Category Archives: Culture

Modern Youth Politics Inc.

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about my experiments with time travel and a series of daily travelogues about my time in Motown for AFPAC, which was much more interesting than I expected. Subscribe here or here.

Symbolism is one of the aspects of all politics, regardless of political system, which tends to get missed by political people. This is especially true of those we call the right, who are often deep in the weeds of ideology or theory. They are like experts on paint who are more concerned with the type of paint used by the great artist than the actual painting he created and its larger meaning. You see this with the reaction to the Nick Fuentes movement that just had its big party this past weekend.

Since he started to gain a following, critics have struggled to find a good way to attack him, as they often get tangled up in the symbolism. He became a national figure during the 2016 MAGA movement, but shot to the top with the 2020 election, where he toured the country holding rallies in the “stop the steal” days. He would gather up young fans and give speeches via bullhorn outside of state capitols. It was reminiscent of the radical protests of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

That was the point, more than the actual content of the protests. It is a form of guerilla marketing in which the counter to the well-financed and carefully choregraphed messaging from the regime is the apparently organic rejection of that message and the people behind the messaging. In other words, the point was not what they were saying at these events. The whole point of the event was to tell the world they exist, despite the mass propaganda from the regime.

This has always had another function for Fuentes. It tells the disaffected youth that there is a place they can go to be with other likeminded people. They see these things happening on their preferred platforms. They get talked up in the online spaces these young people frequent and most importantly, they get criticized by the sorts of people who make good foils for Fuentes. Like all good political animals, Fuentes tends to attract the sorts of critics he needs to make his points.

It is important to note that it has been a long time since someone has come along with the skill of Fuentes in terms of generating excitement. There is an electricity around his events that you never see at other political events. He understands his audience because in reality, Fuentes is his audience. He is trying to create the sort of excitement he and they learned about in history class. He is building a youth movement that mirrors what he thinks it was like in the Reagan or Kennedy years.

This is why the marketing of Nick Fuentes and American First looks like it is put together by profession marketing people. He and his entourage arrive at their impromptu rallies wearing the American First gear, which you can buy at the AF store and the crowd always has the same look at feel. He is always surrounded by guys holding up their mobile device who are surrounded by young men in blue blazers chanting the familiar chants that have become a defining feature of this thing.

While it looks like great marketing, it is genuinely organic. Much has been said about the fact that this generation is the first to be socialized online, but they are also the first generation to be saturated in and socialized by marketing. To old people, the thoroughly commercialized culture of today feels alien and weird. To the young people raised in it, it feels normal. It is simply a habit of mind. The people you see at a Fuentes rally are just falling into the role that fits them best.

In a way, it is as if life has become a video game. They play the character that they feel comfortable playing. Instead of being the barbarian character in the online game, they are the guy holding the cell phone up next to Nick. The archers fall into the role of standing in the back yelling the familiar slogans at Nick. Of course, there are the Leroy Jenkins characters at these things. That would be the black guy dressed as Playa Maga or the has-been grifters like David Duke.

This is what trips up his “right-wing” critics. They see the assorted kooks and weirdos that turn up at these events and then fashion an argument against Fuentes and his followers that often reduces to petty jealousy. Fuentes is doing what many of them said was impossible, mostly because they lacked the skill and courage to try and do the things that Fuentes is doing in terms of public demonstration. Calling Fuentes a grifter is a way to feel good about losing.

When you talk to the people at a Fuentes event, and in Detroit they were everywhere Saturday evening, they will tell you that people like Sneako are not really part of the movement but something like the court jester. They lack the sophistication to explain it, but they sense that the point of these colorful characters is to decorate the public face of the movement as something like an inside joke. The critics do not get it, which is why they are not in it.

Therein lies the genuine problem for this thing. It is like everything else in the modern mass media age in that it is just a thing you do until the next thing comes along. It is why Fuentes has had to keep shifting the focus and changing the characters in what is more like a long running reality television show than a political movement. Every season you get a new character and some new issues. It is not that it is a grift or he is not serious, but rather this is what this generation thinks is serious.

Another way to think of it is the films from twenty years ago where the walls between virtual reality and reality break down and you have a character from the digital world enter the real world or vice versa. This is what is happening for a generation raised on mass media, mass marketing within the context of virtual reality where the worst thing that can happen to you is your character dies. The politics of this generation are the politics of the internet, not the meat space.

Politics as professional wrestling is fun for the twenty-somethings who are naturally drawn to it, but in time they will have to have real lives. You see this transition in some of the older young people who are now working and on their own. Standing outside a Nick rally yelling those slogans feels foolish to them. That is the most likely way this thing unfolds over the next few years. The youthful excitement and superficiality will give way to more mature and serious politics.

This raises the question of the expiry date for Nick Fuentes. All pop stars who court the youth audience run into the same problem. There comes a point where their act goes from opportunistic to weird. They get too old for their market. Fuentes looks like he is a teenager, so he has time, but at some point, he will have to follow his older audience into a more mature form of politics. The question that remains unasked and unanswered is whether he will lead them or follow them.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Euros And Ukraine

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During Covid, one of the questions that kicked around was how would the public react when they found out the government was lying? The answer is we do not know as the whole thing has been thrown down the memory hole for the most part. The truth about Covid has slowly seeped into the public consciousness, but no one asks them about it and no media outlet discusses it. The best anyone can tell is that the Covid lies have become a part of the general cynicism.

We will soon get another case to see how the public will respond when the truth is nothing like what they have been told by the media. In the case of Project Ukraine, this test will happen in Europe where the local media talks about the war in Ukraine in terms that have always been fanciful. It was European media that gave us the “Ghost of Kiev” and the babushkas knocking down fighter jets with canned goods. They continue to feed their public outlandish stories about the war.

Those with an interest in the war and access to the internet can find out what is actually happening on the battlefield. The facts are often blurred by the fog of war and the bias of the people doing the reporting, but with some patience you can get a good picture of what is happening in Ukraine. It is even possible to get a sense of what is happening outside the war zone as there are still plenty of Ukrainians posting stuff to popular apps like Telegram and Instagram.

