Category Archives: Culture

The Return Of Chesterton’s Fence

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One of the things lost in the excitement of the first month of the Trump administration is the pending reform of the FBI. When Kash Patel was grilled by the Senate, he repeatedly made clear that reforming the agency was his top priority. This is one reason Senate Democrats are stalling his nomination. This paramilitary wing of the Blob is calling in every favor to preserve itself. That lawsuit seeking to prevent the DOJ from getting the names of the J6 agents is a similar move.

There is little questioning the underlying premise of the reform cause. The FBI has lost all credibility with the public after a string of scandals. Framing people is a terrible thing but creating elaborate traps for not-so-bright people, as we saw in the Michigan kidnapping hoax, is monstrous. Most people do not know this has been common practice for decades, but many people know it. Of course, you have the outlandish behavior of the FBI during the first Trump term.

The topic of reform starts with looking at how an organization reached the point where reform is required to save it. That is where the FBI is now. Many people think it might be best to just close it down entirely. The few necessary things it does could be transferred to other agencies or maybe to a new agency with a severely limited portfolio, something like an FBI-lite. When forty percent of the agency was used to go after the J6 people over the last four years, the agency is rotten to the core.

The number one reason the FBI is a mess is that it, like most police forces in the country, was turned into a paramilitary unit. After the North Hollywood shootout, where two heavily armed bank robbers tried to shoot their way through a police cordon, every police department has been transformed into a paramilitary unit. They got money for military grade weapons, body armor and tactical training. They also tapped into the military for equipment and the sort of men who enjoy military life.

The result is the police now function like British soldiers patrolling Northern Ireland during The Troubles or American Marines patrolling Afghanistan. No law enforcement organization group has been deformed more than the FBI by this. Years of selection pressure has resulted in agents who not only look at the general public with contempt, but look forward to confrontations with them. They arrive in full battle gear and have a hostile attitude to arrest mothers holding their children.

It is not an accident that the things the FBI is supposed to do have not gotten better over the last thirty years. Whenever some well-known crazy goes nuts and shoots up a public place, we always learn that this person was “known to the FBI.” We also learn they did nothing about it. Over the last thirty years, the FBI has been transformed from the nation’s top law enforcement agency into a heavily armed gang of thugs who only care about pushing around the average citizen.

You see this in the collapse of standards for FBI agents. A common video online is two portly agents, dressed like they are going to watch their kid’s t-ball game, paying a visit to a citizen over a social media post. The grotesque lack of professional standards jumps off the screen. People now expect higher standards from building inspectors and parking attendants than from FBI agents. The ones not playing soldier are slovenly couch potatoes with the disposition of a postal clerk.

The image of the FBI is a good example of the interplay between the aesthetic and the spiritual that we used to understand. The poorest man used to have a suit for going to church and for when he was buried, because the formal things in life were the important things in life, so it was reflected in your appearance. The Medieval scholar Erasmus, paraphrasing Quintilian wrote, “To dress within the formal limits and with an air gives men, as the Greek line testifies, authority.”

This is where to start with reforming the FBI. The first thing that should happen is every agent must pass a physical test, controlled for their age and sex, within the first ninety days or be fired. At the same time, the agents start wearing suits and the corresponding for female agents. Get rid of the casual clothes and you get rid of the casual attitudes they have toward their jobs. For most, showing up to work dressed like an adult will be terrifying, but maybe they should find other work.

Along the same lines, there is no reason for FBI tactical units. Agents get a standard sidearm that is locked up at their office when they are off duty. The automatic weapons, body armor, flashbangs, etc. all go back to the military. The guys who signed up so they can bust down doors will not like it, but they need to think about either going back into the military or signing up with an international security contractor. Free people do not tolerate paramilitary units operating in their society.

Of course, this will result in most agents leaving the FBI. The PT will eliminate a good chunk of them and the new dress code will filter out many more. The goons playing soldier will find the new culture intolerable. That opens the door for the next reform, which is a return to the old education standard. It used to be that the FBI required a degree in accounting. Then it is expanded to computer science. Now the ranks are littered with criminal justice majors.

In this age, the role of the FBI is to investigate technical crimes, like computer trespass, electronic fraud, corporate crimes, and other crimes that require intelligence. You not only need smarts to do this work, but you need technical skills. Reestablishing educational standards, like bringing back the dress code, is as much about fixing the culture of the organization as raising the quality of people in it. Smart people who take pride in their work tend not to beat up old ladies.

In the end, the problems of the FBI are a microcosm of what has brought managerialism to the brink of collapse. They simply stopped caring about their core function and stopped caring about their own standards. This opened the door to mischief and the sorts of people who feed on mischief. It turns out that those old standards had a purpose after all. The lesson here is Chesterton’s fence. The reform of government starts with revisiting all the old, abandoned rules.

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

The End Of Minoritarianism

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One of the side issues with regards to the USAID scandal is the fact that it was part of a system that has dominated the world since the Cold War. During the Cold War, this same system came to dominate the West, both as a whole, but also within the discrete parts of each member country. In fact, what happened at the end of the Cold War is this system sought to fill the void left by communism. The system was not liberalism, but rather a form of minoritarianism, minority rule.

