Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the weird noises coming from the regime after the election, a post about the odd quiet that we are seeing after Trump swept the field and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Legend has it that at the start of the trial of English King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell saw the king approaching Westminster Hall and realized he had a problem. He quickly warned his fellow parliamentarians that the king would ask a very straightforward question at the opening of the trial. He would demand to know upon what authority was he being brought to a trial. This is, in fact, what happened. Charles refused to enter a plea on the grounds the court had no authority over him.

The drama about Cromwell seeing the king’s approach and then suddenly seeing his problem is apocryphal, as the parliamentarians had been debating this issue since the end of the Second English Civil War. According to English law, the king could not be tried for breaking the law. Logically, the king was the law. The king was the sovereign and therefore the embodiment of the nation and its laws. Putting the king on trial was putting the system itself on trial.

Cromwell and his pals got around this problem by simply wielding the power they had, which was the force of arms, to override objections from members of parliament, the House of Lords and the king himself. When Charles asked “I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful authority”, the parliamentarians decided that “the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern.”

In other words, the long-held principles both sides claimed to support, over which they fought two bloody wars to that point, gave way to political expediency. Cromwell and the New Model Army had power, and they were determined to keep it, which meant killing the king and what he represented. If it meant trampling a thousand years of tradition and the law itself, they were prepared to do it. The trial proceeded as if the Charles confessed his guilt, and he was soon executed.

The French Revolution gets all the attention when it comes the crisis of liberalism, but it is the English Civil War that presents the problem plainly. By what authority can a parliament rule over a people? The answer always given is the people, but by what authority do the people have to pick their rulers? Where is it written that the people are the moral arbiter of society? Modern people think the answer is obvious, but for most of human history people thought the opposite.

The reason we have that story about Cromwell looking out of the window of Westminster Hall and suddenly realizing his dilemma is because people at the time understood the power of authority. The king was just a man, but what he represented was earthly dominion over man. No one looked at the king as just a man because he was the final authority, the one man who was an exception to the law, while being the embodiment of the law. He was the sovereign.

It is why after Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored. Despite it all, Cromwell was never able to answer the question posed by Charles at his trial. The authority of Parliament is in the law, but the authority of the law is in the king. Without a king, those in control of Parliament were left with force as their authority. It is easy to see why Mao famously said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The question of authority has haunted the world since that famous trial.

We are getting a glimpse of this with the election of Trump. Fifty years ago, the managerial class staged a coup against Nixon. Like the Rump Parliament that deposed Charles I, they acted extrajudicially but claimed to be doing so in defense of the law, which is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. They rid themselves of the imperial presidency, reducing the office and the rest of the political structures to committees controlled by the managerial class.

Then as now, the central question in the crisis is who says? Much of what constitutes the crisis of the American empire is people shouting from screens, demanding you must do this or must stop doing that. Everywhere you turn is a digital preacher, waging her bony finger at you and lecturing about your sins. The Roundhead ascendency that began with Watergate climaxed with men in dresses calling normal people sinners, but always the question remained. Who says?

The restoration of Donald Trump is an answer of sorts. Whatever his faults, Trump is a man who commands attention and respect. When he enters a room, the room changes because he is larger than life. He persevered over the last four years of official persecution through force of will. He returns to Washington as the leader of the victorious side in the cold civil war that has gripped the country. He also returns with an agenda and a mandate to execute it.

None of this is to say that Trump is the monarch or our moral authority. The point of the comparison is that the executive exists to replicate that role in a democratic system that lacks a moral authority. Without energy in the executive, the president cannot play the role the system requires to function. The last fifty years has seen the rise of rule by committee, and no one builds monuments to committees. Just as Parliament needed the king, Washington needs Trump.

It still leaves open that question. Monarchy solved the problem by making the king the sovereign and the answer to who says? In America, Christianity was assumed to be the answer most of the time. The exceptions required a strong executive to make the hard decisions and force the legislature to act. First the melting away of Christianity then the toppling of the strong executive left us with rule by committee and the fanciful chants about democracy to answer the question of authority.

Trump will not reign forever, so the question will return. Perhaps the managerial elite sees the problem and supports the return of the imperial presidency as a solution to the internal contradictions of managerialism. Maybe the economic elite supports the strong executive as a proxy for their supremacy over the managerial class, much in the way the king was the leader of the aristocracy. Maybe Washington falls into chaos again, as managerialism reaches its end.

In the end, political systems rise and fall on the question of authority. The moral questions in every society are either answered by the gods or by the people though their traditions and customs. Centuries of experience in self-government says we simply cannot accept “because we say so” as an answer. You either have a strong executive with the power to impress or you have a shared religion that answers all the important moral questions. Managerialism has neither.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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.

