Turf Wars

Posted on February 20, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about cat prison, a post about the interplay of politics and war in the Ukraine and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In the political heyday of Conservative Inc., back in the Bush years, Karl Rove would speak about the benefits of “big tent” conservatism. The main upside was that it provided a winning coalition politically. This not only gave the people controlling it power, it made it easier for the coalition they assembled to ignore their differences, as there would be plenty of goodies for everyone. This was the theory behind the FDR coalition that ruled politics for half a century.

The Rove argument never held together for the simple reason that most of the people in this new coalition were never going to get anything. They were being lied to by the neoconservatives who seized control of the conservatism. Their singular quest was to use the American empire to further the long term goals of the neocons. This became clear in the Bush years where we got pointless wars of choice, a massive expansion of government and the creation of a police state.

That said, there was some bit of truth in the Rove claim. A successful political movement is always making compromises with itself. Regardless of the types of politics, practical necessity means cutting corners when it comes to ideology. The communists figured this out after they gained control of Russia. This means there is always going to be tension between the true believers and the ambitious. Success is what allows both sides to look past these differences.

Again, this was true with the communists in Russia. When they were easily crushed by the tsarist system, they spent their time squabbling with one another. When the tsarist system began to wobble and victory became a possibility, the various factions of Russian communism came together to fight the system. The Bolshevik coalition held together through the resulting civil war. Once victory was achieved, the factions began to go at one another.

There is much more to it than that, of course, but the point is that winning and the prospect of more winning can keep opposites attracting. Logically, losing or the dim prospects of winning will highlight the differences. That is what we are seeing inside the conservative industrial complex. The array of ideological groups is starting to turn on one another as their prospects dim. Faced with a shrinking pie and a growing threat from outsider politics, they are turning on one another.

For example, we have this post from the submissions editor of National Review Online attacking the Claremont people. The first thing to note is the post was published in the far-left conspiracy site The Daily Beast. The cozy relationship between people in the conservative ecosystem and the people they claim to oppose has always been a tell, but this is like satire of that old dynamic. If NRO was anything like it claims, Jack Butler would have been fired immediately.

The other thing to note is that the post is supposed to be a rant against the internet character Bronze Age Pervert, but it is an effort to purge Claremont. This may explain recent behavior of some Claremont people. Behind the scenes, where money changes hands and the donors do their best Randolph and Mortimer Duke impressions, a decision has been made to do something about Claremont. Jonah Goldberg’s flunky Jack Butler is playing the Billy Ray Valentine role.

Alternatively, the yesterday men of National Review may simply be going to their Trotskyite roots and taking a shot at the winners of the internal power struggle within the conservative entertainment wing. Claremont did not roll out a real person to respond to this attack and instead used an internet character. This post at American Greatness is mostly laughing at the ridiculousness of that Butler post. He restates the dissident case against conservatism made a decade ago.

In fairness, this spat is between low ranking parties in the conservative industrial complex and may not reflect what is happening inside it. Both National Review and American Greatness struggle to stay in business. The former relies on school children to produce much of their content. the latter relies mostly on unpaid volunteer writers to produce its content. Their respective not-for-profit operations take in a few million per year according to their tax returns.

In comparison, the neocon outfit American Enterprise Institute takes in over $100 million per year and has its tentacles wrapped around the Republican Party. Similarly, The Heritage Foundation takes in over $100 million and remains the primary engine for Reagan nostalgia in the system. Then you have the left-libertarian Cato Institute that takes in $30 million to promote globalism. In other words, two pipsqueak operations beefing with one another is a tempest in a teapot.

The billion dollar thicket of not-for profits that controls the conservative ecosystem remains unified in its opposition to the people they claim to represent. In other words, at the top of the system, the three legs of conservatism remain on reasonable terms with one another, mostly sharing the same donors. Endless war (AEI), liberal internationalism (Cato) and romance for a long lost past (Heritage) continue to hoover up cash to animate the shuffling husk of conservatism.

Even so, the turf wars between the low ranking soldiers of conservatism suggest the system has far deeper problems than personal squabbles among some of the circus freaks they put on stage. The institutions that control funding of conservative operations are now clearly suffering from Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. These operations care only about hoovering up as much cash as they can in order to keep the leadership of these groups in the lifestyle they think they deserve.

This is why they failed to thwart the Trump insurgency in 2016 and why they are struggling to produce a coherent alternative for 2024. The slobbering over Nikki Haley and Tim Scott suggests they have learned nothing. It is also why they have failed to coopt ideas and people from the dissident space. A guy like Bronze Age Pervert should have been easy to crush or corrupt, but the system is now too sluggish and stupid to handle such tasks. It is a fighter past its prime.

All of that said, we are a long way from see the collapse of Conservative Inc., even as its influence fades to black. Even so, it is encouraging to see it pick fights with itself, as it confirms it is entering the end stage. From the dissident perspective, this dispute between Team Claremont and Team Buckley is like seeing your ex-wife drive your new Mercedes over a cliff. You hate to see BAP get singled out for extra treatment, but the bigger picture makes it tolerable.

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The Organism

Posted on February 15, 2023 by thezman

The typical politician in Washington knows what his staff tells him, plus whatever he remembers from his prior life. Given the nature of the life, what happened in the before times is a fading memory. Of course, few of these people ever did productive work before they got to Washington. In fact, having ever had a real job is close to a disqualification in politics. As a result, most have always been in politics and this is the peak of their political career.

Those staffers who make up the reality for a politician are not earthy men of the people, spending their days talking with the hoi polloi. They are from a specific class and spend their days socializing and networking with one another. What they know about the world is what they tell one another and what they get from the media. Their main focus is to make sure their guy is on the right side of the current trends and primed to say the right things at the events they organize for him.

