On Patriotism

Most years the polling services and regime media outlets do polling on patriotism to coincide with the July 4th holiday. This year is an exception, probably because it is an election year, and the regime is at war with itself. Given that the numbers last year were dreadful, no one in the regime was interested in the topic. This was a good decision, given the intrigue swirling around Biden at the moment. No need to remind people that no one else is happy with their country either.

One exception comes from the New York Post, which had one of the young zombies from Conservative Inc. write a post about how her generation is not patriotic because the schools failed them. Seeing this sort of boomer-bait out in the wild is a bit weird if you no longer consume regime media. That post reads like something from the Young Republicans essay contest of 1995. There are few things more jarring than a young person who sounds like an old person.

Objectively, it is easy to see why patriotism is in decline. Most people define “patriotism” with the general happiness of the country. Right now, even those who doing well in the material sense are cranky about the country. Their leaders are buffoons, and the Dirt People continue to not know their place. The Dirt People, of course, are unhappy with the Cloud People for all the obvious reasons. You do not have to dig deep into the issue to see why patriotism is at rock bottom.

Of course, below the surface of those youth numbers lies the demographic reality that an empty vessel like Mx. Schlott is unable to notice. Most young people are not white and not only have no connection to the country’s past, but they have also been conditioned to hate that past as part of their identity. Import enough barbarians, arm them with the tools of cultural destruction and it is no surprise that they make war on the past of the host people and their culture.

It is tempting to hate the barbarians flooding into the country, but the fault lies with the rich people who run the country. The barbarians are just rationally responding to what they are experiencing in the process. They are invited in and encouraged to smash the place up, so from the barbarian perspective, why should they have any respect for the place they are encouraged to smash up? They are literally hired by the overclass to destroy the very idea of America.

Putting that aside, the root cause here is democracy. It is not an accident that the cultural and spiritual decline accelerated with the dramatic increase in the use of the word “democracy” in public discourse. Before this became a feature of our political Tourette’s syndrome, reformers talked in terms of returning to a past ideal, rather than pulling out a clean sheet of paper. Making war on the past was never part of the agenda, even for the cranks on the left.

Starting with the end of the Cold War, this changed. Along with the rise in the use of the word democracy, came the idea that what American needs is a rewrite. Clinton ran on the claim that America was desperate for radical change. This was despite the fact the country had gone through a great economic boom. Obama was even more explicit in his desire to fundamentally reorder the country, because in his view, everything was wrong with the “words on the paper.”

The authority for this program to reinvent the country was democracy, by which they meant the real will of the people. It might seem like people were fat, dumb, and happy with consumerism, but the new democrats knew better. What America wanted was radical change and that is what we have gotten for close to three decades. It is what Biden promises, despite having been in office for four years. Note the critique of Trump is that he wants to take us back to the past.

This is the poison of democracy. In order to win office, you must win a majority to your program, but to do that you must first get public attention. No one gets attention with a program of keeping things the same. Imagine a protest where the speaker calls, “What do we want?” and the crowd responds with “More of the same!” and you can see why democracy selects for change over stability. In fact, the only way democracy can work is as a race to find the most radical path.

Then there is the nature of the people rewarded by democracy. You see it in the interview with Mx. Schlott linked at the top. She has cultivated a disdain for the present, but also an indifference to it. This is the heart of the liberal who is sure she knows what needs to be fixed and how to fix it but cannot be bothered doing the mundane tasks that make society possible. Democracy loves the booshie snob with a head full of impractical, but fashionable ideas.

It is important to note that the issue with democracy is not the mechanics of measuring the general will on an issue. The problem lies with the assumption that everyone has a purpose, so collectively society has a purpose and therefore the point of democracy is to discover that purpose and then reorder society in pursuit of the purpose, even if it means trampling the laws. In a democracy, even the rules of democracy are fair game when seeking to move society towards its spiritual end.

Of course, this is why patriotism is impossible in a democracy. To be patriotic, one has to love his ancestors and their accomplishments so much that he is willing to sacrifice to maintain those accomplishments. This means the natural limits on men of the present is the accumulated wisdom of the past. You cannot have a program of constant change and a love of the past or even a healthy respect for your ancestors. Democracy hates the past and anyone who thinks otherwise.

This is why patriotism is dead. It is not the demographic changes or the material conditions that have killed our love of the past. It is the institutional hatred of the past that has become the state religion. In order to fully embrace democracy, one must not only break free of the past, but turn and face it like an enemy. Despite all the pretensions about the future, our lovers of democracy care little about what comes next, only the next round of ancestor hatred.

This may seem like a grim view of the present, but it is only through the clear lens of realism that an alternative can be formed. Conservatism failed to hold onto anything in the face of this democratic onslaught. That means what comes next must not be a defense of the past, which has already slipped away from us, but a new offensive built around a vision of a new future. What comes next will have to be built on the bones of the democrats, not on what they have destroyed.


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

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.


You Can Never Hate Them Enough

To great fanfare Julian Assange struck a deal with the American government whereby he would be allowed to leave a British jail and return home to Australia. Reportedly, the deal he accepted was to plead guilty to some charges in exchange for a sentence of time served in the British jail. The full details of the deal have not been released, but most likely he gave the government information they wanted or sufficiently demonstrated that he was not in possession of it.

This was always the primary issue. Secret documents and information leak out of the government all the time, but the government knows who leaked it. Most of the time the leaks are official leaks. Someone with authorized access to something hands it over to someone in regime media to publish. Once in a while the people at the top of the regime get mad about this habit and demand to know the source, and the regime reporter puts on a show of resisting but gives in at the end.

