Category Archives: Culture

End of the Gatekeepers

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The manufactured outrage over Harvey Weinstein has been entertaining, mostly because a lot of Hollywood blowhards have taken it in the shorts. Watching guys like Ben Affleck and Jimmy Kimmel suffer is enjoyable because they are horrible people fond of self-righteously lecturing the rest of us. The schadenfreude is all good fun, but it misses a bigger story. The reason Hollywood is imploding in scandals, over what has been the norm for generations, is that the smart money has left the business.

As Steve Sailer noted, degenerates like Harvey Weinstein have always been a fixture in the movie business. Smart Jewish men were drawn to the business, because success meant they got to be gatekeepers in a high demand business. That meant they could charge large tolls for the right to pass through the gates. Anyone who wanted to be in movies had to make it in Hollywood. Actresses and actors that wanted to be stars had to do what was required to make it past the gatekeeper. Everyone paid the toll.

Unsurprisingly, Hollywood has always been the land of horny men and slutty women, willing to trade sex for success. To some degree, that was always the attraction. In what other business could a golem like Weinstein have easy access to hot sleazy women, as a part of his daily work? For that matter, in what other business could hot sleazy women get rich and famous just for having the right look? Other than the smart guys who ran the place, Hollywood was for carny folk hoping they would find the golden ticket.

It all worked as long as Hollywood was the choke point of the entertainment business in America. For the longest time, that was the case. All movies were made in Hollywood and almost all TV shows. Some television work was done in New York City, but even that was controlled by the big studios. That meant smart men looking to make big money in movies went to Hollywood to make their money. They had no choice. Even if they wanted to go around the studios, the studio men controlled the distribution networks too.

Most everyone gets that technology is changing how people consume entertainments like movies and TV shows. Instead of a cable sub and trips to the theater, it is the internet and viewing on a variety of devices from anywhere with wireless access. That is why cord cutting is gaining steam. There is no reason to have a cable deal when you can get all the same stuff, on demand, from your internet provider. With gizmos like Kodi, you can get any video in the world, free of charge, as long as you have the technical savvy.

The other side of this coin is that technology has broken up the bottleneck that is Hollywood. Services like Amazon are greedy for content and they have the money to go around the gate keepers. Hollywood is no match when facing off with the giant tech companies and their control of the internet. Then there is the fact that making movies does not require prohibitively expensive video equipment and facilities. This guy made a very slick drama in Scotland for £3000. It is as good as anything Hollywood produces.

Then there is the fact that social media is making it easier for these independent content creators to get attention. PewDiePie has over fifty million subscribers to his YouTube channel. Mike Cernovich has proved that you can gain national attention, despite having no obvious talent, if you figure out how to work social media. Donald Trump is in the White House, because he figured out that old media is no longer valuable. He spent his time and money on other forms of marketing and won the election as a result.

The days of Hollywood being a choke point for video entertainment is over. The new players in the content business are the services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. They are becoming the new choke points for TV and movies so the smart guys are moving to those rackets. They do not have to be in Los Angeles or even in America. These services are so desperate for content, they will even go to Iceland for it. Like the big record labels of the prior age, Hollywood is on its way to becoming a legacy business.

As an aside, the foreshadowing of this was the pornography business. Twenty years ago, porn producers in the San Fernando Valley made big money producing porno films for home video rental. Bus loads of girls would come to Hollywood to become stars, only to end up in the valley making porn. Then, the internet and inexpensive video gear made it possible for anyone to put porn on-line. Before long, the internet was awash in free porn of every imaginable variety. The porn industry collapsed.

An axiom of modern, life is that the arrival of social justice warriors is a sign that a business or industry has entered a death spiral. It may not be dead, but its days of making big money have ended. The smart-money men, interested only in making money, have left the scene, leaving the people with other agendas to take over and impose those agendas. That is when the gals start running off the guys for being male and cook up schemes to help under-represented minorities realize their potential.

That is what is happening with Hollywood. The girls are taking over, which means they will be producing content that no one watches, as they burn through the assets of the movies business infrastructure. Soon, the oppressed people of color will be accusing the remaining studio men of being insufficiently remorseful about their ancestors owning slaves. Unlike colleges and corporations that go through this, the film business has an ample supply of degenerates like Harvey Weinstein. This is just getting started.

Myths Die Slowly

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Back in the summer, I was talking with a friend and we were talking about Trump and the alt-right. My friend is not into my type of politics. He remains a generic conservative, the sort who thinks Ben Shapiro is great and Gavin McInnes is edgy. I do not fault him for it. Most white people are in that camp, unless they are a Progressive. The Dissident Right is still small and the alt-right is even smaller. The tide is running our way, but it has a long way to go before we have big numbers.

Anyway, one of the things we discussed was what Trump could or would do regarding the big issues. My friend honestly believes that all that needs doing is to cut taxes, cut spending and crack down on illegal immigration. Then America will begin to look like the 1980’s again. He was a bit surprised when I told him that I disagreed. I was a bit turned off by his optimism. The truth is these guys stubbornly cling to the old ideas and old politics. We need to turn them, but it will not be easy. They will not let go easily.

That is the biggest challenge facing the Dissident Right and it is a massive challenge for the alt-right. White people in America have been marinating, for their whole lives, in the stew of multiculturalism and the conventional conservative reaction. They still view the world through the lens of the Cold War. That means accepting the Left’s moral framework, while longing for the Right’s promised ends. The result is a collection of American myths that our people stubbornly embrace, despite the evidence.

