Category Archives: The Resistance

The Cynical Phase

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Note: I have a new post up behind the green door on the move Mr. Jones, which I recommend to those mulling over the current age. Learning about the realities of Soviet communism is a good palliative to those prone to optimism.

The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.

There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the opposite

In time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.

This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how “we’re lurching into socialism” when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.

Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a “radical revolution.” The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.

In other words, a revolution has occurred out of view from the rest of us and now we are seeing the revolutionaries step out of the shadows. This is not a lot different than how Stalin took control of the party and government. He quietly consolidated his hold on the party, while his rivals were thinking the revolution was still ongoing. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.

Now we are in the phase where we get used to the often-bizarre contradictions in the rules being imposed by the new rulers. Some are easy, like the fact that states have put mentally disturbed Jewish men in sundresses in charge of public health. These are ornamental positions, so putting a crazy person in the role allows the governor to display his piety at little cost. Until the Covid hysteria, no one had any reason to know their state had public health officials.

Other bits of the new normal have no explanation. For example, states are now telling people they cannot make noise in their home, as part of the alleged fight against the spread of Covid. In Europe, they are banning the sale of alcohol at certain times, claiming this is to fight Covid. Maybe they believe Covid hates loud noises and people get loud when they drink. It is insane, but it makes more sense than the official explanation, which is no explanation at all.

The lunacy of official policy will not always be humorous. The freedom loving Boris Johnson is now promoting a plan whereby Brits will be issued “freedom passes” if they comply with official edicts on Covid. For a long time, people threw around the word “Orwellian” to mean something they did not like. The English-speaking world is about to learn the real meaning of the term. Getting a freedom pass for doing exactly what the government has instructed is the very definition of Orwellian.

Another part of this phase where we come to terms with the madness of the situation is the acceptance of official silence. In a country with anything resembling an independent media, these officials would be asked to explain their polices. Boris Johnson would be asked about his Orwellian freedom pass scheme. Instead, the media is full of lectures about how we’re all in this together. You see, this is an opportunity to build back better, so you need to embrace this glorious opportunity.

Westerners have been trained for generations to think the media has an adversarial relationship with the government. This will change during this time. We will come to understand what the Soviet citizen understood. The official media is just that, official media promulgating the new lies. It’s value to the people is only in letting us know how to stay out of the camps and in providing a laugh at the absurdity of living in a society based on obvious lies. Everyone becomes a cynic.

That is something else we will learn. Pessimism is not the opposite of optimism. The man who is sure the end is near is really just another type of optimist. He believes that soon, his struggle will come to an end. The opposite of optimism is cynicism. Both the optimist and the pessimist are willing to accept the moral framework as stated. Their actions and understanding of the world are tightly bound by the orthodoxy. Both the optimist and the pessimist give up their agency to faith in the rules that govern them.

The cynic, in the context of an authoritarian society, accepts that there is no inherent logic in the system, other than to insulate those who prosper from their position. The cynic accepts that there is no truth in the system and the outcomes are random, based on the changing desires of the people you interact with in the system. The cynic knows there is no truth in a world of lies, other than his own acceptance of it. It is in this phase we are in now where we learn that you can never be cynical enough.

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Waiting For The Spark

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I was at lunch last week when I overheard a couple of young women talking about the coming revolution. I thought it was a joke, at first, so I eavesdropped for a little while and sure enough, they were talking about revolution. The bossy looking one was going on about something Trump did, I missed that part, and how it was going to be the thing that “woke people up about what’s happening.” My guess is the part I missed had something to do with Russians or maybe the Manafort Trial. The Left is obsessed with that now.

Since the election, the Left has been dreaming up scenarios in which the results of the election are overturned. For a long time they were sure Trump would be impeached, but that seems to have faded. Last year my left-wing office manager was deep into the impeachment scenarios. Now the talk is of revolution, which probably fits better with their conception of themselves as the heroic resistance. They imagine Trump as a strong man, against whom they must resist until the system cracks, and then the revolution begins.

Most of us think of revolution in the sense of people flooding into the streets to protest the government. Either the government makes an error, causing the mob to turn violent or radicals use unrest to foment a full-on revolt. The two models in the Western mind are the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Given the make up of the anti-Trump forces, it’s hard to imagine either scenario. The “resistance” is mostly girls and non-whites prone to committing violence against one another. It’s hard to see them leading a revolt.

There is a another model of revolution, that may be what our current rulers have in mind for us. That is the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong fifty years ago. This was a revolution from above, where the revolutionary elite enlisted the masses at the bottom to purge the middle of bourgeois traitors to the proletariat. Mao purged the party of rivals and then used subsequent protests to advance a lurch into radicalism. The complaints about party leaders and administrators were an excuse to start a cultural revolution.

The most famous aspect of it was the Red Guards. This was a student movement aimed at unleashing “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a deeper and more extensive stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country.” Sinophiles hate the comparison, but this sounds a lot like our billionaire class financing the various radical groups and social justice warriors we see rampaging through the culture today. We are not being sent to the rice paddies yet, but there is still time.