Minoritarianism is a term coined by political scientists to describe a condition in which a minority has control of key decision-making processes. For example, the U.S. Senate requires a supermajority for certain things, which gives the minority party the power to veto these issues. This is the filibuster that the Democrats complain about whenever they need to placate their voters. In the case of the Senate, this system is to prevent the majority from abusing the minority.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been official American policy to control the politics of the rest of the world. The endless yapping about “our democracy” is always about imposing Western systems on the rest of the world. After all, we have reached the end of history and there are no more debates about the morally correct way to organize a society, so everyone needs to fall in line. Even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s people disagree, the minority demands it.

This is where programs like USAID and NED are used. Their job, in many cases, is simply to sow chaos in targeted countries. Once it is determined that the majority is unlikely to get onboard with liberal democracy, Western aid programs go in to stir up trouble in the name of helping the poor or promoting rights. It is why they love sponsoring things like women’s rights in Muslim countries. The point is to undermine the unity of the majority in the country.

The same approach is applied to regime change. In Georgia, for example, the majority of the people wanted a patriotic government that would strike a balance between East and West, but that was bad for the people running American foreign policy, so USAID was dispatched to regime change the place. What followed was a year of protests and unrest, until the government kicked out the foreign aid workers. Once the USAID money dried up, the protests dried up.

The funny thing about the regime change operations is they rarely result in a stable government, but that is not seen as a bad result. If Slovakia falls into chaos after toppling the Fico government, that is fine. That is viewed as a better result than having a pro-Slovak government. The goal is always to prevent a majority from forming anywhere, whether it is inside a country or among a group of countries. The goal of minority rule is to keep the majority in chaos.

This makes a lot of sense from an American perspective. The United States is a small population compared to the rest of the world. If the rest of the world, or even a section of it, united against the empire, it would be big trouble. This is why both Israel and the United States work to keep the Arabs fighting each other inside their countries as well as among the countries of the Arab world. As much as Israeli and American politicians talk about peace in the region, they prefer the chaos.

We can probably date the birth of minoritarianism as an essential part of popular rule to the post-Civil War period in America. The ruling elite of Yankee New England became the ruling elite for the new country that was formed up after the war. That became even more explicit with the progressive revolution in the late 19th and early 20th century, culminating in the New Deal. Suddenly, the people making decisions would be educated experts from the best schools, all of which exist in the Northeast.

The story of 20th century domestic politics in the United States is one of discord and friction over race, region, and religion. Over and over one group is pitted against another preventing a majority forming up against the ruling class. Conservatism, for example, evolved so it could prevent a white majority forming up against the social policies preferred by the ruling elite. The many progressive causes were promoted to keep the coalition of fringes under control.

Everywhere there is turmoil there is the crisis of minoritarianism. Europe is in crisis because the big important countries have no role in decision making. Instead, you have girl bosses at the EU calling the shots. Estonia has more say in decision making than France, Italy, and Germany. Of course, the crisis was precipitated by the Ukraine war, which is the result of Ukraine being ruled by a non-Ukrainian with the support of the ultra-nationalist who make up ten percent of the population.

There is something to say in favor of minoritarianism. Most people are average to below average in their abilities. Collectively they are not magically above average. This has always been the fatal flaw in democracy. In fact, the majority tend to operate below the average of the whole. You need the smart fraction to run things, but the smart fraction needs to act in the interest of the majority. Otherwise, you get chaos, which is what we have seen over the last thirty years.

What we may be seeing now is the end of minoritarianism. The rest of the world is figuring out how to defend against it. This is why the American empire is beginning to withdraw from the frontiers. The American economic elite seems to be seeing the danger, which is why they have backed Trump and his plans to dismantle the managerial state. Even the minority, or at least enough of it, is figuring out that they must act in the interest of the majority.

The curse of the eighth decade is an observation that Israel becomes unstable in the eighth decade of its existence, in whatever form it takes. The first Jewish kingdom, led by King David, lasted for 80 years. The kingdom of the Second Temple lasted roughly eighty years before it was conquered by Rome. The modern state of Israel was formed in 1948, which means it is reaching its eighth decade. The current troubles in the Levant are rooted in the growing instability of Israel.

Perhaps something similar is happening to American minoritarianism. In his book, The Jewish Century, argues that the modern age is the Jewish age, by which he means the post-war world created by America. That is a good starting point for when minoritarianism became the defining feature of America. Eight decades of turmoil later and we are reaching the end of minoritarianism. The curse of the eight decade is now coming for the organizing principle of the American empire.

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The Destroyer Of Worlds

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the practical impact of what is called AI, a post about how I encountered Old Scratch in West Virginia, a video from my back porch and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

When Trump first appeared on the scene as a politician, a brilliant observer compared him to a character in the Asimov novels called The Mule. This was a character called the “destroyer of worlds” because he literally destroyed whole worlds, but he also destroyed the conception of the world. In fact, his very existence was a threat to accepted understanding of the universe, because the universally accepted conception of the universe precluded the existence of The Mule.

