Category Archives: The Resistance

Why Conservatism Died

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I read Tyler Cowen’s blog a couple of times a week, despite the fact he banned me from his site. I mostly skim the comments looking for familiar names. There are a handful of commenters there that post interesting responses. Cowen is not all that interesting. He’s Thomas Friedman without the mega-rich wife. Here’s Friedman’s wife’s home, in which she permits him to live. Banal rump-swabbery pays well, but not as well as marrying the daughter of a billionaire, so Cowen remains a junior rump-swab.

Looking for material, I stumbled upon this in Cowen’s links. It’s not a very interesting article, so don’t bother reading it. What is interesting is the author is a guy named Reihan Salam and he wants to reorganize American politics to be more like some place not called America, perhaps his home country of Bangladesh. Proportional representation has always been antithetical to the American creed, because it breeds the sort of tribalism and sectarianism a continental sized country can never afford.

One of the reasons many of us gave up on conventional politics is that in the mainstream, guys with weird, unpronounceable names, from foreign lands keep demanding we change our country to suit their needs. That would be tolerable if the response was “shut up and learn how to be Americans.” Instead, the political class goes out of its way to celebrate these people. Our rulers make it clear that the opinions of newly arrived boat people count for more than the opinions of the natives, who made the country possible.

Putting aside my justifiable xenophobia, take a look at Salam’s biography.

Salam was born in Brooklyn. His parents are Bangladeshi-born immigrants who arrived in New York in 1976; his father is an accountant and his mother is a dietician. Salam attended Stuyvesant High School and Cornell University before transferring to Harvard University, where he was a member of the Signet Society and lived in Pforzheimer House. He graduated from Harvard in 2001 with a degree in Social Studies.

Everything sounds like an American success story until that last line. What we have is a classic example of how the affirmative action game is played at the highest levels. Most likely he went into Cornell through the agricultural college, which has much lower admissions standards. He then transferred into Harvard because he ticked the right boxes and was placed into a nonsense track like social studies. Barak Obama was at least able to pass the bar. Salam has yet to prove he can stock shelves at a grocery store.

That’s not the worst of it. According to his bio, “Salam has been described as Literary Brooklyn’s Favorite Conservative. He has written that he intends to pump ideas into the bloodstream of American conservatism”. If there is any question about the dullness of Reihan Salam, it is answered right there. Conservatism, by definition, is the rejection of exactly what he claims as his goal. Conservatism, allegedly, is not about chasing the latest fads or ideas. It is the preservation of the proven and the traditional.

That’s not the worst of it. Again, according to his bio, “He believes it is “racist” for people to date only those of their own race.” Everyone knows that a cornerstone of conservatism is race mixing. Of course, that’s a requirement to get invited to the “right-wing” platforms on which he regularly performs. Salam is a regular on Slate, Vice, NPR, The Bill Maher Show, Chris Mathews Show and The Colbert Report. He also writes for National Review when he is not too busy with all of his other media ventures.

You can certainly see why Salam is Brooklyn’s favorite conservative. He’s a regular on all of their favorite shows and writes for their favorite publications. He even holds most of their favorite opinions. If you were one of those ridiculous racists who thinks words have meaning, you would erroneously think that Salam is just playing a well crafted role as the house broken conservative. That would be ridiculous. Salam is a conservative in the tradition of Bill Buckley and Ronald Reagan. What sort of bigot are you?

Obviously, Reihan Salam is just another guy working the Conservative Inc hustle. His utility lies entirely in the fact he has brown skin and a weird name. Instead of being an ornament on the ankle bracelet of Elizabeth Warren, he is a token on the charm bracelet of Rich Lowry. Even so, he is always ready to better deal himself and become a full-throated Progressive if there is a well paid opening. For now, he’s perfectly willing to convince people that today’s Progressive lunacy is tomorrow’s conservative dogma.

It’s why Conservatism is dead. It’s not just that they outsourced their movement to Asian migrants. It’s that they stopped being serious. They turned their thing into a parlor game, where they play a role the Left designed for them. Instead of being in opposition to the Left, they have embraced the morality of the Left, in order to party with the Left. If the public leaders of conservatism prefer to hang around degenerates like Bill Maher, rather than fight for the causes they claim to champion, why would anyone follow them?

The Colony

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Many on the alt-right make references to Weimar Germany and the rise of the NSDAP under Hitler. The Richard Spencer wing is particularly fond of Nazi aesthetics, the haircuts being the most obvious example. Part of it, of course, is owning the insult. If they are going to be called Nazis, they may as well own it. This is a time honored way of signalling a rejection of the prevailing morality. If you are going to be called a dirty hippy, you may as well grow your beard and stop bathing. The alt-right is doing the same thing.

It goes much further than simply adopting the Nazi aesthetics, though. Richard Spencer is fond of drawing comparisons between his thing and the rise of the Nazis in Weimar Germany. He’s not alone. Ryan Landry works from the “Weimerica” motif, in his blogging and his Daily Caller posts. The popular blogger, Brett Stevens, does a lot of this too. The alt-right is not in favor of invading the Sudetenland or partitioning Poland, but they think Weimar Germany is a good analog to the modern US.

I don’t think it works, though. Germany after the Great War was exhausted in every measurable way. It was not just cultural exhaustion. That was certainly part of it, but the heart of Europe was leveled by war. By the end, civilians on both sides were lacking in the necessities of life. The economic base was destroyed. The political classes and social classes were in ruins. Not since The Thirty Years War had Europe been so completely devastated. That does not compare with modern America or even modern Europe.