Very little of this reality gets into Europeans media. Instead, they produce content like this from the UK Telegraph, which is supposed to be a serious media platform, not the typical British tabloid. Not only are they “reporting” that Ukrainian “wonder weapons are decimating the Russians”, but they also have a special section with high production quality explanations of those wonder weapons. In other words, this is a highly choregraphed bit of propaganda designed to deceive the public.

The wonder weapon stuff is mild compared to some of the other posts you will find about Ukraine in the Telegraph. This one claims the Ukrainians are about to seize Crimea because their squadrons of unicorns are showering the place with magical fairy dust they shoot from their ass. That is not an exaggeration, as magical farting unicorns would be more plausible than the contents of the actual post. The whole thing is a fantasy with no basis in reality.

It is not just the UK media that is gaslighting the public. The German media is full of similarly nonsensical stories. Here is the Ukraine page for Bild, which you can use Google to translate into English. Die Zeit is probably the most respected news site in Germany, and it just copies and pastes whatever Kiev, or the neocons send them about what is happening in the war. While not as ridiculous as the UK media, the continental media is gaslighting its public just as hard.

The problem is the war is going horribly for Ukraine. The Russian army is slowly and methodically grinding the Ukraine army into bits. Every month the Ukrainians are forced to fall back at some point along the line of contact. The Russians have knocked out the power grid of the country, which means there is no electric for up to twenty hours per day in some areas. The Ukrainian army is literally snatching men off the streets and sending them to the front due to a lack of manpower.

What Ukraine war watchers have known for a long time is that at some point, the Ukraine army will not be able to keep fighting. At some point, the Russians will decide it is time to end the war on its terms. Given that this is a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, the assumption is the fall is when things come to a head, just in time for the presidential election. Maybe it will happen sooner or maybe later, but at some point, reality will burst through those European headlines.

From a distance, it is hard to know if the firehose of nonsense about the war is fooling the European public. The recent elections suggest that at the minimum the public is tired of the ruling parties putting the welfare of Ukraine ahead of the welfare of the European people. It is possible that the Euros have been wise to the media nonsense about Ukraine, but simply care more about other things. Like Covid, it is hard to know as no one bothers to find out what the public thinks.

Unlike Covid, the collapse of Project Ukraine is not going to be easy to sweep under the rug by ignoring it. With Covid, the liars scurried off with their bags of cash and the pols declared victory as they let their foot off the neck of the public. The general public was simply happy to get back to normal. That is probably not going to work with Ukraine as there is no benefit to putting the topic in the past. There will simply be what the media claimed to be true and the truth, which is the opposite.

Compounding the problem in Europe is the fact that the leading politicians have made Ukraine their signature issue. In the U.S., the pols have been giving it a good leaving alone for a year now, other than the big funding push in February. Note that as soon as that bill passed, they changed the subject. In Europe, the political class has made Ukraine a test of their legitimacy. Therefore, when the Ukraine army surrenders, they cannot shrug and move on to other issues.

One of the lessons of the Soviet era was that the accumulation of lies eventually saps even the most repressive regime of legitimacy. The Soviet system fell apart when no one could think of a reason to support it, not even the people at the top of the system who benefitted from it the most. In this way, Ukraine and Covid may be analogous to Afghanistan and Chernobyl. These are events that delegitimize the system by making clear that nothing it says or does is on the level.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

America Inc.

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about grammar robots, a post the general weirdness of dissident politics and the Sunday podcast, which thankfully had nothing to do about Trump or the anti-Trump kooks. Subscribe here or here.

One of the criticisms of the paleoconservatives is that they never got around to formulating an explanation for why the managerial state emerged. They did a good job describing it and how it differed from the straightforward administrative bureaucracies that have been a part of society since Diocletian. How the bureaucracy transitioned from instrument of the ruling elite into a ruling elite itself has remained a bit of mystery, with only some stabs here and there at an explanation.

The fault probably lies with Burnham, who was the first guy to create a political theory from observing the emergence of the managerial system. He wrote his most famous book, The Managerial Revolution, during the Second World War when the Nazis were at the peak of their power. Therefore, his understanding of managerialism was shaped by the militant authoritarianism of it. Burnham was still a communist, so this no doubt played a role in his understanding of managerialism.

The emergence of managerialism in interwar Europe is easy to explain simply by pointing to the conditions that prevailed after the Great War. Fascism emerged on the losing side of the war because of the chaos that emerged as a result of the collapse of the old order and the general lunacy of liberalism and communism as they fought to fill the void left by the old order. Fascism rode the popular demand for a return of order to power in places like German and Italy.

Once in power, the fascists had to actually govern. The existing institutions they inherited were either badly damaged by the war and the post-war chaos or antiquated holdovers from the prior era. Managerialism provided both a blueprint for governing but also a source of authority. Gather up the best people and set them to work rebuilding infrastructure, the economy, and the state. Once they began to make progress, public support for the system provided the necessary legitimacy.

This model for managerialism being a modern, industrial response to both the collapse of the old order and the chaos of the present works pretty well for the emergence of it in communist Russia. The collapse of the tsarist system and the Russian civil war left Russia as a chaotic mess. Into that void flowed Stalin first inside the party and then as something of an industrial age tsar. He gathered up and developed an army of people to manage, govern and control the new Soviet society.

That same process does not work for America, where managerialism emerged at the same time as it did in Europe. Many have noted the parallels between FDR’s New Deal revolution and the emergence of fascism in Europe. Until the war, many New Deal progressives were fans of Mussolini. They never liked Hitler, due to his crudeness and antisemitism, but they liked Mussolini. There was in the 1930’s a great deal of cross pollination between the two systems.

America, however, was not emerging from a failed war and its political order was not destroyed as a result of it. On the contrary, America was remarkably stable in the aftermath of the economic collapse in the 1930’s and the political system seemed to be working very well. There is no doubt that FDR revolutionized the relationship between the citizen and the state during this period, but he did not do so in response to the loss of legitimacy of the old arrangements.

It should also be noted that the managerialism that emerged in America was different from the militaristic version that emerged in the fascist countries, which built upon trench socialism. Similarly, Stalin’s managerialism was a way to recapture the collective spirit of the revolutionary years in which the Bolsheviks finally seized power and won the civil war. The managerial revolution of FDR was softer and an outgrowth of volunteerism of early America.

