What Must Be Done?

Posted on January 31, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 Anti-Science Right

Posted on January 17, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Monster In A Toga

Posted on January 16, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chaos And Control

Posted on January 12, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Tate

Posted on January 9, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is National Conservatism?

Posted on January 5, 2023 by thezman

National conservatism, a movement created by Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony, has gained some degree of respectability over the last decade. People associated with the movement have been given space on mainstream platforms. His conferences get a large crowd of academic types, most of whom get a speaking role. The event is one part academic conference, one part networking event. Of course, it is all made possible by billionaire Peter Theil who underwrites it.

Therein lies the first puzzle. Look at the collection of people associated with the movement and it is hard to find common ground. Peter Theil calls himself a libertarian, but he supported Trump. Granted, the space between Trump’s 1980’s civic nationalism and libertarianism is not that great, but most libertarians threw their dresses over their heads and went squealing into the night when Trump arrived. They joined their friends on the Left in calling him a fascist.

It gets fuzzier when you see paleos like Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy, along with varieties of the “new right” like Michael Anton and Josh Hammer. The only thing these people have in common is support for Trump. Otherwise, they do not have much in common with one another, at least on the surface. Then you have people like Rod Dreher and David Goldman speaking at these events. Hazony’s events are the bar in Star Wars for dispossessed right-wing intellectuals.

Things get more muddled when you look at where some of these people come down on the key issues of the day. Here is John O’Sullivan giving a speech about Ukraine at the most recent conference. He clearly knows nothing about the Ukraine or the war, but he is happy to defend the Global American Empire’s meddling. Here is someone writing the “national conservative case” for arming Ukraine. He thinks war with Russia will help in the war with China to come.

Those two are not outliers. Here is Yoram Hazony making the rather farfetched claim that Ukraine was just minding its own business when for no reason at all Russia decided to invade them. If one were to take Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, at face value, you would expect him to take the opposite position. After all, Hazony’s book is an argument against empire and it is the Global American Empire that is the cause of the war in Ukraine.

Of course, no one can read Hazony’s book and not see that it is mostly a way to give Europeans the language to defend Zionism. The prevailing ideology of Western elites is explicitly anti-nationalist. An ethnostate like Israel falls far outside of what Western elites consider acceptable, so you can see the problem. Israel ethnically cleansing the West Bank does not fit the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pogrom. The Hazony project is mostly a way to square that circle to Western conservatives.

As an aside, Hazony makes the claim in his book that a people have a right to a homeland if they have the ability to keep and maintain it. He makes this qualification for two obvious reasons. First, it sets a size limit for a nation. Otherwise, three people could get together and demand independence. The other reason is it allows for the easy dismissal of Arab claims in Israel. The Palestinians have no claims because they cannot keep their own lands.

The fact that this argument is best applied to Israel is never addressed. After all, Israel would not exist without the British then the Americans. The entirety of Israeli foreign policy for over half a century has been to use any means necessary to gain favor with great powers in order to fend off the Arabs. Israel is the product of empire. Now that the Global American Empire is looking weak, Israel is now cutting the Ukrainians loose in favor of the Russians.

Putting that aside, the question remains, what is national conservatism? At this point, the best answer is that it is a holding area for people not welcome at reputable events who never want to be associated with disreputable events. For example, Jason Richwine is welcome at a Hazony event, but at that same event Hazony will rage against “race science” like a grievance studies major. Mark Krikorian is welcome, but anyone associated with VDare is banned.

The result is that national conservatism is sort of island of misfit toys. The only thing holding them together is a desire to get a seat at the table. Thiel’s money lets them put on extravagant conferences at world class facilities, which draw in famous people looking for some street cred as an outsider. For example, Marco Rubio, a product of Conservative Inc., gave a speech at Hazony’s event and now talks about himself as an implacable foe of the Washington political establishment.

