Category Archives: Greatest Hits

Modest Proposals

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The paleo-conservative thinker, Sam Francis, introduced the term “anarcho-tyranny” into the dissident vocabulary. He defined it as “we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy), so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).” For example, the streets are littered with speed cameras, red-light cameras and other surveillance equipment to tax motorists. On the other hand, if your car is stolen, the cops cannot be bothered to look for it and you must hope the insurance company is generous.

Francis focused on crime, but we see it everywhere. Because it has crept up slowly on us, the chaos of our age just feels normal, but so does the shrinking freedom of the surveillance state. A way to see this is to think about the small, relatively easy to impose rules our government could do now, that would make life better. Yet, these modest proposals are never mentioned, much less debated. In fact, the very idea of the state imposing quality of life measures is outrageous.

For example, the scourge of mobile phones is obvious to everyone. We have people walking into traffic while texting. Every summer, there are stories of people coming to harm as they try to take a selfie. Even if those are rare exceptions, driving has become a stressful adventure, because of drivers talking and texting. Spend time around the imperial capital and you come to hate the cell phone. This is an easily remedied problem that the government could address tomorrow.

For example, the Feds could tell mobile phone makers that their devices must shut off when they detect movement. Cars with media centers have this feature, so drivers are not fiddling with the thing while driving. If mobile phones were so equipped, the number of drivers smashing into one another over texting would drop to zero. Idiots and teenagers would hate this, but so what? There’s never a need for a human to talk or text while driving. If you need to talk, pull over and have your conversation.

The assault on privacy by tech companies could be also addressed. Your picture, your name, your financial information, all the stuff that defines you is yours. It should be treated like any other property. Google is not allowed to build a surveillance point on your front lawn. Why are they allowed to spy on you and sell your information to the highest bidder? A law that requires written permission to possess and distribute private information would put an end to the abuse of privacy.

In case you think this is impossible, keep in mind it used to exist. Credit bureaus used to need permission to release your credit history. One of the things you signed in the loan process was a form giving the lender the right to pull your credit report and call on your references. The same is true of employers. The application process included you giving them permission to call former employers. Simply restoring a basic of civil society – property rights – would solve many problems.

To get a sense of just how far we have gone down the road to serfdom, ask a normie friend about such a proposal. Ask them if the government should require Facebook to get your written permission to use your data. The right leaning normie will recoil in horror at the state doing anything. The left leaning normie will most likely give you a blank look, as they are unable to process the concept of privacy. The very idea of you owning you is now alien to most Americans.

On the other hand, the idea of transparency among the ruling class has become an artifact of a bygone age. Around the imperial capital are thousands of not-for-profit operations that are financed by rich people. You can look up some basic information about them, but you can rarely find out who pays the bills. Take, for example, The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. This group harasses white people and is run by a white-hating woman named Kristen Clarke. Who pays for this?

Politics is now a clash between these types of groups financed by shadowy characters that none of us see. Instead, we see trained actors as spokesman for these front groups that essentially operate as money laundering operations. Because the billionaire class is unable to hire politicians directly, they funnel their bribes through non-profits. Cliff Asness gets to pay Jonah Goldberg to be his mouthpiece and he gets a tax break. He’s not just a member of the over-class. He’s a philanthropist!

Cliff Asness may be a civic minded patriot, but the only reason we can know his name is he chooses to let us know it. He could just as easily have made the gift anonymously or under some other name. Unless you are into dissident politics, you would never know that every utterance of Jonah Goldberg is paid for by some billionaire with interests that may or may not be your interests. Every nickel that comes into a not-for-profit should be public information, so we can know who is paying the paid actors.

The point is, there are probably a hundred small things that could be done today to significantly improve life in America, for the citizens of America. The increasing shrillness of public debate is closely linked to the lawlessness of modern life. There’s a reason the state is incapable of even small reform. It goes back to what Sam Francis observed with crime. The class-consciousness of the managerial class is the same phenomenon that we see with public bureaucracy.

The Russian Stain

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During the Cold War, popular culture portrayed the Soviets in two ways, often at the same time. There was the ruthless ideologue, efficiently going about his business as an implacable enemy of freedom. The other type of Soviet character was the morally conflicted guy, whose honor compelled him to serve his country, but he also understood that communism was immoral. As far as villains go, both types of Soviet were given a lot of respect, because Hollywood is sympathetic to Bolshevism.

Today, Hollywood rarely uses Russians as bad guys, but our political class sees them as the epicenter of evil in the modern world. Steve Sailer noted the other day that the pundit class has rewritten recent history to fit this narrative. The neocons are celebrating the tenth anniversary of something that never really happened, at least not in the way they currently tell it. Here is neocon puppet Mikheil Saakashvili, and Robert Kagan and Condoleezza Rice repeating the same whopper.

The funny thing about this myth-making is that it is unnecessary. The number of people in the political class who could locate South Ossetia is tiny. Most normal Americans would be puzzled to learn that there is a country named after the peach state. As a public relations item, this ten year old non-event is useless. There’s also the fact that the actual events are easily accessible on-line. It looms large for the neocons, though, so they can’t stop thinking about it.

