Category Archives: Culture

The Plague

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The zombie apocalypse is upon us. It is time to load up on ammunition, potable water and the dehydrated food they say will last generations. Of course, it also means cutting yourself off from the rest of humanity, as you can’t be sure when they will catch the virus and turn into a zombie. You might have to use the ax on the guy next door, who just moved in, so there’s no point in getting know him. It also ensures that whatever is turning people into zombies will not get to you.

We may not be on the verge of a zombie apocalypse, but there is a cornavirus outbreak in China that has spread to several other countries. The Chinese are taking it very seriously, warning people to limit travel and avoid the outbreak zone. They are saying the virus has mutated, but what exactly that means is unclear. There has been at least one case in the United States. The infected person had recently traveled to the outbreak region of China and developed the symptoms.

Now, it is highly unlikely that this will turn into a pandemic that wipes out a large swath of humanity, like the Black Death. It’s not impossible, but the odds are low because of modern technology. One reason the plague spread so easily is the poor sanitation in urban areas. People were exposed to all sorts of unhealthy things. They also lacked the medical care we take for granted. Mortality rates for plague today are about 10%, while they were as high as 60% in the Middle Ages.

Even as recent as a century ago, doctors were still blaming miasmas, bad odors, for various diseases. One reason the Spanish Flu spread so far is the general understanding of germ theory was in its infancy. Rather than isolating infected people and quarantining infected areas, people traveled as normal, spreading the virus all over the world in a short period. The Great War had millions of people moving from their homelands to foreign areas and the virus went with them.

That is the one connection between the last great pandemic and this new coronavirus outbreak in China. Every day millions of people leave their home area and travel to some new area for business, crime, tourism and so on. Humanity is probably more mobile today than at any time in history. Maybe there was more net mobility in the great industrial wars of the last century, but it is close call. The possibility of something really bad being spread by people is therefore at a peak.

Modernity may be the reason we are much more vulnerable to a civilization-wrecking pandemic than at any time in the past. A century ago, most humans lived in rural areas and farming was the number one employer in most of the world. Even industrialized nations still had close to half the workforce engaged in agriculture. Most men still had the wherewithal to maintain themselves in a pinch. The cities would be crippled by a plague, but the rural areas could carry on,

Today, 90% of western populations are dependent on the system to provide the basics of life, like food, water and heat. If enough people die from plague or even get really sick, the supply chain will break down. Given how near run all modern business is these days, the margin for failure is pretty low. A few weeks of failed logistics in the food business would leave whole communities starving. One water main break could cut off water to an entire city, if the work force has fallen ill.

Modern society could be like Jenga, the kid’s game where players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower of blocks. When everything is running as designed, removing one item does not cause collapse. If a few items stop working, then maybe it just takes one wrong failure for the whole thing to come down. For example, a pandemic plus a series of bad weather events leads to widespread food shortages, which in turn lead to civil unrest in major cities.

There’s also another angle to the risk analysis of modern society. Much of the infrastructure in America has been neglected for generations. Drive around an East Coast city and the roads are like the surface of the moon. Under those roads lie generations-old sewer, gas and water pipes that have been neglected. It takes a lot of manpower to keep them running. The same applies to lots of other basic infrastructure around the country. Manpower is needed to keep it functioning.

One reason for this is simple corruption. The ruling class no longer feels a duty to the societies over which they rule. They are extractive in nature, seeking only to skim and pilfer what they can from the people they rule. Another reason though is the collapse of social capital from mass migration and financialization. Most of the public stuff we rely upon is maintained by local communities. The obliteration of those over the last few generations is showing up in the infrastructure.

In a serious crisis, like a deadly pandemic, survival will depend upon communities voluntarily working together to provide the basics and care for the weak. For much of America, this is now impossible. In Europe, where 80-90% of people live in urban areas now dominated by foreigners, it would also be impossible. The point being, the cost of responding to a serious pandemic like the Spanish Flu is now much higher. In fact, we may not be able to react to such a threat.

Now, it is possible that like scarcity, humanity has overcome the threat of pandemic, through medicine and technology. The SARS outbreak killed 800 people, but in a world of billions of people, that is a trivial event. It’s three airliners crashing in a year. Just as we no longer prepare for famines in the West, we may no longer need to plan for another round of the Black Death or similar. Of course, people had similar thoughts before the outbreak of the Spanish Flu a century ago.

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Progressive Whites

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Yesterday’s gun rally in Richmond Virginia was a great success, at least as a public relations item. You can tell that by the relative lack of interest by the Left. Nothing about the event fit into their narratives, so it had to be ignored. Fanatics see only that which confirms their fanaticism. In this case, they wanted to see white supremacists dressed in Klan robes and Nazi regalia, terrorizing poor black bodies, while Antifa battled them in the streets. None of that happened.

The question that never gets mentioned in all of this is exactly why the newly ascendant radicals in Richmond are attacking gun owners. If you look at what they are proposing, none of it has much practical value. All the talk of confiscation is belied by the actual bills they are producing. One limits handgun purchases to one per month. Another bans private sales of regulated firearms. One vindictively targets the NRA shooting range in Northern Virginia. These have no practical purpose.

The answer here lies in understanding how American Progressive’s view society and their role in it. Contrary to popular opinion, the people behind this stuff are not communist, motivated by Karl Marx. They are not controlled by hand-rubbing lizard people living in a secret volcano. They are not triumphant browns. The people pushing this stuff are white people. There are a few Jews and browns tossed in, but the main body of the Left is still white and formerly Protestant.

