Category Archives: Culture

The Potemkin Society

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A Potemkin village is a fake community built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is. The term comes from stories that Grigory Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to fool Catherine II, the Russian Empress. After she passed, the village would be disassembled and then reassembled further down so she could pass another nice village. The story is probably exaggerated, but the concept is a useful one so the term has stuck with us.

It is a useful term that came to mind in the run up to the Charlottesville rally. It came to mind after the riots in Berkeley. In both cases, you have fake cities that exist for no real reason, other than there is a government run college in them. In both cases, the people in charge are ridiculously unserious people, who should not be in charge of a convenience store, much less a small city. That is because the people who put them into office are just as ridiculously unserious. They are adult children playing grownup on the public dime.

This is not just a small city issue. The general lack of seriousness among the political class seems to be a byproduct of managerialism. Look around Washington and it is a parade of naive, clueless airheads produced by our finest colleges. It is not just an American phenomenon. Europe’s leaders are ever bit as ridiculous. The Europeans are creating a class of politicians that are close to fictional. Emmanuel Macron, the new leader of France, may as well be a hired actor, which is why he is a disaster.

Now, Macron’s problems are not all his own making. France, like the rest of Europe, is a financial knot that can never be untied. A lot of it has to do with being vassal states for the last 70 years, but a lot of is demographics resulting from socialism. When you make having babies expensive, people stop having babies. Macron inherited a country that is old, expensive and in debt. Still, he is proving to be incapable of doing the serious business of building coalitions and getting his program implemented.

That is the thing you see all over Europe. The political elites carry on like administrators of a university, rather than serious political leaders. Europe is facing an invasion from the south and instead of addressing it, they engage in public pose downs. The few serious countries, like Poland, find themselves on the receiving end of the elite’s wrath, not because they are wrong, but because they are making the barren spinsters running the EU look bad. The European Union is no more serious than a faculty lounge.

Again, this is probably as much a result of managerialism as anything else. The way Western politics is run is that some segments of the political class are paid representatives of the financial elite. Another segment relies on popular support for their position. Then there is a group of professionals, who do the hard work of figuring out how to get things done. Managerialism does not produce this class of leader. Instead, it is pompous dilettantes and hired men, whose loyalty is bought by the billionaire class.

Even the financial elite struggles with a lack of seriousness. Kevin Plank is supposed to be an important businessman, yet he goes in for ridiculous showboating like this. Under Armor makes overpriced underwear that they primarily sell to blacks and teenagers. In a just society, it would not exist, because it preys on the worst instincts of the weakest minds in society. But men are not angels and there will always be rich men who make money off the poor and stupid. The least they can do is act like adults in public.

But that is a rare thing in the financial elite these days. Google is the most recent example of how unserious people are incapable of managing simple difficulties. Instead of strutting around like a retarded peacock, the Google CEO could have easily made the whole thing disappear. A check and an NDA would have put a quick end to a trivial issue. Instead, he let some old lesbians lead him around by the nose and the result was a fiasco that promises to drag on into the court for years.

The common thread in our public discourse is that our leaders are more concerned with playing make believe than doing their duty. That is why the word “duty” is never mentioned in public discourse. When was the last time anyone heard a politician or a rich man talk publicly about his duty to society? The closest you get is some halfwit sportsball player talking about how he needs to give back to his community. Otherwise, we are ruled by a class of people with the maturity and fortitude of prep school teenagers.

That is what managerialism curdles into in time. What the giants of our side, guys like Sam Francis and James Burnham could not see in their time, is becoming clear in our time. The credentialism and parochialism of the managerial state produces people barely capable of working on a local school board committee. Their lack of exposure to the realities of the human condition cripples them spiritually. They become ruthless, overgrown adolescents playing dress up as they ascend into positions of authority.

That brings us back to Berkeley and Charlottesville. If the political class is unable and unwilling to manage the antics of Antifa and Jason Kessler, what are they going to do when smart and resourceful antagonists come along? The morons waving flags and throwing piss-bombs at each other are the easy problem to manage. The hard problem are the well organized guys with goals beyond getting themselves on TV. As I have said many times, Trump was a warning shot. The political class better get serious in a hurry.

The Fakening

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A universal rule of life is that anything that has value will be faked or stolen. This happens everywhere on earth. You can go to some place on the fringe of civilization to see ruins of an ancient people and you will find some guy selling fake souvenirs. That’s because the locals figured out that authentic crap from their past had value to those funny looking white tourists, so they started faking the authentic relics from their past. Hobbyists in the collectible business will tell you that fakes are their primary concern.

Most likely, the reason that Facebook beat MySpace was that it was easier for Facebook users to keep score of the number of friends they had and see how that stacked up to others. Humans are social animals and one way to determine status is by the size of one’s social network. High status people have lots of friends and acquaintances. People know who they are by reputation. Therefore, someone on Facebook with 500 friends must be a bigger deal than someone with 5 friends. South Park made sport of this.

Inevitably, people found a way to fake their numbers so it would look like their status was high. Everyone knows about click farms that artificially inflate likes on social media or inflate follower counts. It’s fairly obvious that Facebook has been faking their ad numbers for years. This is mostly to defraud advertisers. Fringe celebrities will use services to inflate their follower counts. I’ve always suspected, for example, that Bill Mitchell is more “social media strategy” than actual listeners. Everything about him looks fake.

This story does a great job walking us through just how easy it is to be Bill Mitchell. Here are the juicy bits:

Instagram influencer marketing is now a $1 billion dollar industry, and you don’t need a cute dog or a book-worthy lifestyle to get into the game. According to an investigation by marketing agency Mediakix, anyone can fake their way into signing profitable contracts with brands.

