Category Archives: Culture

The Personal Is Political

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The defining characterization of second-wave feminism, according to feminists, is that the “personal is political.” The phrase comes from an essay by feminist Carol Hanisch with the title “The Personal is Political.” Hilariously, she claimed the phrase was something all women knew and said, but was a secret until the late 1960’s. The most likely reason for her refusal to claim ownership is that she stole the idea from someone else, but feminists have always been nutty, so there is no way to know.

The argument is that personal experience is intertwined with larger social and political structures. One’s personal choices reveal one’s politics. Consequently, one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s politics. Put another way, your life is your politics, so therefore politics defines your life. This was a roundabout way of attacking normal family life and traditional female roles, but it did not stop there. Defining people by their politics, and only their politics, meant that there is no escape from politics.

The irony of this is that this is perfectly consistent with how men have always understood women. Women compete with one another to establish their status in relation to men. That means for women, it is an endless competition. Therefore, politics is all consuming. Men, on the other hand, establish their status among one another. Once the pecking order is set, that is the end of the competition. Politics is for when it is time to reset the pecking order. Otherwise, men define themselves by their role in society and their deeds.

As our society has become feminized, everything is drenched in politics. You see it with the NFL protest debacle. Men watch sports to enjoy seeing men compete with one another in ritualized combat. Men do not care about what the combatants think about anything, including the combat. Interviews with coaches are to be focused on the strategy of the game, not the guy’s feelings about life. Player interviews are only interesting because most players are black now, so they say wacky and stupid things.

Of course, the zeal of NFL owners to include the girls is due to the understanding that their sport is never going to be popular with girls or sissies. Like boxing, it takes guts to play football. Anyone who played the game knows the risks, as they saw teammates carted off with broken bones or on backboards. Girls do not like seeing that and they really do not want their children doing it. The pinking of sports like football is an effort to distract the girls from the reality of the game so they do not shut it down.

In a feminine society like ours, it is just a matter of time before masculine things like sports are either made girlish or relegated to the fringe. Boxing, for example, still exists, but only as a fringe sport done by foreigners. UFC has managed to gain an audience, but again, it is as a renegade activity, done underground and on pay-per-view. White mothers will never be taking their sons to UFC camp. They can tolerate martial arts, just as long as it is white boys in bathrobes, safely pretending to be Jackie Chan.

This is why football is so much trouble. Peak professional football was probably a dozen years ago. It was around then that white mothers, especially divorced middle-class mothers, started turning against youth football. They did not want their little baby being run over by black kids. That is why the concussion hysteria gained traction. It is a ready made excuse for pulling the white kids out of football, which lets white women pretend it is not racism driving their decision. After all, they loved Will Smith in the concussion movie!

It is why the NFL’s decision to let their blacks kneel during the anthem is going to be a disaster for them. The owners signed off on it thinking it added drama and would therefore draw in girls, because girls and girly-men like drama. Instead, those kneeling black players are a stark reminder to white women that the sport of football is for violent black men, not nice suburban white boys. Youth participation in football is collapsing and this will only serve to accelerate it. The NFL has now made football anti-white and un-American.

The root cause is not the inherent danger of playing sports like football. The root is the same as it is for everything in the current crisis. The feminization of the West is turning politics into a never ending soap opera for no purpose than the perpetuation of petty gripes among the participants. Nothing gets done, because girls do not care about deeds. They care about attention. Swedish women have turned their country into rape land, in order to get the attention of their men, who have been feminized to the point of no return.

Aristophanes wrote The Assemblywomen in 391 BC. it is a comedic play about what would happen if women assumed control. The women immediately ban private wealth and enforce sexual equality for the unattractive. It reads like an inter-sectional co-convening of the feminist study department at any university. The play was intended to use humor to criticize the Athenian ruling class. It relied on the basic understanding of the female mind and on the widely held understanding that you can never put women in charge.

For thousands of years, people understood the different roles of the sexes. Human societies, for good and ill, were organized on this understanding. Then all of a sudden, the West went crazy. Men stopped playing their role and instead handed off authority to the women. The women have set about politicizing everything and feminizing everything, including the men. They are now forcing their boys to dress as girls and pretend to be women. Everything is political, even the biology of their children

This will not end well.

Clarity and the Written Record

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One thing that has stuck with me from the American Renaissance conference is something Jared Taylor said in his speech to open the show. He talked about how for the longest time, he was a lonely voice in the wilderness. His events were lightly attended and ignored by the media. He was sure that he was merely keeping a record. He said this while pointing out how quickly things had changed. A few years ago, his event got fifty attendees and now it had hundreds with hundreds turned away.

It resonated with me because it brought to mind the life of Cicero. Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of Rome’s greatest orators and writers. No writer in the history of the West has had greater influence. Well into the 19th century, European writers were influenced by his style. He was also an immensely important politician. He was consul during the Catilinarian conspiracy, having the conspirators executed. During the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, he agitated for the return of traditional republican government.

Following Caesar’s death, Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony, attacking him in speeches. For his trouble, he was proscribed, as an enemy of the state, by the Second Triumvirate and consequently executed in 43 BC. His severed hands and head were displayed in the Roman Forum, as a final revenge of Mark Antony. Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited with initiating the Renaissance and inspiring political theorists like John Locke to embrace the republican form of government.

