Category Archives: The Resistance

We Need A Tom Doniphon

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Recently, the nation’s cat ladies have been asking the rest of us, “Aren’t you afraid that Trump is going to become a dictator and start bullying journalists and judges just to get his way?” Of course we’re all suppose to start from the premise that Trump is Hitler reborn and just looking for a reason to impose martial law. The fact that Trump has assiduously adhered to the rules of the game to this point is just proof that he is Hitler. After all, Hitler won an election too and we all know how that worked out.

My answer to that query is, “No, I’m not afraid Trump will do all those things. I’m afraid he won’t do those things.” For the last three decades, probably longer, the guys allegedly on the side of the rest of us, have been obsessed with playing by the rules. The thing I don’t fear is that Trump will “go too far” or fail to respect the rules of the game. I don’t care about those rules anymore. Those rules are the bars of the cage. What we don’t need now is a guy obsessed with procedure. We need a guy willing to break the rules.

We have reached a point where it is heads they win, tails we lose. The game has been rigged to make reforming the system within the rules an impossibility. When a majority of the people favor a policy that the managerial class opposes, the policy gets hamstrung by the rules of the game. All of a sudden, the process is sacred. When the managerial class wants something for their masters, they change the rules so it either flies through or simply happens without anyone noticing. The process is not all that important.

All the blather about America being a nation of laws is just cover for the fact that ours is a lawless nation ruled by lawless men. An obvious example is the Ninth Circuit judges, who have fabricated a legal justification for throwing sand in the gears of a wildly popular executive order issued by President Trump. These are not men enforcing the law or respecting the laws. These are men who hold the law in contempt. All that matters to them is obedience to the weird secular cult we have come to call Progressivism.

If what it takes to break the stranglehold this cult has on society is a dictator willing to toss a few judges from a helicopter, then sign me up for dictatorship. I’d much prefer to live in a society where me and my neighbors meet once a month to govern ourselves and our community, but that’s not on offer. What is on offer now is the post-modern theocracy that uses the corrupted and degraded tools of 18th century liberalism to maintain its grip on society. Squads of government men rounding these people up in the middle of the night sounds pretty good right now.

Totalitarians attempt to change the world and human nature, by controlling all aspects of society, including the granular aspects of the political system. It’s what makes reform impossible as we are quickly seeing with the opposition to Trump’s policies. It’s not that they object, on policy grounds, to the very mild reforms that are being proposed. What is at issue is the very concept of the all encompassing world state. To permit reform is to permit questioning and that can never be tolerated.

The only way to break the totalitarian stranglehold may be with a an authoritarian willing to bust down doors and crack some heads. Authoritarianism is only concerned with political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty. You can still have judges falling out of helicopters as we saw with Pinochet, but the people can still go about their lives, free from the hectoring of secular fanatics living off the tax payers. Trump ordering the execution of the 9th Circuit is not ideal, but it beats the hell out of being ruled by angry lunatics from San Francisco.

The main argument against personal rule is that the person eventually dies. Then you have to hope the next guy is not crazy or dangerous. That’s also an upside to authoritarianism. Trump is not going to live forever. What follows is not likely to be another authoritarian. Pinochet eventually gave way to a form of self-government. The reason Chile did not suffer the same fate as Venezuela or Argentina is that Pinochet had most of the secular fanatics shot and tossed into a pit. As a result, Chile came out of the other end of the Pinochet years looking pretty good.

America is headed for a bad end unless things change quickly and radically. The suicide cult that has control of our society is not going to stop until we’re all dead. At some point, you have to use every means necessary to prevent a catastrophe. If that means Lindsay Graham winds up in pit covered in lime, so be it. If Bill Kristol has to write his tantrums from exile in Israel, I can live with that. In order to have a world run by Senator Ranse Stoddard, you first need a Tom Doniphon to do the dirty work of clearing out  Liberty Valance.

Stalin’s Children

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When I was just starting out in the world, I worked for a company that had an active human resources department. This was when HR was being overhauled to accommodate middle-aged women without useful skills. Companies were trying to “diversify” their management so they hired a bunch of women for their personnel departments, re-branded them as “human resources” and set them loose to get involved in things well outside the normal scope of corporate personnel departments.

I was new in the world so I had no way to see what was happening. I just assumed it was the way things worked, even if it was obviously insane. There was one woman, who was always gossiping with the female staff, trying to find out who was dating whom, who was socializing with whom and generally playing the role of busybody. In a better age, she was the sort of woman who would end up fitted with a bridle. As far as I could tell, her only job was to gossip, as I never saw her doing anything else.

Inevitably, people would be called into HR for some crime. Once in a while, someone would disappear. It was always males getting the call and it was almost always over having said or done something that offended a female employee. The thing that puzzled me at first was that the males who survived the interrogation never spoke of it. Maybe it was shame or fear, maybe something else that was not obvious. They got called in, something happened and they came back chastened from the experience.

The way it worked is familiar to anyone who has read about Stalin’s show trials. The prosecutor, in this example it was the gossip, functioned as a spokesman for the accusers, as well as the witnesses, in addition to laying out the case against the accused. She would say something like, “Some people have said you said X and you know that you have a reputation for saying X so you can see how we would be concerned. In order to get to the bottom of this, we thought it was a good idea to call you in so we could talk about it and hear what you have to say.”

The accused was presented with an invisible accuser who could never be confronted so their testimony went unchallenged. Slipped into it was the assertion that the accused had a reputation for whatever it was he was accused of doing. Again, there’s no way to confront this as there is no accuser, just a whisper in the wind. The poor bastard in the hot seat was faced with the impossible task of not only defending himself, but doing so as a person assumed to be a habitual offender or at least known as one.

