Biological Feudalism

Posted on July 31, 2019 by thezman

The nature of all human society is that there is an elite that sits atop the society, providing both order and structure to the whole. Because the apple does not fall far from the tree, elites tend to be inherited. The sons and daughters of the ruling class make up the next generation’s ruling class. In Guatemala, for example, a small number of families have controlled the country since the 16th century. Despite what the science deniers will tell you, biology is a real thing and it matters.

In the West, this biological reality has been tempered by an understanding that men of merit can be found in the lower ranks. Cultural pathways evolved for these men to earn their way into the elite. Originally this meant warfare. A great warrior and leader of men could earn his way into the elite. Some of the great aristocratic names of England, for example, were founded by the sword in The Hundred Years War. Later, intellectual and economic prowess became pathways to high status.

Now, in the Middle Ages, as Europe settled into a patchwork of ethnic groups, those pathways were shutoff for people outside the dominant ethnicity. Most obviously, Jews were blocked from holding high offices or ruling over Christians. In the late Roman Empire and into the early Middle Ages, these prohibitions did not exist, so there were very powerful Jews in what is now Italy, Spain and France. They often played a major role in the succession of kings and the naming of bishops.

What came to be the norm in Eurasia is that the ruling elite was biologically of the people over whom it ruled. In the case of conquered people, their elites operated like vassals, reporting to the elite that ruled over them. This is the naturally occurring nationalism that Yoram Hazony promotes for his people. Jews rule over Jewish lands and Jewish people for the good of the Jewish people. Those minority populations that happen to be in the way must sublimate themselves to the interests of Israel.

This is not the model everywhere. In most of the Middle East, a small minority will rule over the rest. The Alawites rule over the much larger tribes in Syria. In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, his tribe, al-Begat, ruled over the rest. His tribe was also of the much smaller Sunni sect. In fact, the history of the Middle East, going back to the classic period, is the story of small groups gaining control over large areas of diverse people, who outnumber their new rulers by significant margins.

South America is another model where the naturally occurring nationalism of Eurasia does not prevail. Throughout South America, the ruling class is very European in appearance and custom. They sit atop a large mixed race population that is often tribal, regional and multilingual. Look at the political elite of these countries and they are very white. In contrast, look at their populations and they resemble what the American Left imagines for Ohio one day. It’s biological feudalism.

This organizational system is why America is being overrun with migrants. In order for biological feudalism to work, the people at the top have to be able to feed and control the population. It’s why revolution has been a feature of South American politics since they broke free from Europe. One faction within the elite takes advantage of the other, by rallying some portion of the swarthy masses that are unhappy. Revolution is really just a family spat over control of the country.

It’s why everyone agrees Venezuela is a problem. There, the coalition of the swarthy actually took over country. You’ll note that in a group photo of South American leaders, Maduro is easy to spot. Granted, there’s a lot of oil and gas to be sucked out of the country by North America firms, but the reason the rest of South America has never embraced the Venezuelan leaders is they represent a threat to the biological feudalism that is the norm in South America.

In order to make biological feudalism work, the people at the top have to be homogeneous and they have to be ruthless. Settling political disputes within a narrow elite works when that narrow elite is what amounts to an extended family. This was what European feudalism relied upon to maintain order. If parts of the elite have loyalties that transcend that of the ruling elite, then fracture is inevitable. People will ruthlessly defend their own from outsiders. It is human nature.

That’s why this model is unlikely to work in America. The ruling elite is too diverse to operate like an extended family. Even in the Imperial Capital, where everyone knows everyone, outside loyalties loom large. At Yoram Hazony’s conference, many of the attendees see America as a resource center for their tribe’s war in the Levant. These are not people who will sacrifice for the good of America or the American elite. Their relationships in Washington are purely transactional.

That’s what you see happening with the Democrat Party. They want to be a coalition that is white presenting at the top, with maybe some token color, and the new coalition of the ascendant at the bottom. The trouble is, they seem to lack the willpower and ruthlessness to do it. They just purged leadership staff because they are too white. The tribes of the coalition don’t know their place and the only way they can know their place is if the ruling elite puts them in their place.

Most likely, the sort of system we will see in the post-national, majority-minority America is one ruled by narrow power centers. Silicon Valley will control the public space, but work with Wall Street, which controls the economy. The intelligence services, with their monopoly of force, will be another power center. These power centers will be controlled by a small number of clans. The farce of modern democracy will simply become a ritual that is managed by these power centers to their own advantage.

Whether or not this is possible is debatable. The dirty secret of South America is their organizational model was just an evolution of the colonial model, supported by North America and Europe. Pull away the support of the home culture and the natives most likely would have eaten their elites a long time ago. The South American system transplanted to North America, without external support, may just quickly devolve into chaos, warlordism and then old fashioned authoritarianism.

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A Future of Cults & Subcultures

Posted on July 29, 2019 by thezman

In modern usage, the word “cult” is entirely negative. It conjures the image of a strange religious group or maybe a charismatic madman claiming to be Jesus. In the former case, the group will have unusual beliefs, isolate themselves from the rest of society and maybe prepare for some prophesied event. Jim Jones or David Koresh are what comes to mind for most people in the latter case. Of course, there’s always the example of the suicide cult, which gave us the expression “pass the Kool-Aid.”

The word “cult” comes from the Latin word cultus, which meant the care owed to a deity, shrine or temple. In the ancient world, cults were common. They could be built around maintaining a particular shrine, which had been built for a deity, a great hero or even a legendary event. The people in the cult maintained the shrine and served the needs of pilgrims. The same was true of temples and even churches. In the ancient world, cults were just a normal part of everyday life.

This was true outside the Roman world, as well. For example, the Vikings did not have a word for what we would call religion. Instead, they had words to describe the public cult, to which everyone belonged, and words for the private cults that people maintained in their homes and villages. The public cult was what bound the people together with common rituals and celebrations, while the private cult was what held the family together. The concept of the household god, for example, was common.