Generally speaking, what the regime cares most about in the case of these leaks is the source of the leak and the method they used. If regime information is getting into the public through unknown channels or by unknown figures, it can not only lead to things in the public the regime does not want made public, but it threatens the legitimacy of the regime for the people inside the regime. Blackmail, for example, only works when the victim is sure the blackmailer has control of the information.

A big part of what makes the managerial system of the Global American Empire work is the trust the people in the system have in the system. The yawning gap we see between the confidence of regime figures and their ability is due in large part to their trust in the system. For them, the system works, so they naturally assume their elevation inside the system is due to merit. A loss of control of the system could lead to a loss of trust and the whole thing spins apart.

Putting that aside, the only good thing about Assange getting released is that the worst people can no longer wave around that bloody shirt. For close to two decades, fringy irritants have been using the Assange case to demonstrate their moral purity and to defend the crackpot idea that journalism is a priesthood. Their defense of Assange always rested on the dubious claim that journalists have special rights and therefore must not be subject to the laws governing the rest of us.

You see, once you call yourself a journalist, you get to ignore the rules of decency, the laws governing private property and declare yourself a moral authority. You get to betray confidences and deceive people about your intentions. You also get to steal the property of others and use it for personal gain. All the while, you get to wrinkle up your nose as if you caught wind of a bad odor and lecture the rest of us about your moral goodness and our moral failings.

The game here was to hold Assange up as a paragon of virtue because he was upholding the highest standards of journalism. He was doing the same thing major media does all the time, namely revealing secrets about the regime. In reality, Assange was just trying to avoid an American prison. Like every other person calling himself a journalist, Assange was a dirtbag and a thief. He trafficked in stolen goods for personal benefit and when he got caught, he tried to avoid punishment.

If you are clear headed about this, the correct response to the Assange case is the opposite than that of the moralizers. Information is property and people who traffic in stolen information should be treated like any other thief. In fact, they should be treated more harshly. Stolen property can be replaced, but stolen information is often irreplaceable and the damage that ensues from its theft can last a lifetime. Information thieves should be killed on the spot.

In other words, the right response to the Assange case was not to treat him as a hero but to demand that all journalists get the same treatment. Imagine a world where doxers have to flee the country and hide out in embassies to avoid being sent to prison and you will immediately see the logic. Imagine if the people who stole Trump’s tax returns and gave them to the New York Times were sent to the gallows along with the people who agreed to publish them. Nice thought, isn’t it?

The defense of journalism has always been a moral perversion. The worst people a society can produce end up in journalism. The fact that they from time to time do harm to terrible people is not just used as a reason to elevate these garbage people, but a reason to sacralize their gutter morality. Journalists are good people, so the reasoning goes, because they are more degenerate than politicians. Assange was celebrated because he represented the ideal of this gutter morality.

Those calling themselves journalists, but lack a place in regime media, have noted that regime journalists have been silent on Assange. The main reason is regime journalists are moral nullities. They envy the attention Assange is getting, so they use the only power they have to smite him. The main power of regime media is the power to ignore, so they were happy to ignore Assange. There is no honor among thieves, so the thieving weasels of the media can never honor one of their own.

Despite his position at the bottom of the moral hierarchy, Assange was useful as a regime irritant, thus proving no life is entirely meaningless. Hopefully, his final contribution is to sink quietly into obscurity. The moralizers who have used his name to elevate the worst profession and the worst people will have to find a new bloody shirt to wave around in defense of the despicable trade. The rest of us can return to hating the worst people, because you can never hate them enough.


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***@mi*********************.com











.


American Paradox

Note: Behind the green door is a short video on the best way to dispose of body, a post about why you should believe conspiracy theories and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.


One of the things about the modern age is that the public statements from the centers of cultural production and the institutions are often contradictory. The most obvious are the statements about “defending democracy” which almost always come when an election goes against the beautiful people. Their preferred candidate or party loses and all of a sudden, the democratic result is declared a threat to democracy. It happens so often now that people no longer bother to laugh at it.

There are these sorts of contradictions everywhere. For example, our betters continue to use the language of rights to define society. Even the most fevered social justice fanatic would not say the government should assign you a mate. You get to decide who you date and who you will marry. On the other hand, if a group of white people start a club and say it is for European people, the full force of the managerial state will come down on them for exercising their right to free association.

You see this with the people we call the left. Every once in a while, one of them will write a confession piece about how they have no black friends. In fact, it is rare for a white progressive to have any association with nonwhites. One of the amusing truths of this age is that the whiter or blacker a congressional district, the more likely the representative is to be a kook. Black districts select hilariously insane black politicians, and all white districts get the hardest thumping lefties.

The lived experience of white progressives is closer to the dreamed of life of white nationalists, but the progressive sees no contradiction. You see, they have a right to live where they like and among whom they like. At the same time, they can wag their boney finger at you for your whiteness, even if you live as a minority in a majority diverse part of the country. You see, there is no hypocrisy as they are just exercising their right to live where they choose to live.

What this gets to is a central paradox of progressivism. An individual has rights, including the right to be free of discrimination. These are contradictory assertions as the only way to prevent discrimination is to infringe on individual rights. If one is to be free of discrimination then it means forcing everyone else to act in ways they otherwise would not act, as in not associating with someone. Your right to not associate with a potential employee must yield to her right to not be oppressed.

Within the progressive morality is a paradox. An individual has rights that must be respected, as in the dating example. Two individuals or three individuals also have these same rights. At some point, there are a number of individuals that flip from judging them as individuals to judging them as a group. The person renting a room in their home can discriminate as they please, but if that landlord is operating a rental property, they must abide by the codes governing group behavior.

At what point does a collection of individuals become a group? If one white person can exercise his right to free association, how many white people constitutes a group and therefore they lose their right to free association? This is the paradox. There is a number at which a collection of white people loses their rights and fall under the supervision of the moral authorities. The trouble is the number cannot be defined, which is a form of Sorites paradox.

