Category Archives: Culture

Lessons From Racing

Posted on by

When I was a little boy, Jackie Stewart, the great F1 driver, was a household name, despite the fact Formula One is mostly a European thing. I no longer recall the brand, but a toy maker used Stewart to sell a slot car toy set. As a kid, it seemed like the greatest toy imaginable. Open wheel racing was important in the 70’s. It is fair to say it was the golden age of open wheel racing. My family was not into racing, but we watched the Indy 500 every year and some of the F1 races that would be broadcast in America.

There is a great documentary on Formula One  that covers the rise of the sport after the World War II, especially the outlandish danger that was a feature of the it well into the 1980’s. Even if you have no interest in racing, it is worth watching. The men who raced in the 60’s and 70’s were incredible personalities and incredibly brave. The film is primarily about how the sport evolved from a deadly spectacle into a safe spectator sport. It mostly uses vintage footage that really brings the feel of the age home to you.

The point of the show is that the sport of racing, not just at the highest levels, but at all levels, was outlandishly dangerous and unnecessarily so. The track owners could have installed safety items like barriers and emergency medical services, but they saw no profit in it. The team owners were only concerned with winning races, so they put no effort into make the cars safe, beyond what would aid the drivers in finishing races. The racers, chasing glory, developed a cavalier culture and proudly accepted the dangers.

This turned out to be an increasingly lethal combination. Even though it was never said, the track owners knew the paying public was attracted to the sport, in large part, because of the wrecks. The car builders did not want to see wrecks, but it was to their advantage to make the cars as fast and light as possible, which meant eschewing safety features like fire suppression systems. The drivers, like all dare devils, had an incentive to take risks, as this is what made their reputations. The result was increasing carnage.

It reached the point where fatalities were so common, the drivers began to organize in order to force the car builders and track owners to improve safety. That is where Jackie Stewart came into the mix. He was the most famous driver of his day and he took the lead in organizing the drivers and demanding safety measures. The real advance in safety came when Bernie Ecclestone gained control of the TV rights. He was one of the first to realize that TV was going to be the lifeblood of sport. Control TV and you control the sport.

It is a good lesson that is applicable to all aspects of society. At some point, someone has to be in charge and have the final word. The claim that different interests will organically work as a system of checks and balances is true only in theory. In reality, it takes a strong leader to marshal the competing interests toward a common goal. This is where the arguments against great man theory of history fail. There may be multi-generational forces at work, but it is the great man who is the inflection point of history.

It has not been all wine and roses for Formula One racing since Ecclestone seized control of the sport. Having one man run things means, inevitably, his interests come to dominate, to the detriment of the whole. What made car racing attractive to adventurous young men was they could test their wits and courage against others. The homogenizing effects of F1’s corporate governance is slowly killing that spirit. So much so that the greatest name in racing is threatening to quit, unless there are changes to how Formula One is governed.

This cookie cutter approach, which comes with rule by middle manager, is what is killing NASCAR. Television viewership for stock car racing in America is in decline and the tracks are seeing lots of empty seats. The labyrinth of rules governing the building of cars has removed one of the cool aspects. That is, redneck ingenuity at finding loopholes in the rules and clever new ways to go fast. Now, the cars all look the same, the drivers look the same and the familiar PC bullshit is being injected into the sport.

This is another lesson that is applicable to our age. Human beings are designed to be curious about the world. Men in particular are by nature inclined to test the limits, challenge the rules of life. By directing all energies toward safety, predictability and profitability, racing is managing only to make itself boring. Most young people today could not name a single race car driver. Forty years ago, when I was a boy, even red neck Americans knew the big names in Formula One. Those were men who you could admire.

Committees are made up of people who naturally fear the world. They desire to put every animal in a cage, have ever blade of grass the same height and make sure tomorrow is exactly the same as yesterday. That is what has happened to racing. it used to be ruled by quarrelsome men led by an alpha male. Now it is run by bureaucrats, disappointed that they never became postal clerks. Of course, there are scads of women showing up to preach the gospel of multicultural lunacy. That never ends well.

Family Friendly

Posted on by

If science suddenly noticed that birds were laying fewer eggs, they would ring the alarm and warn of a coming bird-apocalypse. The assumption would be that humans were doing something to make the birds unable to reproduce. The same would be true of any species that saw its fertility decline. The starting assumption of biology is that all living things are built primarily to reproduce. That is the biological imperative. With one exception, a drop in an animal’s fertility must be due to some exogenous factor. That exception is humans.

In the West, human fertility rates have steadily fallen for over a half century. This is celebrated by our betters as the hallmark of human progress. Anytime the subject of fertility rates is raised, the knee-jerk response is to start hooting about women being more educated and having more options. The underlying assumption is that stupid people have lots of kids while smart people have few children. The implication of this is that the people who built Western Civilization were stupid, because they had high fertility rates.

The whole “women are more educated” argument is not really an effort to understand why fertility rates, especially white fertility rates, have fallen. Rather, it is an effort to not understand it. It is a deliberate distraction, a way of shifting the focus from a problem that cannot be addressed by the Left, whether it is the materialist Left of Europe or the spiritual Left on America. To even acknowledge that the purpose of women is to have children gnaws at the extreme egalitarianism that animates the Western Left.

To some degree, efforts to level off fertility in Europe make sense. There are lots of people on the Continent who do not always get along with one another. Generations of warfare pounded home the message that stable societies, respectful of national borders, is the way to keep the peace. Keeping fertility rates at something just above replacement was an understandable goal. In America though, that is not an issue. The country is mostly empty space with lots of room to expand. Americans should be breeding like Africans.

