Category Archives: Culture

The Great Dilemma

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Imagine one of your friends tells you that the governor of your state was caught on video robbing a liquor store. Not only that, his brother pistol-whipped the clerk during the commission of the crime. Most likely, you would want proof. Your friend then sends you a link to a Twitter thread on the subject. Knowing the volume of nonsense on Twitter, you then go to mainstream news sites looking for something on this incredible story, but everywhere you look you find nothing but silence.

This would present a dilemma. On the one hand, you trust your friend and the story does seem legitimate. Upon further inquiry you find some stories tucked away here and there that confirm the tweet. Independent news sites are howling about the crime and the refusal of the mainstream media to notice it. The dilemma is not about believing the story is true but about trusting your own judgement. If all of the serious people are ignoring this story, why should you be outraged by it?

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is daily life in America. Events that should warrant national coverage go unmentioned, while trivial nonsense gets wall-to-wall coverage from all of the regime media organs. Compounding it is the fact that the stuff getting covered comes with truckloads of official lies and narratives designed to trick the audience into viewing the facts presented in a way that leads to an inaccurate understanding of the event in question.

We are in one of those moments today. Hunter Biden, the crackhead son of Joe Biden, is due in court to plead guilty to some minor crimes. Not happy with a sweetheart deal that is an affront to the idea of the rule of law, one of his lawyers called the court yesterday, pretending to be a lawyer for the Republicans, who had filed a brief with the court contesting the sweetheart deal. This fake lawyer successfully convinced the court clerk to withdraw the Republican filing.

This is not a small thing. The massive corruption involved in this plea deal should warrant Watergate level coverage. Instead, regime media and the volunteer army of online toadies pretend it is normal. Putting that aside, no one would know about this outlandish effort to mislead the court if not for people on Twitter. The Drudge Report has no mention of it. Memorandum, the news aggregator popular with media content creators, has no mention of this event.

In fairness, there is a CNN post on it, but you have to dig around to find it. The three primary media organs of the regime are silent. There is no mention of it in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. Putting aside the Nigerian levels of corruption in this case, the absurdity of this stunt warrants attention. Calling a court clerk the day before an appearance and pretending to be a lawyer for another party in order to trick the court is Hollywood comedy stuff.

As an aside, think about the sort of people who look at an event like this and conclude it is not worth mentioning. It is a good reminder that partisanship is not primarily about rooting for your side, but a hatred of the enemy. The regime’s media organs actively participate in these coverups because they hate the people they imagine are on the other side of the hive walls. They are not covering for the Bidens because they love these people, but because they hate you.

Putting that aside, what compounds the media silence on this story is the outrageousness of it. The law firm involved is not a fly-by-night operation that represents drug cases. Jessica Bagels, the lawyer who pulled the caper, is Director of Litigation Services at Latham- Watkins. This is what they used to call a “white shoe” law firm that represents power players in politics and finance. These are the sorts of people Hollywood uses in conspiracy thrillers like The Firm.

Of course, this casual acceptance of corruption speaks to the general rot that has become the defining feature of the ruling class. It is not that these people are breaking the rules for personal gain. It is that they no longer have any respect for the spirit of the law that is supposed to animate our society. These lawyers think nothing of tricking a court clerk because they have no respect for her or the system. In fact, these lawyers hold the legal system in contempt.

The only reason anyone knows about this latest Hunter Biden caper is that there are still people in America who respect the spirit of the law. They are outraged enough about this case to follow it and post what they learn online. There are still millions of Americans who feel the same sense of outrage, so they follow these people on places like Twitter. Despite the best efforts by regime media, this information still makes it into circulation and people are rightly angry about it.

This returns us to that dilemma at the start. The choice between trusting yourself or the weight of official media rests on a more important conflict. The people who think it proper to trick the court operate from the belief that any means necessary is acceptable in order to achieve their goals. The ends justify the means. The other side of the dilemma are the people who reject this. They think the means justify the ends and that we must always respect the process.

Therein lies the problem. The process no longer has the means to control these corrupt forces in the system. The only solution is to abandon the rules and use whatever means are required in order to remove the rot from the system. What this example shows is that the people who think the end justifies the means will always defeat the means justify the end unless the latter makes an exception and embraces the ethos of the former in order to restore order. That is the great dilemma of this age.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Who, Whom?

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the rather boring Amazon movie Air, which is about sneaker pimps, a review of the classic comedy, The Philadelphia Story and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Imagine you are suddenly thrust into a world where you and everyone else in this world has a unique religion. Everyone has their own moral code, and everyone has a unique way of demonstrating that moral code. There is a finite number of moral principles, so there can be a lot of overlap in this area. On the other hand, there is an unlimited number of ways to exercise your beliefs, so everyone can easily see the differences between themselves and the rest.

This would be a rather strange world, but it would also be an extremely dangerous world as soon as everyone figured out that some of the people had within their religion an extreme intolerance of other religions. Some people may have as a part of their religious practice the forced conversion of non-believers. Others may look at everyone as fair game as far as murder. Some could be cannibals. Quickly everyone would realize they are in an extremely dangerous world.

At the same time, some people would figure out that their moral code is pretty close to the code of some other people. They may have different practices, like feast days and which animals they sacrifice on those days, but when it comes to the important things they are on the same page. While these people may not want to change their practices, they will quickly see the benefit in cooperation and compromise. They can team up to defend themselves against the cannibals and killers.

