The American Jizya

It used to be that social reformers would talk about the day when racism has been eliminated from society. They would quote Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, suggesting the goal was a colorblind society. The only people to say this today are clueless civic nationalists and so-called conservative pundits. The former are always behind the times and the latter is here to run cover for the Left. In the game of racism, the caravan has moved onto a new wave, the third wave of anti-racism.

Like feminism, anti-racism has reinvented itself to meet the challenges of the multicultural age, particularly in light of the new demographics. Blacks griping about whites is not of much use when you have varieties of Hispanic, Muslims, Asians, Jews and lifestyle degenerates. The new challenges of the majority-minority empire require a new kind of anti-racism and a new kind of racism for it to oppose. The new racism is exotic and mysterious, while the anti-racist is fighting a spiritual fight, not a legal one.

Eric Hoffer made the observation that people involved in causes never reach a point where they say the cause has achieved its goals and therefore can disband and cease its activities. For example, anti-smoking zealots have accomplished all that can be accomplished, yet they persist. The same is true of drunk driving activists. Short of martial law, there is not much left to do about drunk driving and smoking. Yet, the pressure groups behind these causes still raise money and agitate for attention.

The same thing has happened with the various causes of Progressivism. Something like environmentalism has evolved into a weird nature cult, with apocalyptic predictions backed by flimsy science. Feminism is pretty much a nonsensical collection of tantrums sporting bizarre lingo and outfits. Anti-racism has moved from demands for equity before the law and mitigation for past racism, to a semi-permanent regime that includes groups, who voluntarily left their home lands for the white nations they now despise.

As a practical matter, so-called “third wave anti-racism” is really just a demand by non-whites that whites mitigate the realities of biology. They can’t say that so they have to use weird language and comical neologisms. The demand is that whites exhaust themselves maintaining a white bourgeois society, so that non-whites can enjoy first world comfort, without actually having to maintain it themselves. The new white man’s burden is whites living as despised helots in the societies they created.

For example, whites are supposed to solve the black crime problem, but not notice that black men commit a lot of crime. No one is supposed to mention that blacks don’t cooperate with police. The justification for the former is the history of racism, while the latter is excused as blacks not wanting to attract attention to the black community. Whites are supposed to work around the realities of the black community, while mitigating the realities of the black community. This is impossible and unreasonable.

Another example is how non-whites expect to be allowed into elite schools. In the name of diversity, the elite colleges decorate each class with vibrancy. The professors are expected to make sure these students graduate and never mention that they make up the bottom third of the class. Once out in the world, the process starts over as law firms hoover up non-whites to meet their diversity quota. Of course, no one is supposed to notice that these lawyers are not very good at being lawyers.

Then you have the central tenet of third wave anti-racism, which is that whites, just by being white, are a burden on non-whites. Because whites want the best for their kids and want to live in safe neighborhoods, it means they live in places without convenient bus service. This is a burden on non-whites, as they don’t have easy access to whites and the societies they create. This is so-called white privilege. The only way to eliminate this is to eliminate white behavior, which would end the modern society.

Instead, the new anti-racism regime is one where every white person is born guilty, tainted by the original sin of white racism. Therefore, just as man was condemned to toil outside of the Garden of Eden for eternity, whites are now condemned to pay the jizya in order to keep non-whites in comfortable modern lifestyles. That means open borders for formerly white countries and a metastasizing set of rules to govern the thoughts and speech of whites. The American jizya is about keeping non-whites happy.

That’s the core argument of Ta-Nahesi Coates. In his jeremiad in favor of reparations, you’ll note he never actually puts a number on it. Reparations are, by definition, about making the other party whole. Coates rejects that such a number exists, because what he means by reparations is actually a recitation. He demands an endless recitation of the crimes committed by whites against blacks. This is to both punish whites in a material sense and to remind them that they are now in the inferior position.

In order to understand the social justice movement, one must first replace the word “justice” with the word “vengeance.” It’s not about settling the books or making anyone whole. It is about establishing a new hierarchy in which whites are the infidels of the new multicultural empire, forever paying the jizya to keep modern society rolling. The point of the tax is not just to finance the system, but to lock in the moral relationships of the new multicultural empire, because it cannot exist without the jizya.

The Pale Man’s Burden

Georgia is one of the places to watch if you want to get a partial glimpse into the future, as it is 61% white, but a growing portion of its white population is from outside the south. The Atlanta area has grown like a weed and much of the growth has come from attracting outsiders. A big chunk of those outsiders are Hispanics, so the state has a little bit of everything, as far as demographic challenges. As a result, it will be one of the first states to realize democracy cannot work in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society.

This story from the past election is a good example of something that pale-folk will come to realize all over the country. That is, you can run out of places to hide. Georgia “solved” the problems of Atlanta by allowing the better parts to secede from the city proper, thus avoiding the challenges of being pale in a diverse city. This concept was applied to other areas that found themselves with a pale tax base, governed by a vibrant majority. Instead the residents fleeing the jurisdiction, the jurisdiction fled the people, so to speak.

As is the case with all such schemes, the Left soon figures out how to defeat them and that seems to be the case with this latest proposal. The author of that piece is an anti-white, so he is a useful example of the attitudes the pale-folk will face in the future, as they seek out new ways to maintain their own communities. The hostile tone masks an important assumption among the diverse. That is, It’s not that they oppose free association. It’s that the diverse have a right to be in close proximity to pale-folk.