Another point of comparison is the war on the “Four Olds” which were old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. This was both a war on the past, as well as a war on the culture itself. For example, the Red Guards pulled the remains of a Ming dynasty emperor out of his tomb, denounced him and then burned the remains. They went around renaming streets and toppling statues. This should strike a familiar cord. Today’s radicals do the same thing and preach against racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism.

No historical comparison is perfect. Again, Sinophiles really hate the comparison, but people are conservative about what they think they know best. There’s also the fact that Chinese culture is remarkably strong and it was largely able to resist the ten year campaign to obliterate it. American culture appears to be brittle and falling apart under the weight of a fifty year planned invasion of aliens hostile to the founding stock. The Chinese did not fill up their lands with hostile foreigners, armed with a ballot by the ruling class.

On the other hand, there are limits to everything. As the outrages from the Left stack up, the average white person in American grows more angry. Talk to anyone sympathetic to this line of thinking and they will tell you they have grown far less tolerant of their remaining liberal friends. I know I’ve lost touch with quite a few former friends, because I will not tolerate their nonsense. I have friends who just a few years ago thought Ben Shapiro was edgy and now think the alt-right is too soft. There is a reaction brewing in the country.

The question is what would it take to move people from yelling at their televisions over the latest liberal outrage to marching in the streets. This is never easy to know. Sometimes, the smallest spark sets of the biggest fire. The reaction to Alex Jones getting purged from the internet has been surprising, given that he is not a serious person. I got questions from people, who never heard of him until yesterday, angry over his banishment. My guess is the percentage of people thinking fondly of Pinochet is at an all-time high right now.

As far as the spark, a move against Trump is good bet. The glue that keeps things from flying apart right now is middle-class white people, who still have faith in the political system. These are the middle American radicals Sam Francis wrote about 30 years ago during the Reagan moment. They will tolerate just about anything, as long as they think they can fight the other side within the system. An effort to remove Trump or even silence his advocates, could be a spark that gets these people into the streets.

Extra-political efforts to ban guns are another possible spark. The coordinated efforts to cut off gun makers from the financial system is not unnoticed by the 2A people. They follow this stuff and there are a lot of them. The pink pussy hat people think they have numbers because billionaires will bus fifty thousand of them into DC. The NRA could get a million people in the streets if there is ever a real threat to gun rights. A big part of gun culture is the idea of the patriot bravely taking up arms to resist tyranny.

It is tempting to think this will all blow over. I was in the camp until recently. Now, I just don’t see how it will ever be possible to make peace with the Left. They hate us and will use any means necessary.The lack of code is the critical part. How does one make peace with someone that will never abide by the rules? Whether this results in revolution, counter revolution or civil war is hard to know, but the number of people thinking the gap cannot be bridged is growing every day. Now we wait for the Cossak’s wink.

An Immoderate Age

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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, that are all bad. That’s 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 very 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’s 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’s 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’s 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 is 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 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’s behind the multicultural madness, the fact is the people pushing it are not reasonable people. They are all or nothing people. That’s 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.

Let A Thousand Honkies Bloom

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When I was at the American Renaissance conference, the striking thing to me was the number of smart and level headed people I met. Just about everyone I met had some college, read books and was familiar with the Western canon. Not everyone was a scholar, but everyone I met was refreshingly open minded. Even the young guys were genuinely curious about the world and our times. I mentioned to J’Onquarious that it was like an academic conference, except everyone was smart and a heretic.

The fact is though, most everyone there was from the same cultural and philosophical place. If you are a fan of American Nations, the crowd was mostly Midlanders, but there were a good number of people from Yankeedom. If I had to guess, the Tidewater was the third most represented nation. My bet is the least represented region of the country was the Appalachia. I did not quiz all 400 people at the event, but I I have a good ear for American regional accents and I did not hear too many hill people or Southerners.

When I cruise around social media, the one thing that strikes me about the alt-right is its Yankee vibe. It is a very northern honky phenomenon. It’s also a very suburban phenomenon too. I’ve made the point for years that libertarianism was a suburban white boy ideology. Most of the guys calling themselves alt-right grew up in the suburbs and started out in life as libertarians. It’s why the alt-right has a greater focus on the JQ than the race issue or even immigration. Jews are simply more numerous in the North.

America is a big place though and there are lots of places where the bourgeois burgher is the weirdo. You see that with the divide between guys like Hunter Wallace and some of the alt-right people over optics. Posts by Wallace here and here, if you are interested in the topic. The gist of it is the alt-right guys think the Southern Nationalists are embarrassing, because they remind people of the old school Southern racists. The Southern Nationalist think many of the alt-right are LARP’ing poseurs or hypocrites.