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the proliferation of rage heads who can only communicate in emotions, a post about how we have become a nation of liars and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

The British conservative party, known as the Tories, finally settled on a new leader after they were nearly zeroed out in the last election. The pick to lead the party is a Nigerian woman calling herself Kemi Badenoch. Her official name is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, but that is far too British these days, so she has shortened it to a single word “Kemi” like pop stars do. She is now the face of the party that is supposedly the face of traditional English people.

The absurdity of this is obvious to most people, but not to everyone. The people running the Tory party are over the moon with this. Many of them are snickering into their sleeves about how the Labour party is “pale, stale and male.” Other are sure that it will take a Nigerian princess to restore British honor and finally confront the multicultural forces that have turned Britain into a zoo. This is their version of “Mexicans are natural conservatives”, popular with American conservatives.

The ridiculousness of this does not stop there. Look at the career of Kemi Badenoch through a traditional lens and her resume is a baffling mix of things that have no connection to one another or fit into a clear theme. She bounced from one thing to another, never accomplishing much but then suddenly she became a hot property among the consultancy class. That is where she was discovered by the political class and turned into a Yoruba version of Barak Obama.

The parsimonious explanation for Kemi Badenoch’s shambolic rise to the top of the Tory party is something John Derbyshire observed about Barak Obama when he suddenly burst on the scene. What appears to be a random walk preceding the meteoric rise is the result of the warm thermals created by white guilt over race and the desires and projects to seek forgiveness. The idealized black flits about until finally catching the sharp upward gust into the clouds.

Upper and middle-class whites in the Anglosphere seem to be driven to do these things, in part, by a desire to be ruled by Africans, who just happen to agree with them or “hold their values”, as they prefer to state it. There is also the desire to be punished by Africans, but not so much as to cause them real harm. They prefer the harm to fall on the bad whites. Then there is the strong undertow of salvation. These whites believe that this process will lead to their salvation.

This explains the weird exultation we see from these whites when a chosen one turns up to confirm the prophesies. The mania over Barak Obama was so bizarre people compared it to the cult of personality seen in places like North Korea. The Obama fans could tell you almost nothing about him, but that did not matter as simply being in the mobs worshipping him provided the religious experience they desired. You see the same look among the Tory members regarding Kemi Badenoch.

It is easy to mock this, but this behavior is driven by strong cultural and spiritual forces, and it is having a real impact. This phenomenon is mostly a product of the United States, exported around the West. The desire to build a city on a hill evolved into a sense of shame coupled with a desire to heal the world. The result is something approaching idolatry, with the well-behaved black person being treated like an emissary of God, who must be allowed to perform his miracles.

It is not an accident that the script writers for Barak Obama had him say things like “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Many people dismissed it as emotive nonsense, but the line has African origins. For the intended audience, white, educated and upper-middle-class, the line struck like a thunderclap. They were the elect and the proof of this was their presence in the cult of Obama. Not only was the promised land near, but salvation was also at hand.

Salvation never came and the result was a decade of madness. It is not an accident that the street violence and other engineered destruction of the basics of society started in the middle of Obama’s last term. At that point, it was clear to all that salvation was not coming, so they had no choice but to search for a villain. This sort of cult like behavior never turns to self-reflection in the face of disconfirmation. Instead, the energy in search of salvation channels into the search for the devil.

It remains to be seen if this is the process in Old Blighty. The Tories are in the political wilderness for a few more years. Labour, which won the last election, is as popular as rectal cancer and faces nothing but bad options. Britain is much closer to economic and social collapse than anyone in power appreciates. Throw in the fact that Black Jesus is not supposed to come from what passes for the right and it seems unlikely that Kemi Badenoch will follow the Obama arc.

Instead, what this looks like is what we see all over the West these days and that is a reboot of an old classic but done by ham and eggers. The Tories, like their American counterparts, have reached the logical end of what has passed for conservatism since the middle of the last century. The only remaining constituency for conservatism is the economic elites who seek to keep the old dialectic going. In the end, this gambit will fail to change their political fortunes.

There is more to it though. This unsatisfied desire for forgiveness that lies at the heart of this worship of Africans in the Anglosphere is not going away, because there is no mechanism to achieve it. Christianity, from which this desire was inherited, had mechanisms for forgiveness of sin. It also had a logic to address those things for which forgiveness in this life was not possible. The secular ideologies that rose up to replace Christianity have no such mechanisms.

Each turn of the wheel has led to a more reckless pursuit of salvation, because “more of the same” is the only possible answer to the inevitable failure. It is why we have gone from the reasonable extension of legal protections to former slaves to a world of unlimited non-white immigration and the erasure of white people from the cultural spaces, like movies, television and advertising. The burning desire to cleanse their souls of this sin has led to the desire to burn it all down.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what is killing the West is something that will lead the people to come down from their cross of ebony and embrace a new moral framing which gives them a purpose that elevates their people, rather than sacrificing them in search of forgiveness. That is unlikely to be found in the past. Instead, it will be found in the rubble of decline. At some point, even the fanatic must submit to reality or at least be overcome by it and those who rise from it.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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.