It is a strange alteration in the dynamics of race relations that goes unremarked, because the people in charge are still locked in another era. They frame everything as a fight over denying the diverse the same access as the pale. That shipped sailed a long time ago, as the diverse now have greater access than the pale. Even new arrivals from lands over the horizon have special access. Every federal government IT contractor is from South Asia for a reason. That’s right, Indians have a special door just like blacks.

There are so many special doors now, all of which reading “no white men may pass” that it has become a racket in itself. There are firms around Washington that exist just to provide diversity to the government contractor. They are not explicit, but it is the thing everyone knows, but no one says. After generations of this stuff, no one thinks about it anymore. The only people fighting it are East Asians at Harvard, who are basically squabbling with other diverse people over how to slice up the pie. Otherwise, anti-white is the norm.

The new reality that has gone unremarked is something you get a glimpse of in that story out of Georgia. The diverse now demand access to the pale. Even if the pale find some way to carve out their own places, but remain within the law, the diverse will find some way to force their way inside. In other words, the Danegeld of the Civil Rights Movement, which was affirmative action, was not enough. It turns out Kipling was right about the Danegeld. Once you have paid the diverse, you never get rid of the diverse.

That’s what makes Georgia an interesting case to follow. In other jurisdiction, the pale simply keep moving. In Lagos on the Chesapeake, the pale first decamped to the first suburbs, just on the edge of the city. Pale-folk could still bus into jobs in the city, but avoid being killed on their own streets at night. But then the the diverse could take the same buses out to the suburbs, so the pale moved further away. Those inner suburbs decayed and many are now dumping grounds for Hispanics and Africans.

As we saw in the Obama  years, the people in charge are plotting to solve this problem with housing laws. The usual suspects have been hard at work on this for a couple of decades at least. The Obama Administration plan called Affirmative Housing or some such nonsense, was basically an effort to compel pale-folk to live among the diverse, by forcing them to have the diverse in their areas. In other words, the same logic they use to diversify schools would be applied to pale areas in order to make them vibrant.

The underlying assumption to all of this is that the diverse have a natural right to access to the pale. We’ve gone from a mindset that says the diverse should have the same rules as the pale, a sensible thing on the surface, to a mindset that treats the pale-folk as a public good, to which the diverse have a natural right. Given the use of disparate impact law, it is not going to be long before the pale will be responsible for making sure they make themselves available to the diverse. They will have to prove they are accessible.

The Civil Rights Movement was always about the pale people. The usual suspects just used blacks as a weapon in their war on pale people. Most people get that, but still cling to the old pale ideas about equality of access and so forth. Those habits of mind that make pale society so successful, make pale societies vulnerable. As long as pale-folk have had a place to run, they have preferred to hold onto those old pale ideals, rather than face the reality of what’s happening. Disorganized retreat before dishonor!

As we see in Georgia and other places, the trap is slamming shut and the pale will no longer have the luxury of heading off for paler pastures. That’s part of what sparked the emergence of the alt-right. It was suburban pale boys suddenly facing the reality of diversity. They found out that libertarianism is no match for organized vibrancy and that dropped the scales from their eyes. The pale man’s burden is an unsustainable Danegled that just makes the final resolution that much more costly.

Black Friday

Steve Sailer likes to draw comparisons between this age and what happened when the 1960’s counter-culture turned toxic in the the 1970’s. The Civil Rights Movement had curdled into militant black power and the hippy movement had soured into roving gangs of militants like the Weather Underground. It’s not a bad comparison, because then as now, the cause of the turmoil was an incoherent radicalism. What did the Black Panthers want, other than access to white women? What was the point of the BLM violence?

A key difference between then and now is the issue of race. In the 1960’s, America was 85% white and whites just assumed blacks were a poor fit for modern society. Today, America is 60% white and everyone has spent their lives indoctrinated in a cult that worships blacks. Fifty years ago when blacks turned violent, everyone sort of expected it, so no one was really surprised. Today, black violence is a mystery to the beautiful people and they insist everyone else pretend that it is a mystery or caused by whites.

That’s what makes the Ferguson Effect an interesting topic, even after the consequences are slowly starting to fade. Prior to the Black Lives Matter stuff and the liberal tub thumping over events like Travon Martin, crime in general, and black crime in particular, had faded from the public’s consciousness. Then all of a sudden the blacks were angry and murder rates in certain cities began to shoot up again. In 2011 Baltimore had 211 murders. In 2015, the year of Freddy Gray, the city recorded 342 homicides.

White liberals, broadly speaking, have argued the Ferguson Effect is the result of black rage in response to police brutality and racism. The reason blacks in Baltimore, for example, started murdering one another at a record clip, was over anger at the police department’s rough justice in the ghetto. It’s an argument that assumes blacks have no agency of their own and are simply controlled by the behavior of whites. This is a gratuitous assertion by people with an anti-white agenda, but it is the prevailing opinion.

Blacks, on the other hand, have never accepted this line of argument. Instead, they prefer to dismiss the whole thing as an baffling anomaly. The prevailing argument from black activists is that there is no such this as the Ferguson Effect. This piece in City Lab, the urban subsidiary of The Atlantic, is a good example. It has become an article of faith among blacks that the Ferguson Effect is just another effort to explain away the real causes of black crime. Namely, to hide the institutional racism in modern America.