The thing with whites in the South and Appalachia is that race and heritage are the towering issues, which is not something people from Yankeedom understand. They won the Civil War and got to impose their culture on everyone else to their satisfaction. People outside of Yankeedom care deeply about preserving their culture, which is a unique subset of America. They are also far less concerned about the JQ stuff, as the only Jews they see are on television. It’s just not an issue for them.

It’s not just a North-South thing. People in the Midwest, the hilariously named “cuck belt”, have their own issues. The effects of globalism probably score higher with them than race or ethnicity. Immigration, on the other hand, is the symbol of globalism and resonates more with honkies in Ohio, than with alt-right guys in New York. It’s in the Midwest where the sense of alienation is strongest. Popular culture, politics, and economics are controlled by people who no longer look familiar to the average white Midwesterner.

Of course, the West and Southwest are ground zero for immigration. It’s not an accident that the three most important voices on the issue are based in California. Steve Sailer, Victor David Hanson and Mickey Kaus are Californians. If you have spent your life in Los Angeles, race is not an issue that concerns you. Immigration, on the other hand, is all consuming. It is the most important issue in California politics for over three decades. The same is true to a lesser degree all over the West and Southwest.

The reality is that the emerging identity politics will inevitably have a regional character to it. It’s also going to have a class character. Richard Spencer gets some grief for being a snob, but he’s just a guy from the gentry class. Steve Sailer is white bread middle-class, because he is from the white bread middle class. The Southern Nationalists are going to be working class guys. America has never had a rigid class system, but class still exists and every American is a product of their social class to some degree.

The point of this is that we are on the cusp of a new era. We have had identity politics for a long time, but whites have not been a part of it. That’s changing as the nation’s demographics change. Even as we lurch into majority-minority status, America is a big country with lots of regional differences. It is a land of nations, with unique local cultures, that persist despite the efforts at homogenization. The white identity that emerges will reflect the local culture. That’s just going to be another feature of the new America.

That means the people talking about this stuff will have to respect this reality in order to understand it. More important, the guys into the advocacy side of things are going to have respect the fact that what works for them may not work everywhere. There’s also the fact that cultural movements are inevitably lots of trial and error. Like memes that go viral on-line, for every good protest idea there are thousands that fizzle. In the fullness of time, these regional white identity groups will figure out what works for them or they go away.

We live in an age of firsts. We are the first country to be ruled over by people desperately trying to commit cultural and demographic suicide. We are the first people, with a significant element that celebrates the extinction of our race. These are events so outside the norm of human history, there are no examples in the past to rely upon for guidance and solutions. No one knows what a majority-minority America will be like. No one knows if it is sustainable. What’s coming this century is entirely new.

Let a thousand honkies bloom.

The Deadend Men

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When I was a young man, starting out in the world, I took a graduate class on proto-Marxism. I was just a freshman, but the professor was satisfied that I could handle the material, so I was waved into the class. My main interest in taking the class was to get a look at real communists. The Cold War was in its denouement, so I thought I’d better get a look at some real Marxists before the whole thing collapsed into a carnival of finger pointing and embarrassment. It was one of the best courses I had in college.

The two big lessons I carried away were that ideologues always believe their thing transcends time and space. They cannot imagine that there will be a time when their tool set of ideas is no longer relevant. The other thing that seemed obvious, is that observable reality is not enough to shake someone from their ideology. The professor was well aware of the problems inherent in Marxism, but he had committed his life to it. To abandon Marxism, to even seriously question it, would be like erasing himself from life.

I’m reminded of that every time I scan conservative sites like National Review, the Federalist or even The American Conservative. They continue to talk about what they call conservatism as if it is a timeless set of truisms that are universally applicable. The fact that the conservatives of today would have been viewed as alien weirdos by the conservatives of just 30 years ago, is completely lost on them. The fact that the world is an entirely different place than 30 years ago goes unnoticed.

Read a post like this one from National Review, and the thing that jumps out is the fact that these guys still don’t know what’s happening to them. Conservatives have convinced themselves that Trump is Nixon and the current tumult is just a replay of the years between LBJ and Reagan. Rather than look at what is happening in the world, they are treating this period as an interregnum. The Progressive tide that peaked with Obama is receding. Next comes the conservative wave to carry them to the promised land.

There’s no mention of immigration or the changing demographics of America in the article, so that means there is no mention of race either. Look through the source document and it reads like a policy paper put out by people who have been asleep for the last 30 years. It also is written in the grad school jargon that sounds convincing to men who have had no exposure to the dreaded private sector. Apparently, conservatives are convinced that the “way forward” for their thing is to pretend that nothing has changed since 1988.

Conservatives keep getting up on the same horse, an image of Reagan on their shield, prepared to dash into the nearest food co-op, in the name of ordered liberty. The fact that the food co-op closed down years ago and their horse and shield are paid for by a 501(c)(3) tax shelter, supported by a billionaire oligarch, makes no difference. Even the fact that their trusty side kick, the libertarian Sancho Panza, is now hanging out on Gab, posting identitarian and Pepe memes, has had no effect on them.

