Category Archives: Culture

Neo-Democracy

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Most people think democracy means the people get to vote on who holds office and what laws get passed. Government by the people and majority rule, at least when it comes to elections and referendums. Not so long ago, serious types would correct someone if they said that America was a democracy. They would say it is a republic, not a democracy, which is technically correct. Civic nationalists will still do this whenever someone says America is a democracy, even though the term has become ubiquitous.

Putting aside the linguistic issues, most people think of democracy as something close to the Merriam-Webster definition, “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” The people have the final say on who holds office and by extension, what they do while in office. The government is controlled by the people, through an orderly process of elections and referendums.

The people in charge, however, have a different definition of democracy. They look at democracy as a thing, rather than a process. When they speak of democracy, they are talking about the offices and institutions they control, both official and unofficial. The media, for example, is an unofficial part of democracy. The array of non-profits and think tanks are part of democracy. The entirety of the managerial state is this thing they call democracy, which is why they endlessly talk about the need to defend it.

For example, this story in Foreign Policy magazine is about how Denmark’s use of computer software to manage welfare benefits is a threat to liberal democracy. The authors use the term in the way in which normal people would use it. They provide an example of how one municipality is using “a system that would use algorithms to identify children at risk of abuse, allowing authorities to target the flagged families for early intervention that could ultimately result in forced removals.”

For these systems to work, the state needs access to all sorts of data that not so long ago was assumed to be outside the scope of government. Think about what the state would need to know about “the children at risk” to know they are at risk. Most of what would be useful is the sort of information people in liberal democracies think is none of the government’s business. Then there is the notion that the state has the right to involve itself in the affairs of citizens, before they do something wrong.

Notice also the shift in language. Those inclined to dystopian views like to use the word “pre-crime” to define this sort of thing, but it is worse. The new class think they need to intervene in your life before you do something wrong, which is different than preventing crime. What the Danish state is up to is intervening in the lives of citizens before they act in a way that may be legal but not in their interests. The state now has a monopoly on morality, in addition to a monopoly on violence.

As the authors point out, the core assumption of liberal democracy has always been that the state must be restrained. This is described as negative liberty. The state is out of the way of the people who are then free to pursue their interests. It is why the US Constitution narrowly describes the role of each branch of government. It is also why there is a bill of rights, which describes broad spheres into which the state is prohibited. In theory, the government is like a dog on a leash. It can only go where the leash permits.

What has happened in the last several decades in the West is a subtle shift away from negative liberty to positive liberty. This is the claim that to be free, a person must be self-determined, able to control their own destiny in their own interests. For example, an addict is not free because they are a slave to the drug. A black person, despite equality before the law, is not free due to white racism and the legacy of slavery. The state may not be placing obstacles in their way, but the person is not in control of their destiny.

The role of the state, therefore, is not to stay out of the way, but to intercede to clear these limits on the citizen’s ability to fulfill their potential. That is why the Danish government just assumes it is their duty to meddle in the personal lives of citizens. They are not violating their rights. Instead, they are helping them reach their potential, by preventing them from doing things that are not in their interests. In the case of family life, it means stopping people from being bad parents or bad examples to their children.

It is why the new class is in such a panic over the rise of populist movements in the West and willing to use totalitarian means to suppress them. From their perspective, these forces are a threat to democracy, because they are democracy. The new class, this consolidating class of people at the top of politics, administration, finance, business, and the law, are the indispensable class. Without them, there is no democracy, because there is no one to structure your life so you can reach your fullest potential.

It is also why they are prone to blaming the supernatural for observable phenomenon like racial inequality or the differences in the sexes. When you eliminate the natural explanations for why blacks have different life outcomes than whites, then you are left with the supernatural. White privilege is just another way of blaming bad juju. The same is true of “gun violence” which shifts agency from the trigger puller to the object. These various bogeymen become an explanation and a rallying cry for the new class.

More ominous is how the new class, at least in America, is slowly concluding that the reason the new citizens are not reaching their potential is that the old citizens have a mystical power source. The mere presence of legacy Americans, minding their own business, living their lives, is bad for the new citizens. After all, that is the definition of white privilege. There can be only one solution to that problem. That probably explains why the Sackler family walks free. They are the sword of democracy.

Gefälschte Nachrichten

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Last week, the German publication Der Spiegel was forced to fire its star performer, when it was revealed that he was a fabulist. Claas Relotius had written for the publication for close to a decade. He had been handed several awards by other media organs. His exposure as a serial fabricator was the result of his piece on the small town of Fergus Falls Minnesota, after the 2016 election. The thrust of his story was that rural America voted for Trump, because it is full of xenophobic weirdos and economic losers.

His mistake was to pick on a small town in the age of the internet. The yokels were able to look up the article and compare his version of reality with their own. More important, they could go to a popular platform and post their reactions to his article, so the world could then compare his work to reality. Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, who live in Fergus Falls, posted their analysis of the article on Medium. Eventually, it took over a year, Der Spiegel was forced to address the issue publicly.

In Germany, this is quite a scandal in media circles, because Der Spiegel is like their version of New York Times. That is, it positions itself as the official arbiter of truth, with regards to public morality. They not only decide what is true, they decide which truths can be said. Worse yet for them, they have been bragging about their fact checking for a long time. As a result of this tent pole toppling over, the German media is scrambling to convince everyone that it is an isolated incident, not a system failure.