Of course, the news of the world that flows from the media to the staffers and then to the politician is not news of the world. The content creators in the media do very little in the way of actual reporting. Their job is to take what is given to them by the agency they are assigned to cover and make it into a story. Most of the time this means taking canned quotes they get via e-mail and using them to salt a narrative, always with the phrase “sources say” to make it sound right.

The government agencies feeding the media have their agenda, which is always about what is good for the agency. Pournelle’s law of bureaucracy is on full display at this point, which means the people dishing to the media are people who care only about the bureaucracy they serve. In modern Washington, it is no longer about power and money, but rather the weird internal competition in the system. Leaks to the media are often about signaling between factions.

Washington itself has become something like an organism. All of its parts have a prime directive and that is to benefit the whole. Their secondary directive is to benefit their part of the whole. This means that everyone inside the organism is surrounded by nothing but other bits of the organism. To be inside the system is to live entirely around those who in one fashion or another serve the whole. Washington is both a system and a collective with its own sense of identity.

This helps explain why the war in Ukraine staggers on with no effort by Washington to make a deal with Moscow to end the war. Objectively, a deal should be easy to make and in the best interests of the West. Russia is not an expansive, ideological state with designs on the rest of Europe. There would be no war in Ukraine if not for the senseless meddling of the neocons that run American foreign policy. Making a deal to end the war basically means Washington stops poking the bear.

We hear nothing like this in Washington. There are zero politicians questioning the sanity of American policy. A few make noises about how the money is being spent, but they do not know why those lines are in their script. The people who put them there, those staffers, saw something about this in the media. The media is told by the Pentagon that there are worries about the accounting. Otherwise, no one questions anything because no one has a reason to question anything.

This dynamic plays out in the bureaucracy too. To be in good standing is to be on the right side of the current initiatives. In this case, everyone who knows what is good for them in the Pentagon makes sure to put on that Ukraine lapel pin. Information about what is happening on the ground leaks into the system, but there is no demand for it, so it sits in unread reports. The current narrative demands different facts, so people are busy getting those facts together.

This is also why we get insane press conferences from the people running the war machine part of the organism. Larry Johnson gives some useful commentary on the absurdity of what Milley and Austin had to say. Both men are reading from a script, prepared by people who care first and foremost about the bureaucracy they serve, which is the Pentagon and the military. They probably know the reality on the ground, but there is no incentive to mention it.

Probably the best example of how the organism works is the catastrophic train derailment in Ohio. The DC pols have nothing to say about it because their staffers have not put it in their scripts. The lone exception is J.D. Vance, the newly minted senator from Ohio, but he has yet to be assimilated. The staffers have no idea where Ohio is or if it is even in America. The reason is the media is full of stories about balloons, weird sex stuff and Trump news.

Here we have the most serious environmental disaster in decades and the organism has yet to respond. The reason is none of the entry points into the organism have pathways linked to the middle of the country. All of those pathways open in coastal cities and only the ones that matter to the organism. Unless what is happening in Ohio poses some risk to the organism, it does not exist for the organism. Ohio could become a dead zone and Washington does not care.

This is why our politics are insane. America is run by what amounts to a closed religious cult that cares only for its internal operations. Like any other organism, it draws sustenance from its surroundings, but unlike any other organism, it has little interaction with its surroundings, other than for defensive purposes. It is why elections have no impact on policy. Whatever the result, what gets sent to the organism is digested and put to use by the organism to defend the organism.

The Paradox Of Openness

Posted on February 9, 2023 by thezman

At the core of the American cultural outlook is the assumption that the more open something is, the better it will become over time. Openness means a low barrier of entry and a low of barrier entry means lots of people with a wide variety of ideas can enter the system, thus improving the system through competition. Therefore, the more open a system is to new people and ideas, the faster it will mutate and improve into something better than the original.

As much as conservatives like to label the cultural lunacy we see happening as the product of Marxism, it really is the product of Americanism. Sure, the people who brought us novelties like gender and racial grievance were trained up in radical philosophy, but they have always operated under the assumption that reducing the barriers to entry is a primary goal. In fact, their presence in the academy is the result of this bedrock belief in total openness.

Whether it is the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace of goods and services, the starting American assumption is the more the better. If you want better health care, so the argument goes, you need more competition among providers. Get more providers competing for patient dollars and inevitably the quality of service will improve and the cost to the patient will decline. Similarly, open the marketplace of ideas and the number and quality of competing ideas will improve.

George Soros is now a stock villain in normie politics, but look at what he calls his umbrella organization. It is the Open Society. George Soros literally seeks the end of all borders in the world. That is not just national borders, but all of the cultural and social borders that define human society. In many respects, Soros is the extreme representation of the core American principle of openness. He imagines the world as one giant wide open frontier.

Of course, the frontier is why Americans love openness. The founding of the American way of life was based on the idea that you could always head west and find a new place to call home if you were not happy. This later transformed into the natural mobility Americans take for granted. The typical European lives his life in one place, only leaving for holiday trips. Americans move all over the place, often from one type of community to another, without thinking much about it.

You cannot move from Boston Massachusetts to Nashville Tennessee if the people in these areas are naturally hostile to strangers. The typical person from Tennessee may think the typical person from Massachusetts is a mean word, but both people assume it is immoral to exclude someone based on their place of origin. We will never see a campaign by one region to block the migration of people from another region, even when it is terrible for the receiving end.

We have a good example in Idaho. People are fleeing California due to the economy, crime, taxes and general lunacy. They first moved to Colorado where they promptly started voting for politicians that promise to ruin Colorado. Now people are leaving the state because it is getting as bad as California. The people of Idaho know this and should erect barriers to entry in order to protect themselves from California, but they would rather die than be rude to the newcomers.

