The New Right And Old Enemies

Posted on July 21, 2022 by thezman

From a dissident perspective, the squabbles between the professional conservatives and their critics in what they are calling the New Right is like see something of a proof of dissident critiques of conservatism. Many of the charges levelled at the professional conservatives are borrowed, without attribution, from dissidents. The main charge, that conservatives have conserved nothing, was a mainstay of dissident discussion before Trump arrived to discredit the conservative establishment.

The term “New Right” itself is borrowed from the old alt-right. Back in 2016 when the alt-right was morphing into old school white nationalism, those not interested in going in that direction were labeled the alt-light. Guys like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobic started calling their thing the New Right as a way to add legitimacy to their activity on social media. Sohrab Ahmari appropriated the term and uses it to describe those criticizing institutional conservatism.

Putting that aside, the back and forth between various groups is useful in understanding what happened with American conservatism. If there is going to be some new force that rises up to challenge the status quo, it will need to avoid the errors made by conservatives in the last century. The debate also provides an avenue for understanding the much larger trends that have led to this point. Ideas matter and it is the ebb and flow of ideas that animates history.

This post in the Claremont publication American Mind by Michael Anton is a good example of how ideas shape actions. Anton is responding to this post by someone calling himself Michael Watson. Those old enough to recall the purging of the paleocons by the National Review crowd will recognize the pattern. Instead of addressing the criticism coming from their right, the conservatives accuse the critics of being anti-Semitic and thus disqualified from the debate.

For his part, Anton responds in the predictable way. He endorses the central claim that any criticism of certain people is off limits, thus his job is to prove that his ideas do not fall into that bucket. The paleos went down this road back in the 1980’s when they insisted that criticizing Israel and Israeli influence in American foreign policy was not an attack on Jews. The neocons were undeterred and paid off enough conservatives, primarily Bill Buckley, to make the charge stick.

For those interested, Bill Buckley produced a special edition of National Review to condemn the paleos. He then turned it into a book. No doubt that American Enterprise, Heritage and other conservative money machines bought skids of the book as a reward for his efforts. Here is a transcript of Buchanan being interviewed on PBS about the charges levelled against him. Thirty years on and we see the same tricks being used by institutional conservatism to guard their right.

Interestingly, Anton makes no mention of the fact that Watson is a member of the neoconservatism cult. He is the associate director of the Center for the Future of Liberal Society at the Hudson Institute. For those interested in the deep state theory of everything, their wiki page is a cornucopia of material. For those interested in anti-Semitism, it reads like something from Kevin MacDonald. It is a good example of how relentless pursuit of group interest can easily look like conspiracy.

Anton has his reasons for avoiding the elephant in the room, but the elephant is at the heart of the debate. Neoconservatism has never made any sense as a subset of Anglo-Conservatism, as its primary focus is international. Conservatism is the elevation of the near over the far, the local over the distant. The singular focus of neoconservatism is the ancient enemies of the Jewish people, both near and far. Given the lack of anti-Semites locally, it is obsessed with distant enemies from the past.

The temptation is to hang all of this on the Jews, but the fact is neoconservatism has become a weird subculture that revolves around the concept of Israel. Many of the biggest neocons are not Jewish. Watson is obviously not Jewish. Bill Buckley was obviously not Jewish. Large swaths of the Evangelical subculture are obsessed with supporting Israel at the expense of everything. Since the Cold War, this subculture has driven conservative politics, right into oblivion.

For this reason, it is easy to see why many on the so-called New Right are loath to take on the neocons. They have a lot of money and they lack a soul. They will say the nastiest things about anyone who crosses them. Taking on a well-heeled collection of sociopaths with institutional power is dangerous. The trouble is, there is no air for a “new right” until the Right is purged of this pestilence. Neoconservatism has to be read out of politics in general, not just right-wing politics.

There are plenty of easy targets in the neocon space. Thirty years ago, neoconservatism was run by smart and clever men. Today it is populated with cranks and crazies who are easy to mock. More important, their schemes have resulted in an evolving economic and political disaster. Pinning the economic war against Russia on the neocons is easy money. The New Right would be wise to borrow a trick from Saul Alinsky and make the neocons own the Ukraine disaster.

Of course, this comes to the other elephant in the room. Conservatism is a business and the neocons have a near lock on the flow of money. They control the billion-dollar think tank racket. They control access to big donors. The reason that First Things continues to publish a nut job like George Weigel is money. His war mongering lunacy and bigotry is out of step with the site, but institutional conservatism likes him so he is tolerated in order to avoid offending the money men.

The golden rule says that the man with the gold makes the rules and that is the problem that any alternative to institutional conservatism faces. Either it accepts poverty as the price for political commitment or it builds a parallel funding mechanism. Whether or not the New Right understands this is unclear. The only way to achieve the latter is to take Alinsky’s advice and focus on the problem, personalize it and then polarize it, forcing people to pick sides, thus neutralizing it.

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Managerial Morality

Posted on July 20, 2022 by thezman

Note: There is a new post up on both Substack and SubscribeStar. It appears there are lots of people on Substack who would never sign up for SubscibeStar and plenty of people on SubscribeStar who have no interest in moving to Substack. Green door content will be posted on both so pick your poison.

In the classic comedy, The Jerk, there is a scene in which the main character, played by Steve Martin, is in court. He is being sued because the invention that made him rich is supposedly causing everyone to go cross-eyed. He invented a thing to go on the bridge of glasses that prevents them from falling forward when you look down. In the scene, Martin looks around and sees that everyone in the court, including the judge and the jury, are cross-eyed like the people suing him.

This is what Elon Musk is going to face in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor when his case against Twitter goes to trial. That assumes it ever gets to a trial, as there is a good chance his lawyers see the writing on the wall long before that point and there is some sort of settlement. The Twitter legal team features a former chief judge from the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. No doubt there are others with connections to the small club that is the Delaware bench.

