Unnecessary Toughness

I finally finished watching the series Justified. Binge watching is my preferred method of watching these things nowadays, but it still took me two months to watch the whole series. I guess I am a slow watcher. Admittedly my taste in TV shows is pedestrian. I just do not expect TV shows or movies to be art or anything close to art. They are intended to entertain the average person. Against that standard, I would rank the series highly. It was not quite as good as Breaking Bad, but it was better than Sons of Anarchy, which went on too long and ended ridiculously.

I somewhat expected the same result as I entered the final season of Justified, despite the particularly good writing of the first five seasons. These long form dramas seem to lose their footing at the end for some reason. My hunch is the creators produce a great idea that works over a single season. They get picked up and put together a few more seasons and then run out of ideas or they cannot figure out how to bring it to a close. That was not the case here as the writers wrapped it up in a sensible way that worked with the rest of the series.

I do not want to give anything away, in case I am not the last person on earth to have watched the series, but what struck me about it was how the main character was a man from start to finish. By that I mean he was what we used to expect from leading men on TV and in movies. He was not racked with guilt or morally compromised. There were plenty of forks in the road where the main character had to figure out the right course, but there was none of the brooding and self-doubt we see in the modern leading man.

That is not typical today. In fact, it is rare. I mentioned Sons of Anarchy and that is a good example of the modern leading man. The hero of that series is always racked with guilt, doubt and Lord knows what else. The rebooted Batman, the one I watched anyway, is mostly about the hero’s battle with mental illness, instead of his fight with the threats to society. That is the model for the modern leading male. They are emotional cripples struggling to keep from leaping off a roof. Even James Bond has been turned into a head case. The last one I saw had him dealing with mommy issues.

Of course, male leads today almost always look like a pillow-biter’s wet dream. Steve Sailer has pointed out that most casting directors in Hollywood are effeminate gay men. The others are middle-aged women so the casting of male leads tends toward the fantasy male that appeals to old maids and queens. The result is steroidal freaks, who look like they spend all their time at the YMCA working out, among other things. That is something else that is changed. It used to be that a male lead lacked the sort of vanity that leads someone to steroid up and use “product.”

Tastes change and styles come and go so it may be nothing more than that, but I was struck by how out of place Justified seemed compared to modern dramas. The main character is a normal looking man, middle-aged with some gray around the temples. He is not a cartoonish looking brute or a mentally unstable pretty boy. His physical confrontations happen within the laws of physiology, as well as the laws of physics. The striking thing is that he is a genuine tough guy in the old time sense. When it comes time to face off with the bad guy, he faces off with the bad guy.

The classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, addresses the issue of traditional male in the modern world. John Wayne is the classic tough guy who operates on the edge of society, protecting society, but never quite part of it. Jimmy Stewart is what passed for the beta male hipster back in the day. Wayne settles things the old fashioned way. Stewart settles things in court arguing the law and morality. The movie never resolves the tension between the two male roles in society, suggesting there is no resolution, just a balance and a tension.

The near total lack of traditional male leads today probably reflects the fact post-scarcity America has lost the will or ability to do the hard work of civilization. Maybe it is simply no longer necessary. The people making TV and movies seem to think that is the case. Hollywood is, after all, the agit-prop of the ruling class. The people in charge want docile males, who are willing to be bossed around by women in Lycra jumpsuits. For the same reason the schools dope up the boys, Hollywood promotes the ideal male as being the Stepin Fetchit for the womyn’s studies department.

The Restoration

The reaction to Trump’s acceptance speech was predictable but illuminating all the same. The Left is in a panic because they have evolved into a bizarre identity cult that no longer cares about the practical aspects of politics. Trump’s talk of jobs, trade and culture may as well have been in a foreign language. The so-called Right has evolved into a wish list of policy positions dreamed up by government spongers living in the Imperial Capital. All of the boys and girls of Conservative Inc. are shrieking in terror at the Trump speech, yelling some version of “See? He is no conservative!”

Because Conservative Inc. insists they own the trademark for “conservative,” they insist they get to define what is and what is not “conservative.” Conveniently, everything Trump says is defined as outside the bounds of conservatism, while everything they say is within the bounds of conservatism. Professional conservatives pretty much spend all their time proving they are inside the lines as currently drawn. The death rattle of every mass movement is when they begin to turn all their efforts to rule making and enforcement.

The one thing the Buckley-ites have right is that Trump is not one of them. He is no libertarian and he has no interest in kissing the ring of the identity politics crowd. Trump made clear in his speech that he thinks the globalist fantasies about the glorious future are nonsense. Trump is a nationalist in the old school sense. That is, he thinks separate countries, governed in the best interests of their people, is the right model. Those best interests are defined by the people and implemented by their representatives. Hardly anyone on Team Buckley holds these views.

That does not make Trump a conservative. In order to evaluate that, we need a better definition of conservative than what has evolved over the last three decades. The place to start for that is Russell Kirk. He is a good example to use when understanding what went wrong with conservatism. Kirk fell out of favor with the Fusionists that make up Team Buckley and he was detested by the neo-cons. As a result, he gets little run in conservative circles these days, outside of some geezer paleo-cons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried.