There is, of course, something to it. Blacks seem to get that the underlying assumption of the Ferguson Effect is that left to their own devices, black society would quickly devolve into something pre-modern and violent. Without the constraints of white society, blacks are simply unable to achieve anything above the neolithic. If whites come to accept this again, then all of the concessions and benefits that came out of the Civil Rights Movement no longer make any sense. The whole project unravels in the face of biological reality.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. Race relations in America, with regards to blacks, have always been about a series of gates. Blacks who can behave themselves pass through the gate from the ghetto to the suburbs. Blacks with something on the ball can enter into the managerial class, assuming they are willing to accept their symbolic role in the system. The violent and stupid, in contrast, cannot pass through those gates, so they are penned up in urban reservations guarded by the police.

Whites in America, have come to terms with this by never thinking about it. Liberal whites invest their time in fantasies like structural racism and white privilege, while normal whites just ignore it. Blacks, on the other hand, are keenly aware of this reality. For those able to pass through those gates, there is a need to obscure this reality, but also a deep resentment for it. You’ll note that black anger at white America comes from those able to pass through the gates, because they know the underlying assumptions are true.

This is why middle-class black anger at white America is visceral and incoherent. You see it at the end of that posted article, when the writer celebrates pointless protest. “If the word “Ferguson” was permanently and exclusively attached back to its original meaning, we might find evidence of an “effect” when it comes to a number of recent, inspiring events: the bringing down of Confederate monuments, the ousting of Chicago’s police chief, or the recent Chicago protests that forced Donald Trump to cancel a rally.”

The truth is, black crime rates went up in areas where Black Lives Matter was active, because the white cops were simply unwilling to do the job that was necessary to control the ghettos. Many simply moved to other jobs, while the supply of new recruits dried up, leaving these police departments woefully undermanned. On the other hand, the blacks who have made it through the gates are reminded of the reality of their situation. They know that in order to avoid this, they must accept this. That’s the source of their anger.

There Will Be Blood

In a healthy and orderly society, the ruling class maintains a set of rules for arbitrating disputes, allocating power and disciplining transgressors. The rules governing the ruling class are intended to defend the ruling class from internal threats, as well as external ones. The rules make sure that people entering the ruling elite are the sort who will improve and defend the system. It also protects those new members, by giving them an orderly path up through the hierarchy.

Imagine if it was acceptable in the Senate for a back bencher to murder his rivals in order to gain a senior position in the Senate. That could be tempting to an upstart, but then again, killing off newcomers would also make sense. Having rules against murdering rivals protects everyone. An orderly system of distributing power and promoting new people up the hierarchy encourages everyone in the ruling class to defend the ruling class system.

It’s why so-called conservatives rush to the nearest microphone to disavow challenges from their right. They always frame it is a choice between reasonable compromise versus unreasonable extremism. Their calls for civility are essentially a defense of the current order. The rules work for them, as it allows them to enjoy a one percent lifestyle as the opposition to the Left. While not as gratuitous, progressives will also call for civility when they sense a threat from their Left.

That’s what makes the debate on the Left about tactics interesting to those on this side of the great divide, even though we have no role in the debate. There is no one speaking for our issues in the halls of power and our people are excluded from the political debate. On the other hand, the most radical progressive crazies get at least an audience with the people in charge. This Atlantic piece gives a little hint that maybe the moderate middle is about to collapse.

American politics is today a brutal boxing match of harassing confrontations. The disagreements renew two enduring questions: one philosophical, one historical. Is political harassment civil? And do the ugly political confrontations signal a sharp departure, or have they always existed in the United States of America?

Moderates in both major political parties have long argued no on both fronts. Their political brand is unity. They pursue the absence of tension. That has meant avoiding confrontations through building political bridges high above the audible river of children crying in detention facilities, in police cars and cells, in abandoned schools, in abuse-infested homes, in rat-infested apartments, in searches for incarcerated and deported parents, in funeral homes over closed caskets, in plantation shacks after their first whipping, and in slave auctions fearing their new harassers.

These political moderates classify as uncivil those, like Donald Trump, who would toss children into those crying spaces. They classify as uncivil those, like Maxine Waters, who run down into those crying spaces and call for the all-out harassment of the harassers. They look down on both the Trumps and the Waters’ from the heights of their self-styled civility. They look down on those crying children—and their comatose or raging defenders—and counsel patience, preaching a religious belief in the American political process.

Now, you have to put aside the fact that the author of that piece is a ridiculous person with a fake name. His lack of authenticity is part of the act that gets him a place in the prevailing orthodoxy. The angry black man routine allows him to play the part of house anti-white among the ruling class Progressives. If he had stuck with his birth name, he would be forced to play a different role, as no one is going to take seriously a guy playing the Malcolm X part with the name “Mister Rogers” and sporting a cardigan.

What matters is his argument that justice requires the just to be uncivil, by which he means overthrowing the rules. After all, incivility is by definition the rejection of the rules of discourse. Radicals have always been attracted to this formulation, as they always imagine themselves as the righteous underdog fighting the powerful system. In the last century, this was at least plausible, if not entirely accurate. Communist revolutionaries wanted a new system. The New Left was in revolt against the previous generation.

Today, the Progressives are in total control of American life. If you doubt this, name a left-wing web site that has been banned from the internet. The terrorist group Antifa is allowed to operate on Twitter and Facebook. Post FBI crime stats on social media and you risk being doxed by a Huffington Post writer and losing your job. In other words, the people in total control of the system are now losing faith in the system, because they do not think it is effective enough at crushing their enemies. Ibram X. Kendi wants more blood.

This is not surprising. From Robespierre through Marxism, into the multiculturalism of today, the Left has always been a spiritual cause, because all of their schemes require a certain type of person, a certain moral understanding. Ultimately what is required for their society to work is a certain moral order that can only be imposed. As Progressivism has curdled into an anti-white ascendancy, it means erasing all traces of whiteness, which is going to mean erasing white people. You cannot do that and remain civil.