This is the paradox where you start with grains of rice. You start placing grains on a table and they remain some number of grains until at some point you have enough grains to declare it is a pile of rice. Logically, there is a number where you go from a collection of grains to a pile, but it is impossible to define the number. You can arbitrarily decide it is one hundred grains or one million grains, but there is no mathematical proof that locates the exact number.

We see the same thing with the progressive view of rights and responsibilities. At some point, a collection of individuals becomes a group and therefore they transition from the rules judging individuals to the rules judging groups. A solitary white man has a right to associate with whom he chooses but get enough white guys together and at some point, they lose their individual rights in favor of group responsibility. The number must exist, but no one bothers to define it.

This works in reverse, as well. Progressives have long argued that whites as a group owe blacks, as a group, reparations for slavery. California has been debating such a scheme for years. The trouble comes when the white plumber is told he has to send money to the black sports star. Collectively the morality of reparations is somewhat justifiable, but once it is applied individually it becomes an abomination. In theory there lies a middle ground, but no one can define it.

The source of this paradox is the fact that the progressive moral framework starts with the group and works backward. Since the Greeks, people have worked the problem in reverse by starting with the rights and obligations of the individual. This meant carving out a well-defined space where the individual is free to act as he sees fit. In old Norse, for example, there was a word for private habits and a word for public habits because it was understood there was a clear line between the two.

In fact, an individual’s obligations to the group were all within the context of what is best for the group, which was always tied to group survival. There was no collective moral purpose, only a collective practical purpose. Socrates did not flee Athens because it would bring shame to his family or to Athens. He remained and faced his punishment because it was good for Socrates the individual. He upheld Athenian law, even if it meant death, because it was his duty to the survival of the whole.

For a long time, since before Gettysburg, progressives have determined that there is a moral purpose to America as a collective entity. Therefore, everyone as an American has an individual duty to further that collective moral purpose. Since the good of the many must outweigh the good of the individual, the moral purpose of society must inevitably chip away at individual rights. Thus, this paradox we see with regards to rights slowly gives way to collective morality.

In a way, the hyper-moralization of mass culture and the transformation of the state into an explicitly moral structure, is an effort to resolve the contradiction. If the point of America is to impose a new moral order on the world, then it must follow that the point of being an American is to dedicate your life to that cause. Individual rights, which imply choice, must fall away in favor of universal moral duties. In this new paradigm, the Bill of Rights becomes the bill of moral duties.

Theocracies have a poor history primarily because men are not angels. This means the moral authorities must either accept something less than the ideal outcome or exhaust themselves making the people comply. This is why our mass culture sounds like a deranged church choir. The ruling class cares far more about you having only the right thoughts in your head than making sure Boeing builds safe planes. At some point, practical necessity requires the people to overthrow the priests.


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***@mi*********************.com











.


The Internet Of Reality

Note: As everyone probably knows, VDare has been under assault by the regime for years and may finally be forced to close down. They have been de-banked so the only way to send them money at the moment is GiveSendGo. If you can spare a few bucks, they could sure use it.


In the early days of the internet, the public places were mostly populated by people who assumed wide open was the natural order. As opposed to the real world with its silos and private spaces, the internet would be wide open. Everyone could go into this new public square and say and hear what they liked. That is why the first public forums were wide open and comprehensive. The idea was that you had one big forum, and everyone could pile in and have their say.

It did not take long for that to fail. The early forums quickly splintered as factions that would develop and soon the forums were a riot of antagonistic posting. This was long before the smart people made it easy for the progressive kooks to get online, but even in a world of smart, tech savvy people, factionalism was an issue. Bulletin boards then UseNet and then message boards followed this pattern. They started centralized and open and soon balkanized into private platforms.

Once the internet was made accessible to the midwit progressive, this pattern became more toxic and nastier. Instead of college football forums unable to maintain civility amongst rival fans, it was the tone police and moral scolds creating dissention and demanding their rivals be censored. They worked to gain control of the platforms and then set about driving off their bogeymen. This led to alternative forums for the people who had been purged from the main platforms.

Another aspect of this new version of the old pattern is that the progressive kooks are unable to start their own forums, so they must infiltrate and co-opt existing platforms, which is why we have a censorious atmosphere online. It was not enough for the kooks to gain control of Twitter, for example, they also had to attack any alternative sites that sprang up in response. In other words, the kooks were threatening the normal balkanization dynamic that had existed since the start.

The point of all this is the last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. Of course, this is compounded by the fact that it is now impossible to avoid the scold. In the analog world you can easily spot the scold and avoid her. They have a look about them that is easy to recognize. If you knew nothing about Kate Starbird you would take one look at her and know she is someone who should be avoided. Online, there is no way to spot these spiteful mutants until they begin to immiserate you.

Here is where we see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

It is clear that kooks in other states are looking to follow the lead of New York, much like we saw with the internet. One site would be subverted by kooks and before long the other sites followed their actions. The peak of this mania was when every internet platform banned Alex Jones on the same day. Even obscure sites like Roku banned him in the rush to anathematize the man. The dream was to bring back internal banishment through de-platforming.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. 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.

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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***@mi*********************.com











.


The Future Of Virtual Society

At the dawn of the internet revolution, it was common for big-brained public intellectuals to talk about what it meant for the nature of society. As is always the case, they confused what they wanted to happen with what would happen. That usually meant some form of “as information is democratized, more people will have access to information and therefore come to agree with me on everything.” The internet would bring about the glorious egalitarian future.