While mutual defense is one reason to cooperate, another reason is to create a mechanism to identify those with whom they can cooperate and those who must either be avoided or defeated. You cannot get anything done if you are never sure if the guy coming down the road is harmless or dangerous. Quickly this new world would sort itself into tribes of people with similar moral codes cooperating with one another in order to avoid being prey to other people.

At this point, these loose associations for mutual defense will undergo a transformation in order to work. Some will fall into disarray and the members will be picked off by other groups through conversation or predation. Some groups will reorient themselves into a unified organization in order to convert the rest. Others will do the same in order to resist being converted by others. In other words, the world of individual religions will quickly give way to a world of group religion.

It is not an accident that this religious model follows the same pattern as urban street gangs in the last century. Organized crime was not just based on ethnicity. They relied on a moral code to hold them together. It was not enough to be Italian, Jewish, or Irish to be a gangster. You had to adhere to a way of life. The reason these people thought of their fellow gangsters as family is they shared the same moral code. It is also why they would kill one another. The code was bigger than men.

Morality in any human society tends toward monopoly. In our fictional world of individual religions, the first thing to happen is compromise for mutual benefit resulting in a consolidation of moral codes into moral tribes. Those tribes, if they could not physically separate to prevent conflict, would inevitably come into conflict until one tribe was able to dominate the other. Barring geographical barriers, in time this imaginary would have one moral code and one way to express it.

There is another thing going on here other than mutual protection. A moral code only works if you believe it is correct. This means you must think other moral codes are incorrect or you are leaving open the chance that your code is wrong. Intolerance of competing morale codes and religious expression is a requirement of faith, for no other reason than to reinforce your own faith. By definition, a moral code must be intolerant of other moral codes in order to remain a moral code.

At this point it is tempting to think this is wrong because in the real world you get along well with the Hindu guy across the street. You are not a Hindu, but you are fine with him being a Hindu and he seems to be fine with you being Jewish. In reality, the reason you two get along is you are both sublimating your religion to the moral code of American society which says you must accept different secondary religions. One part of your primary religion is pluralism, whether you know it or not.

It is also why the people in charge aggressively hunt down people who hold beliefs that they see as dangerous to their beliefs. They automatically view white nationalists, for example, as violent, because from their perspective, people with such contrary beliefs must be violent. The beliefs of the white nationalist are incompatible with the moral code of the new religion. As we saw in the example above, the inevitable consequence must be confrontation between the two camps.

This is what makes the present situation so dangerous. The moral code of people putting child molesters and crossdressers into the schools is incompatible with the moral code of parents. As we saw in our simple example, they must always see one another as hostile because there can be no compromise. There is no middle ground between those who think men should be allowed to mutilate children and those who think children must be protected from those men.

It is also what makes the new religion so aggressive. Much of what defines it is the belief that it must conquer the moral codes of other groups. To tolerate dissent is to question the one true faith. To aggressively stamp out dissent is a public act of piety that reinforces belief. Not only is peaceful coexistence not possible, but peaceful separation is also not acceptable to the new religion. In this clash between moral codes, the only question that matters is who will overcome whom?

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Our Alaric Moment

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Note: If you enjoy the sound of me droning on about things like affirmative action, then you will enjoy this show I did with Jose Nino. I am not the best interviewee, but this one turned out better than most of them. Jose is a good host.

If you were living in the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century you probably knew that things were not going well. This assumes that you were prosperous enough to have time to think about these things. You could see that the infrastructure was failing and that the empire was struggling to maintain order. On the other hand, the decline had been happening for a long time so things may have seemed normal. Without some way to compare the present to the past, you only have instinct.

Today we have mountains of facts and figures to tell us how things are doing in the Global American Empire. There was a time not so long ago when these facts and figures made up the bulk of news coverage. Economists became court wizards, explaining the latest unemployment figures or trade numbers. They were also called upon to bless whatever polices were being debated in Congress. In the Obama years, economic data was the way we measured the glories of the empire.

That has all changed now. One reason is no one in their right mind takes anything the government says at face value. People had grown used to the way the media biased the numbers depending upon who was in office, but the mortgage crisis cratered the public’s confidence in the numbers themselves. If all of the court wizards explaining the numbers could not see the mortgage fiasco coming, then why should anyone believe them about unemployment or inflation?

Then you have the general lying that has become a feature of government. The lying about Covid not only disgraced the medical profession, but it finished off whatever trust people had in the official numbers. If the government lies about how many people are dying from Covid just to move more product for the drug makers, the government will lie about how many people are working or the inflation numbers. No one trusts the numbers because no one trusts the people issuing the numbers.

There may be something else at work. Into the 1980’s, the numbers out of the stock markets were predictable. The markets went up as the economy improved out of a recession and the markets went down before a recession. In between the blue-chip stocks maintained a consistent price-to-earnings ratio between 14.00 and 16.00, which was the gold standard of the market. You could compare a stock’s performance to the S&P 500 to gauge the stability of the company.

That changed in the 1980’s with the new global currency arrangements. The P/E ratio of the S&P 500 as of this moment is 26.43. That looks high compared to the historic averages, but it is low compared to recent times. Just before the mortgage crisis the number climbed to 123.73. It collapsed soon after, but even in the midst of what they said was a near death experience for the financial system, the P/E ratio for the S&P 500 only dropped down into the historic average range.

The point here is we cannot trust the numbers if the numbers have no relationship to anything we have experienced. When the end of the world has the same numbers as what most consider to be a golden era for the empire, those numbers cease to have any meaning to us. Throw in the fact that most people do not feel like they are richer than their ancestors and those inflated stock figures carry even less weight. We are left to rely on our instincts to judge things.