The biggest one is the fetish over the Constitution. The people who love Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck are the best example. They talk about the Constitution like it is a holy relic. It is their magic talisman. They are sure that all we need is a majority of Constitutional Conservatives on the bench and more of them in Congress. When you point out that the Constitution currently requires Christian bakers to celebrate homosexual weddings, they dismiss this as if it is a lie. They just cannot let go of the dream.

These are usually the same people who go on about our Judeo-Christian principles. There is no such thing. It is just something nice white people thought was a good thing to say, so the Jews would feel included. Jews think the idea is ridiculous and very conservative Jews find it insulting. The formulation gained popularity in the Eisenhower years, probably in reaction to the Holocaust. Despite the ridiculousness of it, most constitutional conservatives are convinced America is built on Judeo-Christian values.

The great black hope is another one of those myths that whites cannot let go of, even after eight years of Obama. For example, the mulatto meathead, Dwayne Johnson, was saying nice things about generic conservatives for a while last spring. This set off a round of hero worship in Conservative Inc. National Review did a special issue on him. Most whites still believe the dream of racial harmony, so gaining the approval of a guy like Sheriff Clark or a Dwayne Johnson is like being blessed by the Pope.

This is because whites largely accept the blank slate egalitarianism the Progs have been preaching for the last half century. White people are so afraid of being condemned as racist; they will believe just about anything to avoid it. The hardest boiled right-winger will break out in hives when race is mentioned. The insist that all blacks need to do is act like middle-class white people. It is why they carry guys like Sheriff Clark and Allen West around as conquering heroes. Whites still cling to the myth of egalitarianism.

This spills over into the immigration debate. Listen to the garden variety talk radio conservative and they will fall all over themselves praising legal immigration. They completely buy in the myth of the propositional nation. They do not always use that language, but they accept it. Whites may not think all people are the same, but they think they can be the same. Therefore, the non-whites wishing to settle in America can prove this by following the rules, like a white person would. It is Magic Rule Theory.

Many alt-right people like to flatter themselves by insisting that the JQ is the hardest red pill to swallow, but in reality, patriotism is the toughest. People can accept that blacks are incapable of living with whites. People can even buy off on the idea that Jews have a disproportionate influence on society and maybe that is not a good thing. The one thing you cannot get anyone to accept is that patriotism is anything but an honorable quality. If you dare question the idea, whites will condemn you as some sort of commie.

That is the biggest challenge for the alt-right. They do not couch it in these terms, but theirs is a post-national movement. Their brand of identity politics puts racial identity ahead of all other group loyalties. That includes patriotism. If the black NFL players all stand this week, hands over hearts, singing the anthem, whites around America will be sobbing and hugging one another like it is the rapture. Talking Americans out of this sort of over the top love of country is the great challenge for the alt-right.

Beliefs and customs have a way of transforming into something different when they lose their salience. Many conservative whites have started to abandon their party loyalty, realizing it was a sham. Increasing numbers of whites are coming to terms with the realities of race. Still, they do so with the hope that, with some tweaking, the republic can be set right again. Maybe that is the process. We are now seeing more people talk openly about ending immigration entirely. That is a big step for white people.

The fact is, things like patriotism and a love for ordered liberty are features of white Americans, not bugs. Most whites get that and will stubbornly cling to those ideas, even when they are an impediment to preserving civilization. Sacred beliefs do not go away without a fight. The great challenge for the insurgency is to re-purpose these attributes toward better ends. Appeals to people’s better natures always works better than challenging their deeply held beliefs.

No Tomorrows

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All human societies have some form of belief system, usually based in the supernatural or in unexplained mysteries. People who study these things think that belief is one of the earliest modern human traits. Language and religion, the formalization of belief, most likely evolved together. That certainly makes sense. Religion has always been a handy store of knowledge and language is the way in which it can be transported over time and place. They are complimentary.

That is speculative, but what is not speculative is that all known people have had something we would consider to be a faith system. Primitive people have primitive belief systems, usually based in natural phenomenon like the seasons and elements. American Indians have a whole collection of deities based in nature. More complex societies create more complex myths and belief structures. The Greeks and Romans had complex systems. Christianity is a rich and complex belief system.

We in the modern West tend to think we have moved past this stuff. The educated classes, while not willing to say they are atheists, scoff at the religious. The most you will get from the upper classes is the line about being spiritual, but not religious. The truth is, Western elites are believers like all people in all times, maybe more so. It is just that their beliefs are informal and ad hoc. The people toting canvas sacks to the market are doing so because our better say nature demands it of us.

Belief systems describe a people. The ancient Egyptians had a complex belief system like many ancient people. Their religion, however, was unique in that it was entirely focused on the afterlife. They did not make sacrifices and pray for the here and now. They built monuments, complex burial systems and temples in order to prepare the living for the after life. There is a good argument that this focus on the after life is what allowed the Egyptians to keep their culture going for 3,000 years.

On the other hand, the Greeks were not overly concerned about the after life. Their focus was on the here and now. The gods interfered in the lives of men, so it made sense to focus devotion on swaying the gods to act on your behalf or against the interests of your enemies. The Greeks did have the concept of an afterlife, but it was not the focus of their belief system. Immortality for man was possible by having sons, who would carry his name, or dying for his polis, which would live on and remember his name.

