Category Archives: Culture

The Total State

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Note: Behind the green door is a series of posts on the original Planet of the Apes films, which I watched and reviewed. There was no Sunday podcast due to the holiday, but it will return next week. Subscribe here or here.

If you are of a certain age and inclination, reading The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, a new book by Auron MacIntyre, feels like a trip down memory lane to a time when you were discovering the major figures of what would eventually be called paleoconservatism. The text is filled with references to Carl Schmidt, Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, James Burnham, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, and other figures who feature prominently in the paleo subculture.

That is the first way to approach this book as the writer was by his own account a garden variety conservative until a few years ago. That means he accepted the neoconservative foreign policy claims, the libertarian economics, and the civic nationalism of the Buckley crowd. The Trump years, the 2020 election and Covid forced him to reevaluate that way of framing politics. Working in the media, he also witnessed firsthand the corruption and mendacity of the fifth estate.

Judging from the number of references to Covid and how often it is used as an example in making points about what he calls the Total State, it is fair to assume that the mass panic and group think within the managerial class during Covid is what sent the writer on his journey out of civic nationalism. The state’s willingness and ability to trample the idea of a rights-based society in the name of public health, along with the media cheerleading, broke the spell of civic nationalism.

What followed was a crash course in the ideas of the “alternative right” as Paul Gottfried used to call it before that term was anathematized. The result is this book which can be read as an intellectual journey. Ideas common in dissident circles were new and amazing in their ability to explain what was happening during Covid. The enthusiasm MacIntyre has for the material will surely bring back memories for older readers who recall experiencing this material in their youth.

Another way of reading this book is as a summary, a Cliff Notes version, of managerialism and the managerial state. MacIntyre borrows the title of the book from Carl Schmidt, who called this form of government der Totalstaat, which translates into English as the Total State. He could also have used the term Sam Francis used, Leviathan, or simply the managerial state. All roughly mean the same thing, which is the all-encompassing corporate state.

Read this way, this book is an excellent primer for the person who is embarking on a journey out of civic nationalism. MacIntyre covers all the important bits using accessible language and recent examples, like the Covid panic. He makes good use of references to the pantheon of stars that make up the paleo constellation but does so in a way that does not require the reader to know about these people. It is an introduction to other modes of conservative thought and the topic of managerialism.

Still another way to approach this book is as the down payment on the long overdue project of building an alternative intellectual framework. What passes for the right in America was not much more complicated than saying, “not so fast” to the schemes dreamed up by the people we call the left. The closest anyone came to building an alternative moral framework was Sam Francis who died before he could finish is magnum opus, Leviathan and Its Enemies.

In his review of The Total State, Greg Hood suggests this might be the start or a restart of that project as MacIntyre is not just a nobody on the internet. He is a member of the so-called conservative media with access to influencers allowed to operate unmolested on the public stage. He regularly turns up on television during elections and has mainstream guests on his show. MacIntyre dusting off these ideas from a perch within mainstream media could be the start of the project.

There could be something to this as there is a gold rush right now to find something to replace Buckley-style conservatism. There are formal efforts like Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism project and the Claremont Institute. There are informal efforts among online content creators, the sort of people I called Cosmos and those Dave Green calls the LinkedIn Right. There are lots of people searching for a New Right and perhaps they discover a new ideological framework.

The book is not without its flaws, of course. MacIntyre mentions Curtis Yarvin too many times and one is counted as one too many. Yarvin simply has no place in a serious discussion about politics or political theory. Maybe his name was dropped because he is reportedly Peter Theil’s court jester or maybe MacIntyre thinks this is a useful reference point for his intended audience. Regardless, seeing Yarvin’s name turn up in anything is like discovering a hair in your soup.

That aside, another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists. Burnham noticed that it first appeared in fascist systems. Later writers observed that communism was also good soil for the growth of managerialism. Now we see American-style liberal democracy has also been overtaken by bourgeois managers. This is hardly an accident, but paleos have never produced an explanation for it.

That leads to another quibble that also comes from the paleo space. MacIntyre cannot provide an answer for what to do about it. He finished his book with three possible ends for The Total State. One is it staggers on due to a monopoly of power. Another is it is replaced by a strong man of some sort. The final option, the one MacIntyre prefers, is that it slowly dies from its own internal contradictions. Note that none of these lead to any action against the managerial system.

That was always the flaw of paleoconservatism. It was a call to inaction in the face of perpetual revolution from the top. You cannot build a political movement on a foundation that calls for hiding out in the basement until the storm passes. Even if the storm passes, what comes next will not be the work of those who choose inaction in the face of danger, but by those who have a platform that calls for action in pursuit of something different and better than hoping for nicer weather.

In the end, the judgment of any book is whether it did what it set out to do, not what could have or should have done according to the critics. When approached by any of the angles above, The Total State accomplishes the goal of the author. It is a book for those who would like a fuller understanding of the terms commonly used in dissident circles and for the people looking for a path out of the banality of what passes for conventional conservatism.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Real Idiocracy

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There has been a lot written and said about the decline of intelligence in the Western world, mostly focused on the Idiocracy side of it. Everyday life is getting dumber, compounded by the demographic collapse. Basic processes can easily turn into an ordeal due to stupid people tasked with operating systems that were designed for operators a standard deviation smarter than the current crop. What no one thinks too much about is how this collapse in IQ is impacting the elites.

The dream of the managerial class is to establish themselves as an unassailable aristocracy that rules over a docile population of workers. It is why they favor open borders and mass migration as it provides an unlimited supply of what they imagine to be their ideal helot class. Even if there are pockets of smart challengers out there among the teaming masses, they will be too busy dealing with diversity to organize an opposition to the managerial elite.