Despite having been thrown down the memory hole, Kirk’s conservatism is looking like it will be what survives the current ructions on the Right. Most Americans are what John Derbyshire calls “gut conservatives” in that they are instinctively attracted to tradition and skeptical of the latest utopian fads. Many reading this have been trained by our current elites to be skeptical of their neighbor’s judgement, but the everyday tasks that are essential to an orderly society are carried out by average Americans using their best judgement.

If you look through that list of ten conservative principles, you can make a fairly good case for Trump on a few of them. As is always the case when judging a man through the television, you end up projecting upon him things that say more about you than about him. For instance, Trump is not an Evangelical Christian, but he is not hostile to religion either. Whether or not he believes in a transcendent moral order is impossible to know. He has said nothing to suggest he does, but he has never said anything to suggest he does not believe it. We are left to guess and that means guessing wrong.

Similarly, it is easy to say Trump is imprudent. His critics claim he is proto-fascist because he speaks forcefully about what he will do as president. Maybe it is just ego or maybe he believes it, but Trump certainly does not seem like a guy in awe of his own limitations. On the other hand, his statements on foreign policy sound a lot closer to John Quincy Adams than anything we have heard since the end of World War II. As with his spiritual inclinations, his prudence is not particularly clear.

Determining whether or not Trump is a conservative in the Kirkian sense is further complicated by the fact that he is a natural pitchman. Trump is a self-promoter, in the old fashioned sense. He uses hyperbole freely and amusingly. You know he is polishing the apple and he knows you know he is polishing the apple. In the political realm, this makes it hard to pin him down on specifics. It’s an effective political tactic, in fact, it is a great tactic, but it makes it hard to know exactly how Trump will attempt to govern.

In all probability, Trump is a transitional figure, like Nixon in 1968. The still young Buckley movement was winning arguments, but not ready to win elections. Nixon should have been a bridge between the unhinged liberalism of the 60’s and a sober conservatism, but it never quite worked out that way. The New Right we see forming up in the form of the alt-right, dissident right and so on is not ready to be a full fledged political movement, but it can energize a candidate. Trump could be the shake down cruise for a restoration of the conservatism of Russel Kirk.

Life in a Theocracy

In Saudi Arabia, getting caught with alcohol can get you the lash. Maybe. It sort of depends upon where you are in the social order and who is determining your guilt. In Iran, listening to western music can get you sent to prison or perhaps cost you a job in the government. Again, it all depends upon who you are and who is judging your violation. It can also depend upon who is accusing you too. This was true in colonial New England where accusations of witchcraft were arbitrary and the trials mostly based on things other than religious doctrine.

We have the image of theocracies as places with long lists of precise rules governing morality, public conduct, social relations and so forth, but the reality is always the opposite. Written rules can be debated by anyone with the ability to read. There is not much fun in being a priest if anyone can read the rules and render a judgement. In a theocracy, the religious order educates the public, handles the violations of morality and makes sure the laws comply with the official religion. The result is a high degree of arbitrariness for those who live in the theocracy.

Going back to Saudi Arabia, members of the royal family regularly head off to Dubai to drink, do drugs, fornicate with women, fornicate with men and otherwise live like rock stars. Everyone in the Wahhabis world knows about this, but they like living more than they like Allah so they say nothing. On the other hand, if you are a foreigner, who can be a bargaining chip for the royal family, then you can get jammed up for some pruno. Anyone that is a nuisance to the government can expect to have the religious police snooping around in their life, looking for a reason to send them to jail.

Theocracy is arbitrary. It is this arbitrariness that encourages neighbors to spy on neighbors, associates to rat on each other and even children to report their parents to the morality police. Being a rat brings grace. You see that in this story about the George Washington men’s basketball coach.

In early April, shortly after his team celebrated a postseason championship, a George Washington men’s basketball player visited a campus Title IX coordinator to log complaints about Coach Mike Lonergan. Lonergan, the player believed, had created an offensive, intolerable environment, evidenced in his mind — and in the minds of many of his teammates — by the spate of transfers during the coach’s five-year tenure.

The first thing to notice is the code words for morality. Title IX has become holy writ in the Progressive faith. Like the Bible, it is a mysterious source of authority to the adherents. Most Christians never bother to open their Bible and few Progressives can tell you anything about Title IX. They just know it is the highest of law on the holiest of sites, the college campus. To be the Title IX coordinator is no different from being the Mutaween in Saudi Arabia. This person is the supreme moral authority on campus.

Then we have the complaints lodged against the coach. Notice the vagueness here. On the college campus, “offensive” is the same as blasphemous. Any word or deed can be called offensive if it is deemed to have violated some tenet of the faith. Since these tenets are arbitrary, just about anything can be offensive, as long as someone in good standing with the religious authorities is willing to say they were offended. Again, you will notice that it matters who is accusing and to whom the accusation is being leveled.

Read the whole 2400 word article and you struggle to figure out what exactly the coach had done to warrant being thrown off the roof by the PC enforcers. That is probably why the writer resorts to quoting various shaman in the Title IX sect.