The amusing bit is the German media is rushing around looking puzzled, as to how the vaunted fact checking system could have failed. After all, the best people are in control of the media. How could the best people have made such basic errors? As is the case in America, whenever these things happen, the media handwringing is just a dodge. What really concerns them is how easy it was for two bumpkins from dirt country to sluice out the facts from the fiction in this article.

That is always the thing with these scandals. The media big shots always come off as if they have been insulted about their shenanigans being revealed. In this case, the other major media outfits are rallying to defend Der Spiegel. In the dreaded private sector, competitors are always quick to take advantage of the mistakes of a competitor. In the mainstream media, the opposite is always true. They circle the wagons and begin lecturing the hoi polloi about the dangers of questioning the media.

That is the real cause of these scandals. For a long time, the mass media in the West has been a monoculture. You cannot have a career in the media if you do not hold all the right opinions. To call the media an echo chamber for the left is to understate the problem. The better analogy is a school of fish. Everyone just reacts to those around him, giving the effect of the school having agency. What looks like collusion is just the result of a uniformity of mind, experience, and social class.

That is why no one at Der Spiegel, or anywhere else in the German media, noticed the fraudulence of Claas Relotius. He was writing the things his coevals and superiors said at luncheons, cocktail parties and in the office. His story about slack-jawed yokels in the American heartland ticked all the boxes popular with the left-wing cultural outlook. He was not sent there to report on the place. He was sent there to confirm what his employers already knew about Middle American and Trump voters.

This is why Western media is something worse than propaganda. The person hired by the state or hired by the corporate marketing department has self-awareness. They know their job is to polish the apple of their superiors. The tricks they employ to do that are done with knowledge and forethought. The guy telling the public that his employer, the pesticide company, is deeply concerned about the environment does so knowing full well that no one believes him, including his family.

The media is a different thing. They really believe their own nonsense. They think they are part of a special class of humans, a priestly class that not only reports facts to the public, but provides moral instruction. The mass media is so intoxicated by their own self-righteousness, they lack the ability to question their own actions. When Claas Relotius came back from the bush, reporting exactly what his bosses knew was the case, they had no reason to question it. It was too good to check.

The Age Of Ugly

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In the fullness of time, the robot historians sifting through the remains of this age will point to the 1970’s as the time when the American empire took a fateful turn. The 1960’s get all the blame for the cultural collapse of America and the West, but that is not fair nor is it accurate. Lots of terrible ideas were born in the 60’s, but terrible ideas like the Civil Rights movement started in the 50’s. Women’s rights started in the 20’s. It was the 1970’s when all these terrible ideas came together to wash away the West.

Look at the disco era, as portrayed by the movie Saturday Night Fever. You have all the things that define this era. There is the reckless personal behavior, the pointlessness of the character’s lives and the denigration of bourgeois values. The main character is basically a bum who works in a hardware store so he can make enough money to party with other degenerates. He treats his girlfriend so poorly, she eventually becomes a whore that his buddies pass around, so she can stay in the group.

Everything about the movie, like the lifestyle it portrayed, was degenerate. The disco era was basically just an effort to take the underground homosexual scene in New York City and vomit it onto Middle America. It largely worked too. While the 1960’s saw bourgeois America stagger, it was the 1970’s when the cultural revolution hit the working and lower classes. All the rules that gave structure to the lower ranks were obliterated. The result was the birth of the white underclass and a drug culture that is still with us.

Again, the terrible ideas that found their way into the lower class in the 70’s were not products of the time. Just as the hippy culture was a result of the beatnik phenomenon, which was an outgrowth of the jazz age, the 70’s were a consequence. The difference though is that the cultural changes that rocketed through the middle and upper classes could be absorbed to a great degree. Money and class provide for a greater margin of error. Rich people can afford sex, drugs and rock and roll.

That is the real crime of the post-war cultural revolution. The people at the top benefited from it, as they were no longer morally responsible for setting a good example and looking after society. They were suddenly free to be indifferent. The upper middle-class could inoculate itself from most of the damage, mostly by moving into enclaves where their kids would not be exposed to the consequences. The proliferation of private schools for the upper middle-classes started in the 1970’s for a reason.

It is the middle and lower classes that have paid the price for what happened in the post war years. To a great degree, middle class America has always been an extension of the working class. The smart and resourceful kids of the working class could make it into office jobs, rather than working in blue collar fields. At the same time, if the children of middle-class people slipped up and fell into the working class, the climb back up was not that far and only required a little help. The gap between the middle and the rest was small.

The cultural revolution decimated the working classes, creating a white underclass. The gap between there and the middle-class is now enormous. If the child of schoolteachers makes mistakes and falls out of the middle class, it is as if he has fallen down a well. The climb back out of the underclass is enormous. One unmentioned reason for the shrinking white middle-class is the floor underneath them has collapsed. This not only makes them vulnerable, but it has also made them powerless as a political force.

Another consequence of the cultural revolution was the segregation of the classes, both physically and cognitively. The ruling elites, freed from any moral duty to look out for their inferiors, were now entirely divorced from them. The upper-middle, which always looks up for its aesthetic and cultural cues, has now cultivated a hatred of the lower ranks, as part of what defines their class. Those rules, enforced by the upper classes, that provided structure to the lower classes, also provided a connection between the classes.