American openness is the heart of the immigration problem. You can get a majority behind enforcing the laws against migrants flowing freely over the border, but you cannot get majority support for an end to all immigration. The idea of closing a border brings shame and guilt to the mind of the typical American. He cannot explain why he thinks closing the border is wrong, he just knows it. Like the Idahoans, Americans would rather die than be mean to newcomers.

In fairness, American openness was a great advantage. The openness to new ideas and new people turned an empty continent into a superpower. It made it possible to flood the continent and make the most of the natural resources. If Americans were not willing to pick up and move, the West would never have been conquered. Much of the technological progress the world enjoys is the result of openminded sorts coming to America and challenging old assumptions.

When the continent was protected by two massive oceans that were not easy to cross, this ethic of openness was a great asset. Now that the world is much more crowded and oceans are no longer a barrier, openness is a liability. Not only are millions of people flowing into the country ever month, every stupid and toxic idea is free to jump on stage and do its worst. American openness is turning the country into the dayroom of a lunatic asylum with no way to close the doors.

Many blame the problems of the West on individualism, but the more serious problem may be American openness. Since the middle of the last century, American values have been imposed on Europe. They now sound like grievance studies professors because of the American cultural dominance. For three generations, the ticket up the status ladder has had the stars and stripes on it. As a result, openness is now as much a European principle as an American one.

In the West, it is now immoral to close the door on anyone or anything, with the exception of those who want to close the door. The surest way to be removed from polite company is to question the open door policy. Only fascists and white supremacist want barriers to entry and objective standards. Paradoxically, the most tolerant and open culture in human history is violently intolerant of anyone suggesting that there must be a limit to tolerance and openness.

Fitness applies to all things, even morals and ideas. It is looking like the open society, like many species, was able to flourish in an exceptional environment, but once the environment returned to the norm, the open society is no longer fit. Like the giant panda, the open society is only suited for specific conditions. Unlike the giant panda, there will be no zookeepers to maintain it. Either openness is abandoned or it dies out taking the people with it.

The Museum Keepers

Posted on February 7, 2023 by thezman

Last month Paul Gottfried wrote a brief note in Chronicles about an event hosted by The Philadelphia Society. The event was a virtual debate between Christopher Owen and Glenn Ellmers on the topic of which is the more important founding document, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Presumably, this is some sort of old person role playing game where the two men reenact the debates between Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall from half a century ago.

In fairness, revisiting this topic is useful for those wondering why conservatives have a fetish for Lincoln. Maybe not this debate specifically, but the debate between Kendal and Jaffa in the last century. So-called conservatives embraced Jaffa’s rewriting of American history because it solved their race problem. If one wants to understand the “conservative case for” and the “democrats are the real racists” memes, you start with Harry Jaffa’s Lincoln project.

Putting that aside, the purpose of Gottfried’s post was to point out that these sorts of conservative groups operate like eccentric museums. They claim to exist in order to promote debate, but in realty they exist to prevent debate. Gottfried could be describing all of Conservative Inc. with this line. “Although founded by Frank Meyer in 1964 as a center for vigorous debate on the intellectual right, the Philadelphia Society now exudes the freshness of an ancient Egyptian tomb.”

That is a slander against Egyptian tombs. At least when someone finds a tomb, there is some curiosity about what is inside it. There is a chance that archeologists will find something new or maybe answer an ancient question. Inside conservative institutions there is nothing new. No one needs to be curious about what is inside because everyone knows what is inside. The point of these operations is to make sure nothing new ever happens on the so-called Right.

Gottfried goes on to call for some new voices to be invited into these institutions in order to freshen up the debate. Even if the geezers inside are not interested in new ideas, at least they can freshen up their old arguments a bit. Even museums spruce up the exhibits from time to time. Of course, this will never happen and Gottfried concedes that it can never happen as long as the tomb managers remain. Politics on the Right advances one funeral at a time.

The thing is though, it is not all that clear that the actuarial tables will solve the problem that haunts Conservative Inc. Look around at the various institutions and you see plenty of young people, but they were selected for their obsequiousness rather than their willingness to challenge old thinking. They get picked and promoted in the same way the Chinese exam system promoted people in the Song dynasty. Conformity is the highest virtue in the conservative ecosystem.

The model for this is National Review. When Bill Buckley started searching around for a successor, he went through a few talented men until he found Rich Lowry. Those talented men threatened to change things at National Review. Lowry was simply too stupid to change anything. More important he was an obsequious rumpswab who would tend to Buckley’s lifelong project like the men assigned to keep Lenin’s body on display in the Kremlin. He was the ideal museum keeper.

This is not just a problem with conservatism. The ruling class of the Global American Empire is the product of the 20th century. It evolved for the 20th century and therefore seeks to maintain the conditions that made it possible. It is why the origin point of every subculture within it is the 20th century. Every issue is jammed into a narrative structure that dates to 1938 or 1968. Every foreign enemy is a new version of Hitler and every domestic villain is Bull Connor.

This is why there can be no airing out of the institutions. Even if the crypt keepers of conservatism fling open the windows and let in some fresh air, they will be forced to close those windows. The survival of conservatism depends on it fitting into that 20th century narrative structure that controls the ruling class. The only way those windows remain open is if it is a bankruptcy sale. That particular institution is being sold off because it is no longer needed.

It is also why the new “conservative” operations quickly begin to conform to the old narratives as soon as they get attention. As long as they are not an explicit rejection of the old thinking, they are assimilated into the collective. First some famous people show up to look around, then the money begins to flow. Before long, the “rebels” are beginning to enjoy the perks that come with submission. They are assimilated into the blob and become another node of the system.

Modern conservatism suffers from the same malady that plagues most of the institutions of the empire. That is, it has no purpose. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the organizing purpose of the West collapsed with it. The difference was the West thought it won the Cold War and therefore was validated. The communists were under no such illusions, so they got busy escaping the 20th century. The West thought it had arrived at the end of history.