“They have an obligation to make sure the school is operating an environment where there is no sexual harassment,” lawyer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX expert and a former Olympic gold medal swimmer, said when apprised of the players’ complaints. “He is sexually harassing both the athletic director and the athletes.”

Notice the language again. They never say who is obliging us in this quest. The God of Puritanism is now just a mysterious blank space, a void that can never be mentioned, but must always be acknowledged. In other words, if you know you are obligated to enforce the one true faith, you are an elect. Of course, the quest to which we are supposedly obligated is equally mysterious. What does “an environment where there is no sexual harassment” look like? How do we know we are in one? The answer is one of the priestesses of the faith will tell us.

“Priestess” is the right word. In the America theocracy, women run the cult. Take a look at the bio of Nancy Two Names in the Post story. The hyphen is the first clue. She is or was married to a cuck. People assume that hyphen indicates feminist, but it is a gang symbol within feminism to indicate the adherent has bagged and tamed a male. Second, her bio tells us she went from college into the order and has spent her life as a professional nuisance. Hassling men is her all consuming passion. It is what defines her life.

As with Iran or Saudi Arabia, the accused in the America theocracy often make the mistake of thinking they can beat the charges. After all, if they have done nothing wrong, what do they have to fear? In a theocracy, however, the unwillingness to submit and confess is proof of guilt. Coach Lonergan is a dead man; he just does not know it. He will play by the rules, or at least the rules written down, but the Inquisitor is not bound by rules so the coach will be broken on the wheel and cast out of the campus.

That is life in a theocracy.

Whither the Fanatic?

Churchill supposedly said, “a fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” I think of that almost every time I visit National Review Online these days. As I’m writing this, the featured article is by the unhinged lunatic David French. He is the kook who thought about running for president on Bill Kristol’s Trotskyite party ticket. There is another article by French on the sidebar, which is a rant about Trump. Above that is a tantrum about Trump by Jonah Goldberg.

If you were new to the scene, you could be forgiven for thinking that National Review is some sort of leftist site that was created for the sole purpose of howling about Trump. I have not counted, but others tell me that more than half the posted articles over the last year have been about the terribleness of Trump and Trump voters. Someone told me they went back a few months counting posts on their blog and the anti-Trump posts outnumber the anti-Clinton posts five to one. I am not going to test the assertion as it seems in-line with what I have observed.

National Review is the flagship operation of Buckley Conservatism and it has given itself over almost entirely to anti-Trump lunacy. For over a year now they have been pumping out anti-Trump content to the point where there is no point in reading any of it. The striking thing is not the volume so much as the total lack of content. Their rants fall into one of two categories. There are the base personal attacks, calling Trump a big meanie that makes them cry. Then there are the rants claiming Trump is not a “movement conservative” as if that has any meaning.

That is really the issue at the heart of what is happening. I have often argued that Buckley Conservatism was just anti-communism with things like small government and social conservatism as decorations. Buckley-ites were fine trading authority for those decorative items over to the Left so they could have the whip hand on foreign policy. Once the Cold War ended and intellectual communism fell out of fashion, the Buckley-ites were left without a purpose. They were a mass movement without an enemy. To quote Hoffer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

Thinking back, the fall of the Berlin Wall was in ’89 and then Clinton won in ’92. All the smart people at the time were wondering what would come of conservatism, but then the Republicans won the House in ’94 for the first time in fifty years. Republicans were able to impose spending limits on Clinton and for the first in generations and it appeared that the ratchet was going to click the other way. The smart people suddenly shifted gears and started wondering what would become of liberalism. Even Clinton thought the era of big government was over.

Rolling back the welfare state was going to be dirty work and there is not a lot of fun in it. The Buckley Conservatives had been bred for generations to trade away authority over domestic policy so there were few with a real desire to get into the trench warfare that would be required to claw back the concessions of the previous generations. The ugly fight over welfare reform “taught” the Buckley-ites that there were no parades for the party that cut spending and shrunk government. Fighting wars was much more fun and less risky, to them at least.

I used to say that the worst thing to happen to Buckley Conservatism was the Bush family, but the death blow was actually 9/11. The Buckley-ites went all in on the Bushism because they were sure they had found the successor to the Evil Empire. It was like old times. They eagerly gave the Left whatever they wanted on spending and government, just as long as they could wage the great crusade against the Muslims. It was rank boosterism, devoid of anything resembling principle, but the movement had finally found a new devil and that is what really mattered.

Now that making war on the Muslims is out of the question, the Buckley-ites are once again in search of a devil around which they can base their movement. Anti-Trumpism for fanatics like David French is not going to be a fulfilling cause in the long run. Trotskyites like Bill Kristol and the other neo-coms can probably busy themselves with it for a while, but even they will tire of it eventually. Maybe they go back to being Progressives or maybe they just go away. Pat Buchanan thinks (hopes?) they will just go away, having been rejected by the public.

That is not the way to bet. Fanatics will always be with us. The lesson of the Clinton years was that the ideologues would eventually adapt to the post-Cold War world. The Progressives dived headfirst into the cesspool of identity politics while the Buckley-ites launched a crusade to pacify the Muslims. Now that the Coalition of Weirdos is blowing apart and the Buckley-ites are reeling, we may enter a period of cultural sobriety, but it is hard to know. Perhaps neo-nationalism will the next big thing to sweep the West. Maybe it will be something else, but the fanatics will eventually find their causes.