The white American Progressive has always imagined society as a fully enclosed community, that is judged as a whole. A popular slogan among them is that “society is judged by how it treats it weakest members.” This is an explicit expression of communal judgement, which is the traveling partner of communal salvation. The white Progressive looks at society as an organism that moves forward as a whole. If some parts lag behind, the whole thing slows to a halt.

Further, the white Progressive believes in the unitary reformer. That is, the reformer is not just focused on one area of society, but the whole of society. Even if their efforts are in one area, those efforts support the whole community. A reform effort that does not promise to move the whole of society forward is of no interest. For white Progressive reformers, society is the flock and they are the shepherds. Anything that threatens their effort to guard and guide the flock must be eliminated.

It is this spatial understanding of the world that helps explain these largely symbolic attacks on the Second Amendment. In the hive mind of the white Progressive, people who own guns are outside the domain of the righteous. Therefore, they must be marginalized from society. Much in the same way they anathematized smoking, white Progressives seek to make owning a gun disqualifying. Symbolically, these measures are aimed at putting gun rights outside the whole of society.

This territorial thinking is why Charlottesville remains an important symbol for white Progressives and why Richmond will be erased from their memory. In the former, the righteous chased the threat to the flock from the field. The physical place of society was literally reclaimed by the good guys. Richmond, in contrast, was when the dark forces of society were permitted to operated unmolested. The bad guys did not win. The shepherds were forced to hide their flocks.

There is another aspect to this. White Progressives are aroused by the thought of the Charlottesville riots, because the radical mind needs violence in the same way the body needs food. While many white Progressives reformers are sincere, if deranged, others are in it for the blood. They need to terrorize and attack the enemy. In the same way the bully needs to terrorize the nerd in order to be a bully, the white radical needs the enemy of the cause in order to maintain his identity.

Therein lies the other reason why Richmond will be forgotten, while Charlottesville will be a regular story in the 2020 election. It was there that the need to terrorize the enemy of the flock was fully actualized. They not only chased the evil doers from the field; they drew blood and they had a sacrifice. Notice they always remember the fat women, who died, but not the cops. That’s because she was a blood sacrifice to the cause, while the cops that died were just collateral damage.

This is how to understand these pointless gun grabbing efforts, as well as many other Progressive fads we see today. In Virginia, these proposals are like the winning side erecting a trophy on the field of battle. The good whites have recaptured the heart of the Confederacy, the home of the bad whites. They did not eliminate the enemy, however, as they are still out there in the counties that refused to support the Progressive reformers. The fight must continue.

This is why facts and reason have no effect on white Progressives. They see themselves as defenders of the innocent against the attacks of those who seek to destroy the whole by corrupting the weak. Against such delusions, facts and reason are wholly ineffectual. Appeals to their humanity, on the other hand, are infuriating, as it calls into the question the point of their existence. It is why they are most vulnerable to moral arguments. It cuts to their sense of identity.

Of course, the Left is not just white Progressives. There are other parts, but their motivations are different and mostly modifiers to the whole. These other groups operate from ethnocentric motives. Blacks want free stuff and easy access to white people, while Jews want what is best for Jews. The newly arrived non-whites want a short path to the material assets of the white majority. The bulk of the Left, however, are white Progressives, who provide the power and authority.

The thermal exhaust port of the Progressive death star is their sense of moral purpose, not factual accuracy or even the relationships between the tribes of the Left. The white Progressive sees contrary facts and internal divisions as challenges the righteous shepherd must overcome. Call into question the moral standing of the white Progressive and the very center of the Left begins to collapse. Self-righteous certainty of purpose is the main tent pole that holds Progressivism together.

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The Guns Of Resistance

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Today is the big pro-gun rally in Richmond Virginia. The rally is in response to the gun grabbing proposals by the newly ascendant Democrat party in the state. For the first time in a long time, Democrats gained control of all three branches of government in the last election and immediately set about implementing their fantasy agenda. Their first order of business was a series of vindictive, retributive proposals aimed at the normal population of the state, starting with guns and gun owners.

What’s going on in Virginia is a glimpse of what is coming for the country as a whole as we descend into the multicultural paradise. Virginia was a solidly normal state over the last seventy years. The politics were usually uneventful. Most issues were controlled at the local level. The state government was limited and usually run by the sorts of people, who thought that was a good thing. Once in a while a colorful governor would get his name in the paper, but otherwise politics was sober minded.

Decades of immigration have done to Virginia what it did to California, with the addition of massive Federal growth in Northern Virginia. Manufacturing and agricultural concerns have championed the importation of millions from Central America. Government has imported people from all over the country into Northern Virginia. The result has been the same sort of political shift we saw in California. The sprawling urban areas control state politics, which means the Left controls politics.

Like California, the normal population of the state did not think much about the massive influx of non-white immigrants. No one thought about the long-term impact of a million or so left-wing suburbanites from liberal strongholds moving into Washington suburbs for their government jobs. Anyone who mentioned it was hooted off the stage, if they were even allowed on the stage in the first place. It is only now that the link between demographics and politics is becoming obvious.

This dynamic where the newly arrived take over state politics will be something we see all over the South and Southwest in the coming decades. While whites will remain the majority in some cases or the largest minority in others, white solidarity remains forbidden, both practically and spiritually. As a result, the usual suspects will divide the white vote making whites the least powerful group in these states, even as the newly ascendant non-whites pass explicitly anti-white legislation.