It really is an odd thing that has happened in America over the last fifty years. Starting in the 1960’s, motherhood became something close to a badge of shame with our cognitive elites. This rather quickly oozed into the upper classes and then the middle class. As a result, public policy has been altered to discourage childbearing. Just look at the hysterics from Progressive women anytime they do not get their way. They immediately start howling about how they will not get easy access to abortions and free prophylactics.

This came to mind when I saw a tweet by the left-wing political science professor George Hawley, commenting on the GOP tax bill. He linked to an essay he posted about public policy and fertility rates. For those familiar with this territory, the points he makes and the errors he commits are all familiar. France may have a TFR of 2.08, but the French people do not have that TFR. The invader population has rocket high fertility rates, but the French, well, not so much. Steve Sailer touched on one aspect of this in a Taki post.

A similar pattern, though less pronounced, is seen in the US. White fertility rates are below replacement, while black fertility is still above replacement. Although the homicide rates among blacks probably requires a different definition of “replacement.” Hispanics have the highest fertility rates. In other words, simply looking at TFR for a country that is slowly being overrun by a third world population will lead to errors. In majority white countries, the salient issue is not TFR, but white fertility rates, relative to the whole.

Putting that aside, we return to the original question. Two questions, actually. Is it simply that whites are choosing to die out or have whites simply wandered down a cul-de-sac, in terms of public policy, which is having adverse effects on white fertility? One way to tease this out is something that Steve Sailer did after the 2012 election. He looked at how white women voted, relative to their marriage habits. In places where white women can and do marry, stay married and raise children, whites vote Republican.

Another way of putting this is that where affordable family formation is highest, you get more families. Despite being run by a cult, Utah is a wonderful place to raise a family. It is like the set of Leave It to Beaver, but the size of a European country. At the other end, a state like Massachusetts is wildly expensive and hostile to family formation. Those who do choose to marry and start families, often move to other states. The decades long migration, north to south and east to west, has largely been driven by cost of living.

None of this answers the basic question. Is it crackpot public policy driving down white fertility or is some weird desire for extinction? The latter is impossible to know, so the prudent course is to assume the former is the correct answer. That is basic logic. This means any movement that is explicitly for preserving the nation’s racial character should promote public policies that are explicitly and overtly pro-family. That is the part of Hawley’s post that is correct. The GOP should be fanatically pro-family, not pro-business.

This especially holds for the dissident right. The alt-right is all over the map on public policy, because they get bogged down squabbling over aesthetics. Oddly, the best thing they could do, in terms of “optics”, is cast themselves as the extreme end of the pro-family spectrum. Redefining pro-women to mean pro-mother would go a long way toward rallying white Americans to their cause. After all, being for something always trumps being against something, even when the thing you oppose is awful. Positive always beats negative.

The Church Of Cuck

Posted on by

Back in the salad days of Buckley Conservatism, it was largely understood that the butch wing of the coalition was the so-called religious right. These were the people willing and able to muster big crowds for pro-life marches and organize grassroots support for local candidates. The free market types and foreign policy hawks lived on campus and in the bureaucracy. As a result, they were always apologizing to the Left, over their alliance with those disgusting dirt people in the Bible Belt.

That was a long time ago in a different country. Official Conservatism no longer has a religious right and they no longer care about social issues. National Review, the flagship publication of “movement conservatives” is edited by a homosexual activist who champions the gay agenda on the site. Occasionally, someone from this crowd will make some noises about social issues, but it is mostly nostalgia. Gentry Conservatives talk about abortion to be reminded of better days.

It is not just a matter of the Official Right dropping social issues and social conservatives from their thing. It is more that the religious right has become infected by the same parasites as the rest of the old Reagan coalition. In the 1980’s, Christian organizations decided to fully join the political system and as a result they became political organizations themselves. This opened them up to infiltration. The religious right is now full of cucks.

This week, while campaigning in an Alabama church — as a Bible-believing Christian, I’ll note that this story is already off to a questionable start — Judge Roy Moore, the state’s embattled Republican Senate candidate, faced down a rather spirited heckler. “The entire time, all the girls are lying?” the man shouted, right before he was escorted out of the event. “Why would they lie?” If you’ve been following our very depressing national news cycle, you know the story: Moore, age 70, has faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct dating back four decades, two of them involving underage girls, including one alleged assault of a fourteen-year-old. No charges have been filed, and that’s unlikely to change; the statute of limitations on any potential crimes stemming from the allegations appears to have long ago expired. Moore, for his part, argues that his accusers are part of a coordinated hit job orchestrated by Washington-establishment insiders. “They don’t want to hear about God,” he declared this week. “And they don’t want to hear about the Constitution of the United States and its foundational principles in God.”

We’ll get back to the Constitution — and Moore’s understanding of it — in a moment. But for now, let’s hear what the pastor of the church said, his doughy chin raised high, once the heckler had been neatly dispatched: “I would remind everyone,” he sniffed, “that this is a worship service.”

The opening two paragraphs reads like something you would find in Mother Jones or The Nation. It is the sort of framing that the Cult of Modern Liberalism has used against Christians for generations.

I’ll get this out the way: If you’re in Alabama and you want to vote for Roy Moore, vote for Roy Moore. But let’s at least try to keep things real: If you vote for Moore, you’re doing it because he’s not a Democrat, rather than because he’s some holy soldier on a special mission for God.