Intellectuals Versus Ideologues

I think if I were to produce a defining characteristic of a true intellectual, I would say it is someone willing to consider possibilities that are not already on the table. When I say “true intellectual” I mean to distinguish the real thinkers from the pseudo-intellectual posers. The truly smart and curious are not constrained by or extremely interested in the current fads. When presented with a puzzle, they first try to imagine all of the possible solutions and then begin eliminating the impossible.

One of the useful lessons of mathematics is that there are some problems for which there are many answers. If you are presented with x – 3 = 0   or   x – 4 = 0 then you know x = 3, 4. In other words, X has more than one possible solution. A surprisingly high number of allegedly smart people struggle with that basic concept. When you get into more complex areas like human sciences, the range of solutions to a problem may include a combination of factors interacting to cause the observed phenomenon.

Therefore, the intellectual is someone that starts with the set of all solutions and narrows the list to those that are possible. The religiously minded, on the other hand, reverse the order of things. They first eliminate all the possibilities that fall outside the limits of their faith. A Christian, for example, will never consider the possibility that his faith is nonsense and Jesus was a fictional character. The Muslim will never consider that Mohamed was simply a medieval L. Ron Hubbard.

Throughout history, we have examples of the priestly class convincing the people that the calamity that has befallen them is due to their deviation from the faith. When the plague ravaged Europe, the religious were convinced it was due to God’s wrath. What else could it be? The English blamed the Viking invasions on the faithful falling out of favor with God. Revolutionaries blame the inevitable bad results of their revolution on enemies of the revolution.

Just to be clear, religion is vital to every society. Most people should not be thinking about all the possible causes of what is around them. Islam may be useless to Western civilization, but it serves a needed purpose in the East. Christianity was vital to the development of Western Civilization. In fact, it was what preserved the stock of human knowledge that was the foundation of the modern West. Today, the West would be better off if our leaders were Christians, instead of insane.

Even so, the difference between the intellectual and the ideological enforcer is all about the possibilities. A good example of that is in this post on NRO the other day from someone calling himself Mario Loyola. He is one of the thousands of public intellectuals living off the taxpayer at foundations around the Imperial Capital. His CV is here and you see the word “fellow” turn up a lot in his work history. Most of our “conservative” intellectuals have credentials from the liberal of institutions.

Anyway, his post is about black crime rates and the causes of those crime rates. This bit got my attention. “When America is ready for a real conversation about race, it will start here. It will ask honestly what the causes are. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that race has absolutely nothing to do with crime rates, and that government policies such as welfare are the real culprit, creating the urban blight and broken families that lead directly to crime.”

Let us first start with the phrase, “have a conversation.” When you want to kill time, you have a conversation about the weather. When you want to let someone else know things about yourself, you have a conversation. When you want to find answers to problems, you do not have a conversation. That is how you get fired. You are fooling around having conversations instead of doing work. In modern America, when a Progressive says she wants a conversation, you better run.

Putting that aside, the first thing Mario does in his “exploration of causes” is eliminate those that fall outside the permitted. In fact, he makes clear that he is not interested in that conversation at all. If you already have the answer, there is no need for further discovery. Once you find the answer, the next job is to tell the world about your wonderful insight. That is why scientists post the results of their experiments. It is how the stock of human knowledge increases.

Of course, Mario is not offering any evidence of his assertion. For this type of Progressive, race falls outside the set of acceptable causes so it is eliminated without further discussion. Because he is from the shadow end of the faith, he also feels the need to eliminate racism so he can focus on the welfare state. His post is not intended to start a conversation or begin the search for the causes of black crime. It is testimony in support of his particular brand of Progressivism.

It is not a great surprise that our public debates are echo chambers. Biology has become forbidden knowledge. So much so that few know anything about it. That is because biology is at odds with egalitarianism, the foundation stone of the Progressive faith. Once you accept that nature does not distribute her gifts equally among all men, Progressivism is untenable. It is akin to saying Christ was fictional or Mohamed was a con-man. That can never be allowed, no matter how many people die.

Thoughts On Turkey

In my youth, military coups and revolutions were not common, but they were not unheard of either. Real countries like France or Canada did not have coups, but banana republics in South America had them with some frequency. Then you had the intrigues in the Soviet Bloc. A leader would suddenly stop showing up at public events and that meant he was sick or he had fallen out of favor. Africa would have revolutions with some frequency. We called them revolutions, even though nothing ever changed, but that’s Africa.

The general assumption was that a real country did not have military coups or revolutions because they had democracy of some sort. If the people were unhappy, they could vote in people they liked. If elements of the ruling elite were unhappy, they could appeal to the public for change. The military, instead of being an instrument of the ruling class, was subordinate to the civilian government and excluded from politics. That is not a bad place to start when defining a modern country. Real countries have elections, not revolts.