Much has been written in these parts about the crisis of competence that is creepy up on all aspects of life like the fog. Every day, competent people are aging out and being replaced by people who lack the competence. A complimentary problem, one also driven by demographics, is the Dunning-Kruger crisis. This the problem of incompetent, but highly confidence people, getting elevated into positions for which they are unqualified, simply due to the new ethics of the elites.

The difference here is that the crisis of competence is somewhat correctable, as the unqualified millennial replacing the retiring boomer, has some hope of learning what he needs to learn to do the job. He and his organization will have to suffer through the learning curve, but there is hope he will become competent. Alternatively, the race to supplement or even replace the incompetent millennial with technology offers the alternative of a robot competently doing the job.

The Dunning-Kruger, in contrast, offers no such hope. The person elevated into the position to satisfy the needs of the new morality has no chance to ever become competent at the task. Replacing them with technology is impossible, because it would undermine the whole point of the process. Instead, the system is simply expected to adapt to these new islands of confident incompetence. Every organization is being loaded up with crosses to bear as a form of contrition.

You see how this works with the Kamala Harris campaign. Regardless of the result, it will be remembered as one of the most inept operations in modern history, perhaps rivaling the 2004 Howard Dean campaign in Iowa or even the 1988 Mike Dukakis presidential campaign. After the initial media gaslighting, it has been one unforced error after another, all stemming from the fact the people running the campaign are sure they know everything, but in fact know nothing.

One small example is the Joe Rogan flap. Rogan is the biggest carnival act in so-called new media, so doing his show would be like doing Johnny Carson back in the 1970’s or the Rush Limbaugh show in the 1990’s. It offers a unique setting in front of a huge audience, which itself will attract an even bigger audience. It is the sort of platform a candidate needing attention craves. You take the gig, hope for the best and prepare for the explosion of post-show media coverage.

The Harris campaign never understood this. Instead, they tried to strong arm Rogan into rolling over for them, even leaving his comfy studio to meet them at a hotel somewhere to record a one-hour interview. They should have known he had no reason to take that deal, but stupid people lack second order thinking. Their unearned confidence in themselves compounded the error by carrying on as if they were doing him a favor by entertaining the request.

Rogan, who never liked Trump, did the shrewd thing and invited Trump on his show and Trump happily accepted the millions in free media. The resulting program broke the internet and further humanized Trump. The theme of his campaign this time is that he has dropped the sharp edges, having learned from the past. Hamming it up with Rogan, who was a smitten kitten the whole time, underscored this theme. Team Dunning-Kruger handed Trump a huge win as a result.

This one incident among many is a microcosm of the growing Dunning-Kruger crisis we see unfolding everywhere. It is not just that these people lack the required talents or experience for the task. It is that they lack the innate ability for the roles and the self-awareness to recognize it. Stupid people who realize they are outmatched can be managed, but stupid people who think they are geniuses are a danger to everyone and everything they touch. Invisible stupidity is lethal.

Look at who is running the Harris campaign, and the problem is obvious. The campaign boss is named Julie Chávez Rodriguez. She has three names because her only reason to exist in politics is she is the granddaughter of Cesario Chavez. Her qualifications for politics are that she is female, brownish and related to a famous brown guy. She has parlayed that into a career doing busy work, so that the nice white ladies could put her face on the organization brochure.

Julie Chávez Rodriguez no doubt looks in the mirror each morning and sees a world bestriding figure, when in reality she is a hapless simpleton. She is in this role because of her long relationship with Kamala Harris, another strong diverse female who is brimming with confidence despite having done nothing on her own worth noting, other than being a concubine of Willie Brown. The Harris campaign operates like the marketing pitch for the Christopher Rufo project.

There have been terrible national campaigns in the past, but the cause was always a candidate with little to sell running against a favored incumbent. Mike Dukakis never had a chance in 1988, so his people had few good choices. Bob Dole in 1996 was simply running to pad his obituary. He had no chance against Clinton, and he certainly knew it, but played the role anyway. Harris has the full support of official Washington and the political regime but is still losing.

Given the reality of our politics, this sort of ineptitude may seem trivial, but the Dunning-Kruger crisis is rolling out everywhere. It is why certain members of the economic elite are panicking about DEI at elite universities. They suddenly realized that their good deed installing someone like Claudine Gay as president of Harvard could come at a price to them beyond embarrassment. Handing power to entitled stupid people brimming with unearned confidence is playing with fire.