The neocons love mucking about in that part of the world. Some would say their interests go back to the pale of settlement days. That is the sort of thing that can get your in trouble. Still, there’s pretty good evidence that the American foreign policy establishment has been meddling in the region since the Soviet Empire. The Boston Marathon bomber was probably recruited by US intelligence at some point. His uncle seems to know a lot of people in the CIA.

The thing that no one has yet to explain is why has the American ruling elite become fixated on Russia. Even if the reason for the neocon obsession is ancient hatreds, why is the America left nuts about the Russians? It could simply be convenience, but there are better villains in the world for them to hate, at least in practical terms. China, for example, makes for a much better villain. Iran or Saudi Arabia work much better with the left’s current deep dive into matriarchy.

Even if you want to believe that the left has been infected by the ancient hatred that animates the neocons, the tenor of the left’s hatred is different. The neocons see Russia as a problem to be controlled so it does not revert back to its imperial habits. The left now sees Russia as Old Scratch. Russia is not a problem to be managed and more than the devil can be managed. The very existence of Russia is seen as an affront to the neo-liberal world order.

This visceral hatred has some similarities to the orogressive loathing of the imperial governments of Europe prior to the Great War. Wilson despised the old order, which is why he was so aggressively vengeful toward the Austrians and Germans. American progressives seem to have developed the same view of Russia, and to a lesser degree the Visegrad counties. Their resistance to the neo-liberal order is viewed as an ideological challenge and that can never be tolerated.

The difference is that a century ago, Wilsonian democracy was ascendant, while the monarchical order was in decline. America and American leaders were the new kids on the world stage, pushing aside the old guard. Today, the neo-liberal order is in a defensive crouch. Meanwhile, Russia and Eastern Europe are pretty much just normal countries do pretty well. Perhaps part of the hatred for Russia is the need to find something to blame for the current troubles in the West.

Of course, it is a reminder of the absolute intolerance of secular religions. When people assign the natural order to divine forces, they can be indifferent to alternative forms of worship, as a part of the great mystery of life. When the natural order is a man made creation and the moral code is created and maintained by man, any deviation must be viewed as a challenge to the creator’s legitimacy. The stubborn existence of European countries practicing the old ways is an insult to the neo-liberal creators.

There also may be the issue of reach. Russia is poor and relatively weak compared to the West, but it remains out of reach. It’s ability to thrive outside the new world order suggests the new world order cannot include the whole world. Central to the liberal impulse, going back to Wilson, is totalitarianism. Russia is like a stain that they cannot get out of the fabric of global society. Putin is a new Tsar, the return of that same stubborn problem they cannot resolve.

Waiting For The Spark

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At lunch recently, I overheard two young women talking about the coming revolution, which I assumed was a joke, so I eavesdropped for a little while bit turned out that they were talking about revolution. The bossy looking one was going on about something Trump did, and how it was going to be the thing that “woke people up about what is really happening.” My guess is the part I missed had something to do with Russians or maybe the Manafort Trial. The Left is obsessed with that now.

Since the election, the Left has been dreaming up scenarios in which the results of the election are overturned. For a long time, they were sure Trump would be impeached, but that seems to have faded. Last year my left-wing office manager was deep into the impeachment scenarios. Now the talk is of revolution, which probably fits better with their conception of themselves as the heroic resistance. They imagine Trump as a strong man, against whom they must resist until the system cracks.

Most of us think of revolution in the sense of people flooding into the streets to protest the government. Either the government makes an error, causing the mob to turn violent or radicals use unrest to foment a full-on revolt. The two models in the Western mind are the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Given the make-up of the anti-Trump forces, it’s hard to imagine either scenario. The “resistance” is mostly girls and non-whites prone to committing violence against one another.

There is another model of revolution, that may be what our current rulers have in mind for us and that is the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong. This was a revolution from above, where the revolutionary elite enlisted the masses at the bottom to purge the middle of bourgeois traitors. Mao purged the party of rivals and then used subsequent protests to advance a lurch into radicalism. The complaints about party leaders were an excuse to start a cultural revolution.

The most famous aspect of it was the Red Guards. This was a student movement aimed at unleashing “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a deeper and more extensive stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country.” Sinophiles hate the comparison, but this sounds a lot like our billionaire class financing the various radical groups and social justice warriors we see rampaging through the culture today.

Another point of comparison is the war on the “Four Olds” which were old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. This was both a war on the past, as well as a war on the culture itself. For example, the Red Guards pulled the remains of a Ming dynasty emperor out of his tomb, denounced him and then burned the remains. They went around renaming streets and toppling statues.  Today’s radicals do the same thing and preach against racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism.

No historical comparison is perfect. Again, Sinophiles really hate the comparison, but people are conservative about what they think they know best. There’s also the fact that Chinese culture is remarkably strong, and it was largely able to resist the ten-year campaign to obliterate it. American culture appears to be brittle and falling apart under the weight of a fifty-year planned invasion. The Chinese did not fill up their lands with hostile foreigners, armed with a ballot by the ruling class.

On the other hand, there are limits to everything. As the outrages from the Left stack up, the average white person in American grows angrier. Talk to anyone sympathetic to this line of thinking and they will tell you they have grown far less tolerant of their remaining liberal friends. I know I’ve lost touch with quite a few former friends, because I will not tolerate their nonsense. I have friends who just a few years ago thought Ben Shapiro was edgy and now think I am too soft.

