The Modern Mirsky

In 1904, Prince Pyotr Mirsky was appointed Minister of the Interior by Tsar Nicholas II, after the previous Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, had been assassinated by Jewish revolutionaries. This was a volatile time in Tsarist Russia, as trust in the system was at a low. Liberal reformers wanted what they thought the West had in terms of political freedom. Revolutionaries were conducting terror campaigns in order to undermine the tsarist system.

For his part, Mirsky was both a reformer and loyal to the Tsarist system. In his role as Governor-General of Vilna, which is modern day Lithuania and Belarus, Mirsky implemented liberal reforms like granting political rights, ending the pogroms against the Jews, and allowing a degree of autonomy to ethnic minorities. In his role as Minister of the Interior, he granted freedom of the press, freedom of religion and increased the power and authority of local self-government.

Mirsky was not a reformer because he had dreams of creating a liberal paradise to replace tsarist Russia. He was a reformer because he worried that the lack of reform would result in more radicalism, like the sort that had claimed the life of his predecessor and the life of the Tsar’s grandfather. For Mirsky and his supporters within the system, liberal reform was a way to address some of the issues of the people, while also maintaining the legitimacy of the tsarist system.

Uncertain times always product men like Mirsky. He was not the only reformer around Tsar Nicholas before the revolution. There were others but all of them failed to arrest the process that eventually led to revolution. Reformers were around the King Louis XVI and among the aristocracy prior to the French Revolution. They failed for the same reason Mirsky failed. There were men who feared reform would go too far and there were those who feared reform would not go far enough.

This is what should come to mind while watching Elon Musk try to navigate his way through the current crisis. Musk is a reformer at heart. He bought Twitter because he thought it was drifting away from its essential purpose which is to allow for free and open debate about the issues of the day. His inhospitable takeover of the company was driven by a genuine concern for what is happening in the West. Like all reformers, Musk fears what could happen if current trends continue.

It may seem a bit odd to compare Musk to Mirsky or any of the other reformers who existed in revolutionary times. After all, Musk is the world’s richest man. In the managerial age, however, that only buys a seat at the table. The nine other men in the top-10 richest list are worth five times Musk combined. Apple has a hedge fund that is ten times the wealth of Musk. Blackrock controls trillions in assets and has unlimited access to the highest reaches of government.

While Musk may be the world’s richest man and the most famous of the plutocracy, he is just one voice among many. The managerial elite is thousands, and the managerial class is millions of people. This new class is analogous to the aristocratic classes that existed in 18th century France and 19th century Russia. The best Musk or any liberal reformer can do is influence the people in the system. This is what Musk is attempting with his mild reforms of Twitter.

In this illiberal age, Elon Musk has appointed himself to be the minister of speech on-line and is attempting to roll back the reactionary controls that were put in place by the ruling class over the last decade. While Twitter is not the internet of old, Musk has rolled back much of the censorship. He still bans certain accounts, mostly as a way to tell the reactionaries that his reforms will not go too far. Otherwise, he has had a light hand on the censorship of his platform.

This is where that old revolutionary vice shows its jaws. The side that fears the reforms will go too far has successfully organized an advertising boycott. State sanctioned pressure groups like Media Matters have organized other pressure groups to harass companies that were advertising on Twitter. Those companies dropped their ads, resulting in a fifty percent decline in ad revenue. Musk has been forced to hire a girl boss approved by the reactionaries to be his new CEO.

Meanwhile, the other jaw of the vice sees what is happening and assumes Musk will eventually be brought to heel. Open sites like Gab continue to flourish, building on the alternative platform model. Amusingly and a bit ironically, the hard-core censors are abandoning Twitter for the opposite reason. Mass media companies, no longer assured of artificial reach on Twitter, are also jumping ship. Musk is facing the same dilemma all reformers face when taking the middle position.

On January 22, 1905, soldiers of the Imperial Guard fired on demonstrators in Saint Petersburg as they marched towards the Winter Palace. Hundreds were killed and thousands were arrested in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Mirsky denied having any role in it, but he was blamed by his conservative opponents, as well as the radical opponents of his half-measures. Mirsky did the honorable thing and resigned from his office and retired from politics.

In the end, Mirsky was like all prior reformers in that he was both right and wrong about what was happening. He was correct that radicalism was spreading due to the inability of the system to address the issues of the times. He was wrong in thinking that the solutions to the problems of the system could be found in the system. Just as there was no saving King Louis XVI and the old order, there was no saving Tsar Nicholas II and the system that made him possible.

This is where liberal reformers like Musk find themselves. On the one hand, they are correct in fearing a rising tide of radicalism. He rightly sees that it is driven in part by the abuses of the ruling class, of which he is a part. The trouble is the system cannot withstand open debate. It cannot risk questioning the shibboleths that sustain the moral framework at the heart of the managerial system. In the end, reformers will be crushed by that old vice that has destroyed prior reformers.


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.


We Deserve Better

Note: Behind the green door is a post about my travel woes, a post about the ungovernable country and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.


The ancient Greeks had a rule at one time where anyone proposing a change in the current laws did so with a rope around his neck. He stood in front of the people with the noose around his neck and made his appeal. If the people adopted his idea, then he removed the rope and went on his way. If his idea was rejected, he was hanged using the noose that was around his neck. Needless to say, this reduced the demand for change to that which was obvious to the vast majority.

From time to time, as in a crisis, they would pass a rule with regards to whatever course of action they agreed upon to address the crisis. Anyone who questioned the agreed upon approach or offered up a change to it, was killed or banished. The point of these extraordinary measures in times of crisis was to prevent the minority from undermining the will of the majority and thus the agreed upon policy. Once the majority agreed upon a course of action, the time for debate ended.

While the idea of our current legislators offering amendments while wearing a noose is amusing, we should be able to see why the Greeks did this. In this age, all everyone talks about is change. The way to show your virtue to the rest of those desperate for acclaim and affirmation is to demand change. The managerial elite and their flunkies in the managerial class spend so much time producing new changes, none of the basic things are getting done.

This is because the spring of democracy is morality. In a democratic society, even if it is not actually democratic, the thing that motivates people is the desire to be seen as moral, which means on the side of the people. When moderns say they are on the right side of history, what they mean is they are on that leading edge of change that is carrying the people toward the goal of the general will. They are turning the wheel of progress toward the promised land.