This is a good place to start with the decline of elite intelligence. It is not as if we lack data on this sort of arrangement. The end of colonialism in Africa, for example, is a great example of how quantity has a quality of its own. Millions of 80-IQ Africans were able to overthrow thousands of high-IQ Europeans. Today we see something similar as the Mizrahi slowly push aside the Ashkenazim in Israel. They are not as smart as their European tribesman, but they have numbers.

Israel is another good example of what happens to a society when the intelligence of the ruling elite begins to fade. For a couple of generations Israel has skillfully manipulated regional politics and controlled Washington so as to dictate results throughout the Middle East. With the Gaza operation they have shown themselves to be suddenly thumbless. The Israeli government has turned a tragic event into a crisis that threatens its existence.

Of course, we see the other side of this in America. The people running foreign policy used to know how to keep Israel on a leash. The Israeli lobby was constrained by the Jewish economic elite that largely controls the imperial economy and the neocons who control imperial foreign policy. The former cared primarily about controlling the global economy from their perch in New York and the latter cared primarily about their ancient blood feud with Russia from their perch in Washington.

The Biden administration has managed to make Israeli incompetence and obstreperousness worse by failing to deal firmly with Netanyahu. The result is the pathetic scene of the American military building a dock to supply Gaza with food and water while the IDF blows up schools and hospitals. Add in the bungling of diplomacy in the region, primarily with the Saudis, and the American empire is on the cusp of losing all of its influence in the region.

The clueless bungling with regards to Israel is not confined to the realm of geopolitics, but also turns up domestically. The Jewish lobby used to operate in the shadows, nudging key figures behind the scenes to influence policy. Now it sends out simpletons like Ben Shapiro to demand the genocide of Palestinians. The actors hired to play the role of office holders are marched out to read ham-fisted scripts about Israel and propose laws that manage to offend decent Americans.

It is not just with regards to Israel where things are going sideways. There used to be a time when the Anglo side of the imperial ruling class understood the reality of the neocons and kept them under control. The last gasp of this, ironically, was during the Obama years. Maybe it was that Anglo blood running through the veins of the mulatto mafia that ran the Obama White House, but they did manage to broker a deal with Iran and avoid getting sucked into any new wars.

That barrier to neocon excess has collapsed, along with whatever intelligence that remained within the neocon cult. The result is foreign policy is now run by a pair of slovenly imbeciles who sit atop the Kagan cult. One reason for the Israel debacle is the commitment to Project Ukraine, which itself is becoming a catastrophe that promises to overwhelm the European part of the American empire. It is impossible to overstate the stupidity required to think Project Ukraine was a good idea.

The people who think open borders and mass migration are going to lock in their position also think Project Ukraine is a winner and marching the political actors out on stage to swear allegiance to Israel is a good idea. They also thought it was a good idea to fling open the prisons so black criminals can run wild in the streets. They thought the proper response to general unrest among the white population was to unleash demographic hell on the white middle-class.

It is debatable as to just how much of the general decline in intelligence is attributable to the decline in the European population and how much of it is a consequence of the demographic collapse. This is a big, complicated subject, but what matters most is the general intelligence of the ruling class. If the ruling class is dominated by and controlled by the smart fraction and that smart fraction is rooted in the overall population then society can survive a drop in IQ.

If on the other hand, as we are seeing, the ruling class prides itself on being alien and hostile to the population and begins to exclude the smart fraction, even its own smart fraction, then the consequences for society will be catastrophic. It turns out that the real idiocracy is not with the general population but among the people who control the institutions of society. When the people in charge hire people like this to play the role of elected representative, the end is near.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Digital Man

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the farcical nature of the young online right, a post about the looming summer of hate that is upon us and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Since the dawn of the digital age there has been commentary about the impact the digital age will have on society. Mostly it comes from how we will do things as technology seeps into every nook and cranny of life. Little attention has been paid to who will be controlling things. It has always been assumed that the social structures and selection pressures within them will remain the same, so the new technology will simply be a new tool for the old ruling class.

In the most general sense this is clearly not true. The oligarchs that rose up out of Silicon Valley are a different breed of oligarch from those who rose up in the last decades of the industrial revolution. The latter were the product of an American empire on the rise while the former were the product of an empire at its peak. The industrial age oligarchs were a part of creating the American empire while the tech oligarchs were taking advantage of an existing empire.

Putting aside the nature of the new oligarchs, the nature of the managerial class that actually runs the empire has changed as well. The type of person who slithers his way up into senior positions is different from the old managerial elite. The top officials in government a generation ago, for example, were the product of different selection pressures than those of today. A generation ago, deeds still counted for something in the competition for status within the meritocracy.

Look around at the people running foreign policy now and you cannot help but notice that they are not exceptional at anything. It is one of the things that makes a guy like John Mearsheimer jump off the screen in the geopolitical debate. In addition to having been right about most things over the last twenty years, he is an immensely talented, intelligent, and confident man. By comparison, Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland come off as dull and confused.

As technology has changed society, the selection pressure for the managerial elite has also changed. The legacy pressures that produced a guy like Mearsheimer have been replaced with new mechanisms that produce men like Blinken. These pressures start much further down the development cycle than the institutions. It reflects the changes in the culture brought about by technology. All along the way, technology plays a role in how men acquire status within the social system.

A simple way to think about how this works may be to think about the broad categories of young males that existed in the analog age versus the digital age. The three buckets for young males were the gymnasium, the library, and the playground. The first was for the jocks who were attracted to structure and competition. The second was for the bookish who were attracted to learning and knowledge. The final category was for the typical young male who generally like socializing.