The question is what it would take to move people from yelling at their televisions over the latest liberal outrage to marching in the streets. Sometimes, the smallest spark sets the biggest fire. The reaction to Alex Jones getting purged from the internet has been surprising, given that he is not a serious person. People, who never heard of him until yesterday, are angry over his banishment. My guess is the percentage of people thinking fondly of Pinochet is at an all-time high right now.

As far as the spark, a move against Trump is good bet. The glue that keeps things from flying apart right now is middle-class white people, who still have faith in the political system. These are the middle American radicals Sam Francis wrote about 30 years ago during the Reagan moment. They will tolerate just about anything, if they think they can fight the other side within the system. An effort to remove Trump or even silence his advocates, could be a spark that gets these people into the streets.

Extra-political efforts to ban guns are another possible spark. The coordinated efforts to cut off gun makers from the financial system is dangerous. Gun owners follow this stuff and there are a lot of them. The pink pussy hat people think they have numbers because billionaires will bus fifty thousand of them into DC. The NRA could get a million people in the streets if there is ever a real threat to gun rights. A big part of gun culture is the idea of the patriot bravely taking up arms to resist tyranny.

It is tempting to think this will all blow over. I just don’t see how it will ever be possible to make peace with the Left. They hate us and will use any means necessary. The lack of code is the critical part. How does one make peace with someone that will never abide by the rules? Whether this results in revolution, counter revolution or civil war is hard to know, but the number of people thinking the gap cannot be bridged is growing every day, so we wait for the Cossack’s wink.

House of Cards

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The world is probably overdue for a catastrophe. The last major war in Europe was 73 years ago. There have been some minor skirmishes but nothing to alter the political arrangements. It’s been an extraordinary run of peace. Despite the howling by the neocons, there’s little chance of a war breaking out. The rest of the world is unlikely to see a major war anytime soon. Asia is too busy selling stuff to wage war, and the Middle East seems to have exhausted itself, at least for a little while.

The best chance for something significant is a plague. The last good disease outbreak was the Spanish Flu, which gets overlooked because of the Great War. That killed three to five percent of the world population. Some would say HIV counts as a pandemic, but that’s a different thing than a plague. Everyone knows how to not get HIV. There’s no defense against something like an airborne virus. The normal activities of life spread the disease, no matter what you do.

Researchers at John Hopkins University simulated the spread of a new deadly disease, a variant of the flu, using real politicians to “war game” the thing. A doomsday cult releases a genetically engineered virus, and the politicians were asked to make decisions based on the rules of the simulation. The result was 150 million dead in less than two years and close a billion dead by the end of the simulation. They modeled the new disease on SARS, just made it more deadly.

One of the researchers said, “I think we learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, devoted senior public officials who have lived through many crises still have trouble dealing with something like this.” That’s a very nice way of saying that the people in charge are not very good at this sort of thing. When you dig into the story, the impression is that the result of this simulation was the worst-case scenario. Maybe they had their thumb on the scale, hoping to use the result to get research money.

The simulation does not address the knock-on effects of a plague. For example, the infrastructure of modern life requires a lot of maintenance. Crews around the country are out every day repairing power lines and communication equipment. If a plague starts, what percentage of that work force must get sick, scared or die before maintenance falls behind? Just imagine what happens if your power goes out for an extended period. Then imagine it happening during a plague.

Then you have the interconnection of world populations. A serious plague is going to hit a place like India much harder than a country like Canada. The West has come to depend on India for all sorts of services. Imagine a world without Hindu telemarketers and the world’s call centers shut down. In all seriousness, the disruptions to the supply chain would be massive, because so much is outsourced to poor non-white countries with low standards for public health.

Given that the disease rates would inevitably be higher in non-white areas, white intolerance of non-whites would spike. We see signs of this already, as Amerindians bring forgotten diseases like TB and scarlet fever into the US. This would make it impossible for the politicians to continue the white replacement project, at least not without declaring martial law. That assumes the military could or would go along with martial law. A plague would probably hit the military hardest.

Trust in institutions is at an all-time low in the United States. We have a strong economy, and the nation is at peace. If suddenly food gets scarce and civil unrest is a problem, trust in the state could very well collapse. Decades of stoking hatred among the populace could easily boil over into chaos. Imagine a dozen Katrina scale breakdowns around the country. The people in charge could not respond sensibly to one city-wide catastrophe. Imagine a dozen of them.

There’s something else. The common argument you hear is that there is a shortage of qualified people in critical areas of the economy. This is the argument for importing slaves from Asia. If an airborne virus starts killing people, those who work in offices will be hit hardest. What if we run out of people able to do important jobs. What if 20% of the medical staff drops dead in the first wave of the infection? The point is, it’s not hard to imagine that a serious plague could cripple the system.

In a lot of ways, the modern society is a house of cards. Everything is dependent on everything else. In the normal course of life, this works as defense in depth, with layers of dependency and redundancy. It’s easy to see how this could be turned into a weakness, due to severe shortages of manpower or one part of the system getting hit particularly hard. The modern economy assumes everything breaks, but only breaks a little and not all at one time.