The use of invisible victims and imaginary crimes is the core tactic of the social justice warriors. You see that in this response from Apple to Gab about their application to the Apple app store.

Notice the language. They “find content that is defamatory and mean spirited” but they never mention who is being defamed. The only way words can be defamatory is if someone, a real living human, is being defamed. You see the same thing when they write “there is no tolerance for objectionable material.” Objectionable to whom? The only way something can be objectionable is if someone objects. The person defamed and objecting is an undefined entity that is just assumed to exist.

In Stalin’s show trials, the victims were accused of mysterious crimes like conspiracy and sabotage, even though it was never clear with whom the accused were conspiring or what it was they were sabotaging. Stalin’s henchmen would use pressure to get some of the victims to confess, which was then used as “proof” that the rest of the accused were not just guilty, but guilty of obstructing the revolution’s search for truth. An innocent man trying to defend himself was left to swing at ghosts and shadows.

The modern day Stalinists use the same tactic, in which they accuse enemies of fostering a hostile environment or promoting objectionable material. Apple is not saying they object to the material. They are claiming to speak for those unnamed people who do object, because Apple is just looking out for them, whoever they may be. Since these alleged victims are a mystery, there’s no way for Gab to confront them or argue that they are complying with Apple’s terms of service. It’s just modern show trial in which the verdict is known in advance. The only question is how long before the accused breaks.

Those who confessed quickly in Stalin’s trials did so hoping for leniency, but that never came. Just as the verdict was known in advance, so was the punishment. The same system applies today. Gab could ban all of its users and just have pics of Hillary and Obama and they would still not get on the Apple store. They have been found guilty of blasphemy and heresy. That will be the verdict of the trial and the punishment will be banishment. The only mystery is whether Apple can make them grovel.

The guy running Gab is not going to grovel. He knows the deal. In fact, more and more people are figuring out that there is no dealing with the Left. There’s no accommodation to be made, no compromise to be found. In fact, that was true thirty years ago when I was just getting started. The company gossip was not a person with whom you could strike a bargain. She was a Torquemada, who existed to find the guilty. The answer then as now was what Andrew Breitbart said years ago. The answer is “Fuck you! War!”

The Cloud Party Declares War

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When the Muslim Brotherhood “won” the 2012 election in Egypt, most of the world just assumed Egypt was going to go down the road to Islamism. Either a slow trot like we have seen with Turkey or perhaps a faster pace into something closer to Iran. That did not happen. Instead, Egypt ground to a halt as the civil service and military, which are intertwined, refused to cooperate with the new government. The result was a sort of coordinated work slowdown and the Brotherhood got the blame for it.

That was not the only reason the Brotherhood failed. They had no idea how to run a country and they never had the depth of support they assumed. Still, the bureaucracy set itself to stymieing Morsi, so they simply stop functioning. People still showed up for work and manned their posts, but they got nothing done. It was a good lesson in how a modern country works, even one on the fringe of modernity. Real power is not in the office, but in control of the system. He who controls the bureaucracy controls the nation.

That comes to mind after Trump has been in office for little more than a week. His initial flurry of executive orders has dominated the news cycles, simply because of the infantile theatrics of the Left. Adult toddlers throwing tantrums at the local airport makes for good TV, especially when the people covering it are toddlers themselves. What has gone unnoticed is the fact that the Republicans appear to have settled on a  strategy similar to the Egyptian bureaucracy. They will slow walk everything Trump wants out of Congress.

So far, the Senate has approved the national security appointments because to do otherwise would make them look bad. The education secretary is still bottled up for some reason. Allegedly, everyone in the GOP would just as soon scrap DoE, but they are making a big issue of this nominee. The AG nomination has similarly been slow walked by the Senate. Of course, the traitor John McCain is stirring up trouble over the DHS appointments. The result is there will not be a full cabinet for months.

The bigger issue is the fact that the GOP Congress has no plan to repeal ObamaCare or pass tax reform. It’s pretty clear that the people we thought were secretly supporting Clinton, people like Paul Ryan, really thought she was going to win, so they never bothered to prepare for this. The result is all their big talk after he election about major reforms and repealing ObamaCare was just talk. They were planning for surrender and suddenly found themselves with a President ready to sign off on major reform.

That’s probably only part of it. The fact is, the leadership of the GOP has more in common with the Democrat Party than the emerging Trump Party. Despite the election results, they cannot let go of their belief that the winning hand is to turn the country into a flop house for the refuse of the rest of the world. Globalism is their creed and they will not let go of it just because the people hate it. They are sure Trump will fail so they are going to work hard to make it happen, After all, a prophesy that does not come true is not much use.

Then there is the bureaucracy, which appears to be organizing itself in opposition to Trump in the early going. Senior people in the State Department made a big show of quitting the other day. The acting Attorney General is instructing her department to sit on their hands over challenges to Trump’s immigration orders. It’s all small time and petty, but with the aid of the media it’s becoming cool for the governing class to throw sand in the gears of the Trump administration. At least that’s the hope in DC.

All of this points out the underlying reality in Washington. There is the Cloud People Party and an insurgent Dirt People Party. The Cloud Party and its donor class hate Trump and the people he represents. If you look at the funding sources from both parties, it comes from areas Hillary Clinton carried 2-to-1. According to this Brookings study, the 472 counties that Clinton won last year accounted for 64 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the 2584 counties that Trump won accounted for the remaining 36 percent.

There are plenty of Republicans who support Trump and a surprising number of people in the bureaucracy who know reform is long overdue. Some of the harshest critiques of the state you will hear come from people in the system. There’s also the fact that Trump is proving to be an exceptional political athlete. He has a knack for baiting the media in order to gain public support for his positions. No person has moved the Overton Window further to the right than Trump has done in my lifetime. It truly is amazing.