Like the Steve Martin character in that movie, Musk is about to learn that the laws and procedures do not matter. What matters is who decides. Every judge on the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor was put there by a politician. Those politicians were selected for their loyalty to a system that many deny exists. That system is the managerial system that governs America. You do not get into office with a chance to wield real power unless you are trusted by the system.

System is probably not the best word for what we are seeing. It is more like a mindset, a set of shared beliefs. The judge in the Twitter case, Kathaleen McCormick, will look out at the players and see that Musk is not her sort. He is not the type of person she thinks should be a winner in this world. She thinks this because everyone she knows thinks this about Musk. She may not be able to say why she thinks Musk is a threat to our democracy, but she is sure of it.

It was not always this way for Musk. He was once the darling of the managerial class, celebrated in popular culture as a modern day Thomas Edison. He was serving Gaia with his electric cars and hyper loops. His battery plants would magically allow us to stop raping Mother Earth for fossil fuels. His reward would be to one day travel the stars in his rocket ships. Musk was the way to the glorious future. When he spoke out against Twitter, he suddenly transformed into the terrible past.

This is what stumps people about managerialism. There was no official pronouncement from the leader of the managers. The supreme leader of managerialism did not read out a fatwa against Elon Musk. There is not even an anonymous memo circulating that says Musk is now on the proscribed list. It is a thing that just happened. One day, people with power were showering Musk with your money. Then all of a sudden, they all agreed that Musk was a threat to our democracy.

Another example of the managerial mindset is in this story about the law firm that won the recent gun case in the Supreme Court. The two lawyers who won the case were met with a termination letter after their victory. The law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, represents the most important people in the most important matters. There is a revolving door between Kirkland & Ellis and the Department of Justice. Former AG Bill Bar was a Kirkland man, as were many on his team.

Why is Kirkland & Ellis dropping second amendment cases? No one has made an official announcement on the issue. The attorneys who won the gun case stated that they were told the firm was dropping their gun clients. No one came to the partners of Kirkland & Ellis and made them an offer they could not refuse. They simply decided that their conscience could no longer allow them to handle these cases. Then they were celebrated for it by their friends down at the club.

This is the first domino. All of the other big forms will drop second amendment litigation because they will all be struck by the same crisis of conscience. Much the same has happened in the insurance industry. Insurers refused to do business with the National Rifle Association. Many banks have also joined the boycott. Again, there was no memo sent out from the secret lair in the hollowed out volcano. No one is forcing these big players to do this. They just think it is right.

It is one of things the paleos got wrong about managerialism. Perhaps wrong is too strong a word for it. More like they did not anticipate it. Burnham, a former communist, focused on the material aspects. He never addressed the culture of managerialism that was evolving along with the managerial system. Later paleos started to approach this topic, but they never fully embraced the idea that this class that rules over American society has reached class consciousness.

That class consciousness is not simply an awareness of their position with regards to economic and cultural relations. It is a moral community now. To be in the managerial class requires accepting a set of beliefs about what is right and wrong. Good people accept climate change. Bad people are deniers. Good people think guns are bad, while the bad people talk about their second amendment rights. The good people saw Trump as a threat to our democracy. The bad people voted for him.

This is what Musk faces in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. He may have the facts on his side with regards to the fake accounts. He may have the law on his side with regards to the terms of the deal. He has all the money in the world, which should count for a lot. None of that may matter as the people making the decision have all decided that he is a bad guy. Like every issue for the managerial class, Musk is now a moral signifier. Where you stand on him is where you stand on everything.

Questioning Reality

Posted on July 19, 2022 by thezman

There is a growing sense that there is a crisis in science, with science being broadly defined to include the soft sciences. The reproducibility crisis, as pointed out by the statistician W. M. Briggs, is close to universal. Across the academy, there is a plague of faulty and fraudulent studies being produced. Worse yet, the systems for controlling fraud seem to be encouraging it. Peer review now means nothing more than politically acceptable in the soft science fields.

Briggs offers one reason for what is happening. He notes that engineering is not having this problem. The reason is the bridge has to actually work as predicted or the engineers suffer a heavy price. Engineering is not science, but it relies upon the sciences to produce practical things. Those practical things must hold up to reality, which controls what comes out of engineering as accepted theory. In other words, everything in engineering gets tested against reality.

The academy, on the other hand, never has to face reality this way. Even in the hard sciences, reality avoidance is common. Theoretical physics has entered a world that is beyond the ability to test. Math is still math, but much of what is done is purely speculative or requires unproven assumptions. In the soft sciences, the rules have collapsed entirely and most of what comes out is narrative framing. The “science” is limited to providing cover for current fads.

Another reason for the crisis in the sciences is modeling. Anyone who has worked with models knows that the model maker can quickly become a god. He creates a model of the world based on what he would like it to be rather than as a reflection of the bit of reality he is trying to understand. Of course, model makers often have a boss who needs to be pleased. That boss could be in a corner office or the boss could be an angry mob of blue-haired harpies patrolling campus.

The point is you can make models do anything. The model maker is like a script writer in that he can make the rules do what he needs to reach his desired end. Bad script writers use clunky plot devices to solve problems for their characters. Bad model makers create a set of rules and data selection methods to close the gap between theory and reality. Since the model will never be tested against reality in the soft sciences, bad model makers can quickly become stars.

Here is where the question of causality comes into play. Is the corruption of the academic domain a symptom of larger societal trends? Has the steady decline of standards in society dragged down the academy or has the corruption of institutions subverted society, including the people in the sciences? Is it simply the natural product of multiculturalism, which needs narratives to hold it together, due to the lack of natural social bonds found in homogenous societies?

