Category Archives: Culture

Peaceful Separation

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“Familiarity breeds contempt” is an old expression that like many others, remains true even though it is widely ignored. Proof of this is all round us, as Americans know more about one another than at any time in history. The more we know, the less we like about one another. The reason for this is we have never been one people or anything close to a nation. For most of our history, we have barely been a country. Now we get to see this reality every day on our media platforms.

From the very beginning, from the first settlement, America was a land with people, rather than a people with a land. The people who settled New England were very different from those that settled the South. In fact, those were groups of Englishmen with a long history of not liking one another. The Puritan settlers were on one side of the English Civil War, while the people of the South were on the other. To this day, that animosity shows up in a million little ways.

Even within states there is not a lot of unity. Pennsylvania is a big state with at least three distinct cultures. The people that populated the western part of the state are different from those in the east. That was true from the beginning. It turns up today in cultural habits and especially in voting habits. You could break the state into three smaller states and the people would not care. The fact is, they have never been a unified people loyal to one another.

The colonies and then the new country were a dumping ground from the very beginning for people not all that interested in nation and country. People did not leave the old world for the new because they felt a need to be part of a unified people. Either they were indifferent to it or hostile to it. The original settlers left the Old World to live in the woods with savages because they were done with the Old World. This has remained true, for the most part, to this very day.

The Founders understood this, which is why they tried to avoid creating a strong central government fit for a unified nation. Their first go at it was a loose confederation of states that were free to operate as they thought best. The next go at it was the constitutional framework we pretend to have today. The chief feature of this new structure was that the national government was sharply limited in its powers, outside of a few areas that served the needs of all of the sovereign states.

Much of what vexes modern America is rooted in the fact that the ruling class is oblivious to this reality. They endlessly blather on about the need to unify the country around this or that issue. Their propaganda is drenched in saccharine messages about the need to be unified. The defining characteristic of the modern plutocrat is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is thinking for himself. They are hellbent on uniting a people with no interested in being united.

The quickest way to social peace is to unplug the internet and shutter the public affairs shows on television. If all of a sudden people had to go across town to tell someone that they did not like their politics, they would not do it. In a flash, a disunited and disagreeable people would be minding their own business. The liquored-up harpies on social media would have to join the church or a local civic association if they wanted to gossip about people they barely know.

Obviously, that would not be the end of it, but there is no denying that the increasing social friction is rooted in our increasing familiarity. America has always been a land of many people, a house with many mansions. The reason most of the people are here is they did not want to be around the people over there. Even in America, that mentality has held since the beginning. The migration west was as much about getting away from the people back east as starting new on the frontier.

The great patriotic struggle in the first part of the last century convinced the American ruling class they could and must unite the country. After all, if they could unite the nation to beat the Depression and Fascism, why not poverty and inequality? Why not unite around defeating racism and being mean to people? Not only are they hell bent on uniting a disunited people, they now strive to unite the world. Their new unitarian creed has them as the one true god of us all.

What they are is a lid on a boiling pot of water. The more the water boils, the more the lid is pressed down. America is a pressure cooker right now because the ruling class keeps the lid firmly on, while cranking up the heat. They are under the delusion that if they can just keep it all locked inside, that lid firmly on the top, the whole will suddenly become one. They have been convinced that “E pluribus unum” is their calling, rather than a cheap slogan on our money.

Conservatives get grief for always saying that the solution for our troubles is to get back to our constitutional principles. They should get grief as what we need is to get back to the reason America exists at all. It is a land of people, lots of different people, not a people with a land. There can be local community and regional unity, but this is not a nation and it can never be a unified country. What will bring peace, is what always kept the peace. That is peaceful separation.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Great Stagger

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One of the curious things about the Roman Empire is how it managed to stagger on for so long after the second century. The third century is actually called The Crisis of the Third Century, because the empire was in chaos. Yet, the empire managed to get through that period and carry on for roughly two more centuries. In time, Historians will probably puzzle over the same question regarding America. How is that it staggers on despite the obvious problems?

A popular theme in science fiction is one where the human explorers stumble upon alien technology and they are baffled as to what it does. It’s not that they know the purpose but cannot figure out how to make it work. It’s that they don’t understand the purpose of the technology. The implication is that the aliens were so advanced that they were creating tools to solve problems humans have yet to contemplate. The gap between the aliens and humans is so great that it cannot be bridged.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind when thinking about the modern world. The evidence is pretty good that Western man is dumber than his ancestors. We have more overall knowledge than our ancestors, but our ability to add to it is in sharp decline along with our ability to use it. The people in charge now struggle to do the basics of government, like maintain order and the infrastructure. In America, streets are crumbling and there are regular power failures in parts of the country.

A good small-scale example is the city of Baltimore. All of the machinery that was put in place back when it was an important city is still in place. The people running that machinery today are not doing so well. They clearly lack the intellectual firepower to operate that machinery. Baltimore is one of the most dangerous cities in the world and it is suffering from a steady population decline. The political class is so incompetent they can’t even run the graft system properly.

This was all true before the Covid panic. One thing that kept Baltimore afloat was the tourist and sports industry. In the summer, tourists would come to the well-guarded inner harbor. People from the surrounding areas would come in for sports games and the surrounding restaurants. All of that was shuttered by the panic, which means the tens of millions in tax dollars never arrived. Then there is the cost of the Covid panic itself, which has further crippled the city administration.

When you look at many American cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Newark and so on, the question is not “How did they get to this point?” The question is, “How have they not collapsed by now?” Part of it, of course, is the surrounding infrastructure that keeps them propped up. In the case of Baltimore, the rest of the state is taxed to keep Baltimore City government going. Federal dollars pour in to keep the cops on the streets and the schools open for business.