The agency created two fictitious Instagram accounts: 1) ‘a lifestyle and fashion-centric Instagram model’ and 2) ‘a travel and adventure photographer.’ For the first account, Mediakix hired a model and generated the entire channel content through a one-day photo shoot. Introducing Alexa Rae (calibeachgirl310). The second account was dedicated to Amanda Smith (wanderingggirl), and this time Mediakix went even further. The entire feed was composed of free stock photos of random places across the world and blonde girls, always posing facing away from the camera.

After setting up fake personalities and generating their content, the agency started purchasing followers. “We started with buying 1,000 followers per day because we were concerned that purchasing too many followers at the onset would result in Instagram flagging the account,” Mediakix stated. “However, we quickly found that we were able to buy up to 15,000 followers at a time without encountering any issues.” And how much does this army cost? Between $3-$8 per 1,000.

Essentially, if the followers don’t like or comment on posts, they’re kind of worthless. So the next step was to purchase fake engagement. “Once we had accumulated a few thousand followers for each account, we started buying likes and comments.” Mediakix paid about 12 cents per comment, and between $4-9 per 1,000 likes. For each photo, they purchased 500 to 2,500 likes and 10 to 50 comments. The entire experiment ended up costing Mediakix about $1,000 (around $700 for setting up calibeachgirl310 and around $300 for wanderingggirl). After calibeachgirl310 and wanderingggirl reached 10,000 followers (the threshold amount for signing up on most influencer marketing platforms), Mediakix started applying them for sponsorship deals. “We secured four paid brand deals total, two for each account. The fashion account secured one deal with a swimsuit company and one with a national food and beverage company.” “The travel account secured brand deals with an alcohol brand and the same national food and beverage company. For each campaign, the “influencers” were offered monetary compensation, free product, or both.”

The whole thing is worth a read. Not a lot of it is new to those with a suspicious mind, but when you put it all together in one article like that, it is revelatory. If they could so easily create a fake celebrity on social media, then the people who control social media certainly know this. More important, they know this and use it to their advantage. For example, when a TV person signs up for Twitter, maybe their follower count is artificially inflated by Team Twitter, so that the celeb talks about it to their audience.

Of course, we have the extreme examples of the ruling class de-platforming anyone who challenges the one true faith on Facebook and Twitter. I had the Facebook account associated with this blog deleted due to a mysterious terms of service violation. Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, had his Twitter feed deleted because he made barren spinsters sad on YouTube. There are hundreds of examples of the scolds slamming the door on dissent. That’s what we can easily see.

You can be sure that the vinegar drinking scolds at Facebook and Twitter are using their robot armies to promote the cat ladies and demote the hate thinkers. People have noticed for a long time that they are mysteriously dropped from follower lists of people placed on the Left’s proscribed list. To do the opposite and promote Lefty crackpots is so obvious that even the most hysterical social justice warrior would think of it. How much of it goes on is hard to know, but the sky is the limit, as was made clear in that piece.

What is not so obvious is that other side of it, the fakery. The ease with which mass media is used to promote fake ideas, fake events and fake people. That’s not so obvious as no one complains about their follower count being inflated. No one is going to look too closely at Bill Mitchell’s twitter followers, because he is a harmless old man keeping himself busy in his retirement. The cumulative effect, however, of so much fakery in the mass media is not without its consequences. The fake new phenomenon is just one obvious example.

What happens when people start to think that Twitter and Facebook are mostly robots interacting with one another? Social trust has a value. Take it away and it can only be replaced by coercion. Otherwise, society begins to dis-aggregate. We know that diversity increases intra-ethnic trust and decreases inter-ethnic trust. In a diverse society, people trust their kin and distrust those not like them. Take that diverse society and immerse it in fake news and fake social media and the result will be a Balkanized, low-trust society.

Of course, one could argue that the strong arm tactics we’re seeing is the the inevitable result of diversity. The reason Google has to fire their smart men is their mere presence calls into the question the diversity project. The reason for the heavy handed social media policing is that diversity requires it. Fake news and fake social media are just modern incarnations of the old propaganda films from the previous era, just updated to make people think distrusting foreigners and rooting for your own team is weird and unnatural.

Regardless of cause and effect, this will not end well.

The Coming Violence of the Left

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In my AmRen wrap-up about AntiFa, I noted that it was the women on the Left with the blood lust. The mentally disturbed woman I highlighted is a good example. She goes on social media with hysteric rants about imaginary violence, in an effort to get her fellow wackos to do something crazy. Her claims about gun fire and riots at American Renaissance were entirely false, but clearly, she was hoping her tweets would get her coreligionists into a violent mood. Her life is dedicated to bringing about bloodshed.

Further to that, this was floating around on social media yesterday in the run-up to the big rally in Charlottesville. Every claim in it is false. Mike Enoch has been lecturing people for weeks about the need to avoid violence and not bring weapons The organizers have developed a good relationship with the local police department so that the cops will protect the attendees from the Antifa. The cops spent most of Friday clearing weapons from the park that Antifa has been hiding there in advance of the rally.

Teddy Thin Skin has this post up on the same topic. He links to a mentally disturbed woman making claims about the rally, which are patently false. She claims to be a “behavior scientist” which is a clue that she is most likely just a cat lady. A look at her twitter feed reveals that she spends her days harassing people on twitter, in an effort to draw attention to herself. Steve Sailer often jokes that modern feminism is just a project for homely women to get the attention of males. Caroline Zero is proof of that.