It is comforting to think that maybe the outbreak of incompetence among the elites due to the cult of diversity will cause them to pull back, but that is not the way to bet because of the religious fanaticism around the cult of diversity. If Harris loses next week, expect to hear endless cries of racism. If she wins, the resulting catastrophe will be blamed on the bogeyman. The Dunning-Kruger crisis ends only when the forces and people behind it come to an end.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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.

Note: If you are interested in an hour of precise predictions about the upcoming election, then you are in luck. I was on the Coffee and a Mike show and you can listen to the recording of it here.

The American civil war created an intellectual problem for both sides that was far more important than the issue of slavery. The 19th century was the age of nationalism and national liberation in Europe. These ideas made their way to America and fit in neatly with the American sense of self. After all, the United States was the result of a revolt against an empire in the name of national liberation. The war between the North and South, therefore, was also a war over nationalism.

By default, the South had the better claim. It was the South, after all, seeking to secede from the Union to create a new nation that would better serve the interests of the people of the South. The North was trying to prevent this from happening and willing to conquer the people of the South to do it. From a nationalist perspective, the South was the sympathetic side, even though they were also fighting for the right to maintain the institution of slavery.

A solution to this problem that evolved in the North was the argument that true nationalism was comprehensive. That is the nationalist loved all of his country and all of his people, so a nationalist government must serve and protect everyone. Since the South was not a different people and the Union was not abandoning them in the way the crown had abandoned the colonies in the runup to the Revolution, it was the South that was in violation of the nationalist ideal

Further, the evolving sense of Northern nationalism claimed that the national purpose of America from the start was to spread liberty around the world. America was the city on the hill, so to speak, that stood as an example of freedom craving nationalists around the world, so what the South was doing was a threat to that project and therefore a threat to the national purpose. American nationalism, unlike that of Europe, was a revolutionary nationalism to free all of mankind.

In fairness, these debates about the nature of American nationalism were not at the center of the dispute, but they played a role in shaping how the new intellectual class would define American identity after the war. Those arguing in favor of the war being a new founding are not entirely wrong. The country that emerged after the war was completely different from what existed prior to the war. It was not just free of slaves, but full of a sense of national purpose.

In his book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman describes the three forms of national identity that have prevailed in America. Goldman comes up with three national identities he calls the Covenant, the Crucible, and the Creed. The Covenant is the sense of national purpose. The Crucible is the old melting pot story popular in the 20th century after the war. The Creed is the idea of America being a set of ideas, rather than a physical place or people.

It is a good book that offers a useful way of framing the main ways in which Americans have tried to create a unitary identity. Goldman does observe that it is the covenantal aspect of American identity that has been the most powerful, but he does not get into how this Puritan sensibility evolved in the 19th century during the Civil War to become a civic religion for the ruling elite. He does not mention how the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam blended into this as Jews took up posts in the elite.

This understanding of American identity, or the best effort at forging one, is essential to understanding the current crisis. For over a century, since Woodrow Wilson, America has been on a mission to heal the world. The ruling class has asked, often demanded, that the people put aside their regional and local concerns for the good of one great cause after another. It has become so ingrained in ruling class thinking that they seem incapable to thinking about the state of the country.

Strip away the panic, the hysteria and the outlandish claims and the coming election is about whether we care more about the fate of Mongolian transgender lesbians or the fentanyl epidemic in Appalachia. Do we care more about the abstract concept of climate change or addressing the slow collapse of our infrastructure? What counts for more as an American? The health of your neighbors or the plight of migrants? Will we sacrifice everything in a vain attempt to save the world?

All these questions stem from a growing doubt in this sense of American identity that has been with us since Gettysburg. Americans are increasingly wondering not only if the cost of saving the world is worth the effort, but if it makes any sense at all for us to stand astride the world, balances in our hand. Maybe the people who demand we do this do not have the right to judge the world. Maybe these people lack the moral standing to stand in judgement over us as well.

Fundamentally, the current crisis is about the covenant. If our national purpose is to be the city on the hill, then we must ensure that the city is not full of vagrants and racked with crime and corruption. If our national purpose is to heal the world, then we must first heal ourselves. On the other hand, maybe our national purpose was to avoid falling for these claims and instead focusing on creating a society in the wilderness, away from the entanglements of the old world.

No matter how one seeks to frame it, the struggle today is over our national purpose, a struggle between those who stubbornly cling to the last century and those looking ahead to the next century. The question is whether America will collapse in a heap, exhausted from trying to save the world or will we pull up, realize our folly and return to a sense of purpose rooted in simply being an example to the world? Will we attempt to heal ourselves with the same zeal with tried to heal the world?

It could also be that all these efforts at national identity have failed and what comes next is the great disaggregation. Perhaps it was always impossible to forge an American identity that could permanently hold the people together. Maybe in the end, we learn that the true American identity is no identity at all. We are simply a diverse collection of people who agree to cooperate, when necessary, but otherwise we prefer to leave the world alone and be left alone.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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.