Of course, our sense of things, that gut feeling, is the result of a many small things that we experience every day. Three-quarters of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction because they go to the grocery store every week. They see that despite the crowing about inflation coming down, food remains expensive. Granted, no one is starving in America due to a lack of affordable food, but it is that thing they see every day that gives people a sense of things.

Think about something simple like a pint of premium ice cream. A few years ago, a pint was sixteen ounces. “A pint is a pint the world around” was true from peak of the British empire until just a few years ago. Now a pint is fourteen ounces. The price for the new pint is not the same as the old pint. The price is more than the old pint. A few years ago, the old pint of ice cream was five dollars. That is about 31¢ per ounce. Today the new pint is over seven dollars or 51¢ per ounce.

That is a seventy percent change in the price. This is one example and probably not a representative one, given that butterfat prices drive dairy prices. Even so, this is something people see all over the marketplace. Shrinkflation is a word because it is a thing that exists. People notice that the containers are getting smaller, or they are getting less full in the case of things like snacks. Meanwhile, prices go up. This subtly tells people that something is going wrong.

This is probably why we are no longer getting a parade of court wizards analyzing the latest economic numbers. According to the numbers, Joe Biden should be dozing into reelection with an insurmountable lead, as his court wizards flood the airwaves with the good news about the economy. Instead, no one talks about the numbers and Biden is as popular as rectal cancer. It is possible he could lose the election to a man sitting in prison or be deposed by the secret police.

This brings us back to where we started. There were those in the Roman Empire who sensed the true state of affairs. No doubt some of them lived and died expecting things to fall apart, only to stagger on long past their time. Then there were others who internalized this reality and just accepted that no matter how grim things might appear, the empire was a permanent feature of life. The people probably just tried to make the best of things, even as they noticed the decline.

All of that changed on August 24, 410 AD when Alaric led the Visigoths into the eternal city, sacking Rome and setting off the collapse of the Western empire. The empire staggered on for a bit longer, but it was over at that point. All of those bad signs people had sensed probably seemed obvious in retrospect. Even so, the sack of Rome by the Visigoths was a shock to the world. The signs seemed obvious, but people still thought that the imperial order was permanent.

This is most likely the fate of the American empire. There are lots of signs that things are going poorly for the empire. Getting whipped by a collection of bronze age goatherds in the graveyard of empires should have been a wakeup call, but the empire is now picking fights with Russia and China. Meanwhile things deteriorate domestically, both economically and culturally. Yet, we stagger on, but somewhere out there is an Alaric moment just waiting to happen.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Absurdistan

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The word “antisemitism” acquired magical properties in the 20th century for the same reason that the word “fascism” acquired magical properties. In both cases, they came to mean the worst thing possible. If you wanted to anathematize a political or economic idea, you found a way to compare it to fascism. If you wanted to anathematize a person, then you found a way to accuse them of antisemitism. The meanings of the words were lost in favor of their magical properties.

This has never made much sense in the American context. Fascism in its heyday never gained much of a following in the English-speaking world. There were British fascists, most famously Oswald Mosely. The Irish had the Blue Shirts, who were about hating the British more than loving fascism. Otherwise, fascism was a continental thing. After the war fascism lost whatever appeal it had for obvious reasons. Despite it not being a thing in America, the right people worry about it more than ever.

The same can be said of antisemitism. America has always been a multicultural and multiethnic society, which is the reason for the distinctive American accent. This is also why racial and ethnic prejudice has been superficial. The more like the core American you look, the less prejudice you experienced. That means blacks experienced a fair bit of prejudice, while Jews or the Irish experienced almost no prejudice. Americans have never been tribal like the rest of the world.

While fascism has remained a cartoon epithet, antisemitism does seem to be catching on in certain parts of the culture. The other day, internet gadfly Brett Weinstein noted that Hitler is making a comeback on Twitter. This was probably in response to fans of Nick Fuentes posting clips of their cult leader saying mean things about Jewish people at one his club meetings. The usual suspects took the opportunity to pretend they are the victims of this easily ignored carnival act.

Despite the absurd claims of the anti-anti-semites, talking negatively about Jewish people does seem to be on the rise. At this point, the only reason anyone has to pay attention to Nick Fuentes is his ranting about the Jews. His time in the Kanye West entourage was highlighted by him and Kanye West on the Alex Jones show praising Hitler for killing Jews. Recently he has been ministering to the black people, preaching the good news about Hitler.

Putting aside the weirdness of this, the most interesting aspect of the new antisemitism is the shallowness of it. The old school antisemites put far more time into making it into a worldview and theory of history. Mike Peinovich, formerly Mike Enoch, has used Kevin MacDonald’s books to create a political movement as well as a detailed framework for interpreting history and current events. Nick Fuentes, in contrast, is simply claiming Christ commands him to purge Jews from society.

Putting the Fuentes version next to the Peinovich version and you see that the former is dumber but reaching a broader audience than the latter. Black YouTube was perfectly fine with giving Fuentes the “N-word” pass just so he could preach the gospel about the Jews on a show debating the holocaust. In fairness, blacks have always had an uneasy relationship with Jews. Jesse Jackson’s “Himey Town” comment is an example, but it has always been in the shadows. Now it is in the open.

It is easy to dismiss the concerns of someone like Brett Weinstein because we have been hearing it for decades. No one alive today has lived in a time when the usual suspects have not been calling someone Hitler. Their cries about Fuentes and his Mexican Hitler act sound like more of the same. On the other hand, it does feel like this is different than the past. While the old school guys remain buried by the system, these new school guys are not getting the same treatment.