The utility of such a comparison is mostly on the economic front. Modern America is not suffering from wholesale price inflation due to money printing. We are, however, suffering from asset inflation. The value of homes and businesses, particularly publicly traded companies, has skyrocketed across the West. This is showing up in home owner rates, as young people are finding it hard to buy a home. As Steve Sailer pointed out, affordable family formation is at the heart of what ails modern America.

There’s also the unfathomable public debt. It is not just public debt. Private debt is at record levels and showing no signs of cresting. In fact, it is reasonable to say the world is entirely fueled by debt now. It was the German decision to fund their war effort with debt that led to the economic catastrophe following the war. It was debt that allowed them to make one disastrous decision after another, taking on more risk in a hope of winning a final victory over the Allies, and reaping the benefits of that victory.

The critical missing ingredient, though, is the massive cost of war. America can, if she is inclined, scale back the military-industrial complex, withdraw from policing the barbarian lands and stop playing big brother to Europe. America has good options for averting disaster and no one is dictating policy to us. German after the war had nothing but bad options and the Allies were doing everything possible to maximize the suffering. The soil in which the Nazis blossomed was vastly worse than what is birthing the alt-right today.

A better analogy may be Ireland under British rule or the British Raj. The resistance movements that evolved in those countries were not the result of desperation or a political void. The British, while no one’s idea of generous colonizers, were not ruthless conquerors either. Compared to other European countries, the Brits were sensible and humane administrators. They tried to work with local elites to maintain order. More than a few Indians, for example, were sent to England to be educated and trained.

Even so, they were still foreigners and the natives, like all people, chaffed at being ruled by foreigners. It is a truth of life that most people would rather be ruled by a tyrant from their own tribe than a benevolent king from a foreign tribe.The Irish and the Indians were no different. They wanted the British gone, despite the fact that the Brits were the best thing to happen to them. These nationalists were not motivated by the chaos of cultural collapse. They were motivated by a positive love of their people and their culture.

That’s what makes these nationalist movements a better analogs for what is going on in the West. The people signing onto populist and nationalist movements are not doing so because the state has failed. Ours is not an age of economic dislocation and political chaos. No one is going hungry or being thrown into the streets. What’s motivating these populist revolts is that the people who rule over us are no longer like us. They feel like foreigners, who have no regard for local customs and traditions.

Another reason these are better analogies is the Hindus and Irish were successful, long term movements that brought with them a widespread cultural component. The Nazis, in contrast, were losers whose legacy still haunts the West to this day. Emulating the tactics and philosophy of the Nazis is a good way to follow them into the dustbin of history. It may be a fun taunt, given the nature of the people who rule over us, but in the end, cheap taunts are not going to overthrow colonial rule. Only a legitimate counter culture can do it.

Steve Bannon famously said, “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken.” This is a long war. The alt-right would be wise to think about how to win a long, low grade culture war. That means building up the intellectual and cultural side, while also systematically throwing sand in the gears of the colonial machine. The path to victory is to make neo-liberalism too expensive to maintain and too unappealing to support. Think Michael Collins, not Joseph Goebbels.

The Servile State

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A century ago, Hilaire Belloc wrote in the The Servile State¹ that attempts to reform capitalism will lead to an economy in which the state dictates that certain people will work for others, who likewise must take care of them. Belloc called this the servile state. This is different from early arrangements in which slaves and serfs were the backbone of the economy. In those arrangements, the owner has a choice to not own slaves. It is also different from capitalism, in which everyone is politically free by law.

Belloc was a man of his age so he viewed economics through the goggles of socialism and the newly emergent industrial capitalism. In The Servile State, he was searching for an alternative to the destruction of liberty necessary with socialism and the instability inherent to capitalism. The former results in an inequality of political power, while the latter results in an inequality of material wealth. Eventually, a small number of people rule over the masses, who begin to resent their rulers, seeing them as tyrants.

What Belloc argued is that socialism is inevitably the state dictating to property holders how they can dispose of their property. The state does this either through direct ownership, or through legal requirements for the ownership and use of property. Political freedom is determined by the degree of freedom one has with regards his labor and the results of his labor.. Therefore, socialism must restrict the political liberty of citizens to the same degree that it controls property and labor of the citizens.

Capitalism puts ownership and control of property in the hands of the people. In pure capitalism or what we now call libertarianism, individuals not only control their labor and the results of their labor, they are politically free. In theory, men either labor for their own use or agree to labor for others. The state’s only purpose is to enforce contracts as all of the dealings between citizens is consensual and formalized in a contract. The appeal of capitalism, pure capitalism, is the allure of pure political freedom.

By the time Belloc was writing, it was clear that pure capitalism would inevitably result in the concentration of wealth. A small class of property owners would come to posses the bulk of the nation’s wealth. That means a class of people who were free and a class of people who were not free, because they could not own and control their own labor. This led to social instability and eventually violence. Belloc argued that attempts to reform capitalism through state action would result in something he called the Servile State.

Reforms to capitalism are always through the law. The state places limits on how the owners of property may use their property. This then leads to a negotiation between the state, which has the monopoly of force, and the property class, which has a monopoly of capital. The result is a system in which the state seeks to protect those without property by placing requirement in the capital owners. In return, the state require the masses to labor for the property class, under conditions set by the state.

