Category Archives: Greatest Hits

The Tectonic Paradox

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On my morning run, the local temperature read -3° F. That is an unusually low temperature for this part of the world, but not unprecedented. Modern times makes extremely cold weather not much more than a curiosity. Everyone has shelter and plenty of heat. Even the poor have HVAC in their homes and plenty of resources to get their energy bill paid for by others. The local bums had to be rounded up, but there are shelters for them as well.

Not long ago, extreme cold resulted in a lot of death and damage. A hundred years ago, deaths from cold were common in the northern parts of the world. Some of it was due to disease spreading quickly among people huddled together indoors. There was also the poor nutrition that came from not enough food in the winter months. Even so, people did not have what we have now to deal with the cold, so it was common for people to die when a serious cold snap hit the region.

Go back further and the problem gets even more perilous. A thousand years ago, humans living in extremely cold areas were faced with unique challenges. This required long term planning in order to have enough food, heat and shelter for the winter. It also required a different type of cooperation. Specialization increases productivity so a people facing long winters would be more dependent on one another. Many hands make a light load, but many different skills make it even lighter.

It is generally accepted that humans migrated out of Africa about 60,000 as genetically modern humans. Most likely this meant following a path along the Red Sea and then into Asia and Europe. As the ice sheets receded, humans followed them north to settle into northern Europe and Asia. When the ice sheets began to expand again, these more adaptable and resourceful people moved south, conquering and displacing the people to their south. These people became the stock of settled civilization.

Most of this is speculative, but genetics is slowly filling in a lot of blanks. The implication has always been that harsh environment selected for more resourceful people, who figured out large scale cooperation, burden sharing and so forth. That sounds good until you consider that settled societies did not first start in the north. They began in the mild climates of the Middle East. The data says that the first settled farming communities were in Mesopotamia, which is why it is called the cradle of civilization.

Further, when the Egyptians were building the pyramids, the people in the British Isles were building Stonehenge. That is an interesting structure, but it was built by people who were barbarians compared to the people of Egypt. When the Sumerians were writing down things on clay tablets, Europe was lightly populated by people, who had just barely mastered stone tools. Even into the late Roman Empire, the tribes of Europe were hard pressed to do much more than organize a primitive village.

Of course, all of this has changed. A great puzzle to the blank slate crowd is why it is Europeans rocketed ahead of the rest of the world, in terms of technology and organizational might, starting around the late Middle Ages. When Europeans arrived in Africa, they found a people, who had yet to master the wheel. The ancient civilizations of the Middle and Near East had fallen into squalor. In the New World, the Incas were about where the Egyptians had gotten 5,000 years prior.

It is widely understood that modern humans, homo sapiens, emerged from the speciation phase of sapient humans in Africa about 100,000 years ago. Genetics support this conclusion and it provides details in support of the dispersal. Not only are all modern humans walking around today descended from those original humans, but a baby born today is not vastly different genetically from humans of 100,000 years ago, at least in terms of physiology.

The archaeological record, what there is at least, says that humans dispersed around the world over the next 50,000 years without much change in behavior. Then seemingly all of a sudden, humans began to change culturally. The first agriculture appears in Mesopotamia and soon after large scale settled societies. New technologies spread in fits and starts as people figured out how to contend with and modify their natural environments. This is the tectonic phase.

The sapient paradox is the puzzle as to why it took so long for humans to go from hunter-gathers to settled people. The genetic evidence and lots of wishful thinking say that people in Africa 50,000 years ago were not much different from people 10,000 years ago in the Tigris River area. Why did the people in Mesopotamia figure out how to plan and organize large agrarian societies, while the people in Europe were still living off the land in small tribes? Why did take so long?

The tectonic paradox is the puzzle as to why modern Africans were never able to master the wheel or build a structure taller than a man. When Europeans were conquering the globe, the people in sub-Saharan Africa had yet to adopt a written language. At the same time, how is it that the English, who were no more advanced than Arabs in 1066, were the ones to lead the Industrial Revolution? The great gap  between the big races is recent and unmistakable.