When Prophecy Fails is a classic work of social psychology, from which we get the concept of cognitive dissonance. It is the study of a UFO cult in the 1950’s led by a charismatic named Dorothy Martin. She predicted the end of the world would occur on December 21, 1954. That did not happen, obviously. The study is about how the group handled this reality. One of their observations is that the group drew closer together and became more committed. They even began to proselytize about their beliefs being correct.

Conservatives seem to be going through something similar. They went into the final years of the Obama presidency with a narrative about how the next phase of their thing would unfold. Their “principles” said they needed to embrace multiculturalism, globalism and open borders. That was the future. Then Trump came along running on the exact opposite of those things. His victory was the nullification of the narrative. Instead of accepting it, they seem to be committing themselves to an renewed version of the narrative.

It’s tempting to write off Conservative Inc as just a bunch of cynical grifters. There’s certainly an element of that to it. Guys like Jonah Goldberg are living one percent lifestyles peddling outdated nostrums and ideological nostalgia. Most, maybe even all of them, don’t see themselves as useful idiots of the donor class. They really believe the conservative jibber-jabber. They think the world has not changed a bit and it is the same old fights over the same old issues. All they need to do is repeat the magic words one more time.

Conservatives, like the dinosaurs seeing the comet streaking across the sky, do not understand what is happening to them. Even as the signs of change become more obvious, they cling to the old ideology. They have a lot in common with those old Marxists of the previous generation. Even when the futility of Cold War conservatism is explained to them, they just can’t accept it. To accept that politics and economics are downstream from culture, means erasing themselves from the ideological map. They just can’t do it.

So, it will be done for them.

Mencken Club Diary Part II

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There were three reasons I decided to attend Mencken. One was just curiosity. I’ve been a reader of Paul Gottfried since I was a kid, so I was curious about the sort of people who follow his work. I also wanted to meet Derb again. I’ve been a big fan of his for decades now. I also wanted to hear his views on the alt-right. He was part of a panel devoted to that topic on Saturday. Of course, the normal social stuff was a motivation, as well. You always end up meeting fellow travelers at these sorts of things.

The session on the alt-right is what I was most interested in seeing. John Derbyshire is one of the few in the older generation who seem to get that the alt-right is not a club or even a defined movement. At this point, it is mostly a collection of aspirations, observations and critiques. The second speaker was Keith Preston, who was unknown to me. I was very interested in what Professor Gottfied had to say about the alt-right. He has spent his life in right-wing politics and philosophy so his opinion is important.

John was first up and he used The Dork Tard’s 16-points blog post as the framework for his talk. He made the point that Dork is by no means the leader of the alt-right or the voice of it, but a representative sample that is useful for analyzing the movement. His comments about item number eight were laugh out loud funny, to the empirically minded. What John was doing was introducing the general ideas of the alt-right to a crowd that is not spending their evenings in the meme war. He did a good job presenting the broad strokes.

The next guy up was Keith Preston and I think it is fair to say he is not a fan of the alt-right, but he is not dismissing it either. He took some shots at some of the crazier elements flying the flag, but he gave a good long overview of all the different groups that get lumped into the category alt-right. Preston reminds me of Fred Reed, before Fred went crazy. There is an almost forgotten tradition of Southern populist skepticism that works very well when critiquing political ideologies. As a result, his review of the alt-right was well done.

The final speaker was Professor Gottfried. His talk was interesting for a number of reasons. One is he does not like Richard Spencer very much. He thinks Spencer is just playing make believe and is a bundle of unforced errors. He also said Spencer hates working class people. This is not the first time I’ve heard someone say some version of this. Gottfied did not say it, but the accusation is that Spencer is a dilettante. Having been around enough trust fund guys, I get why people think that, but I don’t share that opinion.

Gottfried’s main theme about the alt-right is that they are not well run and not good at presenting themselves on main stream media outlets. He used, as an example, someone who either writes for Spencer now or used to write for him. Gottfried said the guy was a racist and therefore an embarrassment. He got quite worked up over this point and said you can’t have a political movement without moral standards. Purging racists should be the absolute minimum standard for any political movement.

Gottfried is trying to replay the purges that landed him and the rest of the paleocons outside the institutions. He wants a do over. That’s something you hear from the older crowd a lot and I understand it. There’s a lot of bitterness as to how things played out in conservative politics over the last half century. I don’t blame a guy like Gottfried for looking at a guy like Jonah Goldberg with contempt. Gottfried wrote the book on fascism, but Goldberg got rich off the crackpot idea that Progressives are the real Nazis.

The truth of the matter though, is mainstream conservatism failed to conserve anything, other than the some well paid positions in Progressive media. The reason is they lost the culture war. In the 1960’s, when the Progressives decided to finish what they started in the 1860’s, the Official Right buckled. Instead of fighting to the last man, they agreed to the new moral paradigm, with regards to human relations, that the Left wanted to impose on the rest of the country. When racism became a sin, conservatism became one two.