Therein lies a clue as to why managerialism emerged in America. Through the 19th century, Americans were largely governed by local association. Other than the post office and military service, the typical American had little reason to think about the federal government. It was an abstraction. Even state government played a limited role in his life compared to local government and the community associations that defined the life of most Americans.

The industrial revolution changed America by urbanizing large chunks of the population, thus destroying rule by association for large numbers of people. The shift from industrial work also changed the relationship between the man and his work by making it individualistic rather than communal. The failure of a farmer impacts many more people than the farmer and his family. The failure of a factory worker is a burden only on the worker and his family. Work became a solitary pursuit.

Like the rise of managerialism, the rise of individualism is one of those things that many recognize as a problem, but no can explain. Why all of a sudden did Europeans stop thinking collectively and start thinking individually? Racial solidarity among Europeans was so natural it did not require a vocabulary to describe. Today we have a vast array of labels to describe white ethnic and racial solidarity, despite the fact that it barely exists and only in the virtual reality of the internet.

As work isolated men from one another, the natural response was to think individually and see the man next you as competition. This was obviously good for the factory owner, so work in many cases became a competitive arena, a Hobbesian existence where the owner harnessed this war of all against all to increase productivity, reduce costs and maximize profits. The result was a class of citizen who was no longer defined by community but by alienation from community.

This alienation inevitably led to unhappiness as man is a social animal and evolved to be so within small groups. The emergence of masses of Americans living in big cities fighting one another for wages lead to a disenchantment of the world. The rise of urban political machines was one consequence. Another consequence was a looking inward for spiritual happiness. When community can no longer provide a larger purpose to life, the only option is to seek it individually.

The shift from community man to individual man naturally leads to the individual abandoning his duties to the community. Self-government rests on the assumption that the bulk of the citizens have a moral duty to the whole. Who they are is not just what they have or even what they contribute to the whole. A big part of what defines the community man’s sense of self is the success of his community. Individual man lacks this entirely, so he has no reason to participate.

This is the same void of order into which managerialism flowed in interwar Europe and post-tsarist Russia. The tutelary state that emerged in America in the 20th century was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but simply filled the void left by a growing population of people uninterested in anything outside their window. Urban and now suburban peasants needed the protection of the state because as atomized individuals, they were no longer willing to participate in their own protection.

This is why the state has also become a church of sorts. Much of what the managerial state does is moral guidance. Painting rainbows on crosswalks and then daring anyone to defile them is intended to create sinners so the priests of the system can punish those sinners thus providing the needed moral instruction. What used to be done by community pressure and the local minister is now done by credentialled members of a faceless and remorseless managerial class.

Managerialism is the natural form of government for an industrial people as it mimics the life of the industrial worker. Republican government and aristocratic government reflected the reality of the people, who were primarily organized around communal activities like farming and trade. Twentieth century America turned into a continent-sized business park occupied by one business, American Inc. Like every business, America Inc. needed a management class, so it  got one.

The question is can this model survive the post-industrial age? America began to deindustrialize fifty years ago. The old industrial model of governance has tried to adapt to the transition to the information economy, but managing information is vastly more difficult than managing capital and labor. In fact, it may not even be possible to manage information without poisoning the minds of the managers. The current crisis may simply be due to this problem.

On the other hand, it may be that you cannot have a society organized around marshaling data and data frameworks. Perhaps America Inc. is simply a legacy business parasiting off the societies that continue to make things, fix things, dig things from the ground and invent things. Perhaps the end point of managerialism is the same for all antiquated business models. The current crisis is the struggle to avoid the inevitable bankruptcy of the managerial system.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Diversity Cult

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The 2023 Irish action thriller, In the Land of Saints and Sinners, is one of those films that offers some insight into the machinations of our cultural overlords. It is one of those small budget adult dramas that does not get a ton of attention but does well on the streaming services after its initial release. It is not that these are bad films, but they are not expected to pack the theaters. These are the new version of the B-Movie that fill up the spaces between the heavily hyped, big budget films.

Anyway, the film is set in Ireland during the Troubles because every movie about Ireland is set during the Troubles. It stars Liam Neeson, who plays Finbar Murphy, a hired assassin who lives in a quiet coastal town. It is not all that clear who is assigning the hits, but they come through a local businessman who gets the assignments and hands them out to men like Finbar. This local businessman is not connected to the Troubles and makes sure to not get involved in politics.

The story arc for Finbar starts during his final assignment when the guy he is about to kill gives him some advice rather than beg for his life. Finbar’s habit is to grab his target off the street and take him out to the woods, where he makes the guy dig his own grave before shooting him with a shotgun. He then plants a tree on the grave. This target is a former contract killer, who urges Finbar to make something of the rest of his life before he ends up in the same place as him.

This leads Finbar to have a crisis of conscience and he decides to retire. Meanwhile, some IRA terrorists have come into town to hide out after having set off a bomb in Belfast that killed some children. They are staying with a relative who lives in the town and that relative just happens to have a run in with Finbar. Of course, Finbar solves the problem by taking the guy out to his favorite killing field. Thus, we have the central conflict of the film as the terrorists face off against Finbar.

This all sounds like the basis for a good old-fashioned thriller. You get some Irish history as a backdrop, and you get to see Liam Neeson use his “particular set of skills” to slowly take care of the bad guys. Neeson has been playing this role since he got super famous for doing it in the movie Taken. He is in his seventies now, but he still manages to make it work, just as long as he does not have to move around too much. In this film he is the wise old version of the lethal weapon.

Somewhere in the middle of the film, there is a black guy. Finbar is in a pub and there is a black guy playing Irish tunes on a fiddle. He is not a black leprechaun, but he is a short guy so that would have made some sense. Instead, he is a refugee from Africa who somehow settled into this tiny coastal town in rural Ireland. He tells Finbar that the reason he picked the town is he wanted to escape the violence of his home country and he once heard Irish music as a kid.

It gets more absurd. Later in the film there is the big show down between Finbar and the terrorists at the pub. The terrorists are shooting the place up and Finbar sees the sacred African hiding under a table, so he rushes over to save him. In other words, the wandering African is not just a ridiculous addition to a film set in 1970’s Ireland, he is now a sacred symbol of the film. In that scene you expect the people to scream, “leave the women and children but save our sacred African!”