The Greeks may have been more concerned with the present, when it came time to worshipping the gods, but they had a nice long run. It was not as if they were hedonists, living only in the moment. Even so, this focus on the now had some odd results. For instance, we know just about every Egyptian ruler and his deeds. We even have some of their corpses. The Dorian Greeks, on the other hand, burned their kings, as well as any record of them. We know nothing about them as a result.

This brings up an important point about our present age. The cult of Gaia, for example, is long on rhetoric about the future, but its focus is on present virtue. The greens are not trying preserve the environment for future generations. They are hoping their efforts snuff out future generations. The same is true of anti-racism and multiculturalism. These are all about the present. Calling them suicide cults is useful rhetoric, but in fact our virtuous rulers do not think past tomorrow. it is all about grace today.

This is particularly true with regards to migration. Nationalists like to cook up complex theories as to why our rulers are wedded to the idea of mass immigration. Some say it is cheap labor. Other say it is cheap votes. Still others see it as spite. All of those things are true, but the real motivation is virtue. Instead of a public ceremony where they sacrifice a bull or consecrate a church, inviting in the poor and downtrodden is the big public act of virtue. The consequences are down the road. The grace is today.

It is not just vanity. We are the first people to have no conception of an afterlife. Even the Greeks believed in the after life and they believed there was judgement of souls. They may not have made that the focus of their faith, but they still believed there was something beyond this life. This spiritual hopelessness of Western elites may be why the Cloud People couch everything in terms of personal fulfillment and self-actualization. It is a way of crossing the river Styx without actually believing in it.

The nuttiness of modern elite culture may simply be a neurosis arising from the conflict between the natural desire of man to be remembered, colliding with the lack of any reason to be remembered. Even the humblest of men will carve his name into a tree or scratch his name on his prison wall. “I was here” is the primal scream. Today, that impulse has no outlet. The lonely barren spinster yells “I was here” and the only thing that happens is the cat stirs and then goes back to sleep.

Maybe this is it for us. Maybe there is no tomorrow for the West.

Crime City

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Recently I was searching around for publicly available police data and found that a surprising amount of data is available to the public. Often it is very portable, letting the curious download raw data from government systems. Many cities have built out API’s so you can get live feeds from their systems. I found a treasure trove of raw arrest data from the City of Baltimore. Like a lot of cities, they have exposed their database of arrests to the public. The data only goes back to the beginning of 2013, but that’s a lot.

Since the first of day of 2013, Baltimore City police have made 152,103 arrests as of September 30th, 2017. That works out to an average of 87 arrests per day. That does not sound like a big number, but according to studies, the average time awaiting trial is close to 40 days. The number of people being held in the city awaiting trial is about 8,000, on average. Put another way, about 1.3% of the city’s population is held at any one time, awaiting their turn in the criminal justice system. That does not included convicts.

Just in case you are thinking about being arrested in Baltimore, here’s the daily breakout.

Of course, the break down by race is what you would expect in Baltimore.

Interestingly, there were only 1428 arrests for murder and attempted murder. They don’t code the crimes in an easily understood way. I simply searched for all arrests containing the word murder, which included attempted murder. Netting out the lesser charge and the total is just 252 arrests for the crime of murder. In the same period, 1382 homicides were committed in the city.  It appears arrests for attempted murder is where they start with murder cases. That or the murder total would be much higher if the locals had better aim.

Here’s the racial break down of murder related arrests.

The black share of arrests for murder related offenses should be viewed in addition to two other statistics. Baltimore is 63% black according to the last census and 29% white. This means that blacks are over represented in the arrest data for murder related crime. Whites are under represented. It should be noted that Hispanics are counted as white, but the city has a small Hispanic population. Even so, whites are significantly under represented. This is a pattern that turns up in all homicide studies, even in majority black cities.

The other factor is the victimization data. Murder is almost always a personal crime so the murderer usually knows the victim or they live in the same area. Even in a city like Baltimore, where one block can seem like a different country from the next block, most violent crime is personal. That means most times, the murderer is of the same race as the murdered. Looking at the victimization data, the number of black murder victims over the same period tracks the arrest pattern, as far as the racial breakdown.

Here is the racial break down of the murder victims.

The victim numbers let us net out the Hispanics from the white total, but Baltimore does not have a big Latino population, so the numbers don’t change much. Given the white flight to the suburbs, the city’s white population is probably closer to 25% in this time period, but the white crime share is around 5%. On the other hand, Blacks are 65% of the city’s population and 90% of homicide related crime and over 80% of all arrests. Put another way, if you removed the black population, Baltimore would resemble Salt Lake City.

Finally, here are the arrests by age.

Here’s the arrests by interesting cohort.

Suicidal Prog Boomers

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Whenever there is a man-made mass casualty event, to use the term of art, there are a finite number of narratives. There is political terrorism, lone crazy guy, disaffected youth, political crazies, religious crazies and finally, the conspiracy. The 9/11 attacks were well planned political terrorism, while the Orlando gay club shootings were just a religious crazy. Columbine and the black church shooting were the work of disaffected youth. The Connecticut school shooting was an example of a nut getting loose with a gun.

One interesting thing about the recent political crazies is the perpetrators have been acting in defense of the establishment. The BLM murders were blacks motivated by President Obama to kill whites and cops. The guy who shot Congressman Scalise was a Bernie Bro. The knife wielding crazy out west was a Bernie Bro too. Even the hoaxes are done by people who are trying to defend the status quo against dissent. The last anti-government act by political crazies was the Federal building in Oklahoma.