The result is that the business is forced to hire people it may not wish to hire, but the state also dictates to labor how and when they can sell their labor. Put another way, the poor are forced to serve the rich, but the rich are forced to be generous to the poor, looking out for their welfare. It is a social contract enforced at the barrel of a gun. It has the inequality of capitalism and the lack of political liberty inherent in socialism. The Servile State is the worst elements of both economic systems.

Belloc could not see what was coming in the post-war era and he certainly had no idea what was coming with the technological revolution and the explosion of neo-liberal globalism. He was prescient, however, with regards to how English economic systems would evolve over time. Look around at the modern world and you see the world he described as the inevitable result of “reformed capitalism.” Today, employers hire whole teams of people who makes sure the rich and powerful follow the rules.

What’s been missing in the technological age is the other half of the equation. As the West de-industrialized, the enforcement of labor laws have fallen away. Masses of helot labor brought over from Asia into Silicon Valley, for example, worked under agreements they struck with the business owners. Tech companies love open borders as it gives them a loophole to avoid some of the constraints of the Servile State. The same is true at the unskilled end, where companies rely upon masses of labor from Latin America.

This is an untenable situation in its own right, but the coming automation of the American economy will result in an evolution of the Servile State. The Universal Basic Income is nothing more than a modern implementation of the sort of infringements on political liberty Belloc described a century ago. Property holders will be forced to care for the dispossessed and, inevitably, the state will put behavior rules on the dispossessed. The UBI will come with rules requiring the recipients to act a certain way.

You get a glimpse of this in the efforts to control political speech on-line. Social media companies get exceptions to anti-trust laws, permitting them to run monopolies. In exchange, they are tasked with policing dissent on behalf of the state. The users get “free access” to platforms like Faceberg and Twitter, just as long as they agree to the terms of service and accept discipline when they post subversive things. Imagine this system applied to the universal basic income or to access to your self-driving car.

Belloc’s alternative was something he and Chesterton called distributism. Some have argued that their economic ideas were proto-fascism, but that’s debatable. What Belloc argued for was the inverse of the Servile State. Instead of a strong central state, political authority would be distributed and diffused throughout society, while wealth concentration would be constrained locally though ad hoc arrangements and cultural institutions. The goal is to maximize liberty, while minimizing inequality.

Whether or not this is possible in the modern age is debatable. Belloc and Chesterton argued that this was the natural arrangement of Europe. They also argued that it required a strong and energetic Christian tradition. That ship has sailed in the West, but maybe it does not matter. There’s no getting around the fact that neo-liberalism may be economically stable, but it is wildly unstable culturally. The experience of Europe thus far suggests it is suicidal. How to address it may lie with globalism’s last critics.

Alt-Bot Politics

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Recently, the government has seen fit to dump a collection of hobos into my part of the ghetto. For a long time we were bum free, then one day we had four or five camping in shrubbery, behind buildings and so forth. One was completely insane, running into the street screaming at people. The others just look like men down on their luck, as we used to say. They stay out of the way and they don’t panhandle, at least as far as I can tell.

The one guy I see, on my way to and from the office, never seems to move from the clump of bushes he now calls home. It was raining today and he had an umbrella, so he could guard his camp, I suppose. The bum’s life is a mystery to me, but my hunch is the sheer boredom of it alters them psychologically, assuming they are something close to sane before they hit the streets. This one looks like a drunk to me, but that’s a guess.

Still, imagine what it must be like to wake up every day knowing you have no reason to exist. The crazy ones are probably lucky in that regard. The drunks and drug addicts sober up long enough to realize they are just extra people that have no purpose and the world has no use for them. Presumably, their addictions are what landed them on the streets, but that realization is probably what keeps them there. What’s the point?

Once in my life, I was out of work for an extended period. The career I was in had run its course so I was in need of a course correction. I had some money put away that I could use to take some time off to figure out my next move. The first month was great. I enjoyed all the things I never had time to do when working. Then it got boring and my sleep started getting weird. I realized that I was not built for retirement or extended unemployment.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of the “work sets you free” types. I like goofing off as much as anyone. It’s just that I need a reason to get up in the morning. I need a purpose and it does not need to be a grand purpose. Even a job stocking shelves would be enough, just as long as I know I’m part of the world. I don’t think I’m an outlier. My general impression is most people have the itch that is best scratched by having a job.

Fear of the robot revolution mostly focuses on the economics of a world without work, but there is that other side and it may be more important. Let’s pretend the robots figure out how to keep us in material goods beyond any reasonable expectation. Without some purpose, lots of people will get bored and then go a little crazy. Crazy bums are a manageable problem. Crazy bored smart people may not be manageable.

That’s the other thing about the robot revolution. It’s assumed that the laboring classes will be hit first. That may not be the case. I was talking with a friend over the holiday and he is fairly sure he will be out of a career soon. He is in the money business and much of what he does is being taken over by software. The algorithms are so good there is no need for the smart guy who trades on math, rather than emotion or experience.

It’s not just that the machines are replacing people. What automation often does is reduce the skills required of certain jobs. In the industrial age, automation replaced the skilled craftsman with a local yokel, who would work cheap. Similarly, smart experienced people in the investment game are being replaced with younger, cheaper people who will push the green button when it flashes and the red button when it flashes, like bond traders do now.

