Category Archives: Culture

Thoughts On Kenosha

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Kenosha Wisconsin has now become the pivot point for the revolution from above being waged on middle America. Riots have convulsed the city for three nights since a violent black rapist was shot by police after resisting arrest. Large swaths of the city have been burned as the mayor cheered on the rioters. This led to the shooting of three rioters by a 17-year old kid, who volunteered to help defend the property owners. The video of the incident has become a world-wide sensation.

Of course, this being Jim Snow America, the white kid is now charged with capital murder and faces life in prison. White people who kill in self-defense get charged with capital murder, while blacks who kill for sport are allowed to go free. You see, the former is exercising white privilege and is guilty of being white. The latter, on the other hand, is the victim of white privilege and is justifiably angry. In post-reality America, privilege means being stripped of your rights and dignity.

If Kyle Rittenhouse was a black or an immigrant from the third world or even a transexual, he would not be in jail right now. He would be held up as a hero by the mainstream media. President Trump would send Air Force One to bring him to Washington for a special ceremony. Speakers at the RNC convention would be told to mention his name in their speeches. He is white, so no one at the convention will mention his name. They have not mentioned Cannon Hinnant either.

Unlike other cases where the media can suppress the truth while spreading lies, this time the truth was all over the internet before the media could act. As soon as it happened, social media had video of the attack on Rittenhouse. He fell to the ground as violent criminals attacked him and he opened fire on them. There can be no narrative in which he is the villain. He may have been naive, but he was simply following the civic nationalist code and doing what he thought was his duty.

This is Jim Snow America. A white kid following the rules is guilty, no matter what the facts say, so he sits in prison. His family started a defense fund on Go Fund Me, but it was immediately taken down. Again, in Jim Snow America, whites are not allowed to avail themselves of the resources for self-defense. The system will now wage war on this kid’s family in order to prevent them from defending their son. In Jim Snow America, white people just have to take it.

It is an infuriating reality, for sure. In a better world, the mayor of Kenosha would already be swinging from a tree. The good people of that city would have remembered the words of Jefferson and fertilized their tree of liberty. Of course, in a sane society, it would never have come to this. There would be no riots sponsored by the ruling class, so Kyle Rittenhouse would not have felt the need to go out in the streets. The reason all of this happened is the rulers made it happen.

As infuriating as it may be, it is this reality that must shine through. Those old rules you were taught about the law and your rights as an America no longer exist. They certainly don’t exist if you are white. If you are white, the system sees you as an enemy and will spare no expense in attacking you. The reason Kyle Rittenhouse sits in jail is no one told him this. Instead, internet warriors playing tough guy on-line encouraged him to be a man of action.

This is why people who like saying “well, at least he is doing something” need to be shouted down at every opportunity. These are people who think every cause needs martyrs, just as long as they are not the martyr, so they encourage everyone else to be foolishly brave. Like James Fields, we have another naive and impressionable young white man facing life in a cage, because he was convinced that doing something is always better than doing nothing.

This is just one aspect of a larger point that white people need to grasp. None of this would be happening if not for the political class. The Kenosha police department has tanks and armored vehicles. They have highly trained tactical units that are trained by Israel special forces officers. The Kenosha police force could invade a small country, but they are nowhere to be found during these riots. The reason they are absent is the politicians have ordered them to let the riots rage.

This is what makes Kenosha a pivot point in the ruling class revolt. This kid is not a scary monster who can be anathematized by the system. Even vulgarians like David Frum think he looks innocent. Note that Frum is okay giving weapons to these kids when they are killing Muslims on behalf of Israel, but otherwise he never wants to see white people holding firearms. For the typical white person, if he had a son, he would look like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Ultimately, that is now the significance of the Kenosha riots. White people are faced with the reality of their sons being sent to prison for the crime of being white. They face having their businesses destroyed because non-whites are ungrateful. They are being harassed at restaurants and in their home by mobs sponsored by the ruling class who have embraced anti-whiteness as a revolutionary cause. It’s no longer an abstract political argument. It’s daily reality.

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 End Of The Beginning

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For months now, the more cynical have suggested the lock downs will continue into the fall, as the hysteria has become something of a religion. The facts on the ground are useful to the panic party in so far as they can be used to support the idea that this plague is a curse sent from nature because of Trump. They hope the self-inflicted suffering will purge the lands of orange come November. Word now comes that they plan to cancel college football this week.

There’s no public health reason for cancelling college sports this fall or for keeping the kids of campus, which many colleges are doing. Many colleges will be on-line only this fall, meaning it will be a full year of virtual learning for their students. It was not that long ago when these very same colleges said on-line learning was terrible. Students needed personal interaction with their teachers and fellow students. Like so much that comes from the Left, that was true only while it was useful.

As far as college football, the plan was to minimize attendance at the games and make sure the players were tested on a daily basis. The only thing missing from the regime was daily dips into vats of hand sanitizer. Despite it all, the people who run big time college sports have been bullied into shutting down. This should put to rest that the people behind this stuff are motivated by money or power. They are tossing away billions and their grip on millions of people’s attention.

Sport has always been a window into what lies behind the general culture. In this case, the plight of sport reflects what is happening in society as a whole. The efforts to restart professional baseball, basketball and hockey have been a disaster, because the stripped-down versions lack essential ingredients. Like everything else about a big complicated society, sport evolved over time to work a certain way. Rebooting it without essential elements like a live audience does not work.

The people running the NBA and NHL are a reflection of the people running the country as a whole. They have the problem all outsiders have, in that they see the parts of society and can navigate through them, but they can’t see the invisible bonds that hold those parts in relation to one another. Their scheme to restart their respective sports made sense to them on paper, but to the rest of us it is like trying to impose the metric system or soccer. It’s alien and weird.