While it would be nice to see a wrecking ball smash through these decrepit institutions of conservatism or maybe see a peasant revolt against them, the reality is they will stagger on as long as the empire exists. A feature of every dying empire is a fear of change and we are clearly in that stage. Those old men keeping the museum exhibits going on the Right, as well as their youthful apprentices, care only for keeping the lights on for another day which means keeping the doors locked.

Chasing The Dragon

Posted on February 1, 2023 by thezman

Recently, whoever owns the Dodge car brand announced that the brand would stop making sports cars in the near future. They will discontinue their line of muscle cars in favor of electric cars. Many other car makers have promised that they will soon cease making cars with internal combustion engines. Reminiscent of the Soviet five year plans, they are promising to be right with Gaia in five years. Like those five year plans this is unlikely to happen, barring societal collapse.

The main reason this will never happen is that electric cars are and always have been a stupid lie against practical reality. The stupidity lies in the fact that at the end of every green scheme lies a smokestack. There is no such thing as renewable energy so that leaves the only way we know to get usable energy, breaking atoms. The lie is that these new cars are better in some way. They are not. In fact, electric cars are inferior at all of the things that make normal cars useful.

This short post summarizes the more obvious problems with eclectic vehicles, but you could write a book on the topic. The cost of ownership is significantly higher to the user and even higher for society, if one thinks mountains of old batteries is a problem that society should mitigate against. Then there is the fact that they will forever be impractical for most people. The biggest problem is they will require trillions in infrastructure changes that will never happen.

Like the eBook, the electric car is a solution in search of a problem. In fact, the eBook is the place to start in order to grasp the lunacy of the EV. Deliberately swept down the memory hole is the fact that the same people who say the electric car is the future also said the eBook was the future. The claim was the reduced cost of making an eBook versus a real book would end printing entirely. The publishers would simply abandon the practice of printing books.

There is the first comparison to ponder. Hidden in the selling of the eBook idea was the claim that you would be forced to burn your paper books in favor of Amazon deciding what you could read. It was a form of the old communist line about capitalist selling the communists the rope they would use to hang them. In this case, the greed of the publishers would be used to enforce the eBook dream. Behind every radical project are men holding pistols, waiting for their chance.

We see an advanced version at work with electric vehicles. First the regime rolled out incentives for battery makers and car makers. Then they rolled out incentives for people to buy these cars. There are incentives for municipalities to install charging stations and find ways to encourage EV use. Now we are into the stick phase where car makers are getting bullied to stop making normal cars. The regime enjoys the carrot and stick approach, but they most really enjoy the stick.

In both the eBook and the eVehicle, we saw form up what amounted to a religious community in support of these novelties. When the eBook hit the scene, the same people who swore Starbucks made great coffee suddenly decided that they could only read off a device. It was the future! The same people who swore eBooks were the future are now saying the same thing with electric cars. They are the same people who swore masks and standing on one foot would prevent Covid.

The electric car and the electric book are two examples of the other side of the moral panic, which is the moral crusade. Both moral the panic and the moral crusade arise from the same desire among the people swept up in them. They are seeking both salvation and a sense of security. On the one hand, they want to be secure from whatever it is that is causing the panic, like climate change or Covid. On the other hand, they want to be seen as a good person, one of the elect.

For a very long time, almost all of human history in fact, religion was the vessel into which these aspects of belief were contained. Religion told the faithful that as long as they were pious they were going to be okay. Maybe that meant an afterlife or maybe it meant justice in this life. If they followed the rules, they would be safe. It also promised a little extra for those who were particularly pious. The public act of piety has been with us since Gobekli Tepe for this reason.

It turns out that reason, appeals to nature and historical inevitability are poor replacements for the supernatural. In the Christian era, the faith supplied all of the spiritual security one needed, because it truly sated the desire. It made clear what one could expect from salvation. Ideology, on the other hand, ironically enough, is like an opioid, in that it provides an initial euphoric satisfaction, but then an insatiable craving for even more of what it promised.

It turns out that we are plagued by these moral crusades and panics because the people behind them are like drug addicts. For them, modernity is an opium den in which the are condemned to chase the dragon for eternity. It is why during Covid so many of them had that same dead expression in their eyes you see from addicts. With their mask firmly on, they were in the only space where they were both free from the agony of desire and the ecstasy of the narcotic high.

Now that the high priest of the electric vehicle has revealed himself to be nothing more than an opportunist, the religion of the EV has been shaken. The people who told us the electrical car was the vehicle to spiritual satisfaction are now turning on the idea as a way to smite the evil Elon Musk. Of course, practical reality will eventually reduce the idea to a niche item, like the eBook. Somewhere, someone like Elon Musk is thinking about the next moral crusade to monetize.

What Must Be Done?

Posted on January 31, 2023 by thezman

A year ago, life was great for Marcus Stokes. He was a young high school quarterback with offers to play college football. Some of the biggest names in the sport were calling and texting him. He committed to play for the Florida Gators, which is one of college football’s major powers. For a young man in this age, it does not get much better than being a coveted high school athlete. These days it even comes with the promise of money, not just coeds and attention from fans.

That all came to a halt when video of Marcus Stokes turned up online singing a popular hip-hop song, which violated the Jim Snow laws. Even though these songs are broadcast to everyone, even small children, white people are not allowed to repeat most of the lyrics, not even acknowledge hearing them. You see, in Jim Snow America, a black guy can advocate for murder, rape and mayhem, as long as it has a beat, but a white guy cannot repeat what is said.

The hip-hop song in question contained the magic word and Marcus Stokes said the word in the video. Immediately agents from the Ministry of Leukophobia were dispatched to investigate. Once it was determined that he was white and he had said the magic word, they issued a fatwah against him, his family and anyone even remotely connected with him. The University of Florida was instructed to rescind the scholarship offer and issue mean words about him.