This old idea of the cult is worth thinking about in the current age, as multiculturalism shatters traditional communities and the traditional customs of the people. Without something to organize people on the large scale, even a regional scale, something will inevitably organize them on the small scale. This was the traditional role of cults in the ancient world. They evolved locally to be local. Put another way, they were a local solution to a universal problem. They gave people purpose and meaning.

In modern America, as the shared national identity recedes, something will fill the void and most likely it will be something like the ancient concept of the cult. Of course, with the internet, local becomes a relative term. People of the same cult or subculture, can feel like they are close to one another, by participating is private on-line groups. These subcultures will become that which people primarily identify with in public. Another aspect of identity politics will be the many subcultures and cults that spring up.

Take for example the antisemitic community. It used to be that people who hated Jews were called anti-Semites. One could be an Episcopalian and be an anti-Semite. Not liking Jews was just one of many attributes to describe someone. Later, the term shifted to mean people who were hated by Jews. If Jews thought someone was a problem for the Jews, then they were described as an anti-Semite. The anti-Zionists, even the Jewish ones, are always called antisemitic, for example.

Today, some of that still holds, but antisemitism is much more complex now than just a dislike for Jews or Israel. Antisemitism is quickly becoming a unique and complex subculture with its own language, symbols and literature. Kevin McDonald was amusingly called the Karl Marx of antisemitism, but it is a good description. His three books on the Jews are now the foundation of a complex and sophisticated understanding of Jews and the people who have organized themselves around opposition to the Jews.

Of course, modern Judaism is evolving into cults as well. The Chabad movement, for example, has gone beyond being a weird orthodox subculture. It is now an international secret society with observation posts in every Western capital. They even have one of their guys in the White House. Zionism, as practiced by people like Ben Shapiro and Yoram Hazony, ticks all the boxes of a cult. Everything they touch is manipulated to fit into their worldview and the purpose of Zionism.

The subcultures evolving in regards to the Jews are just one type of cult that will probably be a feature of the coming age. Secular gurus like Jordan Peterson or Stephan Molyneux are going to become more common. It’s fair to say that both would have fit in well on the revival circuit back in the old days. Instead of healing people in tent revivals, they heal people on-line with therapeutic language. The multicultural future will be a new age of prophets and holy men, building communities around their teachings.

Now, America has never had a unifying culture. Regionalism and subcultures have been the defining feature of America since the founding. Civic nationalism, however, provided a universal framework within which all of these subcultures and regional identities could operate without generating social conflict. Much like the Vikings, America was a land with a public cult, civic nationalism and patriotism, and many private cults. You could be a southern redneck and a proud American at the same time.

That’s unlikely to be the future. For starters, the old system relied upon a primary loyalty to the national creed, even among the rich. That’s falling away, especially with the rich, who no longer have any loyalty to the people over whom they rule. Then there is the transparency of modern life. Mass communications means everyone can see how different everyone else is living, relative to their subculture. The Zionists and anti-Semites can follow one another in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.

The old line about familiarity breeding contempt will surely be true of the future. Because these evolving subcultures will know a lot about their competitors, they will evolve in opposition to them as well. You see this with what’s going on between the Zionists and the anti-Semites. They are growing in complexity, but also their animosity toward one another is becoming more complex. In the future, maintaining boundaries will be what matters, not finding ways to break down boundaries and cooperate.

Orange Versus Black

Posted on July 28, 2019 by thezman

Just when you thought it was safe, after the Mueller testimony was a colossal flop, President Trump finds a way to get everyone outraged all over again. His tweets about Congressman Elijah Cummings and his congressional district, have all the usual suspects pointing and sputtering. Given the amount of pointing and sputtering they have had to do the last three years, it is a miracle that they can even sputter. It should not be possible to be outraged for three years, but here we are.

Of course, the usual suspects are howling about the racism, as Cummings is black and his district is a black carve out. It includes some of the worst parts of Baltimore city, which means the mostly black parts. The district is about 30% white, which is why Cummings wins his elections with ease. In 2018 he won with 76% of the vote. If you are white and trapped in one of these districts, voting is pointless. In fact, voting for anyone is pointless as the results are known in advance.

As is custom with these types of districts, Cumming is as crooked as a ram’s horn. His wife runs a shady charity that gets millions from people with business in front the Congressman’s committee. He also seems to have some connection with the recent scandal that brought down the last mayor of Baltimore. In one of his tweets, Trump mentioned the corruption. It should be pretty easy to run a sting on Cummings, but he is off limits for the reason everyone knows, but does not say.

Of course, no one will bother disputing the facts of Trump’s tweets. That’s a dangerous subject that must never be mentioned. Any examination of Baltimore would not only reveal Trump is right, but also reveal those things we all know are true, but are told we must never mention. Baltimore is a black city and the highest crime areas are the blackest areas. For example, 92.9% of those arrested for murder are black and 91% of their victims are black. Crime in Baltimore is a black thing.

Of course, this is something everyone knows to be true. In fact, no one alive in modern America has ever lived in a time when people were puzzled about the nature of crime, with regards to race. The reason the urban hipsters exist is their hipster neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed of non-whites, mostly blacks. Giuliani cleaned up Manhattan by having the police put out the unwelcome mat for blacks. The stop and frisk policy was a success, because it relied on those assumptions about race and crime.

This link between race and crime is so well understood, efforts to conceal it have become a meme on social media. For example, when the news says they are looking for teens involved in a wilding incident, everyone knows what it means. Here’s one from Washington. The same thing is true for the party shootings, which always have a certain color to them. Here’s one from the current news. Shootings at block parties are like shootings at hip-hop concerts. Everyone knows what it means.