You see some of that with the Virginia rally. The organizers are more concerned with looking good for the far-Left media covering the event. They have been telling participants to not bring things like Confederate flags to the rally. The 2A people still think abiding by liberal morality is paramount. Inevitably, the FBI will have some of their crisis actors at the event, so the media can get photos and video. The organizers will then invest their time apologizing for it.

This is a great example of the challenge dissidents face in dealing with the mass of white people in America. On the one hand, the civic nationalists make optics more important than the message. The racists and old school race-realists look at these events as a chance to reinforce the walls of their ghetto. They show up in their silly outfits waving flags in order to offend, rather than persuade. Both sides are simply acting out their Progressive conditioning.

That’s what makes effective activism difficult. These gun proposals by the Democrats are clearly aimed at spiting white people. There’s no practical point to these laws, other than to stick a finger in the eye of the sorts of people who don’t support the Left. The attacks on AR-15 ownership, for example, are about sticking it to white people, who are the people who own these sorts of sporting guns. That should be the salient point, but the emotional conditioning of whites makes that difficult.

You’ll note that there is no longer any discussion of crime on the Left with regards to gun grabbing. Even they have accepted the fact that gun crime is largely a black problem and now a Hispanic problem. Blacks and Hispanics shoot one another with handguns, not expensive sporting rifles. Despite this, the victims of these gun grabbing proposal would rather gnaw off their own arms than admit it. Generations of conditioning in anti-racism have had their desired effect.

Make no mistake about the intent. The newly formed ruling class of the multicultural South and Southwest will first disarm the white population. They don’t care about blacks and Hispanics shooting one another. They do hate white people. That’s why Virginia wants to forbid the private transfer of firearms. That’s the obnoxiously dishonest “gun show loophole” nonsense. It is the precursor to licensing and then confiscation. When every gun is accounted for, they can easily be confiscated.

Another thing you see in Virginia that will apply to the country at large is the stubborn refusal to accept reality. The people organizing resistance to these gun grabbing proposals still think America is a rule-based society. They think if they carefully abide by the rules and mobilize their supporters, they can win the political game. There’s that old civic nationalist blind-spot regarding their enemies. They think they can reason with the other side. The other side will be unmoved by all of this.

Another important angle to this is the silence from Conservative Inc. over what is happening in Virginia. Site like National Review and the Federalist have not talked about it much at all. That’s because Conservative Inc. is staffed by the urbanite bugmen that staff Progressive operations. They think guns are scary, so the issue is not relevant to their project. They are more concerned about getting Twitter followers. It’s another reminder of which side they will ultimately support.

In the end, the Virginia Democrats will pass what they like and most people will go along with it. The value to this side of the great divide is in opening up the 2A issue as another entry point to dissident politics. What’s going in Virginia would not happen in a homogeneous stable society. It is the inevitable result of cosmopolitan globalism and multiculturalism. White people don’t fear white people owning guns. It’s the people ruing over white people, who fear white people owning guns.

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!

Litigating the Blood Libel

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Is the term “white nationalist” a slur? How about “white supremacist?” The general definition of a slur is “an insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation.” For “white nationalist” to be a slur, the term itself would have to be generally accepted as immoral or derogatory. It would also have to be used in a way that incorrectly labels one a white nationalist. Calling Greg Johnson, a white nationalist, for example, is not a slur. He embraces the label.

The interpretation of the term white nationalist is just one interesting aspect of the lawsuit brought by Peter Brimelow, editor of VDare. He is suing the New York Times, according to Brimelow, for falsely labeling him a white nationalist. He not only denies being a white nationalist, he claims the company deliberately labeled him as such in an effort to damage his reputation, even after he made many good faith attempts to point out the error to them. He is seeking $5 million in damages.

That is the first interesting angle to this case. Intent is always a central part of defamation cases. The defendant must be shown to have intentionally libeled or slandered the other party. The statement must have been made with knowledge that it was untrue or with reckless disregard for the truth. Simply making an honest error is not defamation, which is why newspapers have always posted corrections. It allows them to show the false claim was an honest error.

Another interesting bit of this is the unspoken dispute over what exactly makes someone a white nationalist. Greg Johnson, for example, has written a book describing white nationalism. He calls himself a white nationalist. Peter Brimelow, in contrast, has never used to term to describe himself and has been generally negative toward the use of it as a label. No doubt both men share similar opinions on many matters, but they have many important differences as well.

Yoram Hazony has written a book promoting nationalism. He is a proud Zionist and an ethno-nationalist. Large swaths of his book match up well with the arguments made by Greg Johnson in favor of white nationalism. In fact, strip away the references to Israel and the Jews and Hazony’s book is the same argument made by Johnson. Does that make Hazony a white nationalist? Is white nationalism just another manifestation of nationalism, like Zionism or black nationalism?

If this case ever makes it to court, it would be an easy task to show a jury that the term white nationalist is undefined. Its meaning is entirely controlled by the intent of the person using it. When used by the New York Times, the intent is purely negative, perhaps even a synonym for evil. When used by normal people, it is more benign, maybe even positive. In other words, the definition is entirely one of context, which is the heart of the lawsuit against the Times.

That would be an amusing part of this case if it gets to the deposition phase, as everyone involved would have to define white nationalism. Brimelow would have no trouble giving an objective definition. The Times writers and editors would have to figure out a way to craft a definition that puts someone like Peter Brimelow at the same table as Johnson. That’s a circle that cannot be squared, without first asserting the promotion of white interests is negative.