In the analog age, the managerial elite drew from the gymnasium and the library, the doers, and the thinkers. The American empire was the product of men who produced new ideas and those who found a way to make those ideas into reality. The oligarchs who rose up in the industrial age used their wealth to underwrite the scholarly and cultural side of the house. Libraries, universities, and cultural centers naturally attracted investment from the new oligarchs.

The digital age changed how young males live and as a result it changed how the social systems selected for talented young males. That playground group suddenly had new toys to use in their socialization. Instead of kicking a ball around, they participated in highly structured and highly complex digital gameplay. Instead of sorting social standing on the playground, it was done in the virtual world of gaming, online chat rooms and social media. Most important, these became valuable skills.

Look around at the public square and the biggest influencers are not old smart guys or highly accomplished guys, but young guys raised online. None of them were jocks or even played sports. Many have no accomplishments at all in the meat space. They are not experts in a cognitive field. On the other hand, they are not the basement dwelling weirdos their critics claim. They enjoy competition, just the online version. They know things that are important to success online.

The new generation of social influencers are an extreme example of a process that has been going on since the dawn of the microprocessor revolution. Technology changed the value relationship between these three male roles. The skills useful on the playground, now the virtual playground, have become more important than the skills acquired in the gymnasium or the library. The critics in the 1970’s were correct when they said it was the nerds who would eventually rule.

Now, some will say it is the longhouse, the feminization of society that is the root of this transformation, but it looks more like it was technology that made the longhouse possible by changing the selection pressure away from knowledge and deeds to the social skills of the digital space. Because so much of what makes up digital society is useful only because we pretend it is so, it means it is not subjected to the crucible of practical necessity, so convincing everyone it matters is what counts.

Social media is a great example of something that people think is important only because everyone they know thinks it is important. Imagine you refuse to go on these platforms and just live your life in meat space. Then someone starts a viral campaign against you on Twitter. What happens to you? Nothing happens because you will remain blissfully unaware of it. In other words, Twitter matters to the people on Twitter because they pretend it matters.

From childhood on up, the skills that are the most useful in the digital world are not those acquired in the library or the gymnasium. It is the weird, androgynous social skills learned in the digital playground. These define teenage social status and then professional status. Now we are seeing them define managerial class status structures, including the managerial elite. What powers the longhouse is the microprocessor that changed the people in the longhouse.

Not only are the skills from the gymnasium and the library falling in status, but the playground skills have changed as well. The digital playground is not like the analog playground where you can get punched in the nose for violating the rules or challenging the wrong guy. On the digital playground your character dies and you respawn at a lower level or maybe you have to create a new character. There is never any real consequence to failure on the digital playground.

This is where feminization comes into the discussion. It has been assumed that the feminization of society is the product of the feminist movement, the explosion of women in the workplace or the number of single mother households. In other words, generations of men raised by women made men soft. In reality, it is at least one and maybe two generations of men socialized like girls on the digital playground that has made the longhouse a natural home for the new man.

In fairness, not all males have been raised on the digital playground. Young men still play organized sports and they still read books. The real playground still exists where young boys learn how to be young men. Elite culture, however, no longer selects for the traits learned in these areas. Instead, it is the traits acquired on the digital playground that offer the pathway to the higher reaches. By the standards of the digital age, Nick Fuentes is the quintessential digital man.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The New Jew Thing

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The one thing the critics of Elon Musk have right is that after his takeover of Twitter, now stupidly called X, the amount of anti-Jewish material has increased. Not all of it should be called antisemitic, as much of it is anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, but the antisemites have been given far more room to operate. Musk restored the man who has to be the current frontrunner for the Jerusalem Post’s antisemite of the year award, Nick Fuentes, to the platform recently, which has had the predictable results.

No doubt, Elon Musk simply thinks these things will sort themselves over time and there is no reason to stifle speech in the name of guarding the feelings of those who are always on alert for a discouraging word, but it is also true that it has resulted in far more genuinely antisemitic content on the platform. The question is whether this is just a burst of energy due to newfound freedom or does it reflect a change in attitude regarding Jews and their place in American society.

The place to start is this post by someone calling himself Will Chamberlain and the response from someone calling himself Aaron Renn. The former is a Jewish political activist, and the latter is a Protestant involved in religious activism. The topic of the exchange is something the great John Derbyshire observed a million years ago when he wrote a review of Kevin MacDonald’s infamous book. Derb introduced the idea of the “Jew Thing”, which afflicts right-wing people.

It is true that for some reason a certain segment of the right is susceptible to the Jew Thing and when exposed to it they go crazy with it. For most it is a short fever that eventually breaks leaving them with an additional set of tools to help understand what is happening in the world. For others it becomes a lifelong obsession that takes over their life in the same way that drug dependency can take over a life. They wake up thinking about Jews and go to bed thinking about Jews.

That may be what is happening with the volume of anti-Jewish material we see on Twitter, now stupidly called X. This subculture has some room to breathe on a big public platform, so it is party time. This happened in the olden times when social media was called Usenet and there was little moderation. In fact, this subculture was a pioneer in building online communities. Don Black built one of the first genuine online communities back in the early 1990’s and it is still going.

What happened in the old days is self-segregation. People with narrow interests, built communities around those interests because they did not want to interact with people who did not share their interests. It also meant that people dedicated to opposing certain topics, built walls and fences around their communities to keep out the people they claimed to oppose. That is probably what will happen with Twitter, now stupidly called X, once the harpies discover the block option.

There is another option. One obvious difference between this wave of the Jew Thing and prior waves is this one is much younger and simplistic. In the old days, people afflicted with the Jew Thing would spend much of their time working out the details of the Jew Thing, often by reading books written by fellow sufferers or by interacting inside those narrow online communities. They spent only a small portion of their time proselytizing to the masses about the Jew Thing.