We have no information to suggest the Greeks viewed it this way, but they clearly understood that those always demanding change were a menace. Even in a genuine democracy, someone has to be in charge so that things get done. That person or group of people could not function if they were constantly fielding criticism or adapting to new policies pushed through by the change artists. The noose was the way to limit this impulse and prevent the chaos we are experiencing today.

In this age, this would start with the Federal bench. The executive branch of government is now hobbled by judicial fiat. Trump could get nothing done because crazy judges kept inventing novel reasons to block him. Some of his stuff eventually made it through, but the courts ran out the clock on most of it. The same thing happens with governors. They are constantly blocked by judges who just make up reasons to block their policies.

A simple way to stop this is to institute a three strikes rule. A judge who is overturned three times is removed from the bench. In a short time, this would clear the court of most left-wing judges, who are overturned on a regular basis. What would remain is judges who adhere to the point of their role. Further, judges who are removed from the bench are barred from practicing or teaching law. While banishment would be the best option, removing them from the law is good enough.

A similar problem is in the legislatures. All across the country, deranged state legislators have crafted new gun laws. These laws will be struck down by the courts but create mayhem for years. These legislators cook up these laws knowing they will not pass muster with the courts. This is performative legislation. The point of it is to show the intended audience that the legislator is on the right side of history, mostly by tormenting the normal people who are the victims of these laws.

While hanging is the right course here, a less entertaining option is to impoverish the people who vote for laws that are overturned by the courts. For example, when the courts overturn the latest gun grabbing from the New York legislature, the people who voted for it have all of their assets confiscated. They are immediately barred from politics and practicing law. Instantly, the legislative calendars will be free to work on the practical things that are currently neglected.

These small, common-sense changes are not a panacea, but what they would do is reintroduce the idea of a limiting principle. The current civic religion starts with the assumption that anything is possible. If anything is possible, then your version of Utopia is possible, which means it should happen right now. After all, what could be the argument against having paradise right now? There has to be a way to anathematize that impulse and thus curtail this behavior.

Of course, this would require a ruling class that sees the danger. The Greeks were often blessed with an elite that knew society could tolerate only so much debate and so much criticism, so they found ways to limit it. Instead, the current ruling class celebrates the resulting chaos that comes from a culture of critique. They somehow think that paradise is a world where nothing is beyond the destructive forces that lie at the heart of this endless demand for change that animates our age.

Joseph de Maistre famously said, “Every country has the government it deserves”, but this is always misinterpreted to blame the people for bad government. This is the thinking of the mind poisoned by democracy. Joseph de Maistre was not a democrat, so it is incorrect to think he was blaming the people. Instead, he was laying the blame at the feet of the ruling class. The elite get the government they deserve and they take the people with them, even if the people deserve better.


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.


Imagination Land

One of the strange and unnoticed aspects of the modern age is how much time is spent debating imaginary things. In fact, most of our public debates are about things that may happen or could never possibly happen. The things that are actually happening get very little attention. In some cases, like the ongoing criminal operations of the Biden family, the only people discussing them are “conspiracy theorists”, a term that has been transformed to describe imaginary villains.

In fact, much of what passes for public debate is the shift from things that are real and observable in the present moment to things that do not exist. Crackpot libertarian congressman Thomas Massie spends most of his time warning about a highly unlikely problem with E-Verify, so that his voters do not notice the waves of migrant invaders filling up their cities and towns. He is not alone. Every politician is an illusionist now, making reality disappear behind a curtain of deceit.

What has happened to modern American society is a form of the Peter Pan syndrome, in that society prefers to live in a world of make believe, rather than face up to the tough choices that come with adulthood. Libertarian kooks would rather think about a world governed by the non-aggression principle than think about the problems that the current world is presenting to us. Ten thousand migrants a day cross the border, but libertarian guy is concerned about theoretical abuses of state power.

It is not just libertarian kooks who avoid reality. It is a system-wide phenomenon that now defines our public life. Trillions are being spent on climate change, which probably exists as a concept. We know the earth’s climate is always changing. As a real threat to humanity, however, it exists only in the imagination. Given the rampant fraud in the world of science, it is possible that everything about climate change is a lie, yet we are pretending that it is a real as a rose bush.

To fight climate change, governments are putting mandates on carmakers to force them to make electric cars. The people who produced this mandate have no idea if this makes any sense or is even possible. In fact, it is not possible. We do not have enough lithium, for example, to make the required batteries. Our power grid will have collapsed long before that is an issue. In fact, it is already happening. We are spending trillions on climate change while the power grid is failing.

Imagine a politician running on a platform of upgrading the power grid. He promises to improve reliability and toughen it against storms. Many of the lines will be put underground to improve aesthetics. This could never happen because his opponent would instead promise to use the money for “gender affirming care” or maybe combat racist road systems. She would win in a landslide because who cares about the power lines when imaginary problems need our attention?

Imagination land is so powerful, it even warps the mundane things. Here is a story about a sportsball coach who used salty language in public. It was rude and he apologized for it. In the world of real things, this would be enough, but in the world of imaginary things, he must be punished. Imaginary people were traumatized, maybe even physically harmed by his words. According to his boss, the imaginary people now have scars that cannot be seen, because they are not real.

Much has been made of the public apology in these matters. It is a weird ritual that never has the intended effect. The coach just got fined millions of dollars for harming imaginary people, despite his real groveling. What gets missed is these apologies are always directed at people who do not exist. In the material world, you apologize to a person who you can identify as a victim of your actions. In imagination land you apologize to imaginary people for imaginary crimes.

Last month, Douglas Mackey was found guilty in Federal court of violating the civil rights of people who do not exist. The government claimed that his tweets mocking Hillary Clinton voters in 2016 harmed these people. They produced no one claiming to have been harmed by these tweets. They did not establish that such a harm was even possible, but that did not matter. In imagination land, anything is possible. When anything is possible, you go to jail for imaginary crimes.

Another example of how imagination land now crowds out the world of reality is the Bud Light marketing fiasco. The people who cooked up the idea were sure that there are millions of crossdressers desperate for a beer that appeals to them, so they created a campaign around a crossdresser. The fact that in the real world there are more left-handed ginger midgets than men who wear dresses did not matter. In imagination land, the crossdresser is the future.

Everywhere you look in the modern age, the imaginary is crowding out the real, as if everyone is now terrified of reality. The media fills the zone with terrifying stories of disinformation campaigns and hate speech be imaginary actors, while ignoring the tsunami of lies that comes from the government. More time has been spent trying to pretend a brown guy is a white supremacist than looking into the very real problem of the Biden family taking bribes from foreign governments.