Cicero is relevant to our age for the simple reason that he kept a record during the last days of the Roman Republic. Fifteen hundred years later, educated men in the emerging West, would be inspired by and cautioned by the writings of Cicero. There was a record of what was happening in the late stages of the Roman Republic and a record of those who tried to prevent it. Without that record, without the thoughts and words of those ancients, who fought the coming darkness, there may have never been the West.

This is why Rome was of great interest to the men of the Enlightenment. The American Founders were all students of Greece and Rome. They understood that when Rome fell, the West was plunged into an intellectual, economic and cultural darkness. These were men aware of the fact that they were coming out the other side of what happened at the close of the Republic. They naturally looked to Rome for clues as to how they could avoid the same fate, when producing new forms of government.

As we enter the late stages of the American Republic and the last days of what we have always known as the West, keeping a record may be the best we can accomplish. The fight will be fought, but only a delusional optimist can be blind to reality. Whether it is citizens being hunted down for heresy or weird looking foreigners demanding the disenfranchisement of natives, for the crime of hate speech, the signs are all there. The ruling elites of the West no longer have any faith in liberal democracy or the rule of law.

That may seem overly pessimistic, but just look at the immigration debate. Trump won the most improbable of victories on the promise to reverse decades of insane immigration policies. His position is actually the moderate one. A large percentage of Americans would shut down all immigration. Trump has merely promised to crack down on illegals and do something about the visa rackets. In the case of DACA, his position is to enforce the law, rather than perpetuate Obama’s policy of flouting the law.

Despite his moderation, the ruling elite is fighting him at every turn. His own party in Congress is not just blocking him on immigration reform. They are proudly attacking him over it. Politicians are cautious by nature, which means they live in fear of being on the wrong side of voters. Yet on this and other issues, they boast about giving their voters the bird. It is tempting to say they are bought by moneyed interests, but this looks more like insanity than corruption. Our political class is suicidal.

That is just one example. The broad appeal of populist polices on trade, taxes and social issues should have resulted in a wave of populist politicians. Trump is a terrible politician and his many quirks make him ill-suited for politics. Imagine a polished professional running on the same issues as Trump. Yet, we do not see anyone noticing these issues. It is as if the entire political class has been infected with a virus that makes them act against their own interests, by alienating their own voters.

Debating the causes of what is happening is part of keeping a record, just as doing what can be done to arrest it. One has to have hope that the fever will break, but if it does not and we continue on the current path, documenting the insanity of our age is an important part of the fight. We may lack a Cicero to shape the way in which we think of our age, but Julius Caesar and Mark Antony are not showing up either. In an age of mediocre tyrants, we will have mediocre chroniclers of our age. Keeping a record is all that can be done.

How To Sell Soap

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No one is excited about scrubbing a stain from the carpet. If you own a pet, you never look forward to their accidents on the rug or their decision to put their dirty paws on your best trousers. Cleaning up messes, figuring out how to get that stain off the couch cushion, getting the carpets cleaned, these are chores we all do, but we do not look forward to them. It is just a part of life, like cutting the grass or cleaning the gutters. No one goes on lawn care vacations or stain removal holidays.

If you are in the business of selling soap, you have to get over the fact that the mere mention of your product makes people think about a boring task or the dog leaving a pyramid on the rug. No matter how good your product is at doing its thing, if it brings negative images to the mind of the customer, they will associate you and your product with unpleasant thoughts. It why portable toilet vendors pick cheeky names for their companies. They want you laughing when you think of them.

The infomercial guys, who sell miracle cleaners, are good examples of people who understands how this works. They are super upbeat and they do small things to flatter the viewer. “You have frequent parties and one of your guests spills red wine on your brand new carpet!” He is saying you have good tastes and people like you, which is why everyone comes to your house to be sophisticated and cool. It is cheesy, but flattery works for a reason. The pitchman makes his audience feel good about the sale.

These guys also know how to avoid negative associations. They love using the red wine example, even though their typical customers drink beer from a can. Red wine is a stand-in for blood. If they used a severed hand to drip blood on the white cloth, people would be horrified and associate the product with a negative image. No one fondly remembers getting their hand caught in the snowblower. Instead, the pitchman uses wine and talks about you being the cool kid on the block with lots of parties.

Everyone has had a mishap. You are working around the house; something goes wrong and you are running for the first aid kit. In the process you made the hall carpet look like a crime scene. Or you are at work and you do not notice the paper-cut and now you have blood on your favorite shirt. That miracle product to get the red wine stain out is just what you need, but you do not want to be is reminded of it by the happy pitchman on television. It is why the good pitchman avoids creating negative associations.

Even the high energy super-positive TV pitchmen run into a problem of negative associations. That is because Americans associate the lone pitchman with the grifter, the con artist and the guy who takes advantage of the foolish. That is because we have a long tradition of these guys. The snake oil salesman, the patent medicine salesman, various door-to-door salesman, are all stock characters for the disreputable sharpie who blows into town and sells you a monorail.

You may be the most honest guy on earth, but as soon as you get out there to sell your soap as the fast talking pitchman, most people are going to think you are, at the minimum, a liar. It is unfair and unjust, but you will never change that perception. You can be the most honest and forthright soap salesman on earth, but that view of you and your kind is etched into the culture. It is why those TV guys always rely on objective authorities or unimpeachable demonstrations. They know you do not trust them.

Life is unfair sometimes.