What we are seeing is that the anti-white ascendancy that was birthed by cultural Marxism, brings with it the same defects as Marxism. That is, it lacks a limiting principle, so it inevitably proceeds to the most extreme expression of its core beliefs. There was no end to radical intolerance in 20th century Marxism. There will be no end to the racial bloodlust by anti-white radicals. It is why anti-whites are offended by calls to civility. The inevitable end point of their ideology is unrestrained vengeance against whites.

A dozen years ago, Mark Steyn made the point that the history of ruling elites reforming themselves is not very encouraging. That was in the context of immigration. All these years on, we see that our ruling classes have done nothing to stem the flood of migrants into the West. Therefore, it is hard to imagine them standing up to the anti-white radicals they have cultivated the last few decades. Guys like Ibram X. Kendi exist to hate whitey and they will not be restrained by calls for civility or compromise.

The White Not

When one people conquer another people, there are a number of ways they can cement their dominance. One is for the ruler of the winning side to make himself the ruler of the losers, maybe marrying a high-ranking female of the losers. If the ethnic differences between the winners and losers are small enough, this can work out well. In this case, it is not really one people defeating another, so much as one set of rulers besting their relations, who happen to be rulers of another wing of the family. It is a family squabble.

Of course, the other end of the spectrum is when a different people defeat another people. The most likely outcome is some form of genocide. The winners kill off the males or maybe sell them into bondage, while distributing the women as wives to their men. The alternative to this is to simply kill off the losers. Genocide is a lot easier when the vanquished are alien to the victors. Most likely, the point of the conflict was to take the land the losers had been occupying, so killing them off makes perfect sense.

A third way of cementing your dominance over a conquered people is to erase their language and culture. Instead of killing off the men or committing full scale genocide, you take away their religion, ban their customs and force them to use your language for any official business. The first generation is going to resist, but the second generation is going to see the opportunity and adopt the new ways. The benefit of this approach is it turns some portion of the vanquished into an asset that works to support the victors.

The British tried a form of this with the Welsh in the 19th century. For centuries, the Welsh had been a thorn in the side of the English. Despite their numerical advantage, the English were never able to drive them off. King Offa of Mercia built a giant earth works to wall off the Welsh from the English in the 8th century. That was not because the Welsh were a trouble-free population. In the 15th century, Owain Glyndŵr led his people in revolt against the English. For Shakespeare fans, he is Owen Glendower in the play Henry IV.

The English solution in the 19th century was something called the Welsh Not. The British used it in Welsh schools to discourage the use of the Welsh language. A kid caught speaking his native tongue was given the “Not” which was usually a piece of wood on a string he hung around his neck. If he heard another boy speaking Welsh, he could rat him out and the “Not” would pass to him. At the end of the day, the boy with the “Not” got a beating. Alternatively, children were caned whenever they were caught speaking Welsh.

Something similar is happening in English speaking countries today, except the people in charge are attempting to rub out the native culture by un-personing anyone who says or does normal things. People are routinely punished for noticing the obvious or speaking truths about reality. The point of the punishment is to discourage normal behavior, just as the British wanted to discourage speaking Welsh. Every day, we get examples like this one, where the bizarre and deranged are elevated over the normal culture.

The systematic effort to turn bathhouse doggerel into art, at the expense of respectable Western literature, is not so much about elevating the depraved, as it is an assault on the culture. The people doing this are not motivated by a desire to help the degenerates. The point of the exercise is to discredit literature that comports with the norms of Western society. It is the same motivation behind larding up movies and television with vulgarity, even though the audience finds it revolting. Contempt for the audience is the motivation.

It is tempting to assign rational motivations to the PC idiocy, but that is always a mistake when talking about the clash of cultures. The motivations are purely emotional. When the Left flips out over someone noticing a logical flaw in their education policy, it is not the flaw the angers them. It is who is pointing it out. It is why pointing out the endless contradictions and hypocrisies of the Left is a waste of time. In a world of “who? whom?”, the only logic at play is determining who is attacking whom. The point of the attack is manifest.

Like the banning of bagpipes and tartan in Scotland, the Welsh Not probably did more to build Welsh nationalism than break it. It provided motivation for the Welsh to preserve their language. The rallying point was the Welsh-language bible, which was used in Welsh churches. Instead of the language and customs being erased as intended, the British ended up inculcating a deeper sense of identity in the Welsh people. The long-term result has been a modern revival of Welsh and a drive toward greater autonomy for Wales.

It remains to be seen if the current assault on normalcy has the same effect on the normal white people in English speaking countries. Tommy Robinson may be a flawed player in the great battle over immigration in Britain, but he has become a rallying point. The alt-right in America may be a dumpster fire, but the outlandish treatment of them by global corporations has opened a lot of eyes to what’s happening in America. Perhaps the war on whiteness has reached a tipping point and white people are becoming race aware.

The Death of Sportsball

Down at the Hater’s Ball, we were joking around at the banquet about the things you stop enjoying when you become race aware. Pop culture is an obvious one, given the absurd levels of anti-white vitriol we see on TV and in movies. I mentioned that sports stop being fun, as you spend all your time noticing the propaganda and lose track of the games. I am not the first guy to notice this. At Mencken last year, I was hanging out with a couple of people who despised sportsball because of the endless racial agitation in it.