The usual suspects rush in at this point and claim it is all a plot by the “deep state” or some other catchphrase to get money and power. As ridiculous as this age has become, one has to leave open the possibility that we live in a simulation controlled by men living in a hollowed-out volcano. Alternatively, maybe Wells was right when he noted “It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.”

Generations of easy living, living outside the world “change, danger, and trouble” has turned us into Eloi. Our triumphs over the material problems of human existence have left us incapable of dealing with the reality of human existence. If we just wish hard enough, they will go away. If not, then we just fill our minds with the pleasing conflicts that exist only in imagination land. We are a society of helpless children determined to remain children regardless of the demands of reality.


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.


Official Madness

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Amazon show Clarkson’s Farm, a post about the Republican brown plan and the Sunday podcast. I was on live with Patrick Casey last week and the replay is here. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.


If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to pay attention to the news, you remember the debate about the news media. One side, the conservatives, complained about the media bias against them. The other side, the liberals, dismissed the claim as something like a conspiracy theory. For its part, the media spent time trying to prove they were not biased at all. They would point to the one conservative story in the back pages as proof they were giving both sides equal treatment.

The funny part about that debate is everyone was right. The conservatives were right in that self-described conservatives outnumbered self-described liberals two-to-one, but the media was almost entirely liberal. The liberals were right in that it was not some sort of conspiracy to silence conservatives. The media simply reflected the opinions of the people who were in the media and politics. The media was being generous to conservatives, given that everyone they knew was a liberal.

Fast forward to the present and the media is insane. Right now, they are claiming a Mexican immigrant, who shot up a Texas mall, is a white supremacist. Here is the Washington Post version of this whopper. Here is Rolling Stone. Here is the Daily Bleat hyperventilating over it. Of course, the volunteer army of regime toadies is uncritically posting this on social media. The thing missing from all of these stories is a picture of the shooter, Mauricio Garcia.

Of course, by the time they get around to showing a picture of the shooter, someone will have doctored the photo to make him look like a German. The previous Texas spree killer, also a migrant from Mexico, was whitewashed so he could look the part, but the real photo was soon on the internet. The media did the same trick with the Uvalde, Texas shooter last year, then they edited their own news articles when the fraud was detected, but by that point it was too late.

Texas seems to be having a problem with migrants going on killing sprees and not just the mass shooting variety. Over the weekend a migrant drove into a group of migrants, killing eight and wounding ten. This does not get the same attention as the Texas mall shooter, because we are supposed to think it is perfectly normal for illegal immigrants to drive cars into pedestrians. Sadly, it is becoming normal as the country is being invaded by tens of millions of migrants right now.

The regime media telling us that brown people are now the face of white supremacy is just the next click of the ratchet in terms of media perfidy. Over the last year they told us the Russians bombed their own pipelines and the Azov battalion, festooned with Nazi iconography, are freedom fighters. Before that they told us the unvaccinated people cause vaccinated people to get Covid. Before that, they said Russians used mind control to alter the 2016 election results.

In other words, there is a pattern here. The lies from the regime have become more common, but also more outlandish. The crossdresser who shot up a Christian school was characterized as the victim. Imagine what it must be like to sit in a room with an editor who is explaining how the narrative position on the school shooter will be that the little kids she murdered are to be ignored, while the shooter is the victim. Imagine that being the new normal in the media because it is.

Lost in the mounting vulgarity is the question at the center of that old debate from forty years ago regarding media bias. Back then, people in the media could not see their own bias because from their perspective, there was no bias. Everyone they knew agreed that the media was playing it fair. If anything, the media was being too generous to those horrible conservatives. We are seeing the same thing about the grotesque dishonesty in the regime media today.

The reason the crew of eight people responsible for that Washington Post story are willing to post nonsense about the brown guy being a white supremacist is everyone they know thinks this is obviously true. When the FBI guy told them on the sly that the shooter was their primary bogeyman, they had no reason to question it. Normal people would have laughed themselves silly, but not Post writers. For them, it was confirmation of everything they know to be true.

Forty years ago, media bias was simply the result of media culture. What had been a working-class profession came to be dominated by credentialed professionals from the same upper-middle-class backgrounds. Media bias reflected the class of people who working in the media. The paranoia and penchant for wild conspiracies involving fictional bogeymen we are seeing in the regime media today also reflects the culture of the people in media. They really believe this stuff.

In fact, it reflects the managerial elite as a whole. These crackpot tales about Mexican white supremacists are not intended to sway the public. They do not care about the public, so they do not care about public opinion. They do care about opinion in the increasingly isolated elite circles. You can be sure that all of the flunkies, seat warmers and coat holders in Washington read that Post story and believed it. They believe because their bosses believe and everyone they know believes it.

That is probably the hardest thing for normal people to accept. Forty years ago, conservatives were sure they could talk their liberal friends in the media out of their obvious bias. Forty years on, normal people still think the media must know what they are doing is madness. They have to know it is fake. The truth is, they think these nutty conspiracy theories and outlandish whoppers are real. Our ruling class is as nuts as they appear to be, maybe even worse.


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.


The Gods Have Gone Crazy

The primary difference between a god and a man is that the gods have powers that no man can possess. It is not that the gods are bigger, faster, and stronger than men, even though that is often the case. It is that the gods can violate the rules of nature or even harness nature itself. Gods can defy gravity, change the course of rivers, or make it go dark in the middle of the day. The gods are gods because they get to make exceptions to the rules that bound the life of man.

Of course, this is not the only role of the gods. If the gods violated the rules of the universe all the time or helped man violate those rules, then the rules would be meaningless and all that would matter is favoring the gods. A big part of what makes the gods is their enforcement of the rules. What man can expect is the rules to apply at all times and all places. It is the exceptions that remind him that his world is the creation of the gods, and he has to respect them.

Christianity changed this relationship a tiny bit. The old gods were relegated to folklore and the new God was the only god. God was not playing an active role in the affairs of mankind, but more of an observer. Even so, God was the great enforcer of the rules of nature, by not violating those rules, outside of miraculous circumstances that lie beyond the ability of man to comprehend. God made the world. It operates by fixed rules and only God can make exceptions.

This is an important concept to understanding the world. Human society is based on the idea that the rules apply to everyone, except the sovereign, who is allowed to exempt himself from the rules and make exceptions to the rules. The king, for example, can pardon a condemned man, even though the man broke the rules. The king is the only member of society to judge himself because he is the only member of society responsible for maintaining the rules of society.