Most of the predictions about the impact of the internet turned out to be wrong, but the internet has changed society. In fact, it has changed people by changing the selection pressures within society. For example, the phenomenon of the digital grifter is something that could not exist in the past. These people certainly existed in some form, but the digital age rewards their behavior, while the analog age did not, so they now flourish, while in the past they were suppressed.

That is how to think about it. Virtual reality is not reality. Life on-line exaggerates certain features by removing constraints or offering incentives. The solitary nature of on-line life removes the social signals that people rely upon to figure out what they can say and what they should not say. When you are on-line, you are by yourself in the physical realm, even though you are interacting with others in the virtual realm. Those people, however, are mere avatars of people.

Of course, things that get the user attention are rewarded with likes, clicks and views, so this encourages more of that behavior. It does not take long before the weak minded are consumed with attention seeking. Twitter is full of hollow people who amplify the current thing as a way to get attention. In the hours after every cable news actor was sporting a Ukraine pin and chanting “keev”, the internet personality was pulling down her Covid stuff and putting up Ukraine stuff.

Years ago, Dave Chappell did a skit where the internet was a real place. What made the skit amusing, in addition to Chappelle’s delivery, was the fact that the internet is such an absurd place compared to reality. Imagine walking through a store and everyone in the store is doing whatever they can to get your attention. Imagine the day after the war started, everything at the store is in Ukraine colors and all of the employees are chanting “keev” at the top of their lungs.

Another novelty that the digital age has brought is the clout chaser. This is a person who spends his days scanning the internet looking for the next thing so he can seem like the first person to get on it. These people front-run trends in order to present themselves as trendsetters. They will often glom onto a person, positively or negatively,  who has a big following on-line. This lets them free-ride off that person to gain attention and followers for themselves.

This is not something that could exist in the analog age. Famous people had flunkies, but the flunky was never going to use their association with the famous person to make himself famous independent of the famous person. Mike Cernovich could never have become a thing in the analog age by stalking famous people. On Twitter he was able to build a huge following mostly by front running trends he had no role in creating and glomming onto big Twitter accounts.

Another version of this is the manufactured influencer. If you watch YouTube, you will have noticed that Lex Fridman was always in your suggestions. You could only watch woodworking videos, but YouTube would suggest to you a Fridman video. The reason is the people backing him paid YouTube to do it. A similar thing is now happening with Jordan Peterson, who signed up with the Ben Shapiro operation. They are now paying to have Peterson promoted on YouTube.

They did the same thing with Ben Shapiro. The people behind the Daily Wire made a Mortimer and Randolph Duke type of bet to see if they could make this obscure hobbit man into a star. How they did it was social media. They paid to have Ben Shapiro pushed heavy to middle-class whites on Facebook. He was what they hoped young people were really thinking. It worked. This helium voiced nobody is now a household name and a major influencer of old white conservatives.

Tim Pool is another version of this phenomenon. Spend some time watching his YouTube channel and ask yourself why he has a huge audience. There are hundreds of people doing some version of the same act. The answer is he has the backing of an influencer production company. Richard Hanania is the most recent example of the manufactured influencer. The guy suddenly appears on-line and before long all the other influencers are mentioning him.

This deranging of the public culture to now has mostly been about rewarding qualities and people that existed but were suppressed in the analog age. What we see with the Zoomers is a whole generation of people raised in this culture. This post in the New York Times, of all places, is a good read on the subject. Those born around the turn of the century are the first generation raised on the internet. This is their normal as they never knew a world without the internet.

One result of this cohort being raised on-line is they lack the normal social skills that have defined human life for ten thousand years. People have noted that in real life, this cohort is shy, awkward and quite weird. On the other hand, they are the exact opposite as their on-line persona. Meet Nick Fuentes and you are not all that impressed as his social skills are non-existent. Turn on a mic or pull out a camera and he goes from shrinking violet to boisterous and confident.

This is why this generation was not upset by the lockdowns. They did not complain about Zoom school because that was better than having to be around those talking meat sacks on campus. They prefer life on-line to life outside. They have grown up with the chat room as their playground. Instead of playing games with their friends in the physical realm, they played games on-line. Their peer group was the collection of avatars and personalities in the chat.

Everyone has their opinion on this stuff, but the important question that no one seems to be considering is if society is possible under these conditions. China’s heavy-handed censorship is viewed as a defense of the regime, but it could simply be a way to tamp down the negative selection pressures of the internet. American censorship is driven mostly by ethnic paranoia, which is another negative quality that is being amplified by the forces of the digital age.

It could very well be that the newly diverse Western societies cannot hold up under the selection pressure of the internet. The digital age amplifies the differences, which amplifies the natural reaction to those differences. This has the effect of bringing diverse civilizational outlooks into virtue contact. The result is hostility. The West may be forced to choose between the glories of diversity or the virtual public square. The answer may be a segregated internet in order to keep the peace.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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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***@mi*********************.com











.


Natural Excogitating

There are two strains of thought on this side of the great divide with regards to the behavior of the people in charge. One camp, the dominant camp, thinks there is an organized campaign run by a small group of people. The so-called deep state pulls the levers resulting in the things we see happening in the world. The other camp, the much smaller camp, subscribes to the emergent behavior doctrine. What we see is the result of the hive mind that dominates the managerial class.

By any reasonable standard, the deep state side has the easier claim. Spend a week following the main regime media organs and a pattern emerges. On a Monday, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other legacy operations will be running with the same theme. The next day, all of the next tier media operations are running with the Monday theme. By the end of the week, the media narrative has become conventional wisdom, maybe even holy writ.

For example, the midterms are coming up and the uniparty is a little worried that the rubes may be catching on, so they have the media doing their fear, uncertainty and doubt act to wrap up the summer. Here is the Post claiming the red wave nonsense is fading fast. Totally by coincidence, the Times has a similar story. They say it is abortion that is killing Republican chances. Here and here are supporting sources for the same claims made by the big media sites.