The point of all this is that if you want to sell a product, you have to avoid associating it with negative images held by the public. That means you are going to have to use red wine instead of a severed hand to demonstrate stain removal. No, you will not be true to your faith, but you will get customers. You also have to accept the fact that a lot of stuff happened before you came along. If you associate yourself with confidence men of the past, people are going to assume you are a con-man too. That is reality.

Good salesmen never lose sight of reality. That is the problem with outsider political movements. They allow themselves to be trapped in narrow ideological ruts so any sales effort, which deviates in the slightest from dogma, results in civil war. The only pitchmen the ideologues accept are the guys waving around the severed hand, talking about how their product is great at cleaning blood stains. Any concession to public sensibilities is treated like heresy. The result is a self-ghettoization of the movement.

This has always been the problem with the libertarians. You can get a large audience in favor of limiting state regulation of commerce, but you are never getting a critical mass around the idea of abandoning paper money. You can talk people into loosening up marijuana laws, but no one is signing up for legal meth sales. That is why the limit on libertarians is to have some of their language appropriated by Buckleyites. Otherwise, they are seen as a collection of eccentric weirdos.

That is what is happening with the alt-right. The core believers refuse to give in on basic tactics, like banning Nazi gear or minimizing the JQ stuff. The result is anyone that tries to soften the image is attacked as a traitor. That is what you see with the Stormies. Anglin can’t accept even the token compromises at a site like Gab, so he goes to war with it. This ensures that his followers never stray from the ghetto that he has created for them. It also means potential recruits have a reason to ignore him.

This does not mean the alt-right is condemned to having fat guys in their tighty-whities, dancing around at their events. To avoid that fate, they need to produce leaders with the credibility to swat down guys like Anglin, when he gets out of control, but also aware of the fact that growing the movement means appealing to the general public. That means softening the pitch and making some compromises. They do not have anyone capable of doing that at the moment, but they better find some.

TV And The Cloud People

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The other day, Tucker Carlson told someone that Trump trusts television more than he trusts the pollsters, when it comes to judging the public mood. Having spent years working in TV, Trump not only knows a lot about it, but he thinks the good TV people know more about public tastes than the political professionals. The political class, of course, roared in laughter. They think Trump is a rube, of course, but they are also sure they know more about the Dirt People than the Dirt People know about themselves.

This is another case where Trump’s common sense serves him well. The people who have long careers in television all have something in common. They make it their first priority to give the public what they want. Whatever political or personal agendas they have are secondary to putting on a good show. Unlike a pollster or political operator, the guy pitching TV shows has skin in the game. He has to be good at gauging public attitudes or else the show flops. The pollsters never suffer for being wrong.

The thing is though, the TV shows also tell us, the Dirt People, something about the people who rule over us. Hollywood is, after all, the class of people in American, whose duty it is to sing the praises of our rulers. It is also their job to sell the public on the official cultural agenda. Whatever fads or social issues are being pushed by our ruling class, will be praised in our TV shows and movies. It is why all of our action heroes are barren cat ladies now. It is why commercials are now full of race mixing.

On rare occasions, the people making this stuff reveal things about themselves and about the ruling class in general. Someone recommended the series House of Cards to me the other day, so I have been watching a few episodes a night over the last week. As far as this stuff goes, it is not as good as I would have expected. The chattering classes swooned over it when it came out, but it is not in the same league as a show like Breaking Bad. Still, it is not terrible and it is easy to see why people would enjoy it.

Usually, political dramas are terrible because the makers are more concerned with selling a political agenda. The shows are just thinly veiled political ads for the Democrat Party and various Progressive agenda items. That means lots of shows about abortion or sexually confused people being roughed up by the honky. House of Cards, at least so far, avoids that stuff and sticks to the intrigues of the main characters. People, especially women, like watching that sort of thing.

The fascinating thing is that is the politicians are portrayed as true masters of the universe. Everyone is portrayed as shrewd political operators. The main character would make Machiavelli blush. Usually, Hollywood portrays politicians as evil and stupid or sincere and naïve. House of Cards is a one long celebration of the genius and cleverness of the political class. It is not the issues they champion that makes them wonderful. It is their nature. They are simply better than us.

That is made clear in how the politicians in the show deal with Dirt People and the news media characters. The Dirt People are all dumb and helpless without government. The main character solicits a rib joint in the first season. Once this gets out, the rib joint gets famous, but the inherent defects in the proprietor and his Dirt People habits, lead him to failure, as he inevitably does stupid Dirt Man things, like try to help his son. The main character is forced to cut him loose and let him slide back into the muck.

The portrayal of the news media is the most interesting. On the other hand, they are universally portrayed as loathsome clingers, who serve only to drag down the Cloud People. The female reporters are whores, who will bang anyone for a story. The males are feckless and stupid. The one exception thus far in the show is the owner if a newspaper that is supposed to be the Washington Post. The owner of it is a Katherine Graham like Cloud Person, but her people are all loathsome Dirt People.

This is the most interesting part of the show thus far. I am into season two now. The main character has murdered one reporter, had one framed for a serious crime and scared another off to the hinterlands. He also has engineered the termination of a big shot editor at the Washington Post. None of this treated as a big deal. These news media types are so low on the food chain in the mind’s of the writers, which throwing one of them in front of a speeding train is no big deal. Even Trump does not hate the media that much

It is easy to overstate these things, but House of Cards is one rare example of the Hollywood people revealing things about themselves and their masters. It may be the result of Netflix producing it, rather than a Hollywood shop. For generations, the people making TV shows have stuck to the script when it comes to the class structure in America. Alternatively, this was deliberate. The makers wanted to flatter the political class by telling them things they tell themselves. The result is a window into the political class.