That’s what the paleos don’t get. There’s no stopping the white replacement project and the systematic erasure of our culture, until the Progressive moral framework is brought crashing down. I’m no spring chicken, but I fully endorse the youthful antics employed by the alt-right. Putting up posters like Identity Europa does on college campuses, helps build a counter culture and draw in young people. The ad hoc guerrilla marketing campaign of placing “It’s OK To Be White” signs is lethal to the people in charge.

Sure, some of it backfires. Despite what anyone says, Charlottesville was a clusterfuck for all involved. In this sort of movement though, you have to take risks and accept some losses. Let’s also not forget that Charlottesville is why the Hispanic KKK ran that hilariously stupid ad in the Virginia governor’s race. It’s not always easy to know if an action worked. Going off the hot takes of Sean Hannity is a good way to keep losing, like the generation of paleos now carping about the alt-right.

One of the crazier things Gottfried said, is that the alt-right is creating a war between whites, when it is claiming to defend whites. He then went onto say that the reason things are such a mess in America is that Christians did it to themselves. I’m a heretic on the JQ issue, but man, that was hard to take. Anyone vaguely familiar with the arguments of the alt-right would know exactly what the response would be to that. I’ll just say it is an example of the vast cultural divide between the Old Right and the alt-right upstarts.

I have a lot of respect for guys like Paul Gottfried, so this should not be read as a condemnation of him or the paleocons. I think in the fullness of time, they will be remembered fondly for having kept the fires burning, despite having been un-personed by the Buckleyites and neocons. The alt-right owes everything to these old guys, even though many of them made the trip from libertarianism. Richard Spencer got his start because of guys like Gottfried and Taki Theodoracopulos,

The difference is the new guys categorically reject the current moral order. If that upsets the Fox New types, so be it. Politics is a pointless enterprise, if rooting for your own team is expressly forbidden. Taking over institutions does nothing, if the price is embracing the morality of the Left. The Old Right always defined itself as defending the existing culture and institutions. That made sense when those things were worth defending. Today, those things are a cancer on our people. They must be replaced or we will be replaced.

Mencken Club Diary Part I

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I got to the hotel hosting the Mencken event a little early, so I went to the bar to have a beer and kill some time. This was my first Mencken event and I was having second thoughts about the whole thing. I figured it would be an older crowd, which is fine, but I suspected it would a very libertarian crowd too. I don’t have a lot of patience for libertarians, under the best of circumstances. It had been a very busy week for me so I was especially cranky and I feared I would be something less than my charming self.

As I had my second beer, I was thinking about how best to say “the non-aggression principle is for pussies.” I noticed a middle-aged women at the other end of the bar. She had been at a table, tapping away on her tablet. She relocated to the bar and was making an effort to get my attention. She was sporting a Mao cap, which is popular with cat ladies, so I ignored her, had another beer and played with my phone. Maybe if she had been better looking or I had a few more drinks in me, I would have done her the favor.

The reception was a little like God’s waiting room, assuming the Jews really are the chosen people. The room was old and very Jewish. There was a youngish guy over in the corner, who looked relieved to see me walk in, as that meant there were two people in the room paying FICA taxes. We chatted for a wile and I learned he is a devout libertarian and came to the Mencken event primarily to see Tom Woods. He seemed earnest, so I resisted the temptation to tell him about my plan to send libertarians to work camps.

The formal reception was a sit-down affair with a dinner and drinks. I was relieved to meet some younger people, who share my politics. They were mostly millennials, but one guy was gen X. We were the kiddie table. Keith Preston was at our table and he is an interesting guy. I don’t share his politics, but he is not one of those doctrinaire ideologues, who thinks he has figured it all out and now has to spread the gospel. He’s genuinely curious about what’s going on in the dissident right. He’s a good dinner companion.

That is the value of these events. Going back and forth with strangers using fake names on-line has its value, but meeting and talking in real life has value too. I only had some vague notion about Preston, based entirely on his site. Chatting over dinner and then hearing him speak, I now have a new appreciation for what he is doing. At the same time, I saw him nodding more than a few times as I was making my case for the new counter culture. If not for sitting at the same table, we would remain strangers to one another.

Another big benefit to these things is that you find out that there are more of us out there than is reported. Two of the guys at the kiddie table are college professors. Another is an attorney at a big firm. I know from the comments here, and the e-mails I receive, that a lot men in the professional ranks are “our guys” but they keep quiet about it. That’s a necessary thing, but it also means it is easy to feel like a stranger in the world. Having dinner with a gang of smart, like minded professionals is an antidote to the sense of doom.

At the same time, spending time with a bunch of old guys is an eye opener. Most of us experience our politics on-line, through blogs, social media and videos. The people at the Mencken event experience their politics from network news, the cable chat shows and paper magazines. A lot of what we take for granted, they don’t know exists. What they do know about the emerging counter culture, they don’t fully understand. It’s not simply an age thing. Its that there is a necessary bit of self-ghettoization on out side.