Clearly, the quality control committee realized that their film did not have the required amount of diversity, so the script was sent back for a rewrite. The writers probably thought they were okay because they made the head terrorist a sassy girl boss with two thick headed male henchmen. That was not enough so they needed to figure out a way to add some color to story set in rural 1970’s Ireland and they settled on having a peripatetic African midget playing the fiddle in the pub.

We have all become used to the black washing and race swapping that goes on in the culture, but in a film like this you see how mechanical it has become. Somewhere in the process there is a crew of shrews and scolds who make sure there is a girls boss and the proper amount of color. They do not care if it makes any sense. Like people with rubber stamps in a bureaucracy, their job is to make sure the film has enough diversity points before it goes into production.

Eric Hoffer famously said, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” In fact, it often becomes all three and you see it with the diversity rackets that now infest every institution. It is a lucrative racket for those who master the arcana, but it has been embedded in the economy. Like the green rackets, the diversity rackets are now part of the fabric of corporate life. It is assumed to be an essential part of every large enterprise.

The thing that holds it in place, however, is that it is a cult. There is little doubt that many of the people in that film thought it was stunning and brave that they had a little African guy skittering around the set. Those who thought it was a ridiculous addition to the film kept their head down because they did not want the lunatics from the cult of diversity hounding them over it. The result is we now have diversity everywhere when what we need is to have it nowhere.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

When Prophecy Fails

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Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the logic of the West has rested on the theory that the Russians cannot sustain a long war. In the winter of 2022 the argument was summed up by Francis Fukuyama in this legendarily wrong post. In that post he claimed the Russian army was about to collapse at any minute and maybe take the Putin government down with it. He then followed up on that claim with a similar post, in which he claimed to have been right, amazingly enough.

It is tempting to dismiss Fukuyama as just another brazen hustler that circulates around the managerial class, but he is one of the more successful ones. His famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, was a massive best seller primarily because he pushed all the right buttons for the post-Cold War elites. It was massively successful flattery because the people being flattered believed it. They continue to believe it, which is why they maintain a bellicose foreign policy.

Put another way, these grifters passing themselves off as intellectuals tell us something about the system that hosts them, but also the people they flatter. Fukuyama gets to travel around the empire passing as a sage, because the people hosting him think he is right and that is because they want him to be right. Meanwhile, a guy who has been consistently right, John Mearsheimer, gets called mean names, mostly because he is right and the people calling him names hate him for it.

This blinkered view is how we got the war in Ukraine. This almost religious belief that the triumph of the West in the Cold War was the beginning of the final journey into the promised land, the end of history, has shaped imperial policy, both foreign and domestic, for decades. Fukuyama wrote his book in 1992 and others have been building on it ever since. In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued for the breaking up of Russia to finish the Cold War.

In other words, the war in Ukraine is not something that happened for no reason at all, but rather it is the product of a messianic outlook in the West that has existed since at least the end of the Cold War. In fact, the war looks like it comes right from the Western playbook to undermine and topple the Putin government. This study by the RAND Corporation, the most important think tank in the empire, talks specifically about this type of project as a tool to destabilize Russia.

The point of all this is to properly frame the war as part of the overall belief system of the West, rather than just something that happened for no reason at all. Washington expected this war because they had been planning for it for decades. Even though they were wrong in most of their assumptions, there is no reason to think that belief structure has changed. History shows that believers do not abandon their beliefs when faced with disconfirmation. They just believe harder.

That is important to understand when thinking about what comes next. The micro-countries of NATO are now yapping about war with Russia. Hilariously, tiny Estonia is offering security guarantees to Ukraine. The Estonia military is about the size of the Las Vegas police department and probably just as lethal. Lithuania is now inviting in the Germans to build defensive structures for the assumed Russian attack. Perhaps the Germans will bring their broomsticks with them.

The reason these small players are making these noises is the same reason Fukuyama wrote a book, calling the people he wished to flatter, the deliverers of mankind from the clutches of irrationality. These micro-countries organize their foreign affairs around flattering the powerful. Without NATO, Kaja Kallas is as well-known as the mayor of Wichita, but in NATO she can stand on the big stage, just as long as she tells Washington what they wish to hear.

This is what makes the moment so dangerous. Kallas is a simpleton, but an obsequious simpleton, so she often speaks the truth about her masters. Washington has no plan for ending the war other than the total defeat of Russia, something that can only happen if they launch nuclear weapons. The current debate about letting Ukraine use NATO weapons to attack inside Russia is mostly about normalizing the idea of NATO attacking inside Russia, something the Russians will never tolerate.

Compounding all of this is the fact that Ukraine is slowly being ground down by the Russian war machine. All of Ukraine is now forced to ration electricity. Major cities have long blackouts due to the lack of energy. The Ukraine army is desperate for soldiers, but all of the men have gone into hiding to avoid being grabbed off the streets and sent directly to the front. These raw “recruits” are being trained at the front, which means thrown into a trench with a rifle and a few grenades.

The point is we will soon see something like what Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter described in their study of a UFO cult. Western political leaders have been assured for decades that the promised land lies just after the final disillusion of Russia, which will come any day now. Like the people waiting for the space aliens, they have been waiting for regime change in Russia. Instead, they may be facing angry mobs outside their own palaces as the project collapses.

We live in an age of wonders, but the greatest wonder to be revealed will be when the regime realizes that the future promised to them by the neocons and their fellow travelers was never going to be reality. When the Ukraine army starts to buckle and the politics in Kiev become violent, how will the West react? Will reality suddenly descend upon Washington, or will they do like the cult members in When Prophesy Fails and find some way to internalize it and keep the faith?

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Use And Abuse of History

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In the 1976 election, there was a scene at the Republican National Convention that turned out to be a vision of things to come. President Gerald Ford had successfully fended off the primary challenge of Ronald Reagan, but at the convention it was clear that Reagan was the more popular man with the people. The institutional party took the safe route and backed Ford, but at the convention it became clear that the voters were ready to move on from the old guard.

This was largely true of the managerial class in America. Corporate America was pushing for reform against an intransigent old liberal guard. Wall Street wanted changes to the financial system in preparation for the emerging global economy and the looming microprocessor revolution. This book, written in 1976 coincidentally, talked about the looming revolution in economics that was coming with computers. Of course, a sizable chunk of the political class was ready for change.