Even so, the next year will be about the Cloud Party conspiring to undermine the Trump administration, while Trump figures out how to work around the system to undermine the system. His immigration order is a foreshadow of what is to come. Instead of looking for compromise, Team Trump will go big in order to trigger the political class and their media to overreact. This tends to turn off the public and thus turn the Cloud Party assets into liabilities, as we are seeing with these ridiculous protests.

At some point, the Cloud People will shift gears, but for now, the game will be Trump picking fights and the establishment going bonkers.This gives Trump cover to do some important stuff, like we see with the H1B executive order. While the Cloud People are wailing about the so-called Muslim ban, they did not have time to notice the order to shake up the visa program Silicon Valley uses to screw its employees. This sort of cat and mouse game is how an insurgent party must use its speed and agility to overcome the establishment’s size.

The Unanswered Question

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Milo Yiannopoulos is out on the speaking tour, drawing as much attention to himself as possible, but also trying hard to differentiate himself from the people the Left currently hate almost as much as they hate white men. The new Goldstein of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is Richard Spencer and anyone they can associate with him. Spencer is variously described as a “white nationalist”, a “white supremacist” and, of course, a “Nazi.” As a result, Milo is trying very hard to prove he has nothing to do with any of it.

From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. The people running the media in America are as committed to the New Religion as anyone so they will never allow a bad thinker into their thing. Milo dreams of being the gay Bill Buckley or the thinking man’s Rip Taylor. It’s hard to know what he is doing as he does seem to flit from one thing to the next, always in the pursuit of attention. Someone pointed me to this podcast by Sam Harris on Milo.

I don’t count myself a fan of Harris or Yiannopoulos so whatever issues they have are unknown to me. I don’t have anything against them either. I just don’t pay much attention to them. Just taking it on face value then, I’d say Harris is mostly correct. Milo is just an attention whore and he has found a way to be good at it in a way that causes people to give him money. It is social commentary as performance art, something comics have been doing since the Greeks.

Milo is a flamboyantly ridiculous person saying taboo things that are obviously true and everyone knows they are true. There is a long tradition in the West of lampooning the people in charge, especially the people in charge of public morality, which in the West, are often in charge of politics. Further, using a “fool” to ridicule the rulers is common. When Milo goes on campus and mocks feminists, as a ludicrously gay man, it insulates him, so he can say things about the womyn that are both true and forbidden.

That’s all good stuff and well within the Western tradition. In Germany, Till Eulenspiegel is a folkloric hero, who mocks politicians and public figures with political satire. He holds a mirror to make us aware of our times. The English had their court jesters, with some becoming quite wealthy. A fellow known only as a Stańczyk was a famous Polish jester and is a national hero to the Polish people. The point being is that fools like Milo are both useful and necessary, because they tell us something about our age.

That’s where guys like Sam Harris miss the point and get it wildly wrong. There’s a good case to be made that even Milo is not grasping the implications of his shtick.

“The reality is, if you force everyone to play identity politics, if you insist in pitting whites against blacks, women against men, straights against gays, the reality is you guys are gonna win and the left isn’t going to like it very much,” declared MILO. “But there’s a better way. Don’t fight identity politics with identity politics.”

That sounds great. What is it?

“White pride, white nationalism, white supremacy isn’t the way to go,” he continued. “The way to go is reminding them and yourselves that you should be aspiring to values and to ideas.”

Wonderful. And what are those values and ideals?

“You should be focusing on what unites people and not what drives them apart,” MILO concluded. “You shouldn’t give a shit about skin color, a shit about sexuality… You shouldn’t give a shit about gender, and you should be deeply suspicious of the people who do.”

So, nothing.

This is reminiscent of recent forays into doubt by big shot intellectuals like Charles Murray, Steven Pinker and Robert Putnam. In all three cases, they work through the case against the prevailing orthodoxy of the blank slate, egalitarianism and multiculturalism, only to be horrified by where it leads. In the case of Murray, he has been trying to atone for the Bell Curve ever since. Pinker now sounds like a raving loon and Putnam chants Progressive pieties to avoid finishing his thought.

In the case of Sam Harris, he is smart enough to know that the foundations of the Progressive orthodoxy are oogily-boogily of the first order, far more detached from reality than conventional religion. He’s either afraid to take his critique through to its logical conclusion or he lacks the imagination to see what comes next, so he rolls into a ball and starts gassing on about “unifying people with values and ideas.” Any variation of the word “unify” is a signal that what comes next is gibberish.

This is, in the realm of practical politics, why the Buckley crowd is circling the drain as a political force. Way back in the 60’s, they could not bring themselves to challenge the implausible claims by the Left with regards to civil rights. Instead, they picked the losing hand of state’s rights, hoping to avoid facing the Left over the “negro question.” As a result, they ceded the moral high ground to the Left with regards to race and identity. No amount of legal precedent could stand in the way of social justice!

Ever since, the Buckley-ites have had to fight the Left while acknowledging that the Left is their moral superior and the arbiter of civil morality. That’s a battle that can never be won as the other side will simply declare your latest position to be heresy and out of bounds. No matter how logical and right your position, it can never withstand the moral authorities saying it is wrong. That’s why the Left has won every battle in the culture war. They can thunder, “you may have facts, but we have righteousness!”

There’s another problem with what Milo and Sam Harris are saying. Let’s stipulate that identity politics are a bad thing. Is playing that card better or worse than losing to the Left as they relentlessly play the identity politics game? Unless you have a serious mental illness, you have to see that the Left is nothing but identity politics now and they are winning. Just turn on the TV. Just look at the best seller list. The people of the New Religion hate white people, particularly white men and they will not be talked out of it.