Like the gods, this special position falls apart quickly if the king is making exceptions to the rules to the point where the rules are meaningless. The king goes from being the sovereign to being a tyrant. What defines him is not the rules and his role in the enforcement of the rules, but rather his lack of rules. This is the fundamental definition of tyranny. There are no rules, just the caprice of the ruler. Everyone lives in terror of being on the wrong side of the tyrant.

If one wanted to produce a universal definition for hell, it would start with the complete lack of rules. After all, if the Devil has rules, then you can theoretically appeal to those rules for relief. There is some hope that you can end the torment by complying with the rules or finding a loophole. On the other hand, if there are no rules then there is no hope for appeal as there is no rule to which you can appeal. There is nothing but the desire of the Devil to inflict torment upon you.

The point of all this is that order depends upon rules, but it also requires an enforcer of those rules and that is always someone with the power to make exceptions. If that person or entity abuses that power, we slowly move out of the world of order and into the hellish domain of rule by tyrant. The tyrant flips the concept of the rule of law on its head so that the rules become dangerous. Today’s lawful action can be deemed unlawful tomorrow by the tyrant.

We see this in miniature on the social media platforms. YouTube creators must spend time self-policing their old content because even though they complied with the rules at the time, the rules change constantly. That old video about Rumble was within the rules two years ago, but all of a sudden, it is now a violation of the rules, so you can lose your channel as a result of it. This applies across all social media platforms. The “terms of service” is a license to unleash hell on the platform users.

The same people turning the rules of the internet into a jumble of exceptions administered by petty tyrants are doing the same to the law. It used to be that you could have an opinion about the powerful people. You could get a bunch of your friends to hold a rally in order to express that opinion. In theory you can still do these things, but it is impossible to know if it is legal. Years after the fact the state of Virginia is prosecuting Charlottesville protestors for carrying tiki torches.

Of course, the people turning the law into a dangerous labyrinth are also redefining the phrase “new world order” to mean unpredictable chaos. America is supposed to be the keeper of the rules-based world and the defender of order. Instead, the Washington regime spreads chaos around the world, mostly by violating the rules they demand others follow and punishing those who do follow the rules. Washington has become the global tyrant, the great violator of order.

What one finds behind this spread of lawlessness and chaos are people appropriating for themselves the right to make exceptions. Whether it is trivial things like the rules of social media, the mundane things in our courtrooms and boardrooms, or the big things on the global stage, it is always the same people turning the rules into an unnavigable jungle of exceptions. They have declared themselves gods and have driven the rest of us mad with their endless exceptions.

They may be crazy, but they are not gods, despite their claims. They are just the ruling class of the American empire. Ironically, a founding document of the American experiment provides the remedy. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This is what we see happening in the world. The emerging global powers, along with smaller powers like OPEC, are abandoning the old gods of the unipolar world for the new gods of the multipolar world. The new gods promise to respect the rules and avoid exceptions without consent. The same must happen inside the West and eventually in the heart of the American empire. There will be peace only when there are new rules that are enforced by new men who know they are not gods.


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.


The New Iron Curtain

Since about the time he took over the primetime slot for Fox News, people have been predicting that Fox would fire Tucker Carlson. The regime toadies said he would be fired due to his reckless heresy. He talked about taboo topics and questioned official dogma, which can never be allowed. The so-called conservatives repeated the same lines, as is their habit. Normal people, of course, know that anyone speaking truth to power is not going to last long in the modern media.

It turns out that Tucker was not fired for anything he said in particular, but most likely as a result of the lawsuit Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems. It is possible that as part of the settlement, Fox agreed to get rid of people hated by the regime. The first to go was Dan Bongino, who was sacked before the ink was dry. Carlson got the axe Monday morning, which suggests it took them a while to find evidence to fire him with cause, thus voiding his contract.

On the other hand, the lawsuit could simply have frightened or embarrassed the plutocrats who own Fox News. They are regime members, after all, which means they care first and foremost about regime opinion. Tucker has no doubt been a problem in this regard for a long time. This embarrassing lawsuit, punishment by the regime for Fox not falling in line, may have frightened the Murdoch clan. Firing Tucker is a way to win back support of their social class.

As is always the case, the hot take people are rushing forth to give their hot take on what happened and why. Some claim it was due to a lawsuit from one of the usual suspects that triggered the move. Zombies from Conservative Inc think it is due to Tucker using mean words that hurt their feelings. Others claim that the Murdoch family was scandalized by Tucker questioning the J6 narrative. David French thinks it is all about him because David French is a narcissistic simpleton.

The most likely explanation is that Fox either agreed to clean house as part of the settlement or they got the message being sent by these lawsuits. Fox getting sued over election stuff is ridiculous, but the full might of the regime was brought to bear so that it was clearly impossible for Fox to get a fair trial. The judge ruled against them at every turn, so Fox had no choice but to settle. There is another case out there as well, so they have to play ball or face bankruptcy.

This may seem farfetched but consider that the New York Times was sued by Sarah Palin for defamation and won, despite their own emails admitting that they defamed Palin and did so knowingly. Granted, the judge in the case told the jury to rule in favor of the Times, but it is a good example of how the courts treat the media. It is incredibly hard to sue the media, even when they willingly lie about you. Yet somehow the court went the opposite way in this Fox News case.

What is happening right in front of our eyes is the weaponization of the court system by the regime to suppress dissent. They cannot shut down a cable channel or throw their hosts in prison, but they can lawfare into bankruptcy any organization that violates the ideology of the regime. In other words, they told Rupert Murdoch that he can run his operation as he sees fit, but they will sue him into the poorhouse if he steps out of line or fails to get rid of people who violate regime dogma.

This is merely the highest profile example of this new control mechanism. The Alex Jones case is another example. Jones was tagged with a billion in damages for saying nutty things about the school shooting in Connecticut. Like the Fox News case, the particulars were just an excuse to force Jones into a morality play in which he was the villain, and the jury was instructed to condemn him. He never stood a chance at trial because the trial was rigged from the start.

The same thing is now happening to VDare. The state of New York is suing the group because they do not like their politics. You can read the case documents here and what you will find is a prime example of lawfare. What Laquanda Adams is doing is using the process as a punishment. On the one hand, it will cost VDare millions of dollars to defend themselves. On the other hand, it is an effort to scare away potential donors who may be hauled into court as well.

New York did the same trick to the National Rifle Association. They used the court system to batter them into bankruptcy. This is made easier by a court system filled with judges who think this is a great idea. Even if a judge is uncomfortable with these Stalinist tactics, they understand power. If they want to stay on the bench or move up the ranks, they have to do what the regime demands. If the regime can take down Fox News, they can take down a judge.