The robot revolution is not going to happen overnight, but a lot of smart people in their middle years, see the writing on the wall. Baby Boomers have not prepared adequately for their retirement, but at least they had a job until retirement. The next generation is facing a great dislocation in the second half of their prime working years. If “greedy geezers” are warping our politics, just imagine what a wave of pissed off middle-aged people will do.

We may be getting a glimpse of it with the alt-right. It’s hard not to notice that the movement is mostly young males. There are plenty Gen-X people, but they are the geezers of the movement. The irreverence and subversiveness are only partially driven by youth. There’s a healthy disdain for the culture too. The alt-right is a rejection of the modern American culture, by people who think the culture has rejected them.

As the middle-aged people begin to wonder what’s the point, many will do like the hobos at the start of this post. They will find ways to lose themselves in drugs, booze and despondency. Some will get into the sort of dissident politics we see with the alt-right, while others may even find more radical ways to find purpose in their lives. Men need a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning. If work is not it, then something else will fill the void. The robot masters may learn that idle hands do the devil’s work.

Dissident Politics

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To start the year, I made the rather obvious prediction that the coalition of weirdos that willed Donald Trump into the White House would succumb to infighting and begin to break apart and splinter. This was a no-brainer, as fringe politics tends to attract weirdos and weirdos tend not to get along with other weirdos. Often, people are attracted to these movements over one issue. They find out that their new friends have a whole list of other issues that don’t match up with everyone else. That breeds conflict.

There’s also a “giant among midgets” phenomenon, where someone can be a star in a small group and outgrow their hat. In the mass media age, it’s easy to start thinking you’re a big deal when you see your social media profile grow and the calls from media people start coming.This was obvious with Milo who started thinking he was bulletproof. He had gotten away with so much that he thought he could say anything. It did not take long before he pissed off the wrong people.

Then you have the fact that political coalitions are temporary. Many people voted for Trump because they hated Clinton, so they were willing to look past the cartoon frogs and Hitler memes. Now, not so much. Then there is the fact that there is money to be made in politics. Lots of money. A racket like the Oath Keepers is a business that used to be able to peddle themselves as an edgy opposition group. The new groups turning up and battling the Left make the geezers at Oath Keepers look silly. That’s bad for business.

Of course, the Dissident Right is suddenly hip. If you look at the sites and events catering to us, you see lots of young males, which is resulting in lots of young females, because biology. Once young people get into something, even a small thing, it attracts people hoping to ride the wave to riches. That inevitably leads to the purists complaining that their thing has gone commercial along with accusations that the leaders are selling out. You see some of that with guys like Mike Cernovich.

Anyway, things have reached a boiling point with Mike Cernovich and Richard Spencer denouncing one another on-line. Vox Day got into this a little bit the other day in one of his periscope things. For those who don’t follow this stuff, there was a free speech rally in DC last weekend. The organizer invited Spencer and that led to Cerno and the alt-lite guys having a counter rally. Cernovich then made a bunch of wild claims on-line about who did what and a purse fight ensued. It’s all a bit silly, but these things always are to outsiders.

The main problem for all of these guys is the leaders, wannabe leaders and personalities are simply not very good at politics and public relations. That’s common in outsider politics. The two big political parties are good at grooming and selecting people so they can put on a good show for the public. Outsider movements have no systems for doing this so it means the first wave of leaders and personalities are often just the first people to step up to the podium. Spencer registered the domain, so he’s the leader of the alt-right.

All these guys squabbling with one another will inevitably be pushed aside by people who are better at organizing and better at presenting themselves and their arguments to the public. Pax Dickinson, the guy behind Counter.Fund, often makes this point. Most of these people got into this stuff by accident and events carried them to prominent roles. In time, new people will come along who will know how to avoid the petty squabbling and figure out how to impose discipline without alienating the people with big egos.

The bigger issue, as Vox Day points out regularly, is that the alt-lite faction has no future, because it has no logical reason to exist. Civic nationalism sounds good to the younger people, who are fans of McInnes and Cernovich, because they don’t remember the 1980’s when the Buckley crowd were civic nationalists. The lesson of the Reagan years is that civic nationalism has no way to defend itself against the Left. Once you agree to the blank slate argument, you inevitably have to agree to the rest of the Progressive moral order.

The alt-right is not without their problems. The vision Richard Spencer has for a white ethno-state strikes most people, including me, as a bit ridiculous. In fact, the idea of a world wide honky awakening is absurd. Most people engage in culture debate in framework of politics and they are just not going to sign off on a political agenda that strikes them as fantasy. The Libertarian Party has proved this fact beyond any debate and their fantasy land is more realistic than the honky paradise offered by Spencer.

The thing the alt-right has working in their favor is reality. In a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society, people vote their skin. That’s the lesson of history. Humans are tribal and hierarchical. That’s the lesson of biology. As whites in America come to realize their decreasing numbers, relative to the rest of society, white solidarity will naturally evolve and develop into a political order. The exact contours of how this plays out are open for debate, but in the end, Charles Murray was right. Racial politics is the future in the US.

The Witch Hunters

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One of the themes here is that the American Left is a different thing from the European Left in that it was not born out of the French Revolution. It was born out of the English Civil War and the religious radicalism of the prior century. American Progressives are the spiritual children of the Puritans and Public Protestantism. Their primary motivation is communal salvation. To that end, their focus is on rooting out sin and naming the sinner, rather than the material egalitarianism we associate with the European Left.