In two syllables, the promising life of Marcus Stokes was ruined. You see, he violated the most important of Jim Snow laws. It is not the word he said, it is the context in which he said the magic word. One set of language laws for black people and another set of language laws for white people is patently immoral. Not even the most brutal communist dictatorships went down this road. Theocracies like Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have segregated language laws.

The only way the Ministry of Leukophobia can conceal this obvious problem is by terrorizing white people into thinking there are words that possess special properties that when uttered out loud, destroy the white person uttering them. That way, the white people will not notice who is enforcing these language laws. Instead of asking who decided we have segregated language, or even why we have such rules, white people will just assume it is a force of nature.

In order to make this work, the Ministry of Leukophobia does not limit itself to confirmed utterances of magic words. In the case of Mitchell Miller, a professional hockey player banned from the sport, the accusation is that he may have been influenced by a magic word uttered by some white person at some point somewhere. You see, Miller is accused of have bullied a sacred person in high school. Clearly, he must have been motivated by thoughts of the magic word.

Conservatives try to excuse this stuff by blaming the victims or claiming it is just a temporary moral panic. Maybe they blame social media for encouraging the mob to pile on these poor saps, who conservatives are quick to point out deserve everything they have coming for violating the blasphemy laws. The case of the hockey player makes clear that there is nothing temporary or spontaneous about this stuff. It is part of a long term campaign by the Ministry of Leukophobia.

You see this with Marcus Stokes. It has been six months and things should have blown over by now. He issued as many groveling apologies as humanly possible. He has no doubt spent the required time at a reeducation facility. He even found a black person to bless his transformation and provide a redemption arc. The coach of Albany State, a historically black college, offered Stokes a scholarship. No doubt the coach was thinking he could get a good player and lots of applause.

Like Mitchell Miller, there will be no forgivingness for Marcus Stokes. The Albany State coach was told by the Ministry of Leukophobia that he could not offer this blasphemer a scholarship or even a place on the roster. Not only that, they demanded the coach issue an apology. To whom he is apologizing is not all that clear, since no one to date has claimed to have been offended, outside the tyrant class. Of course, that last bit is the key to all of this stuff.

The question that hangs in the air, the center of recent disputes here and elsewhere, is how can American society return to civility? Of course, most of the people attempting to answer it wish the debate to exist in the abstract, as that allows them to defend arguments that make no sense in the natural world. Before any of that can be addressed, however, is the question of whether it is even possible to have a civil, decent society under the current conditions.

Can Austin Nivison, the person stalking Marcus Stokes, exist in a society that respects the dignity of the citizens? Can you have a civil society that includes the people who employ spiteful bigots like that guy? After all, they appear to operate as a volunteer auxiliary of the Ministry of Leukophobia. How is it possible for decent people to cohabited with people so filled with hatred for them? Can anyone reading this imagine being fellow citizens with people who hate them so much?

Stories like those mentioned here, and there are thousands of less notorious examples, suggest that we have reached the point of irreconcilable differences. We have a ruling class that has concluded that the white population is irredeemably evil. That is, after all, what is being said about Marcus Stokes. How can anyone with a soul want to find common ground with someone who seeks to destroy the life of a child for having repeated a forbidden word in a song?

The answer to the subject of this post starts with acceptance. There is no magic set of words that will heal the black hearts of the people who think it is right to torment white kids like we see with these two examples. We have a population of spiteful mutants, to borrow Ed Dutton’s phrase. That population has been weaponized. The answer starts with accepting this reality and then wondering aloud who is doing the weaponing and for what purpose. The answer starts with questions.

The New Anti-Science Right

Posted on January 17, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about Ukraine, a post about Biden and the Sunday podcast. Since there is interest in it, I will be doing a weekly post on the happenings in Ukraine. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Way back in the heyday of conservatism, a common charge leveled at them from the Left was that they were anti-intellectual. Generally, this meant that conservatives did not appreciate free verse or post-modern art. You see, the Left read books and appreciated the arts while the Right read the Bible and fired off their boom-sticks. It was not so much an argument against the intelligence of the Right, but rather a class argument against the uncouth people entering politics.

After the Cold War, it was no longer possible for the Left to use a class argument against the Right, when their champion was the Snopes clan. There was simply no way to present the Clintons as sophisticated and erudite. Compounding it was the obvious fact that their politics looked like daytime television. These were crude, uncouth people who brought with them a collection of vulgar carny freaks. By comparison, the talk radio guys looked sophisticated and measured.

That was not the end of the anti-intellectual claim. It transformed into a claim that the Right was full of anti-science believers. You see, the Left was now armed with the latest ideas from the social sciences, while the Right was armed with superstitious nonsense from their sky god. Never mind that the social sciences are closer to astrology than actual science. They had studies and the word of men with impressive sounding titles to show how much they bleeping loved science.

Since the end of the Cold War, this has been incredibly effective magic. Just look at how the conservatives curled up in a ball when the Left started waving around their studies about the Covid pandemic. Most of them did not hold up to scrutiny, but the conservatives were unwilling to scrutinize them. Instead, they were happy to embrace policies that they allegedly opposed as a matter of principle. They accepted the grotesque violations of civil liberties because science!

Science, of course, is about debate, when you stop and think about it. Theories are proposed to explain some observed phenomenon. Those theories are tested and challenged in a formalized process. Simply put, science is about broadening the debate about the natural world within an agreed upon process. The exact opposite of science is telling people to shut up because science. This is exactly what happened with Covid and the conservatives were happy to agree.

What appears to be happening is that the Left’s claims against what they call their opposition are being embraced by their opposition. Just as many conservatives in the 1980’s relished their populist, working clash aesthetic, the new conservatives forming up seem to be embracing a rejection of science. They are going to stand on antiquarian ideas from the long lost past and reject the human sciences. This is what you see in this book review by Sohrab Ahmari.