Lawfare is not a new thing. Shakedown operations like the alphabet soup gang have been using lawfare for decades. They would jurisdiction shop for a court that would hear their novel legal theory. Then they would judge shop for one of their co-ideologues and before long a heretic is in an unwinnable court case. The most recent example of this sort of grift is the Charlottesville civil cases. The whole stinking affair was an affront to civil society and the rule of law.

What is happening now is that these small-time rackets have been institutionalized into a tool of the regime. Since they can use the court to take away all of your money for any reason they like, they can suppress the speech they dislike by threatening to impoverish anyone that entertains unapproved speech. Since the law is the last resort for the weak seeking protection from the powerful, the regime has effectively closed off the last civil route to challenging regime policies and programs.

In effect an iron curtain is descending across American society. On one side are the regime leaders and their toadies. They get to indulge in the material benefits of the shrinking American pie. On the other side are the common people struggling to come to terms with what these people have done to their country. For now, the real power of that iron curtain is that the people on the losing side refuse to believe it is there and instead keep operating under the old rules.


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.


Your Country As A Service

In the money game, it is said that if you need hard money to control your ruling class, your ruling class will find a way around the limits of hard money. This is observationally true as every government in the history of man has found some way to corrupt their currency for short term advantage. For most of human history this has meant debasing the currency with cheap metal. In modern times, it means installing humanity’s worst schemers with the task of manipulating the currency.

That expression about money is a pithy way of pointing out that words on a piece of paper are never a restraint on the corrupt. The reason is the written law is just the formal expression of the unwritten law. Those words on the paper represent the spirit that organizes and limits the ruling class. If the people in the ruling class no longer abide by the spirit of the law, they will find a way around the letter of the law. This is something we can see plainly with the basics in America.

If you were to ask Americans to name the most fundamental freedom in the Constitution, they would surely say free speech. Some would point to other things, for sure, but the consensus would be speech. It is the thing America is most known for around the world. Europeans will often point to our first amendment right to speak our mind in public as the most important American right. It is the thing the world most identifies with being an American.

Despite that, the right to speak your mind is going away quickly. The most outrageous example is the recent trial of Douglas Mackey. He was arrested immediately after Biden was installed for the crime of mocking Clinton voters in 2016. Mackey operated the Ricky Vaughn account on Twitter, which was notorious for mocking the Left, especially the zombies who lined up to support Hillary Clinton. While obviously a satire account, it was comedy gold in the meme wars.

The government claimed that his jokes about the stupidity of Clinton voters denied these stupid Clinton voters the right to be stupid Clinton voters. That is not an exaggeration or a misrepresentation. The government offered no one who was denied their right to vote but managed to convince a judge and jury that these jokes tricked stupid Clinton voters out of their right to vote. The verdict is on appeal, but Mackey now faces ten years in prison.

Everyone involved in this case, except for Mackey, of course, made clear that they have no respect for the basic right of speech. The government found creative ways around the words on the page to charge Mackey. The judge found creative ways to rig the case in favor of the state. He then threatened the jury with lifetime sequestration when they were deadlocked. The jury then found a way to convict a fellow citizen of speaking mean words to rich people.

The thing about the Mackey case is not that it is rare, but that it is just a causal and blatant example of a pattern. Here is a new case where the Feds are charging people with holding the wrong opinions about Russia. They claim that these people were involved with Russian agents and spreading bad words to blacks. Most people would assume you have a right to spread bad words, even if they are about blacks and they come from a Russian citizen. It says so on the paper.

The recent Fox News settlement is another example of how thoroughly corrupt the courts are now. Fox was accused of doing fake news, a thing so common that the words no longer have meaning. The judge was determined to make sure they were punished, so Fox had no choice but to write a big check. Meanwhile, the New York Times manufactures fake news and deliberately defames people but enjoys blanket immunity from the court system.

Of course, the place where most speech occurs in the modern age is on the internet and the rulers are moving to close off that avenue. The Restrict Act is described as “a systematic framework for addressing technology-based threats to the security and safety of Americans.” The stated purpose is to let the government shut off services like TikTok, but in reality, it will let the party shutter any site they wish. It is the modern version of The Sedition Act of 1918.

There are two main differences between the assault on speech today versus the assault on speech a century ago. The most obvious is that The Sedition Act of 1918 was specifically aimed at anti-war speech. Today, the reason for stripping the rights of the citizens is personal and petty. The people in charge do not like being mocked by the peasants on the internet. The assault on your basic rights is part of a war waged from the top against the white middle-class.

The other main difference is that there was a clear limit on how long these limits on speech would last. This was a wartime act, and everyone agreed it was an exception to the general rule of open debate. In other words, the people who crafted the bill did so knowing the general rule was the default, but that in the extraordinary circumstances of the war, they were making an exception. Today, it is the reverse. The new default is you need permission to speak in public.

Looking back, this change in the spirit of the law, at least with respect to the ruling class, should have been obvious. The concept of the terms of service has proliferated with the spread of technology, despite running counter to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. The contract of adhesion has always been a carefully regulated exception to contract law, but now it is the default. Everything you do is becoming subject to a terms of service agreement imposed on you by the powerful.

It is why appeals to the letter of the law mean nothing now. The people who view the letter of the law through the lens of the terms of service, naturally look at the Constitution the same way. As the issuing party, they get to interpret the words on the paper however they wish. Every judge is now operating like a content moderator at a social media platform. You are free to choose another country provider, but as long as you are in this one, they control your content.

The only difference is that YouTube sends you an e-mail whenever they willy-nilly change their terms of service. In a Country As A Service, you learn about the new rules as they are booking you for violating the new rules. Those weird e-mails have been replaced by the sound of the jail door slamming on some poor victim of the new rules against hate speech or mean content. You can guess what “your account has been suspended” will soon mean.


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.


Obituary Thinking

Elite over production is a concept invented by Peter Turchin, a Russian born academic, which argues that social unrest is often caused by too many potential elite members for the number of elite positions. These extra potential elites are under-employed and thus gravitate to things like radical politics. Over time, these excess elites chip away at the social order and eventually the order begins to falter. He claims that crises throughout history were due to the overproduction of elites.

It is an elegant theory, in that it is simple, not necessarily beautiful. It also seems to explain the present crisis in the West. Look around at any large corporation or government facility and you will see lots of credentials. Look around the local coffee shop and you can see many of the same credentials. America has far too many people with advanced degrees than it needs. Look around at radical politics and it seems to confirm that too many elites leads to trouble.