What the convention revealed was that the public was also ready to move on from the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and the general political and economic stagnation that defined the 1970’s. On other words, the public was in a mood for reform, and they would be willing to take some tough medicine if the right man was put forth to sell them on it. That man was Ronald Reagan, who won the 1980’s election and ushered in the reforms that came to be known as the Reagan Revolution.

There were elements of the institutional left that opposed Reagan. The media called him Hitler, of course, and spent his entire time lying about everything. They invented the concept of homelessness as a counter to the booming economy. The academy was also opposed to Reagan and responded by diving head long into the antecedents of what we now call the woke religion. The Democratic Party remained trapped in the past throughout the decade.

The point of this walk down memory lane is that reform is always a top-down process that begins with elements of the elite either looking around and sensing danger or growing restless with the prior generation of elites. In the 1970’s, there was a little of both as some elites feared the country was headed to a crackup, while others sensed a new day was dawning and the old bulls needed to step aside. Once they found a champion, the reform effort took off.

Fast forward half a century to our time and we can see some of the elements that existed in the middle of the 1970’s. The world is at some sort of inflexion point economically due to the underlying currency arrangements. In the 1970’s the dollar’s status was under assault due to Western incompetence. Today the dollar is under pressure mostly due to Washington perfidy. There are serious efforts to reduce the dollar’s role in the global economy.

You also have a looming demographic change. In the 1970’s the baby boomers were hitting the labor market and the adult economy like a tidal wave. Much of what drove the economic revival was the loosening of the rules so this massive wave of young adults could earn and spend. Today we are at the other end of that long cycle as the baby boomers exit the work force. They are not being replaced. Instead, we have diversity which must be overcome to maintain the economy.

There are a lot of parallels like this. It is the reason that old paleos like Steve Sailer often compare the present to their salad days. Not only does it help explain the present, but it is comforting to think that like the 1970’s, this period of tumult will give way to another great interregnum, a time of relative peace and prosperity where politics gives way to practical pursuits. That certainly sounds comforting but there are some obvious problems with taking the comparison that far.

The first problem, and the main problem, is the country of today is nothing like it was half a century ago in terms of demographics. Instead of having a massive wave of young, smart people ready to build their future about to enter the system, we have a vibrant tide ready to wash away the white middle-class. Demographically, America is like the film World War Z where the new vibrancy is scaling the walls. No one knows what to do about it, other than build the walls higher.

Then you have the fact that there are no signs that any element of the ruling elite is interested in reform. Instead, they look like toadies of a rock band after a long weekend of partying in a fancy hotel. Theirs is a life of self-indulgence and their highest goal is to maintain the system that lets them self-indulge. What passes for an opposition in elite circles is just geezers and their dim-witted acolytes chanting catch phrases that ceased to resonate half a century ago.

Now, not all things are discussed openly. It is possible that behind closed doors in the elite institutions there are top men working the problem. Perhaps they think AI is the analog to the microprocessor. Maybe it is genetics that will be the revolutionizing force of this coming epoch of reform. It is also possible that those are just more overhyped items in an economy that has been running on hype for decades. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man because he is the biggest hype man.

Even if there is something happening behind the scenes with the revolutionary potential of the microprocessor, where is the Ronald Reagan in the political system to sell the changes that must come with it? Where is the socio-political movement that could produce a salesman like Reagan? The political class now looks like that expensive hotel room the elites partied in all weekend. It is a scene full of sadness and memories of better days that now seem long gone.

You can probably take this a bit further and suggest that Trump was the elites vehicle to make the needed changes to stave off crisis. Despite his faults, he is an oddly charismatic figure, who has wanted nothing more than to be embraced by the ruling elite of his country. He would have been a great pitchman for a renewal, but the system has treated him like an alien virus. Imagine if Reagan had been arrested at the 1976 convention instead of cheered.

Historical parallels are often used to inspire a pursuit of future greatness and sometimes they are used to command a return to past habits. We see both in this age as old men like Joe Biden feebly mumble about the glorious future. We see slightly less feeble old men chanting about a return to past principles. There is a third way to use history and that is to show that the present does not have a comforting analog in the past and therefore we are on our own to sort our future.

That is where the West finds itself now. Those who will make the future will first have to close the door on the past. The challenges of the demographic age have no corollary in the past, so the solution, if one exists, does not live in the past. Put another way, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II are not walking through that door, so there is no point in leaving it open. The only reason for understanding the past is to know that it is not the future.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Revelatory State

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Note: Behind the green door is the final review of and commented upon the Planet of the Apes franchise, a post about roots and leaves and the Sunday podcast, which was all about the Trump trial. Subscribe here or here.

Political science claims to have sorted the various types of political systems that have existed and could exist in the world. As a practical matter this means reducing Aristotle’s list of regimes down to “our democracy” and “fascism.” What is called “our democracy” looks nothing like democracy and it has long ago lost its liberalism. As Paul Gottfried noted many years ago, we now live in post-liberal societies. The trouble is, we lack a label that seems to fit what we are seeing.

The reason we lack a label is our socio-political system is amazingly good at disguising itself by shifting focus away from how it acts onto something else. Every month brings the official celebration of some designated victim group. There are many remembrance days for bad things that may or may not have happened. Of course, there is the perpetual foreign bogeyman who threatens our democracy. Russia is currently the bogeyman, but China is warming in the bullpen.

One way of thinking about our socio-political system is to imagine a Protestant minister who had a vision of some sort. Maybe he got a glimpse of a dreadful future or perhaps a new path to enlightenment. He then sets about telling everyone he can find about his vision and what he thinks it means. Of course, he just assumes his vision requires him to tell the world about that vision and what it means. No one ever has a vision that requires them to keep quiet about it.

Now, imagine hundreds of such people working in the institutions having hundreds of these visions. Instead of one eccentric minister claiming to have received a message from God, it is hundreds of mediocrities working in offices around the country claiming to have found some new bogeyman or maybe some new path to the assumed end point of human existence. Every day is spent hashing out these visions in the marketplace of visions and visionaries.