The book and the review are a long form version of the old internet meme about Democrats being the real racists. You see, race never existed until it was invented by bad people to do bad things. Before those bad people, no one had ever noticed the vast differences in people. Then those bad people came along and coined the word “race” and then created “race science” to divide people along entirely arbitrary lines, that while easily measurable, are a figment of our imagination.

Now, Sohrab Ahmari is not working math puzzles in his free time. He is a discount Dinesh D’Souza. An exotic guy who orbits around conservative politics, looking for a place to land. D’Souza got his big break when he stabbed the great Sam Francis in the back on behalf of the Washington Post. Ahmari got his break when he noticed people making fun of David French on Twitter then penned a column based on what he read called Against David French-ism.

Sohrab Ahmari is at the center of the new Right so even though he is no one’s idea of a deep thinker, he represents the new opposition being created within the managerial elite to be the Left’s new foil. He is not an exception. Look at the Yoram Hazony project and you see an even stronger opposition to science. In the tenth item, he writes, “No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test.”

The fact that no one says such a thing makes his opposition to it rather weird, but that is not the point. Anyone who has taken in Hazony’s live shows will have seen how he acts when the human sciences are mentioned. In his first show he said something along the lines that the “race scientists” are incredibly good at marshalling the facts to support their arguments, so it is best to avoid debating them. In other words, this is not a pose for him, but a cornerstone of his worldview.

In fairness, some of this hostility to the human sciences is due to fear of mean words from the Left. If you are going to be the useful idiot to the people atop the prevailing orthodoxy, you have to make clear you are no threat to their worldview. Controlling the morality of race has been a highly effective weapon for the ruling class and they are not going to let that weapon drop, even in the face of reality. They are certainly not going to trade it away just to create a new useful idiot.

That said, there is a genuine contempt for the human science on the Right, both the new Right and the old Right. Part of it is due to the fact that once you accept biological reality, whole areas of debate are closed down. Worse yet, important areas of social life are reduced to the tough choices. A big part of democratic politics is reality avoidance, so reducing policy options to coldblooded trade-offs is no fun. Universal human equality is much more fun than biological reality.

A bigger issue here may simply be intelligence. For a long time, the smart fraction was selected into areas like philosophy and theology. Once theology was dropped from ruling class interest, the smart fraction was recruited into things like the amusingly named political science and then political economy. The rise of actual science began to change the selection pressure. For a few generations now, the smart fraction has been selected into STEM and even finance.

The result has been a dumbing down of political philosophy. A dunce like David French can pass himself off as a deep thinker, as long as he keeps up with the latest fads and picks the right enemies. No one else around him is going to notice that he moves his lips when he reads. In such a world, the increasingly complex world of the human science can easily look like black magic. Declaiming against “race science” is not just an in-group signal but a defense mechanism.

A Monster In A Toga

Posted on January 16, 2023 by thezman

If you were to ask people to name history’s greatest monster, most would pick their team’s favorite bogeyman from the last century. Recency bias is a real thing and as a culture we remained trapped in the last century, so most people would name Stalin or Mao or Hitler as history’s greatest monster. Some might offer up Genghis Khan or Torquemada as a more thoughtful option. No one, of course, would offer up Aristotle as history’s greatest monster, even though he is a good choice.

This may sound crazy, but there is a good argument in favor of Aristotle being the single most malevolent influence on humanity. As far as we know, he did not slaughter masses of people, but he did train one of history’s great slayers. According to our histories, he was tasked by Philip of Macedonia with the job of educating his son, Alexander, who would go on to conquer the world. It is possible that Alexander committed patricide, which is an extremely monstrous thing.

In fairness, you cannot blame the teacher for the sins of the student, unless the student is putting into practice the theory imparted by the teacher. We have nothing allegedly written by Aristotle which recommends conquering the world and subjugating the people in foreign lands. On the other hand, Western universalist claims begin with Aristotle, so maybe Alexander’s desire to impose his will on the world was the natural consequence of Aristotle’s teaching.

We can debate Aristotle’s role in Alexander’s crimes against humanity, but we do know that Aristotle got some important things wrong. For example, he dismissed the ideas of Democritus, who proposed that everything we see is composed of atoms that are the basic building blocks of matter. Democritus also argued that humans “evolved” from an earlier primitive state. Necessity is what drove large groups of humans into societies which offered protection from nature.

In other words, Democritus was an incredibly brilliant thinker, way ahead of his time, but Aristotle dismissed him out of hand. In fairness, Aristotle was a student of Plato, who hated Democritus. Allegedly, Plato hated Democritus so much that he wanted all of his books burned, which may be why none survived. It is possible that Aristotle was just an obsequious rumpswab who aped the feelings of Plato. Regardless, much was lost to us because of Aristotle’s dismissal of Democritus.

Aristotle’s scientific ignorance does not stop there. The Western world spent a thousand years believing the sun revolved around the earth, due entirely to Aristotle’s geocentric model of the universe. It was not as if everyone in his time believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Philolaus argued for heliocentrism. Aristarchus of Samos argued that the earth rotated around the sun, but Aristotle’s stature condemned the West to a thousand years of geocentric ignorance.

Now, one can dispute the damage done by the scientific ignorance spread by Aristotle and his followers. After all, how many people died because we had no idea why some things are heavier than others? Sure, thousands were probably killed for questioning geocentricism, but they were heretics and their astronomical apostacy was just one of many crimes they committed against the Church. You really cannot get a big number of bodies to blame on Aristotle from these errors.

What about medicine? For a thousand years Western medicine was closer to witchcraft because of the belief in the four humors. This is the claim that the body is composed of blood (warm and moist), phlegm (cold and moist), yellow bile (warm and dry), and black bile (cold and dry). These also correspond to the seasons. Illness was due to an imbalance of these humors, so medicine was concerned with rebalancing the humors, rather than producing an actual cure for what ailed the patient.