The question that faces every man is not “what sort of society do I want for myself and my children?” That’s a lie and it has always been a lie. The question is “What are my choices and how do I achieve my preferred option?” The choice pushed by our betters is a world run by Black Lives Matters and women dressed as vaginas. If the other option is white pride, white nationalism and white supremacy, it is not hard to see how this is going to go.

All of the howling and complaining from the Official Right about the rise of the so-called alt-right is due to the unanswered question from the Milo piece. If the identity politics of the alt-right are bad, what’s the other option? If the answer is submission, which has been the case for the last three decades, at least, then the response is not just going to be “no” it is going to be “hell no!” No amount of moral preening is going to work because that is the thing people are rebelling against. What’s left is what is always what’s left and that’s force.

The Title IX Terror

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Very early in the French Revolution, France found herself at war with the rest of Europe. For reasons we will not go into here, the French declared war on Austria in the spring of 1792 and soon Prussia joined in on the Austrian side. Eventually England was fielding an army on the continent as well. One of the many interesting things about the French Revolution is that the country was radically rearranging itself at the same time it was defending itself on all sides. The war and the revolution soon became intertwined.

By the time the Jacobins and the Committee for Public Safety had taken control of France and the revolution, things looked dire for the French army. Many of their officers had fled the country as they were of noble blood. Others fled for lack of pay and support. Those who rose up to replace them were often incompetent boobs, but loyal to the revolution. The solution the revolutionaries in Paris found to this problem was to begin executing their generals for treason. That’s right. The solution was to murder the generals.

The logic behind this was quite simple. Since the new men of the Republic were now in charge of the army, the army was a republican army stocked with virtuous men of the Republic. France was now the first nation in history mobilized for total war. If the army was now composed of virtuous men of the Republic, with the full support of the Republic, the only thing that could stop them was failure at the top and that failure could only be due to treason. The generals failed because they wanted to fail or planned to fail.

There is an important lesson here that has been with us ever since the French Revolution. The Utopian dreamers of the Left always lock in on two unassailable beliefs. One is their vision of the perfect society and the other is their ideal citizens for that society. Those two things become axiomatic, so when things fail to materialize, those two items are off the table. They can never be questioned. Instead, the hunt is on for enemies, heretics and schemers, who are actively trying to undermine the cause.

That’s what has happened on the college campus with regards to the Title IX jihad against men, particularly white men.The original purpose of Title IX was to get more women into graduate schools. In the 70’s, when this odious law was dreamed up, graduate schools, particularly law schools, were still dominated by men. By the time the law was actually passed and implemented in the Clinton administration, women dominated the college campus. They held most of the majority of staff positions, were the majority of undergrads and dominated most of the post-graduate schools.

The feminist pushing this law, however, always had other ideas. They had the radical dream of the female utopia on the college campus and, of course, the ideal revolutionary co-ed. When reality would not yield to their particular brand of lunacy, they went looking for enemies. After all, the dream is perfect and women of virtue were now in charge. The only reason utopia has not bloomed on campus is there must be enemies in their midst and those enemies have a penis! As a result, the campus has become a feminist toxic waste dump.

This story is emblematic of the insanity. You’ll note that tucked away in the story is the reference to a “Dear Colleague” letter – which urged schools to lower the standard of proof for sexual assault and misconduct. The reason for this is that when the feminist nutters found a witch to burn, they were confronted with the silly problem of actually having to prove their case. Since almost all of these cases involve either drunk people or crazy people, there was rarely a way to actually prove anything.

Instead, the enemies of the people were allowed to hide behind those antiquated rules of justice, which were all written by dick wielding enemies of the feminist revolution! In other words, the innocence of the accused is more proof that they are clever and crafty traitors working to undermine the revolution. It’s why every college campus has a Title IX officer now. These tinpot Torquemadas exist to circumvent justice in order to champion the cause of the just.

This too has echos of the French Revolution. The Jacobins sent what were essentially ideological enforcers out into the provinces. They sent Representatives on Mission to watch the generals in the field. During the Terror, Robespierre turned on his former friends, the Girondins, but making his case against them in open court became difficult. The solution was to find them guilty first and then worry about other stuff later. Nothing could stand in the way of the virtuous, as they furthered the cause of the revolution.

It is this toxic atmosphere that encourages the rape hoaxes that have become a feature of campus life. The gyno-revolution is not only short of enemies to persecute, it is short of victims too. That’s why a patently ridiculous story like the Rolling Stone hoax goes unchallenged for so long. It’s not just that these fanatics want to believe it. They have to believe it as to do otherwise means questioning the premise of the revolution and that is a good way to have your life ruined.

It is foolish to think that the Feds will ever find the balls to repeal Title IX or even scale back its scope. One reason feminist nutters are going berserk in the streets is in order to inoculate themselves to the Trumpian reform efforts. The answer will come in the Federal courts as more victims of the Title IX Terror press their case and win judgments. A few fines and the revolution is over. It’s a terrible way to solve the problem, but it is what happens when you put women in charge of anything.

Pink State

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O’Sullivan’s First Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. The law is named after British journalist and former National Review editor John O’Sullivan. This is especially ironic as O’Sullivan was forced to abandon most of his right wing positions in order to avoid being purged from National Review. Diseases are often named after a famous victim, but this is the first time the victim named his disease before he contracted it.

Red State is a website that was originally started as sort of a “conservative” alternative to the left-wing blogosphere. I put quotes there because Red State’s brand of conservatism has always been the housebroken type of stuff popular on the Bush wing of the GOP. Like a lot of so-called conservatives in the Bush years, Red State was basically just a cheering section for the Republicans. Whatever Team Bush proposed, Red State branded as “Reaganesque” and “principled conservatism”, especially if it meant killing Muslims.