The physical ugliness of the 1970’s, as presented in the movie Saturday Night Fever, was a glimpse of the spiritual degeneracy to come. The pointless self-indulgence of the characters, their reckless disregard for one another, their families, and communities, all of it was waiting for the country. The physical ugliness of the age has been cleansed by the sterile aesthetic of Silicon Valley, but the spiritual ugliness of the cultural revolution remains. Glass and stainless steel cannot mask it.

That ugliness is what fuels the populist movements. In Europe and America, the natives, physically and culturally divorced from their rulers, are now looking for alternative sources of authority. The people are recoiling at the ugly world created for them by their rulers, so the slow search for new rulers has begun. No one thinks about it quite like that yet, but in time, that corner will be turned. We will move from reform to the idea of starting fresh and leaving the ugliness of left-wing radicalism behind.

Exiles

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Exile is a central part of human existence, most certainly as old as human settlement and probably predating it. Humans are social animals. Banishment and ostracism are primeval weapons, wielded by human groups for the worst crimes like sacrilege, murder and subversion. Exile as a punishment is based on the understanding that much of who we are as a human is based on our relationship with others. Our role in the group is who we are, so therefore being forced out of the group is a nullification of one’s identity.

Death, of course, is the ultimate nullification. For a group of humans to decide that one of their own must die is the acknowledgement that the person can never be a part of the group. Who they are is not just out of sync with the group. It is a danger to the very existence of the group. Exile, in contrast, assumes the exiled can be reformed. It offers the exiled at least some opportunity to regain himself and become a part of the group again. Alternatively, he can find a new group where he belongs.

While exile is as old as man, it is also as modern as man too. In fact, we would not have modernity without the prominent role of exiles in the human story. The Bolsheviks, for example, came out of exile to rock the old order and begin close to a century of struggle in the West. The Iranian revolution was engineered by exiles, who ushered in half a century of unrest in the Muslim world. Of course, America was born as an enclave for exiles, men divorced from the old country and starting new in the wilderness.

A useful way to understand the role of exile in shaping the West is to think about the birth of conservatism in Europe. Unlike everything else in modern thought, it was not the result of the Enlightenment, but rather a consequence of the French Revolution. The destruction, terror and wars that resulted from the revolution, created a generation of exiles, divorced from their lands, their people and their way of life. Their struggle to understand the revolution and formulate a response, was the birth of conservatism in the West.

Today, of course, there is never any discussion of how the revolution transformed the aristocracy of Europe. The radicals who rule over the West, like chimps looking in a mirror, can never stop obsessing over their antecedents. The revolution, however, fundamentally altered the elite of Europe. There were the material changes, of course, as they were forced to abandon their lands and flee to neighboring lands. There were also spiritual and intellectual changes that resulted in being exiled from their homes.

The French aristocrat living in Vienna, for example, suddenly found himself around a new elite, with different habits and different tastes. This sudden juxtaposition gave these aristocrats a new perspective on their own culture. Prior to exile, they had no reason to think about why they lived as they did. It was just the way things were as they entered the world. In exile, they had to examine why it was their way of life existed, why they existed, and why it was swept away by the revolution.

In other words, exile created a romanticism for that lost past, but also an intellectual framework to understand how that old order was lost and how best to respond to the radicalism that was unleashed on society. Further, the restoration cemented the point that the old order was gone for good. The saying among conservatives at the time was that the restored king Louis XVIII was not sitting on the Bourbon throne, he was sitting on the throne of Napoleon. It was an acknowledgement that there was no going back.

In this age, exile explains why northern conservatism was a shabby response to northern radicalism. The conservative was not the result of exile. He was always as much a part of the ruling ethos as the radical. The relationship between the American conservative and the American radical was always as co-dependents. The radical needed the conservative as a foil, while the conservative needed the radical for a reason to exist. Without one, the other could never exist as an independent mode of thought.

The closest America has come to having an authentic conservatism was in the South where the conquered and displaced planter class had to reconcile the loss of their past with a way forward as a regional elite. It never really worked, as there could never be a restoration, even an artificial one. The anathematization of Southern culture has been so thorough and complete in the 20th century, that now the very symbols of it are treated as an affront to public morality. That aristocracy was exterminated, not exiled.

What may be happening in this age of cultural upheaval, however, is the birth of a new class of exiles. White men of the older generation are seeing the world in which they were born slowly succumbing to the darkness of multiculturalism. Theirs is not a romanticism for that old age, but a growing anger at its loss. The baby Boomer conservative takes a lot of grief, and deservedly so, but every day that group inches closer toward identity politics as the only available response to the gathering darkness.

In the younger generations, there can be no romanticism or an angry response to the loss of old white America. Instead, there is an acceptance that old white America can never be restored. There is also a reconsideration of what created mid-century America and what sent it rocketing into the abyss of self-abnegation. These are the new exiles, divorced from the past, cut off from their culture and hounded by the radicals of this revolution, as the aristocrats of France were hounded by the Jacobins.