Again, the trend you see with this cargo cult is that it is women out front, trying to push for violence and bloodshed. This is similar to what happened in the radical groups of the 60’s and 70’s. Many of the most violent members of the Black Panthers were women. The Weather Underground was led by a woman, Bernardine Dohrn. The radicalism of the 1960’s was initially led by males, but in time women took over and it became more violent and less coherent. Once again, the arrival of SJW’s signals the end phase.

There is something else going on today. Antifa is largely a cargo cult. They dress up like radicals and perform public events like the radicals of 50 years ago, all in the hope that the past will become the present. Unlike the past, there is no reactionary counter to the modern Progressive. No one is putting fire hoses on Lefty or having the cops break up Antifa’s protests. The people in charge are funding groups like Antifa. The government of Charlottesville is backing nutjobs like Caroline Zero.

As Eric Hoffer pointed out, mass movements need an enemy and the Left has always had the struggle as an essential element of their identity. It is why they have invented things like institutional racism and white privilege. Lacking anything resembling actual racism in modern America, and faced with a tsunami of anti-white sermonizing, they have been forced to invent a boogeyman. Like shamans of the past, the modern Left warns about evil spirits, but now they are called unconscious bias and extremism.

Similarly, and you see it in that Medium post linked by Thinskin, the Left is now trying to justify their move to violence. It is evident in the Antifa rants and that post claiming the alt-right is arming up for the rally. The Left wants to start murdering people, but they cannot find a justification, so they are starting to invent reasons. Caroline Zero is adding a veneer of 1970’s pop psychology to her calls for violence, but she is simply trying to invent a suitable stand-in for Bull Connor and the truncheon wielding riot police.

The incoherent and random violence of the 70’s was mostly due to dis-confirmation. The counter-culture did not usher in the age of peace, love and understanding. Instead, it decayed into drug use and degeneracy. Something similar is happening here. The election of Obama convinced many on the Left that the end times were upon us. The righteous would be carried to the promised land, and most important, the bad whites would be chased from the land, either sent into exile or reduced to the status of untouchables.

That obviously did not happen, which is why the Left is so unhinged. More important though, their attempt at a kill shot by putting Obama in the White House has ignited a genuine counter revolution. For fifty years the Left has faced nothing more than token resistance from “their friends on the Right” but now they are seeing a true opposition forming up. The Buckley Right embraced Progressive morality, with slightly different ends, while the alt-right rejects Progressive morality in its entirety. This is the result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e0pOs5yk60

For people like Caroline Zero and Lacy MacAuley, this is reason enough to start murdering people. To them, this parade is violence because it is the nullification of their movement, which is the nullification of them. Their entire identity is now defined by their largely imaginary struggle against the mysterious forces of institutional racism, white privilege and invisible Hitlers. To them, that parade is the manifestation of evil, so they will resort to any means necessary to stop it.

Private War

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When I began my work life, the outsourcing trend was picking up steam in the United States. I no longer recall who it was, but some guy allegedly produced the idea of using the phone book to break up his company. If he could find a company that did a task currently done in-house, he outsourced that task to a vendor. That was probably apocryphal, but it was a useful story. Why do something in-house when there was a local specialist, who could do it better and probably cheaper than you?

To a point, it made a lot of sense. Why would a baker own a fleet of trucks when he can lease them from a company that is expert at maintaining delivery trucks? The baker can focus on his specialty and the truck repair people can more efficiently maintain the bread trucks. Even in cases where there is no direct savings, outsourcing allows for a greater focus on core competencies. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but it is something you heard a lot in the 90’s as companies unbundled themselves.

This was also the driving force behind Al Gore’s project to “reinvent government” by moving tasks from the Federal workforce to private contractors. There was a book published in 1993 that was the text book for government reformers. All over the country, private firms now exist to serve one customer – the government. There are firms around the Imperial Capital that exist solely for the purpose of fulfilling a specific contract. Once the contract expires, the firm will be dissolved or “reinvented” for a new contract.

Of course, there is another aspect to government outsourcing that is different from private outsourcing. In the private sector, the baker can be good at maintaining his bread trucks, if he chooses to put the energy into it. Government is rarely good at anything, so off-loading work to the private sector promises to get around the bureaucracy, especially when it comes to things like work rules. In theory, the government contractor is free to do what is necessary to get the job done, while government is tied down with endless red tape.

This sounds good, but it has curdled into something sinister during the communications revolution. Big tech companies now police speech on-line, doing what government cannot legally do itself. Human resource departments evolved to enforce workplace conduct rules that the state cannot easily enforce. The government cannot tell the males to be nice to the girls at the office, but they can threaten to sue the company for maintaining a hostile workplace, so the company does the state’s bidding.

Now we are about to see this concept taken to the next logical step, as the Trump administration prepares to outsource the war in Afghanistan. The plan is to have contractors like Blackwater, take over the logistics of fighting the Taliban. They would provide an air force and thousands of “contractors”, who would develop and lead militias made up local tribesman. The “contractors” are former soldiers. We used to call these guys mercenaries, but that term has fallen out of fashion for obvious reasons.

The article frames this as a cost saving move, but the most likely reason to consider doing this is the contractors can do things we no longer allow our military to do. Blackwater can also recruit a militia from whatever local forces they like, which probably means the most ruthless killers available. Put another way, there is a realization that the US military has become an inefficient and clumsy giant of a bureaucracy, just like the rest of the federal government. Blackwater will be more efficient at executing this never ending war.