I think this is why the western news services were having so much trouble fitting the attempted coup in Turkey into their standard narrative. Turkey is supposed to be different from the rest of the Muslim world. Turkey is a real country with elections and globalism. Sure, the political leadership sounds a lot like the lunatics from the Arab world, but that is just an act. It is their version of boob bait for the bubbas. Instead of guns and abortion, their rednecks want to hear about Allah and the Jews. Turkey is a real country, not a banana republic.

Following along via Sky News, the BBC and CNN, I had to laugh at the confusion of the news people covering this thing. They did not know which side they were supposed to support. Initially, they were just baffled, as they do not know anything about the world that is not fed to them through their earpieces. They were reduced to stuttering through live images of people walking around the streets waving flags. Then Obama came out in defense of the Islamists and the rest of NATO followed suit. Instantly, the new media was anti-coup.

Another thing I thought was humorous about the news coverage was the repetition of the claim this coup was not a “21st century coup.” I first heard this said on Sky News and then all of the news services were saying it. Whether this was “monkey see-monkey do” or the official word from the party is hard to know. What I found amusing about it is Turkey is not a 21st century country, but it is in the middle of a 21st century civil war, of which this was a part. The fact that this is not obvious to the alleged experts, who rule over us, does not bode well for our future.

In this civil war, Erdogan is the Oliver Cromwell of Turkey and this attempted coup was something analogous to Penruddock’s Uprising. It is not a perfect analogy, but it helps explain what is happening in Turkey. The army is the defender of the secular legacy of Ataturk and the defender of the old order. Erdogan is the leader of the new order, the Islamists that believe they can have a modern technological society, under medieval Islamic moral codes.

Everyone seems to agree that this event makes Erdogan stronger, but Turkish politics are so opaque that outsiders can never really know what is going on in the country. This could have been an operation run by the secular military to get the Gülen cult removed from their own ranks. The Gülen Cult is thought to have a stronger presence in the police than the military so this could be something more complex. In other words, this may not have been a revolt against the AKP but a revolt within the AKP.

There is also the fact that ethnic Turks are a majority in Turkey for now. Kurds are the future, demographically. That is a big part of what has put the AKP in power. The Turks view secularism as the cause of the demographic decline. The organization of the Kurds into a single political party, denying AKP a majority in the last election is a glimpse of the future and the Turks know it. That is why the AKP sent in the army after the election to persecute the Kurds. It is a part of what is driving the Turkish involvement in Syria.

The civil war among the Turks is about what to do about the future, a future that will have more Kurds than Turks if something is not done to arrest the low TFR of young Turks. Turkey has the Western disease, but it is still an Eastern culture. In the West, civilizational death is celebrated in the form of open borders and multiculturalism. In the East, it is met with religious revivals and bloodbaths. David Goldman makes the argument that the Iranian revolution was driven by similar forces.

The Turks are faced with a choice. They can be fully Western and go quietly into that good night. Alternatively, they can be Eastern and fight against the dying of the light. The former means modern technology and prosperity, for a little while at least. The latter means men in robes ordering homosexuals thrown off buildings. That is what is happening inside Turkey today. It is a version of what is happening in the West, but only in a country that culturally is closer to Byzantium than Brussels.

The Wuss Right

In the chattering classes, the line dividing the Left from the Right is over means, not ends. Watch cable news for a while and inevitably they will have one of those mini-debates they like staging to illustrate the two extremes of what is acceptable opinion on some issue. After the Dallas shooting, for example, a liberal and conservative would offer their take on the incident. What we are supposed to take away from these exchanges is that your opinion better fall somewhere between the two offered on TV. Otherwise you’re some sort of fringe weirdo or worse.

The acceptable window varies from station to station, but there’s not a lot of diversity within the dominant political culture. The liberal channels set the window closer to their preferred opinion while Fox is slightly to the right of them. The thing is, everyone agrees on the ends. You never see two people debating an issue where one has an entirely different goal in mind. Both sides always start from the same premise and have the same ends in mind. By “ends” I mean esoteric concepts like world peace, racial harmony or economic equality. They both talk about “solutions.”

If I were to describe what it is that drives those on the dissident right away from conventional politics, into the arms of various alt-right groups, I think I’d start with the ends in mind. People in the various refusenik camps, on the fringes of society, simply reject the ends that the conventional Left and Right accept as their starting point. It’s not that the trouble makers want the opposite of those Utopian goals. It’s that they reject the assertion that those goals are possible. Humans are imperfect and there is no solution to that bit of reality.

An example of how this works is in this piece from The American Conservative on the problems of Baltimore City.

From near and far, too many people who felt qualified to offer an opinion or exercise power to help didn’t take the time to appreciate the history that has shaped West Baltimore or the variety of people who have been working for decades to improve this place. Accounts of a place like Sandtown have to start with policies forged decades ago regarding redlining and lead paint—policies that handicapped the value of many residents’ homes or did likewise to their children’s brains. The harm is ongoing: conservatives can easily recognize how the welfare state disinclines people to work, but it is hard to blame recipients when most of the wealth transferred through government goes straight to property managers and hospitals, not to the people themselves, who have little opportunity to accumulate wealth. The institutions that are accessible to people in West Baltimore—primarily churches and gangs—are trusted because other institutions don’t maintain any reliable order or support.