Otherwise, national conservatism is a term without meaning. The nationalism expressed by people like Hazony is situational. Israel can build settlements in Arab areas because it is in their national interest. Russia, meanwhile, is guilty of imperialism when she moves to defend ethnic Russians from Ukrainian fanatics underwritten by the Global American Empire. This sounds like the same old neoconservatism that has plagued us since the middle of the last century.

As for the conservatism, there is not much agreement. Hazony claims that American conservatism is rooted in Burke. The umbrella group that sponsors his activity is called the Edmund Burke Foundation. On the other hand, the Claremont people that freely circulate in these events reject that claim. They are Lockeans, at least with regards to the American founding. Others are social conservatives rooting their moral claims in the authority of their religion.

There is nothing wrong with heterodoxy. In fact, more events where disparate people can socialize and debate is a good thing. As a movement, however, there has to be something more than Peter Theil’s money and estrangement from the cool kid’s table of the prevailing orthodoxy. Without a common goal or even a common narrative, it is just a collection of outsiders desperate to get back in, terrified of the ominous sounds coming from the darkness to their right.

Willing Accomplices

Posted on January 3, 2023 by thezman

If one were looking for a reason for why the conservative movement failed so completely you would be spoiled for choice. Most people would point to the fact that despite having billions of dollars and majority support on key issues, conservatives managed to conserve nothing. Others would point out that many of the people claiming to be conservative were more concerned with maintaining good relations with their friends on the Left than advancing conservative policy.

Often this is where you hear some form of the Hoffer quote about great causes becoming religions, corporations or rackets. It is a great observations and certainly true, especially with regards to the conservative movement. Any system that produces a sanctimonious simpleton like David French has long since stopped being a serious political movement. Most of conservatism is a racket, while the rest is just a jobs program for philosophy majors.

While true, these are symptoms rather than causes. The real cause of conservative failure was the race issue. Once they conceded the moral high ground to the Left over the issue of race, the Right was forced to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism in order to make any sense of it. You cannot agree that unequal results are immoral if you also claim that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. You have deny nature in order to embrace the moral claim.

Once conservatives accepted the starting premise of the Left, they condemned themselves to forever embracing the Left’s conclusions. You can see this in the fight of the antiwhite pogroms called CRT and DEI. This recent National Review post claims that conservatives can win the race debate. That sounds good until you read the actual text of the post and see that the secret formula for winning is another version of the internet meme, “the conservative case for…”

Here are the key lines. “We must see racial disparities where they exist and acknowledge racial trauma as real, because for many Americans, it is real. Responding to the trauma of racial discrimination by simply expressing a commitment to a race-neutral ideal is a bad move.” In other words, the so-called conservatives have to accept the premise of the Left. They see winning as proving to their masters on the Left that they are properly trained on the issue of race.

Now, the author of the piece is an interesting character. We can be sure that his ancestors did not arrive on the Mayflower. He is an example of what conservatives tell us is the new model American. His people arrived recently and as if by magic they are not only as American as everyone else, but they now have a duty to criticize the errors of your ancestors and explain how you can make things right. South Asians have embraced the skins game with a passion.

There is another name for this. Isaac Willour is a fine example of the Ingrate-American, a new arrival who does nothing but lecture white people for not having done enough to make his stay comfortable. White Americans could be forgiven for wondering why in the hell they need to listen to this interloper about anything. Maybe instead of lecturing us about our ancestors, he should be thanking us for a life that the civilization of his ancestors could never provide to him.

Putting that aside, once you concede that racial disparities require your attention and that they are the fault of white people, you sign onto whatever pogroms the Left launches on white people. There can be no salvation for white people until those disparities are gone, but since that is an impossibility, the only choice left is a forever war on whiteness, which is a war on white people. This is the logical end of the conservative embrace of the blank slate.

One you concede that people are amorphous blobs that can be made into anything, the cause of observable disparity shifts from the individual to society. Once you buy into the idea that all men are created equal, you concede that any observed inequality must be the result of some malevolent force in society. Once conservatives signed onto these two concepts, they committed themselves to a war on the majority population in the name of equality, equity and justice.