This sounds a bit wacky but consider the fact that it is rare to see a product sold on its features and benefits. Even the most mundane products are sold based on their alleged benefit to some cause or your moral benefit. No event is just presented as it is, but instead it is cast as part of a morality tale. A person cannot simply be famous for something like kicking a ball around or singing a song. Instead, he must claim that his fame is in service to a cause.

In all of this is the turmoil of competing revelations. June is now called “pride month” for things that up until recently did not exist. There have always been male and female homosexuals, of course, but their private acts were kept private. The concept of “coming out” is a novelty that brings with it normative claims. Somewhere, someone had a vision that said the path to the promised land is through elevating this tiny minority to the top of the social order.

The market for visions and visionaries is like all other markets, so it did not take long before imitators were on the scene. Lesbian and gay, the L and G of the now famous initialism has been joined by Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Asexual and other, which gets the plus sign for some reason. It turns out that the commodification of sexual deviance has its limits. The next guy or gal with a sexual vision will be stuck with the plus sign.

While much of this stuff seems novel, and much of it is recently invented, the practice of inventing new normative claims is not new. We see it with the various alien bogeymen conjured over the last three decades. The Muslims could not be left to be Muslims in their own lands. They had to submit to this thing called liberal democracy, a thing that does not exist, but when it did exist, it prohibited the imposition of alien socio-political forms on people who rejected them.

Think back to the Bush years and the crusades against the Muslims sounded like Protestant ministers talking about converting the savages. As if my magic, everyone in Washington got it into their heads that the world was at risk unless the Muslims accepted liberal democracy. Put another way, someone, or a group of someone’s, had this revelation and convinced the rest that it was true. Those who did not accept it as a revelation were packed off to the outer darkness.

We now hear the same sorts of sermons about the Russians, except this time the doubters are accused of cavorting with Old Scratch. Suddenly, all the best people are filled with righteous anger at Russia and determined to defeat this enemy in a holy crusade called Project Ukraine. Next up is China, a country all of these people admired until they started having visions about China doing bad things. The gods have spoken and now it is time to act.

The origin of this crusader mindset can be dated to the abolitionist movement when all of a sudden, northern Protestants decided that slavery was a sin, even though Scripture seems to be fine with slavery. Not only was slavery a sin, but the slaver was an irredeemable sinner, and he must be destroyed. Why all of a sudden did masses of people have this shared vision? No one knows because no one asks, just as no one asks why all the best people now say “Keev.”

That is the other feature of the revelation state. Once the vision finds a market, no one bothers to question it. In the revelation state, novel moral claims go from inconceivably strange to irrefutably true in the blink of an eye. Homosexual marriage is the best example of how a joke became holy writ overnight. No one ever asked how this happened as to do so could suggest it does not belong in the catechism, which is a good way to get hurled into the void.

That is another feature of our socio-political system. It demands total, unconditional submission to its moral claims. It is never enough to agree on most things or be indifferent to some things. You are either one hundred percent in tune with the prevailing morality or you face annihilation. The sinners are forced to confess their sins, but always face punishment, no matter how much they grovel. Absolution is arbitrary, but confession is mandatory.

This revelatory aspect of the American ruling class does not explain everything, but it is one aspect of the system. The socio-political system that emerged after Gettysburg was built on the pre-ideological fanaticism that animated abolitionism. In time it seems to have become an ideology all its own. For most of the 20th century it was held in check by practical necessity, but now it has been unleashed and the result is decades of increasingly deranged revelations.

What we may be seeing is the end of a long sociological arc that began in the 19th century with the Great Awakening. Lots of pundits have compared the present to past Protestant fervors, but they snicker in their sleeve and move on. Instead, what we may be witnessing is not echoes of the past but the final end point of a trend that started in that period, mutated along the way into the final virus we see today. The revelatory state may be the logical end point of the Great Awakening.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Peaceful Separation

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How best to govern a diverse population is a part of the subtext of public political debates in America, mostly because no one is permitted to debate the orthodoxy on immigration, so America gets more diverse every day. This is treated as a novelty that only the best minds in the managerial elite can tackle. In reality, humans have been dealing with diversity since the first human settlements. It turns out that there are only five solutions to the problem posed by diversity.

The most common way of dealing with the problem of diversity is also the oldest way of dealing with diversity. That is for the dominant tribe to subjugate or even eradicate the alien tribes from their land. The people of one place finally get the upper hand over the people adjacent to them and wipe them out. Alternatively, the main identity group in the newly formed society compels the minorities to adopt their identity. Wiping out diversity is the oldest cure for diversity.

The trouble is it rarely works, especially when you are dealing with large numbers of people in tight communities. The Israelis are trying to drive off the Arabs in Gaza, even going so far as to deliberately massacre civilians, but they are no closer to pushing out the Arabs than when they started their genocidal campaign against them. Even with modern tools, it is extremely hard to remove a large population. It is possible, but in this age, even the Israelis cannot get away with it.

That leaves the four more civilized options. One is to simply keep the various identity groups apart to reduce friction. This was common in the northern cities of the United States into the 20th century. The old neighborhood system that is romanticized today used to be rigorously policed by the authorities to make sure blacks were not going into Italian areas and vice-versa. Keeping the peace meant keeping the groups as separate as possible from one another.

In the South there was a soft version of segregation. Diversity primarily meant blacks, who were systematically segregated from whites in largely symbolic ways. Blacks and whites could share public spaces, but had to maintain separation, even if it were mostly symbolic like riding in the back of the bus. This performative segregation was to reinforce the notion that the two races could never mix. Segregation became a habit of mind, rather than physical separation.

Both of those effective and popular systems were overthrown by the managerial elite in favor of the chaos of the present. This system does not have a catchy name, like segregation or Jim Crow, but proportionalism will do. The system of rights that had been the basis of America society was abandoned in favor of egalitarian ideals to which the elites make exceptions in order to achieve what they arbitrarily see as a proportional outcome among the various tribes of America.

The growing tyranny that must come from such a system is what is driving the academic debates about the civil rights revolution and the rear guard action to hold the line against DIE programs in the institutions. Of course, the people responsible for this disaster are not interested in altering course. They are especially uninterested in the fourth option which is to not manage the diversity at all. This was the way America managed diversity through most of the 19th century.