How many millions died due to this lunacy? The Aristotle defenders will claim that he did not invent this crackpot idea. It was Hippocrates. The counter here is that Hippocrates is the father of medicine because of Aristotle who promoted his ideas. Imagine if instead of this humor business, Aristotle had not dismissed Democritus and proposed that illness is due to small entities in the body. We may have deduced germ theory many centuries earlier. Millions would have been saved!

Again, we have no evidence that Aristotle killed anyone and we have no evidence that he was in favor of genocide. The perpetuation of his crackpot ideas about science and medicine was not his fault. After all, he did not force those monks and scribes to perpetuate his ignorance. It probably seems unfair to hang millions of dead on Aristotle, just because his nutty ideas about science and medicine came to dominate the Western world for a thousand years.

On the other hand, ideas have consequences. If you manage to convince the world of some bad idea, you do bear some responsibility for its application. Marx did not advocate the murder of millions, but he did lay the intellectual framework for those who would murder millions in his name. If we are going to blame Marx for the crimes of the Marxists, the same applies to the consequences of Aristotelianism. That puts Aristotle in the same club as Marx.

The thing is the influence of Marx has largely dissipated. There are some cranks kicking around calling themselves Marxist, but at this point no serious person believes in the surplus value of labor or historical materialism. On the other hand, lots of bad actors still rely on Aristotle. For example, the followers of Harry Jaffa are still causing trouble and Jaffa was a big fan of Aristotle. Here is an old essay of his arguing for one of his crackpot theories. He mentions Aristotle fourteen times.

How much damage has been done to America by the followers of Jaffa and his deranged ideas about the Framers? His universalist gobbledygook about the Declaration and the perfection of the founding has made opposition to lethal ideas like immigration and multiculturalism nearly unlawful. Even the mildest resistance to the ongoing invasion is treated as a crime, because after all, all men are created equal so the only reason to oppose open borders is racism and bigotry.

It is fun to imagine a monster like Harry Jaffa stepping in front of a bus before he had a chance to inject his venom into the neck of America but imagine if he was not able to sacralize his crackpottery with references to Aristotle. Not only would Jaffa have been denied an authority, so would Straus. Imagine a world free of this dangerous cult that has unleashed so much mayhem on American society. Take away Aristotle and a lot of modern horrors go away as well.

It is wrong to blame the son for the crimes of the father, so it is probably wrong to blame the father for the crimes of the son. The point here is that establishing any man as a moral or even an intellectual authority leads to trouble. When that man is beyond question, the trouble easily becomes horror. The establishment of Aristotle as the father of moral philosophy sent the West careening down a path toward the crisis we see unfolding today, a crisis from which it may not recover.

Chaos And Control

Posted on January 12, 2023 by thezman

The closest thing we have to a universal principle of human society is that all elites are primarily concerned with maintaining their status as elites. No matter how the society is organized and for what purpose, the number one priority of a social elite is maintaining themselves as the elite. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the point of society, from the perspective of elites, is to maintain the elite. Any benefit to the people is either to maintain the standing of the elite or a happy accident.

It is tempting to think that the best way for an elite to maintain itself is to make sure the people over whom it rules is happy. A good king keeps his people in peace and prosperity, so the people are happy to have him as king. The trouble is, there is always someone who thinks they can do a better job than the king. Good times or bad times, these people will look for their opportunity. Of course, in good times, a new elite can form up outside the system and potentially rival the existing elite.

It turns out that good times bring dangers to an elite. In fact, good times are more of a problem than bad times, because in bad times the elite can use the emergency as a way to rally the people. Roosevelt used the Great Depression to rally the people around a set of alien ideas called the New Deal. His massive expansion of the state was totally at odds with American tradition, but times were tough and the people trusted him, so they went along with his radical ideas.

Emergencies are a great way to bind the people to their current elites. Unless the elite proves to be unable to unwilling to face the emergency, the people will give their existing rulers the benefit of the doubt. Throughout the Cold War, Americans were willing to tolerate all sorts of trouble, because the threat of nuclear war made the idea of challenging the elites seem risky. There was plenty of cultural turmoil, much of it from the top, but the great American middle never wavered.

That gets to the other way elites maintain power. By pitting one group against another, the people are too busy with that to question authority. In fact, self-interest leads them to appeal to the exiting authority to resolve the conflict. If crime suddenly becomes a problem in your town, those complaints about the cops suddenly go away as long as the cops do something about the crime. By keeping the masses busy with various small issues, elites can defend against the formation of rival elites.

This explains the turmoil of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The race revolts, youth rebellion and cultural revolution were not grassroots phenomenon. All of these things were the product of the exiting elites. Look into the background of the radical leaders of that period and most of them came from elite backgrounds. Once their radical days were done, they went into positions within elite institutions. Even those who committed serious crimes were welcomed back home.

The second half of the 20th century was a game of good cop – bad cop on the American people by the ruling elite that emerged after the war. The bad cops created cultural mayhem that “freaked out the squares” while the good cops appealed to the people’s patriotism and decency to fight the Cold War. One hand created division while the other hand created unity. Often these two forces were pitted against one another to the benefit of the ruling class.

During the Cold War, this system served the elites very well. The threat of nuclear war forced the agents of control to contain the agents of chaos. At the same time, the agents of chaos understood they had limits. The two sides of the ruling class were not always in balance, but they always returned to balance. The chaos of civil rights gave way to the control of racial peace. The cultural chaos of the 1960’s and 1970’s gave way to the control of the 1980’s.

Ever since the end of the Cold war, this system has been in crisis. Without the threat of nuclear annihilation, the agents of chaos have no limits. At the same time, the agents of control no longer have to worry as much about the façade of democracy. The crusades against the Muslims brought some stability to the problem, but the Muslims were never a serious threat like the Soviets. For the last two decades the agents of chaos and control have been running wild.