That’s why the Black Death was so significant. It fractured the feudal system in ways that could not be repaired. Some have argued that the plague made the Renaissance possible, by crippling the old feudal order. That certainly seems plausible. The feudal order was a pyramid scheme of sorts. It required a large peasant population. Once the peasants started dying off, the system became unstable. Of course, the plague killed a lot of high-born people too. That changed the ruling classes.

The Late Bronze Age collapse is another example of a systemic failure brought on by exogenous forces. The reasons range from diseases, climate change to invasion, but probably a combination of them. The palace system for distributing goods and maintaining order was not able to hold up to these pressures. Since the relationships between the kingdoms were built around the palace system, one kingdom failing set off a domino effect. The result was a dark age that lasted about 300 years.

That does not mean a modern plague would result in a dark age, but major resets change the trajectory of human development. Suddenly, the prevailing orthodoxy is not so strong that no one challenges it. The neo-liberal order of today is fragile and requires enormous resources to maintain. In fact, the cost of maintaining it probably exceeds the benefits. A plague would cause a major reset to the world order and probably force a retreat of the prevailing order, at the minimum.

Democracy Without Borders

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Steve Sailer is fond of characterizing the Democrats as the “party of fringes” as they make their primary appeal to minority groups. When they run short of minorities, they create them by finding a way to slice off some portion of the majority, declaring it an oppressed minority. The result is we have one party that is the default for the white majority and another party that is for none-whites. It is the circus acts attacking the audience members.

This misses a larger consequence of democracy. That is, democracies must always seek to expand the electorate. This is an easily observed pattern. In the 19th century, as the West began to experiment with limited democracy, the franchise was sharply limited to males of wealth. The vote was limited to men, usually over the age of 25, and limited to property holders. In the early years of political liberalism, less than 10% of the adult population could vote.

The franchise slowly expanded, even in monarchies. The German Empire had universal male suffrage by 1871. Italy expanded the franchise to all men over 30 by 1912 and then lowered the age to 21 in 1918. The British followed a similar pattern. Universal male suffrage became the norm, then it was female suffrage. Unsurprisingly, women voting got going first in Germany, the birthplace of every bad idea in human history, and then spread around the West.

In the United States, the presence of a large black population, as well as a sizable indigenous population, added another wrinkle to the process. The urban immigrant population of the early 20th was another group exuded from voting. Eventually, these groups were handed a ballot. Immigrants became a powerful political force, pushing aside the heritage population in major cities. Blacks have become a key part of the Democratic constituency, once granted full voting rights in the 60’s.

The history of liberal democracy since the late 18th century has been a steady expansion of the voting base. At each turn, various arguments have been put forth in support of expanding the franchise, but the one thing that has always been true is there is never a move to narrow it. After every reform effort, every crisis and every war, the arguments are always in favor of expanding the franchise. Today, the debate is over handing a ballot to children, the retarded and foreigners.

As much as some people wish to believe that open borders are motivated by greed, the real reason is something more systemic. An official open borders policy for labor is actually bad for employers looking to game the rules. That is the whole point of hiring non-citizens over citizens. The illegal, is less likely to fight back at exploitative employers. Open the borders and they become a part of the normalized labor force available to everyone.

The real motivation behind open borders is systemic. In a democracy, all fights within the ruling class take place within the bounds of democracy. One side, let us call them the reformers, wants to change things. The other side, presumably benefiting from the rules, resists these changes. Selling the status quo to existing beneficiaries is easy, because over time, democracy creates a prevailing consensus. This leaves the reformers at a numerical disadvantage.

The solution is to expand the voter base. Political reformers of the 19th century, looking to reform the legal and economic arrangements, could appeal to disenfranchised men, offering them access in exchange for a vote, if they could get the vote. Social reformers of the 19th and 20th century could appeal to the female vote, if they could get women the franchise. The last fifty years in America has been about creating a new voters, by expanding the franchise with race consciousness .

The fight over open borders today are actually a battle to expand the franchise by those seeking to push through a post-national agenda. Since the Cold War, the White House has been held by two progressives and a neocon, which is just a hyper-violent variant of progressivism. Despite a near total dominance of politics, the political center has not moved that much since the end of the Cold War. The consensus has the advantage of numbers, so the solution is to import millions of new voters.

The expansion of the electorate is a consequence of democracy. In the age of kings, the ruling class was narrow, closed and well defined. The interests of the king are the interests of the property classes. Disputes are narrow, as the ruling class is hierarchical, with the king having the final word. The ruling class of a monarchy has a motivation to keep the ruling class numbers small. Expansion of their class must necessarily dilute their power within the ruling class. No one wants that.

In a democracy, no one owns the state, so factionalism is the inevitable result of disputes over the proceeds of government. By the logic of democracy, the fights between the factions are adjudicated by the public through elections. Eventually, a consensus forms and the major factions find an equilibrium. The minor factions and the losers of previous fights have no recourse other than to undermine the consensus and alter the make up the voting public.

It is axiomatic that democracy must be short-term oriented. This is not due to greedy voters, as much as the nature of democracy. The people holding office are temporary office holders with no investment in their position. Therefore, their goal is to squeeze every drop from their position as quickly as possible, Hillary Clinton is the ideal politicians in a democracy, because she wants to auction off every asset of the office she holds, as quickly as possible.