This has been the issue since Trump arrived on the scene. The people atop the post-Cold War world and the post-Cold War world itself, were all based on the assumption that a political character like Trump was impossible. The days of populist, nationalist and picaresque political actors was done. The present and future belonged to the Davos persons, the boys and girls who were produced by and benefitted the most from the managerial ideology that dominated the West.

What Trump’s success in 2016 represented was the nullification of the managerial order because according to the logic of managerialism, men like Trump had no place in the system, so they could never be a threat to the system. Instead, they were marginalized to the fringes of managerial life, the place where things are made, fixed, and created to keep the mechanics of the world going. They had no place in the world where decisions were made by the great and the good.

It is easy to forget that the best and the brightest smirked at the very idea of Trump running in the Republican primary. They were sure he was just another foolish businessman from the fringes, who thought he understood how things worked, but would quickly learn he was in over his head. Instead, the destroyer of worlds first destroyed the Republican primary. and the conservative ecosystem that controlled it, then he destroyed the system itself.

Like all monster movies, the story of this monster had that period where the good guys think they finally killed the beast, only to find out that it was still alive. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the regime was sure they were done with Trump. Then he reappeared, determined to run again in 2024. It turns out that the destroyer of worlds can never be destroyed because his mere existence depends entirely on his fulfilling his mission as the destroyer of worlds.

Thus, we have entered the final chapter of The Mule. The first two weeks of Trump’s return to Washington have been revolutionary. Things not thought possible are happening on a daily basis. The latest happening is the assault on the financial structure of the neocon war machine. Right now, members of Elon Musk’s team are combing through the records of USAID, the hive mind of the NGO collective that has controlled American foreign policy for decades.

Few appreciate the enormity of what is happening right now with the vast not-for-profit network held together by government entities like USAID. Suddenly, their very existence is threatened due to the suspension of funds from the American government, but also by the revelations to come about what they do with that money. There is a reason Elon Musk is posting about USDAID being a criminal organization. They were doing much more than keeping the Kagan family in donuts.

The vast informal network of formal and informal power centers that make up the real government, the shadow government, is now under assault. This is something that could never happen according to the logic of managerialism. With the owners of American society marginalized and the workers under control of the synopticon, who could possibly challenge this system? The answer is The Mule, the figure who should not exist in the managerial system.

It is hard to imagine it possible, but this is the calm before the storm. The tariff war with Canada and Mexico is just getting started. The system of free trade created forty years ago, which benefitted the ruling elites of all three countries, but was paid for by the people of all three countries, is now under direct assault. It turns out that the great sucking sound Ross Perot warned of thirty years ago was not a sucking sound after all, but an early warning of something terrible to come.

Team Trump is moving quickly to dismantle the post-Cold War world and the understanding of it. Marco Rubio is out giving speeches about how the unipolar world was an anomaly and we are returning to a multipolar world. On the domestic front Trump’s team is quickly working to dismantle and anathematize the bizarre social fads inflicted on the people by the managerial class. When the president blames diversity for a plane crash, the world has truly changed.

It is a bit ironic that the concept of The Mule was created by a man who was the creation of a world that emerged in the 20th century America. The post-national, post-liberal world that arose with the American empire was only possible with the evolution of the managerial ideology. Progressivism evolved to give managerialism moral agency, and together they made the American empire and for a while, came to defined the post-Cold War world, but now that is coming to a close.

What we are seeing is the long-anticipated end of the 20th century. Russia and China have moved into the 21st century, but America and the West have remained moored to the prior century, convulsively resisting any attempt to abandon it. That world, however, is gone and now, thanks to The Mule, it is being destroyed. For now, the destruction is the show, but soon, what comes next is what will matter. Everyone needs to remember that The Mule is the destroyer of worlds, not the creator of them.

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

The Body Of Lies

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The confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services were yesterday and they offered some interesting insights into how the world has changed over the last few years. In many respects, it was a blast from the past, with the more ridiculous performers dusting off their old routines. Elizabeth Warren, for example, did her angry chicken dance in the hallway after she did her raging old crone routine in the committee room.

Warren and the other senators who took the opportunity to make fools of themselves for the cameras during the hearing were a reminder not only that things have changed, but why they have changed. Warren’s act was just an act. It was clear at certain points that she did not understand the words she was reading from her script, but it was clear she practiced delivering them with the correct angry face. If her handlers had required it, she would have accused Kennedy of colluding with Bigfoot.

That is one reason why we are here. The public, at some point over the last few years, began to turn on this sort of performative politics. According to recent polling, the Democratic Party has its lowest approval rating ever. Meanwhile Trump is enjoying his highest approval ratings. The reason for that is Trump, whatever you may think of him, is a candid and sincere form of politics. People like Elizabeth Warren are just paid performers who will say anything for a buck.

Of course, the fact that Kennedy was there at all is remarkable. Not long ago, Kennedy was a fringe character trafficking in “conspiracy theories.” At least that was the accepted narrative around him. Most people no longer accept that narrative. For many, if not most people, he is now part of this general questioning of those narratives. No one benefitted more from Covid than RFK Jr., because all the trusted sources for public health abrogated that trust, thus validating Kennedy’s critique.