The other interesting thing is that the stuff getting called terrorism is almost always done by crackpots and lunatics, using religion or politics as an excuse. The well organized terror attack by competent political actors is rare and increasingly rare. The West suffered more from this sort of terrorism in the 60’s and 70’s than today. The so-called “lone wolf” stuff the authorities worry about is always a lunatic getting into Islam or Progressive politics, then deciding to start killing people for the cause.

Another thing worth noting is that after Columbine, we were told by experts that this was the coming trend. Disaffected white youth would be going nuts and shooting up public places. That never happened. Shootings at schools tend to be adults and those adults tend to be known lunatics. The Columbine style event never became a trend. The closest we got was Dylan Roof. It is an example of how the people running the media have a ready supply of ways to blame white men for everything.

The thing about all of our recent massacres is the narrative was quickly revealed, even with the media trying hard to lie about it. A Muslim nutter goes crazy and the media will write endlessly about how the motive is unknown, but the truth gets out pretty quick. The same is true of the random lunatic. In all of these cases, we quickly learn that the perp was under medical care and had a long history of serious mental illness. The political crazies like the BLM guys make their reasons known on Facebook and Twitter.

That is what makes the Vegas shooting interesting. This is an outlier case in many ways, but the fact that no one seems to know why he did it is the biggest clue. This is a guy with no social media presence. In this age, which is exceedingly rare for anyone his age. For political or religious nuts, it is an impossibility. That is the thing about these events. They are almost always the denouement to a cycle of madness. The shooter becomes increasingly deranged and then finally moves to do something big.

Similarly, political terrorism is salient only when the reason is made public. The IRA took credit for every single bombing, even some they may not have committed, in order to get their message attached to the news of the bombing. It is why ISIS, and before them Al-Qaeda, took credit for every death on earth. One of the truths about most of the stuff reported as Islamic terrorism, is that it is just random lunatics who know Arabic. They find a reason to go crazy and attack the infidel on-line and then act on it.

What we have here is a guy who was financially successful, old and boring. The weirdest thing about him, beside the fact he is a mass murderer, is that his brother appears to be nutty as a fruitcake. Otherwise, the guy is a semi-retired boomer, spending his days playing video poker at a local watering hole and tending to his real estate investments. If not for his corpse at the scene, this guy would be on no one’s list of suspects. Maybe there is much more to the story, but for now, this guy is the extremist of extreme outliers.

The one thing we know so far is the guy was a careful planner. He apparently had his wits together enough to spend months planning his work and working his plan. He studied up on firearms, learned about shooting from an elevated position at a distance. The police found notes he made calculating drop and distance so he could increase is killing rate while shooting into the crowd. This is a guy who spent a long time thinking about this and planning for the right event on which to unleash his attack.

The other thing we do know is he decided to kill white people. Even taking what the media reports at face value, this guy spent all of his planning time in order to kill white people. If he had shot up a hip-hop show, one that did not shoot itself up, everyone would have made the connection right away. There are few places as white and middle American as an outdoor country show. White people go to these things to celebrate being a honky with fellow honkies. They are one of the few black-free zones in America.

The conspiracy theorists will run wild with this, but the real story behind this thing may simply be that it is another disaffected Prog Boomer. James Thomas Hodgkinson, the guy who shot Congressman Scalise, was a 66-year old Bernie Bro. Stephen Paddock was a 64-year old, who ticks many of the same boxes. His brother looks like the sort of guy who spends his days listening to NPR and ranting about the Republicans. Given the way the media tried to hide the motive of Hodgkinson, it is reasonable to think this is similar.

The news was full of cranks and quacks after Columbine, telling us that disaffected young white males were going violently crazy. That never happened because young people are very rarely so cynical about their future that they become suicidal. Old people, on the other hand, have lots of reason to fear the future. They not only face the grim reality of the actuarial tables, but the grim reality of present failures. For old Bernie Bros, these are the worst of times. Maybe the future of mass shootings is the suicidal Prog Boomers.

The Disaggregation

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Living at the end of a great historical cycle, we take for granted that the way things are currently organized, is the way they have always been organized. Ours is the natural order of things. One reason we think this is that we can only really know our age. We can read about prior epochs, but we cannot truly know what it was like to be alive in those times. It will always feel alien to us. The other reason is that a product of our epoch is the linear theory of history. All of the events of the past led to this point in time.

The linear thinking of our age is why a guy like Francis Fukuyama could write a book titled The End of History and not be laughed out of the room. The truth is, the West has gone through a number of cycles, which had a beginning, middle and end. The feudal period is the easiest example. It was born out of the ruins of Rome, flourished through the Middle Ages and then collapsed in the Enlightenment. The period between the scientific revolution and the French Revolution, was the great transition from old epoch to the new.

To flesh this out a bit, think about the natural trajectory of human organization. The trend has always been for larger and larger organizational units. First settlements were a few tribes making up a few hundred people. The first settlements were small but grew into villages and then towns. The more successful became cities and eventually, the political units we call city-states. The first empires were collections of city-states, but in Europe, that model never scaled up very well, which is why counties were the maximum unit.

This is one of great forces in human history, the natural tendency for human societies to “level up” by getting bigger, taking over neighboring societies. The Han Chinese are a great example of this phenomenon. The Huaxia ethnic group is believed to be the ancestors of the Han, who formed into a tribe and slowly dominated the neighboring tribes. They moved north and south, eventually occupying most of what we think of as China today. Put another way, a bunch of small tribes combined into one big tribe.