The Racial Cliff

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America has a race problem. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, this is something that our betters have preached from their various pulpits. By race problem, they have always meant that the bad whites keep finding ways to keep the blacks down and that it is the holy mission of good whites to root out racism by bad whites. Many whites, good and bad, have accepted this as true. It is why the diversity project has thus far received limited push-back. Only stupid racists refuse to celebrate diversity.

I have been on earth for half a century and I have never known a time when whites did not tip-toe around blacks. Even during my underclass youth, whites watched their tongue around blacks. The crackers might have harsh opinions about their black brothers in private, but stating it publicly was forbidden even 40 years ago. Even 40 years ago, poor whites were figuring out that blacks had to be given extra help and they had to applauded when they managed to behave and make something of themselves.

The general assumption among whites was that race relations would steadily improve with each generation. It is what we were told every day by our betters. That was the driving force behind Obama’s presidency. Progressive Baby Boomers voted for him as an exclamation point, the crowning achievement for their generations efforts on behalf of race relations. Obama was the fulfillment of prophecy, which is why they talked about him as if he was black Jesus. He was the final sentence in America’s long struggle with race.

The point here is for more than half a century, good whites in America have been obsessed with making sure that all whites “come together” to celebrate and encourage blacks. The assumption is that this stems from white guilt, but there is no evidence to support this claim. The real cause is a deep belief that if the white community comes together and is united in its rejection of whiteness and racism, then through some sort of magic, the realities of race in America will disappear, along with the history of race.

This the force behind the frenzy of statue toppling. It has nothing to do with the Civil War or symbols of past racism. It is an attempt to immanentize the eschaton. The Progs are sure that in the final reckoning, all signs of race realism will disappear, including those in the past. Therefore, they can bring this about by erasing the past! That’s what is behind the mania that now includes erasing guys like Ben Franklin and Sam Houston from our collective memories. The Progs are trying to erase the past to bring about the rapture.

This self-flagellation is not happening in isolation. One result of the rise of anti-white politics, among whites, is that non-whites now feel free to drop the mask. Steve Sailer calls it the Late Obama Era Collapse. He trots it out whenever some blacks go crazy and start shooting cops and making a nuisance of themselves. Non-whites are now taking every chance they can to tell the world they hate white people. This is especially true of blacks, who have always hated white people to so some degree.

A good way to think of race is to tie race to geography. Blacks are African. Asians are Asian, obviously. Whites are European. Race correlates pretty well with geography, as the humans evolved on each continent to meet the demands of the environment. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is more like an extended family. A couple of tribes settled in an area like a river valley. They fought, intermarried and traded, but eventually combined into a single tribe. In time, their shared biology became a shared history and common language.

It is why wars between tribes are common, while wars within tribes are rare. It is the same reason a man can publicly criticize his wife, but never let anyone else criticize her. A Jew can make jokes about Jews, but never tolerate a non-Jew making the same jokes. The reason is the Jew mocking other Jews is in the family. The white guy making sport of Jews is not in the family and is therefore always seen as a potential threat. Ethnicity is basic family biology that scales up to the maximum limit.

That is the danger the anti-white Prog bigots have created for themselves. Fake Indian lecturing other whites about white privilege is tolerable to whites. Pampered black athletes, throwing tantrums on the football field and blaming whitey for biology, is intolerable. Black college students demanding apologies from the school because they are offended by the sight of cotton is infuriating to most whites. Blacks rampaging through our streets, making incoherent demands like overly indulged toddlers is creating a lot of bad whites.

For most of my life, the skins game has been a predictable morality play. A self-righteous honky lectures the crowd, black and white, about racism. The people in the crowd quietly tolerate the lecture. Everyone who has been marched off to diversity training knows the scene. This was tolerable as long as the whites in the crowd could pretend that the black people in the crowd were seeing it the same way. That is the main appeal of the Broadway play Hamilton. The whites in the crowd get a lecture and a pat on the head.

This sort of theater worked as long as whites were the dominant racial group and the non-whites took care to not prove the good whites wrong. As America edges closer to majority-minority status, the non-whites feel free to make their anti-white rage public, which is putting the lie to everything whites have been told over the last half century. It turns out that the prophesies were not true. There is no fixing the race problem and that realization by whites now leaves us with a much bigger race problem.

The good white answer to the bad whites, pointing out that blacks tend not to perform well in modern societies, was “shut up bigot.” Now, the only public racists are non-whites, mostly blacks and foreigners. The Progs not only lack an answer to this, but they are actively encouraging it. The result is America is about to drive off a racial cliff. Prog appeals to white virtue fall on deaf ears, while the deranged antics of ungrateful non-whites convince white people that there is no fixing race relation.

This will not end well.

Old Think

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The other day, Andrew Torba was scheduled to appear on the Tucker Carlson show so I figured out how to find it off the underground TV system. I no longer have a TV subscription, so I have to rely on the web for this stuff. Cord cutters can say what they like about services like Kodi, but it is a hassle compared to regular cable. So much so, in fact, that I rarely watch television. Instead, I download movies and TV shows and binge watch when the spirit moves me.