I would be willing to wager that the first draft of this was something like, “If you’re voting for Roy Moore, you’re doing it because he is not a Democrat. Just don’t call yourself a Christian.” That was the tone of the piece and the underlying message. To come right out and say it would require something resembling courage and that is a mortal sin in the land of the cuck. After all, the merchant wing of the movement is going to be peddling Jesus themed wine and cheese baskets as part of the next fundraiser.

The fact is, there can be no interpretation of the events in Alabama that would lead a committed Christian to support the Democrat over Moore. Moore is staunchly opposed to abortion. The Democrat is willing to install Planned Parenthood approved abattoirs in the nation’s grammar schools. Even the most isolated “Bible-believing Christian” can understand the difference between a venal sin and a mortal sin. Moore’s sins, whatever they were, are trivial, compared to supporting wholesale baby murder.

In fairness to “Bible-believing Christians”, the authoress of the NR piece is just some bubblehead hired to write down what she is told. Still, many of the people now claiming the mantle of leadership in the religious right are more concerned with their relationship to Washington than their relationship with Jesus. That is because party politics is always about compromise. If you choose to get in bed with one party or the other, you are going to get up with their fleas, or worse. That is what happened to the religious right and the GOP.

The Southern Baptist Convention being overrun by howling lunatics is the most recent example. A generation ago, the sorts of people hooting about white supremacy would have burst into flames if they walked into a Baptist church. Today, they feel perfectly comfortable walking the halls of their well appointed offices of the SBC. It is because the people in charge now feel more at home with Progressive loons than they do with the people in the pews of their own churches. These churches are run by cucks now.

It goes back to the old line from Robert Conquest. “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” In the case of American churches, they stopped being explicitly Christian. Once they diluted their purpose by getting into politics, they were made vulnerable to infiltration by Progressives, who naturally seek to corrupt the organic institutions of a society. Once the religious right went exclusive with Northern conservatives, they were open to infiltration by Northern Liberals.

Days Of Estrogen Fueled Rage

Posted on by

Like most normal men, I’m enjoying the hell out of seeing the girls go crazy, accusing every liberal man in sight of being a predator. When it comes to the media, I’m firmly in the camp that says, “burn, baby, burn.”  When it comes to cretins like Al Franken and John Conyers, well, there is no torment that would be too monstrous for them. Of course, the Hollywood stuff is manna from heaven. The only thing that would make it better is if they actually start burning men at the stake in the Hollywood hills. That would be awesome.

As others have been enthusiastic to point out, this is almost exclusively a Progressive problem. The men being hauled off to pervert’s island are mostly the male feminist types, who used to delight in accusing normal men of bad behavior. The Fox News scandal that kicked this off is the notable exception, but that’s beginning to look like a special case as the great panic rolls forward. I’ll get back to this in a minute, but I think the Fox stuff fits into all of this, as does the Roy Moore hoax. It’s all part of the larger pattern.

As far as the dominant side of this, liberal career women accusing liberal men of playing grab ass in the workplace, the one thing that jumps out so far is that no black men have been accused. In fact, no black women are at the center of these things either. This whole thing is white women versus white men. If what the Left tells us about the plight of black folks was true, we would see a lot of black women coming forward, claiming to be this era’s Sally Hemings. It turns out that liberal men are just not down with the swirl.

Of course, the “white” men getting jammed up are almost all Jewish men. Thanks to Seinfeld, the goyim know something about the shiksa fetish, but now the world is learning that Jewish men have lots of strange appetites. I’ve had a few Jewish men point this out to me whenever these stories come up in conversation. As the Larry David kerfuffle revealed, this is something known to Jews. It does explain the strange fact that the pornography industry was dominated by Jewish men who looked like The Hedgehog.

This raises an interesting possibility. Maybe this is well-plowed land, but many of the famous second wave feminists were Jewish. Modern gender studies are also heavy on the Jewish gals. Perhaps the root of feminism is Jewish women demanding better treatment from their Jewish men. After all, the description of the patriarchy by feminists sounds a lot like the HR department at a typical media company. Maybe feminism all along has been a primal scream for Irv to stop whacking off into the shrubbery.

Anyway, the charges against conservatives in this are worth considering. They are unique in that they are vague and non-specific, while the charges against liberal men are pretty clear and often pretty weird. One of the things that got Bill O’Reilly canned was that he called a black woman “hot chocolate.” That’s pretty tame compared to installing a button in your office to lock the door, so you can trap women. The Roy Moore claims have fallen apart, as most were obviously fake and the rest are impossible to substantiate.

What this looks like is the Left set out to accuse their rivals of the things popular on the Left. All of these Prog-men being jammed up by the girls were happy to accuse Trump of being bad for women. Meanwhile, guys like Matt Lauer were planning to build a sex dungeon at 30 Rock. Al Franken was entertaining his buddies with stories about how he wanted to drug and rape Leslie Stahl. The Opposite Rule of Liberalism says that whatever Lefty is hooting about, you can be sure he is the guiltiest.

Of course, these estrogen fueled rages tend to indicate the death of a business or industry. The fact is, conventional mass media is an old person habit. The actuarial tables say that most of what we have come to describe as mass media is headed for the dustbin of history. Young people don’t watch any of this stuff. Even not-so-young people have unplugged from television. The smart money is leaving old media and heading for the new platforms. That means the girls are free to feed on the carcass of legacy media.

Another angle to this is that the Prog women are directing their anger over the election to the only target available to them – their men. We are a year into the Trumpening and it is clear to even the most deranged Hillary supporter that there will be no do-over. Trump will be President and there’s nothing to be done about it. I don’t think sane people fully appreciate how traumatic it was for the feminists to see everything they believe invalidated in one night. They’ll never recover, but for now they lash out at their men.