One reason for this is Fuentes is the digital John Stewart, who used bathos and pathos to insert subversive messages into the mainstream. Fuentes is doing the same thing but on the new digital platforms. Like his target audience, Fuentes has grown up socialized by the internet, so he is comfortable communicating in short clips, using a combination of sarcasm and seriousness to make his point. Fuentes can connect with black YouTube because they speak the same language.

There is something else going on here. While the old school antisemites were serious in their politics, hoping to create a mass movement around their message, the new school guys are anything but serious. This is Generation Clown World fully trained to live in the clown world bequeathed to them. The audience for Nick Fuentes or Fresh and Fit would be bored by someone like Kevin MacDonald. Few of them could read his books, because they lack the attention span to read a book.

It may be tempting to dismiss them for this reason, but in a world where Joe Biden is called the “leader of the free world” by people who are supposed to be respectable and sober-minded, the Nick Fuentes act is not so ridiculous. In fact, the whole livestream subculture reflects the decadence at the top. The reason the fans of Fuentes laugh at the scolds waging their finger at him is because those scolds are wearing fright wigs and big red floppy shoes.

In the end, the rise of this new brand of antisemitism is really just another turn of the wheel in a culture that is becoming increasingly absurd. A Mexican livestreamer leading a brown-black alliance against the Jews is just the next ridiculous turn of the wheel in a society that is increasingly absurd and ridiculous. The next turn of the wheel may bring Jewish crossdressers demanding the return of slavery. In Absurdistan, you can let your imagination run wild as long as you like and subscribe.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Anemoia And Hauntology

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the singularity of war, a review of the classic film, From Here to Eternity and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

One of the oddities of the Obama administration was that it seemed as if they were working from a list of wrongs they were determined to right. Those wrongs were what the Left counted as their failures over the decades. A part of Obama being viewed as Black Jesus was his ability to heal the past. This was necessary as those old harms were what tied us to the present. It was only by righting those past wrongs that we could break free and enter the glorious future.

The most obvious example was the health care stuff. This proved to be a disaster for the Clinton administration, but that is not how the Left saw it. They viewed it as a betrayal and a defeat that had to be addressed. This is why the eventual policy was nothing like they promised or anything anyone would call reform. That was never the point of the exercise. The point was to have a redo of that old defeat and this time the good guys would win and erase that loss from memory.

This active revisionism turned up in all sorts of places. They had Hillary Clinton pose with Sergey Lavrov holding a red button. This was part of the Russian reset initiative designed to restart relations with Russia. In reality it was about soothing the wounds from the Reagan years when the Left lost the Cold War debate. The same vibe permeated their Iran initiative. Like the Russian reset, the Iran reproachment had no utility in the present. It was all about the past.

This backward-looking politics is plain now. The retreat into the past has jumped from the establishment Left to the establishment Right. This is not surprising, given the conservative habit of following the Left from one fad to the next. Here you have a collection of flunkies from Conservative Inc. doing cosplay. Instead of dressing up as characters from Japanese cartoons, they are pretending to be their favorite characters from the conservative movement.

Someone on Twitter referred to these people as Reagan Van Winkles. They went to sleep in the 1980’s and just awoke in the present, unaware of all that has happened over the last forty years. It is a clever line and there is certainly some truth to it, but these people are aware of the present. What they want is to go back to sleep and wake up in the 1980’s, as if the present is a terrible nightmare. They are live action role playing in order to take a timeout from the present.

Note the flavorless language. Sixty years ago, when the founders of the Buckley cult were getting started, they used language designed to inflame the passions of the great white middle-class, which they sensed was quietly seething at the cultural changes that had been unleashed by the Left. The language in that statement is so devoid of human passion that is could have been written by software. The point is not to excite the reader, but to put him asleep so he can dream of better times.

What makes this stuff weirder is that most of the people doing it are not old people trying to relive their youth. Nostalgia is understandable for old people, especially those nearing the end of their career. These people are experiencing anemoia, a nostalgic sense of longing for a past they have never lived. None of the “signatories” of that goofy list of principles were alive when Buckley started his cult. Many of them were barely aware of the world during the Reagan years.

On the other side of the old political consensus is hauntolgy, a sense that unfinished business from the past is haunting the present. Like Banquo’s ghost, the old failures in the old causes torment the neoliberal. It is not as if they learned from the old failures, but that they must find some way to make it right. The backwardness of left-wing politics is akin to the people in a horror movie putting an ancient cemetery back in its original state so the dead can finally rest.

In fairness, it is not just conventional politics that is backward looking. Most of the race realists want to go back to the past. They imagine a world similar to the 1950’s, except everyone knows the failures of trying to integrate blacks and whites. The harder core imagine they can go back to the interwar years and be their favorite uncle. Young Nick Fuentes is one click away from wearing a George Lincoln Rockwell costume while locking arms with the hip-hop community.

What all of this points to is the sense of dread than hangs over the American empire as it staggers through its end phase. Everything that it is, everything that defines the American identity is in the past. The only conception of the future is one that is somehow a repeat of the past, real, or imaginary. For a culture that has no future, the present represents the terrifying final step into the abyss, so the only option is to turn to the past and find comfort in reliving it.