The effect of what certainly looks like an orchestrated campaign is supposed to be a collapse of opposition to the regime. Alongside these posts about the dimming Republican hopes in the election are stories about how Glorious Leader has magically made student debt go away. NBC claims that almost half of Latino debt will be wiped away by Glorious Leader. A debt jubilee that targets an important uniparty demographic just when Republican hopes are fading. What a coincidence!

Whether any of this is true is hard to know. It really does not matter if it is true because by next week it will be gospel. Just look at the Russian collusion hoax. Regime media still carries on as if it is obvious that Trump was in league with Putin, who used his super powers to rig the election. He did not rig the 2020 election, which was the cleanest in human history. Only election deniers think otherwise. He rigged the 2016 election, which only QAnon thinks is real.

The point is, spend any time consuming the main media organs of the regime and it certainly looks like it is all coordinated. Add to it the known fact that the activist we call journalist have been caught coordinating their work. Ezra Klein operated a secret group of four hundred far-left activists working in the media. The point was to coordinate their activism across many platforms. This is the sort of thing that supports the deep state idea, but also the claims about its nature.

The thing is though, there is little evidence that spooks from the wilderness of mirrors are behind these operations. When people hear the phrase “deep state” they think of men in stuffed chairs discussing how best to hide the alien space craft that just landed in the desert. The deep state rigged the food pyramid so normal men are filled with soy and therefore easy to manipulate. The deep state is not paranoid weirdos working in the media, sharing the hive mind.

That is the argument against the deep state and for the hive mind. That really is the nut of the emergent behavior argument. Fill a room with people who line their clothes with aluminum foil and very weird things will emerge. The people who work in the media believe completely in the deep state argument. They just think it is run by guys name Prescott and Pemberton. They are raising a secret invisible Hitler army to implement the final final solution.

The further you go up the system, the cultural and ideological diversity thins to the point where it becomes a hive mind. In the media, you cannot survive unless you support the latest things. The selection pressure is for compliance. A process operates across the high ground of the empire. Walk into the C-suites of a large company and it is power skirts, soy faces and a unified commitment to the latest thing. Woke capital emerged from within capital. It was not imposed on it.

The appearance of coordination is the result of a shared set of beliefs by the people who run the important bits of the empire. If tomorrow they suddenly converted to Islam, their women would be wearing head coverings and the men sporting beards. They would carry on as if they had been Islamic since forever. Anyone asking about the sudden conversion to Islam would be called a blasphemer. The New York Times style guide would be relabeled the sharia style guide.

We got a real world test of this claim in February. Russian tanks crossed into the Donbas and instantly every talk head on television was sporting a Ukraine lapel pin and chanting “Keev” like they had a novel form of Tourette’s. It was as if someone updated their firmware overnight. In a way, this is what happened. Everyone was suddenly imitating the others in the hive. It was not a conscious act. There was no discussion or dissent from the program. It was the latest thing.

Just consider what is happening with the Covid vaccine. When Trump announced the program, the hive condemned it as orange poison. Trump exits and suddenly the hive claims the vaccine the universal elixir. They literally spent two years forcing people to take the shot. Now that it is clear it was a fraud from the start and is causing serious health problems, they are pivoted back to blaming Trump. The hive now believes the vaccine debacle was caused by the Trump conspiracy.

When you see these people swinging wildly from one invented reality to the next, it is hard to see the hand of Pemberton and Prescott. Instead, it looks like a murmuring of starlings, rushing in and out of the trees. What controls them is the undefinable, but omnipresent hive mind. They believe the same things, so they react the same way to events, even events they create. The Covid mania makes much more sense when you think of it as a manifestation of a shared reality.

Of course, both sides of this debate can be right. Our ruling class is largely controlled by a shared reality, a new secular religion, but elements inside the hive scheme to manipulate events to their advantage. Here we have Google blithely admitting to running a psychological warfare campaign on the people of Europe. Clearly, the people inside Google excogitating this scheme know what they are doing. On the other hand, they think this is perfectly normal. It is their nature.

This is why it is probably not good to go all in on the deep state or the emergent behavior explanation for what we are seeing. Both are correct to a point but fail to explain the whole. Instead, it is best to think of the people in charge as members of a religious cult and part of that cult is a hatred of normal people. The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@mi*********************.com











.


The Great Hoax

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a review of sorts of a book titillating the usual suspects. Sunday Thoughts is mostly about the various angles to the FBI raid on Trump’s villa last week. SubscribeStar users can find it here and Substack users can find it here.


When it comes time to write the obituary for Western civilization, the focus will not be on the forces of destruction, but the forces of distraction. These are the people who peddle utopian alternatives to the present, thus preventing a real opposition forming up to defend the West from its attackers. The West is not being destroyed by malevolent forces like Wokism, antiwhite radicalism and the concentration of wealth in alien hands, but by the forces preventing an organized resistance.

One of the primary examples of this is libertarianism. The real trick of this evil ideology is that it convinces the victim that he is responding with pure reason to the irrationalism of the rats gnawing away at civilization. In reality he is indulging in fantasy, every bit as ridiculous as left-wing utopianism. The difference is that Marx imagined a world where man was freed from his nature through cooperation, while Murray Rothbard dreamed of you being free from your community.

Libertarianism convinces the victim that cooperation is evil, so he not only eschews any sort of organized resistance, but he also works to prevent it. It is this last bit that allowed it to infiltrate conservatism and turn it into a cat’s paw. Twentieth century conservatism became the great defender of Progressive dominance, undermining any resistance in the name of individual liberty. The result is that otherwise good people volunteer to hang alone rather than hang together.