Once you start questioning the official narratives, you inevitably start questioning the people responsible for those narratives. In the case of Kennedy, that means the public health establishment, which plays an enormous role in life. In fact, it is one of the key pillars of the managerial system, right there with “first responders.” There have been libraries full of televisions shows and movies about the glories of the public health experts saving the day. People are now questioning those claims.

If you looked closely, you could see it in the hearing. One of the Senate performers mentioned the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease.” Kennedy has been open to the possibility that it turned up fifty years ago as the result of a lab leak. Not far from where it first made its presence was a military laboratory that specialized in using insects to carry infectious diseases. That is the connection at the heart of the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease”, which should sound familiar.

Up until a month ago, the “lab leak theory” regarding the Covid panic was a conspiracy theory, one that can still get you banned from YouTube. Now it is the official position of the United States government. Just a few years ago, being open minded about the causes of Lyme disease would have been disqualifying, but it was overlooked entirely in this hearing and Kennedy was even allowed to point out several so-called conspiracy theories that have turned out to be true.

This hearing was possible because the world has changed. Suddenly, as if someone flipped a switch, it is cool to question the narratives. A big reason for that is Donald Trump, who survived one conspiracy after another, including one involving a would-be assassin who just happened to be in a Blackrock commercial. One thing Trump proved is that there is a limit to how many coincidences people can tolerate before they start thinking about alternative theories.

That aside, what the Kennedy hearing reveals is that the moral authority of the people behind the official narratives is crumbling. Elizabeth Warren can carry on like a crazy old church lady all she likes, but no one believes her. In fact, no one believes any of these people because they have lied too much. It turns out Lincoln was right. You cannot fool all the people all the time and once you set off down that road, it leads to a place where you cannot fool anyone at all.

Perhaps one day when the AI historians are writing us stories about the American empire, one narrative will be about how the body of lies necessary to maintain the managerial system simply became unsustainable. It moved from condemning those questioning the more outlandish claims from the authorities to condemning anyone who questioned anything, even when their doubts were confirmed. In such a world, no one can trust anyone and the system collapses.

What probably comes next is asking what else about the past is a lie? Did the CIA sell drugs in the United States to fund covert operations? People like Maxine Waters were condemned for making the claim. It is most certainly true, by the way. They worked with the Mexican drug cartel in the 1980’s to fund the Contras. Here is an interview with a former high ranking DEA agent on that subject. Amazon also did a much longer treatment of this topic last year.

What all this points to is that we are heading into one of those clearings of history in which we exit one forest of lies and must evaluate that time, before we can enter a new forest of lies. The Russians went through this after the Cold War. There was a great reexamining of what had happened under communism. The United States did not have this period after the Cold War but is about to have it now. To close the door on the past, you must revisit the body of lies that is the past.

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

Artificial Eternity

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One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.

Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.

It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.

Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.

That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”

The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.

In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.

Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.

in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.

Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.

Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.

Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.

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

Racism: The Death Of A Concept

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The concept of racism is a novelty of the twentieth century that in recent times has been treated as a timeless truth. In the last century, the best people decided that their fellow white people had been living in sin because they had not welcomed the descendants of former slaves into their lives, so they set about correcting it. What started as a project to better the material condition of black people and include them into general society, slowly transformed into a cult of leukophobia.

It is a good example of how a negative identity can both spread and slowly destroy the people who embrace it. The first “antiracists” were sober minded compared to the modern version, in that they simply wanted to address the practical problem of incorporating the black population into the American legal system. As a practical matter, the United States had two legal frameworks into the twentieth century, one for the white population and one for the black population.

The fact that this dual legal system existed in America is a great example of how practical necessity must always come before the ideal. America was born, in part, in the notion of equality before the law. It nearly tore itself apart in a civil war over this very same issue, but into the twentieth century the majority of Americans, of both races, were comfortable with a two-tier legal system. It was this gap between the ideal and reality through which antiracism entered.

Those first “antiracists” were opposed to this dual legal system. Soon they were opposed to the people who defended it and then opposed to the human reality that perpetuated it despite reforms in the law. The civil rights revolution in the middle of the last century went beyond eliminating the dual legal system. It was aimed at eradicating the conditions that made it possible. Those conditions, it was assumed, were in the hearts and minds of the white population.

This version of the Great Awakening was motivated by a desire to once and for all eliminate that which makes racial inequality possible. Instead of pulling up at the water’s edge of biological reality, the reformers imagined that they were smashing into the final defenses of racism and the racists who made it possible. That sin of racism discovered in the last century was anthropomorphized into an army of imaginary devils, against which the great and the good could rally.

The last generation of madness has been in pursuit of what Chief Justice John Roberts called the folly of trying to create equality from inequality. Not only are differences in individual people immutable, differences on groups of people are immutable, but that itself became one of the deadly sins of antiracism. The stubbornness of this reality just made the antiracist more determined until they embraced state sponsored violence against this imaginary evil.