This new wave is the opposite. It is not an intellectual movement. These are not people reading and discussing Kevin MacDonald. They are not writing long rebuttals to Nathan Cofnas, as they have never heard of him. Instead, they spend their time posting the early life of everyone they think may be Jewish in the timeline of everyone they think needs to hear the news about the Jew Thing. In other words, this wave may not be bigger, but it may be much louder.

Again, most people who catch the Jew Thing recover and simply come away with an understanding of how group loyalty works inside a pluralistic society. In a way, the Jew Thing is like Covid, in that those who recover, and most do, come away knowing that it will not kill you but the people warning about it certainly will, so it is best to be on your guard at all times. This may be what happens with the people currently caught up in the current epidemic of the Jew Thing.

Of course, this could be another symptom of late phase empire. The most famous outbreak of the Jew Thing was in the last century when the old imperial order in Europe collapsed in the wake of the Great War. Once the old mental frameworks collapsed, people could look around and see things they never saw in the past. This stunning emergence of reality and the chaos brought about by the collapse of the old order led people to embrace new narratives.

That could be what is happening now. The American empire is in decline and people feel that things are no longer in good order. Young people, as is always the case in societal decline, feel the tremors of collapse first. That could explain why this new epidemic of the Jew Thing is hitting the Zoomers. The world is not as they were trained up to expect and this disconfirmation is resulting in a disassociation with the old ways, opening the mind to the Jew Thing as an alternative framework.

Another thing that supports that last possibility is that the regime seems to be struggling to contain this outbreak. In the past, they would have pressured Musk into cracking down on this material and we would have seen a coordinated campaign to purge the afflicted from the public square. The ADL forced Musk to visit the pile of shoes, but it did not take, which suggests something has changed. Maybe this epidemic is more than just a replay of the past and something new is happening.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Cosmo Right

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A regular feature of the internet age is the emergence of what is called a “new right” that is supposed to supplant the “old right.” This is largely due to the collapse of Buckley-style conservatism over the last twenty years. The assumption is that the failures of mainstream conservatism and its dwindling demographic must lead to its demise and its replacement by a new, more contemporary right. As a result, there have been a lot of hats thrown into the ring from alternative rights.

What may be emerging as the real threat to win the competition is something that has yet to name itself. The recent hit piece on the publisher of Passage Press, the group responsible for rehabilitating Steve Sailer, led to a gathering of online friends and acquaintances in support of the publisher. This is the online character known as Lomez, who has written for Claremont sites and has a big following on Twitter. He is part of a loose network of influencers that could be called the Cosmo Right.

That is the first place to start with understanding this collection of people emerging into a movement of sorts. They are cosmopolitan in the old bourgeois sense of the word, as they often live in or around the trendy cities. Maybe they went to a college that is near a trendy city or they worked at a company in a hipsterville. Maybe they just like to hang out in places like Austin. It is not so much about location when it comes to their cosmopolitanism, but their attitude.

These are people comfortable in and around the people David Brooks called bourgeois bohemians or Bobo’s. Brooks described them as highly educated people who enjoy the aesthetic of the creative world but pay for it by successfully maintaining a position in the competitive modern economy. Twenty years ago, when he wrote his book about these people, the Bobo’s were a white couple who lived in a gentrified part of the Five Burroughs but had jobs in Manhattan.

This potential new right that is forming up seems to be mostly people who have drifted in and out of that world. They come from generally upper middle-class backgrounds, went to college, and entered a profession. Finding the meritocratic world stifling and sterile, they have been looking around for something more fulfilling and that is not limited to their lifestyle. Their politics are the result of waking up from neoliberalism and then searching about for alternatives.

A representative example is the Blaze writer and commentator Auron MacIntyre, whose book The Total State reads like a personal journey out of the world of conventional politics into the wilderness of dissident politics. Instead of going down the usual rabbit holes which is so common when people get red-pilled on politics, he has maintained a foot in the world of conventional politics, often normalizing ideas that first gained traction in the shadows of dissident discourse.

This gets to the natural trendiness with this new scene. This new right is composed of people comfortable in a world that is often defined by trends, so they do not get swept up in whatever is happening at the moment. In other words, this is a conservatism of disposition, rather than of ideology. Scan the posts of the site IM1776 and you get a Russel Kirk vibe from it. The focus is not on a political agenda, but more on analysis and the proper positioning of politics with the personal.

This is also a millennial demographic. Zoomers get a lot of attention due to their shenanigans online and their skillful use of digital media, but this new scene is almost exclusive to people from the millennial cohort. Like the Zoomers, they come from the suburban middle-class, but unlike the Zoomers they went onto college and got jobs in the above ground economy. Their politics are the result of that experience in the world of practical things, rather than the internet fever swamps.

Another interesting and novel aspect is that this ad hoc collection of people can be described as post-national, post-racial and post-regional. They are all what Leonard Jeffries would call “ice people” but there is no emphasis on it. It is a lot like the old paleo-conservatism in that there are a lot of secular Jews and conservative Christians from mainstream sects. You also see a mix of people from different regions with a regional focus, but not exclusively so.

This is the new cosmopolitanism that may be the result of the demographic changes sweeping the Western world. The old racial categories no longer work because it is no longer a world of black and white. The majoritarian outlook no longer works as there is no longer a natural majority. The response to multiracial neoliberalism may be a cosmopolitan conservatism rooted in classical Western attitudes. The answer to the new Mercurians will be new Apollonians.