Perhaps this weird backwardness is an essential step, and it will burn itself out as the present struggles become too much to ignore. On the other hand, maybe this is just the price of victory in the Cold War. The losers had to get on with the business of creating a new future, while the winners wanted to savor the victory. Our backward politics is the result of a victory party gone on for too long. Regardless, what comes next is not the past, but the future, and it will not include any of these people.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Contemplating The Numbers

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A genuinely novel feature of the modern age is numbers, as in statistics about all sorts of things regarding daily life. Every day some new set of numbers is announced and people who allegedly know about the subject will comment upon them. The government is about to release a fresh batch of inflation data and the volunteer army of economists will talk about them for the next week. The modern age is a game of numbers about everything including the numbers.

This was not always so. For most of human history people could only tell if there was food inflation by noticing that food was more expensive. The king did not send someone out to read the latest inflation figures. The main reason is the king did not know those figures and had no reason to know. That is the other thing about numbers. They only mean something to us in context. The official inflation rate matters only when you understand the concept behind those numbers.

Months after Bud Lite decided to associate their brand with child molesters, people are still tracking the numbers associated with the brand. They have lost X million in market value and X percent of market share. Bud Lite is no longer the most popular cheap beer and has lost X percent of sales year-over-year. To the people in the culture war, these numbers have meaning. It says that lots of people agree with them on the moral question at the center of those numbers.

Moral arithmetic is everywhere. Nick Fuentes went on a ghetto internet program the other day and his fans cannot stop talking about the numbers. They say that over one hundred thousand people got to see him use the N-word in front of a group of black people who look like they work at a strip club. What he said and did and where he did it is not what matters. It is how many people saw it that matters. The underlying logic is the bigger the number, the better the result.

The entertainment business is all about numbers. An artistically grotesque film that sells millions of tickets is better than a great film that only appeals to a niche audience or people with refined tastes. The reason is we do not have a moral metric to use to rate the artistic quality of films. We have ranking lists, but they often rely on the numbers related to popularity. The first Star Wars movies got high ratings from critics because they made a lot of money, despite being mediocre content.

One reason popular politics looks like a carnival is that we can measure popularity through polling and voting. If fifty percent plus one think candidate X is best, then he is the best, even if he is a brain damaged hobo. This is why political actors degrade themselves for attention. The math of politics says that X percentage of people who notice you will agree with you, so the goal is to always increase the number of people who take notice of you. That is the math of the circus.

Roger Scruton once described conservatism as the understanding that there are things too important to be subjected to the marketplace. This is essentially a rejection of the math of democracy. Just because one idea has a bigger number next to it than the other idea does not mean it is true or qualitatively better. Having a brain damaged hobo in the senate is not normatively better than having a Turkish carny in the senate, no matter what the numbers tell us.

This is the problem with conservatism. Who decides that something is too important to be subject to the numbers? There are only two choices. Either a supernatural force like God decides or the people through time and experience decide what is no longer subject to the numbers. The former requires a strong religious foundation for society and the latter is just democracy in slow motion. It turns out that Sir John Filmer was right, and John Locke was wrong.

Of course, we value the numbers of life in this age because we trust that the numbers are not just a reflection of some normative truth but that they are accurate. Low inflation is a good thing so when the government comes out with numbers that say it is at or near the target of two percent, the experts cheer the rulers. This only makes sense if you think the government numbers are correct. The math of this age rests on people trusting the numbers of this age.

Is inflation really near three percent now? Did Joe Biden really get more votes than any human in the history of elections? Do most Americans back Ukraine? Was last Thursday the hottest day in the history of the planet? Despite the lack of evidence to support most of the numbers, most people seem to trust them. At the same time, most people do not trust the people issuing the numbers. For most of human history people would know to never trust anything from untrustworthy people.

That is the other novel thing about this age. Christianity has faded for most people as a foundation for moral claims. Something has to fill the void, so we have been flooded with new numbers to function as the authority. This explains why people trust the numbers while distrusting the people issuing the numbers. People are believing machines so when they stop believing in God, they will find something else. In this age people have come to trust the numbers as a last resort.

In a way though, this is the metric of the liberal society. It works when people can trust the people in official positions. They can trust those people because they trust the institutions to police the people in the institutions. Even in times when the office holders are distrusted, the people can still trust the numbers because they are viewed as the product of the institutions. As long as people still trust the numbers, the rulers are safe, despite the fact they do nothing but lie to us.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Thoughts On The New Gods

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about my trip top the doctor, a post about watching television in the rain and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note: American Renaissance is having its annual conference in August at the usual location in Tennessee. It is a great event and anyone who is interested in the sort of politics discussed here should make it there at least once. You can sign up for the event at the American Renaissance website.

Despite their many parallels in practice, we separate ideology from religion as two separate things that appeal to different aspect of man. Ideology is an integrated set of assertions, theories, and goals for achieving a social end, while religion is assumed to be a set of beliefs with a supernatural basis. The ideologue is focused on imposing changes in how we live as humans in a human society, while the believer is someone primarily focused on how the individual reaches the afterlife.

This distinction is entirely due to Christianity, which is a universal set of beliefs that apply to all individuals, even those unaware of it. Christians start with the belief that all people have an individual relationship with God. The point of life is to discover and embrace this relationship so that you can sit at the feet of God in the afterlife. As a result, we think of religion as a world-rejecting phenomenon. It is focused on what comes after this life, not how to improve this life.

This has not always been how religion works. What we used to call paganism was not particularly concerned with the afterlife. The religions of pre-Christian people were often world-affirming and specific to their people. A people had their gods to whom they could appeal for practical things like a good harvest or protection from the bad people on the other side of the valley. Their gods were tied to their identity as a people and their customs that gave meaning to their lives.