There’s also the social aspect to the popularity of sports. Football became the dominant sport because it is the best television sport. It was the one thing people could talk about at the office with no problems. It’s why so many companies encouraged their people to sport the colors of the hometown team on casual Friday. The popularity of sports like football had as much to do with their place in the social fabric as their popularity as an entertainment product. Big time sports fill a social niche.

The people in charge predicted people were suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome and that the return of any sports would be a success. Instead, baseball, basketball and hockey are not drawing much interest. People moved on in the short time those sports were off the air. Football will most likely face the same fate if it goes dark this autumn. Sports passion is like a fire. It requires constant tending and fuel in order to keep burning. Once it goes out, it stays out.

What’s happening with sports also puts to bed the notion that the people in charge are playing 4-D chess in order to maintain their power. Keeping white people locked into sports watching was always about crowd control. Nowhere is egalitarianism and anti-racism sold harder to more white people than at a sporting event. It is the one place where multiculturalism appears to work. Take that away and normal white people are left to watch white radicals and black activists riot in the cities.

What lies ahead for sports entertainment, maybe all big-time entertainment, is what small business is facing right now. Every business has a cost structure that reflects its revenue stream. Seasonal business has seasonable const structures. Small business has low cost structures. Global sport has a cost structure that requires millions to spend billions every year. Suddenly, owning a big fancy sports arena is not such a great idea in a world where large gatherings are prohibited.

There is a general assumption that the Covid stuff comes to an end with either the defeat of Trump in November or one final tantrum in January if he wins. At that point, the practical reality of life will force this charade to come to an end. That’s true, most likely, for this phase of the process. Economic necessity will force the people in charge to relent or civil unrest will force it. Unless this is really a simulation and the base code has been altered, this cannot continue much longer.

That’s just the end of this phase. The breaking of the sports entertainment model will have far reaching consequences. Tens of millions of people will fill in the gaps left by tailgates, trips to the alma mater, weekend parties glued to the television and billions spent on sports entertainment. All of a sudden, the sort of liberal guy you used to talk to about the football team is not a guy you talk to at all. Instead of talking to the conservative guy about sports, you talk about other stuff.

Even the most basic human societies are a highly complex web of interpersonal relationships that operate within a hard to define thing we call culture. A big diverse country like America has a degree of complexity that we cannot comprehend, other than to have the wisdom to accept that reality. The people in charge have thrown sand in all the gears of the machinery, machinery that has allowed them to rise to the top of the social hierarchy. Sports will soon be the least of their problems.

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!

Mask Madness

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The petty tyranny of the Covid panic has gone from a genuine response to a public health concern to just another aspect of post-sanity America. People now wear all sorts of silly face coverings when going about their day for the same reason they wear pants or shoes. It’s just another thing that is required. Soon, it will be custom, like not wearing white before Memorial Day. The ever changing rules issued from local tyrants are now taken in stride like, the weather or earthquakes in California.

The mask issue is another great example of how American politics is just a morality play with the same roles every time. The Official Left strutted onto the stage warning about the great monster and how the democracy was at risk. Their solution was mandatory mask wearing like their sponsors in China use. The Official Right tried to minimize the issue and resisted for a while, but the Official Left whipped up their partisans in the crowd and the Official Right eventually relented.

Meanwhile, out in the crowd, the partisans of the Left now feel emboldened to harass people on the streets about masks, distancing and so forth. Normal people, of course, are still stuck in the world of facts and reason, but they are adjusting to life in a past-sanity world. A similar pattern happened with homosexual marriage. Normal people still think it is ridiculous, just as they think men in sundresses is absurd, but they navigate around it and the crazies that support it.

Unlike homosexual marriage and drag queens, the petty tyranny has a moral signifier to it that makes it tougher to navigate. The mask is the most obvious one. Spend time in a public setting and you can see the believers versus the compliant. The believers make sure their face muffler is firmly attached and is clean and new. They make sure it is on before they leave the car and they wear it all the way to the car. Normal people stick theirs on just before they enter a store.

The same is true of other aspects of this performance. At places that offer hand sanitizer, the faithful queue up, making sure to keep their distance, then make a big show of rubbing themselves down with sanitizer. Normals feel pressured to do it, but they look a bit out of place. It’s like the C&E Catholics taking communion. They just assume everyone knows they are going through the motions. Others, of course, just ignore it and go about their business.

What makes all of this more compelling, from an anthropological and sociological perspective, is no one knows if these measures have any impact. The people who say they are effective almost always have no math or science. They would not know the first step in thinking about how to test the effectiveness of these measures. The other side of the debate does not exist, at least not publicly. Those strongly opposed to these measures base their arguments in the law, not science.

The truth is, there is no reason to think any of these measures have a positive impact on the progress of the pandemic. That’s the first important thing to know if you want to think about a pandemic. It is a process. Assuming the new bug is not 100% lethal to those exposed and humans can develop an immunity to it over time, a pandemic follows a predictable pattern. There is the initial outbreak, where the most vulnerable succumb, then it spreads through the population and eventually burns out.

A pandemic burns out because eventually there is a critical mass of people who are immune to the virus. Maybe they have a natural immunity or they have developed one, but over time, the ability of the virus to find a new host diminishes and it can no longer spread to new victims. Of course, in the extreme, the virus just kills all those vulnerable to it and the rest survive. Some researchers think this could have happened in Philadelphia during the Spanish Flu outbreak.