Of course, black crime is a young black male problem. When the Obama Administration tried to make the case that the cops are racists, they learned that the cops are probably not racist enough. In their report on crime, they found that young black males are 3% of the population and near 30% of homicides. Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

The fact is, crime in Baltimore, like everywhere in America, is a black thing. The internent meme “1350” works because it is something everyone knows, even if they don’t know the exact details. Even when the issue is contained in certain sections of cities, people are made painfully aware of this reality, because crime in the hood does not stay in the hood. Every white person in America has a story in their family tree that involves leaving the old neighborhood because it went bad.

That brings us back to Trump. In sane world, his noticing the obvious should not be front page news, but we don’t live in a sane age. As the legendary quantitative blogger said long ago, “There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much hostility, or meets with so little benevolence, as when he challenges fashionable perceptions of race.” Trump is about to face a fury of hostility from the usual suspects that no man has withstood in the past.

In fact, one of the usual suspects responsible for inflicting Barak Obama on the country is predicting that this is the Gettysburg of his presidency. From the perspective of the usual suspects, of course, Trump is Lee in this analogy. Like Charlottesville, this event will be the rallying cry for the Left until the election. Whatever other issues come up in the next year and a half, the 2020 election will be about race, specifically the old Progressive view of race versus one based in observable reality.

That is fundamentally the choice before us. Do we want to accept the Progressive view on the human condition, slowly sinking into the desperate, grinding poverty of a place like Baltimore? Or, we will not accept that and do what is required to prevent America from becoming a multicultural ghetto ruled by and parasitic elite? That’s what Baltimore is right now. It is a vision of tomorrow that no one should welcome. It does not have to be that way, but the only way to prevent it is to face it.

The Age Of Anti-Knowledge

Posted on July 27, 2019 by thezman

One of the funny things about this age is how the political poles seem to be swapping positions on a great many issues. The Right, for example, is now more concerned with the plight of the working man than the Left, while the Left is a fanatical defender of global capitalism. If 1980 man were transported to the present, he could be forgiven for thinking Tucker Carlson is a liberal. He uses the kind of language that was common on the Left in response to the rise of conservatism.

That does not mean Tucker is a liberal. It just means what we understand to be Left and Right are not fixed, timeless positions. They are just words used for “us” and “them” in the game of politics. Conservatism, properly understood, was always skeptical of capitalism, because it tended to destroy indiscriminately. Bulldozing a church to build a processing center may be a more efficient use of resources, but conservatives always knew the altar was the keystone of civilization, not the factory.

As is always the case, the Left has the ability to create and define its opponents, because it controls the institutions. Forty years ago it created the image of a conservative as a ruthless, cold-hearted capitalist, in order to have an enemy they could more easily manipulate. They never cared about the poor or the working classes and never opposed rule by corporation. The Left in America is an effort to explain why inequality prevails despite the fact man is born equal.

Thinking of the American Left, at least the old Protestant aspects of it, as a theodicy, is a good way to understand why the people who used to sport Darwin fish on their Volvo are now extreme science deniers. Steve Sailer has been following the new star on the denialist scene, Angela Saini, who is getting famous waging jihad against observable reality. Her latest fatwa has been published on the site called Nature, which is ironic, given the article is a rebuke of nature.

Saini is not the only primitive showing up in the prestige press, shaking her staff at the heavens, demanding the gods conform to her dictates. Cordelia Fine was the toast of the town a couple years ago, when she published a book claiming reality is a magic trick played on us by hobgoblins. She did not put it that way. Her case was actually much weaker and less coherent. Greg Cochran’s review of her book reads like someone correcting a child or possibly a simpleton.

Of course, the over-the-top science denialism we see in the prestige press is filtering down to the rest of the cult. They don’t bother with the arguments, instead preferring to repeat the catch phrases. The extremely long-winded YouTuber, Alt-Hype, reviewed a chubby left-wing incel, who is making a name for himself as a science denier. JF Gariepy has a shorter version. The even shorter version is the lefty incels are now denying the very basics of biology.

If you are over the age of forty, this is quite a development. Within living memory, to be a Progressive meant mocking religious people of all types, but especially Evangelicals, as science denying primitives. The Left waved around evolution like a magic talisman, dismissing any argument they deemed religious, by which they meant cultural. Even Obama mocked Christians this way when he was running in 2008. Progressives bleeping loved science, while their enemies loved magic.

The change in tone and language among some right-wingers, like Tucker Carlson, is a bit jarring, but once you get past the superficial, it makes sense. In the 1980’s, a right-wing regard for the public good would not have focused on things like affordable family formation or wage stagnation in the heartland. The excesses of cosmopolitan globalism would not have entered their minds, because those things did not exist. It took time and hard experience to learn that Pat Buchanan was right after all.

What’s happening with the Left seems to be different. It is not an adjustment to new information or a changing culture. For a very long time, the human sciences understood that the variety we see in the human family is rooted in nature. Even those who dispute the validity of evolutionary biology on religious grounds, fully acknowledged that God does not distribute his gifts equally. The Left argued that these difference could be mitigated through public policy and cultural change.

That’s no longer the case. What the Left is engaged in now is a full-throated rejection of observable reality on moral grounds. Angela Saini commands that you accept that Kenyan performance in distance running is an optical illusion. Cordelia Fine, says, as a women, she knows sex is a social construct, created by men. This is not an inability to grasp the material. It is a conscious desire to forbid certain knowledge, to anathematize noticing the world and the explanations for what we see.

It is popular to talk about this phenomenon in terms of Galileo. The left-wing science deniers are playing the antagonist role of the Church and the humans sciences are in the protagonist role. This is probably comforting to the empirically minded, as it suggests they will eventually triumph in the end. Not only is this a faulty reading of history, particularly the Church, it assumes that human progress is inevitable. That no matter what they do, the march of science will continue unabated.