Of course, all of this validates something normal men have known for a long time and that is “career women” are a cancer on society. Women should only work outside the home out of extreme necessity or as a hobby, maybe to save for a nice dress or better sandwich making implements for the kitchen. Men and women evolved for different roles in human societies. Putting girls into roles better suited for men is always going to end in tears, usually for the women, but also for society as a whole. Feminism is lunacy.

In a way though, this panic will be good for women and for men. If you are a man, you now know you can easily be victimized by a gold digger at the office. Even innocent flirting, outside of work in a social setting, can get you fired. That means men will stop socializing with women at work. They will no longer put themselves in a position to be accused by the harpy down the hall. This is already happening in college, where males have a buddy bear witness to their private time with the girl down the hall. Mike Pence is the model now.

This new awareness by men, particularly successful men, will create a real glass ceiling as well as glass walls and a kitted-out glass basement, where the bros can be themselves without getting jammed up by the gals. Men in the workplace will respond to this threat by walling themselves off from the female staff. Sure, there will be dummies who can’t control themselves, but they will be fed to the lionesses and serve as a reminder to the other men that it is bad business to have anything by token dealings with professional women.

The Corporate State

Posted on by

In America, the First Amendment allegedly guarantees the right of the people to publicly speak and debate public issues. It also guarantees the right to peaceably assemble for political activities. Most important, it guarantees the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. It used to be that every American child learned this in grammar school civics. It was the defining concept of what it meant to be an American. It is what distinguished Americans from other citizens and subjects of the world.

The only people talking about free speech these days are fringe heretics in the Dissident Right. All of our best people now agree that the only way for the people to be truly free is to require everyone to get permission from the authorities in order to have an opinion. It is the only way to keep the peace in a multicultural society. After all, diversity is our strength and nothing is more sacred than our diversity. Therefore questioning diversity is no different than calling for violent revolution. We embrace all opinions, except the wrong ones.

The trouble our betters have is that the pesky First Amendment is still a part of the Constitution. Passing crime-think laws in America is much more difficult than it is in a modern utopia like China. Unsurprisingly, the way around this problem, the inspiration, comes from China. Instead of having the government censor speech, the government leans on monopolistic “private companies” to police the media. It’s not an accident that the tech giants all worked with the ChiComs to build out the Great Fire Wall of China.

America is now a world where you need permission to speak. If you post heretical material on social media, the tech giants shut off your access. If you keep at it and find ways around the censors, the authorities send the mass media after you. That’s what happened with this fry cook in Ohio. He kept saying unapproved things, so the Times was sent in to investigate and raise awareness. He is now in the process of being un-personed. Thank goodness Carlos Slim is here to defend us from these people!

Most Americans look at these complaints about speech and just roll their eyes. After all, they still have thirteen flavors of the same official opinion on their cable system and, let’s face it, the only people complaining about this stuff are bad people. The trouble, of course, is that this stuff never stops with the bad people. Having found a clever way to get around Constitutional limits on the state, the people in charge  are now applying these new techniques to get around the fundamentals of self-government.

That’s what we see here with this story about the credit rating agency Moody’s, dictating policy to cities and towns.

Coastal communities from Maine to California have been put on notice from one of the top credit rating agencies: Start preparing for climate change or risk losing access to cheap credit.

In a report to its clients Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds. If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default.

“What we want people to realize is: If you’re exposed, we know that. We’re going to ask questions about what you’re doing to mitigate that exposure,” Lenny Jones, a managing director at Moody’s, said in a phone interview. “That’s taken into your credit ratings.”

Americans have figured out that climate change is mostly a racket cooked up by rich people and fanatics to skim money from the public. Americans are willing to go along with low-cost virtue signalling, like toting around grimy canvas sacks to the food market, but no one is on-board with returning to the Bronze Age to please Gaia. As a result, local politicians will pay lip service to global warming, but they have no interest in acting on it, even when offered bribes. It’s a good way to get voted out of office.

The way around this is to have private firms do what the stupid voters refuse to do.That’s compel government to enact the polices the greens demand. No one can get mad at Moody’s. They are just a private firm acting in their interests. Unless you’re some sort of America-hating commie, you must support private business. This is just how the market place works. You’re not against the free market, are you? It’s not hard to imagine a time when credit agencies and banks assign credit ratings to politicians in advance.

In 1881, Pope Leo XIII commissioned a study of what is now called corporatism. The result was a definition that imagined society as an organism. Within the organic state were natural groupings of men, to whom the state delegated power to organize labor and capital, on behalf of the state, within their sphere of control. A generation later, the Charter of Carnaro was a constitution built on these concepts. Most historians view this as the direct precursor to Italian fascism.

The point is that cooperation between private interests and public interests is not a new thing in Western society. What’s new to our age is the scale and power of private interests. Under fascism, the state defines society and everything is subordinated to the state. In our age, the roles will be reversed. The “private” interests will define the state and public interests will be subordinate. The state, of course, will exist only as a theoretical construct, as borders and boundaries are antithetical to global interests.

From the perspective of the modern elites, it is an ideal solution to the problems of self-government, democracy and multiculturalism. Instead of government representing the various interest groups in society, government will now look like a corporate HR department. It will safeguard the interests of senior management. Instead of town hall meetings where citizens address their elected officials, we’ll have leadership seminars where management shares their vision with the populace.

This will not end well.