You can model this many ways, depending upon how you as the model maker feel about these topics. The last bit is a clue to the problem. The rise of narratives in social discourse tracks with the rise in diversity. Read anything from a century ago and it is free of the narrative structures we find common today. A story about an athlete was mostly the facts about his life. He was not cast as a character in a drama about social justice or the fight against exploitation.

The ubiquity of narratives gets lost in the flood of them. There is a real war going in Europe and the political class speaks of nothing but narratives. They have meetings followed by press conferences to inform the public on the status of their latest narratives and the battle of narratives surrounding the war. Meanwhile, the Russian army slowly grinds down the Ukrainian army. The same can be said of the energy crisis, which is ignored in favor of narratives about climate change.

You get the sense that the people talking about their narratives and messaging, a subset of narrative framing, think that if they get enough people to believe their story, reality will bend to that story. Put another way, if they can model reality with a set of rules and assumption in such a way that only their preferred conclusions are possible, then reality will have no choice but to comply. Like the model makers, the narrative creators have become gods in their creations.

This does not answer the question of causality, but it is clear that the problem of modeling in the sciences has a related problem in the public realm. In elite society, the focus is no longer on the things that are true, like the axioms of mathematics, but rather on the things that are true within the context of accepted rules, like the equity in the distribution of advanced degrees in the sciences. One is true whether you believe it or not, while the other is only true if you accept the assumptions.

A century ago, smart people understood this difference. Models of realty had to account for those things that are axioms of the universe. Over that time a steady shift has gone on where objective reality is excluded from the discussion of the narrative and at the same time, the narrative challenges objective reality. Put another way and getting back to the Briggs post, models are no longer tested against reality, but reality is being tested against the models.

This helps explain why supposedly serious academics sit in front of congressional committees and claim to not know the definition of a woman. They are not simply clinging to fashionable politics. At the heart of it is the claim that reality simply does not comport with the new model of society, so we have to dismiss that bit of reality, in this case biological sex. Just as the model makers can feel like a god, the narrative makers believe they can bring reality to heel.

There is a lot here that deserves further examination, but it is clear that the crisis in science correlates with the crisis in the West. The causality is not clear, but what is clear is that what passes for the smart fraction is no longer willing or able to accept that there are things that are true regardless of opinion. They are questioning the very basics of reality by claiming there is no difference between relations of ideas, their models and narratives, and matters of fact and observable reality.

The Culture of Deceit

Posted on July 13, 2022 by thezman

A recent Gallup survey reports that confidence in institutions has fallen to an all time low among Americans. The only institutions trusted by a majority of people are small business, the military and the police. The last two are dropping quickly, which makes sense given the behavior of these institutions. A military full of drag queens and a police force siding with barbarians does not inspire confidence. Faith in small business simply reflects the fact that people continue to trust good people.

The normal reaction from the usual suspects is to blame their favorite bogeymen for the collapse in social trust. They will not use the term “social trust” as that risks entering a forbidden zone, but that is the topic. Trust in institutions is a proxy for social trust, how much people trust the people they do not know in their community. A big driver of the collapse in social trust is a generation of open borders. When your neighborhood is full of strange aliens, it is hard to trust anything or anyone.

As is often the case, the flood of aliens into your neighborhood is a symptom of a much bigger problem that lies at the heart of it. The people in charge simply cannot stop lying, which reflects on the institutions they control. The obvious example is the news media, which is approaching single digits in the Gallup poll. The fact that anyone trusts the media is an argument against universal suffrage. Many people, at least ten percent based on the survey, are too stupid to vote.

Putting that aside, the media has become a torrent of lies. Since the very beginning, the media has been partisan. In colonial times, newspapers were known to be advocates for one faction or another. This is what you should get in a society with a free press, free speech and a culture of debate. The partisans in the media make their case for their cause, often cherry picking the facts that work best for them. This is no different from what happens in a courtroom or a business meeting.

That is a vastly different thing than what we see today. Only a complete idiot trusts anything he reads or hears in the media. The starting assumption is not only that the facts are wrong, but the people behind them know they are wrong. It is not partisan zeal or human error, but a deliberate effort to deceive. The people endlessly going on about disinformation are the primary source of disinformation. They either promote the lies of government or they create their own lies.

This story about the war in the New York Times is a good example. Some version of this story has been floating around since the start of the war. It was cooked up by the usual suspects who have been championing war with Russia. The central claim is they have inside access to Putin’s inner circle is obviously false. His one source is not an independent Russian analysist, but a paid anti-Russian activist. The source makes this clear in his own bio.

The author of the New York Times piece is a notorious liar who runs interference for the neocon cult. Despite being a proven liar, he maintains a spot at the main news site in the empire. Certainly, his bosses know he is an activist and a liar. They keep him on because he tells the lies they like to promote. The point is, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. No wonder trust has dropped to zero.

The media is an easy example. They are simply mockingbirds mimicking the sounds from the institutions they allegedly cover. Notice trust in medicine has dropped over the last year, which should surprise no one. They willingly went along with the Covid farce and the vaccine mandates. When people raised reasonable questions about the side effects of the vaccine, Big Medicine was right there to tell the media that those doubters were hooligans and troublemakers.

The fact that those concerns were legitimate and proven correct is a big reason people are now more skeptical of medicine. More important, telling the truth would have served the interest of medicine. Medicine is nothing but trade-offs between the risk of disease and the risks that come with the cure. Chemotherapy is terrible, but it is better than dying from cancer. Instead of being honest about this, they chose to lie which suggests these are people who simply enjoy lying.

No one expects the institutions to be honest all the time. Men are not angels and as long as the institutions are controlled by men, they will have all of the vices that are part of the human condition. What is new in this age is the culture of lying that has taken hold of the managerial class. They seem to take pleasure in lying to the general public, as if it is a status marker. If you cook up some outlandish whopper you get points in the social credit system of the ruling class.