Back in Lagos, I am enjoying my free evenings by watching some television and catching up on some movies. I happened to catch about five minutes of a basketball game. It was Cleveland versus Toronto. The announcers were carrying on like LeBron James had just cured cancer, whenever he put the ball in the hoop. Some famous black guy was on the sidelines doing back flips for some reason. It was like watching a bizarre African circus, but the stands were packed with whites. I lasted about five minutes and turned it off.

The NBA has always been an odd business. The people who own the teams are the types who do business from card tables and folding chairs. They keep a bug-out bag ready and leave their car idling in the parking lot, just in case. The owners are all Jewish. The players are all black. The fans are all white. The NBA is pretty much a long running advertisement for upside down world, where blacks are the elite and whites are at the bottom. It is, in many respects, a metaphor for where we are as a society in the current age.

Anyway, it got me wondering how these sportsball leagues remain in business, despite their hostility toward their customers. Going to sporting events is a civic nationalist sort of thing if you think about it. It is the last place we have where people from the community can meet in public and enjoy something together. The downtown shopping area is dead. Malls are dying off. The movie theater has been replaced by the home theater system. A sportsball game is one of the last public gathering places we have now.

As with so much of our society, the sportsball model assumes the sorts of social arrangements that come with an 80% white society, where people trust one another and take pride in their place. You have an emotional attachment to the local teams because they represent local pride, even if the players are mercenaries. In a world where all relationships are transactional and one place is as good as another, what is the point of following the local team? That seems to be showing up in surveys like this about the NBA.

Another tell that sportsball is headed for a bad time is what is happening with college sports. There, fan loyalty has the added hook of attendance. Alabama football not only plays on state loyalty, they have tens of thousands of graduates who can show their pride by supporting the football team. That means donations. Talk to the people who fund raise for athletic departments and they will tell you that the younger graduates are far less willing to give than previous generations. The “culture of giving” is not there with millennials.

It is not just the changing demographics of America; it is the berserk impulse by the people running the sportsball leagues to destroy what makes sports appealing. Here is a story about how NASCAR is trying to grovel at the altar of multiculturalism. I can guarantee you that not a single racing fan in the South has said to his friend, “You know what would make NASCAR perfect? More blacks.” Sports used to be an escape and a celebration. Today, even NASCAR is a sermon and warning. How is that sustainable?

The funny thing is the sportsball leagues appear to understand that their model depends on fooling whitey about their intentions. I went to opening day for the Lagos baseball team and the pre-game ceremonies would have made Leni Riefenstahl blush. I enjoy some flag waving still, but I was offended by the volume and intensity of it. There were calls to hero worship the military, the cops, some civic group they trotted out. I went to see a baseball game and instead I got an Orwellian rally to celebrate the great leader and his works.

The reason they lay it on so thick is they feel they have to. They say flag waving is the last refuge of a scoundrel, so a sport worried about its appeal will resort to claiming it is your patriotic duty to love baseball. Looking around at the crowd that day, I saw very few non-white faces. It was all white families and white businesspeople skipping out of work. Baltimore is a 70% black city that has to import its sports fans. When America is 70% non-white, from where will they import their fans then? Will it matter?

Given what has happened with the NFL ratings the last few years and the drop in live attendance for all sports, sportsball is in for a rough time. Professional sportsball is not the same business as selling cheap junk from China. For sportsball to work, there has to be an emotional bond between customer and team. That means the fan has to trust the owners of the team are on their side. In our deracinated, low-trust society, which cannot happen. Therefore, it is hard to see how the sportsball model holds up much longer.

The Fate Of The NeoCons

The term “neocon” has been a fixture of political debates in America for the last 40 years, being both an epithet, sobriquet and honorific. In the 80’s, a white person in the commentariat using the term was doing so as a stand in for “hawkish liberal Jews” and he would most likely be called an anti-Semite. It became important to neocons for people not to notice they were all liberal Jews. After the Cold War, Progressives started attacking the neocons, so the squealing about antisemitism lost its potency.

The truth is the original neocons were never conservative. Many were Trotskyists, but most were just very liberal Jews who wanted to use up America’s wealth to fight their ancient enemy, the Russian empire. Otherwise, they embraced the cosmopolitan Progressivism emerging on the Left. Probably the most generous description of neoconservatives was that they were anti-communists, who integrated into traditional conservatism in the effort to prosecute the Cold War. That was the spin, at least.

The years since the end of the Cold War has revealed them to be something else. The berserk, preternatural hatred of Russia is now a major component of neocon arguments, which is why they never shut up about Putin. After the Cold War, neocons opposed efforts to integrate Russia into the modern global economy and they have advocated in favor a hostile foreign policy toward Russia. They backed intervention in South Ossetia and they were behind the coup in Ukraine that has plunged the country into chaos.

Neoconservatism has also curdled into a bizarre hatred of Trump, with many neocons indulging in the most bizarre conspiracy theories. The people defending the FBI in conservative publications are all neocons. Here’s Ben Shapiro defending the FBI. Here’s Jonah Goldberg defending the coup plotters. Of course, the chief nutter of the NeverTrump club is Bill Kristol, whose son-in-law bought dirt on Trump from the now infamous Democrat dirty tricks operation, FusionGPS.

In the interest of accuracy, a major cause of neocon hatred of Trump is money. For eight years these guys were rubbing their hands together thinking about the great jobs they would land in the Jeb Bush administration. Jonah Goldberg’s old lady spent 2015 shopping for outfits, anticipating a six figure job in the next Republican administration. When you add up the book deals, salary, speaking gigs and insider dealing, Trump was a million dollar catastrophe for each of the leading lights of neoconservatism. Of course, they are mad.