We see a bit of this at the end of our epoch. The great industrial wars of the 20th century made war for territory unacceptable. Borders were drawn and respected. Changes to borders were to be negotiated. Then the idea of eliminating borders entirely became the default position of elites. Europe was to combine into a single political unit. Asia would slowly combine into an economic unit. North America was to be the glue, binding it all together. Human organization would be global and managed.

Just as the Bronze Age empires collapsed with the coming of the great migrations and the Iron Age, our commercial empires are showing signs of stress. That is because of the other great force in human history. Disaggregation is when a large entity breaks into its constituent parts. The simplest example is a big company splitting into a bunch of specialized little companies. Men have gotten extraordinarily rich figuring out how to break apart large companies into many smaller, more valuable little companies.

In history, the most obvious example is the Roman Empire. The Romans managed to stitch together people from the Levant to Britain, but the cost of holding it together exhausted them and it broke apart into more logical units. First the Britons, then the various German tribes broke free of Rome. Eventually, the Western Empire collapsed into its tribal parts. Even the Italian peninsular broke into its parts. The end of the Western Roman Empire was also the end of a great historic epoch.

Today, the signs of disaggregation are appearing in all over Europe. The Catalonian revolt is one good example. It has deep historic roots, going back to the Roman Empire, but it is boiling over now for a reason. The same is true of the Visegrad Group. There is more history in those lands than the rest of Europe, but that is not why they are in dissent from the rest of Europe. The reason for the break ups is that the underlying logic of these great combinations no longer makes any sense. The EU is a solution to a problem of the past.

From the Enlightenment through the end of the Cold War, the great debates were about how whites would deal with whites. How would whites organize their lands politically? How would whites describe and maintain borders between groups of whites? How would whites manage commerce in their own lands and between other groups of whites? These were the great questions. The answer was social democracy, separate borders for separate peoples and regulated markets for goods and services.

The end of an historical epoch is not just when the great questions of that epoch are answered. The end comes when new questions arise that the old answers cannot address. The EU is proving to be less than worthless in the face of mass migration from the south. The Yankee Imperium over America has no answers for the demographic challenges facing the white population. It is why the arrangements of the old era are showing stress and beginning to break.

In the European world, large countries and supra-national organizations are solutions to past problems. The new problems, like how Europe will deal with four billion Africans to their south, demand new solutions. If the current social arrangements do not address the coming problems, then those arrangement will fall apart and be replaced by new ones. That first means tearing down the old arrangements to make way for the new. The era of disaggregation will be about the old organization units breaking into their parts.

The Fear Of Disbelief

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I was looking for something I remembered Sailer posting about and I stumbled upon this post from Tyler Cowen. The post is from eight years ago and it is something I found interesting. I did some searching around in his blog to see if he had bothered to revisit the issue and the search came up dry. Cowen, who is one of those guys who likes pitching himself as a step outside the crowd, has avoided the topic for close to a decade, suggesting it was around this point when the subject was declared heretical.

Another thing I found interesting, amusing actually, was that Cowen succumbed to the claim that there is greater genetic diversity within racial groups than between them. While it is true that there is greater variation between individuals, than between groups of individuals, it does not invalidate classifying individuals into different racial groups. Traits common to one group, even in great variety, may not exist in another. Cowen was falling for what is informally known as Lewontin’s Fallacy.

Of course, what screams from the post is the hysteria induced in people like Cowen, when they are sheered between observable fact and prevailing dogma. On the one hand, their brains force them to look at reality. On the other hand, their fear of the morality police makes them want to shriek in terror. Cowen is a gold plated phony, but he is not a dunce. Even back in 2009, the evidence was clear. There are bone-deep differences between the races that go beyond physiognomy. It is right there in the mountain of IQ data.

People can be forgiven for not going against their betters. Even spergs like Cowen want to believe in the prevailing orthodoxy. You see that in the end where he writes “racism itself is far, far more harmful, whether in the course of previous history or still today.” That is the sort of thing a true believer writes, when he is thinking of maybe writing something heretical, but then grows frightened of where it could lead. That whole last paragraph is so carefully worded, it reads like it was written by a committee.

It is not just the smart guys who are tormented by this stuff. Most normal whites get weepy when they see a guy like Sheriff Clark or Allen West say the sorts of things honkies say in private. It is confirmation. When you see a gazillion re-tweets of something a conservative black posted, it is not hard to imagine the relief normies felt when they saw it and the joy with which they passed it along. A couple of generations of whites have been raised up to think of blacks as mystical moral arbiters. Black approval is the highest honor.

There is also the old noblesse oblige hook. Smart people like to think of themselves as having a duty to guide the less smart toward the correct opinions. A guy like Cowen is not wealthy and he is largely dependent on the state for his livelihood, like most libertarians. Nevertheless, he imagines himself as a member of an intellectual elite, charged with training the next generation and providing intellectual guidance to the ruling class. Promoting the blank slate silliness about the evils of racism feels like his moral duty.

On this point, there is a strange phenomenon that I have witnessed. It is not a lot different than what happens in a church when a long standing member quits because they no longer believe in God. There are members who will try to talk the guy out of it, telling him that they too have lost their faith, but they continue attending services to maintain the tradition or support those who to continue to believe. I have never seen this work. Every person who has quit their church did so in their mind long before they left the pew.

