robber than the other. Both are simply not bank robbers. In other words, while there may be degrees of bank robbery, there are no degrees of not bank robbery. Not being one is the limit of that virtue.

This is true of religion, of course. The sinner can be someone breaking a minor rule or someone violating the big rules. Their degree of sinfulness can be established, but their degree of virtue does not exist. If you are not violating the rules of the faith, then that is as good as it gets for you, at least in this life. In other words, there is a limit to virtue. That limit is the rule or prohibition. You are either within the rules or not. Efforts to out-virtue others are usually seen as vanity, unjustified boasting about one’s spiritual state.

The limiting principle keeps religions and the law from going crazy and descending into virtue spirals. After all, if one can be more virtuous than the next guy, then the next guy can be even more virtuous. The cycle ends only when everyone is dead. The same is true of the law. Utopian schemes like communism are aimed at constructing the perfect society, but since perfection is impossible, it is a never ending cycle of madness to make society better, which means making people better. It’s why they always end in violence.

This has always been the problem with efforts to create a civic religion. Robespierre and his radical buddies figured this out quickly, which is why they came up with the Cult of the Supreme Being. Of course, their new reason cult got weird in hurry and contributed to the demise of Robespierre. The reason is any effort to invest moral authority in men or their creations turns those men into gods. The madness of the French Revolution was a virtue spiral, as there was no transcendent limit. The radicals could always be more radical.

We see this with the nature movements that have been a feature of the Left for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The greens always aim for some sort of Edenic outcome. Their goal always lies just a little further. The idea of “good enough” is outside their comprehension. Couple that with their preternatural belief in the sinfulness of man and you end up with a nature cult that borders on being a suicide cult. The end point of every Progressive nature movement is the end of mankind.

The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.

The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found.

Just look at that list. It sounds like a combination of the Shakers and 1970’s new age mysticism. In order to save the planet, according to researchers and experts no less, is to avoid having more humans and make the ones waiting around to die as miserable as possible. The unspoken reason for selling the car and sitting in the dark with your nothing burger is so you can suffer and atone for your sins. In other words, it is not enough to be a green, you have to kill yourself as the ultimate sign of your virtue.

This is not new. The Shakers, obviously, are an example of what happens when a religion cannot imagine a limit to virtue. The Shakers, though, had the decency to mind their own business and not try to inflict themselves on the rest of the world. In the long run, they were a slow-motion suicide cult, but they were willing to let nature take its course. The modern nature cults not only want to rush their demise, they want to take the rest of us with them, or at least make us suffer for their religion.

This is the problem that has haunted the Left in America. There’s no concept of good enough. They are always chanting, “we can do more” or “there is more work to do.” No matter how much damage they do in the holy cause, they are sure that more needs doing, more must be done. It’s why their causes tend to burn out in fits of insanity like we see with the whole transgender thing. The quest for the ultimate victim has led them to celebrate mental illness as a virtue and deny biological reality.

There’s another point here worth mentioning. A reason Progressives lack the concept of the limiting principle is that the modern American Left grew out of the postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century. This was an American Protestant movement based on the belief that the time between now and the end times would be one where the Church came to dominate the nations of the earth and usher in an era of peace, prosperity and righteousness, signally the return of Christ. Abolitionism was a product of this movement.

Modern Progressives have abandoned the language of Christianity, but they retain the characteristics and much of the language of their spiritual forebears. Instead of spreading the Word, they spread democracy. Instead of defeating Satan by expanding the kingdom of God on earth, the modern Progressives expands the inclusive Community to defeat the Hate. Saving the earth is, in a way, the restoration of Eden. When the goal is to immanentize the eschaton, it is no wonder they set no limits for themselves.