The true nature of the cult of libertarianism is clear in this review of the most recent Thomas Piketty book, A Brief History of Equality. The author of the review does not beat around the bush attacking Piketty’s ideas. Instead, he warns that it could persuade people to organize against the forces destroying their society. In other words, the crime here is not in being wrong about economics. The crime is in being wrong about politics by advocating against the status quo.

As is custom when critiquing libertarianism, it needs to be pointed out that the author’s revealed preference is for something other than libertarianism. He has steadfastly avoided the dreaded private sector, choosing a life in government, the academy and think tanks. One of things you will never find in the dreaded private sector is a genuine libertarian, because people who work understand that society is not possible without organization and someone enforcing the rules.

Putting that aside, the absurdity of libertarianism is that it starts by agreeing with Marx on human organization. Marx believed that what defined the human condition and drove the flow of history was economic relations. The human condition is defined by man’s economic relations with other men. This is not only the starting point for both Marxism and libertarianism, but the end point as well. Both seek the perfection of human relations through economics.

Of course, Marx was wrong about the nature of man. Humans are not defined by their economic relationships with other men. The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry. The things that define a people are not the product of economic relations but the product of their shared struggle as a people. Culture is the answer to the central question of human organization. “Who are we?” is answered by the traditions, customs and history of the people.

Put another way, culture is the shared labor of the people. It is not just the product of their current labor. Culture is the preservation and improvement of their ancestor’s labor in order top pass it to the next generation. Culture is the shared accretive product of generations of people. That is what defines a people and the individual, not the trading of goods between people. The Marxist and libertarians strip man of his humanity by reducing him to his transactions.

The Marxists and libertarians share something else. Both are a response to the individualism of John Locke. If God holds dominion over the world because he created it, and man was made in God’s image, then it naturally flows that man holds dominion over that which he created. You own you and everything you make because who you are is the product of your labor. This is the bedrock of Western liberalism. We are naturally free because we own ourselves.

Marx saw capitalist economic relations as the source of exploitation, which he defined as men compelled to labor for others. Contrary to popular legend, Marx was not opposed to capitalism, a term he popularized. He saw capitalism as a necessary transition phase to socialism. Eventually, the number of people controlling capital, thus compelling labor, would shrink to the point where people would overthrow them and restore their rights to their own labor.

Libertarianism makes a similar argument. Instead of the holders of capital compelling labor, it is the state. You will note they always avoid discussing who actually owns the state, but instead focus on how the state compels your labor. They tax your labor and force you to so that which you otherwise not do. It is only when the state is eliminated will you be free, because then you will once again own your labor. They land in the same utopia as the Marxist, just by a different road.

It is not hard to see why libertarians despise culture as much as the enemies of Western civilization despise it. Culture defines who decides. The culture of a people defines who makes the final decisions. The answer is always confined to people who are of the people. How those people are selected and by what right they make their decisions on behalf of the people is within that context. Both Marxists and libertarians hate this idea and always oppose it.

This is the great trick of liberal utopianism. One side explicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations in order to reach the promised land. The alleged opponent implicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations but claims to be a defense of those natural relations, which they define as pretty much the same as their opponent’s vision of man in his blessed utopia. In both cases, the goal is a world of pure self-ownership in which man has no debt to anyone but himself.

Whenever the final accounting of Western civilization is done, libertarianism will go down as the greatest hoax in human history. In the name of individual liberty, it commands the followers to build the gas chambers used by their alleged opponents to snuff out the defenders of Western culture. Without out that culture, what is left is a deracinated mass of individuals enslaved to the great ideological state, drugged by cheap consumer goods to avoid contemplating the banality of life.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@mi*********************.com











.


The Death Of Twitter

Note: My Taki post is on different topic from today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. It is also on Substack for paying members there. Going forward, I will post the pay-per-view material on both sites. Some people prefer Substack and other people prefer Subscribestar. There was also a rare Saturday post, which was going to be a Taki post but I changed my mind.


The Elon Musk versus Twitter drama is now heading to the litigation phase, as Musk has decided to pull out of the purchase agreement. The usual idiots have taken to social media to offer their hot takes on the issue. Critics of Musk think he made the great blunder they have been predicting. The far-left thinks this is a victory, when in fact it is the death knell for the platform. It is this fact that led Musk to pull out of the deal and take the issue into the litigation phase.

The basics of the dispute are simple. Twitter claims Musk is the breaching party and they intend to force him to abide by the agreement. They argue that they have given him everything he has asked. That means they will go into a Delaware court and ask a judge to compel compliance. Musk will tell the same court that Twitter is in breach of contract for falling to disclose information about their user base, which they are required to do as part of the sale.

No one really knows if the court can actually force Musk to go through with the purchase agreement and buy Twitter. In contract disputes, courts rarely compel one party to perform against their will. Instead, a monetary judgment is levied against the breaching party. In most cases, a settlement is reached before the court has a chance to decide the issue. In contract cases, litigation is a part of the process of negotiating the final settlement of the dispute.

In most contracts, especially complex ones like this, there is a liquidating damages clause that spells out the cost of breaking the agreement. In this particular case, we know there is a liquidating damages clause. Both parties agreed to a billion dollar fee if they break the agreement. There are conditions and the interpretation of those conditions will be part of the litigation. Musk has not offered to pay the billion and Twitter is not asking to be paid the billion so far.

All of this will make for good drama, but it obscures the fact that Twitter is a dead man walking, regardless of the outcome. That reality was made clear when Twitter agreed to the Musk offer. They were under no obligation to accept his offer. The board could have refused the deal. Management initially tried to add a poison pill in order to make it difficult for Musk to buy shares but relented after consulting with the board and the largest shareholders. They wanted this deal.