That really is the secret that lies beneath all of this. The underlying assumption of the beautiful people at the New York Times is that white people have no right to promote their interests. Jews, blacks, one-legged trans-lesbians of color, all of these groups have interests and a right to promote them openly. Whites, according to the sorts working for the Times, have no group interests. Therefore, white nationalism is the assertion of something false, for malign purposes.

Now, there is yet another twist to this. From the perspective of someone like Greg Johnson, Brimelow’s suit against the Times can be seen as damaging the cause of white nationalism. The basis of the suit is that the Times deliberately libeled Brimelow by applying a derogatory term to him and his work. In other words, a putative ally is agreeing with the enemy that white nationalism is immoral. That further anathematizes the term and the issues associated with it.

In reality, that train has left the station. In fact, that is another important issue involved in this case and many others. The media is not simply an institution for disseminating factual information about people and events. No sane person would make such a claim, as the media repeatedly states otherwise. The mass media defines the public debate and largely defines public morality. When they pronounce something forbidden, like white nationalism, it usually becomes immoral and off-limits.

That brings us back to intent. There simply is no way the Times can claim they did not intend to libel Brimelow when they called him a white nationalist. There only hope is to conjure a definition of white nationalism that includes Brimelow along with other people, who sharply disagree with him. The only way to accomplish that is to broaden the term to mean any white person, who thinks white people have interests. In other words, merely being white makes you guilty enough in this case.

Finally, this case can be a useful on-ramp. These people are clever, in that they talk about whites in a negative way without directly addressing white people. In this case they have turned the phrase white nationalism into a purely negative term that they liberally apply to white people questioning orthodoxy. They don’t say whites are evil, but they regular claim “whiteness” is evil and that promoting it is immoral. They condemn the thing by condemning its nature.

In the end, this case can only be a net positive, assuming Brimelow and VDare don’t embarrass themselves in some unforeseen manner. Cases like this are a good way to raise this issue. The more people talk about how the Left systematically anathematizes the natural characteristics of white people, the more people will notice the blood libel at the heart of this case and the general war on white people. The reason the Times hates white nationalism is they hate white people.

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!

Outsiders

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In every human society, large or small, there are people who don’t fit in with the main of the society. At the extreme end, these are criminals and subversives. At the more benign end there are oddballs and eccentrics. In small numbers they are harmless, just as long as they don’t form up into an organized whole. A criminal organization is a collection of people, who are no threat as individuals, but as a group they become a threat to the society. They become an alien body.

Human society is an organism. Like any organism, it must always be aware of threats to its existence, internal and external. A group of people inside society that is either hostile to the whole or merely alien to the whole must be treated as a threat. Since self-preservation is the prime directive of any organism, the most prudent approach is to treat the alien as hostile. To do otherwise risks making an error and allowing a hostile alien inside the society. That is a pointless risk.

Societies, like all living organisms have two general approaches to the problem of alien bodies inside the society. One is to destroy the alien body and the other is to isolate it and render it harmless. In the human being, the immune system will attack the foreign entity in an effort to kill it. If the foreign body in not a living thing, then infection will set in until the foreign body is removed. In some cases, the body will surround the item in a cocoon of calcium to isolate it and render it harmless.

In the case of human societies, the alien body is going to be people, like the criminal gang or some group of foreigners. For most of human history, this meant rounding up the aliens and executing them. Hanging criminals was the surest way to deal with the threat of people hostile to the whole. In the case of the non-violent, people who were just irritants, they would be expelled, Banishment solved the problem. This form of elimination allows the aliens to find a more suitable home.

Banishment also allows for reinstatement. A person or group that is cast out can, in theory, earn their way back inside. That requires a commitment to fit into the society and proof of rehabilitation. Banishment and the threat of it was a way to force people to assimilate into the society. A group of dissenters, for example, could remain just as long as they respected the wishes of the whole. Maybe they would be compelled to recant and accept the rules to which they were dissenting.

Human societies, like other living organisms, can isolate the problem. Prisons are really just a way of isolating the hostile foreign body. Instead of surrounding the criminals in calcium, they are placed in concrete boxes. Obviously, they can be permitted back into society, so it is not a perfect analogy, but the underlying logic is the same. Since modern societies do not want to execute trouble makers or banish them to the wilderness, they isolate them from the whole with prisons.

Segregation, formal and informal, is another way the problem of aliens is addressed by societies. The majority group forces the alien minority into a certain area and does not permit them outside that area. Segregation can be physical or logical. In the American South, segregation was mostly logical, as blacks and whites shared the same physical public spaces. In the North, it was physical as blacks were herded into ghettos and physically isolated from whites.

The story of Europe is really the story of people trying to figure out how to deal with aliens in their midst. Slowly and violently Europe has self-segregated. Every ethnic group has a place, either as a country or as a cultural zone within a country. There are notable exceptions, like gypsies, who roam about in all of Europe, but remain culturally at odds with the host population everywhere they live. Gypsies are an implacably alien nation within every nation they reside.

America, which has been multi-racial and multicultural since the beginning, has had another way of dealing with outsiders on the inside. That is to pretend they are not really outsiders. Some form of the phrase, “despite our differences we’re all Americans” is the national motto. The American creed is, in fact, built on this bit of self-deception about our differences. The fact that this is a big country with a low population density makes it easier to perpetuate the charade.

In Europe, a similar experiment is underway with the great homogenization within the European project. National identity is to be replaced with a European one. While less common, you can hear people say, “despite our differences, we are still Europeans” when talking about the current cultural and social unrest. In other words, the differences at the root of the social unrest are waved away and therefore the frictions are waved away as well. Everyone just has to pretend harder.