The defect in the conservative response to 18th century radicalism was it could never get past its own romanticism. The conservatives of that age were still surrounded by the results of their lost culture. In every city center, in every local village, they were reminded of the glorious past. As a result, the conservatism of Europe was always destined to be a compromise with radicalism. Constitutional monarchy was an effort to retain the spirit of the past, inhabiting the sterile, lifeless body of social democracy.

This generation of exiles will have the benefit of not living in a museum. In a way, the radical destruction of the symbols and language of old white America is doing a service to the exiles of today and tomorrow. Without the ghosts of the past, clawing at the present, the response to today’s radicalism can be independent and new. Today’s exile will not be animated by a longing for a lost past but instead be haunted by the unrealized present and an anger at the radicals who foreclosed his future.

The Persistence of Bad Ideas

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The old line about a lie being halfway around the world before the truth is out of bed is a keen observation, but it also suggests something about the nature of lies. That is, a lie that gets around has some appealing quality to it. The reason it spreads so quickly is people want to believe it. There is something about it that ticks all the right boxes. As a result, even smart and skeptical people not only want to believe it, but they want to help everyone else believe it. Some lies turn everyone they touch into willing accomplices.

Bad ideas are like that too. For some reason, people want to believe them, even when it really makes no sense to believe them. For example, most people still think your diet can have a significant impact on your health. If you eat fatty foods, you will have a heart attack. At the extremes this is true, but most diseases are genetic. When it comes to heart disease, diet has nothing to do with it. The same is true of things like cholesterol levels, where there is little data to support a link between “bad” cholesterol and heart disease.

Part of what drives the persistence of bad ideas is they seem to address a need among modern people to believe in free will. As the human sciences build the case that we are the product of our genetic coding, the need to believe we can overcome that by force of will become stronger. Therefore, if you have a family history of heart disease, you want to believe eating unpleasant food, like some form of preemptive penance, will ward off the reality of your genetic makeup. Your diet becomes a moral issue for you.

The concept of epigenetics seems to be following a similar path. It is becoming this catchall idea that lets people ignore what we know, in favor of speculative nonsense that has no supporting data. This set of long posts on the Arktos site the other day are a good example of the phenomenon. The argument from the author is that epigenetics proves that experiences can be passed onto subsequent generation through a biological process, just as genetic traits like eye color are passed on from parent to child.

The author is picking up on something Oswald Spengler argued. That is, the land of a people shapes their sense of identity, how they see themselves and their purpose. This in turn shapes their culture. The author of the Arktos piece thinks science is proving that these collective cultural experiences as a people are shared but also passed on to subsequent generations via the miracle of epigenetics. He points to some papers on the subject and this study on the children of holocaust survivors.

The original definition of epigenetics¹ is the study of how genes are expressed, from a biological perspective. Your DNA contains instructions for determining your eye and hair color, for example, but it also contains instructions for more subtle things like personality traits. You inherit your DNA from your parents. Epigenetics refers to ways in which those genes are turned on and off. Genes are the blueprint for creating proteins, while epigenetics is the study of how genes are read.

The way in which epigenetics is used here and in popular writing is the claim that your experiences can somehow be passed onto your children. This is complete nonsense and there is no evidence to support it. You cannot pass on your experiences to your offspring through any known biological processes. This nutty idea was cooked up by left-wing agitators so they could claim victimhood by proxy. Their ancestors were treated poorly, so they are now suffering from the same effects, as part of their biological inheritance.

To now put this bad idea to use in the name of race realism or the moral philosophy of Oswald Spengler is amusing, but every bit as a nutty. As Greg Cochran once put it, this line of reasoning is like saying if you chop off a cat’s tale, it is kittens will be born without tales. There is simply no known biological process for passing on experiences or learned behavior. In fact, the changes to how your genes are read as a result of environmental factors are reset in the zygote. In other words, you cannot pass on your experiences.

Now, the author of the Arktos piece is probably a nice guy with good intentions. His background is history and theology, so he can be forgiven for not understanding the human sciences part of this. That raises the question of why epigenetics is so attractive an explanation for someone without math or science. Why embrace something about which you know nothing? The obvious answer is it supports his main point, but another aspect of it is that the old need to believe in free will. We are not just moist robots.

In this way, bad ideas are like great salesmen. The bad idea always flatters the person who is willing to believe it. Pitchmen and motivational speakers have relied on flattery since forever, because people like being flattered. The flattery of free will is that you, unlike the rest of those slobs out there, control your destiny. The promise of epigenetics is that your decisions today will alter the lives of generations to come, because your decisions will be passed onto them, whether they like it or not. You are a god.

Of course, it also suggests something about the future. Many think that the unriddling of the human genome will usher in an age of reason. The fact that our theological overlords have suddenly become evangelical opponents of the human sciences, while embracing things like epigenetics, suggests otherwise. Belief is powerful magic, that has always found a way to override factual reality. That is probably the main reason bad ideas are like drug resistant viruses. They make it easy to avoid facing reality.

¹I’m not writing a biology textbook here, so if you’re tempted to sperg out on the science, restrain yourself. This is not a post about science.

The Future Is Now

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People love talking about the future, as it allows them to project their own narrative onto the present, without having to argue about facts and reason. The robot future is the best example. Those inclined to doom and gloom assume the robots take over and the result will be awful. Libertarians imagine robots taking over and immediately realize a society based on private property is the only viable option. In other words, when we start imagining the glorious future, we do so to make points about the present.