That probably sounds harsh, but I’m just getting started. Serial plagiarist Ben Domenech, pen for hire Joshua Trevino and the portly proselytizer Erick Erickson saw an opportunity to promote themselves, and maybe lever their popularity with conservative voters, into the careers they thought they deserved. The whole point of Red State was to ball-gargle the establishment, hoping to turn their obsequious rumpswabbery into a Jonah Goldberg lifestyle. The three of them are emblematic of what went wrong with conservatism.

Anyway, this all came to mind because of this post on Red State that looks like it should be on the Daily Lunatic.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is supposed to be the sane, responsible anti-immigration group of the John Tanton-sphere. Tanton is a former Zero Population Growth activist who bankrolled anti-immigration groups like CIS and FAIR after native American birthrates dropped below replacement.

But now CIS is falling down the same Alt Right pit that Tanton for years has denied courting!

One of the leaders of the “Alt Right,” which is the successor to the White Nationalist movement, which was the successor to the American Nazi movement, is National Policy Institute chairman Richard Spencer, based in Arlington, just like American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

Spencer (who totally isn’t a skinhead, as he only shaves the sidesof his head), is hosting some speakers to promote his ideology, including VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, and VDARE contributor Kevin MacDonald. This is the pseudo-intellectual forefront of the alt-right, white-nationalist movement in America.

CIS being reasonable and mainstream has every reason to distance itself from the likes of these. But no: they’re promoting the works of Brimelow and MacDonald, promoting VDARE links and MacDonald’s own writing. CIS wants you to read more of the alt right. CIS is allying with the alt right as part of its extremist anti-immigration ideology.

I’ve gotten criticism in the past for calling out groups like CIS and FAIR. Defenders have held onto CIS though, hoping that Mark Krikorian would keep the group from falling into crazytown. But he has failed. CIS would rather work with the alt right, than bend on their extremist policy of banning all immigration.

And therefore conservatives must stop pretending CIS and FAIR are groups we can work with, since the last thing we need is to poison our movement with the alt right.

The fat dope who posted that nonsense is a good example of the sort of people who infiltrate the organizations that are not “expressly right wing” and turn them into left wing organizations. His primary motivation is signalling his fidelity to the One True Faith by pointing at the nearest heretic and yelling “witch.”  Fatty was probably dressed as a vagina down at the Women’s Waddle in Washington. That’s because “principled conservatism” means locking arms with liberals to oppose Trump.

Anyway, you see all the cons used by social justice warriors in that post. There’s guilt by association, the use of the transitive property to link the targeted enemy to some imagined evil and, of course, the demand that the target abandon their position or face being branded a heretic. In this case, it means the very sensible and respectable Mark Krikorian must denounce people he does not know or he and his issues are ruled out of bounds for decent people. Fatty does not have an argument to make. He just wants to curry favor with his fellow lunatics by accusing someone of heresy.

Like all of the sites in the cuck-o-sphere, Red State has seen its traffic collapse over the last year. That’s because they were never expressly conservative. They were always just to the right of the Official Left. As progressives rocketed off into identity politics, all of these guys tagged along behind them, convinced that being a little less enthusiastic for the latest liberal fads was enough to make them “conservative” and keep the good times rolling. As a result, they claim anyone not falling for their act is a Nazi.

Red State becoming Pink State is no surprise as it was never expressly right wing, rather it was just a marketing vehicle for the people who started it. All of them have moved on as the enterprise served its purpose. Now it is being overrun by rotund rodents like Neil Stevens, launching purity campaigns against everyone to their right. It’s a good lesson for those inclined to support the emerging voices out of the Dissident Right. Not all of them are in it for the right reasons so taking any of them at face value is not a good idea.

The Long Civil War

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John Derbyshire was the first person I heard use the phrase “cold civil war” to describe the culture war in American society and politics. His argument, if I recall correctly, is that the Civil War may have ended, but a cold version of it has festered ever since, largely over the issue of race, but other issues are part of it. The result has been the Blue side of the conflict, the good whites, imposing their will on the Gray side, the bad whites, using the “transcendent morality” of racism as the main weapon.

It is a good way of looking at things. The recent hysteria about the bogeyman of racism, for example, is almost all coming from suburban white women, who live in all white neighborhoods. They don’t really care about blacks in a practical sense. Their real concern is the specter of bad whites holding opinions the good whites find unacceptable. It’s what caused them to go bonkers over Bush and then force the ridiculous Barak Obama on us. The bad whites needed to be taught a lesson and put in their place, which is at the bottom of the social order.

The whole red state/blue state business that got going with the 2000 election was another manifestation of this. The bad whites voted for Bush and tended to live in awful places like the South and Midwest. The people who voted against Bush lived in cool paces like New York and LA. This was made more obvious in 2008 when the states not going for Obama were conspicuously Southern. More than a few lefties noted that the Old Confederacy did not vote for Obama and everyone knew what that meant.

Now that this Progressive Awakening is sputtering to a comical end, the Left is increasingly convinced that the nation is headed for a civil war. This post on The Daily Lunatic from last year is humorous, but representative. Here’s another from the Huffington Post. This piece in The National Interest is a recent example. TNI is not explicitly Left, but it is certainly not explicitly Right either. It’s always been a neocon hangout, which puts it on the Left, mostly as a home for heretics who broke with the Left on foreign policy.

The reason the Official Right was willing to join arms with the Left in opposition to Trump last year was their belief that Trump was leading some sort of rebellion of the bad whites against the benevolent rule of the good whites. Now that Trump has been installed as ruler, the same people are imagining a counter rebellion by the good whites, like the cat ladies, who waddled into DC on Saturday. The only thing they were missing was having the geriatric Madonna lead the crowd in singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

It is easy to dismiss it, as the Left is prone to these sorts of histrionics whenever they don’t get their way. Even so, what we may be seeing is not a new civil war or even a continuation of the Civil War. Maybe what we are seeing is the final, long delayed end of the Civil War. The political realignment we are witnessing is not the start of anything, but the end of a long cycle of American history that started in the 19th century with the Hartford Convention. After several delays, we are reaching the final denouement.