There is also the fact that it is young and educated. These are not people with warmed over political agendas from the past, but young, educated men reexamining the past for the foundations of a new political foundation. That means it is less a political agenda than a cultural movement. There is a cool factor growing up around these people on social media, which brings in new voices and new ideas. That gives this new scene a vitality missing from prior new right initiatives.

Of course, this could just be another ripple in the river that is the political in the mass media age. This is not the first effort at creating an alternative to the shuffling husk that is Buckley-style conservatism. The difference here is that this emerging new subculture is not a deliberate creation. Unlike Hazony’s newfangled nationalism, the Cosmo-Right is an organic thing that is emerging gradually. Therefore, it may have more staying power because it is not built to replace anything.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Pseudo-Intellectual Posers

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An aspect of modern politics that does not get discussed is that it is less about the practical things politics is supposed to address and mostly about esoteric and abstract ideas that have meaning only because we pretend so. Look at the current crop of campaign ads and the candidates may as well be running against the bogeyman or in favor of the good juju. Without the party labels, it would be impossible to know anything about the candidates.

This was not always the case. The old joke about politics was that every candidate ran around promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot. The point was they all had plans about how to increase material prosperity. Even though no politician speaks to anything specific these days, the economy remains the top issue with voters because the prevailing assumption inherited from the past is that politics is supposed to be about practical things like fixing potholes.

One reason for the shift in political rhetoric is that the public square has become the domain of clever midwits playing word games with one another. Public discourse is now controlled by credentialed experts who have no idea how anything works, other than the complex game of relationships that defines the managerial class. That means they are good at constructing complicated intellectual structures that are useful in rhetorical jousting but have no connection to reality.

One result of this is that mainstream politics rests on the false choice. The “sides” in any debate struggle with one another to see who can impose their false dichotomy on the debate in order to gain the moral high ground. One way this is done is to conjure a nightmare scenario from the other side’s proposal and then claim the choice is between that nightmare and present reality. Alternatively, they will conjure a glorious fantasy out of their ideas and compare that to present reality.

A good example of how this works is this post at the libertarian site Lawn & Liberty that wags the bony finger at people on the right who have praised the crime policies of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Crime has plummeted in El Salvador since they began rounding up the gangs and putting them in isolation. The government has effectively cut the gangs out of society and placed them in a facility from which there is no communication to the outside world.

What the writer of that post is doing is pretending that it is possible to build a civil libertarian paradise in El Salvador. That is the ideal against which he is measuring the highly effective policies of Bukele. This is the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have the rough, but effective justice used by the government to address the crime problem and on the other hand we have this magical reality where there is no crime and no rough justice to deal with crime.

This line gets at the problem. “It’s easy to see why so many on the right have become enamored with Bukele. They too lack basic respect for rules and institutions. They, like him, are largely unanchored by any coherent set of ideas or philosophy.” It is the old joke about libertarians saying, “Sure, the policy works in the real world but does to work in theory?” The writer cares more about his precious abstractions than about the thousands of lives saved by these policies.

What is not so obvious is that his definition of “coherent set of ideas or philosophy” is normative one. Bukele has a coherent set of ideas. It starts with doing what works to solve the crime problem. He identified the problem, evaluated various ways to address the problem and settled on that which creates the best result. That is about as coherent as one can get from public policy, but because it violates the writers sense of moral justice, he flings his poo at the policies.

This false choice modeling of modern political rhetoric gets to another reality that lies at the heart of our politics. All of it is progressive. The various camps, conservative, libertarian, liberal, and so on are all operating within the larger progressive framework which is built on the assumption that the future must be a glorious one as we in the present are compelled to work toward that glorious future. G. Patrick Lynch, the author of that piece, is no different than Ocasio-Cortez in this regard.

The reason that many Americans, mostly those who used to identify as conservative or right-wing, admire what Bukele is doing is the practicality of it. Our political space is littered with discount preachers like G. Patrick Lynch, waving their bony fingers at us while listing off our sins. The stage is packed with dreamers who conjured creative visions of a glorious future that work only in the minds of the dreamer. What we lack are men willing to use the state to solve actual problems.

In the end, the reason that things seem to be coming apart is that our politics are dominated by bourgeois posers who have no practical knowledge, so they spend their days conjuring clever word games to play with one another. The point is never to solve a problem, but to establish one side or the other has the king of the moral high ground, which exists only in their imaginations. The moral high ground is just a place in the stands, far away from the action.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Great Panic

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Ever since the Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023, the American empire has been convulsed by increasingly deranged tremors. The Israelis adopted a policy that on the surface makes little sense. All it has done is poison relations with the Arabs and much of the world. In America, both political parties have gone nuts in response to the attacks, Israel’s response, and the reaction to that response. Peak madness may be Lindsey Graham suggesting Israel uses nukes on Gaza.

Graham, of course, is trying to show he is the most Zionist of Zionists in a party that makes Likud look dovish. Elected Republicans are obsessed with Israel to the point where even pro-Israel supporters are suffering from severe cringe. Here is Ted Cruz claiming that no one came to the aid of Jews in the Second World War and that Israel has had to go it alone. The logic here is that you are either on the side of unconditional support for Israel or you are Hitler.

One reason for this, of course, is the power of AIPAC. Thomas Massie has opposed the blank check to Israel, so AIPAC has launched both a smear campaign against him, but also a television campaign in his state. AIPAC has been threatening politicians around the country with what could best be described as a “stand with Israel or you get two in the hat” marketing campaign. The only thing missing is a pic of Kennedy slumped over in the car as his wife tries to keep his head together.

