We Need To Talk About Fascism

Posted on November 16, 2018 by thezman

When I was at the Mencken Club conference, I was at Paul Gottfried’s table the first night and it occurred to me I should do a show on fascism. I don’t mean the cartoon fascism popular with some elements of the alt-right or the erotic fantasy version popular with the American Left. I mean historic fascism that actually thrived and existed in Europe during the interwar years. I got a lot of compliments on the shows covering libertarianism and democracy, so I thought I should try to do a big-brained show at least one a month.

What occurred to me at dinner that night is Paul’s book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept, would be a great skeleton key for a podcast. The book is a short, general survey of the topic and the academic arguments surrounding fascism. It’s also largely free of discussion of You Know Who. The Nazis were a crude implementation of fascism that lacked the intellectual depth you see in other fascist movements. They get all the attention for a a number of reasons, but they are anything but the exemplar of the movement.

The result this week is a very general introduction to the topic, along with a very general survey of the main themes. Because we don’t live in a serious age or a serious country, most people know nothing about one of the more important ideological movements of the last century. The goal here is to focus on the high points, without getting too far into the weeds. I have a bunch of links in the contents section for those interested in following up on the books and people mentioned. Obviously, this is a highly abbreviated survey.

Now, as an aside, Counter-Currents has been positing a history of the alt-right that is not entirely unrelated to the topic here. The alt-right has tried to imagine itself as the fascist alternative to the cult-Marx mobs of Antifa. They are wrong about that, but the back story of the movement makes for a fun read anyway, so I encourage people to read it. The four part post is here, here, here and here.There are a few things in there that were new to me and some things that I had forgot. Some of it is quite amusing, so give it a read,

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Link)
02:00: What Is Fascism
07:00: Left-Wing Fascism (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
17:00: Right-Wing Fascism (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
27:00: International Fascism (Link) (Link)
37:00: The Fascist Utopia (Link) (Link)
47:00: Fascism In America
57:00: Closing

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/YBpiWICxguQ

November Grab Bag

Posted on November 9, 2018 by thezman

Hello darkness my old friend. We are in the moist glorious time of the year, when the clocks are restored to normalcy. There’s nothing more invigorating than going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. Some people hate this time of year, but autumn is by far my favorite season, followed by winter. I like the shorter days particularly. This is something that has always been true for me, even as a kid. It’s probably a biology thing, as I learned over the summer. The Danes are also big fans of the hygge time of year.

At the Mencken Conference, a few people asked if I was ever going to do interviews on the podcast. I’ve always said no, but maybe I should reconsider. It keeps coming up for a reason, so maybe it is something I could do well. I’ve always just assumed I’d not be good at it, but I could be wrong about that. My assumption is you need to have a strong interest in the person in order to interview them, but maybe that’s wrong. It could be the other way around, where a good interview requires a distance between the interviewer and guest.

I’ll think about it some more, but I’m also pleased with how things are now. It took a while to get it right, but I’m generally satisfied with the results. I’m also seeing steady growth in listenership now. Part of it is I’ve made the show available on a wide range of systems, like Spotify, which is big with younger people. It turns out that iHeart is popular with people who listen in cars. Who knew? There’s a big European podcast network that is like the iTunes of Europe. Still, I think the simple format and style works best for me too.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: The Last Election
12:00: Order Versus Openness (Link) (Link)
22:00: The War On Whiteness (Link) (Link)
32:00: Everyday Cat Lady (Link)
42:00: We Have Always Been At War With Trolls (Link)
47:00: Brave New World (Link)
52:00: Stranger In Our Own Lands (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/3Pye8UfAZTU

Autumn World Tour

Posted on November 2, 2018 by thezman

As this show is released to the world, I am preparing for The Mencken Club conference, which is held annually here in Lagos. Unlike other events on the far far far extreme right, this is an older and more educated crowd. A good number of the attendees have advanced degrees, work in the academy and are members of AARP. Last year, the crowd was a blend of people in their 30’s and people in their 60’s, with a small number in the Generation X category. In other words, it’s mostly Boomers and Millennials.