Ask any liberal why Baltimore is a dumpster fire and they will make the exact same claims. They blame it on magic. Redlining, as a real practice, never really existed. In fact, banks have been under pressure for generations now to lend to unqualified minorities. Even if we pretend it was a real thing, it ended two generations ago. Blaming long dead bankers for the problems of today is the same as blaming ghosts. No one ever tries to explain how not getting a mortgage causes T’Quan to murder Terrelle for his sneakers. Blaming redlining is no different than saying Allah wills it.

There’s a similar problem with lead paint. It was banned in 1971 and government has been removing it from housing for two generations. There’s also the fact that there are no studies showing increased levels of lead in the residents of Baltimore, compared to the surrounding areas. It’s an interesting theory, but that makes it a good example of how statistical correlations can lead you down a blind alley. But, blaming magic means not facing reality so the Left and Right embrace crackpot theories like lead paint as the cause of black crime.

Rebuilding institutions requires local leadership as well as outside aid. Great hay was made of some $130 million spent on a public-private partnership in the late 1990s and early 2000s to revitalize the neighborhood. Much of this money can still be seen in the homes that were rebuilt. You can walk around whole blocks that were vacant 30 years ago and that now have clean sidewalks, no drug traffic, and the sort of neighborliness that New Urbanism celebrates. As deep as the problems of Sandtown are, much good has been achieved using outside investment directed by people from within the community.

This is the sort of stuff black radicals like the Black Panthers used to demand back in the 60’s. They wanted no-strings attached money from white people so they could build their Afro-paradise. When they got it, they stole most of it and used the rest to build out their criminal enterprise. Well intentioned white people supported these groups because they assumed the fairy tales were true. If you just gave black people money, they would create a black version of Mayberry USA. It was just assumed that all human capital was the same, because after all, all humans are the same and only racists would say otherwise.

West Baltimore is what it is because it is full of West Baltimoreans. The people who built and maintained the city’s institutions left a long time ago for suburbs. The current residents moved in, like animals taking up spots in abandoned buildings. They did not build it. They could not maintain it. The result was that nature took its course. The institutions decayed and collapsed. The habits and ways of the new inhabitants took over. There’s no solution to this reality. You don’t fix human biology with a government program or pseudo-prayers to the gods of diversity.

The line dividing the New Right and the Buckley Conservative is between those who accept the reality of the human condition and those who don’t. The writer of that piece thinks all people are the same and that the observable differences are due to various forms of magic like racism and lead paint. It’s why they are called the Wuss Right. They inevitably give into the Left because they share all the same assumptions about humanity as the Left. They share the same goals. Convergence in the form of orchestrated surrender is the inevitable result.

In The Cloud, You Never Have To Say You’re Sorry

After the Brexit vote, Prime Minister David Cameron announced he was stepping down from his position and leaving Parliament. He was on the losing end of the vote so he took the traditional approach and stepped aside. He did not have to do it as it was a referendum, not a parliamentary election. He also had plenty of support in his party for sticking around after the election. Instead, he chose to follow protocol and retire from politics. It is an acknowledgement that no man is indispensable and that there must be consequences to losing.

America used to have a similar tradition. When one party lost an election, they changed their leadership and maybe put new people in charge of the party. That is not the case anymore. Nancy Pelosi presided over a historic defeat for her party, but she refused to resign and remains as leader of her party in the House. Similarly, Harry Reid remains the leader of his party in the Senate despite leading them to disaster. Of course, losing an election is no longer a reason to retire from politics. Instead, it is a reason to make millions on Wall Street preparing for another run.

A big part of what ails America is the near total lack of accountability in the managerial elite. President Obama made a long list of claims about his health care bill, all of which proved to be false. There’s strong evidence that he lied about much of it. Yet, nothing happened. No one resigned from his team. They just laughed, shrugged and went onto other things. Jonathan Gruber, the man credited with designing the thing, laughs about lying to the public about how the program would work and what was expected. He got to keep his perch at MIT.

It is not just Democrats who never have to say they are sorry. Paul Ryan was the most embarrassingly incompetent running mate since Admiral Stockdale. Yet, he was rewarded for this by rising all the way to be Speaker of the House. Reince Priebus took the reigns of the GOP after the 2010 election and presided over the stunning defeat in 2012, only to stick around as head of the party. He is responsible for this battle plan crafted after the 2012 election. Everything in that document has proven to be wrong. Trump is the nominee because he did the opposite of that plan.

It is not just the politicians and party officials escaping responsibility. David Frum was humping this story on Twitter the other day. The story is nonsense, but what got my attention was the author. Franklin Foer used to be the editor of the New Republic back in the Bush years. He was the guy signing off on fabricated stories by a guy using the pen name “Scott Thomas”, claiming to be deployed in Iraq. It turns out that the writer was not in Iraq at all. It was also revealed that he was married to one of the fact checkers. The whole story is here if you have an interest in it.

Now, editors can get fooled by writers or by fake sources. Most anonymous sources in modern journalism are made up anyway. These fabricated stories were so outlandish, only a complete boob or a lunatic could fall for them. Regardless of the reason, he embarrassed his profession and his employers. In most lines of work, this means finding a new line of work, but that’s not how things work in The Cloud. Foer gets to write for big-foot publications and work at a think tank. Short of getting caught on video beating a Girl Scout with a puppy, there is no way to get fired in journalism.