That’s fine for cities, but that cannot work for the country as a whole. Like those cities, the national government is increasing incompetent. Both official political parties are in such steep decline that the next election will offer a choice between a carny barker and a dementia patient. The sober minded will always feels as if the current age sits on the shoulder’s of giants, but the gap between the best we have today and just a few generations ago is breathtaking.

The only thing the political elite is good at doing is keeping the public at one another’s throat over trivia. This is why Trump in President. His main skill as a politician is to stir the pot and cause outrage. He’s a terribly inflamed hemorrhoid on the political ass of the establishment. The upcoming circus over the Supreme Court nominee promises six weeks of television mayhem. The shouting and shrieking, of course, will be from the political class itself, not an outraged public.

One can dismiss that as “bread and circuses” but that does not explain how the country staggers on despite it all. For six months the government at all levels has been sabotaging the economy and civic life with the Covid panic. Tens of millions have been thrown out of work. No one knows how many businesses have closed for good due to the Covid lock downs. Food lines are popping up in the suburbs. How is it that none of this has resulted in civil unrest or at least a few protests?

Of course, no one can really know what is happening. The media told us over 50 million people were thrown out of work due to the panic. The empty streets seem to confirm it, but they also tell us unemployment is below 10%. The stock market has returned to the levels it was at before the panic. The media also tells us that the riots we saw over the summer were a figment of our imagination. How can anything work when no one can be sure of anything being told to them by the rulers?

Like Rome for close to three centuries, America staggers on, despite the problems and the decline of the ruling class. In the case of Rome, there was no organized force capable of toppling her. In the case of America, the global order assumes America will be the pivot point, the fulcrum on which order balances. As long as people are being fed and have shelter, they will not rise up to challenge the rulers. Like Rome, the great stagger will continue until the corpse of the empire collapses.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that when Rome was finally sacked by the Visogoths, the rest of the known world was stunned. St. Jerome wrote in grief, “If Rome can perish, what can be safe?” In other words, for a very long time people knew the empire was a shell of its former glory and Rome itself was no longer what it was. People just got used to the permanent state of decline. It was their normal. Most likely, American decline will become the new normal too.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Gathering Darkness

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Steve Sailer famously quipped that political correctness is a war on noticing. By which he meant noticing human diversity. Initially, this started out as a war on noticing bad things about groups of people. Then it slowly evolved into prohibitions on noticing general differences between groups of people. After all, it was said, all people evolved from the same source. This process has continued to the point where it is now forbidden to notice anything about people.

A good example is in this tweet from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is the premier peer-reviewed medical journal in the United States. Since the start of the Covid panic, it has been reported that blacks are more likely to contract the virus and more likely to need medical attention. This observation has been politicized, of course, but it is also a clue as to how the virus works. Naturally, there is money to find out why and scientific interest in the subject.

Given the racial unrest that has been manufactured by the nation’s elites, one would think that extra resources flowing into the care of black people would be celebrated by the great and good. If we are remaking movies, television shows and commercials to feature all black people, why not remake medical research too? As you can see from the replies, dogma trumps everything. While racism is a real thing, according to the one true faith, race is imaginary and racist.

The very first reply is emblematic of the modern age. It is from someone calling herself Rose Marie Leslie, MD. She claims to be a medical resident. On her twitter profile she lists the following: Top 20 docs on Social Media, Tiktok, Health Ed, Social Justice, Black Lives Matter and Repro Health. As if that was not enough self-parody, her comment was “Why are you spending the time and money on these studies instead of spending the time and money on fighting racism?”

Just below that comment we have a comment from someone calling herself Ramla N. Kasozi MD, MPH. They do not list their pronouns, so we must assume it is female, based on the profile picture. Mx. Ramla wrote, “An example of Biological Racism as discussed by Dr.@haw95 in her book ‘Medical Apartheid’ and Dr.@DrIbram book ‘How To Be Antiracist’.” According to Mx. Kasozi, noticing that Covid infects blacks more than whites is a form of racist experimentation.

In such a cornucopia of lunacy, it is hard to select the most bizarre, but the replies from someone calling herself Karen Gibbins, MD are a good nominee. Her first comment in the thread was, “Attributing genetic variants to race (which is socially constructed) is racist. Stop.” She then quickly replied to herself with, “And systemic racism is why there is why BIPOC are disproportionately harmed by COVID-19.” Racism, the cause of and cure for everything that is wrong in the world.

While these sorts of public displays of insanity are amusing, the salient issue here is the insane people highlighted are doctors. They work with real human patients in real medical settings. That means people are trusting doctors who think biology is imaginary and human diversity is a conspiracy. Given the histrionics, it is not implausible to think that a few of these people think sex is a social construct. Imagine being treated by someone who thinks your penis is a figment of your imagination.

The other salient issue is the panic that radiates from the replies. The mere mention of disconfirming data causes these people to panic. Their complaint is not about factual accuracy or medical efficacy. These are people deeply committed to a primitive animistic religion. This religion tells them that the world is controlled by various spirit forces, good and evil, engaged in a great struggle. Most important, their role in this great struggle is to fight the evil spirits.

Their commitment to this new faith is so complete that in the name of fighting racism, they would happily let blacks die from disease. If the price of helping the people they claim to care so much about is the acknowledgment that nature does not distribute her gifts equally among people or groups of people, then they are perfectly willing to see those people suffer and die. In fact, the suffering is a confirmation that these evil spirits are real and therefor the struggle is real.

The striking thing about this new faith is it is so primitive. These people are a very long way from the Christian looking up from Scripture and contemplating how God set the world in motion. These are people cowering in the darkness, deathly afraid to know what lies behind the movements of the world. Theirs is a world haunted by dread and foreboding, not a world of miracles to be explored. This is the great darkness that is settling on this age, the new dark age of the West.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount. With the holidays around the corner, you may be looking for a gift for the right-wing person in your life. If you click on this link, you get a fifteen percent discount on purchases. I know nothing about jewelry, but I have to say their stuff looks pretty cool. I’m a plain guy, so the subtlety of their designs appeals to my aesthetic. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com .