Age is a part of though. Paul Gottfried kicked off the evening with a speech about the state of the Right. He made the point that the average age of Fox News viewers is 60-something and National Reviews readership is around 70. Then he made the error of assuming that reflects the demographics of the Right. The fact is, Stefan Molyneux has vastly more resonance with people under the age of 50 than a Sean Hannity. Sites like 4chan and Reddit have greater political reach than all of the cable shows combined.

Tom Woods, the featured speaker of the night, actually tried to make that point. He talked about how he has built a business on new media, but I don’t think he won any of them over. He also spent a lot of time trying to differentiate between left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism. There’s always been warm relations between paleos and Rand Paul style libertarians and he was well received by the Mencken folks. He’s a good speaker, so I did not run out of the room screaming, even though the whole thing had a 1980’s vibe to it.

Finally, the most important benefit to attending these real life gatherings is that you get to socialize with other like minded people. The kiddie table ended up in the bar, drinking and telling stories. I learned that one of the college professors is connected with a bunch of people in this thing. I also learned that a couple of the others are readers. That’s always an interesting experience for me. I often forget that real people read this stuff. For me at least, the camaraderie and brotherhood is motivating. It gives purpose to my efforts.

I’ll get into the event itself in another post, but people in dissident politics should begin to embrace these events. Co-opting existing institutions is how the New Left won the culture war 50 years ago. It’s a good model to follow. If alt-right people start populating local clubs and organizations, even If it is in a low key way, it helps build the movement. The first step is meeting people at events like Mencken. Two of the guys at my table are local to me, so now we can socialize and conspire locally. That’s how movements grow.

Christianity, Patriotism and The Alt-Right

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Can you be a Christian and Alt-Right?

That’s a question the TRS guys were debating the other day. It comes up a lot, mostly because the leading lights in dissident politics are not religious. Some appear to be outright atheists, even if they don’t make a big deal out of it. Of the old guys, I can’t think of any who are Evangelical. Most were Protestants, but have long ago drifted from their churches. I don’t think any of the next generation are religious. Some grew up going to church, but abandoned it as soon as they left home.

The thing with the Gen X and Millennial leaders of the alt-right is most of them are disinterested in religion and its role in human society. It’s not something that occupies space in their mental framework. Just because the leadership and intellectual elements of the alt-right are non-religious, it does not necessarily follow that the alt-right is hostile to the religious. They spent their youth marinating in Progressive dogma and as a result, they see culture through a secular lens, rather than a spiritual one.

There’s a lot more to this so there will be many more posts on the topic, but a good point of entry is the simple question at the start of the post. The alt-right makes race the primary identity. Christians, and I’m thinking primarily of non-denominational Christians, place their relationship with Jesus Christ as their primary identity. That’s an obvious conflict, as nothing in Scripture backs the primary arguments of the alt-right. Even the most expansive reading of Scripture cannot arrive at a pro-white position.

There’s also the fact that many Christians are fanatical supporters of Israel. They have incorporated unconditional support for the state of Israel with their Christian identity. That often extends to Jews in the United states. For many Christians, antisemitism is the worst sin imaginable. That’s an obvious problem with the alt-right. Then there is the egalitarianism that many Christians have internalized as part of their relationship with Jesus Christ. They believe they are called to treat all men as children of God.

None of this is necessarily a deal breaker for Christians and the alt-right, but it creates some rather obvious complications. What it means is the alt-right is going to have to get better at understanding how to talk to and appeal to this type of Christian. Simply making the pro-white argument is not going to have much appeal to people who root their identity in something that transcends race. The alt-right, if it is going to make inroads into the Christian community, is going to have figure out how to engage these folks on their terms.

What about Patriotism?

Strangely, the alt-right may have an easier time engaging with Christians, than the hard core Civic Nationalists. Christians have been oppressed in American for generations and they have learned the hard way that they cannot vote themselves to freedom. That’s not the case with Civic Nationalists. The narcotic of patriotism keeps them forever optimistic that one more election and the nation will return to the 1950’s, except with a lot more brown people, who magically embrace white middle-class sensibilities.

As with Christians, the folks listening to Glenn Beck or Ben Shapiro, as they drive around suburbia, root their identity in something that transcends race and ethnicity. Civic nationalism is a religion and a primary identity. They are Americans, no hyphen. More important, these people look at things like taxes and regulation as primary markers of fidelity to their civic religion. To them, guys like Richard Spencer sound like communists, because he doesn’t seem to care all that much about tax cuts or regulatory reform.

The thing is, the patriotic normie is sure he is working from facts and reason when investing all of his energy into the current political arrangements. In reality, gentry conservatism and libertarianism are a different implementation of the Progressive moral frame work. The ends are different, but the assumptions are the same. You don’t talk people out of their moral sensibilities with facts and reason. In order to sway patriotic normies, the alt-right is going to have to appeal to them in moral terms.