That can explain some of the bitterness over Trump, but none of these guys are skipping any meals. John “Thanks Dad” Podhoretz takes $400,000 a year in salary just from his limited work at Commentary. Goldberg lives in a seven figure home in one of the most elite suburbs on earth. Max Boot just signed on with the Washington Post, where he probably makes $250,000 per year to write a weekly column. All of these guys were born into the world of “high pay, but low work” lifestyles that define the commentariat.

What really vexes them, is the fact they can no longer hide in the weeds of Buckley Conservatism. They used to be able to pass themselves off as conventional conservatives, who just had an active interest in foreign policy. Now, it is eminently clear that there is nothing conservative about them in the least. Whatever hand waving they offer in favor of traditionalism and normalcy, is always in the form of “Of course we should defend X, but let’s not waste political capital on that when we should be doing…”

Reverting to their liberal roots is one thing, but it is hard to see what is American about them, given their advocacy against Americans. When a central plank of your philosophy is that native stock Americans need to be replaced, you are un-American. Steve Sailer once described neoconservatism as “invade the world, invite the world” and it was an excellent observation. The growing recognition of this truth seems to be turning neocons in to outright, anti-white bigots. They despise you for noticing what is happening to you.

You see it in this Jonah Goldberg column the other day. The debate over immigration has made plain to white voters that the divide in Washington is between those celebrating the “browning of America” and those who oppose it. The Trump Effect is making that increasingly clear to voters. The people opposing Team Brown, want to preserve their communities and their culture. There is nothing more conservative than that, but the neocons have now taken to calling this a cult, an obvious reference to you know who.

Neoconservatism has come a long way from when Irving Kristol wrote “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed ‘Neoconservative'” in 1979. The world has changed since the concepts that came to define neoconservatism were developed. Of course, all of the guys who founded it are dead. The people leading the movement today are mostly the ne’er do well sons of the founding generation of thinkers. The “Thanks Dad Chorus” that is modern neoconservatism is a good example of reversion to the mean.

Of course, what Eric Hoffer observed about causes is true of the neocons. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” In fact, this is true of the entire ecosystem that is mainstream conservatism. The Buckley crowd are just squeezing out every last dime from National Review, trading on nostalgia to fleece Baby Boomers of donations. Commentary Magazine has a dwindling readership of septuagenarians worried that Hitler really did not die in that bunker.

Even so, Jews in America have faced little in the way of Antisemitism. That is something white Americans have always celebrated. So much so that no one thought much of the emergence of Jewish triumphalism in the last decades. If that triumphalism curdles into anti-white ethnocentrism, then that could change. When you see a guy like Jonah Goldberg appropriating the title of James Burnham book for his next screed against white people, you have to suspect this is all going to end poorly.

Class War As Race War

There is an interesting post up this week over at the American Renaissance¹ website, that I have been puzzling over a bit. What struck me initially about it is the opening line, “Why we must unite across class lines.” That’s not a phrase you hear much these days from politicians, activists or certainly polemicists. In fact, class does not get much of a discussion at all in polite circles. The closest we get to a class debate is snide remarks from cosmopolitans about the people shopping at Walmart.

On the Right, discussion of class has long been forbidden. This was mostly due to the fact that conventional conservatism in America is really just right-wing Progressivism. The official Right and Left agree on the big philosophical items. Their quarrels are mostly about tactics and rhetoric. In the latter, the so-called Right carried the day, so discussion of social class is mostly forbidden. We are an egalitarian society where your status is determined by how well you serve the state.

The author of the AmRen piece then goes on to explore the gap between official rhetoric on racial diversity and objective reality. Our ruling elites systematically arrange their lives so they have the least amount of diversity as possible. Whole sections of cities have been ethnically cleansed so young white hipsters can have cool places to live. Meanwhile, urban blacks, with the miracle of Section 8, are dumped into lower class white suburbs, where they set about recreating their normal chaos in otherwise stable white areas.

This compulsory diversity is not just destroying the white working class, it is hollowing out the white middle-class. Urban female hipsters are free to sing the glories of miscegenation, while they send their super white kids to the private day school, and socialize with people who look like them, think like them and live like them. As we hate-thinkers would put it, we are seeing the systematic Brazil-ification of America, where the white urban elite is turning Middle-American is to caramel colored favelas.

This is familiar ground to readers here, but it is the proposed solution that does not get much attention.

So does our hope lie with the proles? The big difference between Orwell’s 1984 and 2018 is that Orwell’s elites did not bother to indoctrinate the masses, on the ground that the proles’ fidelity to Big Brother was considered irrelevant. By contrast, in our diversity dystopia the masses are at the core of the Left’s indoctrination project. Our “proles” are the ones forced to suffer a bad education in integrated schools. They are the ones subjected to violence, harassment, and intimidation. And they are the ones told, again and again, that any resistance to this makes them betrayers of who we are as Americans, deplorable traitors in need of ever-more reformation.

Leadership may not come from the proles, but good sense and votes will. Those who bear the burdens of diversity see its damage most clearly. It is no accident that Donald Trump swept the white working-class vote.

Whatever our own particular economic station, we all have a role to play in restoring working- and middle-class white America. We should be hiring our own people, tutoring our own people, supporting scholarships for our own people, and doing our best to build schools and cultural institutions that can be healthy environments for our own people.