If you think of America in terms of The American Nations model or maybe the Nine Nations model, the last 200 years can be looked at as a long hegemony of Yankeedom over the rest of the country. Following the Civil War, the South was excluded from having a say in how the nation was governed. The Midwest and Mid-Atlantic were subordinate to the Yankee ruling class, while the West was simply not a factor. This remained the case into the 20th century, as America went from provincial backwater to an industrial power.

The 20th century should have been when this post Civil War arrangement began to fall apart as the South rebuilt and the West joined the Union. Instead, the Great Depression, two world wars and the Cold War locked everything more or less in place. Nixon’s “southern strategy” to win the presidency was an early sign that the old order was unstable. The necessities of the Cold War kept things in place, but the dominance of the old Yankee elite was showing it’s age as far back as the 70’s.

Look at something else. The Conservative Movement got going strong in the 1960’s and came into its own in the 70’s. The election of Reagan made conservatism the alternative to liberalism, but it did not change the regional alliances in the country. Up until very recent, conservatism was strongest in the South, but it had no Southern leaders. The GOP, the alleged home of the Right, remains a party of Southern voters, but Yankee leaders.The Trumpening has mostly been about the long overdue eviction of the Bushies from party leadership.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the start of a process where America returns to being a collection of regions more or less cooperating only on the big issues like national defense and trade. On those items, perhaps the national ethos returns to something like the John Quincy Adams model, rather than the Theodore Roosevelt model. A lot of what Trump says about foreign policy and trade may be a reaction to the neocon debacles of the last three decades, but they are also an echo of the pre-Civil War consensus.

One final thing. The Left is suddenly talking about the need to restore powers to the state as they face a federal government controlled by their sworn enemies. There are many on the Right who would like to see an Article V Convention. One side fears what the Federal government might do and the other side has had enough of what the Federal government has done. The one thing all sides of the political class may accept in the end is a restoration of the natural regionalism that has always existed in America.

Playing With Fire

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The Trump inauguration featured the usual array of public nuisances and troublemakers that are now a feature of public events. If world leaders meet in a city, that city has a riot by anarchist loonies bused in by guys like George Soros. If a country celebrates one of their traditions, lunatics show up to ruin it for everyone. In this case, paid employees inspired supporters of Democrat pressure groups showed up in the Imperial Capital to harass citizens as they attempted to enjoy the spectacle of crowning our new emperor.

I’ve long argued that public protests are anti-democratic, anti-liberal and an assault on civilized order. They are unnecessary in a social democracy. We have elections where the issues of the day can be debated. There’s simply no need to be out in the streets causing trouble. These people yesterday were not there to raise awareness. They were there to intimidate and frighten people. While we cannot ban such things, the punishments handed out for causing trouble should be draconian. Put the rioters in a city jail for a couple of years and this comes to an end.

Normal people will tolerate a fair bit of this, just as long as they can avoid it when going about their business. There’s also an entertainment factor that gives these rioters some room to maneuver. The press loves covering these idiots and people will watch it on TV. Of course, most of the nation’s press corp wishes they could be rioting and looting so they pretend that the rioters are a serious, organic response to oppression. The struggle myth remains a powerful force in Progressive politics.

Property destruction used to be the preferred action of these rioters as it avoided the moral hazard of physical confrontation. If they rumbled with the cops, they could get a beating or worse. If they assaulted people on the streets, something similar could happen. Plus, judges are tough on perps who attack innocent bystanders and cops, while they are lenient on property crimes. Insurance pays for the damage and the miscreants don’t have any money, so it is easier to just let the rioters go.

That’s changing as we keep seeing with Trump events. These lunatics show up and throw eggs, batteries, urine bombs and worse. There were reports that rioters were crapping in their own hands so they could fling it at people. Milo Yabadabadoopolis keeps having his events cancelled because the authorities worry about potential violence. Given that a guy was shot at his last event, it is not an unreasonable fear. It’s the extreme version of the heckler’s veto. Instead of shouting down the person on stage, the heckler opens fire on the audience.

The question that comes to mind is when do we see the other side of this. So far, it has been all leftist crazies assaulting normies, who quietly take it. To their credit, the normies know the media is looking for a reason to blame all of it on them so they have adopted a passive approach to it. Videos are posted on-line and appeals are made to the authorities to do something about the violence. The assumption is the public will side with the victims over the lunatics, even if the press does the opposite and blames the victims.

So far, it has been remarkable that nothing serious has happened. These protesting lunatics are not terribly clever. All it would take is a bit of forethought to lure them into an ambush. How long before some armed normies turn up at an event and wait for the lunatics to give them a reason? The fact that it has not happened is encouraging, but maybe we have just been lucky. There are a lot of young men at Trump events. The alt-right is mostly young men. Young men tend to push back.

The other side of this is something that came to mind watching Richard Spencer get attacked on the street while doing an interview. At the risk of breaking the code, Spencer is an attention hound, who I suspect set this up hoping something like this would happen. Doing an interview on the street in front of the lunatics is just asking for trouble. The video was posted by his followers and he has been talking about it nonstop ever since. It’s good public relations for him and his cause. It makes him sympathetic, but also gives him street cred.

Of course, young men looking for street cred of their own will see this as a chance to be part of the action. They can stand guard while guys like Spencer conduct interviews and give speeches. This has been the attraction for black militants since the 60’s. Given the choice between wearing cool outfits and carrying a gun or submissively taking a beating from the cops, young black men naturally are drawn to groups like the Panthers, the Nation of Islam and recently, Black Lives Matter.