There are several counter arguments to this claim. The first is that our elite appears to be getting dumber. We assume that intelligence correlates with social status and in a healthy society it should, but we have a lot of insanely stupid people in positions of authority and influence. If the insane and stupid are occupying elite positions, then it suggests the excess elites are even more insane and stupid. A few hours on social media seems to confirm this observation.

This conforms with the observation that humans are getting dumber, and the process may be accelerating. Again, anecdotes abound. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is struggling to get a rocket to the moon, a feat accomplished by men half a century ago using materials from their garage. The Concorde achieved supersonic speeds as a passenger-carrying plane last century. We now struggle to keep the slow airplanes in the air and from smashing into one another.

Another counter to the Turchin theory is that what he terms an overproduction of elites is what fuels the dynamism of the West. Those extra elites may go off into radical politics, but they also go off to invent new stuff. The computer revolution was driven in large by people excluded from the elite. As the elite becomes more exclusive, the smart and capable form their own elite outside the system. In time, they are able to challenge the old elite and even replace it.

Then there is the issue of how one defines elite. Elizabeth Warren, for example, is as dumb as a goldfish, but she is in the Senate, which classifies her as elite. John Fetterman, a man unable to communicate with his fellow humans, was just released from a lunatic asylum into the Senate. Even before his trip to the asylum, he had never held a job, but he qualifies as an elite. When your elite contains brain damaged lunatics you have to rethink how you define elite.

As Ed Dutton has shown, many of the people who circulate inside and just outside our elites are people with deleterious genetic mutations. In lean times, these people are excluded from elite society, often excluded from society as a whole, because they pose a risk to the fragile order. In times of plenty, they are tolerated and therefore proliferate over time until they reach critical mass. These people spend their days on social media bombarding the normals with their madness.

Of course, all of these observations can be right. We may be producing too many potential elite members, while at the same time the elite becomes increasingly deranged, owing to the proliferation of spiteful mutants. Selection shifts from the willingness and ability to compete with the best to the willingness and ability to navigate a world populated with spiteful mutants. This would explain why it feels like our elites have gone mad all of a sudden.

Another factor is the commodification of elite perception. A century ago, it was rare to encounter someone with an advanced degree. Most Americans could live their life never having met a college professor. College degrees were rare, and many people never finished high school. Today, everyone is expected to finish high school and then attend college. Even advanced degrees are becoming common. Most college sports coaches now have a graduate degree.

In other words, a marker for elite status has been turned into a commodity that has value only to the diploma mills selling them. This is obvious when you look into the people promoting social causes. You see lots of credentialed lunatics. By lowering the barrier of entry to college, the system has been flooded with the mentally unstable, who ultimately fall into areas that promise to provide clarity and structure. Political causes are a form of self-medication only found on campus.

Then you have the fact that the material difference between most people who see themselves as the elite and the rest of society is quite small. A century ago, a Senator was a rich person who lived a life that was clearly different from the average person, not just materially by socially. Rich people went on holiday and had hobbies, while the average person had to work and spent what little time off they had doing inexpensive local things with friends and family.

Today, people on welfare go on vacation. If you are Elizabeth Warren, it must seem outrageous that Spirit Airlines exists at all. She is a member of the world’s most exclusive political club and she spends time every day begging for money, often having to fly commercial to do it. The psychological impact of this narrow gap in standards of living between the elites and the rest leads to some of the craziness. They have to have some way to signal their elite status.

This commodification of elite markers, things like education and display items, is made possible by the credit economy. The proliferation of highly credential public nuisances is only possible because of the student loan system. Remove this from the equation and half of the colleges go bankrupt in a month. The surviving colleges contract dramatically in order to remain solvent. The college diploma quickly goes back to being a symbol of privilege or unusual individual talent and commitment.

The same can be said for the material side of things. The reason that the middle-manager and his wife can live in a McMansion in a new suburb is the flow of cheap money into the housing markets. When every man can live like a king, every man begins to see himself as a king. Before long he is taking hormones and demanding you call him a queen. This is where elite over production comes back into focus. Cheap money produces an excess of people who think they are special.

All of these explanations for the present madness are interesting and they seem to hold up under scrutiny. The cafeteria of social decline offers something for everyone, so you can indulge yourself according to your inclination. In the end, it may be that Spengler was right to think of civilization as an organism. It has a life cycle. The American empire has reached its old age and therefore is riddled with many of the maladies that eventually kill off a civilization.


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.


What Is Woke?

Note: Behind the green door is a post about Star Trek, a post about the Bud Light imbroglio and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.


A small debate on-line was kicked off by this post from the venerable Paul Gottfried regarding the topic of Wokism. Gottfried pointed out that it is an error to confuse this new ideology with Marxism. While many of the thinkers who laid the groundwork for what we presently call Wokism were Marxists or came out of the Marxist intellectual space, this new ideology is not Marxism. Marxism and Wokism operate in separate intellectual domains and traditions.

This did not sit well with those in the bourgeoning industry that revolves around verbal antagonism toward Wokism. James Lindsay felt it necessary to call Paul Gottfried an idiot while dismissing his post entirely. Lindsay makes his living these days peddling the idea that Wokism is “Marxist-Fascism” which is completely nuts, but it appears that he has been driven insane in his effort to make sense of the material within post-Marx culturalism that informs this new ideology.

It needs to be said that Paul Gottfried’s dog probably knows more about this topic than Lindsay will ever know. Given Gottfried’s connection to Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse, he is as close as we get to an expert on the forerunners of this new ideology gripping the minds of the ruling class. Gottfried is also a world-renowned expert on fascism as an intellectual concept. Paul can be an idiot like everyone else, but on this topic, he knows more than most.

That said, there is a tendency of people on what we call the Right to engage in the same binary thinking we see with the people we call the Left. That means playing the old game of linguistic guilt by association. Since Lindsay’s intended audience has been trained to hear “Marxism” and “Fascism” as scare words, he associates Wokism with those two words to stimulate his audience. Wokism, Marxism and Fascism just mean “bad” to the people in that scene.

On the other hand, there is a segment of the civic nationalist space that insists everything can be reduced to money and power. Their theory is that the people with all of the money and power are doing this Wokism thing because they want even more money and power. In other words, there is no reason to think too much about these novel cultural fads. The people behind them do not really believe that destroying whiteness leads to the promised land.