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Idle Hands

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The old expression, “idle hands do the Devil’s work” is one of those phrases that has lost much of its meaning in the modern age. One reason, of course, is the steady removal of Christianity from daily life. Few people attend church and Christianity has been removed from the public square by the ruling class. People look up for cultural cues, so a society run by secularists will be stripped of religious references. Still, the expression offers some insight into what currently vexes western societies.

Look around the typical large enterprise and what you will find is a lot of people engaged in what is best described as busy work. In the private sector, there are hundreds of job titles that have been invented for tasks that have very little, if anything, to do with the mission of the enterprise. These roles have either been created to meet a demand from government or they have been created to inoculate the firm against current cultural fads like diversity.

Of course, record numbers of people are employed by the state. Not all of them work directly for government. Many work in “private firms” but those private firms exist for only one customer, the government. The imperial capital is festooned with consultants who advise on things like the proper arrangement office furniture. There are thousands of firms owned by special people that exist just so vendors can meet their special people quota in government contracts.

When you factor in education and health care, probably a third of the workforce is engaged in work that is unnecessary. If not for the endless cultural pogroms and government mandates, these jobs would not exist. It’s just busy work for people who tick a box that needs to be ticked. Some significant portion of these people actually cause harm while performing their work. Human resource departments are fountains of trouble making at most companies.

A good example of how people engaged in pointless work create trouble for society is the Antifa professor Megan Squire. She is called a computer science professor at Elon University, but in reality, she is just a busy body with too much free time. When not teaching Python to South Asians, she spends her days listening to podcasts Antifa has deemed unacceptable. She writes down the names of people who appear on these shows and then publishes these lists in left-wing publications.

Now, Elon could fill the teaching role with a grad student or a contract instructor looking to make some extra money. Instead, her role is expanded to include “data science, cyber security, online extremism.” These days, anytime you see the phrases “data science” and “cyber security” in a job description it means the person is not engaged in meaningful work. Of course, “online extremism” is a nonsense phrase that has moral significance to the far-left, but is otherwise meaningless.

On her resume, Mx. Squire describes her work this way. “My main research focus is at the intersection of data mining, cybersecurity, and online communities. I actively develop data storage and measurement techniques for studying networks of toxicity, hate speech, racism, and extremism in online social spaces.” Currently she has a grant for the purpose of “Documenting, Disrupting, and Dismantling the “Alt-Tech” Streaming Funding Pipeline. This is what she does all day.

When you look at her profile at the university, the first sections look like the list of hobbies and interests from a middle aged woman on a dating site. These are not legitimate research areas and none of them qualify as computer science. An aging actress with a supply of box wine can do those things. The biggest section of her profile page is the media section. That’s the point of the position. Her job is to get attention by validating myths and legends popular on the far-left.

Mx. Squire is probably a nice person, who knows, but she is a good example of idle hands being the Devil’s workshop. In a better age, she would be the accounts receivable manager at a mid-sized company. Maybe an office manager with an associate’s degree in accounting. Because we have an excess of middling people, especially women, make-work is created for them in government, the academy, the media and the private sector. The Devil is spoiled for choice.

To make matters worse, this army of idle hands now has access to the rest of through mass media. Someone with the ridiculous title “data scientist” can inflict themselves on the rest of us by adding authority to other worthless people engaged in busy work that reinforces current fads. If the internet was shutdown tomorrow, millions would be thrown out of work, but the overwhelming majority of those people are now doing work that is either pointless or harmful to the well-being of society.

In an even better age, when women performed the role for which they evolved, this natural desire to nose around in the business of others would be put to use in maintaining the social capital of the community. Instead of studying “on-line extremism” our oversupply of data scientists would be supervising the children in their community and working with other women to maintain cultural norms. Instead, our oversupply of childless, middle-aged women is a plague upon society.

It is popular to forecast how automation will change society, but we have a pretty good idea about that now. Instead of a world of Eloi overindulging in recreation and pointless leisure activities, while the robots tend to our needs, the robot future will be waves of credentialed scolds lecturing everyone about nonsensical moral codes. Everywhere you turn will be a data scientist lecturing you about your speech. Instead of a world without work, it will be a world of idle hands doing the Devil’s work.

Media Note: I will be on tonight with Paul Gottfried and Joseph Cotto to celebrate the life of Ruth Buzzy Ginsberg and talk about the supreme court stuff. They are trying to drive up their YouTube subscriptions, so if you like the show please hit the subscribe button today. The more they get the subbed the higher they turn up in search results and other stuff that is important to YouTubers. Once there is a live link for the show I’ll post it here, Gab and on my Telegram.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount. With the holidays around the corner, you may be looking for a gift for the right-wing person in your life. If you click on this link, you get a fifteen percent discount on purchases. I know nothing about jewelry, but I have to say their stuff looks pretty cool. I’m a plain guy, so the subtlety of their designs appeals to my aesthetic. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com .

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Unconservatives

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The defining feature of Conservatism over the last quarter century or more is that it steadfastly refuses to consider the consequences of its dogma. In fact, part of its dogma is to reject any consideration of consequences. Conservatives proudly state that the means justifies the ends. If policy fits conservative ideology, then the results are by definition acceptable. You see that myopia at work in their latest fetish over zoning regulations in the suburbs and exurbs.