Whether they understood what they were doing is unclear, but what antiracism became was a mirror of what they claimed was white racism. This started with shifting the definition of racism from “prejudice based on race” to “prejudice plus power”, which meant only whites could be racist. Since hating white people was not new, they shifted to hating whiteness, the conditions that produce white people. The result was a moral code built on the hatred of white people, leukophobia.

In the final decades of the last century, American children were taught about the cultural lunacy in communist countries like Russia and China. They would struggle to accept that people could submit to reeducation camps and struggle sessions run by crazy people at war with reality. In the fullness of time, children will look at the diversity pogroms of this age the same way. Future children will struggle to believe that psychopathic con artist like Robin DiAngelo were real.

Like the madness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the bloody madness of Stalin’s purges, the madness of antiracism has run its course. Yesterday, Trump signed another executive order, this one rescinding Lyndon Johnson’s EO 11246, which established affirmative action in government contracting. Ten years ago, anyone suggesting this was called a white nationalist and purged from polite company. Suddenly it is in the trophy case of the most banal political activists.

What we are experiencing right now is a preference cascade. Long ago, a wiseman said that antiracism would collapse on the day a so-called conservative professed his antiracism in front of a gathering and that gathering started to chuckle and then burst into uproarious laughter as they all realized the same thing. That thing was that everyone else was sick of this nuttiness too. All sudden, it was okay to laugh at it and so everyone indulged in hysterical laughter.

This is not to suggest that we will be restoring segregation or that television actors will start casually dropping racial epithets. It simply means that the social movement built around antiracism has reached the end of the line. The quest to eliminate race as a defining feature of public discourse ended with race as the defining feature of public discourse, leaving it with nowhere to go but away. The solution to a racialized public square is a de-racialized public square.

Another way of looking at this is the old expression, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. This refers to the idea that wealth gained in one generation will be lost by the third. The founder starts the business, turning it over to his son who competently manages it. His son then runs it into the ground. There are a lot of variations on this same theme, but all point to the same idea. Regression to the mean is undefeated over a long enough time span.

The concepts of racism and antiracism were created by clever people seeking to capitalize on that gap between the American ideal and reality. They got the social movement going and the next generation established it as a fixture of American political discourse. For a couple of decades, antiracism provided good jobs at good wages to college educated people with no real skills. They just had to show up and play their role, but instead they brought the movement to ruin.

One could also look at the death of racism, the political cause, and its moral claims, as part of the overall decline of the American empire. Racism and antiracism were made possible by the emergence of the American superpower after the two great industrial wars of the twentieth century. This last spasm of racism was made possible by the final victory over the other great ideology to emerge from those wars. Now that the empire is on the wane, its social movements are dying with it.

Regardless of your preferred narrative, there is no escaping the fact that the world has suddenly shifted on the issue of race. The moral center is coming to rest where it belonged all along with regards to race and that it is a private matter. One chooses to live with who they like, for any reason they like. It is not a collective matter. We are seeing the line between the private and public reappear. The first casualty is the concept of racism and its traveling partner antiracism.

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

Troubled Youth

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Over the last week a dispute has erupted on Twitter about the relative difficulties faced by young people. One camp, current young people, claim they are entering a world that is much more difficult for them than youth of prior generations. They do not think they have the same opportunities as their parents and grandparents. Another camp thinks that young people are entering relatively good times economically but may have unrealistic expectations regarding adulthood.

To be accurate, there is at least one other camp in this debate. That camp thinks the youth face a demographic reality for which they have not been properly prepared and a prevailing culture that works to prevent that preparation. The relative state of the economy for young people does not matter if they are entering a society that is about to come apart along demographic lines. Young white people have been poorly trained up for a world that should not exist.

As is often the case, the two camps squaring off over economics are on the main stage while the camp looking at upstream issues is marginalized. While economics is downstream from demographics and culture, it still matters. We see this with the oldest demographic who remain stubbornly committed to the system. Baby boomers, overall, have it pretty good, so they still believe in the system, even it means they must endure an emergency room that looks like a Tijuana bus stop.

The economic question for young people is difficult, because it is more about expectations than objective measures. For example, about 16% of native-born teenagers have jobs today, compared to 32% in 1990. On the one hand, this is a bad thing because it means fewer young people getting necessary training to be an adult once they finish their education. On the other hand, it means they have an easier time of it than prior generations who had to work.

Those over the age of fifty love telling stories about the terrible jobs they had as young people, while no one under the age of thirty complains about not having had crappy jobs to make ends meet. In fact, the main complaint from college graduates in their twenties is that they have crappy jobs. This is where the great divide opens between those two main camps debating the issue. Old people roll their eyes, because having a crappy job is a rite of passage. Young people see it as a broken promise.

If you are in that third camp, you can see how both sides are right. On the one hand, young people should stop moaning about crappy jobs and being poor, because that is what every generation faced. In fact, prior generations had it far worse. On the other hand, this was not the deal promised to young people who went into debt to get a college diploma. They were told that this investment would let them bypass the struggle portion of their life and get right into the middle-class.

Here you see the root cause of the complaint from young people. The breakdown of order has eroded the social contract. In fact, the social contract is now a terms of service agreement. They were told to click “accept” in high school, but once they exited college, they were told the terms of service have changed. Just in case they objected, they were also told that the privacy policy had changed as well. “Please click accept” quickly became “accept or else.”