This is not without precedent. Governments have relied on private armies and private security forces since the dawn of time. The American West was often policed by hired guns, simply because they were available and willing to take the work. The Pinkertons were a security force used by the government and rich men. Lincoln used them for his personal security. The railroad used them to infiltrate the Molly Maguires and they were used in the famous Homestead Strike. Guns for hire are not new to America.

Still, this is a bit different and looks like another facet of the modern Servile State. Just as the state has outsourced its coercive functions to private companies, it is now outsourcing its violence to a private company. If Trump goes in for this, you can be sure that a hundred other firms will spring up with plans to do paramilitary work around the world on behalf of the US government. That is the thing with outsourcing. Supply has a funny way of creating demand where none existed. Private war will now get its own SIC code.

Eisenhower famously warned about the military-industrial complex and he has been proven right. The Cold War was used to justify endless spending on the war machine. Then it was terrorism. Now we have an empire to police, in addition to the millions of hostile foreigners our government imports into our lands. There is always some reason to keep shoveling trillions into the war machine. Now the war machine will have libertardian economists singing its praises as an efficient new innovation.

This is not a new problem. The Romans had this problem with their own armies, as well as the Praetorian Guards. America is not in danger of the military seizing control of the state or making demands on the civilian rulers. That is because the global corporations got there first. Those same corporations are now taking over the policing and war making roles of the state. In the custodial state, the throne and alter will be divided once again, with the state serving as the altar and global oligopolies as the throne.

Stupid People ► Fake News

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The plague of fake news is largely assumed to be due to the ruling class trying to convince people to stop noticing things. There is a lot of that, for sure. When the New York Times instructs its writers to use “guest worker” to describe illegal aliens employed in the cash economy, it is a deliberate attempt to deceive. The mythical Backlash™ that is always lurking after a Muslim goes boom is deliberate agit-prop. At the same time, most of the people in the media are true believers so their bias goes unnoticed.

Another aspect of the Fake News phenomenon is the general stupidity of the people in the media. Theirs is the worst sort of stupidity in that it is tightly wrapped with an overweening sense of righteousness and superiority. The typical newsroom is a collection of credentialed mediocrities that are convinced they are the smartest people in the room. It is a reckless stupidity that makes them easy to fool, thus all the hoaxes, but also prevents them from asking sensible questions. This article is a good example.

Clearly, this “study” was shopped to the media via press release. They provide copy that can be cut and pasted into a news item and they provide a graphic, which is like catnip to the modern media. Mx. Chang was given the task of writing up a story about it and someone got the job and slapping on a click bait title. If Mx. Chang bothered to read the underlying study; she clearly did not understand what she was reading. Of course, the people at the Missouri School of Journalism have no idea how to do a study.

The most obvious flaw is that they used a questionnaire, which they distributed to news sites and had them get readers to fill them out. Unsurprisingly, the readers of NPR like and trust NPR. Even less shocking, no one who reads Drudge bothered to fill out the survey as Drudge did not participate. The billion people who go to his site, therefore, were left out of the survey. Even though the methodology used to arrive at their analysis is probably good enough, the data collection is crap on stilts. Therefore, the whole thing is crap.

People who work with data understand that data collection is critical to any analysis, so that is often where you see the most effort. If you want to know how people intend to vote, for example, you better have a sample size that is large enough so that you can model the electorate. A survey of the most loyal readers of news sites can tell you something about those readers, but it tells you nothing about public attitudes regarding the news or the fake news phenomenon. It is a fake study for the purpose of fake news.

That is why the public is increasingly cynical about the mass media. When they see a story about how The Economist, of all things, is the most trusted news site in America, they know they are being fed fake news. Mx. Chang, on the other hand, has not the slightest idea what any of this means. She is just paid $25 to do a cut and paste job and get it up on the site. She is probably a very nice person, but nothing in her resume qualifies her to write about any of the topics assigned to her by Market Watch.

This is something you see all over the news media. The people assigned to cover the news, rarely have any experience in the field. In fact, they rarely have any experience or education outside of media. Their alleged expertise consists of years reporting on topics they do not understand. It is impossible for someone like Mx. Chang to ask sensible questions when she does not know the first thing about the topic. The result is she has to take everything at face value, repeating whatever is said to her.

This shortage of intellectual capital is probably the main driver of the fake news problem and the decline in trust in the news. It is not just the stupid people saying stupid things. It is the lack of smart people at the top. That Missouri study is a good example. They lack the wattage to figure out what is going on in their own ranks. Throw in the fact that most news organizations are overrun with Progressive nutters and you end up with a mentally disturbed lesbian anchoring your prime-time news channel.

Tucker Carlson has characterized the Washington media as a collection of stupid rich kids. That is a good way to think of it. The upper middle class family has one kid, who is not so bright, so they send her off to journalism school and a career in the media. That has been the case for a couple of generations, but there is a limit to that formula and we may be reaching it. One byproduct of the fake news era is the collapse of social status of the media. To be a TV talking head is to be on the same level as a carny barker.

Regardless, anything dominated by stupid people is going to fail eventually. The mass media is experiencing the corollary to the Smart Fraction. It is not that the mean IQ is falling to a certain point where the enterprise fails. It is that stupid people tend to chase away smart people. You see this in a social setting where the smart and sophisticated move away from the boorish and loud. How many smart people want to be on the same set with a talking airhead like Don Lemon or Jake Tapper? The news is becoming this.