I suspect something similar goes on with our betters. They know that even entertaining heretic thoughts can be trouble. They have seen enough old white guys throw in the towel, like James Watson or John Derbyshire. They know that once that seed of doubt gets lodged in the head, it grows into a mighty oak of doubt. Then comes struggle, apostasy and finally banishment from the community of good thinkers. It is better for strangers to think you are a moron than to have your friends and colleagues say you are immoral.

Most people reading this probably belonged to the universal church of biological denialism at some point in their life. It has been dogma for a long time. Probably every white person has felt the warm glow of seeing blacks succeed at white things or showing their appreciation with public acts of patriotism. The opening ceremonies have become American’s favorite part of the Olympics, because it is where they see well behaved non-whites wearing the stars and stripes and looking proud to be Americans.

Race denialism, as John Derbyshire calls it, has been part of the official canon for generations now. Biological denialism has been official dogma for as long as I have been alive. Belief is easy when everyone else believes the same thing. Disbelief, however, is inevitable when belief is at odds with reality. When no matter how hard you try to make the belief real, it is thwarted by reality, doubt is the only option. That is where most whites are now. The question is, what will they believe in next?

The Plight Of The Edgytarian

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One of the more popular ways for people, with modest talents, to gain public attention is to be edgy. The best examples of this are the pop stars who have modest musical ability, but are willing to degrade themselves on stage, well beyond what is common. Comics used to play the edgy card, by dropping the F-bomb in their act or making increasingly bawdy sexual references. The game is to set yourself apart from the other mediocrities by saying and doing outlandish things. That way, the public pays attention to you instead of others.

You see something similar in the commentariat. There are millions of people able to talk and write about public issues well enough to succeed on stage. It is not that hard. Most TV presenters are remarkably stupid, but they can learn to read from the teleprompter and look into the correct camera. The Atlantic Magazine has shown how easy it is to create a black intellectual with the TN Coates experiment. Getting on TV or getting a perch at a big site, therefore, requires something else, something to set you apart from the crowd.

That is where the edgytarian comes in. These are the folks who stake out the turf just on the fringe of what the commentariat has deemed acceptable. Bill Maher is a good example of a Left edgytarian. He says the things that most Progs are thinking but avoid saying for fear it is over the line. There are Right edgytarians too. These are the guys who will make a joke about feminists or dissent from the orthodoxy on trannies. They are not full blown heretics, just a bit reluctant in their enthusiasm, which makes them bad boys.

Left edgytarians have always had it easy. They just needed to find the limit Progressives had set to the Left. The edgy Prog put his right foot on that line and his left foot outside the line. That way, he is outside the acceptable, but not out there where people like Jill Stein live. His only worry was the line would move faster than he could keep pace, as the line always moves in that direction. Dave Letterman went from edgy comic to creepy old man in a couple of decades, because he could not keep pace with the changing line.

Right edgytarians have always had a more challenging problem. They needed to find the line the Progs set on the right and place their right foot on that line and their left foot inside the line. This means living in fear of the line slipping inside of their left foot. That is why they make a study of Prog fashion. To suddenly be outside the bounds of acceptable is death. Inevitably, theirs is a life of defending the line between themselves and those to their Right and keeping pace with the ever changing line of what is acceptable to the Progs.

Even more troubling for the Right in general, but especially the Right edgytarian, is that the Progs can willy-nilly declare someone a heretic retroactively. That means the edgy guy can suddenly find himself being hurled into the void because of past statements, which were just inside the line back then, but are suddenly heretical. It is why conservative commentators always have rabbit ears. They are always watching for sudden changes in the zeitgeist so they can get ahead of it. It is why they love the word “zeitgeist.”

The successful Right edgytarians figured out how to avoid this problem by going into the safe zone as soon as they had anything resembling success. Jonah Goldberg is a good example of this type. When he was a blogger, he played the edgy card, but as soon as he had some success, he raced to the safe zone and became Mr. Conventional Wisdom. In the 90’s he was doing pop culture references and scatological humor. Today he so boring and tedious, he manages to make John Fund sound like a wild man.

It is the smart move though. Look at Gavin McInnes. He burst onto the scene as the hyper edgy nighttime guy on Red Eye. He was mocking the JQ, race and sex, all the while being the middle-aged wild man. Then he got named by the inquisition over heresy regarding homosexuals. Then he was seen in public with known hate thinkers. No matter how many marital aids he jammed up his rectum, he was suddenly off-limits. His choice was to go to the dark side or find a new act. He is now doing a grumpy dad act on CRTV.

What makes life suddenly perilous for edgytarians of both varieties is the old paradigm is breaking down. Progs are rocketing into fads that are essentially the habits of the functional mentally ill. You cannot be more edgy than a guy in a bloody sundress, who just castrated himself, while belting out Helen Reddy tunes. On the Right, the people who would be the audience for guys like McInnes are losing interest in chasing that shadow and are instead wandering out into the new world of new politics.

The result of all this is our official discourse is suddenly becoming very dull. Reading a modern political site feels like you are re-reading articles from the 80’s or 90’s. It is the equivalent of listening to pop songs from three decades ago, while everyone pretends it is new and original. Of course, pop culture has become moribund, as well. Hollywood does nothing but churn out remakes and sequels. Music has become so dull that even the elevator people refuse to play it. Comedy is no longer funny.