American liberals, even though they don’t always articulate it, operate from the assumption that the community is judged as a whole. It is why they obsessively use the word “community” whenever they are talking about public issues. For the Prog, the ideal for man is the community where members are in harmony, living fulfilled lives. It’s why they are endlessly going on about “building communities.” The community has agency and the members work together toward a common goal, that goal being a state of grace.

This spiritual longing for a community is behind the efforts of social media platforms like Facebook to enforce community guidelines. Their executives obsess over their rules as if there can be such a thing as an agreed upon culture for a “community”  that includes a billion people from different parts of the world. That never occurs to them as they assume the community is the default. It is also why they are fanatically evicting bad thinkers from their “community”, even when it is hilariously illogical. So much for their AI, I guess.

The American Left is, essentially, a theocratic movement. They seek to have the church control the state in order to enforce “community standards” and root out “hate and extremism.” The “church” in this sense is the secular religion we call Progressivism. In Europe, the Left has always sought to control the state in order to prevent the Church from making claims on the people’s morality and loyalty. Europe has always been blood and soil, while America was founded, in part, as a spiritual commune.

The quest for spiritual egalitarianism in America is a very different thing than the material egalitarianism of Europe. A Jeremy Corbyn has to kit himself out in the garb of the working man in order to be authentically Left. In America, a rich white woman like Elizabeth Warren can lecture us about the poor, from the steps of her mansion, as she is decked out in a designer outfit. The reason is she cares more for the spiritual well-being of the poor than their material condition. She fears the poor are being excluded.

You see, that’s where the obsession with community fits into their morality. In the mind of the American Prog, the worst thing to happen to someone is for them to be excluded from the community of the righteous. This is almost always caused by the sinners who preach hate or extremism, so the logical way to address this “inequality” is to root out the sinners and hate thinkers. The poor will still be shopping at Walmart and struggling to keep it together, but they will be included in the community and the community will be saved.

This impulse to hunt for sinners in order to save society may feel like a new thing, but it is a permanent and integral part of the Prog theology. It does not always manifest itself in the political and social arena. For example, in the 1980’s, the Progs were sure that the infernal one was causing daycare workers to engage in unspeakable, and implausible, acts with the children in their care. The result was a national panic about daycare centers and a spasm of wild accusations, leading to bizarre show trials reminiscent of Salem.

One of the more egregious examples was in Massachusetts, unsurprisingly. The Amirault family had run a daycare center for decades and there was never any evidence of problems. Then, the fever hit and the Progs were sure it was a den of molestation. The DA at the time had his assistant, Martha Coakley, build a case based on manipulating children into saying things that were not only false, but in many cases physically impossible. The family was destroyed and sent to prison by the witch hunters.

Another example is the Satanic Panic that ruined the lives of a Texas couple. They were accused of being Satan worshipers and doing horrible things to children. Like all of these cases, the evidence ranged from totally fabricated to outlandishly absurd. That did not prevent the state from destroying their lives. Like the Amirault case, the truth was finally revealed and the accused were exonerated, but the damage can never be undone. That’s the thing about witch trials. Even when there is no witch, they still have the trial.

The thing you always see with these spasms of witch hunting, is that the witch hunters never pay a price for their misdeeds. In the Amirault case, Martha Coakley went onto a long political career. In the Texas case, the DA never faced discipline. Today, of course, the wave of hate hoaxes like what went on in Virginia never result in the perpetrators facing punishment. It’s just assumed they had good intentions because they were defending the community against hate and extremism. Who can fault them for that?

The point of all this is to remember that the other side, the people in the Cult of Modern Liberalism, are motivated by the same forces that motivated Cotton Mather. Although he was scientifically inclined, he enthusiastically supported the witch trials. It is an example of how even the most rational mind can be possessed of such fervent conviction that it leads to the embrace of homicidal lunacy. Then, as now, these are not people with whom you can reason. The Prog is a crusader whose thirst for social justice cannot be sated.

Boomer Cons

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During World War II, there was a great debate among the Allies about the use of bombing raids against German cities. Collateral damage was the concern. The Germans built their munitions plants near population centers. There were those in the high command who said that if the Allies used aerial bombardment against these facilities, then they would be no better than the Germans. It would be much better to maintain their principles and lose than win and be judged as morally equal or even similar as the Germans.

Of course, that never happened. There was some debate about the morality of certain tactics, but only in so far as they would result in retaliation. That was the lesson of the Great War. The use of poison gas, for example, just resulted in the use of gas by the other side. As Greg Cochran pointed out, the Soviets may have resorted to germ warfare against the Germans, but fear of retaliation certainly shaped their thinking. If they used biological agents, it was out of desperation and covered up after the fact.

The point here is that in war, the first priority, the overriding priority, is winning. You do that first and worry about morality later. Principles are the things the winners create after they have secured victory. Principles are the way in which the winners consolidate their gains after victory in a war. Imagine if the Civil War had gone the other way and the South had won. Would anyone today tremble at the accusation of racism? Obviously not, because the victors would have had no reason to make racism a mortal sin.