The Shadows Grow

Posted on by

On election night last year, Fox News rolled out Britt Hume to editorialize on the results and what it meant for conservatism. Hume went through the list of things that he said defined conservatism over the last number of decades. He then pointed out how Trump rejected these items, in full or in part, to win the GOP nomination and then the general election. Hume’s definition of conservatism sounded like a lunch order. It was just a list of policy goals, like cutting taxes, reducing regulation and free trade.

That’s because over the last several decades, Official Conservatism™ has been reduced to a soulless list of agenda items, based on the same assumptions about the human condition as Progressivism. In many cases, the official Left and the official Right agree on the same goals, but disagree on tactics. Tax policy is a great example. Both sides agree that tax policy is about social engineering, by rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others. The debate, such as there is, is about which behaviors to prioritize.

The critique of Official Conservatism™ from the Right is rooted in the observation that Conservatives now agree with Progressives on base assumptions about the human condition and human organization. Humans are infinitely malleable and human society has no organic, natural form. As a result, both Left and Right now share a moral code, which is a Progressive moral code. This has reduced conservatism to an assistant’s role, where its primary job is to police the Right and purge those who threaten the moral order.

For the last 25 years, the institutions of Official Conservatism™ have done a good job of imposing their will on the other elements that allegedly make up the coalition of the American Right. Social conservatives have been coerced into supporting globalist economics. Foreign policy realists have either been purged or forced into accepting the neocon position. Everyone has been marinated in immigration romanticism to the point where even the most sensible will genuflect when passing the Statue of Liberty.

The trouble is, the old paleocons were right all along. The hip and modern version of conservatism, what the alt-right boys call Boomer Conservatism, has been a complete failure, even by its own standards. Globalism has not made the typical American more prosperous. In fact, we have experienced a decline in living standards. Wars of choice to bring the joys of social democracy to the savages have resulted in America looking like a police state. The effort to spread liberty has made all of us less free.

It is the area of social policy where Official Conservatism™ has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s not just the trannies stalking the girl’s restroom or the degenerates running wild in the public square. Those are the sorts of things that can be rectified in an hour, if the state feels the need. The real disaster is in the institutions that define the culture at the street level. Social groups, churches, even religion itself, has seen its legitimacy undermined by the new consensus forged between the Left and the Right.

This post on National Review the other day by Ramesh Ponnuru is about the rethinking of this arrangement by social conservatives. He is working off this essay by the editor of First Things, a religious-right operation founded by Richard John Neuhaus. Ponnuru’s post is mostly hyperventilating and hand-waving, in an effort to not address the main observations made by the author. Guys like Ponnuru never imagined they would need to defend themselves from their Right, so they have no way to do it, other than dismissal.

One thing that stands out about the First Things post is the acknowledgement that the bargain struck between traditional Christianity in America and the political Right was deal salient in another age. It no longer makes sense in a post-Cold War America where the challenges are purely cultural. This is a critique of Official Conservatism™ that is popular with blogs like this one. The marriage of convenience between social conservatives, anti-communists and libertarian economists stopped being convenient when the war ended.

Now, First Things is not about to embrace the alt-right, or even biological realism anytime soon. You see that in the post, where the author goes through the usual rituals to signal his fidelity to anti-racism. His discussion of Charlottesville brings to mind a man trying to bury something that keeps rising to the surface no matter how much dirt he piles on it. The thing that is rising from the earth, despite his frantic efforts to cover it up with scare words, is the realization that the old moral paradigm is no longer useful in this age.

For the longest time, Official Conservatism™ was defined by the three key elements of its coalition. Social conservatives, free market libertarians and hawkish anti-communists made up the Grand Army of the Right. They even sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the GOP convention. Once the Cold War ended, the anti-communist leg no longer had a reason to exist, which is why the coalition spiraled out of control. Social conservatism had always been a junior partner, but after the Cold War it was reduced to window dressing.

Fundamentally, the Dissident Right, of which the alt-right is a part, is a reaction to the failures of American conservatism. If Official Conservatism™ is unable to keep men in sundresses out of the girl’s restroom, what good is it? The answer from the Dissident Right is that it is no good at all. Seeing elements of Official Conservatism™ begin to openly question their arrangements along the same lines suggests the shadow of the Dissident Right is starting to reach the walls of the Orthodoxy. They are noticing us.

It goes beyond noticing though. Read conventional right-wing journals and what you find is a vapid recitation of 1980’s dogma, salted with references to Buckley and Reagan. It’s like listening to disco. Read sites on the Dissident Right like American Greatness and you find thoughtful criticism and reasoned attempts at making sense of the current age. The shadow of the Dissident Right is growing, because relative to the legacy right, the people in this thing are intellectual giants. Ideas do matter and we’re the ones with the ideas now.

The End Of The Yankee Imperium

Posted on by

At the very beginning of the 19th century, the New England states were increasingly at odds with the Southern states. One cause of the discontent was the sense that the slave states had too much power over the Federal government. Another was the decline in trade with Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. The Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 sharply reduced trade with Britain and France. There was also the rivalry between the North and South, which dated to the founding the colonies.

Discontent with the War of 1812 brought things to a head. The Federalist Party in New England had been agitating for changes in the Constitution, like eliminating the three-fifths compromise. New England newspapers openly discussed secession. The Hartford Convention was a series of meetings among representatives from the New England states to discuss their grievances. The whole project collapsed with the wave of patriotism that resulted from Jackson’s victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans.

This episode in American history has largely been forgotten, mostly because the North won the Civil War fifty years later. The winners write the history books and this bit of history has never fit the narrative. It’s also why the  Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina has been erased from the history books. Northern conservatives have made John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment their base. The fact that Locke and Shaftesbury hoped to impose feudalism on the American South is inconvenient.