The theory behind these counter measures was to slow the spread, so hospitals would have time to gear up for patients. The fact that the spread was not impeded in the slightest is a pretty good real-world test of the measures. Maybe in theory they could work, but we don’t live in theory. In reality, months of social distancing and mask wearing have had no impact on the course of the disease. In fact, in places like New York, their policies probably made it worse.

It is possible that all of these measures are bad idea. Take the mandatory mask wearing business as an example. Wearing a surgical mask in a medial setting as part of a protocol to maintain a germ-free environment is well established. Hospitals have very lengthy procedures for the staff, as well as regular training by people who are tasked with maintaining a clean environment. The mask is just one small part of a larger process to maintain a safe environment in the hospital.

In the regular world, where no such procedures are in place and no one is trained in the proper use of masks, or even using proper masks, the mask may be a bad idea. If you watch people in the wild, they are endlessly fiddling with their masks. We know a primary vector for a virus is people touching their face and eyes. A policy that increasing face touching is not a good idea in a pandemic. In other words, mask wearing may increase the spread of the virus in the real world.

The efficacy of mask wearing does not matter, as it is now just another amulet people can wear in public to express their adherence to a particular cult. In the case of the scolds yelling at people about their masks, they believe their mask loyalty is a license to harass the world. Social misfits at the bottom of the social hierarchy now use the mask issue to attack the normal people for not liking the mask policy. The mask is now just another part of the general madness of this age.

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!

Sports Entertainment

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Last week, the Wisconsin athletic director sent out a letter to supporters that the university would lose 60-70 million dollars this year due to the reduction in football games being played in the fall. If the season is cancelled, the losses will top 100 million just for the fall. That may be an exaggeration, but there is no question that a cancellation of the college football season will cost the big-time college programs tens of millions in revenue. It is a billion-dollar industry.

ZeroHedge pointed out that ESPN has a billion dollars in ad space to sell for this fall’s college football season. They also have ad space for other sports as well, but college football is the prime mover of ad space. It is unlikely that ad buyers will want to buy ads when ESPN is running replays of card games this fall. ESPN’s primary income stream is mandatory cable fees, they net close to nine billion in fees every year, but a billion dollars in ad revenue still counts for something.

Of course, everyone knows no one is watching ESPN at the moment, but that has no impact on the cable fees. The way it works is a service like Hulu of Comcast pays ESPN nine dollars per month for each subscriber to their service. These deals are not contingent on viewership. As ZeroHedge points out, the language in these deals does not require the content provider to deliver particular content. As long as ESPN is beaming something, they get paid for it.

Even so, the mass disruption of sports is going to have an impact on the economic model of professional sports. Out of work people will begin to look at that cable bill and wonder if it makes sense. Cable providers will begin to look for ways to get out from under their ESPN deal. For its part, ESPN will not be paying the leagues for content when the leagues are shutdown. Like the economy as a whole, professional sport is about to experience an unprecedented jolt.

Way back when the lock downs were on the table, the sober minded warned that you can’t lock everyone in their homes and not have consequences. The modern economy is a highly complicated balancing act that has evolved to produce increasingly efficiency, along with the retail excess. Even small disruptions can upset the balance within supply chains resulting in unexpected outcomes. Start turning off large bits of it and before long the whole thing starts to crash.

The first glimpse of this may be what is happening with sports. Major League Baseball is the first to re-open, but it is quickly becoming a disaster. The empty parks make the television product less than compelling and now games are being cancelled as players test positive for the virus. The NBA is struggling to keeps its knuckleheads inside the compound where they plan to play their games. The NFL is seeing droves of players sit out the upcoming season for fear of the virus.

The thing no one dares mention is the impact this lock down is having on interest in spectator sports. Being a sports fan is like being a smoker. Part of the dependency is the ritual and structure of it. The smoker takes a break every hour to smoke, collect his thoughts and get the nicotine hit. The football fan has their weekend in the fall, where they have scheduled social activities around games. Like the smoker, the sports fan builds their life around the habit.

People who quit a vice like smoking or drinking note that they also quit the social scene that goes with it. They lose touch with Sally from accounting who they used to take smoke breaks with every day. The people at the bar are no longer a part of their life. That’s what will happen with sports. Those weekends in the fall will be filled with other things and after the withdrawal pains subside, the habit will be lost. People who cut cable know this experience. In time, you don’t miss it.

This is not idle speculation. It has been known for a long time in the sports world that the recovery time after a work stoppage is very long. When a sports league shuts down due to labor strife, it takes years for the fans to return. It’s not because they are mad at the greedy players and owners. The fans simply find other things to do with their time and many of them drift away entirely. Millions have probably broken the habit already and that is before the hate whitey lectures were added.

There is one final piece to this puzzle. The growth of sports entertainment has tracked the arc of the Baby Boom generation. Look at attendance figures for sports in the 1960’s and 1970’s, before Boomers were dominating the market. Ball parks rarely sold out and the audience for televised product was limited. In the 1980’s as the Boomers took over the marketplace, sports boomed. When they could play tennis, professional tennis was huge. Then it was golf that had a boom.

The fact is, the sports entertainment model was built for and on the Baby Boomer generation, which is now entering its power down cycle. Boomers are retiring and that means down-sizing their lives. The major sports leagues are facing a demographic reality that cannot be overcome with happy talk about diversity. Non-whites don’t spend like whites and they cannot sustain an economic model built for whites. What happened to California is what is coming for sports entertainment.

This demographic cliff has been known to the sports leagues for a long time, which is why they happily throw in with the hate-whitey stuff. Sure, many of the principles really do hate white people, but much of it driven by the carnival barker’s belief in his ability to will an audience into existence. They really do think they can cast the same spell on the brown hordes that they cast on white people and get the same result. The virus panic and cultural revolution will put those theories to the test.