The American Conservative has been running posts like this one that claim the suburbs need to be exposed to predatory developers. The marketplace should decide if a chemical plant is built next to the school or a federally subsidized tenement is constructed in your town. After all, every conservative knows that the will of the marketplace is supreme. The only way for anything to be legitimate is if it is the result of the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Of course, National Review has also jumped onto this fetish. This post from last month in response to the Trump administration trashing some Obama era housing regulations demands the suburbs be deregulated. He also makes the conservative case for exposing local communities to the whim of developers. The irony here is the author lives in one of the most regulated suburbs on the planet. In fact, Northern Virginia would not exist as it does if not for the federal government.

Like the fetish for legalizing drugs or hardcore pornography, conservatives first start their case by rejecting the obvious consequences. Any consideration of the knock-on effects of public policy violate conservative dogma. The only thing that can matter is if these proposed polices square with what passes for conservative theory. In this case it means zero government involvement in the regulation of development. Property owners can do whatever they like with their property.

Of course, at this stage, conservative theory is barely distinguishable from libertarian theory, which is nothing more than a pose. It is a way to stand on the sidelines and pretend to hold the moral high ground. In this case it means avoiding the real issue at play in this story. That is the systematic blockbusting of white suburbs by the Left through the use of federal housing regulations. They are trying to dump non-white populations into white suburbs in the name of retributive justice.

Rather than think about that, because that is scary and icky, the modern conservative focuses on the theoretical aspects of the issue. Like the reformer in Chesterton’s fence, they refuse to wonder why this is an issue. They refuse to ponder why the Obama people were doing what they were doing or why local communities have been fighting these efforts over the years. None of that matters. As is true with all ideologues, all that matters is the ideological conformity.

The irony here is that what passes for conservatism today is pretty much the opposite of what conservatism has meant historically. Conservatism has always prized continuity, as that is the result of generations of trial and error. Change must come slowly and deliberately with proper consideration for local customs and concerns. Modern conservatism is the embrace of constant change, the whirlwind of the marketplace, in total disregard for community and custom.

Another part of that embrace of continuity is the point of Chesterton’s fence. The conservative not only knows there are consequences to every reform, but those consequences will have consequences as well. It’s not that the Right is adept at seeing the downstream consequences of the proposed reform, but that they know we cannot always see far enough downstream to truly know the second order effects of the proposed reform. Prudence is chief among virtues.

Getting back to housing policy, what we do know is the Left is not acting from republican virtue when they propose changes to the law. They are animated by anti-white hatred and the quest for retributive justice. That is the starting assumption when examining any proposed reform from the Left. Therefore, the conservative must look at how best to prevent the consequences the Left imagines. In this case, how best to prevent the Left from devastating the white suburbs.

As to the issue of property rights, this is another example of how modern conservatism is an inversion of what conservatism has meant historically. Conservatives have always understood that rights are the product of human society. Citizens have rights and one cannot be a citizen unless they are part of a society. Therefore, the good of the community comes before the individual. This is why no right is absolute. There are always situations in which rights give way to the public good.

This is the case of local control of development. The people in the community live in the community, which means they live with the consequences of how members dispose of their property. They get a say in that. Ideally, this is a light touch that relies on the moral scruples of the community members, but when that fails, the collective good of the community must prevail. Further, the rights of the outsider, the developer, do not exist, because the developer lives outside the community.

It is popular to call the modern conservative controlled opposition. There is some truth to it for sure, as many are paid by left-wing media organizations. For most of them, they are just part of another tentacle of the managerial octopus. Some tentacles lash at the body of society, while others, like this one, try to cut off oxygen to the brains of otherwise conservative people. The hope is they will sacrifice themselves and their community in the name of abstract principles.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

American Pericles

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A popular topic among those less optimistic about the American Experiment is to compare America to Rome, either the republic or empire. The former camp looks for the Sulla in the past and the Caesar in the future. The latter camp looks for evidence that the American Empire is in its final days, like fifth century Rome. The trouble with comparing America to Rome is it is not a republic. It has not been since Gettysburg and is now something closer to a radical democracy.

The more accurate historical analogy for modern America is ancient Athens. While America is not quite yet a radical democracy, that is the current path. Soon the electoral college will be circumvented, so that presidents are elected directly. The Senate was democratized a century ago. The franchise is universal and will soon extend to anyone currently standing on American soil. The last ragged bits of republic will soon be gone and America will be a radical democracy.

Just as the wealthy and powerful in Athens assumed democracy worked best when they controlled it, the American oligarchs favor democracy because they believe it insulates them from the public. The factions at the top are prevented from open warfare because they have a common enemy, the general welfare. Thus, they are always willing to cooperate in order to maintain their position, even if it means one faction gains at some small expense to another faction.

Probably the most important man in the history of the Athenian democracy was Pericles, the first citizen of Athens, as Thucydides called him. He was a statesman and general of Athens during the time between the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars, which is usually called the Athenian golden age. He turned the Delian League, which was a federation of city-states, into an Athenian empire and led the fight against Sparta during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War.

What is often overlooked about Pericles is that he is responsible for the structures we now associate with ancient Athens. He began the public works projects to beautify the city, including the building of the Parthenon. Most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis, in fact, were the work of Pericles. It is possible that ancient Greece would have no hold on the western mind if not for those old ruins. What we think of when we think of ancient Athens is mostly from the time of Pericles.

Is there an analog to Pericles in the American narrative? The place to start would be Lincoln, who should be called the founder of America or possibly the re-founder or second founder. Lincoln destroyed the old republic and set the country off on the path of becoming a democracy. In one sentence, thirty words, Lincoln re-positioned the country to rest upon the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution and the history and debates that surrounded its creation.