Most of the alt-right seems to think this is a self-resolving problem. Mass immigration and the war on white people will beat the patriotism out of these people. They will inevitably come to accept identity politics. Maybe, but it would be preferable to win over these people before America becomes Brazil. At that point it may not matter. The alt-right is going to have to think about how to offer something to these folks that rivals the narcotic power of flag waving patriotism. That means constructive engagement, rather than mockery.

These are just two facets to a very big topic. Racial politics in America has always been about the two sides of white America debating how to best deal with the blacks. That’s made identity politics two dimensional. In order to move past that, it means creating an alternative moral framework. That cannot be conjured from thin air. It must happen in relation to and in reaction to the current claims on the identity of whites. The alt-right will have to be reconciled with religion and patriotism, or it will fail.

The Future of White Nationalism

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At American Renaissance, I was introduced to an old guy from VDare, who seemed to experience the world strictly through the search functions of his phone. Someone told him about my site and the first thing he did was search for the site name and “white nationalism” to see if I had opinions on the subject. His first hit was a post where I called white nationalism the dumbest thing going. He tried giving me the business about it and I gave it right back to him. I will forever be off the VDare Solstice card list as a result.

In fairness to him, he was a good sport about it. In fairness to me, my criticism of white nationalism is mostly about aesthetics. The term is not a new one. That means it comes with baggage and that baggage is not easily overcome. When most Americans hear “white nationalism” they think of snaggle-toothed rustics, wearing wife beaters and jorts, complaining about the coloreds. Getting modern whites to overcome the cult of anti-racism is hard under ideal conditions. Having Cletus as your sales rep makes it impossible.

That’s something the white identity people need to accept. For generations, Progressives have tightly associated racism with the South. The good white/bad white thing that John Derbyshire discusses is based entirely on this image. Bad whites shop at Walmart, like domestic beer and hate black people. Despite the fact that blacks have been moving back to the Old Confederacy for decades, black culture holds that the South is still aggressively racist. It’s at the core of the statue toppling and confederate flag burning manias.

Even if you can somehow get past the image problem, white nationalism is not some new concept developed by the alt-right. It has a history and it has a lot of veterans of its prior iterations. Those people are still kicking around. The web site Storm Front, in addition to being an FBI honey trap, is the home of the old White Nationalist guys, who used to follow guys like David Duke. If you borrow the language and symbols of these guys, you are inviting them and their ideas into your new version of white nationalism.

There are two problems with this. One is many of these guys were not the best people or the most stable people. Stepping way outside the moral framework is never easy, but it is a lot easier if you’re crazy. It’s also easier if you have nutty ideas that no one takes too seriously. Even the most generous evaluation of White Nationalism 1.0 says it was mostly a reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. It never came up with a plausible way forward politically or culturally. It was mostly old racists who just liked to complain.

Again, even if you manage to rehabilitate the language and symbols, you can’t get past the fact that prior efforts were a failure. A pretty good rule of life is that failure is assured if you follow in the footsteps of previous failures. It’s why adopting Nazi symbols is stupid. The Third Reich was most notable for being a disastrous failure. Associating your thing with failure is just bad marketing. It also tends to attract people who find some sort of satisfaction in losing. New Movements need need language and new symbols.

Putting all of that aside, prior iterations of white nationalism always suffered from the fact they were reactionary. At their very best, they could only offer a critique of the prevailing order. They had nothing to offer as an alternative, beyond demands to wind the clock backwards. Reactionary movements always fail in the long run for the simple reason that yesterday can never follow tomorrow. Even if everyone agrees the current arrangements are not working, what comes next is never a return to the old order.

There’s something else that prior white nationalists movements never got right. They assumed that a majority white nation was a given. If they could just get a majority of whites on their side, they would win the political battles over race. America is 70% white at the last census and will be majority-minority in a few decades. The issue today is not about keeping America white. That horse has left the barn. The question before us today is how whites will survive as a minority population in a majority-minority country.

That means the math is not about 50% plus one. Whatever comes to define white identity in the age of identity politics will have to appeal to and serve the interests of the vast majority of whites. That can’t just be a visceral hatred of non-whites. Whites in America are mostly from west of the Hajnal line, which means low clannishness. Old fashioned tribal signalling against the next tribe is not going to work. What comes next has to be an ideology that promotes a positive identity offering a promising future.

That’s probably the most encouraging thing to come out of the Charlottesville protest over the summer. The people involved began to appreciate the need to build new symbols and use new language. Even guys like Andrew Anglin are pushing his people to drop the Hitler images, beyond obviously satirical stuff. Mockery of taboos and irreverence for social norms has a place, but it can’t be the focus of a political movement, if it is going to draw in the skeptical. The white identity people seem to get that now.

The irony here is the New Left went through a similar problem. Before they were able to start the cultural revolution, they existed as an ad hoc counter-culture. The old commies from the CP-USA days tried to glom onto it, but the new radicals correctly saw that as a bad idea. They eventually purged their ranks of the old guys and their old ideas. Now, the cultural movement that seeks to destroy the New Left and the Baby Boomer culture is going through a similar process as it organizes itself.