Despite that, I had a good time last year, so I’m returning. I’d say the crowd is also divided ideologically. The older crowd is pretty much paleo-conservative, while the younger side skew alt-right. Given the condition of the alt-right these days, I doubt any of them would use that label, at least not in public. Still, the generational divide at this event is a useful proxy for what is happening in the culture. The older generation still thinks ideology is what matters, while the younger generation is drifting into identity politics.

One of the things that will be interesting to watch over the next decade is just how these sorts of events change, as the old give way to the young. The older generation prefers a model similar to an academic conference, in which you have speakers and organized social events. The younger generation seems to be less inclined to formalized meetings and more interested in the general socializing aspect. There’s also a noticeable lack of leaders in the younger generation, willing to organize these sorts of things.

Given the events of the last year, I’m interested in see who shows this year. The older crowd is less concerned with being outed as a heretic than the younger people, for obvious reasons. If you are a 30-something college professor hoping to get tenure, you need to be cautious in this age. This weekend will be a good test to see if the the endless persecution of heretics is having its intended effect. If I don’t see as many young faces this year, then we’ll know that the terror campaign working. .

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: Racism In Kenya (Link)
12:00: The German Right (Link)
22:00: China Worries (Link) (Link)
32:00: Brazil Hegemonic Masculinity (Link)
42:00: Viva L’Italia (Link)
52:00: Oh Canada (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/cz4ZKYTrKQg

Our Conservative Enemies

Posted on October 25, 2018 by thezman

Hunting around for material this week, I stumbled on some stuff from Conservative Inc. that reminded me of why so many of us threw in the towel on them and made the journey to this side of the great divide. It also reminded me that there are lots of people just starting the journey from Buckley conservatism or libertarianism. A lot of things readers and listeners here take for granted, they are just experiencing. It’s why it is necessary to go back and play the standards once in a while. So, I have a show about cuck-bashing.

A funny thing I discovered while doing research is that The Weekly Standard website is now for subscribers only. They used to post their stuff to the public, but now you need a sub to read their articles. What that means is my posts now have more readers than anything at the Weekly Standard. They claim 65K subscribers as of 2012, which is probably down to 50K now, maybe less. This site gets about 100K unique readers every month. My heart is an alligator. Let’s hope their numbers continue to fall.

It’s not all good news. I saw that one of the dingbats NRO hires to churn out pap for them was on twitter demanding someone be purged. The fact that any young people still think that crap is edgy or relevant means there is still plenty of work to be done. Like it or not, the cuck-o-sphere still has a vast audience for their surrender ideology. That’s why it is important to keep going over these arguments about the futility of Buckley conservatism and the danger of subversive neocons like Ben Shapiro.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: The Rackets (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
12:00: Wirtschaft Uber Alles (Link)
22:00: Exceptional Mendacity (Link)
32:00: Kept Men (Link)
42:00: Benny Passports (Link) (Link) (Link)
52:00: The Neocon Menace (Link)
57:00: Closing (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/lfFxlAwZ6qU

October Grab Bag

Posted on October 19, 2018 by thezman

It was a struggle this week. Sometimes, I have more material than I need and other times the opposite is true. It may be the result of the Kavanaugh circus. We’re in a let down period while the crazies rest up for the election. It could be me. It has been a melancholy week and the weather has changed all of a sudden. It has been a very tropical summer here in Lagos and then all of sudden it changed to mid-autumn. Autumn is by far my favorite season, but we usually get a transition period in September, where we ease into it.

It’s weird. It seems like all of a sudden it is getting dark early and the leaves are falling off the trees. We have skipped that wonderful time when the leaves change and you get the smell of autumn in the air. As I said, I like autumn, it is my favorite season. I like winter too, so I’m cool with the short days and long night. We somehow skipped the normal transition and it feels a little depressing for some reason. Maybe I’m just getting old.