Anyway, I found a stream and tuned in to the show. I did not know when Torba’s segment was scheduled so I had to sit through the whole thing. Watching Tucker interview some old guy, I felt like I had gone back in time. I have not watched these shows in a long time. I get my news on-line. I skip the Blue Team – Red Team hooting that makes up political banter in the mainstream press. In fact, I barely notice most of what passes for current events discussion.

The Torba piece was short. Carlson spends little time on-line. The things Torba said about intent platforms censuring people was obviously news to Tucker. He was genuinely surprised when Torba explained the realities of who controls the internet and the power they have over speech. The reason for this is no one in the mass media understands any of this stuff. They live in the media bubble and the sorts of things we experience on-line are alien to them.

This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the old days when people were coming home every night to a dozen CD’s in the mail from ISP’s offering a free month of internet, the mass media was unaware the internet existed. I recall laughing myself silly one night, watching a couple of airheads on the local news in Boston, talk about “the mysterious underworld of the internet” as if it was the back room at Rick’s Cafe. They carried on like the internet was an opium den.

It is another example of the great divide. We are at the point now where most everyone under the age of fifty is getting their information from on-line sources. The median age for the TV chat shows is mid-60’s and the age for traditional print publications like magazines and journals is seventy. The people working the chat show circuit are people who came into the business from newspapers and political magazines. Even the young people on TV are living in the old mindset.

When you consume news on-line, you scan the high points until you land on something of interest. On a daily basis, I visit maybe ten sites. I do not read every word. Often, I just skim and move on. Social media provides a feed to skim the news. Information about the world is now a stream and you can dip your cup into as you see fit. Since you can absorb vastly more information by reading, the on-line experience is more informative and more customized to your interests.

News consumption in the information age is on-demand. You take what you want, when you want it, at the speed you want. The old model was an on-supply model. You got what they gave you, on their schedule and their pace. Sitting there watching Tucker and his guests plod through each segment was painful. I no longer have patience for the banter and mugging that is traditional television. I just want the facts and do not have any interest in their attempts to color it with their personal touch.

It is not just an age issue, but that is certainly a big part of it. The young people you see in the mass media are just fogy-ish as an old fogy. They are positive that the old model is still relevant. They create the news and supply it to you in doses they believe you can handle. Meanwhile, most people have consumed the stories via their social media accounts long before they turn up on the chat shows or big shot news sites. People tuned into see Torba inform Carlson about what was happening with speech on-line.

The people in charge get this to some degree. That is part of why they are berserk for cracking down on dissident speech on-line. Trump was elected because an ad-hoc army on disaffected people went on-line and drove the news cycle, while the people in charge were selling that old hag Clinton on TV chat shows that no one under the age of sixty bothers watching anymore. Their efforts to match this have resulted in memes like “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” where the old thinkers are made to look ridiculous.

It is tempting to cast this as a bad development. The Fake News phenomenon has simply been met with a guerrilla version of it. Mike Cernovich peddling Pizza Gate on twitter is just as corrosive as the New York Times making up stories about Trump. It is important to remember that the news has always been fake. In the 18th century factions had their newspapers promote false narratives in favor of their faction. It is the source of the Sally Hemmings stuff. Yellow Journalism was a thing before radio existed.

The only question today is the impact of the speed and volume. Fake News delivered by town crier can be mulled over and debated. Propaganda posing as news in the daily paper only comes in once a day. For people glued to their computers and mobile devices, being immersed in a solution of fake news, agit-prop and craven nonsense is a fact of life that is new to our age. Maybe it cancels itself out and all of it becomes background noise or maybe is erodes public trust and begins to set off panics. Or something else.

 

Absentee Strangers

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Walking through the residential neighborhoods of Bethesda, where many of our managerial class luminaries live, it is common to see little brown men working the business end of a leaf blower. Over many years, I have never spotted a black working on one of these landscaping crews. In fact, I have never spotted a college boy doing this sort of work either. It is always Atahualpa and his men. Today, even the Conquistador Americans prefer to have Amerinds raking their lawns, rather than Americans.

The other thing I have noticed is that the housekeepers and nannies are never black or white. Instead, you see East Asian Nannies and Mexican housekeepers. The housekeepers do not look like Incas. They look like the Cholo girls, but paunchy and middle-aged. The nannies are mostly Koreans, but there is an increasing number of Chinese. The hunch here is the subconscious math of crime is at work. Asian women are considered the safest so they can be trusted with kids.

I have this theory that some of what drives this desire for Amerind labor and Asian servants is a weird manifestation of white guilt. A crew of blacks, singing spirituals, while raking leaves would set off mass panic is a place like Bethesda. A thick black woman, kitted out like Mammy, dotting on the children, would probably kill the typical SWPL in Cloud Country. Ruling class whites simply have no will to face up to the reality of black America, so they systematically exclude it from their lives, with the use of foreigners.

This denial of reality also would explain the lack of whites working as domestics. There are plenty of unemployed white girls who could be trained to clean houses and tend to small children. The same is true for landscaping and residential work. The presence of working class whites, however, would fill the Cloud People with angst. It would be a daily reminder that for all but the grace of the void where God used to exist, that could be the life of the lady of the house. Who needs to be reminded of class reality in their own home!