This actually works in the short run. Initially, the first generation of aliens bumping into one another want the new arrangement to work. They are willing to overlook the differences in favor of the assumed benefits. It is subsequent generations that begin to question the arrangement. They were not around to enjoy the giddy promise of the multicultural paradise. The kabob stands and food trucks are just part of the scenery of their life. What they see are the aliens around them.

This is the heart of the crisis in the West. Man is a social animal, who naturally wants to live in a society of people who look like him, sound like him, love the things that he loves and hates the things that he hates. Those are the invisible bonds that commit him to the other members and the other members to him. A society of strangers is not a society, but an ad hoc collection of people living outside their natural society. There is a word for such an arrangement. It is called a prison.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

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!

Digital Grifters

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Like most slang terms, no one is entirely sure how the word “grifter” came into common usage, but it has been fairly common since the start of the last century. Researchers claim it was carnival slang that crossed over into common usage in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It was possibly a corruption of the word “graft”, another slang term that loosely meant financial crime. Either way, a look at Google Ngram shows it took off in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

One interesting fact about that graph is the usage of the word seems to track with the rise and fall of social trust. In the run up to World War Two, social trust began to decline for a number of reasons. One big one was the financial collapse and the subsequent economic depression in the 1930’s. The fact that the word is increasingly common today, starting in the 1980’s with the digital revolution, suggests a correlation. People are more exposed to corruption now than 30 years ago.

Putting that aside, the microprocessor revolution has changed many things in our culture, one of which is the nature of the confidence man. Before the internet, running a con was an intimate affair. The con man had to personally interact with the mark in order to earn his trust. That meant the con man had to be able to read people and control his own emotions and body language. He also had to understand his mark, so he could say and do things that played on the mark’s vanity.

The life of the analog con man was a dangerous one. Having to operate in close proximity with the mark meant physical risk. If the mark got wise, it could mean a beating or maybe worse. The analog con man therefore had to be highly skilled, but also possess some courage. Often, he was operating in a world with other criminals, maybe even targeting criminals. One mistake, knocking on the wrong door or targeting the wrong old lady, could mean physical harm.

That’s the first thing that has changed about grifting in the digital age. The con man can operate from a great distance, often in anonymity. He can put up a false website that lures people in, based on certain known characteristics. Alternatively, he can create a false persona on-line that ticks the boxes needed to appeal to a class of people the con man is targeting. The confidence game and marketing are often indistinguishable from one another on-line. It’s easier to be a con man now.

Unlike the analog con man, the digital con man no longer has to possess the personal skills to work a mark or a group of marks. They also have a much lower risk of being caught and they don’t have to worry about physical harm. The result is a lower barrier to entry, which means many more con men. In the depression of the 1930’s, money was scarcer so people were more aware of swindlers. Today, the number of swindlers is much higher, so the word “grifter” is more common.

Another difference between the analog and digital grifter is the former operated on a small scale. He had to work a small number of marks at any one time. The latter can work in volume. In fact, the digital con game works better when scaled up as it can then rely on social proof to draw in suckers. While analog grifting was a retail operation, often a bespoke business, the digital con man works wholesale. He skims a little from many people, who often do not notice the con.

One main way the digital grifter works is through front running. They find a fad that is building up steam on-line and rush to the front of it. This helps them get attention from the sorts of people who get caught up in fads. These are people that like being led and need social proof. Once the con establishes himself as a prominent person in the fad, he either asks for support or has something to sell. Think about all the Tea Party sites that offered merchandise ten years ago.

A great example of this is Mike Cernovich. He has jumped from one fad to the next, almost exclusively operating on Twitter. He jumped from fad to fad on-line until he struck pay dirt with his goofy self-help book. He then re-titled it for the Trump era and became a leader of the MAGA cult on-line. When Trump got into office, he then started claiming to be a White House insider. His front-running of Trump allowed him to move a lot of merchandise and establish his brand.

That’s the other aspect of the digital grift. In addition to front running, the digital grifter is always looking to free ride. They look for a movement or fad forming up on-line and then come in with something to sell. It may be a book targeted at the vanity of the people in the movement. E-books are a popular item, because they are cheap to produce and don’t require a lot of work. Video is another, as it can monetize the front-running aspect with just the cost of a webcam.

The real pros in this segment were on display when it looked like Trump was contemplating war with Iran. The cable chat shows were littered with people ready to sell a book on their alleged inside knowledge of Trump, the war planning or the Iranian regime. The same people who peddled books for or against Trump three years ago were going to selling war books. Cable news was a grifter’s ball for a few nights, until Trump pulled the plug on the ear machine.

One similarity between the analog and digital grifter is that the mark builds what he thinks is a strong personal bond with the con man. In an atomized world of deracinated bugmen, there are tens of millions of people willing to follow a guy on-line. Just as lonely old shut-ins were easy marks for the analog grifter, the intensely on-line, who lack the normal personal connections in the physical world, are easy targets for the digital confidence man.

The low barrier to entry means we are Carny Town. The question that remains unanswered is that of cause and effect. Is the proliferation of con men on-line driving down social trust? Is the decline in social trust opening the flood gates for the con men to pour into our lives? Another possibility is that both are driven by the breakdown of white community. A world of atomized strangers is a fertile hunting ground for sociopaths, serial killers and confidence men.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

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!

Carny Town

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One of the important side effects of the communications revolution is the proliferation of grifters, con men and hustlers. Things that were impossible thirty years ago, like e-mail scams, remain a constant problem. The internet has made it easy for even the crudest hustlers to reach a broad audience. As a result, the number of hustlers has increased and the types of hustles have also increased. The twitter troll, for example, is an entirely new type of hustle, made possible by the internet.