A Post About Fake News

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Like a lot of people, I developed the habit of going to the Drudge Report as a one stop shopping experience for political news. His penchant for sprinkling in some news of the weird helped keep it interesting. He also is obsessed with extreme weather which I find amusing for some reason. The result is that it has been my first stop for general news going back to the Clinton years. Most mornings, it is my first stop just to see if anything important blew up while I was off-line.

The thing that always worked for Drudge is that he simply linked to the news stories in the mainstream press. He operated as a senior editor and headline writer. The New York Times may have decided to put something on page three below the fold, but Drudge would make it front page and give it a spicy headline. As these organizations became more dependent on web traffic, they became more Drudge friendly. That was true of writers as well.

Drudge was also the first to notice that the foreign press was often better at reporting on America than our local press. Many Americans now regularly read the British tabs because they were introduced to them through Drudge. While probably not intentional, it has opened the eyes of many Americans about the realty of the mainstream media in the United States. When the Guardian is doing a better job covering your hometown than your hometown news site, you notice it and you begin to wonder why.

That is the reason the Left has always claimed Drudge is a right-wing, even though his site is just links to left-wing publications. It is the editorial discretion. The people running the New York Times know they are shaping the news. They have always lied about it, but at some level they knew they were advocates for the Left. That was reflected in their choice of stories to cover and how hard they promoted those stories on their front pages. Drudge used that against them by re-prioritizing their stories.

The important thing though, is Drudge has always existed like an oxpecker. His site sits atop the mainstream media, plucking from it the stories that should be publicized. In return for this service, the mainstream media gets lots of traffic from Drudge. They could live without him, but it would be less pleasant. On the other hand, he cannot live without them. His existence depends on their existence. Drudge can thrive as long as most people think the news is largely true, but mostly biased to the Left.

What happens when the news is not true, but instead is mostly false and often just propaganda? How can Drudge work in the age of fake news? That keeps coming to mind every time I visit the Drudge Report lately. Yesterday he had a headline that read, “Dem Dream: Take Back House” and another, “Support Surges.” Both linked to stories that are entirely made up. The claim that there is a wave of support for Democrats right now is so ridiculous it should be in the Onion. That is obviously fake news

That is the reality of the Drudge Report now. He is working hard to add a tabloid gloss to the news, but the news is already well past being a tabloid. We are in the era of fake news, where political sites just make stuff up, claiming “anonymous sources.” Mike Cernovich has figured this out and he now has an army of anonymous sources of his own. On occasion, some of them have been right, which puts him ahead of the so-called journalists, who work in Washington politics. Drudge is now a fake news portal.

That is not the fault of Drudge. My recollection is that he hires people to help maintain the site, but he may be completely hands off now. It is that his business model is built upon the assumption that the news, to a great degree, is true. He then takes their news stories and adjusts out their bias by filtering and ranking them to highlight that which is often hidden by the mainstream press. If the news is fake, then he is doing what he set out to avoid, which is peddle bias.

This post is too long already, but there are two points that arise from this that are worth considering. One is that the fake news and its impact on sites like Drudge will have further collateral damage. Just as Drudge relies on the news being true, but biased, so do the conservatives. The hysterical pearl clutching at National Review looks even more ridiculous when it is clear they are reacting to fake news stories. In other words, fake news further reveals their complicity.

Another issue is that the prevailing orthodoxy is built around a superstructure composed of things like the mass media. Our progressive masters get to sway the public by filling the air with approved messages. The advertising model assumes people think the ads are there to sell product. If the public begins to see them as agit-prop, then all of those ads on TV peddling miscegenation take on a different color. Having a mixed race couple peddling camping gear then looks like an ad for race mixing, not camping gear.

In other words, a lot of other efforts depend upon the public accepting that the mass media is on the level, at least in terms of intentions. If people start assuming the news is fake, they are not going to be fooled by the ad men peddling the one true faith, dressed as product promotions. It is a short trip from there to questioning all of the other arrangements. Like the kids game Jenga, removing one key peg can cause a whole bunch of other things to come tumbling down as well.

Again, this is way to long, but the point is this. You do not have to red pill your honky friends on everything, just whatever they are ready for at the moment. The mass red pilling on the media is leading a lot of people to question all sorts of things that are only tangentially related. As the number of people aware of fake news grows, the number of people doubting the ad men and the intentions of corporate America grow as well. It means more people turning against the controlled opposition and their wealthy patrons.

Doubt is on our side.

Positive and Negative

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Buckley Conservatives have tried hard to make the term “identity politics” into an epithet, but like all their other efforts, it has been a failure. The only thing David French managed to do in that piece is reveal that he has no respect for his ancestors and he remains petrified of the Left. He and the other wimps of the Right can beg and plead all they like, but identity politics is going to be a feature of the next generation of culture wars, probably the focus.

What is driving the growth of the Dissident Right, in part, is the realization among whites that the old political groupings no longer make sense in an age of identity politics. The one common theme among the people and groups now populating the movement is white identity. Some people prefer white nationalism, but that is mostly the older crowd. There are others who simply go with pro-white. The salient feature here is whiteness and that is generally defined as European, but there is some debate about that too.

Since no one is ready to roll out the equivalent of the Brown Paper Bag Test to determine entry into the Honkyverse, debating these fine distinctions is mostly a waste of time. Like porn, most people know white when they see it. What does matter is the nature of white identity. It is easy to generalize about what it means to be white and list off some things that are in the interest of white people, but that is not an identity. At best that is a list of political goals and at worst a list of complaints about the prevailing order.