I was reminded of this when I saw this Noah Millman post on the American Conservative website. It is a post about the death of free speech in India, of all places. The idea that speech was ever open in India, or anywhere outside the English speaking world, is ludicrous on its face. It is just another example of the blinkered universalism that prevents our elites from understanding much about the world. The point of the post is that free speech is under assault, even in bastions of liberalism like India.

I looked for his twitter feed but came up empty. I was going to suggest he perform the same analysis on another foreign country, by delving into the tech giant’s efforts to suppress political speech in America. While the snake charmers and call center staffers in Tamil Nadu are important, most readers of Millman care more about what is happening in civilization. Exactly nothing changes about the world if Indians lose whatever civil liberties they enjoy at the moment. It does matter if the lights go out in the West.

It is much easier to be pious and self-righteous about the world when you focus on problems beyond the horizon. You get to fret over the state of civil liberties in a place like India, without ever being expected to do anything about it. Of course, criticizing some foreign potentate brings no risk. Millman writing a broadside against the Washington Post’s proselytizing for Progressive causes risks future employment. Going after Google for sand-boxing alt-right videos is a bit too dangerous, so he focuses on the foreign.

This deliberate self-alienation by our elites is probably what drives their zeal for open borders. Those Cloud People in their seven figure homes do not know any working class whites. They have never met a man who makes a living driving a truck or running a tow motor in a warehouse. They do know Garbanzo, the guy they see cutting their grass in the summer. Their kid’s Korean nanny, whose daughter plays the flute, is someone they know and bond with across class lines. The Dirt People, on the other hand, are strangers.

This would also explain why our political class has such a tin ear about economics. The Cloud People think smokestacks and industrial parks are ugly. They think office parks are ugly, which is why they are building their compounds to look like the college campus or the lair of a super villain. Logically, they just assume that getting rid of these hideous eyesores is what everyone wants. The fact that it results in the white working class falling to pieces goes unnoticed. It is how this guy is considered an expert on the working class.

Our modern form of bureaucratic capitalism, which tries to bend the marketplace to the whims of the central planners, may end up having a defect similar to what plagued English authority in Ireland. Prior to the Irish Land Acts, the bulk of Irish farmland was owned by English landlords, who did not live in Ireland. Therefore, they had no stake in the local community. The result was that Ireland was a net exporter of food during the Irish Famine. This system is largely blamed for The Troubles.

 

The BQ

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We live in an age of great inequality. In fact, some economists think America may have greater inequality now than at any time in human history. Americans do not think about it too much, as generations of indoctrination about class envy have made questioning such things seem un-American. That and the middle-class may be swamped with debt, but they have all the trappings of prosperity. Even poor people are fat.

Few people on this side have much to say about economics. The main reason, obviously, is that demographics take up most of the space. A big part of the aesthetic is ignoring the trivial things like tax policy, in order to remain focused on the bigger topics that are assiduously ignored by our rulers. That and the subject is full of libertarian hucksters, peddling apologies for globalism and the billionaire class.

The Left has always argued that inequality is immoral on its face. They may not use that phrasing, but that is the underlying assumption behind their arguments for taxing the rich and redistributing wealth. Perhaps that can be debated, but there’s little doubt that great inequality brings with it great social and political change. A society with relatively small differences in wealth, where there is economic equilibrium, is unlikely to lurch into unrest or reckless adventures.

When Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, he became king of a country that could be described as a three-legged stool. The Church held 25-30% of the land in the country and had a monopoly on moral authority. The aristocracy, including the king, held an equal amount of land, but had a monopoly on secular authority. The rest of the land was owned by the commoners and petty nobles. The result was a balance of power between the three key elements of English society.

Henry is best known for his serial adultery and his habit of having wives sent to the gallows, but his biggest contribution is the destruction of the Church as a force in British political and economic life. The Acts of Supremacy, passed in 1534, recognized the King’s status as head of the church in England and, with the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1532, abolished the right of appeal to Rome. The king had effectively assumed the moral authority that had once been the monopoly of the Church

This was made possible by the oldest of political tactics. When Henry seized Church lands, he used these to buy support from other nobles, as well as large land holders who also sat in Parliament. Naturally, Parliament was strongly in favor of not only seizing Church lands, but supporting their good friend, the King, in his efforts to assert his authority over the Church. When he seized Church lands, the crown ended the economic power of the Church and its moral authority.

This had a radical effect on the politics and culture of England. Hilaire Belloc argued in The Servile State that it was this reorganization of capital in England that gave birth to what we call capitalism. In this case, capital was land. When land was distributed between the people, the state and the church, the concentrated use of capital was impossible. Once the crown and nobility seized the property of the Church, capital was for the first time concentrated in a small number of hands. This allowed the propertied class to dominate English society.

This was clear after Henry VIII died. A dozen years of violent political turmoil followed his death. Edward VI never made it to adulthood. Lady Jane Grey was queen for nine days until Mary I, with support of the nobles, deposed her. Bloody Mary made it five years before dying and then began the reign of Elizabeth I. This also corresponded with the birth of the British Empire. Whether or not any of this would have happened if Henry had not sacked the Church is debatable, but it is clear that the change in English economic order was an inflection point.

Another example is what happened to the Roman Republic after the defeat of Corinth and Carthage. The Republic had been at war with both city-states, off and on, for over a century. In 146 BC, the Romans finally defeated and destroyed Carthage and then provoked a war with the Greeks. They defeated the Greeks at Corinth, destroying the city and its population. The male population was killed and the females and children were sold into slavery. Rome was the undisputed power in the Mediterranean.