The trouble is, Lincoln was not much of a democrat and he was no voice of the people, as was the case with Pericles. Lincoln really was not all that fond of the black people he was freeing from bondage. It is not clear that Lincoln fully understood the ramifications of his project. He certainly could not foresee his creation becoming first a continental empire then a global empire in less than a century. He may not have fully grasped the radicalism and ramifications that was contained in his Gettysburg speech.

That’s another important aspect of Pericles that is relevant to this age. He knew exactly what he was doing and he understood the nature of Athenian democracy. He was often accused of being a populist and a potential tyrant by the rich and powerful, because he so carefully courted the approval of the masses. Much of what he accomplished was in the face of resistance from what we would call the ruling classes of Athens. Pericles fully understood his projects and its significance.

Pericles was also committed to the general welfare. His first building project was the walls guarding the city of Athens. This had two consequences, in addition to protecting the city from attack. One is it put people to work. Rather than depending upon the generosity of the wealthy for such endeavors, the people could now count on the state to provide work on these projects. The other is it protected the poor in the city, but left the landed estates outside the city exposed.

The most obvious example of such a politician in American history would be Franklin Roosevelt, as he ushered in the federal public works project. It is easy to forget just how radical the Roosevelt administration was in America. The mobilization of the public in the face of the depression was unprecedented. For close to a century now, it is assumed that the federal government is responsible for the welfare of the people, rather than the states or powerful local interests.

Another interesting parallel between FDR and Pericles is that while both men were high born, from powerful families, they were opposed by the ruling classes. One of the great political dramas in golden age of Athens was the struggle between Thucydides, the leader of the conservative faction, not the historian, and Pericles over spending on projects like the Parthenon. Pericles outmaneuvered and outwitted Thucydides and the conservatives to win public approval for his projects.

Similarly, FDR faced a great deal of resistance to his projects. Factions in his own coalition objected to part of his program, while conservatives tried to bottle up his plans in the courts. Like the opposition to Pericles, the opposition to FDR was also keenly aware that there was a foreign policy element to the debate. The support for FDR’s domestic program was tied to support for his policies toward Europe. In fact, his domestic program was essential to his foreign policy.

Another possible candidate as the American Pericles would be the combined administration of Kennedy and Johnson. The space program is probably the closest thing America has to the Acropolis. The reforms of Johnson, which were largely created by the Kennedy people, haunt us to this day. Given the current unrest and the demographics of the country, it is not unreasonable to think that America will never escape the shadow of the Johnson administration.

Donald Trump, of course, could be the modern Pericles. He is not a great orator, but Trump has an uncanny ability to resonate with the public, both good and bad. He’s also a high-born man who sees himself as the defender of the public. No president has shown a greater concern for the general welfare since FDR. Unlike FDR, but like Pericles, Trump is faced with a ruling class committed to stopping him. As with Pericles, their opposition is strongly linked to foreign policy.

One other way to look at this is that in a democracy of any sort, the Pericles role is an essential one, as is the role of the oligarchs. Lacking the legal structures to balance between the natural factions in society, particularly the rich versus the general public, democracy evolves these roles in the form of charismatic politicians. Whenever the relationship between the people and their rulers gets out of balance, men step forward on behalf of both sides to reestablish an equilibrium

Of course, the other significance of the life of Pericles is that after his death, Athens was plagued by inferior men, inciting the worst habits in the public and only concerned with personal popularity. The inability of Athenian democracy to produce statesmen close to the quality of Pericles marked the end of the Golden Age of Athens and led to defeat at the hands of the Spartans. The run of politicians since FDR, with the exception of Reagan, is another useful parallel to consider.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Arc Of White

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One of the distinguishing features of politics in the American Empire is the phenomenon of white populism. This is something that emerged in the middle of the last century with the establishment of the American Empire after World War II. Every generation has experienced a wave of populist unrest, always in reaction to some reform movement initiated by the white elites. The elites act and the white working and middle classes react.

The first example of this was the white populist revolts in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960’s Cultural Revolution. Whites in the South reacted to the destruction of segregation. This was followed by a revolt by northern whites over things like forced busing and the cultural upheaval. This set off the great political realignment where southern whites and northern ethnics migrated from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party in the 60’s and 70’s.

Another white populist revolt started with the de-industrialization of the country starting in the 70’s and accelerating into the 80’s. The rapid conversion of the economy from manufacturing to retail and services continued the political realignment that started in the 60’s. The so-called Reagan Democrats were mostly the people who had voted for Nixon, but this time they moved the GOP for good. This was also the start of the gap between the knowledge economy and the labor economy.

The current crisis is another wave of white populism. This time it is in reaction to the continued looting of the middle-class economy by the global elites, but also the betrayals of the Bush years and the Kulturkampf of the Obama years. Large numbers of whites in American have come to the conclusion that the political and economic elites are at war with them. The election of Trump in 2016 is one obvious result, but the hysterical and now violent reaction of the elites is another.

The thing about these waves of white populism is they follow the same pattern; despite the fact the triggering events are different and the times are different. There are some obvious parallels between what is happening now and what happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but modern America is nothing like the America of the 60’s. In fact, the people of that age would not recognize this age as America. Despite the enormous differences in culture and demographics, the pattern is the same.

One aspect of every white populist spasm has been that it gets funneled into a form of legitimate politics. The conservative movement of Bill Buckley, for example, tapped into white populism in order to get professional conservatives into office. Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy was an explicit attempt to get disaffected white voters in the South to abandon their allegiance to the Democrat Party. Legitimate politics promised these voters a remedy to the assault on their culture.

The rise of Evangelical conservatism in the 70’s and 80’s was another effort to funnel white unrest into legitimate politics. Christians logically figured that if they organized politically, politicians would seek their vote. They would get the vote by addressing their concerns about things like abortion, family law and education. Of course, the Tea Party Movement and now the MAGA stuff are more efforts by whites to defend themselves through the legitimate political process.