This is how conservatives went from Bill Buckley arguing with James Baldwin over the issue of civil rights to a world where recent arrivals lecture the white population about the crimes of their ancestors. After all, if all you have is the claim that all men are created equal, endowed with natural rights, what argument can you have against some guy getting off his flying carpet and claiming to be your equal? As your equal, does he not have the right to judge you and your ancestors?

Of course, this degenerate thinking pollutes everything. After all, how can one oppose open borders when you owe such a huge debt to the world? How can one question the economic arrangements when the world is counting on your sacrifice? How can you oppose community wrecking policies when you wanting to live a peaceful life among people like yourself is clearly white supremacy? Once the blood libel gets going, it becomes the universal weapon.

This is why conservatism has been a failure in America. Once they signed off on the blank slate and egalitarianism, they had no way to dispute any of the claims made by the Left, so they were reduced to being their unwilling accomplices. Eventually, their masters lost patience and now conservatives compete with one another to see who can be the most enthusiastic for the latest progressive fad. Conservatism is a shadow that cheers as the Left flits from one cause to the next.

What If They Believe It?

Posted on January 2, 2023 by thezman

One of the questions no one in the media plans to ask is why the FBI was so deeply involved in the Twitter disinformation campaigns? The word “disinformation” is the correct word in this case. Twitter was actively trying to provide the public with false information about a wide range of issues. One tool they used was silencing those who contradicted official narratives. They would instruct the Twitter censorship team to take down posts and ban particular users.

Presumably, the FBI was not just involved with Twitter, but with all of the big social media companies. Of course, this was just part of what the FBI has been doing to undermine the normal functioning of society. Victor Davis Hanson took a stab at cataloging some of their activity. He does not get into their plots to entrap people in various capers like the Gretchen Whitmer case. Then there is their involvement in the January 6 protests at the Capitol.

This is a massive effort, but to what end? Paul Gottfried suggests the primary motivation is power politics. “I’m still trying to figure out where the close alliance between surveillance agencies and the woke Left, which has been evident since at least the Obama Administration, may lead. I have no doubt this friendship is based more on power considerations than ideological affinity.” The assumption here is that the FBI does not really believe the crazy things they are saying.

Gottfried’s position is the standard conservative position that has been the default for more than half a century when dealing with the Left. Conservatives assume that there is no way these people believe what they are saying. Instead, they are motivated by a more sensible reason like money or power. Conservatives tend to be practical people, so they assume people are motivated by practical reasons. They cannot accept that these people genuinely believe what they are saying.

What if the FBI is as woke as it appears? What if the people at the top of the military, the people pushing the DIE agenda throughout the ranks, really are as antiwhite and generally insane as they sound? Talk to anyone in the services and they will tell you that the officer corps makes corporate America look old fashioned. Every FBI agent is sent to the ADL for brainwashing, so the selection pressure strongly favors the sorts of people who believe in the woke conspiracy theories.

It is entirely possible that these organizations, in fact the entirety of the managerial class, has been taken over by true believers. This does not mean all of them believe this stuff, just that there is a critical mass of believers. The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, is as close as we have to an axiom in this area. Across all human organizations we see that there is a “vita few” that exert an extraordinary amount of influence over the whole.

What if the managerial class, having become self-aware at the end of the Cold War, has simply landed on what we call wokeness as its binding agent? What if adherence to one of these illogical and unnatural fads is simply the way people inside signal their status and commitment to others? Many, if not most, do not honestly believe this stuff, but as social animals they do what they believe is necessary to be in the group and enhance their status opportunities in the group.

In other words, the conservatives are right in that there are plenty of people cynically playing along, but know this stuff is insane. They do it for all the reasons ambitious people do things. They want to increase their status. The wrinkle here is they operate from the assumption that everyone else does believe this stuff, or at least enough important people believe it that it is best to play along. Even though a majority of the members do not believe, the whole acts as if they do believe.

What this suggests is that even if the conservatives are right and most people in the managerial class do not believe this woke lunacy, they act as if they do because they believe their fellows do believe it. That means no amount of facts and reason could change their minds, because they assume that everyone around them is genuinely woke on the latest things. In fact, knowing the truth, so to speak, makes life more dangerous for them in their social milieu.