The fact is the future is never what is promised. Those inclined to dark thoughts in the middle of the last century were sure Orwell’s vision was mostly correct. We live nothing like that today, but people insist he will be proven correct any day now. Of course, the glorious future promised in the middle of the last century never happened either. Instead of flying cars, hot women in tight fitting jumpsuits and colonies on Mars, we have traffic jams, fat single mothers scurrying over the southern border and an emerging police state.

Just because the futurists always seem to be wrong, it does not mean no one warned about what was coming. Every society has its prophets. That is because the future does not spring from nothing. There are always signs early on, suggesting what comes next and the ramifications of it. In retrospect, those signs seem obvious, of course, but the fact that some people saw them suggests people could not see them or to simply ignored them for short term reasons. Immigration policy is an obvious example.

What commonplace items today will be things the robot historians look at and wonder how we missed them? This story at the Huffington Post on DNA testing is an example. The story itself is unimportant. It is the sort of thing that would have appeared in a woman’s magazine fifty years ago, except the topic would have been French cooking. That is a clue but one being missed today. Popular culture is now awash in females playing roles, other than the one for which they evolved.

The interesting bit is the writer. Her name is Julia Ries, a young graduate of Boston College, working as a freelance writer. Here is her resume. Boston College is one of the more prestigious schools in America these days. It is in a new class of colleges called the “New Ivies” because their admissions standards are similar to the Ivies and their name carries a lot of weight in the managerial class. That means young Mx Ries is emblematic of the type of woman who will be taking up a position in the ruling class.

Look at the job titles. It is a dog’s breakfast of managerial speak. For example, she was a media planner for health and wellness clients. The word “wellness” is a neologism that means the state of not being sick. In other words, instead of being sick, people have degrees of wellness. No one can ever be completely well, so there is a whole industry to promote wellness. If you read that entry carefully, what you see is she spent her days recommending keywords that would work in a Google search.

The next entry is “Digital Content Strategist” which she describes as “we listened to clients talk about the growing pains their brands were experiencing and we whipped up some powerful campaigns to create some buzz and punch things up.” If you want to know why corporate communications is a tangle of neologism and nonsense phrases, there’s your answer. It is bright young people spending their days coming up with new ways to say what their parents said. It is a thousand monkeys pounding away at search engines.

The point here is this woman is pushing thirty and her career thus far has been a series of nonsense jobs with clever titles. She no doubt thinks they are important steps on the career ladder, and they very well may be essential steps. The managerial system is just an apprenticeship process bolted onto an exam system. If you want to know why mass media is populated with middle aged airheads, incapable of dealing with observable reality, the answer lies in the resumes of young people like Mx. Ries.

The managerial system is not just selecting for the weak and frivolous within its ranks. It is breeding a generation of hot house flowers with its exam system. This story Sailer linked to is a great example. The Hindu comic gets the hook, because his jokes made the Columbia students uncomfortable. The thing about it is the students did not rush the stage or stomp off in a huff. They sat there in various states of emotional distress, until their handlers rushed to the stage and shut down the comedian mid-set.

The point of all this is there seems to be a strange flaw in the managerial system, that will probably seem obvious in another generation. That is, the system selects for and cultivates increasingly weak-minded people. As the system becomes more complex and interdependent, the people become more helpless, depending on the inertia of the system to supply courage and resolve. In a system built by people with the soul of a human resource department, the greatest skill is doing nothing while sounding essential.

Perhaps the system will become self-aware before this becomes a crisis, but that is not the way to bet. Instead, we will reach a point at which the people in charge are emotionally, morally, and intellectually incapable of addressing the inevitable crisis. We may be getting a glimpse of this in France, where the ridiculous fop Emmanuel Macron is quickly being undone by men in safety vests. Macron is an example suggesting the managerial system is not going to produce a Napoleon or even a de Gaulle to save the day.

The Mongols figured out that invaders from the hills had a habit of taking on the habits of the people they conquered in the valley. The conquers got soft and were in turn conquered by a new tribe from the hills. The Mongols tried to remedy that by being raiders and never settling the lands they conquered. In the West, allowing talent to bubble up from the bottom, often in military service and later business, was a way to keep the ruling class vigorous and on edge. This used to be the way things were done in America.

Today, the ruling classes of the West are a closed system. The children of the elite head off to prep schools nestled away in secluded areas. They head off to nice colleges and then start their apprenticeship in the system. Outsiders can only gain entry by first proving they are no threat to question the system. The managerial class is becoming a hot house of make believe work and fatuous airheads. Like the people in the valley enjoying the good life, they are wholly unequipped to handle the next conqueror.

 

The Death Of Edgytarian Man

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The other day, Paul Ramsey had an amusing take on Gavin McInnes dramatically quitting his fan club, the Proud Boys. Everyone is assuming this was in response to the FBI using the word “extremist” when describing the McInnes fan club in a bulletin they issued to the Portland Oregon police department. The assumption is that the FBI is now going to treat Proud Boys as a criminal organization or a terrorist group. McInnes is disavowing them to avoid legal guilt by association or any financial culpability stemming from lawsuits.