The point here is that Americans have been raised up on a history of the nation written by Yankeedom. The North won the Civil War so they became the dominant region both legally and economically. Through the 20th century, the North also came to dominate the nation culturally, writing the history books and defining the national narrative. That’s how we get nonsense about the Puritans seeking religious freedom and carving a nation out of the wilderness. Jamestown has been all but erased from the nation’s memory.

The dominance of the North over the rest of the country probably would have petered out in the 20th century, but world events changed the direction of America. Teddy Roosevelt badgered Woodrow Wilson into breaking with American tradition, with regards to getting involved in European affairs. The Yankee desire to dominate North America became a quest to dominate the world. Once the US chose to get into the Great War, the old traditional American conservatism was killed off forever. The Yankee Empire was born.

The aftermath of the Great War, the Depression, World War II and then the Cold War prevented any change in America’s domestic arrangements. These were great unifying events; in that they justified the suppression of anything challenging the established cultural order. The upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s were based in New England, the Upper Midwest and Northern California for a reason. American Conservatism was born at Yale and run out of Connecticut for the same reason. That where the ruling class lived.

All empires end eventually. Often it is from exhaustion, the cost of maintaining the empire having long ago exceeded the benefits. Other times the culture that built the empire runs its course. The empire remains as a brittle outer husk that eventually shatters. Other times, it is a slow, ad hoc retreat back to something resembling normalcy. The Soviet Empire is a good example of this. It’s not been an organized retreat, but it has been a fairly bloodless one. Russia is now back to something close to its historic norm.

America was never built to a be great crusading empire. Even after generations of cultural cleansing, Alabama is still a vastly different place than Vermont. Regionalism is still the defining feature of America. Having one region dominate the others was the fear of the Founders, which is why they struggled to craft a government after independence from the British. The solution was a small federal government that handled a narrow set of things, like war and trade, that could only be done by a central government.

America’s ruling class, especially over the last few decades, have gone to great lengths to explain why providence has ordained America as the world’s peace keeper. The usual suspects have twisted this into a foreign policy of keeping the world safe for the Jewish diaspora. The truth is, the American Empire was always built on serendipity. The total destruction of Europe and the technological backwardness of East Asia left a huge vacuum. The atom bomb locked in the gains of the victors, by locking out all challengers.

The world that birthed the American Empire is long gone. China is now taking up her historic role as the hegemonic power of Asia. Europe is fully recovered, in the material sense, from the 20th century. It is time for Europe to recover culturally and that can only happen when the Yankee Empire recedes. Whether or not the European people have the will to defend themselves from the barbarian hordes to their south, that’s not something that can be decided for them. Europe must live or die on its own.

Domestically, it is long past time for a return to normalcy. The Cold War has been over for 25 years. The rest of the country is economically and demographically in better shape than Yankeedom. The oldest and most sclerotic states in the nation are located in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The election of Trump and the resulting chaos in Washington strongly suggest the rest of the nation is ready to step outside the shadow of Yankeedom. CalExit and similar rumblings from Progressives are another sign of change.

The fact is, America was never a singular nation. It was a hodgepodge of nations, thrown together with degrees of overlap. The regions of the country share a language and share some history, but they are significant different too. America, maybe even all of North America, is better run as a federation, like a continent sized version of Switzerland. The areas where there can be no agreement are delegated to the regions. The areas where the interests are shared are delegated to a federal state.

That can only come with the end of the Yankee Imperium.

The New Romantics

Posted on by

One of the forces pushing the alt-right along is a rejection of the modern, sterile aesthetic that is the technological age. This seems to be especially true of the younger millennials and Gen Z. They grew up in a world of glass and stainless steel, smooth edges and shades of gray. This is also an age that rejects spontaneity. It is why popular culture is so dull and feminine. There is a drugged dullness to our age. It is not a rational age, for sure, more like an unromantic age.

That is part of the appeal of the new dissident politics. There is a danger to showing up at alt-right rallies or associating with hate thinkers on social media. Men, especially young men, like adventure. For the generations raised by helicopter parents, thought police and sensitivity training, the danger of the alt-right is attractive. Breaking taboos and standing outside the herd is exhilarating, but the associated brotherhood fills a void the custodial state created in young men. It is not just fun to be bad, it is liberating.

We seem to be at the confluence of two forces acting on our societies. One is the hyper-feminization we see everywhere. There are few public places where men can be themselves or hold a dominant place. In fact, any sphere of life that is male oriented is under pressure to bring in girls. Even things like sports are forcibly integrated. We live in an age where elites want to put girls on football teams and in the boxing ring. Modern life is covered in a wool blanket, drenched with the fetid waters of feminism.

The other force is mass media. If you examine modern movies, one of the odd things is that many are in celebration of old weird America. Boston, for example, became a popular setting for movies, but almost always the old Boston of ethnic neighborhoods. Mass media allows young people a glimpse of the old lost age. They can see a time where the South was still rural and mysterious, the Northeast had tribal ethnics and Los Angeles still had Americans. For the young, old America feels like a foreign country.

The point here is that we are now at a time, at least from the perspective of a young male, where America is a feminine and deracinated society. For those of us who have lived through this transformation, it may be depressing, but it is not jarring. We saw the changes over time. We heard the warnings of those commentators on the Old Right and we saw those warnings ignored. It is like driving a new car for ten years. You know it is old and you remember when it was new, but you also remember everything in between.