The obsession with principle has always been the central defect of what the kids now call “Boomer Conservatism.” The BoomerCons accept, without argument, the principles and moral framework of the Left and then they try to out-righteous the other side in a pointless game of virtue signalling. It is the basis of the DR3 meme. Even if you are able to “prove” that the “Democrats are the real racists,” all you have done is prove they are right and that racism is the worst thing ever. Even if you win, you end up losing.

And yes, I know, not all Boomers think like this and many younger people fall into the same trap. Lots of young people like the Rolling Stones and The Who, but it is still Boomer music. The cultural upheavals going on today are due to the cultural upheavals that went on yesterday, when the Boomers tossed over the culture they inherited and created the prevailing orthodoxy of today. All of us now live in Boomer Land, which means we live in the moral structure created by the Boomer generation.

Now, the folks with the tricorn hats and “heritage not hate” signs can be forgiven for not seeing the folly of their tactics. They came of age when the general consensus said that the goal is a color blind society. If the bad honkies would just open up their hearts to the black man, all the race stuff would melt away. It was all nonsense, but a whole generation was raised on it and now they struggle to let it go. For most Boomers, egalitarianism is their heritage, so it is understandable that they cling to it.

Of course, the libertarian boomers have turned their love of principle into a ready excuse for not getting into a serious fight with the Left. You see it in this post on the American Conservative.

This month, three conservative protesters rushed onto a New York City theatre stage—and briefly into the national spotlight—enraged by the mock-execution of a character dressed to look like Trump. As a New Yorker fond of civilization I was alarmed at this barbaric behavior because this is how cultures unravel.

Well, that’s how culture wars work. Each side tries to impose their cultural preferences on the other. If you are in opposition to the prevailing culture then what you seek, by definition, is an unraveling of the culture. That’s how you win. Otherwise, you confine yourself to tactics that will never work. For guys like Todd Seavey, principle is a coffin they think will give them comfort as the Left lowers them into the grave.

Again, the Boomer generation can be forgiven for clinging to their principles even if it means defeat. They came into an America that was the colossus, standing astride the world as the defender of freedom and the exponent of economic prosperity. The principles they inherited were cooked up by people who conquered the world. America in the 50’s and 60’s was a society that was sure it had things figured out. If you were ten years old in the early 60’s, truth, justice and the American way made perfect sense.

The last fifty years, however, have proven to be a cultural disaster for America, one that will have to be addressed by the coming generations. In order for that to happen, a counter culture must form that is willing to be called unprincipled as they rush the stage or shout down the people with the megaphones. What ponytails and recreational drugs were for the Boomers, fashy haircuts and race realism will be for the next generations. The young who are rebelling are rebelling against those vaunted principles the Boomers cherish.

The only way a counter culture gets any traction is if it is indifferent, or even hostile, to the prevailing morality. There are two types of principles a people live by. There are those that precede their demise and those they create after they triumph. The people desperately clinging to their principles, lecturing those willing to do what it takes to win, will be buried with those principles. The winners, meanwhile, will be busy crafting a new morality. That’s the lesson of history. The people with a future get to write the past.

The Glass Jaw

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It used to be, and maybe it still is the case, that boys learned about bullies on the playground. There was always some kid, who would push around the other kids. The lesson kids learned was that merely standing up to the bully was usually enough. In some cases, you might have to duke it out, but no matter the result, the bully would leave you alone after it. What makes the bully possible is moral authority. They present themselves as the natural ruler of the rest. If everyone accepts it, then the bully gets to run the yard.

In much the same way, the slave owner has to maintain a moral authority in order to keep his slaves from revolting or running off. The whole point of slavery is cheap labor. If the slave owner has to employ an army to keep his slaves under control and on the plantation, there’s no point in having slaves. He would be better served by hired men. In order for slavery to work, the slaves must accept their natural condition. Like the bully, the slave owner may be outnumbered, but he has the force of moral authority.

One of the least remarked upon aspects of the collapse of Soviet communism was just how peaceful and swift it was in the end. The Poles standing up to their rulers broke the spell. In 1980, Lech Wałęsa scaled the fence at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, leading a strike against the government. Within a decade, the Soviet empire would collapse and Wałęsa would be elected president of Poland. In other words, the commies were morally and spiritually exhausted and they could not take a punch.

I thought about that when the little guy with the goofy haircut decked the Antifa girl at that Berkeley riot. Everything about her world made sense right up until she took a right cross to the puss and fell to the ground. All she had to do was show up in the right outfit and all the bad people would go away. Then, her bluff was called. The bad man was not intimidated. She no longer had moral authority over him. Her after action comments strongly suggest she had some sort of epiphany on the way to the ground.

The thing is though, the whole Antifa movement seems to have fallen apart after that event. Poor old Gavin McInness is begging them to show up at his events, but all he’s getting is some cranky coeds and a few old hippies. In one of life’s many ironies, the anti-fascists had to manufacture fascists to fight and now the alleged fascists are forced to invent anti-fascist that they can fight. Gavin is going to have to find a new act. It turns out that the Prog street warriors have a glass jaw. They can’t take a punch and they know it.

That may be what we are seeing with Conservative Inc. In the last week, homosexual activist and managing editor of National Review, Jason Lee Steorts, has penned over 10,000 words of criticism aimed at those to his Right, which is pretty much everyone on the Right these days. The first piece was a dismissive critique of neo-reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug. The second, a much longer piece, is a not entirely coherent rant against what he calls the illiberal critics of grade school “freedom shrines.”