Musk said he made his best and final offer. He was a large share holder and had access to their public filings but also access to their management. In other words, he knew the peak value of the company and made a premium offer. Twitter had been saying their target price was $70 per share, but they quickly accepted the offer from Musk at $54 per share. In other words, everyone concerned knew that the $54 price was the best Twitter would ever get from anyone.

For its part, the market never bought the $70 claim or the $54 offer. The stock ticked up on news of the offer, but then traded down to below its prior level as news of the agreement got into the public domain. The day before Musk cancelled the deal, you could buy shared of Twitter at 60% of what Musk agreed to pay. The fact that no one was doing this says that insiders smelled problems. They knew Musk would never follow through on the $54 offer.

One reason for the skepticism is that Twitter does not make money and is unlikely to ever make money. The platform is useless for advertising so its only source of income is selling user data. There are plenty of players in that market. The big fish are Google and Apple, who control the mobile market. Since most Twitter users operate on their mobile device, Twitter data is mostly phone data. In reality, Twitter is just a derivative data stream that is rooted in the mobile data streams.

The bigger issue for Twitter and all social media is the barrier to entry has collapsed and disaggregation is upon us. Gab has proven this. They not only have a stable platform that is better than Twitter, but it was done on a shoestring by one committed guy, in the face of massive resistance by the usual suspects. The future is bespoke platforms of like-minded users. People are looking to be free from the blue-check harpies who have ruined the large social media platforms.

Those who have been on-line since the early days saw this coming. It is part of a natural cycle on-line. The first bulletin boards were big central places. They gave way to small places of like-minded people. Usenet splintered into a million sub-channels once it was possible to do so. The first message board communities were much like the big social media sites, but then over-zealous mods ruined them and the sites splintered into a million small communities.

This is why Twitter remains eager to sell to Musk. They have an inside view of what is happening and they know his offer is the best offer. In fact, they know half his offer is the best offer, which is why they will seek to cut a deal. Twitter is basically worthless as they own little in the way of unique infrastructure and their core product is now a commodity anyone can create. Their main offer is access to emotionally unstable people who want to lecture the rest of us.

Elon Musk may be a monorail salesman, but he is an extremely talented one who has worked the most sophisticated marks in the world. He is also the richest man on earth which means he owns the best legal talent on earth. He did not choose to enter the litigation phase because it is a sure loser. He understands that Twitter will have to disclose things in court that they would prefer to keep private. The fact that he is boasting about this on Twitter is a clue to his thinking.

Many assume this is just a way for Musk to lower the price, but he may be using this phase to bleed the company into bankruptcy. His people looked at the user data and probably saw that Twitter is past its peak. Like centralized internet platforms before it, Twitter is about to die from a thousand cuts. If anyone can put up a similar site for people of the same mind, then what is the point of Twitter? Musk can wait out the answer to that question in a Delaware court.

The fact is, Twitter should never have existed in the first place. It was just a novel implementation of the same old idea that has been with us since the dawn of the internet age. The dream of the virtual agora where the demos can debate the issues of the day and find a consensus has been tried many times. In every case, the demos discovered they did not like it and moved back into their own private warrens and subcultures to be free of the masses.

Familiarity breeds contempt and what the big socials have done is make everyone familiar with everyone else. The solution is what was there all along. The various communities build fences between themselves and the others. That way they do not have to be reminded of their unpleasantness. They can also pretend that those people on the other side are good people who mean well. Good fences not only make good neighbors they make human society possible.

This is why Twitter and the other big socials are doomed. Twitter is the most ridiculous and silly, so it will be the first to go. Facebook sees the writing on the wall, which is why they are betting on their virtual realty scheme. Sites like Instagram are just public bulletin boards that offer little interaction, so maybe they stagger on, but the days of big social media platforms are ending. The looming death of Twitter is just the first big step into the inevitable demise of the concept.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@mi*********************.com











.


AFPAC III

Note: The normal Taki post is up. This week it is not tied into the Monday post here, but rather to a special post over at American Greatness. I read and reviewed Paul Gottfried’s latest book, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. If you can drop a positive comment over there, that would be good. Fair warning, the comment section there is a full SD below what you get here. I also have some notes about my trip here.


Conferences are an American past time. We have conferences for serious things like business issues and community topics. We also have conferences for less serious issues like politics, social issues, academics, books and hobbies. The conference industry is big business in America. There are people who make their living organizing the details of conferences. Every decent sized venue has people dedicated to managing and directing conferences.

You can rank these things by their production values. The more important the event the better the production values. The well supported operations can hire good people and a first-class facility for the conference. At the other end, the conference is put on by volunteers who have a passion for the topic. They rent a ballroom at one of the hotels near the airport and hope to get enough attendees to cover the cost. In the end it is just people with the same hobby in a room having hotel food.

AFPAC III was near the top-end of the conference spectrum. It was not at the level of CPAC or global corporate events, but it was just below. There was well over one thousand people in attendance. The facility could hold a few hundred more, but beyond that this event will be moving into the big-boy size facilities. To give some perspective, if you were in the back of the room, you needed the giant video screens to follow the speeches as you could not see the speaker.

That is the other thing you see at the higher end of these things. There was a stage with the podium, in the middle and two massive video screens. The room is setup with a first-rate sound system that lets the people in the back hear the speech, without the people in the front going deaf. The video screens had the graphics and video shorts you see at these things to keep people excited between speeches. Again, it was not at the CPAC level, but they can feel the breath of AFPAC on their neck.

Therein the lies the second observation about AFPAC that is important. There is something happening here. CPAC gets all the beautiful people in their finest to tell one another everything if going to be okay. AFPAC draws the Dirt People in their finest, who know everything is not going to be okay. CPAC only lacks the smell of fresh cut flowers to feel like a well attended funeral for a rich man. AFPAC has the smell of revolution in the air and the energy that comes with it.