Conservative Inc has a similar policy of shielding their worst elements from responsibility. The publisher of The Federalist is a guy named Ben Domenech. He also co-founded the RedState group blog. He also worked for the Washington Post until it was revealed he was a serial plagiarist. When caught he lied repeatedly until it was impossible to maintain the lies. He was also caught in a payola scam where he secretly accepted payments from agents of the Malaysian government to write editorials promoting Malaysian interests. Like Foer, Domenech could murder a nun on national TV and face no consequences.

The rest of The Cloud enjoys the same risk free existence. Look at all the people who pushed the Iraq War. They remain in their positions as experts at think tanks and government agencies. Karl Rove has grown rich on Fox News being wrong about everything. Bill Kristol is a millionaire based on being wrong for the last three decades. The Bush administration nearly destroyed the Republican Party and yet all of the principles escaped any consequence. Many have been recycled into new government positions with others waiting to join the next administration.

One of my favorite idiots is Jamie Gorelick, who has been a colossal screw-up at everything she has touched. In every position she has held, she managed to screw up in ways no one imagined. She was instrumental in the mortgage meltdown and collapse of Fannie Mae but walked away with close to $30 million. People thought it was impossible to break Fannie Mae, but she managed to do it. She even managed to screw up Duke’s handling of the phony rape scandal. It’s fair to say the woman is as dumb as a post, yet she was close to being named FBI Director by President Obama in 2011.

We could spend days listing the people in economics and banking who were disastrously wrong yet suffered no consequences. Being a Cloud Person means never having to say you are sorry. It means never paying a price for failure. That is the job of the Dirt People. They pay the price. The result is our ruling class is packed to the brim with credentialed fuckups who flit from one disaster to the next, usually because they created them. It is why Obama was able to rise through the ranks so quickly. Merit no longer has any meaning in The Cloud.

The fact is we are ruled over by irresponsibly reckless idiots paid for by a global elite that has no concern for the governance of our countries. They are global pirates riding a sea of credit money, as they sack the Western middle class. They have no interest in good governance because competent people in government may do something about the financial pirates like George Soros. Rule by hired moron means rich guys can crater the mortgage markets and escape with billions. It means you can lose two wars of choice and keep your sinecure.

That brings us back to where we started. David Cameron was on the wrong side of the Brexit vote and resigned. That is what an honorable man is supposed to do. Theresa May was on the Brexit vote and not only stayed on, but she also fought to get the top job and will be the next Prime Minister. The guy who was probably most critical to mustering support for the Leave campaign, Boris Johnson, was not only passed over for the job, but he was also shived in the yard by his fellow inmates in the party. He is out of politics while the losers get to be in charge of the country.

The common theme here is sex. In the wild, males fight males for females. It is winner take all. the loser either dies or flees. Females compete with one another for the attention of males, but it is not winner take all. The loser simply hangs around hopping to lure the male away at some later date. The Cloud is feminine, dominated by women and the habits of women. The pirate class out there on the sea of credit money is exclusively male. In effect, our national governments are literally the kept women and common night walkers, for the global billionaires.

Aristophanes was right. This will not end well.

Barak X

Way back in the olden thymes, there was a guy named Kurt Schmoke, who was the hottest thing in black politics since Martin Luther King. This was the late-70’s and early-80’s so most black politicians were like Jesse Jackson. Schmoke was different. He was charming and smart with credentials from the Ivy League. Most important, he was not standing on ghetto corners yelling about the honkies. Instead, he had moderate political views, worked in the legitimate economy as an attorney and he participated in mainstream politics. He was the sort of well-behaved black guy white liberals love.

Schmoke was supposed to be the example of how Progressive race polices would succeed. He went to public school, but got into Yale, went onto a Rhodes Scholarship and then Harvard Law School. This was how race policy was supposed to work. Given the opportunity to be free of white racism, blacks could rise to the very top of society and compete with whites. No one talked about affirmative action and it probably never played much of a role. Schmoke was a genuinely smart guy, but that did not stop white liberals from taking credit.

Schmoke eventually won office in ’82 and then became mayor of Baltimore in ’87. Everyone assumed he would be governor one day and then who knows. Instead, the politics of Baltimore devoured him. He went into office as a cerebral, race neutral technocrat. He was going to fix the city and avoid the racial politics. By the time he left office, he was wearing a dashiki and waving the flag of the African National Congress. Instead of being the sort of black politician that made white liberals proud, he ended up the sort that made them ashamed.

Twenty years after Schmoke was written off by white liberals, they had found a new great black hope. Barak Obama was a “new breed” of black politician. He was the product of the best schools and, according to Joe Biden, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Even better, he had an exotic back story with a white mother, a Kenyan father and a youth spent in Indonesian madrassahs. Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic convention made him a star in the party and punched his ticket as the next big thing.