Something else happened. Those slaves that poured into the Republic from the conquered lands first ended up in the hands of the wealthiest landowners. This influx of cheap labor allowed the large land holders to replace their native labor, which flowed into the cities, not having anywhere else to go. The small landowners suddenly found themselves at a disadvantage, as the larger landowners had an army of slaves to work their land. The result was a great economic re-ordering of the Roman Republic.

It is not an accident that this sudden change in political and economic of fortune changed the nature of the Republic. The constant campaigning created a class of soldier that was more loyal to his general than to the Republic. The turning over of large tracts of land to slave farming resulted in a new problem, slave revolts. The Servile Wars, the Social War and two civil wars dominated the Late Republic. It has this title because the Republic came to an end with Julius Caesar and the founding of the Roman Empire under Octavian.

The relevance of all this to our age should be obvious to those who have been following what is going on with our tech oligarchs. A generation ago, arguments for taxing the rich got little traction, because no one had any real fear of the rich. That and they were not so rich as to feel alien to the rest of us. Today, the billionaire class feels like they are from another planet and they are a real threat. They are advocating for policies that promise to dissolve the ties that bind the nation together.

A popular issue on the Dissident Right is that the old framing of politics, based on the blank slate and egalitarianism, is no longer relevant. Race and demographics are what will define politics going forward. That is true, but none of that will matter if the West is going to succumb to what amounts to techno-feudalism, where a relatively small number of oligarchs control not only capital, but information. Addressing the threat to free speech means addressing the Billionaire Question.

In order to address the BQ, the Dissident Right is going to have to break free from the old moral paradigm with regards to class, inequality and economics. The fact is, no one will care if Mark Zuckerberg drowns in his bathtub. The things that the vast bulk of Americans care about do not depend on getting cheap stuff on-line. The billionaire class is no more essential to society than any other luxury good. They are tolerable unless they become a burden.

That’s going to be hard for our side and it is going to be even more difficult for the sort of people attracted to the Oaf Keepers or the PoofBerries. That is the effect of a few generations of telling people that it is un-American to think ill of the rich. Even so, part of breaking free from the old thinking will be adopting a new brand of economics, along with tackling the realities of demographics. You can be pro-white all you like, but that is of no use if you are a serf living on the modern version of a feudal estate.

The Nazi Tar Baby

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Thirty-five years ago I sat in history class, as one of my fellow classmates told Father O’Connell that Hitler must have been a liberal because he was a socialist. The old man smiled and said, “Then that would mean Teddy Roosevelt was an actual moose.” It took a minute, but eventually we got the joke. You can call yourself a leprechaun, but that does not make you a leprechaun.

Where to put fascism, especially Nazism, on the political spectrum is a big topic due to the use of Nazi iconography by some movements and the defensive position of most conservatives on the issue. It is also important because our rulers are making the claim that any resistance to their nation wrecking program is fascism. Everyone is now required to have an opinion about a political movement that stopped being relevant close to eighty years ago.

The first thing to note is that relying on a two-dimensional political spectrum cooked up by 18th century French radicals is not a good way to understand the world. Even the updated Cold War version that places internationalism at one end and nationalism at the other is of little value to our current age. Embracing the ahistorical Progressives worldview that insists history started when they synthesized their current worldview is equally foolish. It leads to nothing but error.

There is also the fact that there are no Nazis or fascists today. These movements were outliers that existed in the narrow space book-ended by the Great War on one end and the Second World War on the other. The late historian Ernst Nolte argued that fascism, broadly defined, was a reaction to the violence and mayhem created by the Russian Revolution and the spread of Bolshevism. It should be noted that Bolshevism was also an outlier movement that has long since died off.

This is a point that Paul Gottfried makes in his book on the history of fascism as a political concept. Note the difference between concept and ideology. An ideology has a tight, well defined set of rules, while a concept is vague. Progressives took the dead ideology of fascism and turned it into a political concept to include the set of people who oppose the Progressive project. As the opposition adjusted, the definition adjusted to meet the new threat. As a result, fascism is as meaningless as it is non-existent.

Any effort to connect modern political movements to fascism, therefore, is nothing more than rhetoric or cynicism. The conditions in which both fascism and Bolshevism were born no longer exist and are unlikely to exist again. To Western Europeans of the age, the excesses of communism were frightening. It is eastern origins appeared sinister. The ad-hoc and incoherent response called fascism, to what appeared to many people as a foreign conspiracy to bring down the West, was, in context, quite sensible.

Putting fascism on the right of your antiquated political scale probably makes sense, as it was opposed to what is on the left end of that scale. That means, of course, you are embracing a base assumption of Progressives. They argue that all opposition to them is reactionary and incoherent. Therefore, nothing on the Right can exist in isolation. It can only exist in opposition to the Left. In that regard, they are correct about fascism. It was a devil with an expiry date that has long passed.

A more reasonable argument, with regards to fascism and the Western Right, is that fascism was a rearguard action. It was a final last desperate gasp of the old culture before it was destroyed by liberalism. Fascism therefore is a grab bag of items from the ancien regime, bolted onto some modern industrial economics and sold to the public with modern public relations techniques. That would put fascism on the Right, but only when it is defined on a spectrum that has not had relevance for close to a century now.