That is what distinguishes this counter-culture movement from the 1960’s version. In the old days, the game was to get to the main stage and be slightly outrageous. The hippies and radicals were all about freaking out the squares. Comics like George Carlin were all about pushing the envelope, from their perch on the big stage. Radical politics was about being radical within the established parties. The edginess was never authentic as it was simply a means to an end. The point was to eventually be mainstream.

Today, a guy like PewDiePie has fifty-seven million subscribers to his video channel and his videos average 2.5 million views. He has no interest in going mainstream. A guy like Milo was better off avoiding the official media entirely. His attempt to be an edgytarian has made him into a sad joke. Of course, the new politics is completely off the mainstream reservation. Today’s counter-culture is not a reaction to the old culture so much as an abandonment of it. It is an ad hoc, chaotic effort at something entirely new.

That is why being Mr. Edgy is a dead end street now. A guy like Gavin McInnes is smart enough to figure it out, which is why he is putting on the cardigan and scanning old shows like Leave It To Beaver for material. You cannot be edgy in a world where the gap between what is allowed and was taboo is impossible to span. You see this in comedy where guys like Andrew Anglin and The Right Stuff can never possibly “cross over” and do their thing in what is now the mainstream. They are all in on this side of the divide.

There is an old gag where a chicken and a pig talk about opening a restaurant. The chicken suggests they call it “ham and eggs.” The pig declines, saying, “I’d be committed but you would only be involved.” That is what is going in the culture. For years, the edgytarian could just be involved in fringe culture and the dominant culture. Now, everyone must be committed. you are either fully on one side of the chasm or on the other side. To mix metaphors, those who try to be both fall into the void.

Sargon of Blockhead

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The reason that Buckley Conservatism completely failed to halt the advance of Progressivism is that the Buckley-ites eventually came to accept the moral framework of the Left. Libertarians have gone down the same road, embracing the morality of Progressives, while trying to find a way to carve out a place for individual liberty within that moral framework. It is why the differences between libertarianism and what passes for conservatism are trivial now. They both operate in the same narrow space.

A good way to illustrate this is with this interview Carl Benjamin conducted with Jared Taylor. Benjamin is a British provocateur who goes by the handle Sargon of Akkad on social media. He describes himself as a liberal, but to Americans that should be understood as libertarian. His views are consistent with what you see from the Reason Magazine types. That means he embraces the libertine social polices of the Progressives, but he likes getting cheap stuff from Amazon without paying sales tax.

He is also an incandescently obnoxious troll, who goes out of his way to pick fights with people on-line. His go-to move for years was to post gay porn into the twitter feed of people he was trying to provoke. He used to spend his days attacking alt-right people on twitter with this tactic, but they largely ignored him. He has also made a habit of going after feminists, who always take the bait. He styles himself as an intellectual, but he is just another shallow end of the pool libertarian, afraid to venture into deeper water.

In the video, Jared Taylor makes the reasonable point that race relations in America are at a standstill because blacks are fundamentally different from whites. Compulsory integration over the last 40 years has done nothing to improve the lives of blacks and nothing to improve relations between the races. If anything, relations are worse now. The logical solution is to junk the compulsory integration and let people do what they do naturally, which is self-segregate. At some point, a peaceful divorce will be arranged.

In theory, libertarians like Benjamin should embrace freedom of association. After all, what can be more basic to personal liberty than the right of association? If you can stuff your body with illicit drugs, because you own it, you should have the right to put your body near whomever you like. That means having the right to not be around people you do not like, for any reason or no reason at all. Places where you need to get permission from authorities to be around other people are called prisons.

There are no modern libertarians who embrace this as it runs afoul of official orthodoxy on race. Progressives have declared private discrimination to be a mortal sin. You see this in the interview at about the 10 minute mark. Benjamin starts spinning around like a top, trying to re-frame Taylor’s point as compulsory segregation. When that does not work, he then says that everyone he knows loves diversity and they want to forget about the whole race and ethnicity stuff. In other words, there is no need for freedom of association.

This is why libertarians have been forced to embrace egalitarianism. This let us them wriggle free from the vice of freedom and anti-racism, by claiming that systematic social inequity is the cause of racial differences. Therefore, fixing the social problems will let everyone be treated the same and the gaps between the races will close. Everyone will embrace diversity and multiculturalism. This is now orthodoxy with “conservatives” like Ben Sasse, as well as most libertarians.

At about the 20 minutes mark, Benjamin gives the game away entirely by trying to tie the bogeyman of Richard Spencer to the reasonable arguments in favor of freedom of association made by Jared Taylor. You can see the wheels turning as he tries to square his own self-righteous disdain for guys like Spencer with the reality that Spencer is to the right of him on the issue of personal liberty. Benjamin rattles on a few minutes trying to square that circle, but then gives up and changes the subject.

That is where is gets a bit amusing as he makes the ridiculous claim the Islam has somehow managed to overcome tribalism. This would be quite shocking to the practitioners of Islam in the Arab world, who have been in waging tribal warfare since the birth of Islam. Sure, Islam has no racial component, but the practitioners certainly do. This is the same with Christianity and Judaism. The same is true of sports and gardening. Just because tribes can have much in common, does not make them any less tribal.

Libertarians and conservatives have the same problem. They have been forced to embrace the moral framework of Progressives. Benjamin starts from the bedrock assumption that racism is evil and that race is an artifact of a prior age. From there he tries to reach classical liberal conclusions, but that is an impossibility as classical liberalism inevitably runs afoul of Progressive morality. This is why Progressives have been able to roll the opposition. They set the rules so the results are inevitable.