There is another camp that has chimed in on this topic, mostly in response to those who chant about liberalism being the only antidote to Wokism. The claim from this camp is that liberalism or some aspect of liberalism, like individualism, is responsible for the phenomena we call Wokism. Some say Wokism is just the full expression of liberalism, while others say liberalism is the manure that fertilized Wokism. Either way, this weird new ideology is the result of Western liberalism.

There is an interesting contrast here with the Hazony camp, who argue that Wokism is just a new form of collectivism. He says the antidote to this collective ideology is nationalism, which he defines as a collective defense of the tradition, culture, and history of a people. Those blaming liberalism, however, think the answer is a dictator acting on behalf of the people to defend their traditions, culture, and history. Put another way, the answer is either “good” nationalism or “bad” nationalism.

The result of this debate is a muddled picture of Wokism that mostly serves as a platform for whatever is being promoted as an alternative. They all agree that Wokism is bad, but they do not agree on what it is or why it exists. Everyone agrees that the 20th century was a disaster, giving birth to this bizarre mind virus called Wokism, yet everyone agrees we have to go back to the 20th century to reanimate one of the dead ideologies, but which one is the point of contention.

Interestingly, there is little attention to the word “woke” and why it became the preferred label of the people in this new ideology. The generally accepted explanation for the term is that it broke out of black politics into the broader Left as shorthand for being aware of the reality of the system. That reality was oppression, first in the name of white society, but then in the name of the abstract concept of whiteness. Awareness of the reality behind this false reality is what it means to be woke.

Not only is there nothing Marxist about the origins of the term, but there is also nothing liberal about it either. If anything, the root is paranoia and delusion. To be woke is to dismiss reality as a trick by white people. You must substitute your own reality, your lived experience, as it were, for the false reality. This is the sort of thinking that used to be associated with conspiracy theories. At essence, Wokism is simply awareness of the great conspiracy that lies behind reality.

This strikes most people as insane, but there is a logic to it. The core assumptions of the people we call the Left are egalitarianism and the blank slate. They assume that all people come into this world with the same potential. People are shaped by family life, society, and experience. The great variation we see in people is due to these social forces molding people during their life. You are a product of your environment, which means inequality is the result of those social forces.

Obviously, if some people benefit from the rules and others suffer, then there must be a reason for the rules benefiting one group over another. From a black identity perspective, this is a much better answer than biology. The condition of blacks in America is no longer a product of biological reality and instead the result of a system that harms them to the benefit of white people. This not only justifies questioning the system, but it also justifies attacking the system.

Of course, this framing can work for any identity group, real or imagined, that views themselves as oppressed. Anti-Semites use the same logic to explain why Jews run the world, despite being a tiny minority. Reality itself is a part of the great trick being played upon the oppressed. The people behind this false reality use it and their control over the systems of power to benefit themselves as an oppressor class at the expense of whoever is feeling oppressed at the moment.

This is something the “blame it on Marx” camp has right. Wokeness has borrowed the idea of class conflict and applied it to identity politics. For Marx, the proletariat was the only legitimate class, but for the Woke, every identity group is legitimate, no matter how obscure, except for the oppressor class. This is why white people, especially white males, are not allowed to be “allies” unless they either adopt some novel identity or fully confess their sins as a member of the oppressor class.

Of course, the anti-liberals can point to the business about oppression and claim it comes from liberalism. Liberalism has always conceded that coercion is a necessary part of every society. The goal of politics should be to reduce coercion, which is the argument for both popular government and cooperative government. Taken to its logical conclusion, the goal should be a society free of coercion, which by definition is a society that is free of all oppression.

Wokism would amount to nothing more than bourgeois decadence if not for the fact that rich white people are acting on it. Striking the radical pose has been around since the birth of the American empire. Things like black identity politics or novel sexual movements have always been popular with the bourgeois radical, but it never amounted to much in terms of policy. What is new is that it is aggressively embraced by the ruling class, which should fall into the oppressor bucket.

That is the key to understanding the reality of Wokism. Why all of a sudden are oligarchs investing in things like Black Lives Matter, which raked in billions and did nothing but set cities on fire? Why is the Secretary of State lecturing Saudi Arabia on their intolerance of crossdressers? America puts the sodomite flag up on its embassies during homosexual month. We now have months dedicated to various identity groups, real and imagined.

In this regard, the reductionists are correct in that this new ideology does something for the people embracing it. They get something from it. The reductionists are wrong, however, in assuming it gets them money and power. They have money and power, so the last thing they should want is to undermine the system that provides them with all of the money and power. They are getting something from this new way of thinking, but it is not the stuff they already possess to excess.

That is the key to understanding Wokism. It is not so much what it is but what it does for the people who embrace it. For the managerial elite, it provides a sense of legitimacy to their place atop the social hierarchy. For the climbers dreaming of a perch at the top and those who gain satisfaction aping those at the top, it provides an ever-changing set of cultural fashions. Primarily, Wokism provides a way to distinguish who is inside and who is outside the dominant social group.

This is why you see the convert-adherent dynamic within Wokism. For some people, delving into the esoteric thought that underlies Wokism is a revelation that cuts them off from their old life and sets them off into a new life. For most, it is just the thing they need to do to operate within their social class. These are the adherents. They are often the most aggressive at enforcing the moral code because they connect it with their own standing inside their social class.

Of course, all elites have two primary concerns. One is the peasant revolt and the other is the palace coup. Wokism provides a defense against the former by putting the peasants on their backfoot, always defending themselves against an evolving set of moral codes that violate their sense of decency. Like the corporate HR department, Wokism is always ready for a new initiative to change the culture by preventing the people from discussing the current culture.

The other side of Wokism is it enforces discipline withing the managerial elite by demanding the converts and adherent focus on the moral code. Those people with Ukraine flags on their Twitter profile used to have a syringe and before that a mask and before that a BLM badge. From the entry level to the C-suites, the managerial class spends more time keeping track of the current thing than they do in performing whatever task they are assigned in the system.

This is not as much of a novelty as it seems. In the court of Louis XIV, the people in Versailles often participated in humiliation rituals. A part of who they were was their willingness to degrade themselves. It is an elite version of the Theodore Dalrymple observation about communist societies and political correctness. “A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.” Wokism provides a necessary enforcement mechanism to maintain elite solidarity.

What Wokism does is fill the role of religion for the ruling elite. If you go back and examine the language of abolitionists or New Deal reformers, you will find that the language is not particularly different from the language of Wokism. The main difference is the overt references to God and Christian morality. It is not hard to imagine the grievance studies departments singing a Woke version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic before every staff meeting.