It is hard to see how the old sports entertainment model survives the current crisis. That doe not mean these leagues fold or that sports entertainment dies out. It’s just that the old model was built for an old America, one that no longer exists. On the other hand, sports entertainment has been a vital part of keeping whitey under control. Something will have to be done to reestablish the mind control device known as sportsball. Perhaps part of woke America will be mandatory sports watching by recalcitrant whites.

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!

Judas’s Priests

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It is popular in various dissident warrens to characterize mainstream conservatism as a collection of spineless sissies. Sometimes they are drawn as naive idealists who get taken by their more cynical opponents on the Left. Other times they are described as fools operating under a set of “principles” that make it impossible for them to fight the Left effectively. While some of that is certainly true, the reality is conservatism has been a cynical confidence game for a very long time.

Probably the best example of that truth of conservatism is Jonah Goldberg, formerly of National Review and now head of something called The Dispatch. For a couple of decades, Goldberg has played the role of affable right-wing dufus. He was the doughy, easy going every-man, who liked popular culture and goofing off, but was also one of those instinctively conservative guys. He was not going to quote Edmund Burke or even Bill Buckley in his posts. He would quote the Simpsons.

It was a great role for him to play, as he is no one’s idea of an intellectual, but he also has the disheveled goofball look popular in the movies. It was also an effective way to get people to overlook the fact that he was never a natural conservative or even much of a conservative. He was an actor playing a role. He started out in his acting career working for Ben Wattenberg, a far Left radical in the 1960’s and 1970’s, who got on the public television gravy train in the 1980’s.

Wattenberg was associated with the American Enterprise Institute, the symbol of conservative racketeering in Washington. This is the financial engine for the so-called neoconservatives, which means it is staffed with left-wing activists posing as conservatives, in order to promote an imperialist foreign policy agenda. They also peddle libertarian economics on behalf of their corporate sponsors. Ben Wattenberg was one of the first models to roll off their production line.

Goldberg was also a creation of AEI. It was his first job out of college, which is where he was paired up with Wattenberg to be trained as a subversive. Once ready for action, he was installed at National Review. He was then assigned the task of creating their on-line presence, which is where most people became aware of him. His frumpy every-man act became popular with a new generation of conservatives, looking for something more in line with the slacker culture than the Ivy League culture.

This is a good example of how a tiny group of people came to control the conservative establishment in the last century. In order for a conservative writer to get access to a conservative platform, it meant passing muster with a thicket of gatekeepers trained by and controlled by operations like AEI.  If you wanted to write for NRO, it meant getting vetted by Jonah Goldberg. To write for the print side, it meant being vetted by some other think tank approved gatekeeper.

Of course, the main source of control was money. AEI and Heritage are the bottleneck in conservative fundraising. AEI brings in over 50 million in contributions each year, while Heritage hauls in close 100 million. They also control the flow of cash into hundreds of smaller, less well-known non-profits. These operations underwrite conservative publications and conservative book writing. They will bulk-buy a book, thus providing the writer with a nice royalty.

If all of this sounds like a racket, that’s because it is a racket. It is more cynical than that though, as the people running the rackets are terrible people. They lie about what they are doing, causing otherwise well intended people to support things that go against their stated interests. They con rich people into giving them money, which gets used to support the lifestyle of these grifters. They also use their power to attack anyone that challenges their hammerlock on official opposition.

A good recent example of this is something done by Jonah Goldberg. Back in 2018, a woman named Emerald Robinson got a scoop that many so-called conservative publications had been secretly taking cash from the tech monopolies. They were being paid to support the tech monopolies stranglehold on political discourse. Payola has always been a problem with Conservative Inc.  and this looked the latest example of their penchant for pay-for-play shakedowns.

Now, Emerald Robinson was a reporterette for something called One America News Network (OANN), which is an independent media outlet that aims to serve the grassroots conservative. Their audience is the sort of people who support Trump because he is opposed by people like Jonah Goldberg. They are the talk radio crowd that skews more Huey Long than Bill Buckley. Robinson now works for Newsmax, another one of those types of operations.

Goldberg was dispatched to trash her, which he was happy to do. First, he trashed her personally on Twitter. Then he posted a piece on NRO, smearing her as a “failed-actress-turned-faux journalist” and an idiot. He also claimed she had no real evidence to support her claim. He finished by writing, “Look, I honestly suspect Robinson makes up many of her “sources” and that she’s a fake reporter while claiming to wage a war on “fake news.” That’s a serious charge.

It turns out that Goldberg was lying. Google was giving money to National Review and dozens of other so-called conservative operations. His paymasters at AEI were part of the operations to shower Conservative Inc. with payola, so they would do the bidding of the tech oligarchs. There’s simply no way Goldberg did not know this when he smeared Robinson, so his lies were conscious. They required forethought. He also lied when he knew all of his fellow racketeers knew he was lying.

The truth is, the people running Conservative Inc. are not just idealistic naifs being rolled by the bare-knuckled lefties in politics. They are not excessively principled ideologues playing by a set of rules that prevent them from winning. In reality, they are evil subversives grifting off the destruction of the country. They are selling out the people they claim to represent and they do it with enthusiasm. They are soulless grifters, willing to say and do anything to keep the con going.

What makes them especially evil is that they are preying on the most vulnerable people in the country. These are the average white people who have no representation in the halls of power. Mostly, they are happy to be left alone to live their lives. These are the people who trust the system. They are willing to trust others to look out for their interests in Congress and their state legislatures. The GrifterCons prey on these people like jackals, stealing their money and selling out their interests.