His post on Moldbug is revealing for a number of reasons. For starters, Moldbug has not posted in years. His last serious philosophical posting was half a dozen years ago. He and neo-reaction were a big deal on-line a decade ago. It’s not quite disco, but addressing it now in a serious way is a lot like demanding the record stores stop selling Bee Gee’s albums. What his post reveals, more than anything, is that he and the rest of the Buckley Mystery Cult have not been paying attention for a long time.

The longer post is a more serious attempt to address the many boogeymen and hobgoblins that haunt the minds of Buckley Conservatives. His essay reads like it was written by a committee. He spends thousands of words stroking various aspects of Conservative Inc, for no purpose other than flattery. When he gets into specific topics popular on the Dissident Right, he reveals a depth of ignorance that suggests stupidity has mass. His bit on IQ reveals he is a man who does not know what he does not know.

Whenever you are charged with defending the status quo against criticism, your job is to re-argue the case for the establishment. The rightness of the prevailing order creates its own moral authority, thus reducing even legitimate criticisms to mere quibbles. What’s striking about Steorts’ piece is he struggles to describe what it is he is defending, much less defend it. After 7500 words, the reader is just left with the image of a fussy prig, crinkling his nose up, as if he just caught wind of a bad odor.

For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, Buckley Conservatives have functioned as a palace guard. They defended the status quo by acting as a buffer between critics and the Progressive elites. At the same time, they served as a conduit for middle-class white grievances and objections. Taxes are too high! Government is too big! Pop culture is damaging to bourgeois values! That sort of thing. They were in the passenger seat of Progressivism yelling “slow down!” as the car zoomed forward.

For good or ill, their source of moral authority was as the voice of the white middle-class and the civic virtues that made it possible. They no longer talk about the actual people they used to represent, other than in the occasional genocidal rage. Jason Lee Steorts can’t even describe middle-class civic institutions. He has reduced them to the ridiculous image of a “freedom shrine.” The Buckleyites no longer have moral authority. They are simply another blemish on the face of the Progressive orthodoxy.

How aware of this they are is hard to know. It’s a lucrative racket so they are probably more concerned about keeping their spot on the Left than these larger matters. Perhaps like the Polish authorities, they will just stand aside as a new opposition movement, this counter-culture, grows up to challenge the Left. Perhaps there will be that moment of clarity that Moldylocks experienced as she hit the pavement. Either way, they are morally and spiritually exhausted. What comes next is inevitable.

Tactics and Money

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Social movements go through phases, depending upon their scale and success at interrupting the prevailing order. If ten people become convinced that devil worship is critical to the survival of mankind, no one will notice until they start sacrificing goats in public. If ten million people take up this idea, then it is different. The movement has to learn to work within the prevailing order, then learn how to alter the prevailing order by infiltration and coercion. Tactics become as important as ideology.

The alt-right, Identitarianism, new right, or whatever you prefer to call the growing dissenter movement that has grown up the last few years, is reaching a point where the people in charge think something must be done. The sacking by Breitbart of Katie McHugh at the behest of a neocon mob looks like an orchestrated hit. There is a secret mailing list for neocon pundits in the media and all of their known members were immediately on-line celebrating, so the scheme was probably hatched by them.

The neocons are putting enormous pressure on their “friends” at Breitbart to abandon Trump and purge their ranks of anyone outside the orthodoxy. Back in the election, the odious carbuncle John Podhoretz accused Brietbart editor Joel Pollack of not being authentically Jewish due to his Trump support. Imagine members of your church threatening to ex-communicate you over your voting habits. Then there are the threats to staffers and advertisers. If they can’t kill the message, they will kill the messengers.

The point of this is that tactics are important. Katie McHugh is a nobody in the grand scheme of things, but her corpse on the sidewalk sends the same message as the Seth Rich bike rack outside DNC headquarters. As the Chinese say, you kill some chickens to scare the monkeys. You can be sure that people inside Breitbart are now working on their resumes and ready to rat on their friends in order to find a safe landing spot. It is the same tactic the Feds are using to fix the leak problem. Jail a nobody and the somebodies notice.

As they say in the crime business, it is all fun and games until the bodies start to drop on your side. That means the good guys better start to learn how to use the rules to their advantage. They are entering into the phase of the game where tactics matter as much, if not more than, ideology. They’ve picked the fight and now it is time to fight. In the context of this culture war, it means waking up every day thinking about how to ruin someone on the other team. It means turning the weight of the orthodoxy against itself.

For instance, when the mentally disturbed woman harassed Richard Spencer at his gym, he made the blunder of not looking for a way to turn this into a weapon. His first move should have been to call the cops on her. Then he should have insisted on filing a report. Then he should have gone to court seeking a restraining order. In other words, he should have used her enormous weight against her. Even if the court declined to grant him the order, he would have had a great chance to get it, the message would have been sent.

Similarly, the habit of Progs to use campaigns against people in order to cause financial harm should be met with legal action. Tortious interference is when one person intentionally damages someone else’s contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm. A phony e-mall campaign, that is intended to intimidate a hotel, for example, from hosting a VDare event, is precisely the sort of thing that should be met with a lawsuit. Worst case is you get it out into the open, where the rats can’t hide.