One reason for this is that the internet has turned into a big stage where anyone can try out their act on the public. In the old days, a carny bimbo would have been confined to a traveling carnival, Hollywood, New York or community theater. Maybe she would have ended up in pornography. It was not an easy way to make a living. Today, she can have a twitter account where she flashes photo-shopped pics of herself. Thirsty losers send her money through PayPal or super chats on her YouTube channel.

The low barrier to entry means every female with a desire for the carny life can get on stage from the privacy of her studio apartment. It’s not just females working the new rackets. In a prior age, Mike Cernovich would have been traveling from town to town selling his monkey mind juice to gullible townies at state fairs. Alex Jones would have been mailing people his mimeographed newsletter, where he explained how space aliens control the Federal Reserve Bank.

Most likely, it is the communications revolution that has caused the news media to commit suicide. In the old days, when the audience was fixed, the focus was on maintaining the facade of objectivity. No one was under any illusions about growing the audience, so they focused on keeping the audience. The internet promised a global market and unlimited market share. A relentless drive for eyeballs gave rise to the clickbait journalists turning the media into fake news.

The thing is though, the basics of the confidence game have not changed all that much with the new technology. The confidence man gets his name because he is adept at winning the confidence of the mark. The mark then lowers his defenses and foolishly trusts the con man, rather than his own natural skepticism. The mark is manipulated into thinking the con man is a friend or at least someone who can be trusted. The con man then uses that trust to exploit the mark.

The way in which the con men does this is by flattery. The mark trusts the con man, because the con man finds small ways to confirm the beliefs of the mark. The adept grifter will be a good listener and pick up the little things that the mark thinks are important, like religious beliefs or opinions about personal matters. Seemingly out of the blue, the con man will express those same opinions, which flatters the mark. After all, everyone likes being told that their private opinions are smart.

That’s something you see with the internet grifters. They often have worn a lot of masks as they seek out on-line audiences. Mike Cernovich is the obvious example. He was a sexual deviant, then he was into the man-o-sphere stuff. He was alt-right and then it was alt-light and Trump . After Trump won, he morphed into new media, claiming to have White House connections. Now he is a guy hustling supplements. He works a lot of hustles, because he is always looking for a new crowd to flatter.

Another aspect of the con that remains constant is how the con man uses his alleged status as a victim to work the mark. Con men will use their mark’s natural empathy to win their confidence. Today that often means claiming the big bad tech companies are censoring them. Alternatively, they will claim evil trolls are haunting their internet activity, causing them harm. The term troll has been changed from meaning someone seeking attention to something almost supernatural.

This is a favorite of the Left. They know their audience wants to believe they are in an end of days struggle with dark forces. Like the old circuit preachers, who would pretend to be wrestling with Old Scratch, the left-wing grifter claims to be in a holy war with right-wing trolls. The game is to portray themselves as a victim, as people naturally sympathize with victims. This scam allows the left-wing grifter to shift the focus from her con to the alleged evil doer.

That’s something else you see with the new con men of the internet. Like the old school con men, they really do see themselves as victims. That’s why they get so man angry when they are caught or even accused. Think back to Bill Clinton in his deposition with Ken Starr. When he was pinned down, he got mad, not because he was caught, but because he truly felt he was being persecuted. What allows the grifter to operate is the persecution complex. They think they are the righteous.

In the before times, society made an effort to police the con men. City police departments had “bunco squads” that worked confidence swindles. The point was to both tamp down these rackets, but also maintain public confidence. Society is based in social trust and the confidence man erodes social trust. We no longer have bunco squads and the grifters are running wild on new media. One result of that is the sharp decline in social trust. Carnies and con men rule the day.

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!

No More Weirdos

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A couple of weeks back, National Review was doing one of its ritual denunciations of the Four Bads. Those are the things our betters have declared to be the worst things possible for anyone to allow into their minds. They are racism, sexism, homophobism and, of course antisemitism. These are the mortal sins of the current age. Someone calling himself Zachery Evans posted this column about the alleged rise in antisemitism in Brooklyn. Supposedly it is on the rise over the last year.

Now, it has to be mentioned that the writer is not an American. He is an Israeli whose bio states he is a “veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces and a trained violist.” It’s hard not to suspect that this person is a Hasbara operative. His lack of a social media presence is a bit suspicious. That and these writers go heavy on the networking, hoping to climb the media ladder. This guy is probably on the payroll of a pro-Israel, white box content operation that places material in sites like NRO.

Putting that aside, the column comes with a picture of a young fellow in the typical outfit of the super-orthodox Jews. They dress a lot like the Amish, except for the long curls of hair and the tassels. There are variations on the costumes. Some wear enormous fur cylinders on their heads. Others wear different headgear. Presumably these things all have meaning inside the cult. These outfits are both a tradition and a way to separate themselves from everyone else.

The use of costumes as a form of self-ghettoization is not exclusive to the super-orthodox Jews. Black American cults have used the uniform as a form of separation from the main. The Black Panthers are the most obvious example. The Nation of Islam and their bow ties are another. The Black Hebrew Israelites, who have been in the news of late, dress in white robes and white head dresses. The point of these outfits is both recognition and separation. They are not us.