Identity movements, as cultural or even political phenomenon, come in two flavors. One is positive and the other is negative. A positive identity is one that exists independently and in isolation. It is true in all times and all places. Its logic is entirely internal and only modifiable by those within it. A negative identity, in contrast, exists only in context, usually in relation to or in opposition to something else. It is dependent on some outside thing. Its logic is external and modifiable by whatever exogenous thing upon which it depends.

Consider something like Icelandic identity. To be an Icelander means you or your ancestors were born in Iceland. If the rest of the humans on earth die off, the person born on that rock in the North Atlantic is still an Icelander. If for some reason the people within that identity group decide to change the rules, adding some morphological feature, then that will be the new definition. Even if the French protest that change, the Icelandic identity is whatever the Icelanders decide. That is a positive identity.

Now, think about black identity in America. sub-Saharan Africans come to America and refuse to call themselves black or even African-American. They have a different identity, their own identity. Black Americans are defined by the fact that whites needed farm equipment and brought blacks over to the colonies to work the fields. Everything about the black experience is in relation to this history and its alleged effects on the present. To be black in America is to be defined entirely by your relationship to white America.

This difference in nature is why Icelanders do not spend all their time listing their grievances against some group outside their group. Blacks, in contrast, do nothing but complain about whites. They define themselves in relation to whites, mostly in how they are treated by whites. It is why they insist on being close to whites. Section 8 housing is popular with blacks, because it lets them mix with whites and have a daily validation of who they are as people. If whites suddenly went away, blacks would lose their identity.

These are extreme examples. A less obvious example of negative identity is Ireland. The Irish fell into the negative identity camp, defining themselves in opposition to the English, over the years of British occupation. The Irish certainly had plenty of cultural history of their own, but their subjugation by the British eventually began to shift the Irish identity from a positive and internal one, to an external and relational one. It is why the Irish continue to obsess over British politics, despite having their own government now.

The point of all this is that what is happening now with white identity has to avoid going down the negative road. If the alt-right, for example, is going to be a laundry list of complaints about non-whites, it can never chart its own destiny. It will always be dependent on those outside groups. On the other hand, if this thing follows the course you see with Jared Taylor, then it can chart its own course. Taylor does not waste a lot of time with grievances, beyond those related to the right to have a white identity.

Put another way, if being pro-white is only going to mean anti-black or anti-Jew or anti-Asian, then it is never going to be a useful identity group. It is just going to be the nullification of other identity groups. That is not a movement with a future, because it is definition lies outside its control. It is why feminism is curdling into a home for barren spinsters. It is just a list of grievances. In order to avoid that fate, white identity is going to have to be a positive identity that defines itself, independent of the rest of the world.

The way to do that is as a cultural movement. The reason Progressivism lasted for half a century, despite being at odds with reality, is it was a cultural phenomenon. Being a Progressive was not just politics. It was a lifestyle. Even today, you can tell a Lefty from a distance because they dress a certain way and act a certain way. One Lefty starts wearing fake glasses and all of them do it. Whatever white identity or pro-white comes to mean, it has to define itself internally, if it is going to be anything more than a passing fad.

Proof of this is the old white nationalist and white supremacist movements. Those old guys complaining about blacks and Jews were just that, old guys complaining about blacks and Jews. You got nothing by being a part of their thing other than endless lectures about blacks and Jews. Even racists run out of ways to keep that interesting. Avoiding the fate of those movement means steering a path down the positive road, even if it takes longer and is less clear. It has to be this way because this is probably the last shot at it.

AmRen Diary Part III

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On Friday night, Jared Taylor took to the podium to welcome everyone, but also remind everyone that the protesters would be out in force on Saturday. His order was to ignore them and avoid engaging with them. A local judge had ruled that the protesters had a right to harass the people at the facility and come inside to use the facilities. That meant it was possible the protesters would try to bust in and disrupt things. As a result, the park police were deployed inside as well as outside in an effort to maintain order.

From what I was told by one of the cops, the previous events had avoided all of this by putting the protesters on a hill well away from the facility. That way they could be easily contained by the park police and easily ignored by everyone else. The judge, a liberal for sure, did not like that so she came up with a plan in the hopes of creating a violent confrontation. It is a helpful reminder that the rent-a-nuts we see at these things are paid for by the ruling class. In a sane society, Antifa would not exist.

Despite the best efforts of our rulers, Antifa was more entertainment than political statement. The conference people stayed inside and largely ignored them. The young people could not avoid pulling out their cell phones and taking pics of the circus through the windows. Then they started taking selfies with the circus in the background. The scene had the feel of a futuristic zoo, where people get to view the humans who came out of the factory with serious flaws. It is hard not to laugh at this stuff.

The twitter feed of the mentally disturbed women where I got that tweet is useful, when thinking about groups like Antifa. Pretty much everything she tweeted about the day did not happen. There were no gun shots or confrontations. It was just a few hours of a freak show, where bizarrely dressed people and septuagenarian hippies danced around in the parking lot. It was a hot day and most of them ran out of steam by mid-afternoon. The whole thing was so silly, I suspect even some of the protesters felt ridiculous.

For Lacy MacAuley though, the thirst for violence is all consuming. This story about her trip to Turkey and this story about getting beat by Turks are good examples. This is a person who hates herself and hopes for nothing more than a violent denouement to her otherwise pointless existence. That’s probably true of almost all of these people. They self-mutilate and dress like clowns because they seek to degrade themselves. Almost all of them smoke and by the looks of it, I’m guessing, many use street drugs to excess.