Some of the old religion still exists in this age. You cannot become a Druze, for example, even if you learn their religion. You have to be born into their faith in order to be accepted into their religion. Shintoism is not as strict, in terms of outsiders joining the religion, but for all practical purposes it is a Japanese faith. It is impossible to disentangle Shinto belief from Japanese identity. These are what people who study religion call folk religions.

Here is where you see the lines between religion and ideology blur. While Marxism does not possess a god or gods, it is not without its mystery. Marxist historiography is a central tenet of Marxism that must be accepted without proof. Then you have the assertion that this arc of history must bend toward communism. Of course, there is the assumption that all of mankind will eventually progress to the point where they join the rest of humanity in the communist paradise.

The similarities between religion and ideology have been noted many times, but always as a way to underscore the irrationality of the ideologue. The climate change people are compared to a cult, because they carry on as if they are worshipping Mother Earth and fear she is unhappy with mankind. Calling it a religion is a way to dismiss their claims to science and reason. Joe Sobran made the comparison between the Left and religion in his essay about the hive.

There may be another way of using this comparison. For example, the distinction made between universal religions like Christianity and folk religions like Shintoism provide an insight into why one triumphed over the other with some exceptions. Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion. Similarly, Christianity has been a failure in Japan because it lacks something the native religion possesses.

A simple example is the Gaia worshippers. What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? There is a money racket to it, for sure, but this is only possible because millions of people sense that the way we are living in the modern age is leading to some sort of supernatural doom. Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?

If we take that last part a bit further and incorporate Gaia worship into the basket of things we call the Left, the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status. Proof of their uniqueness is their membership in a group that holds these beliefs. They are on the right side of history because they carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks and take their young children to drag shows at the local library.

Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.

On the other hand, it is possible that the new religion is the vestigial part of the old world-rejecting religion expressing through social fads. The gender stuff is a clear rejection of biological reality. Gaia worship is the rejection of human progress and civilization itself. The thread that runs through all of these social fads is their destructiveness to Western societies. The new religion of wrecking things appeals to people seeking an escape from this life.

The other appeal is that the destruction of the old order and the coming of the new world orders is full of uncertainty. The weirdness of these beliefs operates as a selection mechanism, filtering out anyone who questions the project. The new religion selects for those seeking the same shelter from the storm, but also those who think that when the storm passes, they will lead the way into the next phase of humanity. There is, after all, a whiff of Calvinism to all of this.

At this point, it is hard to know where the new religion will go or where it will end up on the folk-universal spectrum. What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Death By A Thousand Lies

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On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.

In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.

Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.

The response from the media was much different when the Twitter Files revealed the level of cooperation between Twitter censors and the government. The primary response was to ignore the whole thing. This is the real power of the media. They can simply ignore a story and let it be buried under a mountain of nonsense about carny folk or conspiracy theories about things like global warming. The second response was to trash the reputation of Matt Taibbi who did the reporting.

So far, the media response to this injunction is what you would expect. On the one hand, they are treating it as a partisan issue. You see, it is the nasty Republican states that are hassling Biden for no reason at all. On the other hand, this ruling is preventing the government from defending our democracy against election interference. The brave disinformation researchers are now prevented from doing their work to protect you from words and sounds that threaten our democracy.

Disinformation is information that is intended to deceive, usually from an official source, like the media or the government. This is an easily solved problem by having an adversarial relationship between the government and the media so both sides police each other. Instead, the media has teamed up with the state to battle this invisible fiend who is attacking our democracy. It is tempting to call this language Orwellian, but it is too ridiculous and insane to be Orwellian.

This is a feature of managerial polyarchy that does not get attention. An enormous amount of time is spent on imaginary things. The Russian collusion hoax probably cost over a billion dollars in the end. It was something that obviously did not exist, because it could not exist, but for the people in the hive it had to exist, so they treated it as if it were as real as a rose bush. Take a tour through the fever swamps of the hive and you will see plenty of people who still believe in it.

Then you have the innate need to credentialize everything. Since Grog sold a faulty wheel to Trog, humans have been trying to deceive other humans. In fact, the second oldest profession rests on this very idea. Of course, you cannot have public debate without people trying to convince others of things that are not true. The argument in favor of democracy starts with accepting this trade-off. You accept false opinions in order to encourage the free flow of ideas.

Suddenly, the people who used to claim to be the guardians of this idea are obsessed with disinformation. So much so they will help the government crush anyone who dares say anything that has not been approved. Of course, this means there must be disinformation researchers and disinformation experts. Colleges are now offering courses on the subject. How long before we see someone with the title “licensed disinformation researcher” on a cable chat show?

Notice no one ever asks what a disinformation expert does. The most likely reason for this is the people in this racket could not tell you. Here is the Wilson Center’s page on their disinformation project. Nina Jankowicz is listed a senior fellow. Read her bio and you will see that her only gainful employment has been as a professional liar, spreading government propaganda. Perhaps the theory here is the same as the government hiring former criminals to solve crimes.

If you put “disinformation expert” into a search engine you get millions of links to stories featuring them. If you search on how to become a disinformation expert, then you will see tumbleweeds on your screen. Everyone seems to accept that this profession is real, but no one has the slightest idea how you get the title. One would think that someone in the media would do a deep dive into the topic, but that would risk being accused of disinformation and who wants that?

What this reveals is the inherent decadence of managerialism. Since all authority lies with the expert, every opinion must have an expert behind it. The demand for experts is unlimited, so you end up with experts in things like disinformation. The same process unleashed the army of bigots known as antiracism experts. In place of a holy book or the word of the local shaman, moral authority lies with the expert, so the managerial system manufactures an expert for every normative claim.