Now, the article itself is reasonable about the harassment of these super-orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. The media likes to say it is due to white nationalism or the rise of the KKK or something, but that’s insane nonsense. The real issue, one the writer alludes to in his piece, is the local blacks and now the imported Muslims. Blacks have never liked Jews in general and they really don’t like the ones in funny outfits. They see these people as just another gang, one they can easily push around.

Then there are the imported Muslims. Since 9/11, the United States has responded to the threat of Islamic terrorism by scouring the earth for Muslims of every sort to import into the country. The theory is that by importing tens of millions of Muslims from places the American military has bombed for decades, the miasma that is causing Muslims to commit terrorism will dissipate. It’s lunacy, but the result is places like New York City suddenly have a new class of weird foreigner.

Inevitably, these various weirdos, imported and domestic, will not only agitate against the main, but begin to attack one another. The old rule of diversity plus proximity equaling violence is what you see in that NR story. It is one non-white tribe of outsiders attacking a different tribe of outsiders. The only role white people play in this at all is in the madness of importing these people into the country. Otherwise, this problem is not a white people problem. It is a diversity problem.

A fundamental axiom of group dynamics is that you get rid of the people who cause disharmony in the group. The people who stir up trouble, don’t fit in or simply cannot behave themselves, are removed. This leaves the like-minded to get along with one another with the minimum of friction. In the current age, this has been turned on its head so the opposite is the goal. Our rulers import weirdos from all over the globe and put them in close proximity with us and one another.

If one were to sum up the demands of the populists in every country of the West, it would be “no more weirdos.” If every mainstream political party of the West, even just one major party in each country, embraced this simple dictum, most of the populist unrest would subside. The native populations are simply tired of having to make excuses and accommodations for the foreign weirdos. People are simply exhausted from having to tolerate these people and their weirdness.

Think about it. Imagine if these fur cylinder guys were packed up and sent back to Eastern Europe of Israel. On a different plane were the various brands of Islam imported over the last decades. That alone would make the tri-state area more livable for actual Americans. No more disputes with the orthodox Jews trying to take over local neighborhoods. No more Muslims trying to blow themselves up in public. Two big problems would go away for the people of the region.

It’s not that these people are hated. Most Americans have no idea why the orthodox walk around with giant fur cylinders on their heads. They don’t understand anything about Islam. They don’t want to know. They should not have to know. These are foreign to a Western nation in general and very foreign to America in particular. There is no reason to have these foreign people here. They are weird and they will never fit in with the rest of us. It is immoral to demand we accommodate them.

That is what makes the simplicity of the “no more weirdos” idea so beautiful. It does not tax anyone, by requiring anything from them. They are free to be themselves, in all their weirdness, just not here around us. If the fur cylinder guys want to parade around Tel Aviv, best of luck to them. If Mohamed wants to pray in public, let him do that in a Muslim land. If Mr. Abdillahi wants to do whatever it is, he does in Somali, as long as he does it in Somalia and not Maine, no one needs to care.

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The Great Consolidation

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One of the more important trends in post-Cold War America is the great consolidation that is going on all areas of life. This past Christmas shopping season, for example, was great for a small number of giant retailers. Amazon certainly had a good shopping season, as well as some giant operators like Walmart. For the small local retailers, Black Friday was not the start of their boom time, but a continuation of a decline that started in the 1990’s and continues unabated.

An adult in 1985 would probably have done business with a dozen different retailers during the season, in order to get the gifts and supplies he needed. He would have gone off to a mall to walk through dozens of shops. He would have hit the bigger retailers, of which there were many. That mall would have had two or three big stores, in addition to many small retail chains. Most people had access to two or three malls, in addition to small retailers operating in older strip malls.

This past Christmas, many people will have done all of their shopping on-line and some of those will have done their business with just one company. You can buy just about everything you want from Amazon. If they are not the direct seller, they are operating as a fulfillment company for others. They also operate storefronts for those who just a few years ago would have had their own web store. Amazon and Walmart are close to owning the entire on-line marketplace in the United States.

Consolidation is, of course, a feature of capitalism. An important thing libertarians always miss is that markets naturally seek to consolidate. No matter what set of rules are agreed upon in the market initially, dominant players will emerge and seek to consolidate their grip on the market. Eventually you end up with a few players that control the supply side of the market, thus turning the market into the modern version of the Bronze Age palace economies.

This tendency toward consolidation is not just turning up in the retail side of the American economy. It is occurring in the wholesale side as well. The industrial supply sector has seen a great consolidation in this age. Regional players have been backed by investment bankers toting unlimited credit money, so they can buy-up the smaller players. The supply chain has also seen a similar consolidation, where local operators are displaced by global operators.

The relentless drive toward consolidation is not just an economic trend but a cultural and political one as well. For the first time in a very long time, the children of middle-class Americans can expect a lower standard of living than their parents. One reason for that is the consolidation in the professional ranks. That great consolidation in the economy has meant relatively fewer jobs in the middle and upper management ranks of American business and in the professions.

That’s something that has gone completely unnoticed. In the 1980’s, going to a top-25 law school meant an upper-middle class life, even for the slacker. If you could not cut it at one of the elite firms, you were going to land in regional or local firm, where you could expect a comfortable life. There is a now a great consolidation in the law that will accelerate in this decade. Not only will the number of spots in the elite get smaller, but the next levels down will disappear entirely.

Another area where this will happen is higher education. In a way, higher education has been a relief valve for the children of the top-10%. Those unable to get into elite law schools or cut it in the law of finance, could land a comfortable life in a university either as an administrator or professor. The number of tenured professors and senior administrative staff continues to shrink relative to overall staffing. Of course, the college finance system is about shrink the whole system.