Another thing all of these right-wing populist movements have in common is they failed to get anything for their efforts. Nixon did nothing to address the concerns of Southern whites over desegregation. He was happy to let them think he was on their side, but Nixon was more focused on gaining acceptance from official Washington. Reagan delivered for corporate interests and the military industrial complex, but never got around to doing anything for social conservatives.

Today we are seeing the same thing with Trump. His reelection depends entirely on whites coming out to vote for him for symbolic reasons. He will not deliver anything useful to white voters, but he will be a constant irritant to the elites. In fact, the only practical reason to vote for Trump in November is his reelection will send the elites into orbit and they could harm their own efforts. Otherwise, like Nixon and Reagan, Trump will deliver nothing for white populists.

The one new wrinkle to this process is that after the Cold War, many Republicans became hostile to white populists. The purging of the paleocons by the neocons in the 1990’s realigned the party away from populism. Most Republicans, for example, were openly hostile to the Tea Party movement. Trump’s biggest problem in Washington is his own party, which hates him as much as the Left hates him. So-called conservatives are fully onboard with multiculturalism now.

Of course, white populism has always had another outlet. That is the path of what can loosely be called white nationalism. In the 1960’s, people like George Lincoln Rockwell and William Pierce tried to tap into white populism to promote racial awareness among disaffected whites. Theirs was an anti-politics, in that it rejected the political system itself as illegitimate. Rather than try to mobilize people to elect better politicians, they wanted to organize people to create a new system.

In the case of Rockwell, it got nutty and then it got bloody. He tried selling Nazism to a country still proud of defeating the Nazis in WWII. The absurdity of his presentation got him plenty of attention, but that did more harm than good. He attracted a lot of weirdos and lunatics to his banner. He ended up taking two in the hat outside a laundromat, but even all these years later, the Left finds him to be a useful example to wave in front of bourgeois whites as a warning about white nationalism.

This is a pattern that has repeated in every spasm of white populism. The white nationalist lane is divided into one sober minded track and one eccentric and often dangerous track. William Pierce was a genuine intellect who understood the larger problems facing white people in America. He could never figure out how to break free of the eccentrics like Rockwell in order to attract a broader audience. The result was white nationalism became an insulated subculture.

This pattern repeated in the 1980’s. People like David Duke and Don Black came out of the Rockwell experience with the hope of breaking out of the white nationalism trap and addressing a general audience. Instead, Duke ended up being a less bizarre version of Rockwell and his movement was plagued by criminals and weirdos. After some national attention in the 1980’s, as well as some white nationalist violence, this phase of white nationalism faded into an insulated subculture.

In this current wave, the pattern has held. The alt-right started as a genuine populist revolt on-line among younger white males. The anonymity and irreverence of on-line culture gave them a way to express their unhappiness with modernity. The alt-right tapped into that, but like prior white nationalist spasms, this one was overrun by eccentrics and criminals. This time, the preppy airhead, Richard Spencer, was the clown prince used by the Left in their presentations.

As an aside, white nationalism in America has tracked the technological changes in the country over the last fifty years. The first iteration was banned from conventional media platforms, so it relied on things like newsletters and shortwave radio. The second iteration was the first to use the internet to build an on-line culture. Stormfront really was an innovation in political organizing. This last phase is confined to private internet channels, podcasts and live-streams.

Taken as a whole, the pattern is clear. These spasms of white populism in reaction to social experimentation by elites or changes in the economic order always end up going down two dead end paths. One is conventional politics, always through existing political channels, like the GOP. The other is white nationalism, which always ends up in a circus of attention seeking eccentrics, who are easily exploited by the Left. It is two roads that lead to the same dead end.

Interestingly, these two tracks always end up convinced that the other track is a dead end populated by losers. Today, many of the MAGA people invest as much time in rejecting the bad whites as they do supporting their cause. The remnants of the alt-right, in the name of white people, invest much of their time attacking white people, their history and their customs. Many of them sound anti-American to most people. Their rhetoric is decidedly leftist and hostile to American traditions.

The logical way out of this trap is something William Pierce recognized, but was never able to implement. That is, white populism needs to be channeled into a bourgeois politics that attracts high quality people who understand the problem is the system itself, rather than the office holders. In other words, it borrows the central insights of white nationalism, but provides it with a cultural and historical framework that appeals to the mass of middle-class white people.

Whether such a movement can get going is open to debate. The history of white populism is now a nightmare from which we cannot awake. Any effort to speak of white interests brings all of the usual suspects from past failed efforts into the mix. It’s as if all the parties enjoy playing the roles that have been created for them. The arc of white politics in America is looking like an immutable law of nature. It may require whites reaching minority status for the pattern to break.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Echo Chamber

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For generations now, the mass media has referred to itself as the echo chamber or the media echo chamber, at least with regards to politics. A favorite politician or pundit says something pithy or useful and the media repeats it verbatim until everyone is sick of hearing it. After the 2010 midterms, Barak Obama used the word “shellacked” as in his team was “shellacked”, and the media repeated it every hour for days as if it was wisdom sent down from the heavens.

This was an incite the Clinton crime syndicate figured out how to use to their advantage back in the 1990’s. They would come up with some slogan they wanted to get the media repeating. They would then have their mouth pieces repeat the line over and over in their media appearances. The media would get the hint and then start repeating the slogan over and over. What they essentially did is weaponize the natural conformity of the mass media and use it as a propaganda organ.

The best example of this is the Russian conspiracy stuff from 2016. For weeks DNC e-mails had been leaked on various forums. The media had been instructed to ignore them, but people were reading them anyway. Eventually, Team Clinton came up with the idea of blaming it on Russian hackers. They sent out someone to brief the press on the campaign plane. It was like she had a strange form of Tourette’s. She just kept saying “Russian hacking” like a lunatic.