This would explain the fanaticism of these people. If they were cocksure of their beliefs, they would have little reason to proselytize. The obviousness of their claims would be enough, so there would be no need for enforcement. On the other hand, if these people are riddled with doubt, but sure most around them are true believers, then stamping out all contrary opinion and the people who present those contrary opinions is the most rational way of defending themselves within the group.

The “group belief” option seems to comport with observation. The people policing the borders for dissent always frame their actions in terms of self-defense. The Twitter censors were “protecting” fellow believers from “misinformation” and “stochastic violence” on the platform. When what others think you believe determines membership in the whole, it is not a big leap from there to believing that anything that causes doubt or questions belief is a threat to your existence.

The other thing the group belief option does is explain how easily these people flit from one set of beliefs to another. The people bellowing “my body, my choice!” quickly shifted to bellowing “take the vax bigot” during Covid. Not only did they not see the irrationality of both positions, but they were blind to the contradictions. The reason is the content in these slogans is not what matters. In fact, it is meaningless. What matters is what the slogans signal to the person’s social environment.

This approach answers the “woke buddy” question. Everyone has at least one person in their life who is smart and capable, but he subscribes to the latest madness from the cult of modern liberalism. You can explain it to him and he will nod a long, but then go right back to spouting the latest madness. The answer is that these noises are just group identification. Like a cult member facing deprogramming, he says what he must to break free, but remains in the mental space of the cult.

Finally, the irrationality of the beliefs probably enhances the group solidary aspect of the whole wokeness agenda. Because it makes no sense on its face, one must be initiated into the concepts. Once inside, the member comes to feel like a member of a clerisy or possibly an elect or even a chosen few. It would be interesting to see a demographic study on the woke population. It would explain the overrepresentation of certain groups in this secular cult that now dominates the ruling class.

Getting back to the beginning, the reason the FBI and other institutions are bending the knee to this new religion is the people running these organizations either believe this stuff or want to believe it for social reasons. Even if the true believers are just twenty percent, they have become the standard against which members are judged. That means your facts and logic are, at best, pointless noise to them. At worse, reason is viewed as a grave personal threat.

This may be why conservatives are loathe to consider the possibility that these people really believe this stuff. If that becomes clear, then the conservatives with the charts and graphs lose their value. If the group belief option is true, then conservatism is a dangerous liability to society. The rational thing for normal people is to snuff out the remaining conservatives and then set about plotting in secret for when the ruling class can be physically removed.

Is American Conservatism Possible?

Posted on December 28, 2022 by thezman

In America, Right and Left are relative terms in that the Right is defined by its relationship with the Left. While the Left flits from novelty to novelty, the Right shouts, “please slow down” while following it around. As Robert Lewis Dabney put it a century ago, “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” His observation has remained true to this day. It is why yesterday’s radical idea is today’s conservative principle.

This is not true in other parts of the world. Radicalism exists, but it throws itself against the defenses of tradition and history. It may break down those walls, as we see in Europe, but the contours of the Right remain in place. European conservatism is the appeal to hierarchy, tradition and permanence. Joseph de Maistre would be shocked by modern Europe, but he would still be able to make out the borders that define the modern conservative forces of Europe.

The opposite is true in America. Take someone from the founding generation and transport him into the middle of the 19th century and he would recognize the forces of radicalism quite easily. After all, the radical abolitionist would look strikingly familiar, having come from the same stock. Transport that man further into time and he would recognize the New England roots of the progressive. Conservatism, on the other hand, would make no sense to him in any age.

That is the problem for conservatives. The rest of the world has traditions, habits of mind and institutions with roots into the mists of time. America is a young society, so the ancient customs are not all that ancient. Most of those were borrowed from Europe during the colonial period. Others were trampled under the hoofs of one prior radical pogrom or another. Modern conservatives are left to conjure an authority due to a lack of tradition and history.