There is more to this broken social contract than economics. The conditioning of young people comes with the assumption that if they follow the rules and tick the correct boxes, they will find meaning and purpose in life. Instead, what they find is life in a cubicle, paying off school debts while living at home. Half of college graduates live at home, which is not as high as you might think, but they continue to live at home long after they have left college. That is a novelty.

In effect, young people were sold a program that said if they went to college, took on the debt and followed the rules, they would come out the other end with the sort of fulfilling life they saw in the media. Instead, they are faced with what feels like a pointless existence as an economic unit. That philosophy major at the coffee shop is not just a punch line. She is a bitter victim. Telling her that she now must find her own meaning in this struggle sounds like another lie to her.

That said, the youth of the past did not like working in high school and would have preferred to hang out with friends playing video games. College grads of the past would have preferred to get a job in their field at the same wage as an experienced man, rather than working retail until they could get their foot in the door. The struggle for today’s youth is relatively easy, even if it is the result of a broken promise. In fact, young people probably have it too easy in many respects.

This generational conflict is, in the end, a proxy for the larger conflict which revolves around the failure of the ruling class over the last thirty years. Instead of upholding the rules, especially the rules of the social contract, they turned the country into a smash and grab where everyone is on their own. As a result, the powerful, for example colleges, exploit the weak, their students. It should be no surprise that the victims of such a system are not its biggest fans.

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

The Inequality Of Man

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In the fullness of time, whoever is writing the story of the American experiment will marvel over the fact that the United States never understood itself and as a result, was eventually destroyed in a struggle with itself. A land with vast resources and a capable people could never move past a central problem that stepped off the Mayflower to start the American story. That problem is how can you build a society that derives equality from inequality?

At every step in the American story, we see this conflict. One the one hand, what drives the efforts of the American people is the desire to equalize not only American society, but the society of man. On the other hand, there is the grudging acknowledgment that what lies between here and the egalitarian paradise if the impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. Despite the unconquerable truth of the human condition, what drives America is the desire to overcome it.

This conflict is right there in the founding myths. The colonists rebelled against the symbol of hierarchy and innate inequality, the King of England. They did so on the grounds that all men have the same rights. It is right there in the powerful opening of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest celebration of egalitarianism ever written, but written by a man who was the gold standard of both the natural inequality of man and the necessity of hierarchy.

This contradiction is right there in the life of Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of aristocratic stock, born into a wealthy family. He was living proof that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. He supported the redistribution of land to the poor, despite the fact he was a wealthy planter and slave owner. Despite the reality of his life, he was also capable of expressing the egalitarian spirit in such powerful and direct language that it continues to haunt the nation he helped create.

Modern America, the Global American Empire, is the product of the innate American egalitarianism, but also the willingness to use violence in the unequal relationship between America and the rest of the world. The regular speeches we hear from politicians about America’s role in the world would be familiar to Thucydides. On the one hand those speeches are a form of the funeral oration of Pericles and on the other hand the frank dialogue with the people of Melos.

The present crisis of America is the product of this great contradiction. In his majority opinion in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Chief Justice John Roberts struggles with this very question. Much of the opinion, in fact, is a recitation of how the country has struggled with this question. Often, Roberts laments that the court has failed to live up to those ideals of equality, but then he acknowledges that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

In his discussion of Plessy, the case that established the doctrine of separate but equal, Roberts argues that despite the intent and the remedies to address defects in the doctrine, the result was institutional inequality in education. Roberts writes, “the
inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from inequality—soon became apparent.” The remedy was to scrap it entirely in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Note that in a 237-page decision lamenting the history of discrimination and challenges in addressing it, the central problem lies in just one sentence. You cannot derive equality from inequality. If Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, a truth not only visible to the casual eye, but supported by mountains of data, then the equality of man is impossible and any effort to achieve it is folly. Despite this immutable truth, the court continues its quest to reach the egalitarian paradise.

Right there is the beating heart of the current crisis. For going on three generations now, the moral arbiter of America society, the Supreme Court, has demanded that we press ahead with a project it knows is impossible. The moral regime that makes the open society as the highest good and discrimination as the worst evil, which grew from the Brown decision, is all about finding, at long last, some way over or around that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

The moralizing is clear in the text of the decision. Roberts often blurs the lines between legal discrimination and general discrimination, because to make such a distinction suggests the latter is acceptable under the right conditions. Instead, the starting place is the assertion that discrimination is always immoral, but for now certain exceptions must be made until we work out a few things. Affirmative action, for example, is a temporary fix until equality is achieved.

Think about how many social problems could easily be solved by simply acknowledging that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. If the court said that Harvard is a private college and so it can admit who it likes for any reason it likes, this case never sees a courtroom. Public universities, on the other hand, must admit everyone that meets the objective criteria for admissions. Debates over college admissions would vanish instantly.