The thing that puts these people in a special category is the audacity of their conniving and grifting. When their perfidy is noted, they carry on as if they are the victims of some new pogrom. The American Right has been consumed by army of Judases swarming traditional America like a plague of locusts. Washington has been their playground, their Garden of Gethsemane, for generations now. The best the Right can hope for now is that these people are remembered as well as their inspiration.

A Sad Note: The proprietor of The Woodpile Report died last week. He was a great promoter of the sorts of content you find here. He had a big audience, so when he linked to someone, he sent a lot of traffic their way. I will forever be grateful for his support in linking to me on a regular basis. Rest in peace Ol’ Remus.

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 Media Revolution

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In 2016, the Left was super confident they had the election in the bag. So confident, in fact, they got sloppy. It was around this time that the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign, assuming President Clinton would be cool with it. They are just as confident this time, but they probably don’t have the FBI and CIA spying for them. Given what happened in 2016, you would think they would be cautious, but instead they are overflowing with certainty. They know they will win.

One reason for this is they have purged almost all dissenting voices from their preferred media platforms. The Drudge Report is so over-the-top in his anti-Trump antics it feels like a parody site now. There is some speculation that he sold out to Silicon Valley grifters, but Drudge was always a creation of Neo-Conservative Inc. His sources and sympathies were always in that world. That whole scene has fired up the NeverTrump clown car for one more ride through the public square.

Twitter is just a far-left echo chamber. They have been purging so many people from the platform, even the most determined of trouble makers has grown bored with the effort it takes to get back on and stay on the site. Sites like Reddit and 4chan are muted for fear of being shut down like 8chan. That site was shuttered by the usual suspects and had to re-spawn as a weaker version of itself. Other than Gab and semi-private platforms, the internet is tumbleweeds and left-wing cranks.

One result seems to be a soaring confidence of the Left. They are carrying on like Dementia Joe will win every state twice in November. His vote will be so strong it will change the results of the last election. That’s an amusing exaggeration, but it is at the heart of their world view. Installing Biden in the White House will allow them to memory hole the 2016 election, as if it never happened. They will probably instruct textbook makers to skip the last four years of history.

Another result is some former enthusiasts of the Trump campaign are very depressed, certain that their guy will lose and that he deserves to lose. The anti-Semites, for example, are sure everyone is abandoning Trump, because the anti-Semites have been purged from the internet. It’s really weird how those guys on the one hand claim our greatest ally controls the media, but on the other hand they intensely follow the media and accept what they see at face value.

It is a good example of how the intensely on-line can lose perspective. When all of your inputs are from on-line media sources and people who agree with you, often two sets with great overlap, you get a warped view of the world. That’s the irony in what we are seeing right now. The former Trump fans who now hate Trump look at the media and see confirmation, while the people who hate those former Trump enthusiasts see the same media and also see confirmation.

The thing is, normal white people are getting really sick of the hate whitey stuff all over the media. During the last few months, whitey has been finding refuge in watching movies and television shows. Now they are being bombarded with explicit hatred of white people. If you circulate around normal people, it comes up a lot. When it does come up, the intensity is plain as day. These are people who would be Trump voters, so it is not as if this is changing minds, but it is pissing them off.

The puzzle is, with the lack of confirmation, will these people act on their anger and frustration this November. They don’t have anyone but Tucker in the media addressing their anger. They can’t get confirmation on-line, even from dissidents, as they have either been purged from social media, toned it down or now operate in semi-private venues like this one. Tucker having record numbers, however, suggests there is a deep reserve of pissed off Trump voters.

An important tenet of modern mass media is that these big social media platforms dictate public sentiment. The Left used to say, in the before times, that their control of the media was worth as much as 4-5 points in an election. That was probably an exaggeration, but it did seem to matter. They controlled what was discussed, thus always giving the Democrats home field advantage. They are now sure their control of social media is driving public sentiment.

Is the same true of modern media? The 2016 election could be used to argue both sides of that debate. Trump used Twitter to get around and control the media, by forcing them to respond to him, rather than the other way around. On the other hand, he was confronted by a wall of sound from the Left, but won anyway. It is easy to forget, but the Left was every bit as triumphant and nasty four years ago as they are right now, but the voters did not follow along as predicted.

He also had his rallies, which had to be covered by the media. This confirmed to his supporters that they were not alone. They saw lots of normal people enjoying the rallies and they saw the cranks in the media mocking those fellow normies. It was both confirming and infuriating. That’s the thing he needs to work around this time. He needs to let his voters see that normal people are just as angry at the revolution and that the way to express it is to support Trump.

One thing that has always been true about the American Left is they think rhetoric that works once will work forever and in all situations. The word “Nazi’ has been so overused that only far-left cranks respond to it with something other than laughter. Racist is heading in the same direction, as most normal white just laugh at it now. We may be seeing something like this with mass media. The Left has so abused their control of the media that it now amplifies sentiment, rather than alters it.

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 Back Of The Hand

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Establishment types were clucking about the news of Andrew Sullivan leaving his post at NY Magazine. He wrote a typically long winded farewell column, stating that he was being pushed out by the new woke rabble. Whether or not that is true is hard to know, as Sullivan is prone to exaggeration and hysteria, but it was accepted as true by so-called conservatives and the “old style” liberals. It was another ominous sign that the woke revolution is consolidating power.

The details of his case are not all that important, as it lines up with other incidents involving less creative story tellers. The New York Times has been dealing with a public revolt by the woke young staffers. These are mostly emotional young women of various flavors, who start sobbing whenever they hear a discouraging word. Collectively they become a storm of shrieking harpies that manages to get its way. These tantrums are now being spun as the new ideological revolution.