Instead, what we are seeing could be the signal of a coming dark age. Maybe this is what it was like in 1177 BC. The slow decline in general intelligence leads to a period of anti-knowledge, where knowing how stuff works, or even being curious about it, is seen as a threat to the established order. The brakes are applied and progress is reversed until the point where the people are no longer able to operate the mechanisms of society created by their ancestors.

Alienation And Its Discontents

Posted on July 24, 2019 by thezman

If you were to transport into this age, someone from a prior age, say the 19th century, that person would certainly be amazed at what he saw. From the perspective of this age, the assumption is he would be most impressed with the technological advances relative to his time. The ability to easily communicate with people, from all over the globe, would probably be the most dazzling. Instead of waiting weeks for a letter from a friend, we exchange e-mails and texts instantly from wherever we happen to be standing.

People in the modern West tend to think of progress in purely material terms, so that would be the thing most people think of in this thought experiment. Our communication systems are better. Our transportation systems are better. Our food and entertainments are vastly more plentiful, if not necessarily better. It’s not unreasonable to think that 19th century man would marvel at a fast food drive through. To him, at least in a material sense, this age is beyond the world of fantasy.

Something else would probably stun 19th century man. That is the lack of human interaction compared to his time. This is one of those counter-intuitive things for people in this age, because this age is awash in communications. Everywhere you turn, the rulers are sending messages to you about the latest products you must consume or the most recently approved thoughts you should promote. Humans in this age are awash in mass media, which bombards us wherever we go.

When you look past that top layer, however, what you see is people “interfacing” with one another, but very few people bonding and interacting. Look at the typical customer service experience. You call and someone, from somewhere, responds to your prompts, using a script provided to them by the software in the call center. Increasingly, the customer service agent is a robot. Most people order their prescriptions, for example, from a robot, not a pharmacist. It is purely transactional.

This sterilization of human interaction is not limited to the impersonal contact we make with global corporations. Inside the corporation, relationships are increasingly automated and systematized. Managers are trained to use management systems to interface with their direct reports. Staff is no longer encouraged to be loyal to a manager, as that is as sensible as being loyal to the coffee machine. The manager is just an entity that inputs data into the management system.

The argument in favor of automation in the work place is it reduces errors and lowers costs, but often the driving force is to limit human interaction. The shift supervisor, so used to dealing with systems in his life, is unequipped to actually manage human beings on a personal level. Instead of monitoring their work and correcting their errors, adjusting for personality, he posts their efficiency reports in the break room, along with all of the other management metrics that come from the quality control system.

This is something people in the process management world have come to understand about the modern workplace. It’s not as much about efficiency as about the fact that young people no longer possess the social skills that were an assumed part of society just a couple of generations ago. The young manager does not have the social skills to confront an underling over an error or the intuition to encourage someone who needs a little motivation to get through a difficulty.

The general reputation of millennials in the work place is that they are self-absorbed, needy and entitled. Companies have responded to this with tighter structures that remove the need for initiative and adaptability. In reality, the cause of the problem is a generation of people raised by robots. The well-adapted millennials are those who played sports or served in the military. In those environments, stripped of automation, they learned how to be leaders, teammates and adapt to new conditions.

This is not just a workplace phenomenon. This post from the London School of Economics is amusing in many ways, but one line jumps out. “Occupational segregation matters because it can lead to inequality between workers and limit the talent pool for employers trying to fill a position.” The sterility of language will remind anyone over the age of 40 of the jokes made about communism. That’s a line that would seem at home in a provincial report on the latest five year plan.

This is something you see all over the social sciences. It’s why the author of the post claims, with a straight face, that economists are baffled as to why homosexuals are clustered into certain fields. Within living memory, people just knew why this was and did not think much about it. It was so obvious, it was assumed everyone knew it. In the atomized transactional world of today, humans are the most baffling thing to their fellow humans. No one knows anything about themselves now.

Part of this is the result of multiculturalism. That man brought here from a century ago would have been snatched from a world in which everyone was like him. If he was a city dweller, he may have bumped up against other tribes of immigrants or natives, but his daily life was spent around his people. What he knew about those other people was through the lens of his understanding of himself and his people. It was not through a description in a textbook or from a class on human development.

Today we live in a world of strangers. White communities have been shattered, along with the sense of community. In fact, whites are no longer permitted to have a sense of community. Since most of what makes the modern world possible is still run by whites, the result is a world run by deracinated strangers in a sea of alienation. Those management systems are simply a response to this reality. It’s a solution to slow what is the inexorable process of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

There’s also the fact that technology has not just made stuff cheaper. It has changed how humans interact with the world. This shows up in standardized testing. Young people are better at taking tests, because they live in a world of tests. Their games are structured along the same lines as a standardized test. Instead of a free form world of play, it is the range of options available in the video game. Instead of problem solving, it is leaning the combination of available inputs.

This transactional existence is not without its consequences. The alienation that is a daily part of modern life manifests as nostalgia throughout the culture. Hollywood movies are either based on childhood items, like super heroes, or remakes of shows from when America was not this way. The rising tide of populism and ethno-nationalism, particularly among the youth, is a romantic response to a modern world that offers plenty of ways to use your time, but no answer for how to live.

That’s what would most shock and horrify 19th century man about this age. He could live without the instant communications, but he could not live a life in which no one had anything to say or a reason to say it. He could live without modern transportation, but he could not live without a place to a go or a people to visit. He could not live alone in a world full of strangers. It’s all those close, smelly, sweaty connections with your people that makes you human. He could not live without that and in a probability, neither can we.

Self-Loathing As Medicine

Posted on July 17, 2019 by thezman

At the national conservatism conference, a recurring theme of the speeches was the awfulness of identity politics. The speakers would not get into the details, beyond noting it made unifying the country impossible. There were no references to black identity or the variety of group identities coming from the grievance studies departments. They would just refer to it in the same way that people refer to drug taking of drunk driving. That is, these are obviously immoral things that good people know to avoid.