There is a practical value to this for the system. These make-believe jobs provide work for the swelling army of credentialed mediocrities. There are now millions of people calling themselves “open-source intelligence researchers.” What this means is they spend all day on Google, going past the first couple of pages. This is the town busy body for the digital age. They work with the disinformation experts to get you banned from Twitter for noticing things.

It is tempting to focus on the un-American aspects of these censorship campaigns, but the fact is America stopped being a rights-based society long ago. The important issue is the vulnerability it reveals. The regime is employing armies of people to control information online and failing miserably. It turns out that the unguarded entrance to the Death Star is a well-formed meme. This probably explains why they are treating Douglas Mackey like his public enemy number one.

It is a sweet irony that a regime that is built on a foundation of lies thinks that its vulnerability is clever lies on Twitter. They are not wrong about this. The regime of lies was possible because people trusted the system. People living in a world of lies are not going to trust the system and they are certainly not going to trust the people who are responsible for the world of lies. They will seek out alternatives. It turns out that the answer to the Big Lie is millions of little lies.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Antiracist Constitution

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the movie Amadeus, a post about Affirmative Action and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note: American Renaissance is having its annual conference in August at the usual location in Tennessee. It is a great event and anyone who is interested in the sort of politics discussed here should make it there at least once. You can sign up for the event at the American Renaissance website.

When the typical person thinks about the law, he thinks about it as a list of behaviors that are prohibited. You cannot fish during certain months, for example. You are not allowed to drive over a certain velocity. The law is a list of limitations on what you can do as well as a list of things others cannot do to you. This is largely true as a practical matter, but the law is more than a list of prohibitions. It is a moral system that turns those limitations into a habit of mind for the citizenry.

Although the law often looks chaotic and self-contradictory, it is a system made of properties and methods. The properties are things like constitutional rights, precedents, and legislation. These are statements that are treated as facts. Your First Amendment right to assembly is assumed to be a fact of nature. The Court’s decision that the First Amendment does not permit you to yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire is now assumed to be a truth in the Constitution.

The methods are the rules that govern how the people inside the law interact with those properties as well as the other people inside the legal system. The courts have processes for adjudicating disputes between citizens, for example. The government has to meet certain conditions when they infringe on the rights of a citizen. All of us exist inside the legal framework, as it is the implementation of the moral framework of our society and the framework determines how we interact with one another.

This is the starting place for reading this new booklet titled How We Got Our Antiracist Constitution: Canonizing Brown v. Board of Education in Courts and Minds, which is part of the Claremont Provocations Monograph Series. The author is Jesse Merriam, who teaches government at Patrick Henry University. His focus is on the history of the famous Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which has transformed not just the law by the Constitution itself.

The author starts with a short history of the famous case. This is one of those things that will be a revelation for most readers. Even though the case was decided in 1954, the process started a generation earlier when a young communist radical received a million-dollar inheritance from his father. He was going to reject it, but the founder of the ACLU convinced him to use the money to fund left-wing causes. This was in 1922, long before normal Americans thought about civil rights.

This money was used to start the Garland Fund, which gave the NAACP $100,000 to begin the litigation that eventually led to the Brown decision. The author does not spend a lot of time on it, but the point is clear. The civil rights movement was not something organic and spontaneous. It was a long-term project organized and financed by wealthy and important individuals. They set out to change the moral framework of the country and committed their lives to the cause.

That brings us to the heart of the topic. The author walks the reader through the process by which a legal decision becomes canonical and then how that status in the law warps everything that comes after it. In the law, “canonization” is “the process by which a single Supreme Court decision comes to control constitutional theory, debate, and interpretation.” A case can become so important that it changes the methods by which the Court views the Constitution itself.

This is a three-step process that starts with the construction phase. This is when the new moral principles are introduced to the moral framework or old moral principles are challenged as antithetical to the core principles. Brown was the end point of the construction phase where two new principles were added. One is that diversity is a constitutional good. This is why diversity is a strength. The other new principle was that discrimination, private or public, is always unconstitutional.

The next phase is what the author calls submission, which is the process “whereby critics of the initial decision capitulate to the new paradigm.” The author provides data on how conservatives changed over this phase. He counted negative stories in National Review before and after Rehnquist was nominated to the Court. He also looks at opinions on Brown during this period and notes that they went from uniformly hostile to neutral and then accepting.

The submission phase with regards to Brown is a great primer on what lies behind the internet meme “the conservative case for…” These new moral claims are first embraced by the people with control of the institutions. That power is then used to select against critics, which has the desired effect of selecting for those willing to bend their knee to the new moral paradigm. What has shaped conservatism over the last several generations is this process of submission to the Left.

The final phase of canonization is weaponization. This begins “when the former critics marshal the decision and its values for their own legal and political agenda.” As the former critics incorporate the moral principles in their own arguments, the case then becomes a controlling moral authority. Those former critics of the new morality transform themselves into its champions, often trying to stake out positions that are more extreme than those of the original advocates.

Again, the author dives into the writings of conservatism to provide examples of how they now embrace the moral claims of Brown. This is the origin of another well-worn internet meme, “democrats are the real racists.” For a generation after Brown, opposition to this decision was central to conservative arguments. Over the last thirty years Brown has taken center stage in conservative arguments in favor of diversity and opposition to discrimination.

The final result of this process is that the original Constitution has been hollowed out and in place of the rights-based moral order we now have the twin moral demands that have come from the logic of the Brown decision. Not only are your enumerated rights subject to the “Brown test”, but the federal system established by the Constitution has collapsed in order to comply with the new moral paradigm, leaving us with what the author calls the antiracist Constitution.