Myths Die Slowly

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Back in the summer, I was riding with a friend, up the north shore of Massachusetts, and we were talking about Trump and the alt-right. My friend is not into my type of politics. He remains a generic conservative, the sort who thinks Ben Shapiro is great and Gavin McInnes is edgy. I don’t fault him for it. Most white people are in that camp, unless they are a Progressive. The Dissident Right is still small and the alt-right is even smaller. The tide is running our way, but it has a long way to go before we have big numbers.

Anyway, one of the things we discussed was what Trump could or would do regarding the big issues. My buddy truly believes that all that needs doing is to cut taxes, cut spending and crack down on illegal immigration. Then America will begin to look like the 1980’s again. He was a bit surprised when I told him that I disagreed. To be honest, I was a bit turned off by his optimism. The truth is, these guys stubbornly cling to the old ideas and old politics. We need to turn them, but it will not be easy. They won’t let go easily.

That is the biggest challenge facing the Dissident Right and it is a massive challenge for the alt-right. White people in America have been marinating, for their whole lives, in the stew of multiculturalism and the conventional conservative reaction. They still view the world through the lens of the Cold War. That means accepting the Left’s moral framework, while longing for the Right’s promised ends. The result is a collection of American myths that our people stubbornly embrace, despite the evidence.

The biggest one is probably the fetish over the Constitution. The people who love Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck are the best example. They talk about the Constitution like it is a holy relic. It is their magic talisman. They are sure that all we need is a majority of Constitutional Conservatives on the bench and more of them in Congress. When you point out that the Constitution currently requires Christian bakers to celebrate homosexual weddings, they dismiss this as if it is a lie. They just can’t let go of the dream.

These are usually the same people who go on about our Judeo-Christian principles. There is no such thing. It is just something nice white people thought was a good thing to say, so the Jews would feel included. Jews think the idea is ridiculous and very conservative Jews find it insulting. The formulation gained popularity in the Eisenhower years, probably in reaction to the Holocaust. Despite the ridiculousness of it, most constitutional conservatives are convinced America is built on Judeo-Christian values.

The great black hope is another one of those myths that conservative whites cannot let go of, even after eight years of Obama. For example, the mulatto meathead, Dwayne Johnson, was saying nice things about generic conservatives for a while last spring. This set off a round of hero worship in Conservative Inc. National Review did a special issue on him. Most whites still believe the dream of racial harmony, so gaining the approval of a guy like Sheriff Clark or a Dwayne Johnson is like being blessed by the Pope.

This is because whites largely accept the blank slate egalitarianism the Progs have been preaching for the last half century. White people are so afraid of being condemned as racist, they will believe just about anything to avoid it. The most hard boiled right-winger will break out in hives when race is mentioned. The insist that all blacks need to do is act like middle-class white people. It’s why they carry guys like Sheriff Clark and Allen West around as conquering heroes. Whites still cling to the myth of egalitarianism.

This spills over into the immigration debate. Listen to the garden variety talk radio conservative and they will fall all over themselves praising legal immigration. They completely buy in the myth of the propositional nation. They don’t always use that language, but they accept it. Whites may not think all people are the same, but they think they can be the same. Therefore, the non-whites wishing to settle in America can prove this by following the rules, like a white person would. It’s Magic Rule Theory.

Many alt-right people like to flatter themselves by insisting that the JQ is the hardest red pill to swallow, but in reality, patriotism is the toughest. People can accept that blacks are incapable of living with whites. People can even buy off on the idea that Jews have a disproportionate influence on society and maybe that’s not a good thing. The one thing you cannot get anyone to accept is that patriotism is anything but an honorable quality. If you dare question the idea, whites will condemn you as a some sort of commie.

That’s the biggest challenge for the alt-right. They don’t couch it in these terms, but theirs is a post-national movement. Their brand of identity politics puts racial identity ahead of all other group loyalties. That includes what Americans call patriotism. If the black NFL players all stand this week, hands over hearts, singing the anthem, whites around America will be sobbing and hugging one another like it is the rapture. Talking Americans out of this sort of over the top love of country is the great challenge for the alt-right.

Beliefs and customs have a way of transforming into something different when they lose their salience. Many conservative whites have started to abandon their party loyalty, realizing it was a sham. Increasing numbers of whites are coming to terms with the realities of race. Still, they do so with the hope that, with some tweaking, the republic can be set right again. Maybe that’s the process. We’re now seeing more people talk openly about ending immigration entirely. That’s a big step for white people.

The fact is, things like patriotism and a love for ordered liberty are features of white Americans, not bugs. Most whites get that and will stubbornly cling to those ideas, even when they are an impediment to preserving civilization. Sacred beliefs don’t go away without a fight. it does not happen after one speech or one good YouTube video. The great challenge for the insurgency is to re-purpose these attributes toward better ends. Appeals to people’s better natures always works better than challenging their deeply held beliefs.