This explains the ridiculous things we see today. On the one hand, the security state is wantonly violating civil rights in order to maintain control. The extent of the crimes committed by the FBI is unknown, but what is known is shocking. On the other hand, the super-rich finance crackpot schemes to unleash crime waves and pervert the law to torment the people. Throwing open the jails and appointing pro-crime prosecutors is the definition of societal madness.

The standard explanation from conservatives for what we are seeing is that the people behind this stuff want money or power. The trouble is the people behind this stuff already have money and power. In fact, they have more money and power than any ruling elite in human history. Western elites, especially the American elites, make the aristocracy of 18th century France look poor and impotent. Clearly, the motivation behind this behavior is not money or power.

What we may be seeing is the organic death of a ruling elite. The 20th century selected for a certain type of person in the American ruling class. One type was the agent of chaos and the other type was the agent of control. There was no selection pressure in favor of prudence or moral scruples. The great crises of the 20th century provided something like an electric fence around the elite. Over time, these conditions produced an elite incapable of self-limit.

Like the panda bear, our elite has evolved down a dead end. They thrash around looking for some great crisis to serve the same role as the Cold War, but that was a unique period in human history. It cannot be replicated. Meanwhile, the agents of chaos and control explore the outer limits of their sociopathy. Unencumbered by the fear of destruction, they keep pushing the limits, while simultaneously creating the conditions for their own demise.

Andrew Tate

Posted on January 9, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about Ukraine, a post about Covid and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Andrew Tate is a former professional kickboxer who transformed himself into an internet personality by mixing ghetto culture with manosphere memes. He offered courses to young males in the art of being a pickup artist. He gained widespread attention after his banning from social media platforms. He is currently in a Romanian prison awaiting trial for a number of sex crimes. Despite his predicament, he remains boastful about his abilities and what lies ahead for him.

Tate’s penchant for display items and cartoonish misogyny have not only made him famous, but it has also put the spotlight on the internet manosphere. Tate is viewed as the extreme expression of a lifestyle that is free of all cultural coercion. It is not that the pickup artist lives solely to sate his appetites. It is that he rejects all of the conventions of society with regards to how a man should live. By conventions, they always mean the highly feminized rules and the modern West.

It is more than a bit ironic that the people who have been gnawing away at conventional sex roles in order to liberate women are now up in arms over men doing the same thing, but for the purpose of liberating men. It also speaks to the feminization of Western societies that the people seeking liberation from cultural norms are young males hoping to prey on women raised on feminism. Women were liberated so that liberated males can treat them like prostitutes.

To further add to the irony, much of the modern left-wing liberation movement is about freeing nonwhites from cultural coercion. You see, according to woke theory, nonwhites can never truly be free until they eradicate white power structures. These are defined as the norms of Western society. Of course, one of those norms used to be how males should behave toward females. It looks like the woke would like to keep some of the old white power structure they claim to oppose.

That gets to the heart of the matter. Andrew Tate is not a man. He is a caricature of what it means to be a man. He is what second wave feminist called a chauvinist, a male who defines himself by minimizing women. Back in the heyday of second wave feminism, such men existed mostly in the agitated imaginations of recently divorced women, but now thanks to the miracle of the internet, they are legion. Feminism literally created what it claimed to oppose.

The reason these internet personalities specializing in the art of exploiting women have grown in number is they appeal to the young male’s natural rebelliousness. Those old white power structures used to have systems for young males to “sow their wild oats” and then settle into the normal routine of being a responsible man. Those have been wrecked by feminism. It turns out that there is little point in being a responsible man when the women are not good at being women.

In fairness, feminism would never have gone anywhere if ruling class males had done their duty and maintained the old ways. The bourgeois society that arose in the 20th century, especially in America, brought bourgeois degeneracy with it. Over the course of the 20th century, America and then the West has come to be defined by the coffee house radical seeking new ways to stand out from tradition and custom. Feminism and the pickup artist are two manifestations of this process.

Interestingly, both Andrew Tate and his woke feminist critics are right. From his perspective, the hedonistic lifestyle built around the exploitation of liberated women is completely rational. If modern society has no rewards for playing the traditional male role, if in fact it punishes those who play that role, then logic says the male should reject that role and seek profit where he can find it. Biologically that means getting as much high status stuff and as many females as possible.

The woke feminists are also correct in pointing out that males living outside the feminist cultural norms are a direct threat to their existence. Modern bourgeois society depends upon males playing the traditional roles in key areas, while the ruling class free rides off of their efforts. It is a parasitic relationship that can only work if the males among the Dirt People play along with it. The lifestyle of Andrew Tate threatens the balance between the host and the parasite.

Of course, no society can survive if the males are like Andrew Tate and the females are like his woke feminist critics. To be a man is to be trusted by other men to keep safe that which is important to men. Andrew Tate cannot be trusted around your women or your belongings, so he is not a man. In a crisis, the first thing that happens is the men in charge kill the guys like Andrew Tate. It is addition by subtraction. Not having to worry about him leaves time for important matters.

Similarly, the woke feminists will disappear in a crisis. In fact, all forms of feminism will disappear as soon as things get serious again. For starters, the men in charge will have no patience for it. Like Andrew Tate, some nag complaining about the unfairness of biology is an unnecessary distraction. The responsible females will quickly move in to put a muzzle on these women. When the crisis comes, look for mobs of middle-aged mothers reviving the ducking stool.

In the end, Andrew Tate and his woke feminist antagonists are both products of the carny morality that springs from bourgeois society. Free to indulge in their worst instincts, a bourgeois ruling class will do their worst and then seek to normalize it among the people over whom the rule. Like the people who live the life of excess, a society ruled this way ends in physical and mental despair. Like the man of excess, a society of excess eventually needs an intervention.

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