The madness is not contained to the street level politics. The normally sober minded David Goldman, the man behind the Spengler column in the Asia Times, posted a crazy rant about Christian Nationalism at the Claremont site, American Mind. In that post he seems to suggest that Christians do not deserve their own nations and must worship Israel if they want to survive. It is a bit of mask dropping that you only ever see from fringe players in the diaspora.

All of this raises the question as to what is happening here? The large and well-funded philosemitic ecosystem seems to be shaking itself to pieces. The trigger for this lurch into madness was the Hamas attack, which the people in this ecosystem demand be treated like a world defining event, when in reality it was just another reprisal in a long running blood feud between the Arabs and Jews. For some reason, it is not seen as such by these people. Instead, it is an inflection point.

One reason for this is the changes inside Israel. The old guard is reaching its demographic end point. Since its founding, Israel has been controlled by Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from the diaspora. The other Jewish tribes, particularly the Mizrahi, have been spectators. The Mizrahi are the Jews who have always been in the Middle East, as opposed to those who migrated with the Roman Legions into Europe. Mizrahi is a modern term that means “eastern.”

The dominance of westernized Ashkenazi Jews has meant that Israeli politics has reflected the politics of the American empire. One side has taken the dovish view of Arab relations, and the other side has taken the hawkish view. Further, Israel diplomacy has followed American diplomacy. This has made it easy for the Israelis to deal with the rest of the world diplomatically and provided some limits on Israel behavior. Now that the Mizrahi are ascendent, this dynamic is changing.

The Mizrahi have now entered government and are taking over what has been the political right in Israel. They have an agenda that starts with the removal of the Arab populations from “Greater Israel” which is why the expression “from the river to the sea” is so controversial. The Mizrahi also demand the return to Talmudic law and the building of the third temple, which means destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Mizrahi back Netanyahu, who needs them to survive politically.

This changing of the guard inside Israel explains the crazy response from the Israelis, in the teeth of global opposition. It does not explain why the Israelis seem willing to offend their supporters in America. Normally, the protests we see in the West would have led to strong pressure from whoever is occupying the White House to tone down the violence and address the optics. Instead, we have both parties demanding total, unconditional obedience to the Israeli cause.

That gets to a different problem. Project Ukraine has brought to light some hidden truths about the Global American Empire. One is that the vaunted American war machine is a paper tiger. Western wonder weapons were supposed to scare the Russians into submission, but instead they have been a colossal failure. Further, all of the predictions about how the war would unfold and how Russia would respond to Western efforts have turned out to be fantastically wrong.

Project Ukraine is looking like the Varian Disaster for the American empire. This is having a profound impact on the internal politics of the empire. After all, the people responsible for this catastrophe look a lot like the people who are mismanaging the unfolding catastrophe in the Levant. It is not hard for even the most dimwitted to make the connection because the people running foreign policy routinely claim primary allegiance to Israel.

There is also a changing attitude in the general public. Thirty years ago, Washington would not have had to do these marketing stunts to whip up support for Israel, because the public supported Israel. The public has clearly changed. The long allergy to thinking about the role of Jews in these foreign projects is gone and now you see things in the public square with regard to the role of Jews in politics that would not have seen the light of day a few decades ago.

This does not mean Americans are becoming antisemitic. It just means as ethnic and racial awareness break through the forcefield of mass media menticide, awareness of both Israel and Jewish influence in politics is growing. People notice that Ben Shapiro cares more about Israel than America. They are noticing that public officials love Israel more than they think about their alleged constituents. Just compare Nick Fuentes to Kevin MacDonald and you can see the change.

Taken together this explains the panic we are seeing. The erratic behavior and weird mask dropping are the result of the sudden awareness that the old arrangements with regards to Israel and the Jewish people are falling apart. Just as the American empire is reaching its denouement, the Jewish century is also reaching an end. As the world transitions to a multipolar order, the internal politics of the West must change with it in order for the West to survive.

For people whose lives were constructed around the old order being permanent, this emerging new order is causing panic. In fact, much of what makes up elite Jewish identity depends on the old imperial order remaining in place. That means the multipolar world and the new American politics are a mortal threat. The panic we are seeing, whether genuine or purchased as in the case of Republican politicians, is the result of the great change that is about to sweep the American empire.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Who Says?

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the odd neo-romantic subculture that exists among the young online right, a post about how the Germans were right about the liberating nature of work and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

There is a famous line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which one of the characters asserts that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. This has been resaid many ways and attributed to many people, but the original is from Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist. For most of human history, the answer to the question, “Who says?” has been God, maybe the gods or perhaps a holy man who everyone agrees has some connection to the gods.

When someone said you should not do something, that question, “Who says?” was baked into the statement, along with its answer. You should not speak ill of the gids because the gods will exact revenge on you or maybe the authorities, fearing the wrath of the gods, will punish you. The answer to the question of who says you should or should not do something was always the same. it was some concept of the supernatural or its manifestation in the natural world.

In modern times, we do not appeal to the gods. You should not drive your car recklessly in a school zone because the government says you should not do that, and they have men with guns to arrest you if you do it. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is the government. Every prohibition in our lives comes with an assumed answer to the question, “Who says?” That answer is almost always the government or its agents.

The government is not a god or claims connection to the gods, no matter what the politicians have to say about it, so who says they have the authority to decide how fast you can drive and where you can do it? In theory, it is we, the people, who decide these things through the democratic process. We created government and the process by which men hold power and they make the laws. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is us, the people.

Of course, it does not stop there. If the government enacted a rule that says you must beep your horn when you see an orange-colored vehicle, no one would be satisfied with the answer “the government says you must do it.” It is a stupid rule and people would want more than that as an answer. In fact, some people might argue that the law is invalid because it requires people to do what they would otherwise would not do and for no reason that can be deemed in the best interest of the people.