When seen in the light of democracy’s inevitable expansion of the franchise, open borders make perfect sense as the next logical step in Western democracy. It is why the open borders advocates are endlessly chanting about “our democracy” requiring the free flow of people. Democracy starts as a system for the people, controlled by the people in order to chart their own path. It soon becomes a system that eliminates the very concept of a people.

The Corporatist Enterprise

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Fascism is word that no longer has meaning, mostly because the left has made it the catchall term for anything they currently oppose. Even adjusting for that, no two academics can agree on a usable definition of fascism. Paul Gottfried, who has studied the subject more than anyone alive today, makes the point that fascism was a lot of different things, even to its advocates. It was an anti-movement, a reaction to and rejection of things like modernity, radicalism, and liberalism.

That is not a fair rendering of Gottfried’s thoughts on the subject, but it is a useful starting point when thinking about historical fascism. The book Fascism: The Career of a Concept is an excellent entry point into a topic for those interested in a sober minded history of fascism. An aspect of fascism that rarely gets discussed in the current age is its corporatism. Fascists, particularly Italian fascists, were corporatist. Mussolini saw the state as something like an organism that transcended all institutions.

The most famous expression of this is the line from Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism, “everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.” The state not only provides the services expected of the government, but it also provides the spiritual purpose for those in the state. The individual exists only in so far as his interests as an individual correspond with the interests of the state. The state is an organism that defines the citizen.

This is often used as the description of totalitarianism, but that is not an exactly accurate comparison. Bolshevism, for example, was indifferent to the spiritual life of the citizen, only focusing on the political and material life. That is the striking thing about Italian fascism versus Marxist movements. It attempted to give purpose to the life of the citizen, beyond his material utility. Instead of viewing the citizen as an economic unit, fascism saw the citizen as a heroic part of the great struggle.

This spiritual appeal can be seen in the modern managerial state. Politics is becoming all consuming. You cannot watch a movie or sporting event without being barraged with messages about “who we are.” Trump sounds like an anachronism, because he talks about bread-and-butter issues, while the rest of the managerial elite focuses on esoteric topics like “who we are” and “our democracy.” By democracy, they mean the managerial system and culture.

It also shows up in the modern conception of the business enterprise. It is not enough to have a job. It must give purpose to your life. It must be part of the great struggle that helps you reach your potential in service to the great cause. You see that in this story about a firm that forces its employees to embrace vegetarianism. Read about the company and it sounds like a religious mission. It used to be that businessmen only wanted to make money. Now they are priests.

It’s why rank and file employees of new style companies like Constant Contact feel the need to moralize from their cubicle. The young woman doing this is not merely a bonehead functionary. She sees herself as committed to the cause of the company, which is a holy cause. It is not a place where she performs tasks for money. It is what defines her life as a person. Led by tech, the managerial enterprise is not just an employer to its hired help. It is the defining feature of their lives.

The historian Ernst Nolte described one aspect of fascism as “theoretical transcendence” which he called a metapolitical force. Fascism sought to go beyond what exists in this world, toward a new future that was free of the restraints on the human mind. It imagined a world that was free of class, poverty, ignorance, and material restraint. That is what the modern managerial enterprise preaches. They are not just selling a service. They are changing the world.

The bizarre nature of the modern enterprise, where it describes itself as a mission to change the world, is one result of democracy. It obliterates local institutions, leaving the citizen as a stranger to himself and his fellow citizens. The corporation fills this void by providing a structured environment where the employees share an identity and see one another as on the same team. The managerial enterprise becomes both the local community and the church for its people.

The trouble is that a business is primarily about making a profit. Social activism keeps running up against the profit motive. Short of state sanctioned monopoly power, the corporate enterprise must compromise its values in order to make a profit. This is why democracy must favor monopoly. You see this with media companies, where the government encourages collusion and combination. Amazon enjoys massive subsidies, as it obliterates all other forms of retail.

This dynamic between the growing cultural power of the corporation, and its greater dependence on the state for protection, results in a merging of the two. Walk around a government campus and you see the modern corporations. College presidents now call themselves CEO’s, not because the college has become a business, but because both are now part of the great mission. The line between the state and the private sphere no longer exists because it cannot exist for both sides to thrive.

This is why gun grabbers, for example, have turned to corporations to advance their gun grabbing agenda. The state failed to ban guns, so now banks, media companies and retail monopolists are stepping in to “solve” the problem. In the not-so-distant future, you will have the unfettered political right to carry a gun, but no one will sell guns because it is practically impossible. No “private” enterprise will do business with a gun maker or a gun retailer. Individual rights are worthless without individuals.

Thoughts On The Current Crisis

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Imagine you and a group of your friends produce what you think is a revolutionary way to improve the world. You are so sure it is a great idea, you and your buddies decide to overthrow the government so you can implement your idea. Now, even assuming your revolutionary idea is legitimate, that is a terrible way to go about changing the world. You and your band of nobodies lack the numbers and the moral authority to take over the government. The most likely result is you get arrested and locked away in a padded cell.

Now, a more rational way of putting your brilliant idea into action is for you and your group to go out and start telling people about it. In a prior age, this meant handing out fliers and knocking on doors to spread the good word. In the current age, you can start a social media campaign and create a YouTube channel, where you post informative videos on your brilliant ideas. Maybe someone with a big on-line following notices your efforts and joins the cause. Perhaps someone of importance gets interested in your ideas.