In this regard, it makes sense why they selected Biden for president. In addition to his stupidity, Biden is a notorious liar. A big part of his affable simpleton routine while in the senate was his penchant for telling outlandish whoppers. Of course, he was always the hero of his tall tales. He is a man who has done nothing useful so he made up for it with glorious tales about himself. In a system increasing defined by a culture of deceit, it makes sense to have a notorious liar as the figurehead.

There is a cost to lying. The drop in trust is one consequence. The main cost is that a society low in social trust is harder to maintain than one with high trust. The cost of keeping America together is reaching a tipping point. Then there is the transaction cost of everyday life. In a world where no one trusts anyone, the cost of doing even simple things goes up. A big part of the drop in the standard of living is due to the collapse in social trust due to the constant lying.

The Deep State Interface

Posted on July 12, 2022 by thezman

One of the weird things about this phase of liberal democracy has been the normalization of conspiracy theories. Thirty years ago, everyone, regardless of their political inclinations or what they thought of the other side, dismissed the claims of the conspiracy community. At best the deep state conspiracy was a plot device for a fantastical Hollywood script. At worst, it was a sign that the person may be struggling with mental illness.

Today most people think there is a deep state. In fact, the phrase deep state has become a normal part of discourse. In conventional politics it can mean anything from the leaders of both parties to nefarious forces controlling the institutions. George Soros is part of the deep state, even though the deep state is supposed to be a shadowy group of people unknown to the general public. Even secret societies need to be personalized, so the deep state has many public faces.

You do not have to line your clothes with aluminum foil to wonder if there is not something going on off camera that explains what is happening. For example, the berserk effort by Western government to “decarbonize” the West looks like a suicide pact by a collection of cult leaders. How can these people really think it is good idea to shut down Dutch farming to save Gaia? How does returning Germany to using wood for heat make any sense? There must be something else.

Of course, we all know that there is no such thing as a deep state but it is not hard to see why people are open to it. It is sort of like the concept of space-time. That is, it is an invention of mankind to help explain the universe. The fact that it does not exist is not really important because it allows physics to explore the universe. At some point it will be abandoned for a deeper understanding. The same may be true of the deep state in that it works for now, even though it is not real.

For example, when you see an ad for something like plant based milk you are supposed to think, “why yes, I would prefer this over actual milk.” Then your brain reminds you that we have no need for plant-based milk. We have plenty of actual milk. The reason we have lots of real milk is we invented refrigeration so that we no longer have to rely upon things like almond milk. That is when that concept of the deep state fills in the blank and you begin to wonder what they are up to with this.

This is when someone chimes in about lactose intolerance, but you do not build a church for Easter Sunday and you do not build an industry for people who cannot digest milk enzymes. Similarly, you do not invest billions on meat made from twigs and bugs that “tastes almost like real meat!” Similarly, you do not bother inventing eggs made from grass that are almost like real eggs. These are solutions in search of a problem, perhaps a problem contemplated by the deep state.

Now, solutions in search of a problem are not new. The e-book was supposed to replace the real book, but there was never a need to replace the book. It was the result of two thousand years of evolution starting with the early Christians. By the 20th century it was the ideal solution to distributing the written word. That did not stop smart people from pushing the idea of the e-book. Innovation is as much about bad ideas and it is the few good ideas that are genuine improvements on the old ideas.

In the present age, the managerial class plays an outsized role in picking winners and losers, so there is money to be made exploiting their hopes and fears. This has always been the genius of Elon Musk. His projects all tap into the boutique beliefs of the managerial class. He is a futurist selling futuristic solutions to the problems of the future to people haunted by the prospect they will not see the glorious future. They are willing to spend your money to achieve their dreams.

Klaus Schwab is working the same grift. The World Economic Forum is a crackpot idea that appeals to the vanity of the managerial class. It did not get much traction until he was able to hook a few billionaires to attend his event. That was the validation needed to turn the thing into Burning Man for the managerial elite. They go to be seen with their analogs in the other parts of the managerial class. The deep state vibe is part of the appeal to people who spend their days in committees.

What has happened over the last thirty years since the end of the Cold War is the Western managerial class has evolved both a class consciousness and a messianic religion that binds them together. It is why they have become so paranoid about the people over whom they rule. A big part of being a Cloud Person is thinking about how much you disdain the Dirt People. Displaying your cloudiness is often just expressing your contempt for dirtiness.

This is why the concept of the deep state has caught on. From the perspective of the Dirt People, it looks like there is a secret set of hands guiding the movement of the clouds and the people inhabiting them. When all of a sudden, every chattering skull on television is chanting “keev” you cannot help but think it is scripted. The ads for food made from bugs make a lot more sense when you imagine a secret cabal plotting to kill off farming to please Gaia.

Like space-time, the concept of the deep state works because it allows for the further exploration of the environment in which we find ourselves. The fact that it is not a real thing, at least not in the way it is used, does not matter right now. Blaming Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates for the current crisis is fine. Waging war on the people profiting from the system is almost as good as attacking the system itself. For most people, raging against the deep state is comforting.

Just as the reality of the universe lies beyond the interface of space-time, the reality of the managerial state lies beyond the deep state. It is not a collection of super villains controlling the world. It is a system that produces the super villains it needs to control the population over which it rules. If Klaus Schwab did not exist, the system would simply invent him just as physics invented space-time. These bad guys are a necessary interface to the managerial system.

There is another aspect to the deep state interface. It is comforting. The people invited to the soiree’s like WEF and Davos get to think they are influencers, shaping the mind of the deep state actors. The Cloud People can be sure there is a powerful force guiding their hand. The Dirt People get the comfort of knowing there is a rational actor behind the movement of the clouds. Perhaps he is amenable to reason or perhaps he can one day be defeated by the Dirt People.