The thing is though, this sort of talk only occurs in front of white people. Despite all the invective aimed at people on the dissident right, about their alleged racism, there was not a lot of diversity at the conference. A back of the envelope count says it was 65% white, 30% Jewish and 5% other. It may have been more Jewish than that, but not every Jew wears a yarmulke. Regardless, there may have been one black person and a few dozen people of mysterious origins. No a lot of vibrancy.

In other words, despite the hooting about white racism, the room was full of white people, who spend most of their time around white people or fellow whites. The typical black person experiences vastly more diversity in his daily life. Even the emotionally crippled women of the gender studies department get more diversity. The point being, Joe Sobran’s line about liberals applies to the various types of conservatives and now these newfangled national conservatives.

Putting that aside though, the typical white person in America really and truly does think identity politics is a bad thing. They look at the alternatives to the bourgeois civic nationalism of their lives and see that it is a shabby alternative. In fact, non-white identity politics can only exist where white people are in sufficient numbers to keep the water flowing and the lights working. That’s because identity politics is actually just anti-white politics. It is an entirely negative identity.

No public white person would dare say such a thing, but that’s the truth of it and more and more white people are waking up to it. The old paleocons can pearl-clutch this stuff all they like, but there is no turning back from it. Lecturing white America on the dangers of identity politics is now getting people killed. The only responsible thing to say in front of a white audience on the subject is the truth. What animates the new faces of the Democrat party, for example, is a hatred of white people.

Of course, one reason why the people railing against identity politics do so exclusively in front of white audiences is they fear this truth settling in on whites. That’s why tirades against white nationalism often coincide with the tirades against identity politics. They are two sides of the same coin, which is a fear that whites will begin to see their collective interests as primary. If in the next election whites vote their skin, Trump wins a fifty state landslide and 70% of the popular vote.

At the risk of over-making the point, these lectures to whites about identity politics are more insidious than they seem at first blush. The temptation is to assume it is just bourgeois white people extolling civic nationalism, by criticizing anything that undermines civic unity. Alternatively, it is a way for these people to puff out their chests and declare that it is the Democrats who are the real racists. Even today, this is a wildly popular tick among the civic nationalist types.

There’s something more important about these lectures. They are built on the assumption that the worst of all identity politics is white identity politics. Blacks embracing their racial awareness is not only ignored, but often celebrated by the same people fretting over white identity. Jewish identity, of course, is the greatest of all possible things. A multi-million dollar celebration of it was just staged in the capital, along with hundreds of media people, marched in to report on it.

White identity, well, that’s the worst and that’s why these lectures against identity politics never happen in front of non-whites. David French does not spend his days going to colleges demanding they junk their black studies departments. The boys at various Koch Brothers rackets are not going to the grievance studies departments, holding seminars on the dangers of identity politics. Instead, rants against identity politics are only aimed at white audiences, because white identity is what they fear.

When you witness this stuff up close, it is hard not to get angry about it and develop a deep loathing for the people behind it. When a Tucker Carlson does a bit on the evils of identity politics, one has to wonder if he is really an asset. To perpetuate white self-loathing in an age of racial politics and minority-majority demographics is to invite terror upon white people. To anathematize whites in order to prevent white identity is to counsel the victim to just like back and take it.

In fairness, a lot of the hooting about identity politics from civic nationalists is just alienation dressed up as nostalgia. They feel the same loss the rest of us feel for an America that is never going to return. Those on this side of the great divide have come to terms with it and seek to build a new identity that provides community and a sense of purpose. The civic nationalist just wallow in the self-pity and nostalgia. They are the new flagellants, who think more self-harm will solve the problem.

A Book Of Contradictions

Posted on July 14, 2019 by thezman

When reading Yoram Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, the image that keeps coming to mind is of a man working a puzzle, only to keep arriving at an unsatisfactory conclusion. There’s the period where it feels like it is all coming together, then that moment when he realizes the emerging answer is all wrong. Not factually wrong, but unacceptably wrong. After a brief moment of terror, he then throws his work into the fireplace and begins again with a fresh sheet of paper.

The point of the book is to make the case for nationalism, but not just any old form of nationalism. Hazony sets out to craft a new definition of nationalism that is essentially Zionism, without the overtly Jewish attributes. It is a nationalism that any people can embrace, but not every people can have. He then compares this form of nationalism with the alternative, making the case that this form of nationalism is superior. In the process he makes some interesting claims that are worth exploring.

The book starts with the rather interesting claim that imperialism is a political system that “seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.” This a curious way to describe empire that makes imperialism sound like a hippy movement from the 1960’s. While it is true that empires grow from a desire to create peace for the conqueror, the prosperity and happiness of the conquered is never a concern.

This odd way of defining imperialism is a part of his rhetorical sleight of hand. What he seeks to do is redefine imperialism away from its biological and material motivations, to something that is ideological. The empire is not about putting one tribe ahead of all others or the material benefit of the emperor. It is about imposing a politics and culture on all people. The reason this is important is it allows Harzony to claim that Nazism is imperialistic, not nationalistic, in its fundamental nature.

Few scholars of fascism would agree with this, even though they would acknowledge that Nazism was expansionist and probably necessarily so. This is the result of the geopolitics of the period, not the inherent logic of fascism. That’s not the point. What Harzony is doing is inoculating himself and Zionism against the charge that is always leveled at nationalism. That is, it the logical endpoint of it is Nazism and that inevitably leads to war, genocide and barbarism.

That is the real argument of the book. Harzony puts no effort into explaining how his conception of nationalism could be applied in Europe or America. Instead, his argument is that Zionism, Jewish nationalism, is both the pure form of nationalism and the best form of human organization. It allows a people to chart their own destiny, but also prevents one nation from meddling in the affairs of another. A world composed of naturally occurring nation-states would be peaceful and prosperous.