Growing up in the underclass, my exposure to bourgeois sensibilities about class came mostly through the movies. Movies and TV shows featuring the white working class as protagonists, only did so as a canvas onto which the writers could paint pictures of the multicultural paradise. White union men learned they had to accept blacks into the union in order to succeed. Archie Bunker had to see George Jefferson as just a dark skinned version of himself, in order to rise above the limitations of his class.

The Left’s class warfare was always a hoax played on the white working and middle classes. The offer was better economic conditions, as long as blacks were allowed to have some too. It was always a bait and switch. Whites got high divorce rates, their daughters dating black guys, rocket high inequality and the looming threat of minority status. By any measure, the Left’s agenda for the white working classes has been a disaster. It’s why the great white die off is the shadow hanging over all of us.

We are  seeing a replay of this now with immigration. “Fellow white people! You’re gonna get lots of cool restaurants and cultural diversity, and a police state, well mostly a police state. Open Borders!” All the promises of open borders and globalism are a deliberate lie, using appeals to morality to overcome practical objections and economic arguments to overcome cultural objections. Just as accepting racial integration in exchange for economic prosperity was a disaster for whites, open borders will be too. That’s the goal.

Our side embracing the rhetoric of 1960’s Progressive class warfare seems a bit strange, but it is one entry point for introducing racial consciousness to the discussion. Every time someone sees a politician address the concerns of the white working class, the audience hears it is OK to be white. Whenever white people, even hipster college professors living in urban oases, engage in talk about the white working class or the white opioid epidemic, being white gets re-legitimized and re-normalized in the greater culture.

The second line of that AmRen post is a line from Orwell, “If there is hope,” wrote Winston, “it lies in the proles.” Orwell wrote in a time when it was assumed that Africa was for Africans, Asia for Asians and the West was for white people. The olden thymes were an argument between whites about how whites would deal with one another. Our age will be an argument between whites about how we defend ourselves, our lands and our posterity from the rest of the world. That starts with defending the white working class.

¹I will be attending the American Renaissance conference this spring. if you are interested in attending, sign up is here.

An Immoderate Age

Last week, this ridiculous article in the New York Times generated some attention on alt-right social media, mostly because it allowed for some petty bickering. Anytime the media does a story on alt-right people, the guys not mentioned take the opportunity to say bad things about the guys that were mentioned in the story. John Derbyshire said everything that needed to be said about the Times piece in this post at VDare. In it, he referenced his old column on the topic and the corresponding version from Jared Taylor.

Taken together, it is good example of how the hive mind is unable to address reality on its own terms. Mx. Audrea Lim, of the New York Times piece, cannot consider the possibility that there could be more than two opinions on a subject. For her and the others in the Progressive hive, there are good people, the people inside the walls, and bad people, those outside the walls. The good people hold the correct opinions, while the bad people have other opinions, which are all bad. That is as much of the world she needs to know.

As you see with Derb and Taylor, there is a wide range of opinion on the Dissident Right about subjects like race, identity, immigration, race-mixing and diversity. Even the alt-right has a diversity of opinion on these subjects. Calling any of these people “white supremacists” is about the dumbest thing possible, but it is just one of the many scare phrases Lefty has for those outside the walls. Not only are there few, if any, white supremacists on the Dissident Right, there are more than a few non-whites.

The fact is, the Dissident Right, in all its permutations, exists because our Progressive overlords lack the capacity to understand nuance. Take miscegenation, for example. It is a fact of life that some small number of females, of any race, will have a mating preference for males outside their race. Males are far less choosy, as their biology favors the shotgun approach to reproduction, while the female favors the rifle approach. This reality is just salt in the stew of life and if left alone nothing anyone need worry over.

For people in the hive, this is an impossibility. You either completely and totally embrace something, or you completely and entirely reject it. It is why they squeal about homophobia if you are not enthusiastic about the latest perversions. The Progressive mind cannot accept the possibility of being indifferent to something. It is why our television shows and movies are now packed to the gills with race mixing. Even though our rulers live like Klan members, there is no limit to the amount of race mixing they will pack into the culture.

The hive minded also struggle with abstract reasoning. Richard Spencer likes using the concept of an ethnostate to explain his opinions on race and identity. It is a useful way of getting people to break free from the concrete world of the here and now to imagine an alternative ordering. Spencer is not advocating for a new country to be carved out of Canada as a new white homeland. It is a mental model meant to illustrate certain points about race and identity. The hive minded, however, assume he wants a honky homeland.

Diversity is the salt in the stew. Some races like more than others, but no people wish to be overrun by people not like them. The Chinese have always been careful to limit the number of non-Chinese into their lands and limit where they can go in China. Africans tend to murder anyone not in their tribe. Europeans, in contrast, are fine with cosmopolitan cities, where you see lots of diversity, as long as the home team remains in charge and atop the social structure. Like seasoning, diversity works in moderation.

That is the core problem in the modern age. Our rulers lack anything resembling moderation. If a little immigration is good, then they want unlimited immigration. If a few temporary guest workers are good, they want the entire white workforce replaced by helot labor from over the horizon. The vulgarity of having Americans train their foreign replacements at places like Disney is driven by a near total lack of moderation. If one Hindu is good, a whole building full of them will be heaven on earth!

We live in an immoderate age. We saw that in the past election and we are seeing it now in the efforts to craft immigration reform legislation. No one would oppose a small, limited amnesty for some illegal invaders, who have been here for a long time. As long as it comes with tough measures to limit further invasions and protections against future backsliding on the issue. Trump’s wall creates a permanent lobby in Washington in favor of border protection. Programs like e-Verify alter the hiring culture to prevent labor abuse.