It is another example of the dangerous game being played by our Progressives rulers. While the public becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the current order, the ruling class becomes increasingly hostile to the people. By encouraging this sort of mayhem we see outside public events, they are encouraging a response to it. I don’t have much interest in Spencer and the preppy Nazi stuff, but if I’m forced to choose between him and the anarchist rioter, it is not a hard choice.

I’ve been making the point for a while now that Trump and his election are a warning shot across the bow of the ruling class. The public is increasingly frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the ruling class. Reform is long overdue. The support for and election of Trump is that message. If the ruling class ignores it or actively subverts it, what comes next will be much worse. The status quo is untenable, but we are not at a crisis. More videos of citizens being assaulted by leftist mobs and people start thinking the time for half measures has passed.

New Solutions

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The generally accepted theory among archaeologists is that humans began to settle down and transition to agriculture about 15,000 years ago. It did not happen all of a sudden nor did it happen everywhere. The first large scale settlements arose in places that were the most hospitable to people just mastering agriculture. The region between the Yellow River and Yangtze River, Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley are thought to be the first places humans developed large scale settlements.

The big challenge for the first settled people was how to pick leaders. Hunter-gatherers had an easy solution for this. The best warrior or most senior male would be in charge of the group. Since the groups were small and composed of related males, disputes could be worked out at the personal level. If Trog turned out to be a bad leader, Trog would fall off a cliff or have a hunting accident. Once the group got too big for this to work, cousin Grog would lead his kin off to form a new clan somewhere else.

Once groups of humans began to settle down in close proximity with one another, conflict was inevitable. That’s most likely why the first settled societies happened in the fertile river valleys. They were good for human habitation, so populations grew. Before long the population density made group conflict inevitable. In time, one group would come to dominate and absorb other groups. The old Grog clan from above would take over the Trog clan and maybe some others. The result was a tribe distantly related people.

Picking leaders to rule over unrelated people required different habits and different rules than picking a leader for the small group of related people. Once you get past second cousins, family relations are not all the close. Then you have the habit of marrying off women to other groups in order to broker peace and cement agreements. Governing can no longer be personal. You need a system to develop and select leaders, adjudicate disputes and delegate authority.

There are many ways to pick leaders, but the real challenge is how to deal with a bad selection. The Roman Republic solved this with what amounted to term limits. The Roman Empire relied on assassination to solve the problem. The Chinese never have figured out how to remove defective rulers, but they did come up with a very good way to filter them out before they gained power. Mao remains the best example of what happens when their filtering fails. The Great Leap Forward killed between 30 and 50 million people.

The European method that developed after the fall of Rome was feudalism. The king had to rely on the large land owners for money and soldiers. Those large landowners often relied on lesser nobles to collect food rents and conscript men for soldier work. This system put limits on the power of rulers, so a tyrant or lunatic could be controlled until he fell off his horse or got some bad wine. It was not perfect, but it protected the landowners from a predatory tyrant or a dangerously ambitious monarch.

The other unique thing about Europe that effected the evolution of governance is the fact that no one group was ever able to dominate the rest of the continent. The Qin unified China over 2000 years ago. Various Arab tribes dominated the Near and Middle East for very long periods. The Romans dominated Europe, of course, but that domination was their undoing. The cost of holding the Empire together exceeded the benefits of keeping it, leading to the collapse of the Western Empire. The fact that the Eastern Empire held on is not an accident. Europe is not built for unification.

Europe’s governing structure where rulers were limited and ethnic groups competed with one another, but were never able to fully conquer one another, was probably the recipe that eventually led the West to race ahead of the world economically, militarily and technologically. There’s more to that story, but things like the rule of law and property rights were essential ingredients for the Industrial Revolution. Without property rights and limits on the state’s ability seize property, there’s no reason to save and invest.

The sudden changes in governance that swept Europe coincided with the Industrial Revolution. One way of looking at the French Revolution is that the old governing model was built for an economic system that was being replaced by a new economic system, one that would require a new governing model. Liberal democracy has only flourished in nations with merchants and manufacturing. Industry does not automatically lead to democracy (China), but in order to have self-government you need a market economy.

The point of all this is that social structures like liberal democracy are not the product of inevitable historical forces. The Chinese form of government is the product of the evolutionary history of the Chinese people. Pluralism, openness, self-government, the rule of law, all the things we associate with liberal democracy, are the product of the unique history of the people of Europe. It is why they have proven to be impossible to transplant to other parts of the world. The rest of the world is not built for Western social structures.

That’s a lot of book length material summarized into a few paragraphs, but it is an important lesson of history. The people of the West have unique organizational structures because they have unique histories. As a result, they have different human capital, because the people evolved with those social structures. These small differences on the individual level, roll up to be rather large differences when expressed in customs and social institutions. Just as important is the fact that it is ongoing. People and their societies continue to evolve.

With that in mind, what we call liberal democracy is the product of the industrial age when making and selling things was the core of European economies. The challenge every ruler in Europe faced in the 17th century was how to get the most of the available human capital. That not only meant getting everyone working, it meant increasing each worker’s productivity. If you are going to have a big standing army, for example. your farmers have to produce lots of surplus food and supplies for that army.

The technological revolution is going to lead to a different economic model. Instead of one that gets the most from the available human capital, the new economy will be one that gets the most from technological capital. The robot revolution is oversold, but the future will require fewer people to produce the goods and services we demand. It is not just labor being replaced with machines. It is intellectual capital being replaced with technology. The future is about how best to organize society when technology is handling the bulk of work.