Maybe like space-time, the deep state interface will be useful in breaking the system open to expose its internal workings. On the other hand, it may come to be a great impediment to understanding the world. There are some who think space-time has inhibited our ability to understand the universe. Regardless, the deep state does not exist, but it is useful. Like electric cars and milk made from bugs, it has a purpose, even if we cannot be sure whose ends it serves.

The Road To Revolution

Posted on July 4, 2022 by thezman

Note: My Taki post is on the same topic as today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is on a short break for the holiday, but I did post this about our spoiled rulers.

For the longest time, Americans were told that class did not exist because in America anyone could grow up to be president. While theoretically true, everyone understood that this was never to be taken literally. It simply meant that if you worked hard and made the right choices, you could maximize your potential. A person born poor could become rich is they had the talent for it.

This has been true, at least as far as economics. Many of our rich people started out as modest men. Through good fortune and tenacity, they made billions. Even today you can go far if you know how to work the system. Ibram X. Kendi has made himself very rich working the race hustle. Robin DiAngelo got rich in the same hustle. Even these sorts of mediocrities found riches by working the right angles.

This economic egalitarianism has fooled people into thinking the same rules apply to the management of society. America is a democracy where the people pick their leaders and guide public policy. The fact this is not true and never had been true is something with which Americans have always struggled, but good times made it is easy to conceal, because the system seemed to be working.

Things have not been working for a couple of years now. In fact, the sense that things are going wrong has probably been with us since the Bush years. While the economic numbers given to us by the government painted a rosy picture, people were starting to question things when the Iraq War went bad. The sense that things were heading in the wrong direction grew during the Obama years.

The election of Donald Trump was confirmation that a significant share of the voting public was worried about the direction of things. He was a blow against the Deep State that was secretly rigging things in favor of certain elites. The response from Washington seemed to confirm that shadowy actors are putting their thumbs on the scale, eighty million of them perhaps, to alter outcomes in their favor.

The concept of the Deep State is another form of escapism. Instead of questioning the system itself, blame goes to invisible players who corrupt the system. Even the most unhappy people want to believe the system can work. Those shadowy players use this to pit one group of Americans against another. “It is the Left!” for some, “It is white supremacy” for others.

A recent poll claimed that most people think the government is completely corrupt and barely half trust election results. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of Americans say they are proud to be an American. In fact, well over half say they are very or extremely proud. The fact that the poll headline suggests the opposite of the results could explain the apparent conflict in these polls.

People are starting to figure out that they are ruled by aliens and they have no peaceful way to alter this reality. The two parties are just two sock puppets operated by the people who are in charge. In the fall, one sock puppet will “win” the election, but they will just do all the same things the other party was doing. It will be done in the name of bipartisanship, which is when you are supposed to clap.

This is where that gap between the two polls creates trouble. The various campaigns waged by the ruling class over the last few years were intended to destroy pride in being an American, especially among a certain group. Instead, it has evolved a sense that the people in charge are alien and hostile. They have corrupted the people’s system for their benefit at the expense of the people.

In other words, the managerial elite wanted people to become more docile and dependent on the people running things. In order for that to happen the people needed to lose trust in themselves as “Americans”, whatever that means, and increase their trust in the experts running the system. What those two polls suggest is the exact opposite of what the managerial elite needs to happen.

Things will get interesting in the coming months as inflation, recession and supply chain problems eat into the economic wellbeing of the public. Again, people can and will tolerate just about anything if they have a good economy. Juvenal mocked this about the Romans and many do the same about Americans, but this practicality is the thing that makes civilized life possible.

People get political when forced into it. Bad times force people to look around and update their judgement about society. Those drag queen story hours piss off politically inclined people in good times. In bad times, they infuriate everyone else. In good times, a president who struggles to remember his own name and soils himself in public makes for some good jokes. In bad times it stops being funny.

None of this is to suggest that there is a revolution brewing. Right now, inflation is tolerable and gas prices are worrisome for most people. Revolution is a process that starts with a tiny minority realizing that the system is beyond reform. If they are right, this awareness slowly grows among the politically inclined, changing their rhetoric and how they engage with the public at large.

This is what happened when the colonies revolted 250 years ago. A sense of separation between the rulers and the people crept in like the fog. Some people never lost their connection to the king. Others lost it at the first sign of trouble. Most were in the middle somewhere, eventually coming around to the fact that they no longer had a natural bond to the people who claimed to rule over them.

The first rebellion in the colonies was close to a century before the big rebellion that led to independence. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led an army of 1,000 Virginia colonists against the governor William Berkeley. They suspected the governor was in league with the Indian tribes, which made him reluctant to go after the tribes that were massacring settlers on the frontier. That should sound familiar.

The fact is, there were many revolts, rebellions and insurrections prior to the war for independence, all of which stemmed from the same problem. The people in charge were not safeguarding the interests of the people. Often, they ignored their duty for personal gain. In time, the general population was in revolt spiritually, if not physically taking up arms. The result was inevitable.

This is where we are in America. Every day, more people have that revolution in the mind where they realize that it is the system that created these loathsome creatures who inhabit positions of authority. The system was not captured by them. The solution is to throw the whole thing into the ocean and start fresh. Perhaps in time January 6th will be Culpepper’s Rebellion or the War of the Regulation.

The American revolution was not a singular event. It was the culmination of a process that began generations earlier. The same is true of all revolutions. The events that made this day possible happened over a long period of time. Present day America is somewhere on the timeline, maybe closer to the end than most realize, but still not quite at the revolting stage. Time will tell.

The New Creed

Posted on July 1, 2022 by thezman

This is the Fourth of July weekend, the high point of the summer and theoretically the most America holiday of the year. Thanksgiving is probably the most American holiday, but the usual suspects have been gnawing away at it. July 4th is expressly a holiday for celebrating what it means to be American. It is the one day of the year when normal people are allowed to be nationalistic and patriotic. You are even allowed to say nice things about the white people who founded the country.