Watching the freaks dance, as they tried to take photos of everyone inside, I noticed that it was a girl thing. There were extremely ugly old women, wearing shirts with feminist slogans. There were a few younger women, dressed in what used to be the uniform of the skateboard punk. The young ones clearly were the ones hoping for some ultra-violence, like the stupid girl Damigo decked at Berkeley. And of course, there was a tranny. This one was maybe six foot tall, with half its head shaved and the other side died bright yellow.

This reminded me of how David Horowitz described the Weathermen. In the late sixties and early seventies, the normal white males had either left or were pushed aside in radical politics. Instead, it was blacks and white women. In both cases, it was the women who had the greatest thirst for blood. Similarly, the Manson gang’s women were the ones hellbent on murdering people. The American Left has been a feminine movement for at least fifty years and maybe longer. After all, women pushed through Prohibition.

That raises something else that was obvious on Saturday. Antifa is a cargo cult. They think if they ape the aesthetics of the radicals from the past, the past will become the present. Many of the geezers I saw at the protest were just reliving their youth, if they ever stopped living their youth. The younger ones though, they are romantics. They believe the world needs to return to a better time when they were the radicals and people cared about their issues. Antifa and the other Progressive rent-a-mobs are the death rattle of the Left.

Oswald Spengler wrote about this phenomenon. A culture, like a person, is born, lives and then it dies. Like a person, it’s youth is a chaotic becoming, while its maturing is what it became. It’s death is romanticizing what it was and then, it is gone. That’s the American Left now. It is a thing for old people and young romantics, but the death certificate has been filled out with everything but the date. The radical culture that was born in the 60’s and flourished for two generations is about to expire.

One final thought on this. I was standing in front of the big glass windows watching the Antifa loonies, when I turned and looked at the young AmRen guys taking pics and selfies, laughing and enjoying themselves. On one side of the glass were grotesquely out of shape people in grubby clothes, smoking and gesticulating. On the other were young men in suits, well groomed and composed. It was one of those times when you can stand on the timeline of your life and see the past and the future at the same time.

AmRen Diary Part II

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One of the things that is not appreciated, at least I have not full appreciated it, is just how lonely it is to think about the stuff we think about on this side of the intellectual universe. By that I mean, much of what is discussed here, for example, is never discussed at your office or your church or at social gatherings. When we can discuss this stuff with fellow travelers, it is in hushed tones and care is taken to make sure no one is listening in on the conversation. It’s the cost of having so much of reality made off limits to discussion.

That’s probably the biggest value of events like AmRen and why our side needs to start cultivating Jacobin clubs, so the like minded can do this locally. It is refreshing to be able to sit at dinner with other people interested in the same material, going back and forth on something like black crime, without having to constantly look over your shoulder. At lunch on Saturday, J’Onquarious pointed out that this is the only place on earth where we could have the sort of conversations we were having about social science data.

A good example of this is a conversation I had with a Jewish guy on Friday night. That’s right, there was a Jewish guy at AmRen. In fact, there were quite a few. Something almost no one knows or thinks about is that smart Jews are having the same debates among themselves about the roles of race and identity in Western society. My sense is that race is the trigger point. Smart Jewish guys grow up in nice safe middle class towns learning the egalitarian faith, only to get into the world and see the reality of race.

Just to get this out of the way, in case it is not obvious, I’ve always been on the side of Jared Taylor when it comes to who is white in America. His line about Jews is “They sure look white to me.” That becomes blazingly obvious when you talk to a conservative Jew about religion or race. Long before I came into hate blogging I knew this, having had this conversation with conservative Jews in the past. I’m also fine with people who think otherwise and are into the JQ. So are the Jews I met at AmRen.

It is at a thing like AmRen where you can appreciate just how oppressive and stupid our intellectual life has become in the West. There are few places on earth where a Jew and non-Jew can talk about something like racial identity or the realities of black life. The guy I was chatting with was like a lot of people I met at AmRen. He was bursting to talk about this stuff because you can’t do this anywhere anymore, other than in the comment sections of sites like this. We really are living in an age of madness.

If one is looking for the little green shoots, a place like AmRen is a good place to start. No where else in America can a guy like Richard Spencer have a jovial and thoughtful conversation with a Jewish guy about whether Jews fit into white identity. Spencer thinks Jews are a separate identity group and he thinks Jews will figure that out on their own and do their own thing. The Jewish guy in this case, is unsure, but that’s why he was sounding out Spencer on the issue. Try having that conversation on a college campus.

That’s where the optimism lies. In the fullness of time, the smart kids get to be right. That’s the lesson of history. The people who rule over us are trapped in a frenzy of purging anyone who notices anything about the world. They are systematically and aggressively estupidizing themselves, by driving off anyone with the temerity to ask a question. By herding all of the smart white guys into the Dissident Right, they are not saving themselves. They are creating the army that will destroy the prevailing order.

After attending something like this, it is easy to come back high on your own fumes and there is some of that with me. I know someone into lacrosse and every time he comes home from a tournament, he is sure lacrosse is about to sweep the nation. That’s never happening, but believing it keeps lacrosse from dying off. That’s the benefit of networking and socializing to these sorts of things. Being a biological realist is a lonely life at times. It helps to know that you are not alone in the struggle.

Even so, I’ve sat around with grad students at places like Yale and I’ve been around a lot of smart people in STEM settings. Often, the most striking feature is the oppressive lack of curiosity and the fear of saying the wrong thing. The core of Western civilization, dating to the Greeks, is smart people openly discussing the hard subjects of the day, trying to push the rock of humanity up the hill. That’s what’s happening on our side. On their side, it is struggle sessions and the slow boiling off their best assets. There’s the green shoot.