He is not wrong. Judaism is the purist expression of nationalism. On the one hand, you have a collection of people, who not only share a language, history and religion, they share a common ancestor, hand-picked by God. Not only that, the Lord picked a land for his chosen people. To be a Jew is to be a member of a timeless tribe with an unrivaled link to the heavens and an unrivaled claim on the land. It is a sense of nation that transcends time, place and boundaries.

This is where Hazony reaches that point where the emerging answer to the puzzle he is working terrifies him. If a nation is a people with a common language, customs, history, territory and ancestors, then how is it wrong for a nation to not accept foreigners into their ranks? If France is for the French, they should have the right to deport the non-French from their lands? More precisely, would they not have a duty to deport these people, as their patriotic duty is to preserve the nation for future generations?

To get around these obvious difficulties, Hazony compares the nation to a family with lots of adopted children. Some reviewers think this sort of equivocating is a bow to the ideological realities of this age, but a closer reading suggests he is concerned with a different part of his audience. If a nation can decide who it allows in, based on its own internal logic and customs, then there can be no moral basis for opposing racism or antisemitism, as both are just natural extensions of nationalism.

Of course, the other problem with nationalism for the Zionist is the case of the Arab minorities in the Levant. If a nation is defined as a people with a common language, history and territory, then why can’t the Palestinians have a country? Why are their claims against Israel not valid? In chapter 17 Harzony resolves this by refining his definition of nationalism to limit it only to those who can attain a nation. In other words, everyone can have a nation, if they can get it and keep it.

In chapter nine we get another one of those moments where you can imagine him pulling up short as he realizes the implication of what he is writing. He starts out making the case for the biological underpinning of human society, then realizes where that is headed and swerves into the guardrail of civic nationalism. Then in the following two chapters, he makes the dissident case against social contract theory and the case against the materialist view of society peddled by libertarians.

If you can ignore the whiplash, the book has some excellent points to make that dissidents would be wise to read. In chapter 15 he carefully explains how federalism cannot work, using the case of America leading to the Civil War. He then compares that to the internationalist dream of a world controlled by supranational bodies arbitrating disputes between states. In the following chapter, he eviscerates the arguments of Ben Shapiro, without actually naming him.

Chapter 16 is his best chapter and one of the strongest arguments for ethno-nationalism you will find, outside of dissident circles. That chapter would not look out of place in Greg Johnson’s White Nationalist Manifesto. It is both an argument against multiculturalism and an argument in favor of ethno-nationalism. He is careful to avoid directly mentioning the biological aspect of nationalism, but no rational person can read that chapter and no think Hazony assumes a biological root to nationalism.

The last section of the book, which most reviewers apparently skipped, offers some very interesting insights into Zionism. In chapter 22 he writes about the shame Jews feel over not having fought back against the Nazis and how this is integral to Jewish nationalism and national identity. Instead of Jews being a people whose men and women stood helplessly as their children were murdered by the Nazis, Israel is a nation of armed men and women defending their children.

Similarly, chapter 24 offers insight into why Jews see criticism of Israel as a form of racism and antisemitism. On the one hand, they see the West adopting the Kantian model of nations, which holds white nations to a higher standard that non-white nations, like the Arab countries surrounding Israel. That’s the racism. On the other hand, the imperialist opposition to nationalism, which is what defines the Jewish people, is a hostility only aimed at Israel. That’s the antisemitism.

As is to be expected with polemical book, The Virtue of Nationalism will drive the pedant mad at times. Hazony makes some odd claims about the Thirty Years War. His view of Catholicism is weird and comes close to bigotry. As stated at the beginning, his definition of imperialism is hard to accept. Of course, the equivocation on the biological foundations of nationalism, especially Jewish nationalism, will strike a certain type of reader as predictable. That said, it is a good read for the dissident.

Finally, something that is not touched on by Hazony, but is implied in all Zionist discussions of nationalism, is this basic reality. For Israel to exist as currently constructed, it needs a robust relationship with a robust America. That America can only exist as a majority white and chauvinistically white. This inevitably puts the Zionist on the same side as the white nationalist. It turns out that the great irony of this age is that the fate of the West may ride on ancient enemies finding common ground.

The Usurper

Posted on July 9, 2019 by thezman

Origins myths are a natural element to all human organization, whether it is a great family, an enterprise or a nation. The founder of the great family is lionized as not only good at making money, but also as a great man. In fact, his great wealth is seen as a result of his great deeds. Similarly, the successful business will celebrate the founders as something more than hard working men who got lucky. Usually they are cast as plucky underdogs, who beat the odds because they were moral men.

For a people, the mythologizing gets more grandiose. The origin myths not only explain the founding of the nation, but justify the current order. The social arrangements, the type of government and the people in charge are the work of providence. The celebration of national holidays are part of reinforcing the founding myths and most especially the moral order. In America, the endless flag waving and saccharine patriotism is a daily reminder that the current order is God’s will.

The reason for these myths is that all authority comes from usurping it. The great families of a nation arose because the founders of those families knocked off the previous great families. In England, for example, many of the great families made their fortune fighting for the king in the 100 Years War. They went over to France, killed a bunch of rich people and took their wealth back home to England. For most of human history great men rose to fame by putting other great men to the sword.

The successful business is less bloody, in most cases, but the founders were still usurpers who made their name at the expense of others. Maybe their business success came at the expense of established companies in the field. Maybe they used connivance or trickery to out-compete their rivals. It does not matter as wealth does not spring from nothing. As in all competition, there are winners and losers. The great company was founded by men who usurped existing great companies.

Because all societies begin low and violent, purity and grandeur arise from distance from their origin. The rulers and the people must put distance between themselves and the origins of their people, in order to give purpose to the perpetuation of their people, but they can never be disconnected from their origins. Instead, they mythologize them in order to both disguise the reality of their beginnings, but celebrate themselves as part of the natural order. The origin myth is a pretty lie that keeps us looking forward.