The incident itself offers some insight into how left-wing politics has evolved over the last decade. Sullivan is a competent and productive writer, but his insights are just banal liberal boilerplate. His act was always derivative. He is a reboot of Truman Capote or maybe the literary Liberace. He is a professional homosexual, who says harsh things about normal Americans, but in a flamboyant and flippant style. The establishment subversive always puts style over substance.

Nowadays, the outrageous gay guy act is the leisure suit of public performance. It’s not just out of style, it makes everyone stare at their shoes. In fact, gay males are now totally out of fashion on the Left. They have been replaced in the catalog with hairy Jewish guys in sundresses. In fact, the wide array of imaginary sexual identities has displaced suburban white girl feminism too. In order to get in the Progressive catalog, you better have at least two things going wrong for you.

The Sullivan incident and other similar happenings during this phase of the revolution puts the lie to the whole coalition of the fringes thing. If there was really an intelligence behind this stuff, playing four-dimensional political chess, they would not be swapping out the gays for guys in lady’s underwear. Feminists are also financially and organizationally strong. In reality, it is the old Progressive hatred of tradition manifesting itself as a quest for the novel and bizarre.

That’s the thing about the cultural revolution that gets missed. The communist revolution was serious about remaking society. They wanted to strip it down to the foundation stones and start fresh. They were even willing to tear up the foundation if they thought it necessary. The liberal democratic revolution is more like a redecorating party.  They are willing to make superficial changes, but only in the areas that people see. Sullivan was replaced by a new set of drapes and a transgender garden gnome.

The superficiality of this revolution may have been exposed by the maker of an energy drink last week. When he found out his females were going bonkers over the BLM stuff, he fired them. The Red Bull story may turn out to be an amusing turning point in the revolution. You can be sure lots of other corporate executives are looking at that story and wondering if that is not the right course. Just tell these harpies no and show them the door. The rest will pipe down in a hurry.

That was always the truth of feminism. All the bellowing about the patriarchy and male chauvinism was just a desperate cry for a firm hand. College men cruised the women’s studies department for a reason. It was where you could find the six who desperately wanted to hear she was a nine. Professional feminism was just the same thing, but the women were rapidly approaching the wall. Still, the firm hand worked just as well and it may turn out to be the antidote the woke pandemic.

This is the paradox of the cultural revolution. The Bolsheviks could carry on without liberals, monarchist and other types of socialists fighting with them for control. Once they eliminated their rivals, they set about creating their society. The same was true of the Maoists and Khmer Rouge. The old school radicals did not need the constant struggle to justify their existence. They just needed the specter of it to focus the attention of the revolution away from the failings of the revolution.

The modern radical cannot exist without the thing it is claiming as an enemy and it seeks to destroy. Black identity movements are entirety dependent on whites tolerating and indulging them. The old feminist line about a woman needing a man like a fish needs a bicycle was always just a coping mechanism. Feminism can only exist in the presence of normal males. Cultural Marxism is just the over indulged third child that endlessly acts out to get attention from her parents.

This suggests the revolution will continue until it gets the back of the hand. It will not be happy to dominate the institutions and push its opposition to the fringes. In fact, the further it pushes its opposition into the shadows, the angrier it will get, as what it wants is the confrontation. Starved of that confrontation it will grow increasingly berserk as it tries to flush out the opposition. It will endlessly provoke and harass until it gets the back of the hand it so desperately needs.

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 85’ers

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Lost in the turmoil of the present revolutionary moment is the fact that one side of the political class remains trapped in a strange time warp. Look through the publications of mainstream conservatives and it is as if they stopped publishing new material somewhere in the last decade. They acknowledge that Trump won the White House, but they refuse to see it as anything but a one-off anomaly. There was no reason for it, other than a bug in the code or a one-in-a-million event.

For a while after Trump took office, they carried on with the anti-Trump stuff, but the money from the usual suspects ran out, so they dropped it. The Israel First wing of Conservative Inc. has setup shop at The Dispatch and The Bulwark, sites that cater to an audience that is similarly lost in time. Both sites look like recycled versions of the Weekly Standard circa 1996 or maybe The New Republic in 1986. What’s left of the old conservative coalition looks like a museum exhibit.

A good example is this post from Kevin Williamson. It feels like forever ago when he was considered an edgy writer for the new breed of conservatives. Read his copy and that feeling is obvious. For the last four years immigration has been one of the main topics of conversation in politics. What it is doing to a state like Texas has been a popular example. Yet, in a post about how Texas is becoming California, in terms of its politics, he does not mention immigration once.

How is it possible to be so obtuse? Granted, Williamson is not the brightest bulb in the bunch, but even the dumbest pundit should notice what people are saying. Of course, Williamson is a good example of another modern phenomenon. Whenever one of these guys gets mugged by the mob, instead of being radicalized by it, they go the other way, desperately trying to prove their prior blasphemy was an anomaly. He’s now a 1985 libertarian, ignoring most of what is happening in the world.

That’s fine, but National Review chooses to publish him anyway. They don’t have to make a trauma victim their lead writer. On the other hand, what else is there? The entirety of Conservative Inc. is in the same panic room as Williamson. At this moment, National Review’s front page has a story about electric cars, a story drooling over an Indian immigrant running for Senate in Tennessee, a story about robot wives and, well, you get the point. Teen Vogue is more serious.

It is not just con-men and grifters from the Conservative Industrial Complex that are trapped in a time warp. This was on Breitbart over the weekend. James Pinkerton used to be a guy who would speak forthrightly about the warmongers in the conservative sphere or the impact of globalization on regular Americans. He’s a libertarian, for the most part, but a rare one, in that he was prone to fits of realism. That post looks like something he wrote in the 1980’s.