AmRen Diary Part I

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I went into the event not knowing if it was for me. The stuff I do here does not fit neatly into the general categories of the Dissident Right. I’m a race realist and a biological realist, but I don’t do much on white identity. As I told Jared Taylor, I thought that AmRen was an older crowd who wanted to go back to the 50’s. On the other hand, I also went into it prepared to be wrong in ways I could not imagine. The event sold out so it had to be more than old guys telling war stories, but what that actually meant was a mystery.

Well, I was amazingly wrong. The age of the crowd was the first thing I noticed. There were many people there in the under-30 age bracket. There were lot of guys in their 40’s and 50’s too. The average age was probably early 40’s and there were quite a few women in attendance. Most important, the crowd was smart. AmRen is full of smart, well read people, more interested in the right answer than anything else. I’ll get into more detail later in this post, but AmRen is a gathering of the best minds on the Dissident Right.

The reason for this is Jared Taylor. Some men are impressive for what they have done and others impress for who they are. Taylor is both. He has worked tirelessly for a quarter century promoting pro-white ideas, often at great personal cost. He is also a man of great decency, integrity and accessibility. He has a presence. Spend a few minutes talking to Taylor and you get the sense you will be telling your grandchildren one day, about the time you shook the great man’s hand at the conference he founded…

The most exhilarating part of the trip was meeting John Derbyshire. He will be embarrassed for me after reading this, but having the great man say, “I am a big fan of your work” was the thrill of a lifetime. It’s like having the Pope say, “I envy your piety.” Many men have made the intellectual journey to this place because of the writing of John Derbyshire. There is a long list of imitators, like me, who came into this thing because we’ve read and understood his stuff. It was an honor to meet you, John…

I am not Derb’s #1 fan. J’onquarious Williams holds that title, in addition to the title of “second greatest quantitative blogger.” He’s also a brilliant and charming guy. Most quantitative guys are terrible conversationalist, but JW is an exception. There’s a genuineness to him that is striking. Within five minutes of talking to him, you feel like you have known him for decades. It also helps that he knows his stuff and he is a super smart guy. There’s something to say for getting the right answer and then embracing it.

I think both of us came away understanding that a lot of people are reading us and therefore, we have a duty to be good at what we do. JW told Derb that he was thankful that guys like Sailer and Derbyshire were there when he was ready for it. I think he hit the nail on the head. We both now see that one day someone will be saying the same thing to us. That means we have a duty to do our best work. Speaking only for myself here, I find that incredibly humbling and motivating. It’s good to have a team again…

On a slightly different note, I walked into the Friday night reception, hoping to see one of the famous guys and maybe buy them a drink. Instead, someone stopped me to say he was a fan. Then someone else did the same. That’s flattering, of course, but it takes getting used to. I watched guys like Richard Spencer spend hours getting his picture taken and shaking hands with admirers. He is incredibly accessible and he seems to enjoy talking with the young guys who look up to him. That’s hard thing to do well.

He invited me and some others to a late dinner and he was just one of the guys, debating the topics and soliciting opinions. There are some big differences between the two of us on philosophical matters, but he was very interested in discussing them. My take away is he is a guy fully aware that he has to keep growing into his role as the movement grows, so he is eager to sound out people on these topics. Not a lot of people can do that. I came away with considerably more respect for who he is and what he is doing…

I was at dinner with Spencer, because of a fellow I’ll just call the International Man of Mystery. This mystery man introduced me to all the big hitters at the conference. It seems that he knows everyone and they think it is important to know him. In addition to being the most connected guy in the universe, he is a wonderful conversationalist and an extremely intelligent man. Walking through the darkness to a party, feeling one another out about our politics, I sensed more was going on that meets the eye.

Every cultural movement needs people, who know how to put people together and put people at ease. Otherwise, they fall into factionalism and petty jealousy. Guys, like our International Man of Mystery, keep everyone working together. Of course, conspiring in the Tennessee darkness with an International Man of Mystery makes doing this a lot more fun. On the other hand, if I step out of line, I’ll have to hire someone to start my car in the morning. But, life is full of trade-offs…

Our International Man of Mystery put us at dinner on Saturday with Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing. I must admit I’m not as familiar with these guys as I probably be, but that speaks the wealth a breadth of content coming out of the Dissident Right. The banquet had a lot going on so I did not have nearly enough time to talk with Greg, but my first impression is that he is a very smart guy, who has spent a lot of time thinking about his set of issues. I came away thinking I need to make a point of reading his stuff…

At lunch on Saturday, JW and I were joined by a young guy, a teenager I think, who made us feel a little dumb. The kid is very smart and he has read a lot. He asks great questions. What struck me about the conference is that the Dissident Right is now the place for smart white males and not just old guys. Young guys are coming into this because they can be smart without someone screaming at them for noticing things or their toxic masculinity. Having a bunch of smart guys on our team is encouraging…

Regular reader Rurik was kind enough to buy me a beer and make a point of impressing upon me how much people enjoy what I’m doing here. I truly appreciated the kind words…

I met a brilliant young guy, who is emblematic of what I observed at the conference. He had a sense of race realism, but only after watching a Jared Taylor video did it all come together for him. This is a common story. The conference, at some level, had the feel of a group of people coming out from a cave to see the stars. That’s encouraging as it means something is genuinely happening.  He posts under the handle “scotty” so if he starts turning up in the comments here, bring your A-game….

I’ll be doing some more posts on the conference. I don’t want to go too long, so I’ll stop here for now…