The package of proposals from the White House is reasonable and sensible. It is a practical response to a public policy problem. If the compromise includes legalizing a few hundred thousand invaders, a civilized people can accept it. But the people in charge are incapable of moderation, which is why they blew up the talks and are demanding a blanket amnesty with no conditions. Again, the hive minded can only understand the world in binary terms. It is those inside the walls versus those outside the walls.

There is no reasoning with fanatics. As much as many on our side want to believe that practical issues are what is behind the multicultural madness, the fact is the people pushing it are not reasonable people. They are all or nothing people. That is why this cannot end well. The people in charge either succeed in pulling the roof down on the rest of us, or the rest of us are forced to do what is necessary to dislodge the lunatics that have seized the high ground of the culture. Moderation is not the answer to fanaticism.

This will not end well.

Thinking Backward

One of the hardest things to do when thinking about a subject is to start without a desired outcome. Most people start with the end in mind and work backwards, finding supporting evidence or constructing their argument. There is noting wrong with it, just as long as you are willing to change your mind when you stumble upon contradictory data or an alternative argument. That is hard, though, so most people do not do it. Ideologues stubbornly cling to their ideology, because it is easier than confronting their beliefs.

The funny thing is most people do not realize they are thinking backward. Even with the popularization of the term priors by economists, few people bother to examine or even consider that they are working within a moral framework. In fact, most people do not even consider the possibility of there being a moral framework. In America, at least, people who engage in publicize discourse at any level are almost always operating from the assumption they are freely exploring the full range of possible outputs and inputs.

The truth is, Progressives have imposed a moral framework on American public debate and most of their efforts are aimed at maintaining it. The four mortal sins of the modern age are antisemitism, racism, sexism and homophobia. There is nothing rational about these sins. In fact, these crimes have little support in Western history. All of them were cooked up in the 1960’s as the New Left seized control of public institutions. A quick look at Google N-Gram for their frequency in print makes this point quite clearly.

If you could go back in time and retrieve some of the most Progressive thinkers from a century ago, and bring them into the present, they would be baffled by the limitations on modern debate. Teddy Roosevelt would be baffled as to why Jews, blacks and women were even allowed to participate in public debate. The point here is that the moral framework in which we operate as modern Americans is entirely contrived and entirely new. It is as if we have been colonized by a minority cult imposing their alien religion.

Few think much about this as most of us have been born into it, but the way to understand the current troubles and the Dissident Right is to understand this point. Our public debates in the West are not about finding the right trade-offs to arrive at a sensible set of public polices. It is about public piety and defending the dominant moral framework. For example, when a guy like Sargon of Akkad decides to form a new cult based on Civic Nationalism, it is important to focus on what goes unsaid, rather than what he says.

Now, I have covered the limitations of Carl Benjamin in the past, but it is still useful to look through his new cult’s founding principles. What is missing from his laundry list of items, obviously plucked from libertarian forums, is freedom of association. The reason for that omission, and I doubt he thought much about it, is that freedom of association means the freedom to privately discriminate. If you are free to associate with whomever you like, you are free to disassociate with whomever you like, for any reason you like.

For guys like Benjamin and his followers, they have been marinated their whole lives in the morality of the Left. They just assume that private discrimination is immoral and always has been immoral. They assume it to be true in the same way people accept gravity. Even when they think about it, they quickly realize this road leads to heresy, so they change the subject. In the case of Benjamin, he is publicly in favor of laws against private discrimination. He thinks the Christian baker should be compelled to bake the cake.

The amusing thing with libertarians, but also the incoherent liberals like Benjamin, is that they will fly into a rage if you suggest ending abortion or oppose drug legalization. They demand the citizen’s absolute right of dominion over their body. There is one exception. A person is free to fill their body with drugs or hire someone to rip out their unborn child, but they have no right to position their body next to someone else without first getting permission from the state. The irrationality of that position never occurs to them.

The fact is though, individual liberty starts with freedom of association. No one has a right to be around you, which is the fundamental argument underlying the four mortal sins of Progressivism. Blacks have a right to associate with whites. Women have a right to work in your business or join your club. Jews have a right to join your golf club. Homosexuals have a right to be around your kids. Restore freedom of association and all of those conjured rights become irrational and unenforceable. Modern liberalism collapses.

That sort of forward thinking is strictly prohibited, so everyone is forced to think backward, starting with the “Four Isms” and then creating a moral philosophy within those limits. It is not hard to imagine Benjamin sweating over his manifesto, with the image in his mind of a purple faced racist standing in the doorway to block blacks, Jews, gays and women from entering his business. Liberals and libertarians are forced to defend liberty within the increasingly constrained space permitted within the moral framework of Progressivism.

That is the fundamental reason the Dissident Right exists. It is a rejection of that moral framework. The alt-right kids talk about being red-pilled, but what they really mean is they asked themselves something like “why do blacks have a right to be near me?” No one was able to provide an answer, other than “shut up!” What we are seeing is smart young white guys figuring out that the starting point of any sane society must be freedom of association. No one has the right to be around you or have easy access to your culture.

Group identity is the natural outgrowth of personal liberty. If you are free to be around whomever you choose, the group has the same right. If a bunch of libertarians wish to setup a town on libertarian principles and make adherence to those principles a condition of membership, they have the right. If on the other hand, everyone must seek permission to association with others, then there can be no individual liberty of any kind. Places where people must get permission to speak and move are called prisons.