By the time I was putting the show together, I got interested in the Proud Boys saga and I did not have time to do as much on it as I would have liked. Maybe next week. There’s also the story of the Rise Above persecution that deserves attention. This is the group the Feds are harassing over Charlottesville. It really is an egregious case, but one that should put to bed any notions that we live in a lawful republic. We are not all that far away from the government snatching people from their homes in the middle of the night.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: Believe Anarcho-Tyranny (Link)
12:00: Progressive Paranoia (Link)
22:00: Debt & Deficits (Link) (Link) (Link)
32:00: The Wages Of Diversity (Link)
42:00: Proud Boys (Link) (Link)
52:00: Dead From Lagos (Link) (Link) (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/hctcVRq4aww

Of Mobs And Men

Posted on October 12, 2018 by thezman

I’ve been on the road for most of the last week, but I decided to do a show anyway, as it seems like a good idea to stick with a regular schedule. I just got back in town and I did not have time to prepare for the podcast, so I’m just winging it this week. It sort of worked out as the media is full of hyperventilating about angry mobs. It is one of those times where the show wrote itself. The first three stories I found in the Post were all about the angry left-wing mobs that either did not exist or were the potent of great happenings.

Even after all these years of following politics I’m still impressed with the hive mentality of the Left. They really are like a school of fish. When one responds to a threat, all of them respond, as if by direction from central authority. It is like a highly choreographed dance of lunacy. There is some degree of direction and coordination, to be sure, but most of what we see is the loons all responding to what they see the other loons doing, as they peer out over the hive walls at the rest of us. it really is incredible and a bit scary.

I go back and forth on what we see happening. This Kavanaugh thing seems to have poleaxed the establishment GOP. Poor old Lindsey Graham is still in shock over what the Democrats tried to do. He may never be the same. On the other hand, the Left is equally stunned that their gambit failed. This feels like an inflection point, but what comes next is still a mystery. Maybe after the election the ruling class comes together behind closed doors to renew their shared hatred of the rest of us. Time will tell.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: Whatever It Takes (Link)
12:00: The Gaslight Gang (Link)
22:00: Mob Talk Is Racist (Link)
32:00: Lessons Of The Mob (Link)
42:00: Our Friend, The Government (Link)
47:00: Even Hitler Hates Trump (Link)
52:00: Left Wing Terrorism (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/qN6N-CXGVoo

The Haunted Present

Posted on October 5, 2018 by thezman

For a while now I have wanted to do a post on the intellectual origins of these rather weird political theatrics we are seeing in the public space. A mistake our side tends to make is to assume the Left is not working from an intellectual foundation. Because the Left never talks about their intellectual history, we just assumed it does not exist, outside of Marx or maybe some feminist writers. That’s not true. What we are seeing today is the culmination of a mode of thought that started a century ago in the interwar years.

It’s only one facet of it, but it is an important one. A point that cannot be made enough is that what we call Progressivism is a religion, a civic religion of sorts, but increasingly an esoteric mystery cult. The attraction for the modern Progressive is purely emotional and temporal. It is all about how the swirling torrent of Progressive fads makes them feel in the moment and how it makes them feel in relation to one another as initiates in the cult. What the show is about this week is taking a look at the sources of this phenomenon.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: Hauntology (Link) (Link) (Link)
12:00: The Specter Of June Cleaver (Link)
22:00: The Legacy of Lynching (Link) (Link) (Link)
32:00: Imported Grievance Warriors (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
42:00: In The Shadow of Adolf (Link) (Link)
52:00: Fear Of The Past (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/BHZM2UpAAnc

Tales Of Ordinary Madness

Posted on September 28, 2018 by thezman

With the infuriating madness going on in politics, I thought it was a good idea to take a look at the general madness that is the current age. It really is remarkable just how crazy things have gotten in a short period of time. The other day I was picking around YouTube, watching some old clips from 1970’s shows and I was struck by how strange and alien it all seems. Even though I was alive then, I was too young to notice what was happening in the world, so to my old eyes, it looks like another country, because it is another country.

Even in my adult life, things have changed so fast that my teenage years now feel like the past of different person from a different world. When I was in high school, no human walking the earth thought teenagers fumbling around in the dark was anything but normal, as long as it was a boy and a girl, of course. Today, it is grounds to destroy a man’s life, humiliate his family and maybe even warrant physical harm. The Anita Hill travesty looks quite innocent now, compared to the disgusting displays we saw this week.