The fact is, debating the place of fascism and the relevance of Nazism to our current age is a pointless waste of time. It lets grifters like Dinesh D’Souza peddle books to well-meaning normies and it lets internet pranksters generate some laughs, but otherwise, fascism, as a political force, has no relevance in our age. It is as salient as free silver or calls to restore the king of France. There will always be people clinging to the detritus of past failures, but there are people that believe they are space aliens too.

The great divide today is not over economics. It is demographics. The cultural struggle that is developing, therefore, will be how our people will thrive in a world of modern challenges and modern threats. What will drive politics in the West, in the coming decades, is what Steve Sailer calls the world’s most important graph. How to survive as a people in a world dominated by races unable to escape the Neolithic, is not something contemplated by Bolsheviks or fascists.

The debate itself underscores the fact that we are at the end of a cultural cycle, one born in the Great War, defined by the Second World War and formalized during the Cold War. Modernism as a cultural force has come to an end. Those in charge of the brittle husk that is the prevailing orthodoxy keep reaching into their past for villains to maintain support among the faithful. Those in opposition find themselves without fully formed alternatives in the present, so they look to the past.

Regardless, the place of fascism on the political spectrum then or now is as irrelevant as the spectrum itself. The arguments putting the fascists on the Right only make sense in the context of the long gone era in which they were born. Putting them on the Left only makes sense in the context of the dying era, if you are hoping to squeeze a few more bucks out of the rubes. Hitler is irrelevant to the current age and will have no more bearing on what comes next than Genghis Khan or Henry VIII.

The Provacateur

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Way back in the olden thymes, there was a guy calling himself Ken Kesey. He is famous with Baby Boomers for having led the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies and degenerates, who scandalized American society in the 1960’s. He and his crew drove a psychedelic school bus across country, hosting parties and handing out LSD. Tom Wolfe wrote about their early escapades in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Most people no longer recall that Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

That last fact is important. The movie version of his book is a classic that transcends generations. The movie was released 42 years ago and people still reference it today, even when they do not know it. It is like The Godfather or Gone with The Wind. Despite its status, Kesey is best remembered for a bus trip a half century ago. That is because his provocative hijinks came to represent a key element of the counter-culture movement we associate with the 1960’s and the baby Boomer culture that arose from it.

The provocateur has always had a role in human affairs. The court jester, in many respects, was the formalization of this role. The jester was the one person who could mock public piety – to a point. Eventually, the role of the formal jester was replaced by theater and then comedians and writers. The internet provocateur is an extension of this, and to some degree a revival of the classic jester. Kesey was jester for his age. Today, an Andrew Anglin is the jester of the modern information age.

For those unfamiliar with Anglin, he is the guy behind the website The Daily Stormer, which has been shutdown on numerous occasions. Whether or not it was actually shut down by his registrar is hard to know. If it was shut down because it was outlandishly offensive, or he cooked up the story as a prank, is not important. Whether it was a provocation or a prank, it has put the spotlight on the very real fact that on-line speech is now controlled by an oligopoly.

That is precisely the role of the provocateur. By breaking every conceivable taboo, Anglin is forcing a debate on the topic of speech. How much speech will be permitted and who will set and enforce the limits are fundamental questions that determine the arc of a society. In America, it has long been understood that the limits are immediate public safety and they are set after long public deliberation and due process. Everyone is taught the famous line about burning theaters for that reason.

Americans have also just assumed that free expression is too sacred that no one would dare violate it, but that is not where we find ourselves today. The people in charge believe they have found a loophole. They have outsourced policing speech to private companies, who can claim to be enforcing terms of service as private companies. Under the current arrangements, FaceBorg can ban any mention of the country Niger, even though it is perfectly legal to yell “Niger!” in a crowded theater.

That is the value of an Andrew Anglin. Yes, his Nazi routine is troubling and his followers on-line are embarrassing to those involved in politics. This was true of hippies and the Merry Pranksters too. Read a guy like David Horowitz and you will learn that people in the New Left worried greatly about the loose cannons and provocateurs. In the end they figured out it was best to just let those guys do their thing and not comment on the acts but focus on the larger moral issues they raised.

That is how a guy like Andrew Anglin should be treated. You do not want to be seen standing next to him at a public event, but you do want to be seen supporting his right to attend public events. You do not want to be paling around with him on-line or posting links to his stuff, but you do want to be the guy defending his right to be a Nazi asshole on the internet. When his antics threaten your assets, you want to be the guy who crushes him like a bug. The jester must always serve at the pleasure of the king.

That is what some of the important figures in this thing have to learn. Anglin causing trouble on Gab, for example, is fine up to the point where he puts the enterprise in jeopardy. At that point, the owner needs to quietly step on him. Similarly, alt-right big shots would be wise to comment about Anglin and his antics, but not get in bed with him. Anglin is a pyromaniac who can just as easily burn down your house as someone else’s house, so you do not invite him to stay in your basement, where you keep the flammables.

The thing to remember is provocateurs and jesters are important tools in modern political discourse. The key to victory is to destroy the other side’s moral authority. The most effective way to do that is to mock their piety and taunt them into revealing the face behind the mask they present to the public. When someone loses their marbles over being mocked by an Andrew Anglin, they inevitably say and do things that reduce their status in the eyes of the public. Do not be that guy and do not be the guy standing next to Anglin.