Stop and consider where we are at this moment. On the one hand, we have a ruling class that is rotten to the core. They have corrupted every aspect of civil and cultural life in America. They now send gangs out into the streets to attack people and take over sections of cities. Pinkerton’s argument is the GOP must become the defenders of those corrupt institutions, as if this is forty years ago and the Left was making its final assault on the infrastructure of the country.

It is as if the entirely of conservatism has responded to the present turmoil by hopping in their DeLorean and going back to the 1980’s. Instead of reevaluating those old positions in light of new reality, they have reconstructed a new reality that is just ignorance of the present reality. The effects of wholesale immigration, globalization, the rise of the Cult-Marx Left and the populist awakening are all ignored. Instead they are retreating into their Burkean panic room to wait out the danger.

Part of it, no doubt, is fear. To talk candidly about what is happening these days is to risk your job and career. Most of the people in Conservative Inc. are there for the money and lifestyle it provides. They like the social aspects and the easy living. If being a Maoist provided the same lifestyle, most would happily quote from Mao. These are highly remunerated house slaves. The monied interests that underwrite these publications are not looking for candor.

Still, there are people who talk candidly about the current year. Kevin Williamson could at least mention immigration once in a story about how Texas is being turned into California by the flood of immigrants and migrants fleeing the invasion. Even if he can’t bring himself to admit the truth, he could at least acknowledge that people have been talking about it for close to a decade now. Pinkerton could acknowledge that the GOP is just the political arm of global enterprise.

What makes this retrenchment even more strange is the people they used to rip-off are heading the other way. You see it in little ways. For example, the old MAGA types are abandoning Twitter and Facebook for Parler. Many have recently taken the plunge to join Gab, after hearing Andrew Torba on Glenn Beck. Trump’s support is lagging because his voters wanted him to be more of what Conservative Inc. warned about, rather than less of it. They want the Trump the Left promised.

For the boys and girls now huddling in Camp 1985, the world has become a dangerous place, so they are hiding out in the past, hoping it all goes away. Every once in a while they will mutter “Orange Man Bad”, but otherwise, they are sitting out the storm, updating their old posts about the need for Burkean conservatism and how race relations were never better. Conservatism has become a cargo cult. They think if they pretend hard enough, it will be 1985 again.

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!

Our Primitive Ugliness

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Something that is easy to miss in the insanity of the current age is the fact that the people running the revolution are not just mediocre people, but they have the most mediocre dreams. Unlike revolutionaries of the past, they don’t speak of moving past this age of trouble and strife to a new age of man. There’s no sense that mankind can ascend to a higher level of existence. Instead, all of their energy is directed to that which touches on the imponderables of the human condition.

The assault on Confederate symbols is the most obvious. There’s no thought given to why these statues were erected by the people living in these communities. What little thought there is to the people who erected them is simplistic and childish. In fact, the need to know anything about the statues was so vexing and offensive to the people assaulting them, they quickly moved from attacking Confederate symbols to attacking all symbols that were connected with the past.

There’s certainly a strong anti-white element to this. They have to deny it for partisan reasons, as to do otherwise is to give the other side a victory, but only Progressive ideologues and their conservative enablers can deny it. The appeal, however, is in the simplicity, as it requires so little from the partisans. This is why they have moved so quickly from Confederate iconography through “symbols of whiteness” onto all items with a nuanced connection to the past.

This vulgar dullness is often read as just fanatical violence by rich kids seeking attention or authenticity within their movement. Others want to see it as just decorating common street criminals with politics. The thing is though, many of the rioters and statue topplers are the children of ruling class types. Just as the left-wing radicals of the sixties were the children of the bourgeoisie, today’s street radicals are children of the managerial elite. These are bourgeois revolutionaries.

The blandness of this revolution reflects the tastes and sensibilities of the people who produced the ideology and the radicals themselves. Look around at the creations of our modern rulers and the remarkable feature is the ugliness. If someone had dozed off in the 1960’s and been revived in this age, they would be sure the communists had won the Cold War and imposed their aesthetic on the West. Relative to the post war years in America, the modern aesthetic is offensively ugly.

The synthetic ugliness of the current year West surpasses the ugliness of communism in that it is the product of material excess. The dreariness of communist architecture, for example, could be explained by scarcity. They had to make do with what they could produce, which meant concrete and steel. The modern West is brimming with material excess, but insists on an aesthetic that captures the hopes and dreams of the career civil servant. Today’s style is depressed postal clerk.

This is, of course, the fruit of egalitarianism. When a society embraces the natural hierarchy of man, even the people at the top are looking up for inspiration. They are sure there is something better and more beautiful a little higher than where they currently stand. There’s no limiting principle to capturing the beauty and wonder of God’s creation. The aesthetic of such a society is one of increasing beauty and complexity in the art of the people.

In an egalitarian society, this is thrown into reverse. Everyone is discouraged from looking up, as that may suggest apostasy. Instead, the best only look up in order to get a better grip on the self-imposed ceiling, which is always pulled down. Everyone else is compelled to look down for a new lowest common denominator. Only in the most vulgar and debased can everyone be included. The result is a community that looks like film noir, but is awash in pornography and degeneracy.

This makes perfect sense, as egalitarianism inevitably flips the natural order on its head, elevating the bottom over all else. The ideological enforcers in the human resource department are no different from the ideological enforcers in communism. These people are not selected for their skill, but their stupidity. They are too stupid to contemplate what they are doing. Instead, they puff out their chests and stiffen their backs for having memorized the latest party fads.