In other words, the horn beeping law would fail to satisfy the question of “Who says?” because there has to be something more than just “because we say so” as an answer in order to satisfy the question. In the case of speeding around school zones, the real answer to the question is the safety of children. We prohibit reckless behavior around schools because we value the lives of our children. More important, we feel compelled to protect the safety of children.

Instead of something ridiculous like beeping the horn when you see an orange-colored car, pretend the law says you cannot teach women to read. The argument is that once women learn to read, we end up in the Aristophanes cycle. That is a good and valid reason for the law, but some would argue that it is more wrong to deny women the basic rights nature grants all people. Women have a natural right to exercise their minds by learning to read and using that knowledge to improve their lives.

What the critics of the prohibition on female literacy are saying is that it is not enough that the laws reflect the general will and have a practical purpose. There is some universal standard of justice against which the laws are measured. The horn beeping law is not just invalid because it is ridiculous. It is invalid because it unjustly compels people to act for no reason other than the state has the power to force them to beep their horns whenever they see an orange car.

A more serious way to think about this is with the waves of laws being pushed by Republicans regarding prohibited speech and thoughts. It is the official policy of the Republican Party that you should not think poorly of Israel, and you should not be permitted to criticize Israel. In fact, Republicans now think the one group of foreigners that should be deported are critics of Israel. The question they are never asked is, “Who says we should ban criticism of Israel?”

Most people would say it is rude to say mean things about Jews or Israelis, just as it is rude to make fun of fat people or homosexuals. No one suggests we deport people for telling jokes about fat people. In other words, there must be some other reason for the extraordinary emphasis on being rude to Israelis. It cannot simply be that we have all agreed that it is wrong. If there is no reason given, then it must be assumed that no reason exists, so there is no answer to the question.

Obviously, everyone knows the answer here. The massive Israeli lobby is bribing these people to pass these laws. Marco Rubio owes his political career, and thus his luxurious lifestyle, to a Zionist billionaire car dealer named Norman Braman. Rubio has been in the pocket of the neocons his entire career. Most Republican officials have a similar backstory, so this is why they want to strip what remains of your speech rights and ban large swaths of the Christian Bible.

None of that changes the basic problem. This crusade against anti-Zionism and antisemitism have to answer the same question that all prohibitions must answer, which is “Who says?” Being anti-Zionist might be viewed as rude to Jewish people and anti-Zionist are often rude to everyone in their presentations, but whoever says they must be muzzled must answer the question, “Who says?” Who says these people must be silenced and by whose authority are they being silenced?

This is a long trip to the basic question that lies at the heart of the current crisis and that is the question of authority. In the anti-Zionism debate, the problem is the same as with the horn blowing example. The answer to the question of “Who says?” is “the government says so” but that is not adequate because who says the government has the right to police your opinions? The only possible answer to that question is us, the people, and no such authority has been granted.

The question of authority always resolves to two possible answers, which is the collective will or the supernatural. The natural rights crowd will say the authority is nature, arrived at by reason, but that is just a way of blaming God while pretending he is no longer around. Once God is removed from the set of possible answers to the question “Who says?” we are left with our collective will, which means whomever we choose to be the final authority.

In the end, the response to all new demands for censorship and prohibitions against thoughts or actions must be “Who says?” Who decided that being rude to Jewish people is the worst sin? When was this decided? Who says we have to pretend crime is not what it is? Unless and until the scolds can answer these basic questions of authority, they have no legitimacy. An unjust prohibition is no prohibition at all, but merely an invitation to social conflict to the benefit of outsiders.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Burn Baby Burn

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For the last few weeks, protests have raged at some elite colleges between anti-Zionists in support of Gaza and Zionist in support of Israel. At Columbia University in New York City, the protests essentially closed the college. The cops were finally sent in yesterday to clear the pro-Gaza camp, but at this point there is probably no point in trying to resume the spring semester. At other colleges, police continue to battle with protestors in an effort to restore order.

The protests provide some insight into what is happening among the Cloud People and also some insight into how the Dirt People see the Cloud People. It has been a long time since factions of the anti-white coalition that makes up what we call the left have squared off against each other. As a result, the Cloud People are struggling to grapple with what is happening. Usually, it is easy for them to pick sides, as the protestors are always targeting Dirt People.

The first thing worth noting is that the pro-Gaza protestors are not white. It is anti-Zionist Jews and nonwhites, with a smattering of upper-middle-class white girls from the grievance studies programs. The pro-Israel side is primarily Jewish students organized by the network of anti-BDS organizations that exist on every campus. As a result, the pro-Gaza side uses the antiwhite language they have been trained to use against the mostly Jewish protestors on the other side.

One result of this is the bellowing about antisemitism has had no effect on the protestors or their supporters among the faculty and media. This is has been the most powerful magic in American politics for so long that no one remembers a time when it was not otherwise, but the magic seems to be fading. Amusingly, this has the conservative commentariat chanting “antisemitism” even louder, sort of like how English speakers shout at foreign fast-food workers.

One reason for this is the youth are not as white as they used to be due to the deliberate demographic changes over the last half century. This is especially true on the college campus where antiwhite activism is now admissions policy. Those nonwhites and post-whites trained up to hate whitey now look at the people carrying Israeli flags and repeat the classic Jared Taylor line, “They look huwhite to me.” It would take a heart of stone to not laugh at this development.

There is a serious element here. Young people are nowhere near as supportive of Israel as in the past, due mostly to demographics. Support for Israel remains strong with old white people, but support declines rapidly after the boomers. There is also an antisemitism fatigue setting in with whites. Decades of crying wolf has had the natural impact on the culture. People are tired of the complaining from people who have done better in America than any other group.