The energy is the third thing worth noting. On a personal note, I have been to a lot of conferences for all sorts of things. I have never felt like I was in the middle of an electrical storm until AFPAC. Most of that is due to the youth of the audience, but even the geezers were ready to spit on their hands and hoist the black flag. Rock concerts are not this fired up. If you are showing a bit of gray in the beard and want to feel good about the future, attend AFPAC IV.

The show itself was much better than you normally get at these things. The speakers know they are standing in front of a young crowd hungry for red meat. A Catholic priest opened the show with a prayer, then Nick gave the crowd a short talk, which was the signal to strap in and enjoy the ride. Marjorie Taylor Green spoke first. She is a fountain of political bumper sticker quotes. That is politics today. Then it was a run of famous live streamers with a few other politicians mixed in.

The speaker list and its arrangement are where you see the growing pains for AFPAC as it was a bit too much red meat. Pols are always going to be a fountain of applause lines as that is their business. Live streamers are not the sort of people used to organizing a speech around a topic or set of themes. As a result, they fall back on the zingers and conversational style they do on their show. The effect is something like a motivational seminar rather than a political conference.

In future events, they would be wise to bound this with two professional speakers who know how to deliver a speech that people remember the next day. The big boys will have a speaker open with a speech that gets the audience thinking, then a series of speakers to pump up the crowd. The next to last speaker is the closed parenthesis to the first speaker. The star, in this case Nick Fuentes, comes out to close the show with a speech that binds the energy with the message.

The same can be said for the security, which was done by lots of young men volunteering for the job. Like the speeches, they had tons of energy, but not the structure people come to expect at an event this size. They got the job done by being wildly overzealous, not terribly efficient. In the future, a professional team to manage the young men would be wise. It is not that they did not get the job done. It is that they missed a chance to impress with it.

The final criticism is that it went too late. The event started with a cocktail hour where the special guests mingled with about two hundred attendees. Inevitably, these go on too long, which was the case here. Then it took too long to get a thousand people seated, so the first speech started at 8:00 PM. Of course, in a room pulsing with energy, the speeches went on longer than scheduled. By the time Fuentes closed the show it was pushing 1:00 AM and the crowd was running low on energy.

Again, this is the bucket of great problems to have if you are the organizers. It is easy to remedy going forward and offers something new in the future. They should probably have a VIP dinner on Friday night for three hundred people. They meet the guests and get a dinner speech from Nick. The next day is a full day event with breaks to let people rest up, socialize and all that stuff. It should build up to the evening portion that gets everyone pumped up to conquer the world.

Of course, that is only possible if the numbers grow and that does not seem like a problem, given what has happened thus far. AFPAC I was a small affair held in the third-rate motel in Northern Virginia. Maybe 150 people were in attendance. To go from that to ten times the crowd at a major facility is special. That is the right word for what is happening with this youth movement. It is not without some challenges and it will hit some bumps along the way, but something special is happening.

That is the question that I had as I packed up for home. I chatted with many young people and I have some knowledge of the people organizing it. I have followed Nick’s career since I met him four years ago. Right now, this is just a thing that is happening, but no one can define. That has its benefits, but it comes with risk. At some point soon it has to be more than just a lot of young guys looking for something that welcomes them as young men in a world hostile to young men.

In the near future, this thing will need a superstructure of ideas to hold it together once the blows start coming from the establishment. The blows will not be name calling from the simpleton army of the SPLC. One day soon, senior Republicans will be told by their handlers to denounce this movement and its leaders. It has to have the strength to withstand that sort of assault and answer back. That comes from having a superstructure of ideas and objectives.

That has always been the problem with populist politics in America. It has the numbers and the energy, but it always lacks a positive message. People will sacrifice for only so long in opposition. Eventually, they cut deals in their mind to accommodate that which they oppose in order to get on with their life. On the other hand, people will sacrifice their lives for a dream, a dream for their children. Populism tends to live in mere opposition, so it tends to fade.

That is the unique opportunity of AFPAC and the movement it represents. Nick Fuentes comes in for a lot of criticism, but he is smart and committed. He is not the same man he was when I met him. He possesses a self-awareness you rarely see in anyone that gets famous in politics. It is extra-rare in outsider politics. Being the big fish in the small pond tends to make people feel like gods. They wake up every morning wondering who has been talking about them since they went to bed.

Fuentes, in contrast, is thinking much bigger than being the big fish in a small pond and he knows he is a big fish in a small pond. He also knows he will not be allowed in the big pond, so he is committed to building a bigger pond. If Pat Buchanan and the paleos had possessed this degree of self-awareness and realism, we might not be in the situation where we have to hope the youth will solve the problems left to them by their parents and grandparents.

A sign that these guys have the right stuff to build a genuine opposition is something Fuentes did in his speech. He gave a moving tribute to Jared Taylor that was heartfelt and sincere. Fuentes is loyal and you could see that in his tribute to Taylor. This is a young man with a code. He sticks by those who stick by him. That is not always good in politics, but that is the problem with our politics. No one in it has code. We are ruled by sociopaths, not men with a code. We need more men with code.


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Crypto Debate

Today at 3:00 PM I will be debating cryptocurrencies with Kart Thorburn. He is the house cryptocurrency enthusiast for Counter Currents. The topic is whether crypto can threaten the hegemony of the dollar and fiat currency in general. My position is that cryptocurrency can be useful to dissidents on the margins, but it will never be a threat to legal tender, regardless of who holds power

The replay is here: https://dlive.tv/p/nixjeelvy+9HRrOkXGg

Tomorrow I’ll post the mp3.

I had a good time and I was not too unpleasant about it.