The point of raising awareness and getting people involved in your movement is to increase your numbers. One reason your plot to overthrow the state failed in the first paragraph is you lacked the numbers. If you get a million people to sign onto your cause, then you have a chance. Not only that, when it comes to changing minds, quantity has a quality of its own. People are much more open-minded to an idea that has a big following than one held by a tiny fringe group. Human beings are social animals.

On the other hand, numbers alone are not enough. Your revolution also failed because you still lack moral authority. In a country of 300 million, a million strong movement is still pretty small. The state will feel justified in using extreme force against you and your movement if they see you as a threat. Numbers are not the only reason you failed. The people in charge could operate in the knowledge that most people see them as the legitimate power in the country. Therefore, they can squash all threats.

Revolutions succeed because the prevailing order lost its moral authority. Even though the numbers that oppose them are small, the lack of moral authority means no one is willing to risk much to defend the status quo. The lack of legitimacy is why governments fall, religions collapse and cultures collapse. The Bolsheviks did not succeed because they had a better set of tactics or a plausible alternative. They toppled the Czar because the one thing everyone agreed upon is the old order had to go. Anything had to be better.

That means you and your band of revolutionaries does not really need a manifestly brilliant idea to change the world. If the prevailing orthodoxy has lost its legitimacy, even a mediocre alternative is enough. If you examine successful revolutions, the alternative on offer is usually quite vague and, in the end, totally impractical. It was more of a sunny vision, a promise of a better day, than a fully considered alternative moral order. It was just something that felt better than the discredited status quo.

The point of all this is that in the current crisis, the job of the dissident is to build numbers and delegitimize the prevailing order. When the alt-right got full of themselves and decided to it was time to start the revolution, they were squashed like a bug. The reason was they lacked the numbers, and they had done nothing to undermine the moral authority of the people in charge. To most white people, the riot in Charlottesville looked like a bunch of fringe weirdos making a nuisance of themselves. They deserved what they got.

Ultimately, revolutions that matter start with the small group and slowly grow into a larger group. That was true of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Iranian revolutionaries. It was true of the American revolutionaries. The small group grew into a larger group and then it became a sub-culture. Finally, it blossomed into a counter-culture that provided a home for the whole man, not just the revolutionary. Dissidents in America are in the sub-culture phase or possibly in the early phases of becoming a counter-culture.

Another aspect of successful revolutions is they are short on concrete ideas. Detailed plans can be analyzed and critiqued. Vague promises cannot. That is one reason Trump won in 2016. His promises sounded good, mostly because they lacked specificity. They were aspirations, not policies. That means the people spending their days working out the new legal code for the ethno-state are wasting their time. The timeless principles of today are just the rules instituted by the winners, after they won.

There are two recent examples American dissidents should study. The first is the Evangelical movement that started in the 1970’s as a response to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. They had unassailable principles and specific policy goals that arose from those principles. They had great organic organizations, their churches. They had money and manpower. They also focused on one party, hoping to make the GOP the counter to the Left. By the 80’s, the Evangelicals were a powerful political force.

They also failed to accomplish any of their goals. Their top issue was abortion, specifically rolling back Roe. They lobbied hard to get their guys into office and on the bench so they could get that ruling overturned. They had zero success. In fact, it is hard to find any aspect of the culture war they were able to win. If you had told Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the 70’s that their efforts would still mean gay marriage and trannies stalking little boys in public toilets, they probably would have lost their faith entirely.

The reason they lost is they engaged the ruling class on their terms. The Evangelicals agreed to play by the rules set by the ruling class. This ultimately meant supporting the ruling class institutions, like the political rules and the party system. Those things are designed to preserve the current order. In effect, the Evangelicals agreed from the start to defend and support the prevailing order. It was inevitable that their efforts would only lead to more of the same because they agreed to all of the assumptions of the prevailing order.

Another useful example is the NRA. Starting around the same time as the Evangelicals entered politics, the NRA decided to change direction. They became apolitical, supporting only candidates that were pro-gun. They stopped arguing about the efficacy of gun control as a crime fighting tool and started arguing about gun culture as a vital part of American culture. The NRA shifted from political debates to moral debates and captured the high ground by linking gun rights to patriotism and basic America concepts of liberty.

This is why the fight over guns has been the one exception in the culture war. The Left tried hard to capture the high ground, usually by standing on the bodies of dead kids, but they failed because the NRA always fights to hold the moral high ground. They never conceded the premise or the moral framework of the debate. When the Left says they want guns off the streets because of the children, the NRA says they want guns in the hands of parents, so they can protect their children and themselves.

The lesson for our thing is to first understand where we are in the process. Our job right now is to grow our numbers by promoting our ideas. Part of doing that is taking every opportunity to undermine the other side’s moral authority. Just as important, it means developing a genuine alternative to the moral order. A counter-culture has its own ethos, which means its own media, its own language, and its own comedy. That last part is important because what we mock speaks directly to what we believe.

Revolutions feel like they happen overnight, but they are the culmination of a long process that starts before the vanguard is out of diapers. The 60’s radicals would never have existed without the Beatniks and the drug culture. The Jacobins would not have existed without the salon culture that had developed in Paris. Radical politics are born of a counter-culture that provides the basis of an alternative moral order. For there to be right-wing radicals tomorrow, we must build the right-wing counter-culture today.