More worrisome, the madness we see is almost exclusively a female problem. The women of America have gone insane. Not all women, of course, but a very large swath of them. Now, it is possible many are just liars, taking advantage of the lunatics to gain attention, but that seems worse to me. I think I’d prefer it if some women are simply insane, infected by some unknown pathogen, rather than knowing that some portion of our women are sociopaths. We are faced with nothing but bad choices.

Anyway, this show is a sampling of the more popular forms of madness we are witnessing today. Sadly, most of it is female madness. I guess the last two segments could be argued as both male and female, but I don’t see that as encouraging. The fact that male and female are close to being forbidden concepts speaks to the madness of this age, more than anything else, I think. Perhaps that is the real shame of it. The men are no longer able to keep pace with the women in the race to the asylum.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: The Kavanaugh Circus (Link) (Link) (Link)
12:00: The Madness of the French (Link) (Link) (Link)
22:00: #NotMe (Link) (Link)
32:00: Xirl Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
42:00: Going Gaga (Link) (Link) (Link)
47:00: The Wang Conjecture (Link) (Link)
52:00: The Dragon Lady (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/qPwN0GOv8HE

September Grab Bag

Posted on September 21, 2018 by thezman

I’m back from over the horizon and I’m just starting to get back to my normal schedule and feel myself. Any time I go away, even for a few days, I need a week to get back into my normal routine. I don’t know why this is exactly. I think one reason may be that I always maintain a full dance card, so when I break my routine, I fall behind on things. When I return, I then have to spend a week playing catch-up. On the other hand, it could simply be that I am now a creature of habit and any break in the routine throws off my game.

Regardless, this week’s show was thrown together in about two hours. Normally, I start making notes the weekend prior and then collect up the material I want to use during the week, so I can have time to record and edit. I’ll go through it a couple of times to clean up the “um’s and ah’s” that seem to be a feature of my spoken word. This week I did not have the time for any of that, so you’ll have to forgive the quality. Not only do I suffer for my art, but I make you suffer along with me. Just hope I never decide to cut off an ear.

This week I spend some time on the new mystery cult we see forming. That is the initiates into the secret ways of the sexually assaulted. Once you declare yourself in this club, you not only get magical powers, mortals are no longer allowed to question anything you say, not matter how insane. In fact, you’re not even allowed to ask for a definition of sexual assault, a term that appears to mean everything and nothing. Another perk of being in this club is you and the rest of the hens get to pick the Supreme Court judges.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: The Kavanaugh Drama (Link) (Link)
12:00: Kill The GOP (Link) (Link) (Link)
22:00: Burning Man (Link)
32:00: The Disaster of Diversity (Link)
42:00: Crazy People (Link)
47:00: Anarcho-Tyranny (Link)
52:00: A People Without A Home (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/_z0VNiCO614

The Social Contract

Posted on September 14, 2018 by thezman

This week I’m coming to you live from Copenhagen Denmark. Well, not live exactly. The show is recorded, as usual. I’m posting this from Denmark and as far as I know, I am very much alive. I’ve never been to Copenhagen, so I’m looking forward to some exploring, but I suspect I know the reason this is not a tourist hot spot. So far, the city seems rather plain, a lot like a Midwestern American city. There is nothing wrong with plain, but tourists want a hopping city center, real or manufactured, painted with the local culture.

The one thing I have noticed is that this is hipster hell. I feel like I’m in Portland. Every male has a skinny jeans, bespoke facial hair and noticeable ink. Now, this may be true everywhere young white males congregate. I live in Lagos, so I don’t see many hipsters or white people. Of course, I have yet to see a black person walking around here. I did see some Muslims and at the airport I swore they had Hispanics working the maintenance jobs. Maybe they import Spanish or Italians. Maybe Mexicans are great swimmers.

Since I’m here doing some big brain stuff, the show this week will be a big brained show, getting into political philosophy. For those with the small or medium brains, you may want to break out the brain oil before listening. One thing missing on our side of the great divide is anything resembling original thinking about politics. It’s either criticism of the mainstream options or romanticism for long gone models. That’s not going to cut it, so I’m going to be doing more stuff on alternative politics and alternative political philosophy.

This Week’s Show

Contents