The most obvious example of how this works is the Lincoln fetish we see with our ruling class in America. Both sides venerate Lincoln and the Gettysburg address, The Civil War has been cast as the second founding, a purification ritual that addressed the original sin of slavery and republicanism in the founding. Rather than being seen as a break from the founding, which is surely was, it is a continuation of it. Lincoln the usurper, is replaced with Lincoln the saint, who saved the republic.

The Gettysburg Address now holds more emotional power for our elites than the actual founding documents. At some level, Lincoln certainly knew he was a usurper and that speech is pretty good proof of it. He allegedly jotted it down without much thought, but it shows all the signs of a man who knew he destroyed the old order and was now tasked with creating a new one. Starting with a lie about his own motivations was the most obvious place to start. It was the usurper announcing his victory.

The great compromise after the Civil War was to allow the defeated to hang onto their heroes in symbolic form. In order to avoid a genocide, which is what abolitionists surely desired, the South was allowed to exist as a conquered people, but with their memories and some of their customs intact. Whether it was conscious or just an inevitable result of the war, a grand compromise evolved that allowed the South to retain its unique identity, but subsume it into the overall identity of the new nation.

Of course, this is why the current ruling class is obsessed now with erasing all traces of the South, by toppling over statues, desecrating graves and erasing images of the actual founders of the United States. These are people haunted by their own illegitimate claims on power, so they are removing anything that reminds them of a past in which they played no part. It’s also why the past is being systematically colorized to write in strangers to the family tree of America.

That’s why these acts are so compelling to the emerging multicultural ruling elites. For them, this is not about revenge or spiting people they hate. They are, in fact, a consecration of their own authority. They are symbolically giving birth to their new nation by destroying the old. For the usurper, the victim is only important in so far as he has what the usurper desires. It’s not vengeance that drives these people. It is a desire to mythologize and legitimize their own authority.

The implication here is that the die is cast. It is no longer a question of if America is taken over by the coalition of the ascendant, but rather how long this process will play out and how it will end. There is no restoration of old white America. That door closed decades ago, when the borders were flung open to the world. If this emerging ruling elite is to be toppled, their power will need to be seized by a new usurper, a group that seeks power and legitimacy by whatever means are available.

The Jewish Dilemma

Posted on July 5, 2019 by thezman

Like the fog, talk of nationalism is slowly starting to roll in on the intellectual and pseudo-intellectual conversations of the West. One reason for this is the rise of populist movements in Europe and America, responding to the importation of non-Western people into Western nations. Another reason for the rise in nationalism is the sense that the ruling classes of the West are no longer Western. To the typical occidental, the elites seem foreign and oriental in the language and dispositions.

The emerging debate about nationalism among the intellectual and pseudo-intellectual classes is therefore reactionary. Across the board, the debate is being picked up by people so unfamiliar with the topic, they struggle with the basics of the concept. This column by Dennis Prager in the American Zionist broadsheet The Daily Wire is a good example of the fumbling you see when these people take up the issue. He treats the word like it is on loan from a foreign race of men or possibly space aliens.

Nationalism presents a particularity difficult problem for the Jewish ruling elite, which is another thing you see in the Prager piece. The word “nationalism” is derived from the word “nation” and that comes to us from the Old French word nacion, which means birth, rank, descendants, relatives, country, homeland. The French, of course, inherited the meaning from the Latin word for “birth, origin, breed, kind, species, race of people, tribe.” The word nationalism means loyalty to a people, your people.

If the word nationalism means what it actually means, then it presents an obvious dilemma for diaspora Jews in the Occident. If Jewishness is what the religion says, then Jews are their own race of people. Jewish nationalism would therefore be to the Jewish people and the state of Israel. One cannot be equally loyal to two nations or two of anything, for that matter. Inevitably, you will have to pick between the two, thus establishing one as the primary loyalty and the other secondary.

This is the age old issue with Jews in the diaspora. For the longest time, they were accused of dual loyalty, but in reality they were accused of having no loyalty. Like so much about this topic, the facts have been corrupted to obscure the truth. In reality, the accusation was that the primary loyalty of Jews was to their people and the apparent loyalty to their host population was out of convenience and necessity. The core of Western antisemitism in the West is the claim that Jews are not us.

Jewish intellectuals have always understood this, so after the Second World War, they pounced on the opportunity to anathematize the concept of nationalism. The claim was that nationalism was the cause of the great industrial wars that reduced the West to rubble and gave rise to fascism. Therefore, to avoid a repeat of those horrors, nationalism must be stamped out. In fairness, this was not solely a Jewish project, as there were plenty of gentile communists who embraced the idea.

Still, the primary beneficiaries of anti-nationalism were Jews. In America, this allowed Jews to enter the ruling class and by extension the global ruling elite. The global power of the American Empire, now including the international financial network, gave diaspora Jews unprecedented power. Jews are now wildly over-represented in all of the positions of power and influence. While this is a popular talking point for anti-Semites, it has also been a point of pride for Jews themselves.

We see why Zionist like Denis Prager are terrified by the sudden reappearance nationalism in the West. If the people of the Occident regain their love of self, then Jews are on the horns of a dilemma. They can either assume their traditional role as guests in their host counties or they can join their neighbors in these host countries and place loyalty to their neighbors over loyalty to their ancient tribe. Judaism becomes just a remnant of who they used to be, in the same way Catholicism is for the Irish.

The third option, one you see in the Prager piece and in the Ben Shapiro book is to muddy the waters on the whole issue. For example, Prager defines good nationalism as that which is good for him, while bad nationalism is when it is bad for him. Ben Shapiro, on the other hand, tries to redefine 2,000 years of Western history to make Jews the loyal partners of Christendom. The absurd concept of Judeo-Christianity is just an effort to rewrite the past to insert his ancestors into your family tree.