A good example of this is in this interesting post about an old house by one of the professors in that linked video. He bought an old farmhouse and got curious about its history, so he did the research. It turns out that his house has a diverse history that reflects the way diversity was managed in early America. Basically, people were left to sort themselves out as best they could, which generally meant peaceful separation when peaceful cohabitation was not possible.

As pointed out in that post, who people are, in terms of their primary identity, is how they live, and no amount of downward force can change it. This is why the path of proportionalism as practiced by our tyrants must lead to that first and oldest option for dealing with diversity. They are trying to wipe out whiteness, by which they mean white people, through a campaign of cultural genocide, along with the importation of nonwhites in numbers no society can sustain.

The trouble is that wiping out even a small minority is difficult. Purging America of “whiteness” when most of the population is white and determined to live as they prefer, in the teeth of the cultural pogroms, is impossible. This brings us to the irreconcilable contradiction that lies at the heart of the current crisis. For the ruling elite to remain the currently constructed ruling elite they must continue with proportionalism, even though it must fail and lead to their eventual overthrow.

What all of this points to is both a solution to the current tyrannical regime and the challenge of diversity. Because whites will remain the largest population and will increase their self-segregation in response to their shrinking majority and the cultural assault on them from the elites, the racial tyranny must collapse. Put another way, the old solution of self-sorting, the habit of frontier America, will be the rocks upon which the racial tyrants will be destroyed.

This may seem overly optimistic, but the reality is the current regime is fighting human nature, which is undefeated in fights of this sort. Ideology, and the racialized politics of this age are ideological, is hostile to human nature. Communism did not fail due to technical errors. It failed because it was inhuman. The same is true of the racial ideology of the managerial class. Peaceful separation is the natural state of Americans, and it will be it natural order again.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Trump The Elephant

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Mary was a five-ton Asian elephant that performed at a circus, until she went berserk and killed one of her handlers. For some reason, the otherwise gentle beast attacked the handler on his second day of work. She picked him up with her trunk, hurled him against a wall and then stepped on his head. The circus owner decided that the right thing to do was to hold a public execution of the elephant for the crime of having murdered the elephant handler. The elephant was then hanged.

This strange story happened in 1916 in rural Tennessee, and it is a good way to think about what is about to happen in a New York City courtroom. This week the jury will get the Trump case with instructions by the judge to convict. This trial and the behavior of the people running it is like the execution of a circus elephant. It is about vengeance, rather than justice. The circus owner hanged Mary the elephant to satisfy the lust for vengeance and the conviction of Trump is for the same purpose.

The trial of Trump has nothing to do with the law. He paid a lawyer to make a problem go away, which happens all the time in America. The claim here is that it was booked incorrectly by his accounting department. The trial was never about the alleged accounting error. It was an excuse to humiliate a man that the judge, the prosecutors, the media and most likely the jury think deserves to be punished just as the locals thought Mary the elephant needed to be punished.

There have always been two sides to punishment. The one we like to think is our motivation is side that seeks to discourage future bad behavior. We want the criminal punished so he and others will not commit future crimes. That is a pleasant thought, but in reality, most of the time punishment is about vengeance. The person who harmed us and is causing harm is what the masses detest the most. Low morality revolves around those things that harm people, society, and our beliefs.

Ironically, this is why the “best” people have relished the seedy details of this trial and now prepare to celebrate the guilty verdict. Joe Biden is set to give an Oval Office speech once the verdict is read. The reason for this is the managerial class has the morality of a servant, despite their control of the institutions of power. They look at Trump as someone who harmed them, their system of rule and their beliefs, so as far as they are concerned, he is evil and must be punished.

The Trump phenomenon has provided an interesting insight into the psychology of the managerial elite. Despite their pretensions and their control of the institutions, they are still motivated by a low form of morality. That starts with what the weak always fear, which is harm done to them by those with power. Theirs is the slave morality which is rooted in paranoia, distrust, and fear. Being a good person, therefore, means not causing those reactions among the servant class.

It makes sense as the managerial elite are not powerful in the convention way in which we think of power in a society. They are the product of a system that empowers the servant of the owner, rather than their own accomplishments. You rise in this system by pleasing those above you and managing your horizontal relations. No can ever reach a place of independence within the system as the system is built upon interlocking relationships within the institutions.

This is the difference between an owner and a manager. The CEO of a company is not truly powerful because he must answer to the owners. The power he wields is on behalf of the people who granted him that power. Those people have power due to their own deeds, so their source of power is internal rather than external. Further, that CEO must always fear being replaced by someone below him. The manager must always be paranoid and fearful of everyone around him.

Trump, of course, is not a product of the managerial system. He is in many respects the abnegation of that system. Rather than getting rich and famous through a system of interlocking dependencies, he got rich building big, complicated buildings and famous by being good on television. Trump, for all his faults, is his own man and this is the not just the opposite of managerial man, it is the nullification of him. It is the existence of Trump that terrifies the managerial class, not his ideas.

This is the other cause for managerial rage over Trump. He has choices because his power is internal. He did not have to run in 2016 and he does not have to run in 2024, but he chose to for his own reasons. Everyone involved in the case against Trump depends to a great degree on the decisions of others. They have bosses or they have a career that comes with normative demands. The judge has to act in a certain way in order to remain in good standing.

That is a key difference between the owner and the manager. The owner can separate himself from the manager, but the manager can never separate from the owner without losing all of his status. The owner makes choices based on what he thinks is best, while the manager makes choices based on that fear of losing his position. The reason the slave resents the master is the same reason the manager resents the owner. It is why the managerial class despises Trump.

There is a related motivation here. The managerial class does not just see themselves as functionaries managing the system. They see themselves as something like a priestly class that dictates the happiness of the people. This is especially true in the media which has the greatest loathing for Trump and his fans. These are people whose power rests solely on dictating what is morally right and wrong. They sit in the judgment of everyone, even the truly powerful.

The reason for this is the power of priestly class rests on their framing of good and evil, which always places them on the side of the good. They prove this by pretending to live the purest of lives according to the morality they impose. Note how our managerial elite is always preaching about things like the climate, race, our democracy, and other parts of the progressive catechism. Our managerial class is the clergy, and the elites see themselves as the high priests.