Young people lack that middle part. They came into a world disconnected from the old world they can still see on TV or in movies. For young white males, increasingly alienated from the modern culture, it is not a big surprise that they would look backward for examples of how to move forward. Spend time following alt-right social media, and you see lots of references to the fact that the current culture is degraded and ugly. The past had true diversity, while present is a homogenized, degenerate slurry of nothingness.

This interesting story from the Guardian UK, about something similar happening in Germany, suggests this could be a pan-Western phenomenon. The difference is that it is still possible to be a famous intellectual in Europe. You can also be famous as a writer of fiction, read by men. In the US, public intellectuals are chattering skulls on cable TV, who spit out vapid platitudes approved by the people in charge. Literature, of course, is now dominated by women, so it has no point and no audience, outside the academy.

That said, Europe and America have something in common. Young males, disconnected from the culture, are searching for something to give purpose to their lives. A common refrain on the alt-right is about the uselessness of being a wage slave in a cubicle farm, just so you can buy useless crap from global corporations. That seems to be a theme of the new romanticism bubbling up in Europe. It is young people, particularly young males, reaching back to an age before they were born, for inspiration and purpose.

The Guardian piece is quick to point out the connections between German Romanticism and you know who. That brings up a big difference between the US and Europe. Germans are not about to become minorities in their own country. The same is true of the rest of Europe. In the US, whites will be a minority in a generation. The cultural phenomenon may have many parallels today, but in the fullness of time they will head off in different directions. It is why the alt-right is less artsy than the new European romantics.

All in all, what we are seeing is validation of an age old truth. One of the top-level duties of a ruling class is to keep its young men busy. Too many alienated and idle young men always spell trouble. What has happened in the West is the ruling elite has deliberately pushed men out of the social order. The follow on act was to invite in millions of foreigners to gloat over the deracinated male population. There are only so many mixed race couples you can see on TV before you get the message.

This will not end well

Warring With The Cult

Posted on by

Last weekend, Richard Spencer tried to hold his annual conference. The vehicle Spencer uses to run his alt-right thing is the National Policy Institute, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit based in Montana. This is a standard thing to do these days, for any sort of activism. It allows rich people to quietly fund activities and take a tax deduction for it. It also gives solo acts a way to fund their activities, without having to keep a day job. Once a year, Spencer has a conference and dinner for the people interested in his efforts.

Last year was the infamous Heil-gate episode, where Spencer’s imprudence got himself in trouble. Since then, Progressives have been working hard to un-person him and anything he touches. That linked video has 2.8 million views for a reason. As a result, he was unable to book the Reagan Building for his event, which is a violation of Federal law, but the people in charge think the law is for suckers. They do what they want. As a result, Spencer was forced to find another venue for the event.

A weekend conference organized by white nationalist Richard Spencer was shut down after the owners of the Maryland farm he rented discovered he was behind the event.

The think tank that Spencer leads, the National Policy Institute, hosted the conference for about 100 people at Rocklands Farm, a winery and events venue in Montgomery County. Spencer said in an interview that a third-party logistics company contacted Rocklands Farm on behalf of the National Policy Institute this month and didn’t reveal that white nationalists were affiliated with the event when they booked it. The company told the farm’s management only that it was a “corporate” gathering, according to Spencer.

The conference started about 11 a.m. Sunday and was scheduled to continue until 8 p.m. Caterers at Rocklands Farm served brunch, and participants recapped 2017. At about 4 p.m., Spencer said, someone working the event learned that Spencer was there, and management told everyone to leave.

“We didn’t lie, we didn’t deceive, and we certainly did not break any rules while we were there,” Spencer said. “We had sharp words and were obviously disappointed, but there was no confrontation of any kind.”

The farm refunded the group’s money after asking it to leave.

The owners of Rocklands Farm didn’t comment on the incident beyond a statement on their website Monday, which says it proudly does “business according to family values, including welcoming people of all backgrounds, race, ethnicities, cultures, and religions.”

If you go to the source article, the picture of Spencer they use is from his thing at the University of Florida. OK. Stock photos are standard stuff in the news business. Then they use a picture of a black protester from that Florida event. That has no place in a story about something entirely different and 3,000 miles to the north. It is an important lesson that no one on our side can seem to get through their thick skulls. The people in charge are perfectly willing to lie, cheat and steal to win. They are not bound by any rules.

Putting that aside, the highlighted portion of the story is illustrative. This is the sort of the stuff Gentry Conservatives wave around claiming they have their principles, while the winning side is riddled with hypocrisy. The winning side, however, just shrugs, because as far as they are concerned, that quote is the model of logic. That is the nature of cults and the people inside them. The rules and tactics of the cult are the model of moral perfection and timeless logic. You not getting this is proof that the adherents are anointed.

Cults have an internal language that only the members fully understand. The zombie who issued that statement knows that “family values” means the cult’s definition of family values. By “people of all backgrounds” they just assume it excludes people outside the cult. The people outside the walls are not really people. They do not exist as a flesh and blood humans. It is the same reason the Puritans had no trouble burning Indians and chasing Anglicans off into the wilderness. They did not see them as human.

I will also note that the Washington Post story is not an actual news story. The Five W’s could have been done in a paragraph, which by the conventions of news reporting make it not worth doing. It was a non-event. That is why the bulk of the story is folklore and legend now popular with the cult. There is the Charlottesville reference, the preening and pleading of the fearful restaurant owners and so on. This is written as a cautionary tale for other cult members. “Beware! If you are not vigilant, the Nazis will show up at your door!”