You can see the dilemma here in this speech Michael Anton delivered to Hillsdale College on the end of conservatism and the beginning of a new politics. Anton is part of a project to build a “new” conservatism. Like the “old” conservatism, his starting point is Lincoln and the “second founding” as imagined by Harry Jaffa. Note also that the person introducing Anton is careful to insert the Athens and Jerusalem line into his remarks, signaling his membership in the cult of Jaffa.

The cult of Jaffa and Lincolnism has been discussed at length here and other places, so there is no need to go over it again. Of interest here is the selection of Lincoln as the Abraham of modern conservatism. This is a bit like picking Karl Marx as your starting point for German conservatism. In his time, Lincoln was a radical and not just the bourgeois coffee house variety. He was willing to kill as many of his fellow citizens as needed to impose his radical vision on the country.

The “new right” would no doubt dispute that characterization of Lincoln, but you cannot place Lincoln on the Right during his age. Abolitionism was a radical idea, one that the radicals of the founding generation rejected. John Adams opposed the idea on the grounds that it was worse that slavery. Like many of his generation, he personally opposed slavery, but he understood the danger posed by the abolitionists. Adams would have viewed Lincoln as a dangerous fanatic.

Of course, in his own time Adams was a dangerous fanatic. The people trying to form up a new conservatism love waving around the Declaration of Independence, but that was the most radical document produced to that point. In fact, the entire founding of the United States was a great experiment in radical politics. It is not an accident that America is often called an experiment. The very basis of America is the praxis of radical thought and it continues to this day.

The truth is America has never had much to work with for anyone trying to create a genuine conservatism, because America lacks the history and traditions that would naturally anchor conservatism. Compounding it is that the limited history and traditions that are available are nothing but a long journal of one radical experiment after another in the vain hope of creating that city on a hill John Winthrop imagined when he and his fellow fanatics landed in the New World.

This lack of necessary ingredients with which to fashion a genuine conservatism in America is probably why conservatism has been a failure. When you are reduced to conjuring a novel history in support of novel ideas, as we see with the current “new right” experiment, all you are really doing is engaging in your own form of radicalism, just without the force of authority enjoyed by the Left. Conservatism becomes nothing more than a parlor game for outsiders.

This is why any effort to produce a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy needs to start with an honest inventory of reality. What can be produced from the materials at hand to create something that can resist the acid of liberalism? The answer cannot lie within the liberal tradition. To go back to 1950, 1850 or 1750 looking for answers to the problems created in those times inevitably means explaining away the defects of liberalism in order to preserve it.

The place to start with fashioning an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not in 1950, 1850 or 1750, but in 2050. Given the current demographic trends, imagine a continent filled with versions of Orania and then contemplate the ideology of a people who can maintain it. This is one lesson we can take from the founders. They tried to fashion a practical solution for their people at the time. The next founding will have to do the same thing, but for a different people.

The Marx Of America

Posted on December 27, 2022 by thezman

Note: Henrik and Lana of Red Ice need some help with medical bills. Their new born needed almost two week in the ICU. Donate here.

There are men who are remembered for what they did. There are men who are remembered for what they said. Then there are men who are remembered for who they have influenced or the chain events touched off by them. This last group is unique for the simple reason it is hard to say exactly why they are remembered. They are history’s version of the popular figure who is famous for being famous. One such example is the late philosopher, Leo Strauss.

That last sentence provides a clue as to why this mediocre philosopher and historian is a figure who looms large of contemporary politics. Serious students of philosophy take exception to calling Strauss a philosopher. Historians dismiss him outright. Students of Greek philosophy roll their eyes when they the man’s name. Even his followers will spend hours debating how to properly label the man. Despite this lack of distinction, Leo Strauss is an important figure in our politics.

For those looking for an accessible explainer on Leo Strauss and his work, Paul Gottfried’s book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America is a straight forward summary and analysis of the man and his work. For those looking for an even shorter introduction to the topic, here is a good review of the book. At the end of that review, the reviewer touches on the central question of Strauss. Why does this mediocre academic cast such a long shadow?