The author does not get into this, as it falls outside the scope of the essay, but the new legal framework created by Brown reflects the new moral framework that has come to dominate the thinking of the ruling elite. Diversity as the primary good and discrimination as the primary bad haunt every aspect of modern life. Not only must you avoid discriminating against members in the league of the oppressed, but you must also swear allegiance to diversity.

This is fundamental to the new religion which imagines the end point of social progress as the open society. If all people are inherently equal, then the differences we see must be due to social structures, which means that people are infinitely malleable. This is the universal truth of mankind. Thus, we have the holy trinity of the new religion, equality, the blank slate, and universalism. The logic of Brown reflects this spiritual sensibility as well as the ultimate goal of the open society.

This is a topic of critical importance for dissidents, so this booklet on the Brown decision and its canonization in the law is an important entry point. As the author notes, the road forward is not in fighting the tentacles that have grown out of Brown, but to understand how we got to this point. In order to remove the tentacles of Brown v. Board of Education from the neck of society, the moral claims that lie behind the decision must be understood and then defeated.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

Questions Of Competence

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The crisis of competence has been a popular topic in dissident circles but largely ignored by mainstream politics. Human intelligence is a dangerous subject in this increasingly primitive time because it points to immutable differences in human beings, which contradicts the new religion. If who we are is determined by our genes, then many of the popular social fads are invalid. This makes discussing the declining competency of Western societies difficult.

Even so, the reality of the situation is hard to ignore, and we are seeing more mainstream writers notice the topic. Here is a post in the Claremont Review of Books discussing one cause of the decline. While the article focuses on how civil rights theology has warped the law, this warping of the legal system is having a deleterious impact on society by reducing competence to happy accident. When vague notions of social justice are primary, competence is an afterthought.

The most recent Budweiser panic is a good example. The ethic inside the company was built around notions of representation and equitable outcomes. These magic phrases did not spring from nothing. They are rooted in the same civil rights theology as the legal mechanism that enforce diversity quotas. It is a straight line from expecting equal outcomes to thinking you need to market cheap beer to crossdressers in order to make sure everyone is represented in your marketing.

Instead of a company making cheap beer, imagine the same company making airplane parts, elevator controls or military equipment. Competence is just as essential to beer making as making any other product. There is no reason to think that the company providing safety services to airports is less concerned for their diversity goals than the company making cheap beer. When diversity is our greatest strength, it means competence is somewhere down the list.

Of course, the new religion is not the only cause of the crisis of competence we are seeing throughout American society. This long article on the impact of diversity quietly mentions another elephant in the room. While not explicitly stated, the decline in intelligence brought on by immigration is making it more difficult to maintain the complex systems of our society. The millions moving to America are not fleeing well-run, high-IQ, high-trust societies. They are the exact opposite.

Again, this is not a new topic on this side of the great divide. Here is a post from 2022 on how the decline in competence led to the Ukraine war. Here is another post from last year going into the impact of the general decline in IQ. In 2018 Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley wrote a book on the topic of declining Western intelligence. Quantitative bloggers and HBD commentators have been talking about the impact of intelligence on society for decades now.

There is a chicken and egg angle to all of this. Is the spread of the new religion the prime mover of these observed phenomenon? For reasons as yet explained, the ruling elite of the Global American Empire embraced these vague notions of equity and diversity because they solved some unexamined psychological need or maybe they were deemed useful in promoting group solidarity. The resulting policies led to a decline in competence and general intelligence.

On the other hand, material prosperity reduced the risks in life, which resulted in more stupid people making it to sexual maturity. More of these people were then able to reproduce thus increasing the percentage of stupid people in society. Generation after generation the stupid multiplied due to the work of the intelligent in making life safer for the stupid. At a certain point, ideas like diversity and equity start to make sense as the stupid begin to overwhelm the competent.

The best evidence in support of this theory is the social fads. You have to be outlandishly stupid to think people are assigned a sex at birth. In fact, stupidity alone does not explain this lunacy. It must be amplified by a fanatical zeal to conform. In other words, people are not just dumber, they are increasingly terrified of the world around them and naturally seek safety in numbers. Western man has gone from being wolves taking on nature to moronic sheep hiding from nature.

All of this reads like a warning, as if there is something that can be done about the rapid decline in general competence. The immigration people say that ending immigration will help arrest the decline, but it is probably too late. Even if all immigration ends today, America becomes majority-minority by 2050 at the latest. It would also take competence to end immigration and we probably lack the ability to do it now. In other words, we have passed the point of no return.

The question then shifts from what can we do about it to what happens as the population loses the ability to maintain the social systems? For example, you cannot have a rights-based political culture with a low-IQ, low-trust population. You cannot leave people to question the rules and be inventive when you have to fear the consequences of their inventiveness. The Western way of organizing society can only work when the population is smart and competent.

This raises another question. It is not as if the future will be universal stupidity as it was  in the movie Idiocracy. The future is going to be pockets of occidental competence in a sea of vibrant stupidity. Will high IQ, homogeneous New Hampshire want to be in the same country as diverse and stupid New Mexico? The former has an average IQ of 103, while New Mexico comes in at 95. Throw in the language and cultural barriers and you can see the problem.

This brings us to a final question stemming from the crisis of competence. If we cannot have the social structure we had when America was a European society, then what sort of social arrangements can we have in the diverse and stupid future? What sort of society is possible with the demographics of the future? Will all of the people of the future accept such those arrangements? Will the rump occidental population tolerate those conditions or seek to change them?

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