There is no one who enjoys vengeance more than the priest. The suffering of the wicked is the greatest joy to the truly righteous. For the managerial class, punishing those who transgress and seeing them suffer is their reward. It is why the media love ruining people. It makes them feel like Aquinas relishing the image of the damned writhing in the pits of hell. This is why this case matters so much. The managerial priests will get to see a wicked man suffer.

This returns us to Mary the elephant. The people who wanted to see the elephant hanged were not demanding it for practical reasons. They were weak people who lived in fear and the elephant came to represent that fear. Killing the animal by public hanging was an act of piety. It represented the triumph of their sense of justice, which is always expressed as vengeance by those who see themselves as weak. They killed the elephant as an act of revenge.

That is the point of this trial. The managerial class wants revenge on Trump for violating their taboos and holding a mirror up to their system. Vengeance is the product of revenge and revenge is the result of resentment. The managerial class resents men like Trump as a part of their organizing ethos. By running for president, he became the slave owner who came down to party with the slaves in the slave quarters. His actions remind them of their status as slaves.

In the end, that is the point of the Trump phenomenon. Despite his populist rhetoric, Trump is an aristocrat of the old sort. He is a self-made man. The question he poses is will we and can we be ruled by the servants of aristocrats or will they fail and be replaced by the natural aristocracy. Can you have a society ruled by people controlled by resentment for the natural elite? That is the question Trump poses. Whether they hang him or not, the question must be answered.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Total State

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Note: Behind the green door is a series of posts on the original Planet of the Apes films, which I watched and reviewed. There was no Sunday podcast due to the holiday, but it will return next week. Subscribe here or here.

If you are of a certain age and inclination, reading The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, a new book by Auron MacIntyre, feels like a trip down memory lane to a time when you were discovering the major figures of what would eventually be called paleoconservatism. The text is filled with references to Carl Schmidt, Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, James Burnham, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, and other figures who feature prominently in the paleo subculture.

That is the first way to approach this book as the writer was by his own account a garden variety conservative until a few years ago. That means he accepted the neoconservative foreign policy claims, the libertarian economics, and the civic nationalism of the Buckley crowd. The Trump years, the 2020 election and Covid forced him to reevaluate that way of framing politics. Working in the media, he also witnessed firsthand the corruption and mendacity of the fifth estate.

Judging from the number of references to Covid and how often it is used as an example in making points about what he calls the Total State, it is fair to assume that the mass panic and group think within the managerial class during Covid is what sent the writer on his journey out of civic nationalism. The state’s willingness and ability to trample the idea of a rights-based society in the name of public health, along with the media cheerleading, broke the spell of civic nationalism.

What followed was a crash course in the ideas of the “alternative right” as Paul Gottfried used to call it before that term was anathematized. The result is this book which can be read as an intellectual journey. Ideas common in dissident circles were new and amazing in their ability to explain what was happening during Covid. The enthusiasm MacIntyre has for the material will surely bring back memories for older readers who recall experiencing this material in their youth.

Another way of reading this book is as a summary, a Cliff Notes version, of managerialism and the managerial state. MacIntyre borrows the title of the book from Carl Schmidt, who called this form of government der Totalstaat, which translates into English as the Total State. He could also have used the term Sam Francis used, Leviathan, or simply the managerial state. All roughly mean the same thing, which is the all-encompassing corporate state.

Read this way, this book is an excellent primer for the person who is embarking on a journey out of civic nationalism. MacIntyre covers all the important bits using accessible language and recent examples, like the Covid panic. He makes good use of references to the pantheon of stars that make up the paleo constellation but does so in a way that does not require the reader to know about these people. It is an introduction to other modes of conservative thought and the topic of managerialism.

Still another way to approach this book is as the down payment on the long overdue project of building an alternative intellectual framework. What passes for the right in America was not much more complicated than saying, “not so fast” to the schemes dreamed up by the people we call the left. The closest anyone came to building an alternative moral framework was Sam Francis who died before he could finish is magnum opus, Leviathan and Its Enemies.

In his review of The Total State, Greg Hood suggests this might be the start or a restart of that project as MacIntyre is not just a nobody on the internet. He is a member of the so-called conservative media with access to influencers allowed to operate unmolested on the public stage. He regularly turns up on television during elections and has mainstream guests on his show. MacIntyre dusting off these ideas from a perch within mainstream media could be the start of the project.

There could be something to this as there is a gold rush right now to find something to replace Buckley-style conservatism. There are formal efforts like Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism project and the Claremont Institute. There are informal efforts among online content creators, the sort of people I called Cosmos and those Dave Green calls the LinkedIn Right. There are lots of people searching for a New Right and perhaps they discover a new ideological framework.

The book is not without its flaws, of course. MacIntyre mentions Curtis Yarvin too many times and one is counted as one too many. Yarvin simply has no place in a serious discussion about politics or political theory. Maybe his name was dropped because he is reportedly Peter Theil’s court jester or maybe MacIntyre thinks this is a useful reference point for his intended audience. Regardless, seeing Yarvin’s name turn up in anything is like discovering a hair in your soup.

That aside, another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists. Burnham noticed that it first appeared in fascist systems. Later writers observed that communism was also good soil for the growth of managerialism. Now we see American-style liberal democracy has also been overtaken by bourgeois managers. This is hardly an accident, but paleos have never produced an explanation for it.

That leads to another quibble that also comes from the paleo space. MacIntyre cannot provide an answer for what to do about it. He finished his book with three possible ends for The Total State. One is it staggers on due to a monopoly of power. Another is it is replaced by a strong man of some sort. The final option, the one MacIntyre prefers, is that it slowly dies from its own internal contradictions. Note that none of these lead to any action against the managerial system.

That was always the flaw of paleoconservatism. It was a call to inaction in the face of perpetual revolution from the top. You cannot build a political movement on a foundation that calls for hiding out in the basement until the storm passes. Even if the storm passes, what comes next will not be the work of those who choose inaction in the face of danger, but by those who have a platform that calls for action in pursuit of something different and better than hoping for nicer weather.

In the end, the judgment of any book is whether it did what it set out to do, not what could have or should have done according to the critics. When approached by any of the angles above, The Total State accomplishes the goal of the author. It is a book for those who would like a fuller understanding of the terms commonly used in dissident circles and for the people looking for a path out of the banality of what passes for conventional conservatism.

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