The main reason anyone talks about Strauss is that his followers have been central to American politics for half a century. His most famous acolyte was Harry Jaffa, who created the cult of Lincoln that still animates conventional conservatism. His reimagining of American history allowed contemporary conservatives to get to the left of their opponents on the issue of race. It is why the modern conservative cannot shut up about Abraham Lincoln. He is their get out jail free card.

That does not explain why we have lots of middlebrow intellectuals announcing themselves as Straussians rather than Jaffians. Modern conservatism owes far more to Jaffa than Strauss, but the conservative intellectual space is littered with people flying the flag of Leo Strauss. Additionally, there are flavors of Straussianism, as in the East Coast Straussians and the West Coast Straussians. What is so magical about this man that half a century after his death he still casts a shadow?

This is where Marx comes into the picture. Like Strauss, Marx was a mediocre intellectual, but he cast a huge shadow. There were many smart men working the communist and socialist circuits in the 19th century, many smarter and more reasonable than Marx, but it was Marx who towered over the rest. Despite having been wrong about pretty much everything, Karl Marx remains a respected thinker and philosopher on the Left.

One reason Marx rose above the rest was that he provided intellectual authority to the socialist movement. His theory of history turned a collection of moral preferences into scientific fact, which gave the believers an unquestionable authority upon which to base their economic and political claims. To this day we hear people on the so-called Left claim that they are on the right side of history. This means their opponents are on the wrong side of history, so they can be dismissed.

Similarly, the Straussian method provides the believer with a set of tools to instantly create the needed authority for their normative claims. Strauss taught that you must learn the true intent of a writer. The Straussian, of course, has the special skill to see through the esoteric writing of genuine philosophers, who out of necessity always cloak their real meaning from the casual reader. Strauss allows his followers to divine the real meaning of historical texts.

At first this does not sound like much, but it allowed Harry Jaffa to tease out the real thoughts of the Founders, which to that point had been called the Framers, because they wrote the text of the Constitution. Jaffa claimed that their real thoughts were contained in the Declaration. From that he could turn the Founders into Moses and Lincoln into Joshua. The former led his people out of bondage, but not into the Promised Land, while the latter completed the journey.

That is a clever trick, but as Gottfried noted, this was not simply for the amusement of bored intellectuals, but part of a political strategy. By casting Lincoln as the real founder of the American republic, conservatives, who were clustered in the Republican party, could claim him as their own. Not only does the “great emancipator” become a shield against the charge of racism, but he also becomes a license to turn egalitarianism and the blank slate into conservative principles.

That is a major appeal of Strauss. His method provides a set of tools for rhetorical combat within practical politics. The Straussian method allows the user to flit from one tine of Hume’s fork to the other. They can conflate those things that are axiomatically true with those things that are contingently true. Decorated with their own interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, gratuitous assertions become immutable fact. These tools let the users win the debate, rather than reveal important truths.

Probably the main appeal of Strauss is the same as for Marx. For the initiate, the system of thought provides a framework to answer every question. This in turn elevates the believer’s sense of self. When you are on the right side of history, you inevitably are filled with confidence. When you can divine the intent of the great minds and use this secret knowledge against your opponents, you become a god. The appeal in both cases is spiritual, not intellectual.

The comparison between Marx and Strauss works because of the people who were most attracted to the two men. The people who rallied to Marxism were not the urban proletariat, but the urban bourgeois intellectuals. Similarly, those rallying to Strauss are not highbrow political thinkers. His appeal is to the middlebrow bourgeois intellectuals that grow like a fungus on the modern age. Both provided a purpose to idle men without an obvious role in life.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. That should be the lesson of Marxism. Leo Strauss was a clever man, for sure, but his bad ideas have given us a half century of political agitation and subterfuge. One would think the embarrassing catastrophe that was the Bush presidency would have relegated Strauss and his followers to the dustbin of history, but when you are untethered from facts and reason, the facts never get in the way of your next argument.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Culture