The fact that it works says a lot of about this age. There are people in the media and in charge of the media operations that understand this ploy. You would think someone would call shenanigans on this once in a while, but it never happens. That’s because the handful of people who control these big media operations think it benefits their long-term project. The people working as reporters are just carny-folk now, willing to say and do anything to keep their acting gig.

Another way the media echo chamber is used to attack the well-being of the public is through the use of manufactured evidence and phony experts. The “gun show loophole” is a perfect example. There is no such thing as a gun show loophole in our gun laws, but the media repeats the lie, anyway. The reason is the Left supplies so-called experts to repeat the lie and wave around fake data in support of it. As a result, we have a label for something that does not actually exist.

The fictional threat of this moment is white supremacy, which no one bothers to define, but the media is sure exists. The echo chamber is regularly fed nonsense stuff like this from so-called think tanks. In the first sentence we see several obvious lies, but they will be echoed by the media. The expectation is that the Biden campaign will program their candidate to repeat some of this stuff, so the media will then repeat it for a few weeks after, to drive home the message.

This is not an accident. This particular scheme is a highly coordinated effort orchestrated by the usual suspects. Not only do we have Daniel Byman at Brookings, but there is his old friend Joshua Geltzer from the Obama administration, now working for a “New America.” Mentioned by Brookings as an expert in support of their claim is Heidi Beirich of the SPLC. She claims to be an expert in extremism, but presumably not extreme fitness, some other kinds of extremism.

Putting aside the obvious fact that none of the people behind the white supremacy propaganda campaign were altar boys, they also all have that weird obsession with Russia that keeps turning up. In this case, they are making the claim that the imaginary white supremacists are in league with the invisible army of Russian agents called the Russian Imperialist Movement. The absurdity of calling them white supremacist is apparently lost on these people.

Stand back and look at this as a whole and we have paranoia over white supremacy, which is entirely fictional. Then you have all the Russian conspiracy stuff, which is mostly fictional. Russia, like every country on earth, has an active interest in the empire, so they try to lobby for their interests. They are not bribing American politicians or planting listening devices outside the White House, but they have their espionage services like every country.

While the media echo chamber is useful in promoting the narrow interests of groups like the Clinton crime syndicate, it is highly susceptible to subversion by people with agendas at odds with the usual suspects. That’s the real reason behind these spasmodic efforts to censure right-wing voices. It is not hard for clever right-wing groups to use social media to meme their ideas into the echo chamber and have them rocket around the internet.

That is the weakness of the media echo chamber. It works when it appears to be organic and natural. If it looks contrived, it actually works against the people trying to influence the public. Leaving it open makes it more effective for the people in charge, but it also makes it useful for their opponents. Closing it off makes the tool useless to the owner, as well as the opponents. There is no middle ground that works for the usual suspects, but not for their enemies.

What this means is the efforts to censure the public square will become less overt in the coming years. Banning people and manipulating search results is too ham-fisted to work in the modern age. Instead, contrived terror campaigns like the “white supremacy” stuff or the Russia paranoia will become the norm. The echo chamber will be flooded with this stuff, in an effort to drown out dissent. The echo chamber is about to be a bell rung by the same people all day every day.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Turn Off, Tune Out And Drop Out

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Television is the great propaganda weapon of the liberal democratic state, so it is a useful window into the thinking of the oligarchs. Movies and television shows still have to attract an audience, so they are usually the trailing edge of whatever the oligarchs are trying to impose on society, but the ads are a different matter. They are the leading edge of the latest Progressive fads. They know people will not abandon a show or movie just because the ads are offensive.

That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.

This is why the ad makers were ready for the aggressive push to support the Black Lives Matter stuff after George Floyd died from an overdose. It is the thing that gets no attention, but should be the focus. Within days of the event, even before the rioters were in the streets, every global corporation was running diversity ads. The television services had all their blaxploitation films and shows ready. They even changed their graphical interfaces to feature black stuff.

It takes weeks and months to put together a simple ad. The concept has to be settled and the story boards created. Then there is filming, editing and final production. A corporate marketing program takes months to get ready. Changing the look and feel of the TV streaming service to feature blacks is no small feat. Creating a useful list of “black creators” should take a week or two, but they had it all ready to go. This pogrom was in the works for months.

In large part this is why Black Lives Matter initially had lots of white support, despite its record of murder and mayhem. Just four years ago BLM was executing cops, but thanks to a barrage of ads, most people forgot that and were initially inclined to support the cause. Then the black protesters reminded everyone why Africa is not the high point of human progress. The ad makers have now shifted the diversity message to feature homosexuals, deviants and girls playing male roles.

That’s really where you get a clear look into the mind of the oligarchs. This ad for the Marine Corp is getting revived in time for the election. When the ad was produced three years ago, the official line was that the Marines made the ad because they were facing pressure from women to let the girls go into combat units. That’s a lie, of course, as no women want to go into combat. Most men don’t want to see combat. Lying, however, is the core of advertising and the modern media.

The ad, of course, is disgusting. The thought of sending mothers and daughters into combat should make a decent person wretch. People at the edge of extinction turn their future into weapons of war. The ancients defined the barbarians, in part, by their habit of bringing their women and children to the battle. Of course, the absurdity of this little girl in combat is impossible to miss. Ad makers can normalize just about anything, but even they are bounded by reality.

You’ll note that the ad makers always use white women when they are trying to convince girls to be boys. Non-whites always get portrayed in traditional roles or they are cast as the natural leaders. The military ads always have the blacks in command positions or as the heroic example of the military code. That’s what they are selling to the non-whites they are targeting. Apparently, the oligarchs think they can patrol the empire with a Tinkerbell army run by 90-IQ officers.