Every elite needs a sense of legitimacy. This is what authorizes their use of force to coerce the people into compliance. “Because we can” is never enough. Elites must operate from “because we must” and Wokism not only provides the moral force behind their actions but justifies their position at the top. Their commitment to these social causes, to the liberation of man from the human condition, is proof that they deserve their position at the top, as leaders of the people.

Finally, we are left with the question of why this ridiculous collection of beliefs has filled the elite’s need for an organizing purpose. One reason is timing. The radicals that fled Europe in the middle of the last century arrived when the elite of the new American empire was in need of a new organizing ethos. Protestantism was no longer a good fit as Jews took up positions in the managerial elite. A new elite needed a new ideology, and the new radicalism was there to supply that need.

The necessity of the Cold War, however, limited the growth of this new religion among the elites, as the threat of nuclear war required serious men. When the fate of the world is on the line, you cannot afford to humor the man in a dress. Of course, the conflict with the Soviets provided all the required villains for the ruling class. In fact, a radical complaint in the Cold War was that anti-communism sucked all of the air out of the room, leaving no space for the new ideas.

The end of the Cold War removed that constraint. It also left a void in the ruling elite that what we now call Wokism was ready to fill. Now that we have reached the end of history, the ruling elite of the empire could get on with the project of liberating mankind from the oppression and unfairness of the human condition. Wokism is the new religion of this new ruling elite that exists to liberate humanity. From the war on Islam to the current war on Russia, Wokism is about freeing the world.

Many have noted that Wokism sounds like Gnosticism. That is because embedded in human experience is the desire to transcend this life. That sense becomes acute for those who rise to the top of society. If you possess God-like power over your fellow man, why not take the final step? Our managerial elite embraces Wokism because it promises to give them power over the human condition. When you can turn boys into girls, you have become a god.

In the end, this is where most of the critics of Wokism fall short. They cannot accept that vagueness as the answer. They insist that the Woke know why they believe what they believe or that they know it is all nonsense. None of this matters. Beliefs exist because they serve a purpose. For our present elites, Wokism fills a need, so they do not have to think about the logic behind it. If the time comes when Wokism stops filling the needs of the elite, they get a new religion, or we get a new elite.


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!


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Generational Musings

Note: No show this week. A bolt of lightning took out one of my machines, the one I use to produce and edit the show. This happened yesterday, so I did not have time to make other arrangements. It is a pity as I had a great show planned. A new machine is on its so things should be back to normal next week. Today is a post from behind the Green Door that seems appropriate for the moment.


One of the more toxic aspects of modern politics is the generational stuff, which pits one generation of whites against another generation. While old people have always complained about the younger generation, it was historically in the context of concern for the future, not a competition for resources. In 20th century America, generational conflict became another exploitation vector by the ruling class.

That said, we are experiencing some weird generational warping. Baby Boomers, for example, came along in a unique time in history. They experienced the post-war expansion, the problems of the 1960’s and 1970’s and then the reforms that came in the 1980’s, which set off another run of good times. From the perspective of this generation, the system really works. It even fixes itself!

Younger generations have a different perspective, so their faith in the system is much lower and they are more open to questioning the system. The millennial that had to put up with diversity in school, along with endless lectures about diversity, even while enjoying material prosperity, is not going to be as patriotic about the American Way as his parents or grandparents.

Of course, the Zoomers are coming onto the scene as the American Empire shows all the signs of decline. It is an interesting contrast with the Boomers, who came on the scene when America was at her peak. The Boomers came along thinking everything was possible. The world was their oyster. The Zoomers came along in a time when people wonder if anything is possible.

There is something else. The Boomers were raised by a generation that was pretty sure that every problem had a solution. That solution, however, was not just ready to spring to your aid when you needed it. Like every generation before them, the Boomers were raised to make things, fix things and discover things on their own. While brimming with a sense of entitlement, they still had to make their way in the world.

In contrast, Zoomers were raised with the answers all around them. They have never known a time when you could not google the answer. This seems like a small thing, but it has an enormous cultural impact. For 10,000 years of human history, getting the answer meant work, real work and there was a good chance the answer was not available, but today it takes a few clicks and there is almost always an answer.

This contrast turns up in some strange ways. Here is a story about Zoomers bested by common office equipment. What is happening here is the young people are experiencing tools for the first time. A tool does nothing for you other than extend your own skills in some way. This seems strange to young people who look at everything as a technological shortcut to getting the desired result.

I have run into this in my work life. A story I love telling is about a summer intern we had about ten years ago. He broke the letter folding gizmo one day. He came into my office and told me the machine was not functioning. I told him it was probably a paper jam and told him that my tools were in the closet. Take it apart, clear the paper jam and reset the wheel that fed to paper through the machine.

He left and came back in a few minutes. He had no idea what he was looking for in the closet in terms of tools. I realized that he simply had no idea what I was asking of him, so I walked him through it. He looked on as I fixed the machine as if I was performing black magic. He actually asked me how I learned to do it. I showed him the instructions on the inside of the machine. He was still baffled.

Now that I am done with the old guy interlude, the Zoomers share something with the Boomers and that is being a unique generation. The Baby Boomers were the first generation to come into a world of mass prosperity. The Zoomers are the first generation raised on the internet. Both generations came into the world with expectations that were not like prior generations.

For the Boomers, this novel view of things was not much of a problem as the conditions that created the novel view have remained in place. For the Zoomers, it may not work out the same way. For them, life is going to be a real struggle as the country falls prey to its demographic changes. There will be no button to push to solve the reality of race and no place to hide from it.

This is going to make for some interesting generational conflict. The advice from old people will make as much sense as Charlie Brown’s teacher. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” sounds like madness when the problem is demographics. On the other hand, the Zoomers blaming the Boomers for the decline of the country is going to strike the old folks as nothing but the mewing of ingrates.

Another weird thing will be the fact that the Zoomers distrust the American Way, but completely trust the technology of their life. Prior generations viewed technology as a tool to be used like any other tool. Zoomers think of technology as a natural and normal part of their ecosystem. They trust their mobile device more than they trust flesh and blood people. That is something new.

Regardless, the future belongs to the Zoomers as they will be around for it, so whatever skills they came into the world with will be what they use to navigate their way. If they are being bested by the copier, one should not be optimistic. Maybe the marching morons problem transcends demographics. On the other hand, maybe training on the office copier turns out to be good training for the war ahead.


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.