It is hard to know, but it seems that patriotism is on the wane. The days of retail shops decorating themselves with red, white and blue colors are gone. They no longer run sales around the holiday. The media seems to be ignoring the holiday this year, despite the fact their cult controls the formal government. Back in the Obama years they took this time to tell us that the strange man with the Muslim name was actually Abraham Lincoln reincarnated. This year it is silence.

Back in the Bush years, white people were super-patriotic. The crusade against Islam was the main reason. After the end of the Cold War, white people were desperate for an enemy and the usual suspects were happy to oblige. That may have been when patriotism started to decline. By the end of the Bush years many people thought their civic nationalism had been exploited for illicit purposes. The last twenty years have largely confirmed those suspicions.

Of course, patriotism has always been a white thing. Black people are the least patriotic for obvious reasons. The origin story of black people is probably enough to prevent great loyalty to the country. There is no getting around the fact that blacks were brought here against their will. Even though Africans in America live like kings relative to Africans in Africa, the resentment is part of black identity. Therefore, the decline in patriotism is all about white people.

The steady decline in white patriotism can also be rooted in the antiwhite pogroms that have become a feature of America. Every ad maker complies with the edict to erase all white faces from their ads. The exception is the race mixing ads and when they use a white man as an object of ridicule. Movies and television shows have not gone quite so far, but the antiwhite messaging is still there. Of course, politics is drenched in antiwhite rhetoric from the Left with conservatives nodding along.

It is a weird thing to see the regime demanding everyone accept high food and fuel prices as the price to pay for democracy. The implication is that paying the price for bad policy decisions is our patriotic duty. White people can be forgiven for thinking this is just a joke at our expense. The regime is laughing at us. Why would white people make any sacrifices to a regime that calls us evil? Why would anyone be loyal to a system that has produced this corrupt regime?

According to a recent poll, most people think the government is corrupt and a quarter are open to an armed revolt. Interestingly, the reason for this is in the text of that Guardian story. “This deadly attack on the US Capitol stemmed from the false, partisan, pro-Donald Trump belief that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election. Rioters attempted to thwart certification of the election, in an effort to keep Trump in office.” This degree of lying naturally makes people want to revolt.

This raises the question as to whether patriotism is possible in this age. Back in the Bush years the media was biased against “conservatives” so naturally “conservatives” were patriotic as a way to oppose the liberal media. There seemed to be a line between the media and the political class, even if the media favored one side. Now only a simpleton thinks the media is anything but the voice of the ruling class. As a result, we are constantly reminded of their corruption.

If it is no longer possible for a rational person to feel any loyalty to the nation, then what will hold the country together? In the book After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, Samuel Goldman looks for a new way to unify the nation. Here is a good summary from Chronicles. Goldman describes the three prior unifying identities as the covenant, the crucible and the creed. These were the large frameworks in which patriotic loyalty was cultivated.

There is plenty to dispute in that description, but what the Chronicles review makes clear is that there is no obvious fourth option. The only way to arrive at something close to a civil society again is by first removing the people in charge of the political and cultural institutions. The crazies currently in charge are not going to be talked out of their positions and they are not going to sacrifice themselves for the common good, so that means physically removing them from power.

This is why the regime is so desperate to break up anything that looks like self-organizing by normal people. They understand better than most Americans that the only thing preventing a revolt is confusion in the masses. It is why they remain haunted by the January 6th events. Their determination to put Trump in jail is viewed by them as a matter of self-preservation. It is why the bigots have been enlisted to start attacking Christians who question the regime.

The fact is, the system holds together only if the majority population has no sense of identity at all. Patriotism focuses too much attention on the institutions and the people running them, so that cannot be allowed. Regional, religious or racial identity, at least among the majority population, is dangerous, so it is forbidden. The nature of minority rule is that it must make sure the majority never agrees on anything. Division is now the new creed of the American empire.

The Story Tellers

Posted on June 30, 2022 by thezman

The war in Ukraine has brought into focus a strange belief among the ruling elites of the West that the world is controlled by narratives. If they can conjure a good story that seems to cover the facts in evidence, then the story is not only true, but it will control reality for the people in it. It is a form of abductive reasoning where they start with observations of varying degrees of plausibility, make sweeping conclusion and then declare war on anyone who raises doubts about them.

Formally, abduction is a form of logical inference. You begin with a set of observations and then look for the most likely conclusion from the observations. It is simply the best available explanation for what is observed. There is the possibility that some less likely or entirely unknown explanation is the correct one. This is where the ruling class logic departs from the formal definition. The explanation deemed most likely becomes an article of faith, often in support of some other belief.

Another difference from the formal definition is that the initial set of observations are never debated or reevaluated. The faith of the ruling class in their own ability to observe and define the world rules out uncertainty about their observations. Since many of the observations are part of this process, reconsidering these observations means questioning the reasoning behind them. More important, it means doubting the reasoner behind them and that is forbidden.

With regards to the war in Ukraine, Western leaders told the politicians that Russia was nothing but a big gas station with large land holdings. They could not sustain a large army in the field for very long. They lacked the capacity to make the ammunition and equipment needed for the war. Her economy was no better than Venezuela, so a boycott would bring it crashing down and before long it would lead to one of those mysterious color revolutions so popular these days.

This set of observations dates back to the post-Cold War days when the Russian economy was recovering from the collapse of communism. To whatever extent they were true at the time, no one has bothered to update them. They have become articles of faith, pillars upon which all relations with Russia are based. Over time, the new set of observations about Putin have been synthesized by the same crowd to fill in the gaps between the prior observations.