Obviously, that will never happen. It does, however, reveal that these people are not geniuses who have carefully thought this through. They are caught up in nutty fads of their own creation, that sweep them along like flotsam. You see that with the response to the riots this summer. These idiot mayors, in places like Minneapolis and Portland, really thought they would be the heroes of these stories. They believed the agit-prop produced by the cult of social justice.

Even so, there are long term consequences to the culture war waged on the television screens of America. White males have been mostly removed from advertising, unless they are the fool or the supplicant. Blacks have been turned into objects of worship, largely due to television and advertising. This absurd sense of entitlement by blacks is one consequence. The negrophilia by many whites is another. It is not beyond the pale to use the term “ethnic cleansing” for what we are seeing.

At the peak of the 1960’s cultural revolution, Timothy Leary popularized the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out” as a way to convince people to detach from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society. Of course, he was peddling degeneracy and self-abuse to whites, but the advice actually makes a lot of sense as an antidote to what the oligarchs are doing to us now. Disconnecting from the system as much as possible places you beyond the tractor beam of the propaganda organs.

This is the irony of this phase of the cultural revolution. What was initially pitched as a counter culture movement, was really a war on heritage America by the newly ascendant managerial class. The way to overthrow this decrepit and degenerate ruling class is to take their old advice. White people need to detach from the existing conventions and hierarchies that support the oligarchs. We need a counter culture that turns off, tunes out and eventually drops out.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Their Summer Of Discontent

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One of the stranger parts of the summer of left-wing violence is that no one has bothered to think too much about why the people are rioting. Sure, the official Left says it is an organic uprising over something or other. The official Right says these people are communists doing communisms. That’s the same old tired sloganeering we hear from the political class all the time. Neither claim gets to the question of why these people are out in the streets every night in certain cities.

Initially, the Black Lives Matter stuff was just the semi-organized Democratic Party street activism we have come to expect before an election. BLM was organized by the Obama administration on the college campuses. Then it bled into the legacy racial grievance rackets. The statue toppling after George Floyd overdosed in police custody was mostly paid for by the party trying to whip up black support. Then it gave way to the anarchy we are seeing in places like Seattle and Portland.

That’s an aspect that gets very little attention. The violence we are seeing is in mostly white cities by mostly white people. Minneapolis is 19% black. Seattle is 7% black and Portland is 6% black. Kenosha is 10% black and close to 80% white! Note that super-black cities like Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit have had no riots. Los Angeles, which just had a police shooting, could not get a decent riot going. They tried, but they lack the white kids with back packs needed to do it.

The truth behind these riots is that they have nothing to do with local issues or legitimate grievances. They are simply a happening that is drawing in the disaffected white youth that provides bodies for Antifa. Get up close to an Antifa crowd and what is striking is how unimpressive they are individually. The males are skinny and awkward, while the females are loud and ridiculous. These are young whites who have no place in the neo-liberal order, so they end up in Antifa.

What being in the anarchist underground gives them is the same thing you see in other types of anti-social subcultures. They get a sense of purpose, but also a community in which they have a clearly understood place. They go out and protests or riot with their mates and then have that to bond over afterward. It is not all that different from the hooliganism you see around European soccer. The difference is the Antifa kids come from the middle-class, rather than the working class.

Now, calling them kids is not entirely accurate. The guy who murdered the Trump fan in Portland is a middle-aged man. Still, he is a good example of a larger phenomenon that is fueling anarchism and also fueled the alt-right to some degree. This is a guy who has no place to go in life. There’s no role for a low-normal intelligence white guy with a taste for action. He’s probably too dumb for the military and there is no working-class community for him, so he drifted into anarchism.

The cities that are experiencing the anarchist unrest should be models for the modern liberal democratic order. They have very low crime. They are prosperous, bourgeois urban areas based on the new economy. The young people have access to college and jobs, while living in carefully curated hipster areas. Portland is what east coast cities aspire to, in terms of demographics and urban renewal. The whole point of gentrification has been to look more like Seattle than The Bronx.

The problem is these cities are entirely synthetic. Walk around hipster parts of these model cities and they seem very nice, but they also feel like the suburban town centers developers create for their housing developments. You can’t put your finger on it, but something is missing. Granted, visitors can’t truly judge these things, but the constant civil unrest by the younger people suggests they are not happy with the paradise in the wilderness either. Progressive Whitopia is not working.

Related is the flight out of places like San Francisco and New York. The plague is being blamed for it. The man-made panic shutting down these cities is forcing people to find greener pastures. Note, however, that the people who flocked to these urban oases for the culture, lifestyle and urban living are unwilling to fight for it. Instead of taking to the streets demanding more from their mayors, they are just packing the Subaru and heading for the suburbs. It was all fake and temporary for them.

What we may be seeing this summer has nothing to do with the tired clichés from the worn-out political establishment. Instead it is one of the consequences of trying to turn America into a Potemkin village. Replacing social capital with likes on social media and pointless employment in the new economy is not working. The generation that created it is committing suicide at record numbers. The generation that is faced with living it would rather watch it all burn than participate in it.

A truth of the human condition is men need purpose and fraternity. Maybe it is the military and family life. Maybe it is a frat at college and then a career. Maybe it is the job site and the local pub. Women need community and companionship. The nuclear family was created for them. The liberal democratic world order does none of these things for people. Living atomized, pointless lives among constantly shifting groups of strangers is a recipe for disaster, not paradise.

What’s now happening on the Left is a reflection of what has been happening in the white working and middle-classes. Progressive politicians cheer it on, because at some level, they wish they could be in the streets too. The mayor of Portland is living a pointless existence and he knows it. The difference is these anarchists get to express their unhappiness outside. Working class whites are ignored and the white middle class is threatened into remaining quiet.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!