Simply acknowledging objective reality about human beings would solve many of the problems in present day America, but it is impossible. The belief in the equality of man is too powerful with the managerial class. John Roberts and his staff wrote 237-pages of text to cover over “it is folly trying to derive equality from inequality.” Since the middle of the last century, all efforts have been mustered to defeat that simple truth, but it remains that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

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

The Age of Ignorance

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Note: There is no show today, but for those who need to hear my voice, I was on a couple of popular programs over the holidays. I was on with Paul Ramsey and his lovely new cohost, Alicia Bittle. Rumble link. I was also on with Mike Farris. The Rumble link for that is here.

One of the strange aspects of the so-called information age is how little information there is relative to what was expected at the start of this age. At the dawn of the internet, everyone assumed we were on the cusp of a great democratization of information, where everything was available to the public. Not only would the sum of all human knowledge be made available to everyone, but the ability to conceal information, like government secrets, would be near impossible.

It has not turned out like that at all. In many ways, people are more ignorant now than fifty years ago, despite having access to the great data stream. It turns out that you must want the information in order to have it and most people just want to be told what to think. Faced with the great firehose of information called the internet, most people simply find a narrative source to trust. Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news.

This was always true, but prior to the internet there was some competition inside the media for an audience. That meant doing genuine reporting. The local newspaper had lots of information about what was happening. One unexpected result of the internet is a mass convergences of mainstream news sources and a narrowing of what is presented to the readership. Look at a aggregation site like this one and you can see the echo chamber that is mass media quite clearly.

The internet killed off local news and the organs that provided it. The days of making a career as a newspaperman covering local events are gone. Along with it the apprenticeship system has disappeared. People entering media as a career now step into a narrow, vertical world where the major regime outlets are at the top and everything below is aimed at feeding people into those major outlets, while echoing everything that comes from those outlets.

It is why we know so little about the Jefferey Epstein case, relative to what should and could be known about it. The major media outlets have little interest, beyond parroting government statements, so there is nothing for the rest of the system to echo and amplify. For example, the two guards that night have been ignored by the media, despite being the second to last people to see Epstein alive. The NY Times does not care about the case, so no one else cares about it.

This is a pattern with most big stories. The lunatic they caught outside of Trump’s Florida villa should be great tabloid fodder. The guy’s internet profile alone makes for great clickbait, but the major media has no interest in him. In the analog age, camera crews would have tracked down everyone who met him. In this age of a trillion cameras, no cameras show up anywhere interesting. The same is true for the kid who allegedly took shots at Trump in Pennsylvania.

There are many ways to describe the modern mass media, but one label that fits is “deliberately uninterested.” There is a weird lack of curiosity in the modern media that defies easy explanation. Sure, the people running the Post or the Times coordinate with the government, but one would think a small outlet would see this gap as a chance to grow their audiences. Instead, even C-list outlets follow the lead of the Times and Post into the great darkness of modern ignorance.

Look at the New Year’s Day terror attacks. Now that the identity of the two people involved are known, it should spawn a million questions. The obvious place to start is the fact that neither man fits the profile. According to the government, for no reason at all, two military men went crazy on the same day. The Vegas guy’s back story makes no sense whatsoever, but so far no one in the mass media has found anything weird about it, much less questioned the government about it.

Both guys were attached to Fort Bragg, which is a pretty big coincidence all by itself, but this is not the first terrorist attached to that base. This alone should spark some curiosity by the media, but when you look closer you see there is a lot of violent crime attached to this base. It is the sort of thing that in a prior age would be the basis for a big expose in a major news outlet. Reporters would have been tasked with asked the government about it, but today it gets ignored.

Even if the Fort Bragg connection is mere coincidence, we will never learn anything about these two cases. The “journalists” will cut and paste some government press releases into their sites and a week from now it will be forgotten. Like the Trump assassins, the major media outlets will simply ignore these stories and so the rest of the media system will ignore them too. In their place will be the latest conspiracy theories around Trump that the Post and Times are peddling.

The great leaving alone that now defines official media is, in part, due to the professionalization of media. In the analog days, the news was a working-class job, so there was a degree of distrust between the media and the ruling class. Today, every journalism student imagines herself as part of the ruling class and one day she will do her part to further the mission of the ruling class. To reach the top of the media system, one must be an unusually good toady.

There is also the fact that the interests of the ruling elites have consolidated, which has resulted in confluence in the media. In the old days, the guy who owned a major newspaper saw the guy who owned a factory or the guy who owned the bank as a rival, so he was fine with his people poking around in their business. He also looked at the government as a potential problem, so maintaining an adversarial relationship with the political class was in his interests.

Financialization has resulted in a narrow economic elite. They are all in the same boat when it comes to how they view society, so they no longer see each other as rivals, and they all depend on the managerial elite to run things. In the media, the result has been a shift in skill selection. In the old days, getting dirt on a banker and a politician doing deals would make your career. Today, what makes your career is building a relationship with them, so they trust you with information.

The shift to access journalism has come with new selection pressure. In the old days, noticing patterns and having a curious mind were rewarded. Today, those are qualities that get you weeded out early in your career. What matters today is the right LinkedIn profile and the right relationships. It a world where curiosity can get you expelled from your social group, in addition to our profession, it is no wonder that everyone in the media is good at never noticing anything.