This mental framework with regards to Russia and the war in the Ukraine is so brittle and inflexible, it is forced to ignore facts on the ground. This story in a main Western media organ has become a standing head. In the old days of the newspaper business, a standing head was a headline used so often that it was made into a permanent block for the printer. For five months, Western media has been quoting regime experts claiming the Russians are about to run out of supplies.

The first quoted official is illustrative. “There will come a time when the tiny advances Russia is making become unsustainable in light of the costs and they will need a significant pause to regenerate capability.” This is true only within the logical framework of the belief set. The fact that Russia is obliterating the Ukrainian army and seizing large chunks of territory is ignored. The fact that the prior predictions have been false and the Russians show no signs of running out material is also ignored.

The undeniable truth of the war is that the Russians are using an expeditionary force of about 200,000 men from its professional army to systematically annihilate the Ukrainian army, which is larger and dug into fortified positions. This is possible because Russia is not a gas station with land holdings. In fact, it now has a military industrial capacity greater than the West. It can sustain its operations in Ukraine for as long as it takes to destroy the Ukraine and its ability to field an army.

None of this seems to register with the decision makers. This quote from retired Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. forces in Europe who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, is illustrative. “I remain very optimistic that Ukraine is going to win.” He then added, “Right now it sucks to be on the receiving end of all this Russian artillery. But my assessment is that things are going to be trending in favor of the Ukrainians in the next few weeks.”

The natural assumption by people in control of their faculties and aware of what is happening in the Ukraine is that these people are lying. Many of them, especially the ISW types, have a well known cultural affinity for lying. This general, and many like him in the decision tree, display no signs of sociopathy. They genuinely believe the narratives that they have played a role in creating. The fantasy world they have made for themselves is now more real than physical reality.

This disconnect between the world the elites imagine they control and the world that exists for everyone else is the crisis in the West. Four months ago, that general should have seen that their plan to bunkerize the Donbas and wait out the Russians was quickly becoming a suicide pact. The Russians are simply standing off and hammering these fortifications with artillery. This reduces their losses to the barest minimum, while it slowly and systematically destroys Ukraine.

That is reality, but for Western elites, this does not exist. Instead, they imagine a world where heroic fighters, who look a lot like them, are defending against an increasingly desperate horde of barbarians from over the horizon. It is the great battle for Middle Earth and the beautiful people are the elves and the Ukrainians are the humans, hobbits and other lower creatures of the world. Meanwhile, Putin is Sauron and his army are those vicious, bloodthirsty orcs.

The war in the Ukraine is but one glaring example. The gap between reality and the narratives created by the ruling class are everywhere. The energy crisis they created is not angry people paying five dollars a gallon for gas. It is the struggle to break free from hydrocarbons and transition to a world powered by fairy dust. Food shortages are just the price to be paid for transitioning to sustainable food created in labs using twigs and bugs so that the woodland creatures may be free.

No matter the problem, they have a story for it. They call these stories “messaging” but they are just stories to comport the bits of reality that interrupt the dream, with the larger narratives that define ruling class reality. This summer we will be awash in messaging in the run up to the election, which now works like an award show for the freaks that populate the political class. The best message wins. The winner then gets to spin some new narratives to please the Cloud People.

A Sports Example

Posted on June 29, 2022 by thezman

When the big tech companies decided to crack down on speech on-line, conservatives started chanting about how these are private companies and therefore they had a right to regulate what is done on their platforms. The reason conservatives said this is they were taking bribes from the big tech companies. If Silicon Valley started human sacrifice, National Review would have posted the “conservative case” for ripping the beating heart out of virgins to please Moloch.

Even without the bribes, conservatives would have sided with the oligarchs because for conservatives, the term “private company” has no real meaning. It is just a way to dodge the issue of state power. The Left advocates the promiscuous use of state power to achieve their moral ends, while the Right opposes any use of state power to achieve any ends, which leaves a big void. We end up with giant corporations pushing people around with the consent of the state.

A mundane example of this is sports. In the West, sport has been a central part of the culture since the Greeks. Sport has always been a theatrical version of war, which allows men and society to blow off steam. Sport also allows diverse people, as in people not bound by kin relations, to build bonds. The town comes together to play the next town in a game. After the game, the people of both towns throw a big party with one town having bragging rights until the next time.

In other words, large scale athletic spectacles have a social function, one that is integral to the smooth operation of society. This is why in modern times, cities will spend hundreds of millions to create venues for pro sports teams. A section of the city will often be designed around the arenas, with shopping, nightlife and swank living arrangements placed around the sports facilities. The sports are viewed as a social good so the city spends money on them.

Professional sports leagues also enjoy special rules granted to them by the government that protect them from competition. In the United States, it means an antitrust exemption from Congress. States will grant special tax exemptions, especially for the payroll taxes of the athletes. Localities will give them free land, utilities and exemptions from the normal property taxes. In America, sports leagues are special monopolies that exist as a creation of government.

Here is where the above mentioned dynamic between Left and Right works against the interest of the people. The Left uses state power to make sure these sports leagues aggressively support the cultural causes. The four big sports leagues are out front on the things like sodomy, cross-dressing, social vengeance and so on. They also make sure to support other state-sponsored ventures like war mongering and the medical fads that are an increasing part of daily life.

While the Left is weaponizing sports against the majority population, the Right carries on like these leagues are bastions of libertarianism, instead of rentier enterprises for the benefit of the oligarchs. Any suggestion that maybe the state do something about the outlandish prices or the grotesque subsidies these operations enjoy is met with howls of “socialism’ from conservatives. You see, those subsidies are just tax avoidance and taxes are bad so reasons.

The result is sports leagues function like tax farmers. Every cable household is sending money to pro sports leagues through their cable bill. Since the sports stuff is bundled into the basic bill, you pay for sports by default. The only way to avoid paying for sports is to not have a television subscription. Even taking that approach, you are subsidizing sports through property taxes, sales taxes and entertainment taxes. Everyone is a tenant on the sportsball farm in America.