Maybe that’s what motivated McInnes, but the more likely answer is something I pointed out a year ago with him and other edgytarians. For right-wing edgytarians, the game is always to keep an eye on where the Left is drawing the line. To be edgy on the Right means always staying just inside that line. When the line moves, make sure you move with it, maybe do so reluctantly, while lecturing those to your Right about the need to play nice or be civil. A good discourse on principles and “who we are” always helps.

It is a tough life and many trip and fall into the void. That is what is happening with McInnes and his fan club. Let us not kid ourselves about the Proud Boys. It was never intended to be anything but a fan club for McInnes. He got the idea from hanging out with alt-right people in the run-up to the presidential election. He saw that guys like Mike Enoch and Richard Spencer had built an audience around a personal brand, so McInnes created what he thought was a mom-safe version for himself. Proud Boys is alt-right-lite.

Now, the assumption that the FBI is about to RICO the Proud Boys is way off base. The use of the term “extremist group” is meaningless. There is no formal designation in the law or with the FBI. It is as meaningful as saying the Proud Boys are a drinking club or they like wearing polo shirts. The FBI is a corrupt and broken organization, but they are not about to RICO a TV clown’s fan club. The dramatic reading of his resignation was about getting inside that line again, so McInnes can keep his career alive.

It is why it is always wise to think about the motivation of popular figures who dabble in dissident politics. A guy like McInnes is primarily a performer. He has spent his life feeling around for a vehicle that will get him a big audience. He is tried edgy magazine writer, edgy polemicist, TV clown, YouTube clown, jokey political analyst, cheeky adman and now he is the hipster gadfly. His instincts, with regards to politics, are conventional white guy politics, but they have always been a decoration for his performing career.

Another example is Stefan Molyneux, who built his career being a dramatic, somewhat edgy, anarcho-libertarian YouTube performer. His edginess was to flirt with things like biological realism, by posting available data on things like race, sex, and IQ. Molyneux is a trained stage actor, who has developed an act that works well on YouTube. As soon as he got some heat from the Left, he has quickly retreated into generic libertarianism, which is completely safe, because it is completely harmless. The show must go on.

On the surface, the right-edgytarian feels like a good thing, because through humor (McInnes) and dramatic presentation (Molyneux) they can help normalize and popularize heretical ideas. Lots of alt-right people love Moly, because his videos are useful in making clever social media memes. The trouble is these guys can just as quickly vilify dissident ideas, when they are sprinting to catch up with the new line Lefty has drawn. Effectively what McInnes is doing is throwing his own fans into the gaping maw of Lefty outrage.

The trouble, of course, is that in an age of extreme intolerance, as we see today, the ideological enforcers are less tolerant of edgy clowns like McInnes than serious dissidents. They see the edgy clowns as mocking their identity and that can never be tolerated, so they go after these otherwise harmless performers. It is why a relatively safe performer like Molyneux gets mass reported and protested. The ideological enforcers know they are defending a dead and brittle orthodoxy, so there is no room for tolerance.

It is why edgy guy is doomed, at least for now. As I pointed out a year ago, in an ideological age, you pick one side and only one side. There is no bridging the gap or performing on both sides of the street. The edgytarians, if they are to exist at all, will have to operate on this side of the great divide. That requires a new type of performer with a grounding in dissident ideas. None of the edgy guys today have that, so they will eventually end up on the other side, singing to an audience of true believers.

Black Friday

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Steve Sailer likes to draw comparisons between this age and what happened when the 1960’s counter-culture turned toxic in the 1970’s. The Civil Rights Movement had curdled into militant black power and the hippy movement had soured into roving gangs of militants like the Weather Underground. It is not a bad comparison, because then as now, the cause of the turmoil was incoherent radicalism. What did the Black Panthers want, other than access to white women? What was the point of the BLM violence?

A key difference between then and now is the issue of race. In the 1960’s, America was 85% white and whites just assumed blacks were a poor fit for modern society. Today, America is 60% white, and everyone has spent their lives indoctrinated in a cult that worships blacks. Fifty years ago, when blacks turned violent, everyone sort of expected it, so no one was really surprised. Today, black violence is a mystery to the beautiful people, and they insist everyone else pretends that it is a mystery or caused by whites.

That is what makes the Ferguson Effect an interesting topic, even after the consequences are slowly starting to fade. Prior to the Black Lives Matter stuff and the liberal tub thumping over events like Travon Martin, crime in general, and black crime in particular, had faded from the public’s consciousness. Then suddenly, the blacks were angry and murder rates in certain cities began to shoot up again. In 2011 Baltimore had 211 murders. In 2015, the year of Freddy Gray, the city recorded 342 homicides.

White liberals, broadly speaking, have argued the Ferguson Effect is the result of black rage in response to police brutality and racism. The reason blacks in Baltimore, for example, started murdering one another at a record clip, was over anger at the police department’s rough justice in the ghetto. It is an argument that assumes blacks have no agency of their own and are simply controlled by the behavior of whites. This is a gratuitous assertion by people with an anti-white agenda, but it is the prevailing opinion.

Blacks, on the other hand, have never accepted this line of argument. Instead, they prefer to dismiss the whole thing as a baffling anomaly. The prevailing argument from black activists is that there is no such this as the Ferguson Effect. This piece in City Lab, the urban subsidiary of The Atlantic, is a good example. It has become an article of faith among blacks that the Ferguson Effect is just another effort to explain away the real causes of black crime. Namely, to hide the institutional racism in modern America.