There is another angle here. The shuffling husk that is the conservative movement has been trying to do what it exists to do, which is get white people to focus on the how and why, rather than the who and what. They shout about the pro-Gaza side being communists and antisemites, so their aging followers will focus on that rather than the fact these people do not belong here. They do not want you to notice the two alien tribes from the Levant fighting it out on the college campus.

That is why they jumped on the image of the “frat boys” supposedly “defending” the American flag at UNC. It was a staged photo by the usual suspects because this sort of boomer bait always works to distract middle-class white people. The “frat boys” were part of some anti-BDS operation. They were also waving around an Israel flag, but that was trimmed from the scene. This sort of thing is a reminder that conservatism exists to distract white people from what is happening.

The fact is none of the people involved in these protests should be in the country and that is what people should notice. Thirty percent of the undergrad student body in Columbia is foreign. Less than half of the student body is classified as white and half of those identify as Jewish. If you are the typical white person, Columbia University may as well be located in another solar system. It is not just a foreign place. It is an alien place that rests on hostility toward you.

These protests not only suggest fractures in the antiwhite coalition, but they suggest the Potemkin opposition in American politics is losing its grip. The Republican response to these riots was to pass a bill banning parts of the Christian Bible and stripping you of your right to criticize foreign governments. The Antisemitism Awareness Act is probably the most vulgar and depraved piece of legislation to ever pass the House, and it passed with overwhelming support from Republicans.

The Republicans passed this, in part, because they are trapped in 1985. They still think their voter base cares more about Israel than anything else. The idiot who dreamed up this monstrosity is right out of central casting. He is the typical clueless zombie that gets recruited into Republican politics, because he is biologically incapable of noticing what is happening all around him. The GOP is the party of feckless, clueless goofballs who can no longer play the role for which they exist.

In the end, these protests matter to Dirt People only in so far as they indicate problems among the Cloud People. None of these people are on our side and all of them would lock shields with the other side if asked to put on their Antifa and BLM outfits in order to terrorize white people this summer. The hope is that both sides of these protests are committed to the theory of escalatory dominance. After all, revolutions often grow out of the cracks in the ruling coalition.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Right-Wing Coffeehouse

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Last week Keith Woods posted on his Twitter a video montage of a guy going about his daily routine somewhere in America. Woods captioned the video with “One of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever watched.” What followed was a chain of thousands of comments back and forth, either trying to explain what Woods meant by that tweet or why he missed the point of the video. The video is worth watching and the comments are worth reading to get a sense of the debate.

The video itself was posted by the guy you see in it, and it turns out that he is a reasonably successful man. He has an advanced degree and a nice job. He is obviously doing well in the material sense. He is also married to a professional woman, and they are expecting their first child. Reportedly he posted the video without thinking much about how people would react. As is often the case with “viral” content, this one is about the people reacting to it, not the content.

The first thing it reveals is there is a segment of the on-line right that looks at normal life as something to be avoided. For Woods and many of his fans, a life like the man in the video enjoys is a nightmare. The reason for it is they see his life as having been reduced to material goods. He is not “living” in any meaningful way. He labors in a tedious job inside a sterile office in order to pay for things that are as sterile as the life he lives in order to obtain those things.

For this side of the on-line right, the point of life is not material prosperity, but something else that they are never very good at explaining. Keith Woods is not a hardy guy who is going to go off on dangerous adventures. He is not signing up to be a soldier of fortune or sail the seas as a merchant marine. In all probability his life is as routine and boring as the man in the video. Yet, he thinks that life should be about more than material comforts and should have a higher purpose.

Romanticism like this is associated with the people we call the left, but there has always been a strain of it on the right. This is especially true in Europe, where the terms left and right used to mean more than tomorrow and yesterday. In America, the people we call the right have always embraced the sterility of material existence. The point of life is to get a good job, work yourself to death to buy stuff and then die before you become a financial burden on the next generation.

Note that Woods was not universally denounced for his post. There was another divide in the responses and that was the age divide. His younger fans were right there with him in condemning the traditional definition of success, while the old guys like Matt Walsh were baffled by the response. From his point of view, the old American right’s point of view, the video guy is living the best life. It is impossible for Walsh to grasp why people like Woods reacted negatively to the video.

No doubt hoping to benefit from the debate on Twitter, Nick Fuentes posted this video of himself mocking people with jobs. Unlike the Keith Woods reaction, Fuentes is crude and self-indulgent, but the point of view is the same. He is rejecting what most people would consider a normal and happy life. It is important to him that the world knows he rejects the conventional life. His critique of women, heterosexuality and marriage all come from the same rejection of the conventional.

This new romanticism is not entirely new with the Zoomers. Richard Spencer should probably get credit for introducing this to the alt-right. Much of his appeal was to the sorts of young men who suspected that the middle-class suburban life they have always known was missing something important. Spencer was never able to explain what was missing, but he was able to tap into this longing in order to make himself a cultural phenomenon for a brief time.

The superficiality of this new form of romanticism is what gives it the coffee house radicalism vibe. By any reasonable standard, Richard Spencer lived a boring life, even when he was at his peak fame. Other than a few publicity stunts, he spent his days drinking and playing on the internet. The next generation of online romantics does even less living in the romantic sense. Woods and Fuentes, for example, are teetotalers who primarily exist as avatars online.

Even so, there does seem to be a change among the young right-wing with regards to their view of what constitutes a good life. Read the comments to that Fuentes video and they are more slobbering than normal. The new counterculture forming up is on the right and it is exclusively male. Having been raised online, they want nothing to do with the mundane life that makes the physical world possible. They may not know what they want, but they do not want what is on offer.

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