The same is true of the volunteer auxiliary police patrolling the public space for unapproved thoughts. Imagine the dullness and ugliness of someone who takes the job of Facebook moderator. It is no wonder so many of them are South Asian. The Indian subcontinent’s primary export is the narrow-minded functionary, best fit for the ticket window of the train station. The fact that suicide is not common among the staff of social media firms confirms the dullness of them.

At first blush, it seems like a paradox that a system capable of marshaling human effort to produce such spectacular material excess also produces such mediocre men. It’s as if the engine of material progress uses the creativity and passion, the hopes and aspirations of the people as fuel to make consumer goods. Just as the failed materialism of communism denuded the land of culture and beauty, liberal democracy is doing the same, just with high tech materials.

If it were just ugliness, one could think that perhaps the next phase of man is a post-beauty world, where the aesthetic is defined by efficiency. That’s not so, as the people are also made vulgar and simplistic as well. What passes for intellectual endeavor in the modern academy is striking for its narrowness. The innovative thinker is one who manages to lop off some new bits of human knowledge. The goal of intellectual life is to reduce the stock of human knowledge.

This is most evident in politics. The market place of ideas that is supposed to be the wellspring of liberal democracy has resulted in a bazaar full of weirdos all selling the exact same goods. The defining feature of the modern elections is their pointlessness, as no matter the result, policy never changes. In modern politics, innovation is treated like superstition. Anyone suggesting something different is treated like he has been possessed by a demon or is in league with Old Scratch.

Perhaps liberal democracy has reached a point where a small number of capable people can keep everything running, while the mediocre and stupid run riot. Maybe that is the world at the end of history. Given the recent madness, there is a strong case to be made for this argument. On the other hand, history says man cannot live without beauty, even the simplest expressions of it. The inexplicable beauty of the world has always demanded our attention. Will we want to live without it?

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!

Covid Capitalism

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For most people, buying a car is not a pleasant experience. Getting a new car is always nice, even if you are not a car person, but the process of getting it is almost always a hassle due to how cars are sold in America. Getting a used car can eliminate the hassle of the dealership, but then you have to worry about getting hustled by someone trying to unload their lemon onto a sucker. The car market is extreme capitalism, where no one gives a sucker an even break or smartens up a chump.

Strangely, this makes it the ideal place to understand what has happened to our society over the last six months. For example, every car dealership website now has a prominent banner informing the visitor just how much the car dealer cares about the health and safety of their customers. There’s usually a link to their page detailing just how much they care about you, the sap they hope will buy a car from them. All of these mission statements are titled, “Our Response to COVID-19.”

In case it is not obvious, a business built around the phrase caveat emptor is not concerned about the safety of anyone, even the employees. Like every business in extreme capitalist America, the car dealers see an angle in presenting themselves as guardians of public health. At the far end of capitalism, the business must be both rapacious and patronizing. Telling you how much they care about your welfare while stripping you of what they can is the standard business model.

The thing about all of this that goes unnoticed is how predatory economics has not just been normalized, it is now celebrated. Forty years ago, soulless money grasping was seen as immoral. The movie Wall Street presented a morality tale about how extreme capitalism was soul destroying. Today, the ruthless businessman is in the morally superior position, while the person doubting the ethics of his behavior is portrayed as a naive and stupid person, possibly even dangerous.

Maybe it is just a case of monkey see, monkey do with these dealers, but all of their steps to show just how much they care are the same across the board. They have “contactless” car buying, which is a very strange thing, when you consider it. How much physical contact would one normally have with the the car salesman under normal conditions? Of course, since their goal is to screw the customer, maybe this is a strange inside joke or possibly a cry for help.

Of course, all of this is just a racket and everyone gets it, except for the people firmly in the panic camp. They see it as confirmation. In fact, that’s the point of all these ads from giant corporations telling us how much they care about us and the communities they are destroying. It is pure partisanship. On one side there are the people sure this pandemic is punishment for Trump. On the other side are people who are sure the other side is using the virus to advance their ideological goals.

This is the world of today. There are now two camps of people. One camp consumes every event and metabolizes it into fuel for their ideological war. As soon as the virus became news their chief concern was in how to turn it into another weapon in their social war to control society. As soon as the hated Trump declared his side on the virus issue, the Left immediately embraced a set of positions on the virus. Every left-wing and adjacent governor blew up his state to spite Trump.

The second camp are the people who realize that the new issue is becoming politicized and they form up an opposition to the Left. In the case of the virus, they started as curious or maybe mildly skeptical. These were the people who said it was just going to be a very bad flu most likely, but we needed more information. Now they are the people who say the face muffler is the six pointed star of totalitarianism. For them, the facts of the virus no longer matter anymore.

In this environment, there’s no truth or even the desire for truth, as all truth is determined by which side of the line you stand. The car dealers, for example, would have lepers selling cars if it moved more product. It is in their interest to go along with the safety campaign, so they go along with the safety campaign. They would have their people in hazmat suits putting the buyer through a delousing station if that’s what it takes to sell cars. They care, because they don’t care.

Everywhere else, the caring capitalists are either proof that the plague is real and a punishment for the Orange Man or it is just part of the fraud perpetrated by people obsessed with hating the Orange Man. Not only does this make everything extremely simple, it means the simpletons rule the day. If you’re inclined to automatically take one side or the other based entirely on your feelings toward the people on each side of the line, this is a glorious time to be alive.

The car dealership is now the metaphor of our age. The people running it engage in the most extreme form of ruthless transactionalism. They do so while pretending they care deeply about the people they will gladly fleece. Meanwhile, on the lot, one group of buyers is misty-eyed over how much the dealer cares about this plague sent to spite the Trump people. The other group grits its teeth behind its face mufflers, fantasizing about the revolution and that sports car in the showroom.

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!