The 2008 presidential was one long sales pitch about how Barak Obama was the salve to what ailed America. Obama was the quintessential example of what post-racial America was going to be. He was a post-racial healer, who would close the books on America’s racist past. The way the Obamasoxers carried on in 2008, you could be forgiven if you thought Obama was the leader of a new cult. They honestly believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy. He was the one to bring about the end to the long civil war in favor of those on the winning side of history.

The Magic Negro stuff was never going to last. It is not how the world works and it is certainly not how things work with the American Left. Obama was always a prop, a pitchman, an actor hired to play a role written for him by old white lefties from the 1960’s. His job was to freak out the squares. People forget that in 2008, the chatter from the Left was that whites feared nothing more than an intelligent, articulate black man. They believed it which is why they hired Obama in the first place. That was the point. They did not care a whit about Obama’s ideas. His job was to read from the teleprompter.

Things did not go as planned. The debacle of health care led to the midterm disaster and the Left decided Obama had to be scarier. The Henry Louis Gates flap was where the shift began. Obama the racial healer could have turned that into a chance to close the books on the bitter racism of Gates, but that would not have freaked out the squares in the suburbs. Instead, Obama made it clear that when the choice was between a black and a white, particularly a white authority figure, the weight of his government would back the black guy.

Here we are at the end of his time in office and America is looking worse on the race front that it has since the late 60’s. Instead of the post-racial leader of a unified America, we have a bitter black guy shaking his fist at the honkies, while homicidal blacks run wild in American streets. All the talk of the new black political leader seems like a long time ago. It is also reminiscent of the end for Kurt Schmoke. The reason Schmoke rose to be a star was that he was black. In order to remain a star, or at least remain in office, he had to keep getting blacker.

That has been the story with Obama. He has gone from the Magic Negro to Barak X.

It’s The Bogeymen’s Fault

When the Vikings sacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, the Anglo-Saxons, trying to figure out what happened, came to the only logical conclusion. God was angry with them over something did or did not do.

“In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen people destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.”

–The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

What followed in Britain as well as the rest of Christendom was more than just a military response to the Vikings. There was a spiritual revival. The secular authorities contributed to the Church and invited the bishops and priests into the granular management of society. The Church reformed religious orders and cleaned up the monasteries and nunneries. The role of women in religious orders was also diminished at this time. In other words, Europeans responded to a pagan assault by getting right with the Almighty.

Oliver Cromwell was pretty sure he was in God’s good graces. After all, he went from minor political figure to the head of the parliamentary army to the Lord Protector of God’s people, the English. After the disastrous military expedition into the Caribbean and a Royalist revolt, Cromwell came to the obvious conclusion. God was not happy with him and the English people. He set off on a campaign to restore liberty of conscience and promote both outward and inward godliness throughout England.

In the early 19th century, Abolitionists were sure that slavery was an offense to God and its presence in the new world would bring an end to the America Experiment. The people of Yankee New England were convinced that America was the city on the hill, the savior of mankind. They still believe this. The lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic make this quite clear.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.

The winning side of the Civil War blames the war on the siege of Fort Sumter by the evil white men of the evil South. The truth is the Abolitionist fanatics were spoiling for a fight. They truly believed that slavery was an offense to God and the only way to get back in the good graces of the Almighty was to end it by any means necessary. American Abolitionists grew out of the Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical Anglican lunatics.

We are now fully in the post-Christian era so the schools no longer teach kids the religious origins of the present lunacies. Instead, an array of bogeymen and evil spirits are conjured as replacements. Blacks are where they are, despite three generations of Progressive programs to help them, because of the mysterious demon called “white privilege.” No one can describe how this works, but our betters are sure this demon travels in the book bags of college students.

Sometimes bad juju is the cause of trouble as we see in this article about the George Soros funded attack on Dallas cops.

When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in 1963, their reports ricocheted off the tall buildings surrounding the green park. One bullet caught an innocent bystander. One found the governor of Texas. Two more, of course, struck and killed President John F. Kennedy, and in those few seconds frozen in time, the city of Dallas was instantly branded: the City of Hate.

A little more than 50 years later, the shots have rung out in downtown Dallas again, just a short stroll from infamous Dealey Plaza. There are some eerie circumstantial similarities, to be sure. But this time the target was not a president—it was police officers. And the political obsession of the moment was no longer the Cold War but racial division, the remaining scar of America’s greatest sin: slavery.

Notice the residual language. Sin is a Christian concept so if there is no Christian God, there can be no sin. That’s too complicated for the modern lunatic so they appropriate the language of their spiritual forebears, without thinking much about the implications. In this case, the modern lunatic thinks we have not fully atoned to the invisible forces of nature, for the sin of slavery, so we are having another spasm of black rage. How one can get right with the Great Spirit is never explained, but it means punishing the bad whites for some reason.

The modern era is riddled with these sorts of bogeymen and evil spirits. The Southern Poverty Law Center exists for the sole purpose of scaring old Jewish widows with stories about Hitler. Adolph is no longer a flesh and blood historical figure. He is a permanent spirit-force that takes the form of man, usually a Republican politician. Similarly, the KKK has become the Eye of Sauron, watching every dusky fellow in the country. If a brotha is not on his toes, a cop will pop out of thin air and shoot him for no reason.

Our current ructions are over who is to blame for angering the Bogeyman.