The Haunting

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A couple of years ago, John Derbyshire talked about the sexual aspect of what ails the West. He referenced this comment to Steve Sailer, in one of Sailer’s blog posts. No doubt others have noted that women in the West seem to be the driving force behind things like immigration. The angle is always that the women are ascendant because the men have grown soft. As Derb talked about in that podcast, the girls are inviting in the swarthy foreigners, because they are dissatisfied with their men.

That is appealing to men, especially older men, as older men are always sure that the younger generation is soft. When I was a boy, my grandfather would say, “In my day it was iron men and wooden ships. Now, it is iron ships and wooden men.” I am an old man, but not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail. It was just his way of saying that his generation was tough, while the younger generation was soft. The thing is though, this assumes that only men have changed.

Maybe a better way of thinking about the sexual aspect of our cultural crisis is that both men and women are haunted by different specters. For instance, our women are increasingly deranged, not because men are wimps, but because the traditional sex roles no longer exist. This leaves them as free radicals, with the wacky fads out of feminism and gender studies, orbiting them like unpaired electrons. Women are like bees without a hive, so they become erratic.

Here is a good example. This woman is an angry lesbian. She has been a public nuisance for a long time, ranting and raving about homosexual causes. Self-identified lesbians are 1.3% of the population, according to the CDC. That is a small club, but not select enough, so she is now claiming her son is transgender. Like so many of our women, this woman is in a race to the most bizarre position imaginable. It is the need for attention, applied to inappropriate things.

The male side of this coin features a nostalgia for a lost future. It is a form of romanticism, where men imagine a past that led to a different present. All of those decisions by prior generations, have led to a present where there is no point to being man, because there is no role for men. The only place where men are needed is the military, but even there, the multicultural nags are ruining things. It is not a longing for the past, but a longing for a different present.

If you look at the various sub-groups within the Dissident Right, they are almost exclusively male. The alt-right certainly has a strong romantic streak. Their embrace of the fascist aesthetic was always based on an imaginary version of history. The PUA guys go the other way, embracing a cynical and callous view of women as nothing more than a game to be won. It is an absurd version of the alpha male. Weirdos like Patriot Prayer are trying to create a space for men to be men.

The result of all this is men and women are rocketing off in different directions, seeking something that fills the void left by traditional sex roles. The trouble is the current culture views traditional sex roles as toxic. That not only directs the search for biological fulfillment toward the wrong answers, but it also makes the right answer the polar opposite of what is acceptable. The result of this is blue-haired feminists screaming into the void and the cartoonish primal scream of the Bronze Age Mindset.

It is why polling on so many issues divide sharply between males and females, married people, and single people. That last part is probably the most important, as people living the traditional married life may as well be in a different country. The former have a point, while the latter are searching for one. The former see politics as a necessary burden, while the latter view it as the hunting ground for personal fulfillment. It is why Antifa is run by girls and the alt-right is run by boys.

Of course, the specter driving all of this was created in the bygone era, the one where the West still had its traditional social arrangements. The increasing animosity toward baby boomers has a lot to do with the fact that the young blame their parents and grandparents for screwing up the system. This is certainly true in America, where the boomers inherited a world of order and then set about destroying it, replacing it with a world of disorder and irrationality.

That really is the specter haunting all of us, regardless of our age. It all seems so unnecessary and pointless. What was so monstrous in the 50’s and 60’s that it spawned a generation hell bent on self-abnegation? That is the specter that haunts our age. It is as if the point of the cultural revolution were to create a society of people infected with the existential attitude. The result of the revolt was a people gripped by a sense of disorientation, confusion, and dread.

How Not To Be Boring

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There are few things worse than conversing with a boring person. I’m not talking about quiet people. A person who keeps his own confidence is often thought of as mysterious or complex. Their silence makes them interesting. A boring person is almost always someone who talks a lot, revealing that they are not very interesting. Boring people are such a menace, that there is a whole area of etiquette about politely getting away from the boring guy at a social event.

So, what makes a person boring?

More important, how can you avoid being seen as a boring person?

The first thing you notice about boring people is they never seem to have a point to their stories and anecdotes. Stories must have a point. No one cares about what you had for lunch, unless it was something bizarre or unusual. If you had a delicious turkey club for lunch, that’s not something anyone wants to know. Now, if the waiter stripped naked and ran screaming into the street after serving you that delicious turkey club, then you have a story with a point. That’s an amusing tale.

Your stories and anecdotes don’t have to be amusing.  What’s important is you have some reason for telling the story. This is a courtesy to the listener. By having a point, you are showing respect to the listener, whether it it by sharing information with them or making them laugh with an amusing story. When your stories are pointless recitations of mundane events, you are, whether you realize it or not, insulting the audience. At the minimum, you are wasting their time, which is just as bad.

You should also avoid unnecessary details. That story about the waiter stripping down and running into the street is a good example. If you spend five minutes describing the menu and the turkey sandwich, then thirty seconds on the naked man, you made an amusing tale into misery for your listeners. Sure, a little setup to the big reveal is a good way to create tension, but a little goes a long way. In a social setting, a good story is one that avoids extraneous details.