The so-called populist uprising in the West, seen through this prism, takes on a different color. For instance, the reason Hillary Clinton lost is that technology allowed for a different type of campaign and new way around the government controlled media. The establishment showed up in its 1960’s muscle car and the challengers arrived in Teslas. In 2016, the twitter account of thousands of alt-right types carried as much weight as the pages of the New York Times.

This post is going on too long, so let’s wrap this up. In 1789, no one in France could imagine what was coming. That’s in part because they had not noticed the demographic and economic changes that had been going on for generations, which led to the Industrial Revolution. The modern West has been in a post-industrial phase for at least a generation, maybe two. Yet, the organizational model we have is still an industrial one. Consider this. Who has more power? Congress or Google? Your PM or Tim Cook?

It may not be 1789 all over again, but these populist uprisings that are vexing Western leaders could simply be the tremors that precede the earthquake of social upheaval, as the old organization system falters in the face of new challenges. Ours is a less violent age so Madame Guillotine will not be making an appearance, but systematically altering the governance model is not out of the question. Our constitutions were not handed down by God. They were always temporary solutions to immediate challenges. We have new challenges and maybe social democracy has run its course.

The Abuse of Sexual Assault

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The other day, I ran across this story in the sports pages. The sporting news often resembles the police blotter, so this is not a unique news item. I usually skip these stories, but something about it peaked peeked piqued my curiosity. The accused in this case is a college football player charged with “sexual assault” along with some other crimes. Like most people, I hear the word sexual assault and I think rape, but then I remember the mountain of rape hoaxes on the college campus and I’m immediately skeptical.

In this case, the player is charged with two counts of fourth degree sexual assault, crimes resulting from the cops trying to arrest him and underage drinking. Sandbagging is the standard procedure these days so even the smallest crime ends up in a litany of charges. Because cops and prosecutors are mostly incompetent, they use the sheer mass of the system to bludgeon those caught up in the system.  The idea is to bully the accused into taking a deal, which makes life easier for the cops and prosecutors.

Of course, the charge that will ruin the kid’s life is the sexual assault charge. Looking at the news story from when it happened, you get to see the absurdity of the charges. In Michigan, fourth degree sexual assault is basically aggressive touching, at least when it is between adults. It is always leveled at males, who get into some sort of beef with a female. Two fully clothed people on a city street are not engaging in anything sexual, but that does not matter. It is the go-to charge against young males in an altercation with a female.

Common law defined rape as unlawful intercourse by a man against a woman who is not his wife by force or threat and against her will. These days, rape is legally defined as unlawful intercourse against the will of the victim. In other words, the sex of the parties and the use of force are no longer relevant. Attempted rape, of course, is a failed attempt to commit rape. These are concepts that everyone understands, with deep roots in western legal tradition. They don’t require further explanation as the definitions are clear.

Assault is a bit different. Most people think of assault as physical contact where one person causes bodily harm to another. That’s not the legal definition of assault. In the law, assault is an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact. Put another way, assault is when one person does something to cause another to think they are under threat of harm. What most people think of as assault, the law defines as battery, which is why you hear the phrase “assault and battery” in crime stories.

The point here is the law has had, for a very long time, a definition for forcible sex, assault and battery. A reasonable person, particularly someone on a jury, could review the facts and testimony and render a judgement. That should have been enough to cover what happened in this Michigan case and all others like it. Maybe the accused was threatening the woman and she had a reasonable concern for her safety. That’s assault. It is patently absurd to attach sex to it, raising the specter of rape in the minds of the public and a potential jury.

But that is where we find ourselves in the modern age. We have expanded the definition of a sex crime to include anything that may give a woman the blues. The lunatics in charge encourage young women on the college campus to scream “fourth degree sexual assault” whenever they feel bad about a random hookup, which they are encouraged to do by the same lunatics. Inevitably, these cases end up dismissed, but you still have the waste of money and the ruination of reputations.

The fact is, there is no such thing as a sexual assault. The law often conjures terms, from commonly understood words, that have meanings well outside of the component words. It is almost always a hangover from the past. In the case of “sexual assault” it is a modern attempt to alter the relationship between the sexes. When was the last time you heard a woman charged with sexual assault or a man charged when the victim is another man? The answer is most likely never as it almost rarely happens.

It is yet another example of how the Left carves out authoritarian safe spaces, so it can run wild against its enemies. The war on men would not get very far in a fair fight, because as Hitler said, there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy. The expansive use of the phrase “sexual assault” in the laws allows every deranged co-ed in America a free shot at a male that vexes them. It’s how the mentally unbalanced young woman at Columbia was indulged well past the point where it was clear she needed psychiatric help.

Rape is a very serious crime, which is why we send rapists away for long stretches in nasty prisons. Attempted rape should be similarly punished as we know that sex criminals can never be rehabilitated. This is where penal colonies make a lot of sense. Sexual assault, on the other hand, is a made up crime that is entirely political. It is a weapon used by deranged feminists and lazy cops to bludgeon young men for the crime of having a penis. It’s also why these cases have such a startling low conviction rate. It’s also why so many young women put themselves in dangerous situations.

That last bit is the worst result of the expansive use of sex crimes in the war between the sexes. Young women are led to believe the law is a force field around them, insulating them from their idiotic decisions. That leads young women to going out, getting knee-walking drunk with strange men and then waking up with regrets, if they are lucky. You can bet that some portion of the “rape” problem in Europe has something to do with unattached young woman staggering around wasted at all hours of the night.

For just about forever, humans understood that boys and girls were different, requiring different rules for both. Women need to take care to protect themselves from men and men need to take care of their women, so they are not assaulted by strange men. That is biological reality and the only way our species survives. The abuse of sexual assault is just one of many examples of what happens when the Assemblywomen becomes a law book, rather than a comedy.