Benjamin lacks the intellect to grasp this reality, so he flounders around trying to self-righteously condemn race realism, while smugly pretending to be outside of Progressive orthodoxy. He is a big admirer of himself. Because there is no way to make his brand of libertarianism work while embracing things like anti-racism, he is reduced to having personal squabbles with heretics. He was unable to do that with Taylor so he just came off as a smug blockhead, which is a fairly good description of the modern libertarian.

The Media Wall

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The “fake news” phenomenon could turn out to be the most important turn of events in the Trump era. The simple reason is it has awoken millions of normies to the realities of mass media in America. Most white conservatives accepted that the news was real, but biased in favor of one side, the Progressive side. They never stopped to think that maybe the news was not even real, that the Prog news outlets were making stuff up. Now, most white conservatives assume the news is fake.

That is a positive development, one that our side can certainly exploit. It is a handy tool for whenever the megaphones start blasting the latest propaganda from our rulers. Simply yelling “fake news” has become a useful way to prevent the Progs from framing the debate, at least with regards to politics. The other aspect of the fake news stuff that is useful is that the mass media is no longer capable of doing real news. Mass media is no longer a feedback loop for the ruling class. It is just agit-prop.

The origins of fake news lie in the New Journalism that emerged in the 1960’s. Telling a story around the facts of a news event turned out to be a good way to go from ink stained wretch to rock star. Guys like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were stars, because they made the news compelling. Why stick to old fashioned reporting, when telling a colorful tale, with colorful portraits of the main players, based on real events, was the road to fame and fortune? The result was New Journalism became the default.

An instructive anecdote in the book Banana Sunday, by the old Telegraph reporter Chris Munnion, is about the new breed of reporters from America arriving in Africa. These “reporters” would show up and spend their time in the hotel bar, picking up tidbits from the real reporters, who went into the field to gather news. They would then salt their pre-written stories with these facts. As a gag once, the real reporters made up crazy tales to tell around the Americans. All of them fell for it, but they were never called on it.

That seems to have been the lesson American media people figured out over the decades. There was never going to be a penalty for faking their stories, just as long as it was not too egregious. As long as the “reporting” fit the prevailing narrative, the copy would be accepted without question. That is how Bob Woodward allegedly interviewed Bill Casey, while Casey was in a coma. It is why Stephen Glass was able to sell whoppers to the New Republic. It is why Rolling Stone fell for the Virginia rape hoax.

Fake news is just one result. The other is the media no longer has the ability to do real news. From top to bottom, the business is staffed with people trained to tell stories. The “journalists” are tasked with taking what is given to them and spinning a colorful tale around it. That means cultivating cozy relationships. It is why close to two hundred journalists went to work in the Obama administration when he took office. The line between reporter and subject no longer exists. It is just one big story factory.

A good example of this is what is happening in college sports. The Feds have arrested five coaches and half a dozen others in a bribery scandal, involving Adidas, a major sneaker company. Read the filings by the prosecutor and it is clear they have a lot more information that they are withholding. This is already a huge case involving famous people. Rick Pitino is one of the biggest names in the sport. This will probably get much bigger and alter the economics of American sports forever.

Of course, anyone the least bit familiar with college athletics has known it is dirtier than boxing and it always has been. The sneaker companies bribe youth coaches, college coaches and college administrators. The recently fired Athletic Director of Louisville had his daughter on the payroll of the sneaker company doing business with his school. At high school camps and tournaments, runners and street agents are there “advising” kids and their parents, with handfuls of cash. It is dirty from top to bottom.

This is something that everyone has known for years. Yet, the people tasked with “covering” college sports never bother to report on this stuff. The “hard hitting investigative teams” are always too busy looking for white supremacy to notice outright bribery going on in the sport. All a sports reporter had to do was hang around the AAU circuit for a summer and he could have a book’s worth of stories. But that would mean mixing it up with the dirt people and why do that when the pay is the same for selling the narrative?

This was the situation with the steroid scandal in baseball. The beat writers for baseball spend their whole lives with the players. They travel on the road with them and they spend time together with them in the locker room. The one time a reporter mentioned that Mark McGuire had androstenedione in his locker, the reporter got in trouble. It is why sports reporters are the most oblivious people in the business. Noticing is so dangerous to a career that only the oblivious survive. The result is nothing but safe fake news.

This inability and unwillingness to do real news has been a boon to the Dissident Right. We saw that in the election. The fake news was so sure Hillary would win, they had magazine covers pre-printed and ready to go in advance. It is why their attempt to censor alternative media has been a failure. They simply do not understand what they are up against as they do not know anything about us. The clever boys on social media easily subvert the narrative and turn it against the fake news media.

For a long time, the media was a weapon the ruling class could use to keep the public in line. Newspapers would sell the claims of each faction in the political class, thus defining the bounds of political discourse. Then television became the voice of the ruling class in the living room of every home. The internet was supposed to be the voice on everyone’s desktop. While that remains true, the loss of credibility is now turning the mass media into an expensive wall between us and them.

That is a useful metaphor. The media used to inform the ruling class on trends among the Dirt People. Instructions from the rulers flowed through the press to the Dirt People. The responses flowed back up through the media to the Cloud People. Now, the media is a wall between the two. The people in the media face in toward their masters, rather than looking out over the wall at the rest of us. For those involved in dissident politics, this is useful as it makes it more difficult for the people in charge to respond.