There’s also the use of public accommodation lawsuits. The Left used Title II of the Civil Rights Act to gut free association. A clever lawyer could use the same law that forces your restaurant to serve ISIS sympathizers, to force Facebook into letting the alt-right have their own page. It would be a tough case to make, but it could be made with the right plaintiff. That’s how lawfare works. The point is to de-legitimize the rules and laws, but also to force the other side to live by their own moral code.

These efforts take money, of course, just as the efforts to build up alternative media require funding. That’s where the dissidents are making the most progress. WeSearchr is still trying to find its footing, but it has worked well as a proof of concept for fund raising outside the orthodoxy. The new site Counter.Fund is a very creative idea that could turn out to be a viable alternative to the establishment crowdfunding sites. By being explicitly ideological and open about its business model, it makes supporting it feel important.

Mass movements of any type have certain thresholds they must pass in order to become credible threats to the prevailing orthodoxy. If you’re building a religion, you better be provocative and you have to live off the land, so to speak. If you are building a political party, it is about working the election laws and getting your message out to a broader audience. Put another way, you have to demonstrate tactical savvy and the ability to finance your war against your opponents. Otherwise, people are reluctant to join.

Whatever your preferred term is for the brewing rebellion among the Dirt People, they have weathered the first punch from the Cloud People. The dismissive name calling that was a feature of Progressive commentary, has given way to attacks on the people on the front lines of the fight. The next step is to start going on offense using the rules against the establishment. That means coordination and that means money. There are some good signs so far, but the Dirt People are still a long way from being a credible threat.

Remember, support your local Dirt Person.

Barren Cat Lady

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The above is the speech from British Prime Minister Barren Cat Lady after the latest attack by Muslims in Britain. Like all modern political speeches, hers was vapid and stupid in ways that suggest the people who wrote it, and the Prime Minister herself, are suffering from brain damage. The best part of the speech was the airy and frivolous platitudes about the true nature of Islam. Funny how our pols are now all experts on Islam.

It is only five minutes long, but it is tough to take so I’ll cover the key points for you. Barren Cat Lady wants everyone to know that the people responsible for importing millions of hyper-violent savages into Britain are on top of things. That’s something you never hear addressed in public by the pols of any party or the so-called news reporters allegedly charged with grilling them. No one ever asks, “why did you import these strangers into our lands?” It’s treated as if it just magically happened like a freak storm or earth quake.

Of course, someone could start asking these questions, so the Barren Cat Lady promised to ramp up policing of the Internet. No kidding. That was her first big proposal. She wants the British government to further stamp out speech on-line and she wants other countries to stamp out free expression in their countries as well. When your first response to an attack by foreign invaders is to crack down on your own citizens, it is not unreasonable to wonder who Barren Cat Lady is blaming for these attacks.

After she promise to crack down on the Internet, as if it is a thing with agency of its own, she makes noises about properly worshiping the gods of the new religion. She provides an example by informing us that the Muslims doing this are not practicing real Islam. That despite what all the Imams say and their holy books instruct, the real Islam is this wonderful thing that is going to be great for Britain. Even though the corpses are piling up, what’s important is that you don’t notice that all the perpetrators are Muslims.

Humorously, she then declares this mysterious, perverted version of Islam, that looks like all the other versions of Islam, is the great challenge of our time. She then goes on to say that “British values” of pluralistic tolerance are superior to anything offered by the preachers of hate. Well, we will find out soon enough. So far, the British people have not been able to rouse themselves from their drunken degeneracy to do anything about this challenge. The scoreboard says the Muslims are winning in a blowout, pun intended.

Probably the most laugh out loud line in the sermon, and yes, this was a sermon, was when Barren Cat Lady said that “we have to be less tolerant of extremism. And yes, that could mean some embarrassing and difficult conversations.” Embarrassing for whom is never mentioned, but we know. The reason we know is after the last Muslim attack, the one last week, the Brits went around arresting white people for saying mean things about Muslims on Faceberg. Being arrested is embarrassing, even when you’re innocent.

What was revealed by this speech is that outside of the public eye, the people in charge of Britain have no emotional or moral attachment to the British people. As far as they are concerned, the people are just a burden, whether it is the hyper-violent oogily-boogily people that arrive over the channel or the native Brits. Barren Cat Lady sees no difference between a Muslim from Pakistan and an Episcopalian for York. She just sees grasping hands demanding her time when she would much rather be elsewhere.

Prior to watching this speech, I figured that this event would get the sane Brits out to vote next week for the Tories. Labour is led by a deranged lunatic who should probably be locked away in an institution. No matter how bad the Tories have been, incompetent is better than radically deranged. Watching Barren Cat Lady, I think I’d be switching my vote and going with the black pill candidate, Burn it down. The only hope is to wipe out the people who put Barren Cat Lady in charge and then have the final battle with the crazies.

This is the same problem we face in the US. Instead of Barren Cat Lady, we have faggots fools¹ like Caitlyn Graham and Paul Ryan supposedly leading the charge against the nihilistic death cult called the American Left. Trump is the black pill, which is why so many of us voted for him, despite what it most likely meant. The only way the West has any chance of defeating the demographic and ideological challenges facing it is to first hang all of the people currently in charge. Then new leaders can emerge to lead the fight.

¹ It has been brought to my attention that otherwise respectable and sensible gay males will use the term “faggot” as insider language and they would take offense at my use of it here. In short, I was unintentionally insulting faggots by calling Paul Ryan and Caitlyn Graham that name. My sincere apology to all the faggots in the reading audience.