Then there is the problem of Israel, which is an ethno-state, despite the humorous efforts to prove otherwise. Jews see the physical land as theirs because according to the central tenant of their faith, God gave it to them. Their loyalty to the land of Israel is an expression of their loyalty to the people of Israel, wherever they may reside. In this regard, Judaism is the most pure expression of nationalism, as it literally transcends time and physical boundaries. Israel is the symbol of that blood loyalty.

You really cannot square that reality with objections to the French demanding their country be for the French people, as defined by the French people. If what it means to be a Jew is defined by Jews, which is literally true, then what is the moral or factual objections to Germans defining what it means to be German? There is none, of course, which is why Israel has always been a problem for diaspora Jews. You can’t be a Zionist, while preaching multiculturalism and open borders.

The usual suspects assume this contradiction will inevitably lead to the age old conflict, but that is not necessarily true. Much of the history of antisemitism is apocryphal, used by Jews to gaslight themselves into remaining loyal to the tribe. In fact, Jewish identity in America is largely a negative one now as a result. To be authentically Jewish is to believe that your gentile neighbors will one day pull their khaki outfits from the back of the closet and get the trains running on time again.

The alternative is for diaspora Jews in America to come to terms with the fact they have a different history from the rest of the Tribe. They represent a fork in God’s project, creating a new tribe of Israel. This new tribe places its primary loyalty with the host country, because it cannot exist otherwise. Since Israel, as it is currently constructed, cannot exist without a powerful America as its powerful ally, American Jews serve Israel and the Jewish people as loyal allies of their fellow Americans.

It is possible that Zionist Jews hold such a conception of themselves. Whether they keep this to themselves because they distrust their gentile neighbors or they don’t trust themselves, not speaking to it is a problem only they can solve. If even Zionist Jews remain locked into an old identity, then the only way forward is to slough off that old identity and accept present reality. Regardless, the dilemma of resurgent nationalism in the West is a Jewish dilemma, not an occidental one.

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The Eternal Scold

Posted on June 29, 2019 by thezman

A popular game with the old Buckley conservatives was to figure out how to blame the actions of the Left on socialism or a quest for power. Whenever the Left found some reason to attack some aspect of white culture, the National Review types would work their fingers raw trying to explain why it was either due to socialism or a quest for political power by those dastardly democrats. Sometimes, they would combine the two, so that the quest for power was to impose socialism on us.

Some elements of the dissident right have inherited this tendency to reduce all left-wing activity to simple, individual motivations. The Left does something similar, but they prefer supernatural and mystical explanations. In fact, that is probably a useful way of describing the political divide. One side relies on magic to explain the world, while the other side relies on some form of self-interest. In both cases, the preferred answer strips the humanity from the actors and reduces them to robots or pawns.

The truth is, human society has a lot of complexity, because we have a wide range of human types. For example, the scold is a feature of all white societies, regardless of political and economic makeup. These are people who take pleasure in lecturing the rest of us about our failings. Sometimes they often find a home on the Left these days, because the Left defines the civic religion of the West. In a prior age, they would have been defending order and tradition, as part of the religious community.

These people are not motivated by greed or a lust for power. Their scolding of the population may result in elevated status or a comfortable lifestyle, but that is not what motivates them to scold the rest of us. Al Gore made a lot of money off the climate change rackets, but that’s not why he does it. He was plenty rich before he got the green fever after the 2000 election. What gets him up in the morning is the need to be Gaia’s prophet, an Ezekiel warning the rest of us about the end times.

A recent example of this is the decision, by some scolds on the San Francisco board of supervisors, to ban e-cigarettes. According to the news accounts, they will ban the sale of these devises and ban the shipment of them into the city. Strangely, people will still be allowed to possess them and use them in public. Perhaps the scheme is to ban the public use of them next and then criminalize the possession of them. That’s the way they attacked the sale and use of tobacco forty years ago.

Now, the anti-smoking crusades were allegedly about public health. Smoking is not only unhealthful to the smoker, it has a societal cost. Lung cancer is a terrible way to die and an expensive one as well. Public health is often cast in emotional terms, trying to save lives, but as policy matter, it is about saving money. Either way, the cover story for the taxes on tobacco and limits on smoking was about public health. We wanted to end smoking and therefore improve the health of the people.

Of course, that was never true. It was convenient that smoking was bad for your health, but the real motivation was the need to boss people around. The scold has to have someone they can bully. The reason is just an excuse. That’s what you see with these crusades against electronic cigarettes. There is no data suggesting they are unhealthful like cigarettes. Nicotine is not the issue with tobacco use. It is the other chemicals and the particulate matter from burning tobacco. That’s not an issue with e-cigarettes.

The funny thing about this is these electronic cigarettes are probably the best tool for quitting conventional tobacco use. They allow the user to wean themselves from the psychological habit as they wean themselves from the chemical addiction. There is some evidence suggesting the addictive power of cigarettes is not the nicotine, but the drug cocktail used to prepare the tobacco, in combination with nicotine. Therefore, this delivery system is a better way to get off the drug than other methods.

None of that matters to the crusaders. It never mattered to them when they were howling about smoking at ballparks or out of doors. What motivates these people is the need to lecture the public about morality. The scold always assumes pleasure is an indication of sin. Those hipster goofballs vaping in the coffee shop, therefore, must be doing something wrong. That’s the bat signal for the local scolds to rally and demand the activist be stopped, else the community will be at risk.

That’s the other thing about scolds. They always justify their activity by claiming they are sacrificing for the good of the community. In this case, they are looking out for the children, as if toddlers are growing beards and taking up vaping. In reality, it is just the same old people, the eternal scold, getting a rush from making other people stop doing something they enjoy. It’s not about money and it is not about power. For these scolds and busybodies, the reward is in being the scold. It’s who they are.

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