There is, of course, something to it. Blacks seem to get that the underlying assumption of the Ferguson Effect is that left to their own devices, black society would quickly devolve into something pre-modern and violent. Without the constraints of white society, blacks are simply unable to achieve anything above the neolithic. If whites come to accept this again, then all the concessions and benefits that came out of the Civil Rights Movement no longer make any sense. The whole project unravels in the face of biological reality.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. Race relations in America, with regards to blacks, have always been about a series of gates. Blacks who can behave themselves pass through the gate from the ghetto to the suburbs. Blacks with something on the ball can enter the managerial class, assuming they are willing to accept their symbolic role in the system. The violent and stupid, in contrast, cannot pass through those gates, so they are penned up in urban reservations guarded by the police.

Whites in America have come to terms with this by never thinking about it. Liberal whites invest their time in fantasies like structural racism and white privilege, while normal whites just ignore it. Blacks, on the other hand, are keenly aware of this reality. For those able to pass through those gates, there is a need to obscure this reality, but also a deep resentment for it. You will note that black anger at white America comes from those able to pass through the gates, because they know the underlying assumptions are true.

This is why middle-class black anger at white America is visceral and incoherent. You see it at the end of that posted article, when the writer celebrates pointless protest. “If the word “Ferguson” was permanently and exclusively attached back to its original meaning, we might find evidence of an “effect” when it comes to a number of recent, inspiring events: the bringing down of Confederate monuments, the ousting of Chicago’s police chief, or the recent Chicago protests that forced Donald Trump to cancel a rally.”

The truth is, black crime rates went up in areas where Black Lives Matter was active, because the white cops were simply unwilling to do the job that was necessary to control the ghettos. Many simply moved to other jobs, while the supply of new recruits dried up, leaving these police departments woefully undermanned. On the other hand, the blacks who have made it through the gates are reminded of the reality of their situation. They know that in order to avoid this, they must accept this. That is the source of their anger.

Kritarchy Then Chaos

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Imagine if in a local courthouse, we discover that the judges are giving accused child pornographers a free pass. The accused come into the system, get booked and then a judge finds some reason to either leave them free on their own recognizance or simply drop the charges. After a while, someone notices that this sleepy little courthouse has a rather high number of people arrested for kiddie porn, but that all of them get set free on some technicality by one of the judges.

Upon further inquiry, it is learned that the head judge belongs to some weird club that thinks the age of consent is immoral, that adults should be free to have sex with children and consume child pornography. Once installed at the courthouse, he hired other judges from his club, as well as clerks and secretaries. The whole courthouse was full of these people. Further, the child porn people heard about it so they would travel to this jurisdiction to indulge in their fetish, knowing they would get a free pass.

Such a thing would be the scandal of the century. Now, instead of something abhorrent like kiddie porn, let us say the secret club is composed of people loyal to some strange religion or bizarre ideology. They think the laws of the country are immoral and seek to overturn the entire legal system. Instead of operating in a local courthouse, they are targeting the federal system. In other words, it is the same sort of conspiracy, but the motivation is ideological, and the target is national.

That is what happens in the federal court system. It is riddled with judges who belong to a bizarre political cult. They are members of a legal sub-cult that does not accept the rule of law. Instead, they think the law and the enforcement of the law should always be in support of their cult’s radical agenda. As such, they no longer abide by the law as written and refuse to obey the authority that issues the law. That is what we are seeing on a daily basis, as federal judges revolt against the legal system.

This is not a new thing. The legendary ninth circuit has been a dumping ground for lunatics appointed to the federal bench. Rulings come out of the ninth circuit, only to be struck down on appeal. The reason the ninth existed was that everyone acknowledged the existence of this cult, but instead of exterminating it and its members, the idea was to keep them bottled up in specific circuits. It was like a quarantine around an infected zone. Rather than kill the afflicted, they would be isolated.

To continue the metaphor, the virus has jumped the quarantine and now the entire system is showing signs of infection. For two years the Trump administration has been plagued with federal judges who just make up rulings. In many cases they are ruling on behalf of plaintiffs who have no standing in the court. In other cases, they are simply making up legal theories so bizarre they would get a first-year law student dismissed from school on mental health grounds.

In this particular case, the law is clear. It is not just US law, but international law. There is a legal process for applying for asylum. No country is required to accept anyone who does not follow the procedures. US law is crystal clear on the issue, yet this judge is making up stuff that is in direct conflict with the law. This is no less deranged than if the judge stood up, stripped off his clothes and declared he is an invisible chicken and that everyone in the court must cluck in worship to him.

Yet, this judge is not an exception. He is now the rule. The federal system is full of his fellow cultists, trained in a bizarre legal theory that insists there is no law, just an unwritten ideology that is the rejection of the basis of Western civilization. People jokingly call it the kritarchy, but it is not a bad way to think of it. Instead of the judge being a neutral interpreter of law, as is the Western tradition, the judge in this cult is a shaman, charged with spreading the cult’s ideology.

Kritarchy is a system associated with pre-modern societies, in which there was no central rule making authority. Instead of a written laws, there is custom. This works well enough, it is better than anarchy, if the people within the community adhere to the same customs and beliefs. The idea is to reach a peaceful and practical result, not a logically consistent one. In a modern, rule-based society, this form of legal theory is as alien as human sacrifice. It is an assault on civil order.