The easiest way to avoid loading up your sixty second story with ten minutes of tedium is to never explain the obvious. This is the most common error boring people make when telling a story. For some reason, they think they need to explain what everyone on earth has known since childhood. In the case of our turkey club, the boring person will actually explain what he means by turkey club or maybe even talk about the history of the turkey club. When in doubt, skip it.

Another way to avoid being the boring guy everyone avoids is to never tell a story that requires a back story. Boring people often start a story that should last three minutes, then veer into a long back story. For example, the they will veer into a story about how they met their lunch companion in the turkey club story. The result is a dull story about the lunch companion, plus a dull description of the turkey club. This is misery for listeners and is an unacceptable price for the pay-off.

The boring also have a funny habit of talking over people. They ignore the little things others do to signal to the boring that they need to stop talking. The boring are strangely competitive in their dullness. If you notice people starting to speak as soon as you take a breath, or they start looking at their phones, you are the boring guy. You are not going to improve this situation by talking louder or talking over any interruptions. Take the hint and wrap up your story.

A good way to stop yourself from being that guy is to always invite others to tell their story or comment on the topic of conversation. People will find your turkey club story more interesting if you showed interest in their lunch story. A little active listening goes a long way. It not only keeps you from droning on about the delicious turkey club, it makes you seem more interesting to others. Boring people are selfish people, in that they are only interested in their point of view, in far too much detail.

Finally, if it is a story you tell often and the listener is someone you know well, assume you told them the story, because you almost certainly did. Start with “If I told this before, stop me” or maybe, “I probably told this story before…” This gives them the right to stop you from boring them with the 80th retelling. This is a courtesy to the listener and it makes you seem more interesting. This is flattering to the listener and and they will think better of you for it.

The Immorality Of Immigration

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Every ruling elite has certain primary duties. These are obligations that come before anything else. Regardless of the form of government, the rulers  have to maintain things like public order. Being the tribal chief is useless if your people are in chaos. For that matter, having a tribal chief is useless if it means living in chaos. Therefore, one of the primary duties of all rulers in all times and all places is to maintain public order by enforcing laws and local customs.

There are other primary duties of the ruler, like organizing the common defense, that are universal to all forms of government. Then there are primary duties that are peculiar to a people or to a form of government. If the ruler is understood to be a god, then the ruler and his retainers have to maintain that myth.  In modern western countries, protecting property rights and enforcing contracts is counted as a primary duty of the state in order to maintain its legitimacy

One of the more destructive things to happen to America over the last half century is the sacralizing of immigration by the elites. The endless repetition of the nonsense phrase “nation of immigrants” has turned a temporary expedient a century ago into an essential element of the nation’s founding mythology. The fact that immigration is a violation of the state’s primary duty to the people is excused because the immigrant now has a superior place in the moral order.

In a country like America, one that allegedly is built on consensual government, citizenship has great value. In fact, the most valuable thing to a citizen of a representative democracy is his citizenship. The reason for this is that citizenship is an ownership stake in the country. In theory, the American government was voluntarily founded as an agreement among individuals, invested with the power to secure mutual protection and regulate the relations among its members.

If you had the option of selling your citizenship, let us say at some sort of auction, there would be no shortage of bidders. For example, there is no shortage of buyers for the EB-5 visa, which costs $500,000. That is right, you can buy citizenship from the US government. Your citizenship is something of value and therefore, the state has a duty to protect it, just as they have a duty to protect your property rights. This is a primary duty of government.

When the American government hands out citizenship to millions of foreigners every year, it is stealing the value of your citizenship and giving it to someone else. This is no different than a company diluting the value of its shares by selling additional shares. It is why open borders fanatics swear that immigration makes us all richer, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. They know it is essential that people believe this as even the sacred immigrant is not enough to justify theft.

The argument from open borders people is that immigration is not just holy and beneficial. It is perfectly legitimate. The trouble is, when 50% plus one vote to rob the 50% minus one, it is still theft, even if it comes after an election. This is why America is not a democracy and it is also why democracy was famously called two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch. The very nature of democracy makes it an immoral form of rule because of the theft problem.

Additionally, a primary duty of the modern state is the maintenance of equality before the law. In fact, this is what makes the law legitimate. Not only do all citizens have a say in what laws are passed, but those laws apply to all citizens equally. The very nature of immigration violates this principle. Immigration steals from some citizens for the benefit of foreigners and the connected. This is true for quasi-immigration schemes like guest workers, as well as for permanent settlement.

If the primary duty of the state is to safeguard the citizens, including the value of their citizenship and maintain equality before the law, then immigration by its very nature is a direct violation of the social compact. It makes a mockery of the very idea of consensual government and sows distrust among the people. It is why all mass immigration quickly leads to a breakdown of order, because it erodes the legitimacy of the ruling authority, as the people see they are no longer willing to fulfill their basic duties.

That does not preclude all immigration. It is just that the bar is extremely high. In order to justify that which is naturally and always immoral, the offset must exceed the cost of the deed. Since this is impossible in the modern age, the open borders people have been forced to turn morality on its head, claiming the first duty of the state is to foreigners at the expense of its own citizens. It has turned America into a bust out where the value of your citizenship is stolen.