A functioning opposition to the Left would take one of two moral positions on the issue of professional sports. One is the equality position. The only way to treat all economic actors equally is to avoid special treatment. The sports leagues should lose their antitrust exemption and lose their tax subsidies. They should also lose the right to muscle cable operators into forcing their product on customers. For example, only 25% of people watch ESPN, but everyone pays for it.

The other moral position on this issue is to engage the Left in how best to regulate these public goods. For example, make the leagues choose between pay-per-view and commercials in the broadcasts. Currently, they are allowed to both price-fix the purchased content and jam it full of ads. A football game is about an hour of game time and two hours of other stuff, mostly ads. This is how thirty-two oligarchs get nine billion per year just from broadcasting their games.

If sports are a public good, then they need to be regulated in the best interest of the people, like a road or a waterway. Economic considerations fall behind the moral and social considerations. On the other hand, if they are just another business with no special meaning to society, then they get treated as such. In America, the first option is only open to the Left and the second option is never considered. Both Left and Right support using sports to advance left-wing ends.

This little example illustrates a core premise of the dissident project. It is the destruction of the old dynamic between Left and Right, where one side argues from morality and the other side hides behind abstract economic concepts. The new dynamic needs to begin with the basic question. Does the issue lie in the public culture or does it belong in the private culture? The former requires public power to regulate on behalf of the public, while the latter needs to be protected from public power.

Note that the issue is culture, not economics. This is the other aspect of that change in the political dynamic. The debate must always start first with the culture. Not only does this focus the mind on what actually matters, but it keeps the specter of who decides hanging over all public debate. What is in the best interest of the culture and who ultimately decides is the core of all politics. A genuine opposition to the Left embraces this reality and makes it the focus of their politics.

The Righteous Cause

Posted on June 27, 2022 by thezman

Note: My Taki post is on the same topic. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those who are in need of audio stimulation. I also have a post up about my recent trip to the doctor for the annual inspection.

Clausewitz famously wrote that “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” Like all overused expressions, this one is always used to end analysis rather than open it. The true meaning of the expression is much deeper than the simple comparison between two related activities. War and politics have much in common so the comparison should be used to take what is known about one and use it to understand something about the other.

You see this in the case of abortion. For fifty years religious and social activists in America have organized to overturn the Supreme Court decision that invented a right to abortion in the Constitution. From the perspective of most religious people, life begins at conception, so the court has institutionalized murder as a right. Others saw the issue as an assault on the logic of society. The Orwellian invention of new rights was simply laying the groundwork for arbitrary rule.

Within the pro-life movement, therefore, there was always this double helix around which the movement organized itself. One strand was the moral arguments about human life and the other strand was the rational arguments about the constitution and the structure of America politics. In the end, the court yielded to those rational arguments, but that could not have happened without the energy of the moral arguments that kept the movement going for over fifty years.

In war, men will die for their cause. They will not die for a paycheck or the promise of war booty after the battle. They will die for a cause because they are motivated by a sense of righteousness in the cause. When an army believes it is fighting for what is right, it is willing to do whatever is necessary to win. An army fighting with a bayonet at its back or because it is paid to fight is risk adverse. It will do only that which is advantageous to it because that is what reason dictates.

This is something people have known since forever. The ancients observed that men would fight like lions in defense of their own lands but became quite conservative when they crossed into the enemy’s lands. The reason militaries try to build bonds of brotherhood within units is they know men will fight for their brothers, even sacrificing themselves if necessary. In other words, a man will die for two brothers of eight cousins, but that is the limit of his sacrifice.

Therein lies the reason the pro-life cause was able to sustain itself for two generations fighting to overturn Roe. For the people in that movement, the logic of abortion is not what motivated them. In fact, most never bothered to think much about the legal and political logic of the issue. They simply focused on the morality of it. Abortion is murder and a society that institutionalizes murder is immoral. They felt a moral duty to commit their lives to end this immoral practice.

It is important to note that the only two issues the Right has had any success in America are guns and abortion. The gun people had the advantage of the second amendment but they never relied upon it. Only a few gun cases have made it to the courts and they have only nibbled around the issue. Instead, the gun people launched a crusade against the gun grabbers in every state and locality. Their task has always been to anathematize gun grabbing and the gun grabbers.

The lesson here for those engaging in politics is that like war, politics is about morality, not facts and reason. The soldier fights for his love of country, often expressed as love of his brothers in arms. He fights for a cause bigger than himself. In politics, the winners are those who frame the issue in moral terms, seizing the moral high ground and demanding opponents justify their actions in the face of morality. The losers are those who settle for facts and reason.

This is why the American Left has won every battle against the so-called conservatives over the last century. The Left makes moral claims while the co-called conservatives force opposition into rational claims. The exception has been the two issues where professional conservatism has had little role, abortion and guns. It is important to note that professional conservatism has opposed the NRA over the years and they opposed Trump, who promised to fill the court with pro-life judges.

It is why conservatives oppose the term “antiwhite.” They know that this is a morally charged term that offers no opportunity for them to negotiate away the interests of the people they claim to represent. It makes a clear moral distinction between us and them, which is the enemy of the sorts of people working in conservatism. The same is true of the word “groomer” which is not only factually accurate, but it also lays bear the moral implications of the sexual revolution.

In the end, the lesson of the abortion movement for dissidents is that the way to defeat the moral framework of the Left is with an alternative moral framework. You cannot defeat moral arguments with facts and reason. People will sacrifice for a just cause, but not for a logical explanation. It turns out that Ben Shapiro’s line about facts not caring about your feelings is just another trick to prevent a moral people from standing on their morals to oppose the moral framework of the Left.

The Z Blog

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