The thing is the outcomes are not important here. Even if this lunatic is overruled, the damage that is being done to civil order is incalculable. Every time one of these cult members gets on the bench and starts making these bizarre rulings, public trust in the legal system is eroded. We are very close to the point where most people no longer think we have a legal system at all. Instead, it is arbitrary rule by robed shamans, so the law is irrelevant and the system for writing laws is illegitimate.

We now live in an age in which the federal court says the White House cannot decide who gets a press pass, but it is perfectly fine for the banks to collude to shut you out of the financial system, because they do not like how you voted. The law says a business can fire an employee, because he does not accept the company values, but the same business must hire a mentally unstable man in a sundress and let him watch the female employees undress. This is a revolt against rationality and reason.

Getting back to where we started, the remedy for that courthouse overrun by perverts is to clear out the perverts. What America faces is the near total takeover of the institutions by a secular cult that is evolving into a suicidal mystery cult. Removing the believers from positions of authority will not be peaceful. Allowing their madness to run its course will not be peaceful either, as the overthrow of order can only lead to anarchy and what always follows is chaos.

Prog Taqiyya

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According to Islamic scholars, taqiyya is “is a precautionary dissimulation or denial of religious belief and practice in the face of persecution.” Muslims are forbidden to deny their faith, but there are exceptions and one of them is when the Muslim is living in a place where persecution of Islam is common. For Islam to spread, the adherents must be alive, so allowing for this exception makes sense. The implication here is that the faithful Muslim works like a fifth columnist, recruiting in the shadows, while hiding his faith.

Of course, this doctrine is open to interpretation, so some sects have interpreted it to mean that all lying is acceptable, if it can be argued that the lie is in service to Islam. If the faithful Muslim can use deception to help the faith, then lying is not only acceptable, but also admirable. The effect is Islam can easily become an end justifies the means political and cultural movement. This is what we see with Islam in the West, where Imams preach against their Western hosts in the mosque, but go on television and say the opposite.

This habit of mind is something we see with modern Progressives whose hive-mindedness has evolved to the point where lying to outsiders is not only acceptable, but a goal. Every election, Progressives fill the airwaves with things they know are lies. In fact, they tell lies that they know everyone else knows are lies. The practice of lying in the election process has become something like a religious practice for them. The point of the lying is not to conceal or deceive, but to demonstrate their worthiness to the cause.

The academic quality of the lying turns up in all the Progressive fads. We saw that in the madness of the Kavanaugh hearings. The definition of sexual assault, a nonsense term, has been stretched to mean just about anything, by people who seem to take pride in making the language meaningless. When you see a young feminist loon howling about being assaulted, the look on her face usually suggests she is proud to have found some way to stretch the meaning of the terms to include some new nonsense.

The thing is the sheer volume of lying has had the effect of concealing in plain sight the fact that the Progressives never speak the truth about anything. In fact, speaking the truth has become a crime of sorts. Professor Amy Wax is thinking about suing her school, because they accused her of making up what is a plainly obvious fact. If the school is correct about what she said, they could release the data and show that she is wrong. Instead, they lie, refuse to produce the data, and then accuse her of lying about the data.

It used to be that the Left either exaggerated to make their points or used clever euphemism to obscure the truth. For example, the illegal immigrant was an undocumented worker. This sort of soft, fuzzy language was the result of modern managerialism, where garbage men became sanitation engineers and janitors became facility management specialists. Applying the same sort of rhetoric to political discourse was natural, but at least there was some connection to reality, even if it was tenuous.

Where they are now is that the lie is the point. This became obvious when the Clintons arrived on the scene. They would lie for sport. Even their allies were baffled as to why they would lie when the truth would serve them better. It’s not hard to imagine a person like Hillary Clinton ordering a turkey sandwich for lunch and when it comes to the table, swearing she ordered something else. There is no purpose in the lie other than to do it and be seen doing it. Clever lying is now an end in itself with the American Left.

This cult of mendacity is not without antecedents. The Frankfurt School was a series of clever intellectual constructions that advanced a political agenda by scrambling the relationship between public policy and observable reality. From it was born the notion that the point of academic activity is to disrupt, overturn and challenge anything that resembles accepted policy. Read through the stuff coming from the multicultural rackets and the whole point of it is to turn being a public nuisance into an academic specialty.

The permanent revolution of Marxist radicalism became a permanent assault on reason by cult-Marx intellectuals. In politics this then became a game of shameless lying not only advance an agenda, but to increase the status of the liar. The more absurd and ridiculous the fabrication, the greater the applause from the Progressive crowd. In fact, it is no longer possible to identify a Progressive agenda. It is a dadaist performance that is rapidly becoming an anti-agenda. It is mendacious nonsense as a public display of piety.

Invasive species are a danger because the ecosystem they invade is not prepared to deal with the foreign threat. The oriental logic of the Frankfurt School may have had the same effect in the liberal tradition of the West as the presence of Burmese pythons has had in the everglades. Instead of being taken over by this alien mode of thought, the Western liberal tradition has been driven mad by it. The result is an intellectual movement that celebrates complex dishonesty and fabrication for no purpose other than for aesthetics.