This also explains the obsession with narratives. Now that the media is absorbed into the managerial class, it is assumed that controlling the narrative is the key to pushing the programs and initiates of the managerial class. As you see inside every large corporation, everyone feels the need to support the latest things and be seen promoting the latest things, so what little imagination and creativity remains, flows into creating and promoting the narratives that support the latest things.

The result of this is we now live in an age of ignorance. The objective facts are often more readily available than in the prior age, but they are so layered in pejorative narratives that they are difficult to locate. With no institutional support in finding and assembling the facts, we are left with narratives that often serve no other purpose than to make the participants feel like winners. The great leaving alone that defines the public square has created an age of ignorance.

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

An Early Warning

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The new year has started with a bang, literally and figuratively, as terrorism was the big story on the first day of the year. A Tesla truck exploded outside the Trump building in Las Vegas, killing one and injuring seven. Then there was the car attack in New Orleans, where according to news reports a car went on a rampage killing fifteen people and injuring dozens of others. Police say the driver of the vehicle was not alone and there is currently a manhunt for the others.

The identity of that driver in New Orleans has been released and to no one’s surprise his ancestors were not on the Mayflower. The media is calling him a “Texas man” but he was born to recent arrivals, most likely from East Africa. He served in the military and had various office jobs until he decided to go on jihad. Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar is a good reminder that absimilation is just as likely as assimilation. It is a thing we increasingly see as alien populations increase in the West.

Assimilation means to become like that which you joined. As John Derbyshire observed almost a decade ago, there is an opposite, absimilation, which means to become less similar to that which you have joined. In the case of second and third generation immigrants, this is a common enough thing that it has become the focus of the overall immigration debate. While most absimilated migrants do not go on murderous rampages, many refuse to assimilate on principle.

This is one of the problems with immigration that the Romans understood, but our current oligarchs do not understand. When the alien population is small, the pressure to assimilate is very high. Those who refuse can find little support within their alien community, so they either assimilate or leave. This was the case with 19th century immigration from Europe. Some claim up to a third of European immigrants remigrated because they could not or would not fit into American society.

When the alien population reaches a large enough size, there forms a critical mass of aliens who refuse to assimilate and find enough support within the alien population to survive apart from the main population. This was the lesson of the 19th century when Italians packed into ghettos became a society within a society. It turned out that even in 19th century America, assimilation is not automatic. The more alien the population, the more difficult it is to assimilate them.

Of course, in this age, there is no effort to assimilate these people. Instead, they are encouraged to let their freak flag fly in the name of diversity. Further, there has been intense pressure on the native population to move aside and not demand these new people quickly assimilate into the native culture. The result is second a third-generation migrants who are alienated by the deracinated state of America and encouraged to hate the white population.

That alienation is not just with the migrants. It appears the Las Vegas Tesla attack was done by a white man named Matthew Livelsberger. Like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans terrorist, Livelsberger was an army veteran and served with Jabber at the same base in Texas. It is looking like these two attacks are connected and the result of a group that may have come together in the military. Long forgotten, Nidal Hasan was in the Army when he went on his rampage.

It should surprise no one that alienated migrants are now finding common cause with alienated natives this way. On the one hand, we have massive importation of people unlikely to assimilate into American society. On the other hand, we have a culture war against the native white population, specifically white men. It is as if the ruling class is trying to create the perfect conditions for terrorism. This is not an unreasonable suspicion, given the performance of the FBI.

Even though these events took place in the new year, they are part of a pattern we saw in 2024 from the FBI and the other security forces. The assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania was due to staggering incompetence. The same is true of the attempt in Florida by a guy who should have been on the FBI radar. Time after time we see that the FBI fails at its basic duties, most likely due to the fact they spend all their time trying to frame people for the latest fads.

As we always see in these terrorism cases, the people involved in this one will have been brought to the attention of law enforcement. The FBI will say they had reports about these people. No one will ask what they did with those reports, because the answer is they did nothing. Their response will be to demand more money so they can frame some people for whatever they will call this stuff. They will pretend they are now on top of this new problem.

Putting aside the FBI malfeasance, this batch of terrorism is a reminder that our rulers have created a tinderbox. The revolt against Musk over the holiday break regarding Indian migrants should be another warning to the oligarchs. To head off much bigger problems down the road, there needs to be an immigration moratorium, including a halt to most “guest worker” programs. Every new arrival is a flammable log on the hot coals of the deracinated American population.

Further, there needs to be a national effort to assimilate the current alien population into the native European culture. Part of this needs to be remigration. Those who refuse to assimilate must leave. Cultural diversity needs to be treated like communism was treated in the 1950’s. It took an economic collapse and world war to assimilate the last great immigration wave. That was with a diverse European population before the major powers had nuclear weapons.

Unless the oligarchs wish to be swinging from trees, they need to head off this looming demographic disaster. Things like diversity and openness are luxury goods that can be indulged in easy times, but the easy times are over, so these leisure habits must be replaced with realism. What the first day of the new year tells us is America has a real problem with its population. That reality can no longer be ignored. To fix it means being realistic about the human condition.

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