What we are seeing is something no one worried much over in the 20th century and that is the collapse of the upper-middle class. The focus was always on the working class and the great solid middle. While the working class has been obliterated as a social unit, the middle-class has struggled on. Where there is a crisis is in the upper middle, the class of people who served as the staff for the ruling class of American society in business, the professions and politics.

The great consolidation at the very top, is going to mean a great consolidation in the class that serves the top. In a world of ten thousand local guys like Jeff Bezos, there was demand for ten thousand top assistants. In a world of one Jeff Bezos, there is only one aid and maybe a support staff for that top man. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it reveals just how much damage consolidation at the top does to the next strata of society that exists to serve the elite.

There is another consequence to this great consolidation. The children of professionals, who are unable to find a spot in their class, tumble into the next class. This changes the that class. The radicalization of the white middle-class we see happening is due, in part, to this consolidation. All over in dissident politics are men who would have been in management tracks, partner tracks and tenure tracks. Instead they are working outside that system and exercising their minds in dissident politics.

This will have consequences. One way of viewing the revolutions set off by the Enlightenment is that they were the result of idle smart people. The American Revolution and the French Revolution were led by smart fractions. In a world of global oligarchs, where the smart fraction is coalescing outside the ruling fraction, the result will be increasing social unrest. The great populist revolt of the past decade is probably just an appetizer for what lies ahead in the new world order.

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Right-Wing Cosmopolitanism

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The British election offers a good opportunity to see the detachment of official conservatism from the people they pretend to represent. Most of the conservative chattering class was quietly hopeful of a Labour Party victory. They would be justified in opposing what they sneeringly refer to as populism. Boris Johnson is a boorish loudmouth, who has an uncanny appeal with working class people, despite being a man of privilege. He’s the sort of guy conservatives think should not exist.

What baffles conservatives about Boris and Trump is that neither man goes in for the dorm room libertarianism that has come to define conservatism. They proudly talk about spending money on things like infrastructure projects and government services. They think the government should make the lives of the citizens better. The economy, as far as they are concerned, is about serving the people, a concept so alien to modern conservatives they confuse it with socialism.

Of course, what baffles conservatives most about these types of politicians is they don’t seem to care very much for the cosmopolitan types, who decorate the salons of modern conservatism. Johnson won on the strength of his appeal the sort of native Britain, who no longer goes to London, because London is full of foreigners now. Similarly, Trump won on his appeal to whites in flyover country, who worry that their country is being turned into Brazil. Conservatives are baffled by this.

So much so, they just assume it is an illusion. Andrew Stuttaford, writing in National Review recognizes the facts of Johnson’s victory, but then says, “If the Conservatives are to repeat last night’s success in the next general election (currently scheduled for 2024) they will want to claw back some of those London voters.” In other words, despite the results, he remains convinced that the path to victory is chasing the non-white cosmopolitan vote in the cosmopolitan areas.

This is the same psychosis we have seen in America with conservatives. They demand the GOP bankrupt itself chasing a few black votes, at the expense of the vast number of white votes it can easily gain. It is a form of Stockholm syndrome. Conservatives have been captured by the Left for so long, they have now completely internalized the morality of the Left, to the point where it is natural for them. They just assume one sacred black vote is worth more than every single white vote.

Of course, people in cults cannot process disconfirmation, so they look for ways to explain the contrary results within the context of their beliefs. Quickly after the results were known, the so-called conservatives blamed the results on the antisemitism of Jeremy Corbyn. Also in National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty claims “Under Corbyn’s watch, Labour became a party in which anti-Semitism started to have free rein.” Yeah, that’s what caused millions to vote Tory.

Not to be outdone, the neocons are blaming magic miasmas that brought with them a foul odor of socialism. The Trotskyites at Bill Kristol’s new Persia-based outlet are blaming it on their old enemies in the party. Charlie Sykes writes, “And make no mistake about it, Corbyn’s Labour party platform was a progressive, democratic-socialist fever dream.” You see, according to these guys, Brexit and nationalism are wildly unpopular, but the scary socialisms is even more unpopular.

Another point here is that the so-called conservatives were completely taken in by the last-minute campaign by the mass media to claim the election was tight. One reason is they really wanted to believe it. Another reason, a more important one, is that they always trust the Left. They instinctively trust the left-wing media, despite having been lied to so often. It’s not an institutional trust or a desire for it, but a natural comfort for the sorts of people who control the left-wing media.

That is because conservatism in the English-speaking countries has become nothing more than right-wing cosmopolitanism. These are people who live in cities as strangers to everyone around them. Community is not based on history or tradition, but in a shared ideology. Ben Shapiro made this clear when he said “And by the way, I don’t give a good damn about the so-called “browning of America.” Color doesn’t matter. Ideology does.” This is the essence of cosmopolitanism.

It’s also not conservative. The reason conservatism exists is people naturally attach to their kin, their land and their traditions. This is the bulwark against radicalism, which seeks to replace normal human relations with ideological ones. Most people, as the saying goes, are conservative about what they know best. That means in the English -speaking world, most people are naturally conservative. It is this vast majority of whites that is now alien to the cosmopolitan conservatives.

This is why the first project of an authentic alternative is to claw back the mantle of conservatism from the cosmopolitans. Let them drift back to their kind in the party, to wrangle over false consciousness and the finer points of ideology. The authentic alternative to this is not a slightly different ideology, but the rejection of ideology as the foundation of politics. In order for there to be a genuine alternative politics, the cosmopolitan conservatives must first be driven from the temple.

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!