It is why it is useless to bother engaging with these people at any level. It is better to imagine them as a colonizing tribe of aliens. There is no middle ground, no room for agreement, because their reason to exists, their core identity, is based on wiping out all non-believers. Anything that even hints at compromise, is seen by the cult as a direct threat to its very existence. That is why they take so much pleasure in stalking guys like Spencer around and preventing him from living a normal life. It is what defines them.

Devlin Reviews Hawley

Posted on by

One of the items on my vacation list is to read Making Sense of the Alt-Right, by Alabama political science professor George Hawley. His book, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, was well received. It is refreshing when someone from the academy looks over the walls of the hive and not only sees what is on the other side but makes an honest effort to understand it. I do not know anything about the man’s politics, but he does not appear to be a guy spending his nights howling at the moon.

That came to mind reading F. Roger Devlin’s review of Hawley’s latest, posted on VDare.com the other day. Devlin is a serious guy, who is largely responsible for the whole man-o-sphere subculture. He literally wrote the book on critiquing feminism. That is not a small accomplishment. He has also been involved with the alt-right from the start, so he has observed and interacted with all of the big shots of the movement. That positions him to be a good critic of a book written by an outsider, attempting to understand the alt-right.

The review is worth reading, even if you are not interested in a book length treatment of the alt-right. Devlin’s four key points that define the alt-right are excellent and precise. I think the fourth point cannot be emphasized enough, mostly because it is a point I often make about dissident politics. When I write about peaceful separation, it is not intended to be a road map or political treatise. The point of the exercise is to break free of the old moral paradigm and get readers to start thinking outside of those restrictions.

Before I get off onto another point, I would take some issue with Devlin’s criticism of Hawley’s use of scare words like “racism” to describe the alt-right. Paul Gottfried, in reviewing Hawley’s previous book, made the point that it is a requirement of every academic. “If I were young enough to be considered for tenure in the average political science department at an American university, I too would spray my books with PC bromides in order to keep the Leftist lunatics off my back.”

This is a point that cannot be overstated. Every university is infested with feminist rage-heads, writing autoethnographic “research” papers about how toxic masculinity makes them angry. In departments like political science, feminist “scholars” demand that the white males take a version of the Voight-Kampff test, to make sure they are replicants. “If you see a white person and black person in a photo, how much do you hate the white person?” My guess is Hawley salts his lunch orders with PC jargon, just to be safe.

Putting that aside, Devlin makes a point that is always missed when people discuss the alt-right or the larger ummah of the dissident right. There are layers to it. The guys posting frog cartoons into the timelines of Progressive media people are not the alt-right or any part of the dissident right. They are part of this cultural phenomenon, in the same way that hippies were part of the 1960’s counterculture. Hippies played no role in the intellectual side of the New Left, just as Milo has no role in the intellectual side of the alt-right.

It is one of the things I learned over this past year, attending the hate festivals of the dissident right. There are a lot of smart people having second thoughts about the modern world and the intellectual traditions that created it. Roger Devlin is a good example. He is not spending his evenings trying to promote his brand on Periscope. He’s reading books and writing essays on sites like AmRen and Counter-Currents. There is a lot of intellectual capital in this thing that is concealed by the pranksters and self-promoters.

That said, I would take issue with this bit in Devlin’s review:

The Alt-Right is a political movement which seeks to ensure the continued existence and well-being of European descended people. As such, it neither implies nor precludes any particular religious beliefs. We are not opposed to Evangelical Christianity as such, but some figures the Evangelical leadership (notably Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention) are our declared enemies and we treat them as such.

The alt-right, like the larger dissident right, is a cultural phenomenon, not a political movement. Smart young males, mostly out of necessity, are picking up paleo-conservative ideas and questioning the prevailing orthodoxy. These ideas are being extended to question the core assumptions of modern American political order. It is more akin to the Scientific Revolution than a political movement. The former was about rethinking our place in nature. The latter is about rethinking who gets to be in charge.

It is why it feels like the alt-right is hostile to Christianity. It has to be. What is generally understood to be mainstream Christianity in America, has been hollowed out by Progressivism, and is now worn like an animal skin by crackpots and degenerates from the fringes of the Left. Even the more culturally conservative parts of the country practice a form of Private Protestantism than embraces extreme egalitarianism, anti-racism and universalism. It is not an accident that these churches are deep into the refugee rackets.

I think most big names in the alt-right avoid the subject, mostly because it results in howls about how this is not real Episcopalianism or this is not real Christianity. It is reminiscent of the days when academic Marxists would say the Soviet Union was not real Marxism. It may be theologically true that the current iterations of Christianity are outside the traditions and teachings of the faith, the fact remains that the people running mainstream Christianity these days look a lot like the faculty of your local gender studies department.

That is not a small thing. The reason the New Left was able to sweep the field in the culture war, which included deposing the Old Left, is that their thing took on a quasi-religious tone. Humans are built to be believing machines. That is a part of biological reality our side has yet to face, but it must be faced eventually. Something is going to have to fill the spiritual vacuum if this cultural phenomenon is going to be a cultural and then political movement. An Alt-Right form of Christianity would be a welcome development.

Those quibbles aside, the review is worth reading if you are interested in a sober rendering of alt-right thinking. A part of the development of an intellectual movement is learning how to engage with critics. If your thing cannot hold up to scrutiny, your thing is not going to be a thing for long. Having intellectuals from outside this thing engage with elements of the alt-right is healthy. When serious people start to take dissident politics seriously, it means these ideas are starting to penetrate the mainstream.