Genetics is starting to unriddle this great puzzle. Even though the genetic difference between human groups is tiny, it turns out that small difference can have huge downstream consequences, particularly with regards to cultural evolution. The high risk environment of northern Europeans, for example, is most likely the root of the wide variety of hair and eye colors that do not appear anywhere else. A small difference results in people who look like a different species.

What this means is that human evolution is not just recent and local, but the behavior differences between populations is not amenable to social engineering, at least not in the short term. The Arabs flowing into Europe are going there because like all mammals, they seek safety and easy access to food and shelter. They are not Germans, however, and no amount of proselytizing will change Mother Nature’s mind on the subject.

We may not know exactly why people are different, but we know they are and there is no changing it. Short of making great leaps in genetic engineering, the differences in the races are as permanent as anything in this world. That means the cultural collision that arises when different people are forced together is not changing. People used to know this and accept. Good fences make good neighbors. What has changed is our betters no longer accept Mother nature’s word for it.

The New Zeros

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In the coming decades, Western nations are going to be faced with a number of problems stemming from the technological revolution. We are now post-scarcity societies, where we have more than enough food, medicine and housing for our citizens and even some non-citizens. The pruning force of scarcity is no longer doing its magic to keep the population fit or even sensible. The next big problem is what to do with the tens of millions of extra humans, no longer needed to contribute to society.

The hardest part of the automation wave will simply be language. What do you call people who no longer have any purpose, in terms of producing goods and services through their labor? For as long as anyone has been alive, the small slice of the population that has fit this definition could simply be dismissed. The underclass is assumed to be lazy or anti-social. Trying to fix this has been a good way to keep the useless off-spring of the middle classes busy in social work.

When the numbers swell as automation eliminates the need for human labor in wide swaths of the economy, it will be impossible to dismiss the idle. When many of the idle are people who formerly occupied office jobs or semi-skilled laboring positions, blaming their condition on a lack of ambition is not going to be possible. The current labor participation rate is about 63% right now. In the coming decades, that number will fall below 50% due to automation and demographics.

The other challenge is how to support the swelling ranks of the useless in a way that keeps them from causing trouble. The hot idea currently is the universal basic income, which is being experimented with in Finland. In the US, some states are talking about how to replace their welfare programs with something simpler like the UBI. Libertarian economists like the idea of the UBI, because it theoretically allows the under classes to participate in the market economy, unencumbered by the state.

The trouble with this idea is math. If all citizens have a floor, in terms of their basic income, whatever that floor is, will be the new zero. The only possible way to have a negative income, in real terms, is if someone is paying their employer. There may be some bizarre situations where that exists, but in the main, zero is the smallest number that can appear in box #1 of your W2. If that number is bumped up by the UBI, that becomes the new zero, the lowest possible.

Imagine the government decides to help BMW sell more cars, so they offer every citizen $5000 if they spend it on a BMW, rather than some other car. BMW is now facing a wave of people coming into American dealerships toting a $5,000 check. The logical thing for BMW to do is raise the price of their low end models by $5000. That way, they do not increase production costs, but they increase the profit per car. In effect, the floor for entry level buyers was just raised by $5000 by the government.

There is a fairly good real world example of this. The government decided to do something to help working class people get into college. Since many need remedial help, before taking on college work, the scheme was to offer a subsidy to be used for community colleges. The students would use the money to prep for college then head off to a four year university, presumably using loans and aid at that level. The result, however, was the community colleges just raised their tuition.

The UBI would most likely follow the same pattern. By guaranteeing that no one would earn less than some amount, in lieu of traditional welfare payments, the absolute floor becomes the subsidy level. In effect, the new zero becomes the subsidy so all other wages would be based off that number. It is really no different than printing up money and dropping it from helicopters into the ghetto. The UBI would be as inflationary as debasing the currency.

The truth is the zeroes that our rulers will be forced to address are zero population growth and zero TFR among the surplus populations. For example, you could fix Baltimore in a generation with mandatory Norplant for the underclass. A generation of childless females means the last generation of 80 IQ residents. The reason Baltimore is a violent city is not an excess of hard working, college educated STEM workers, but a surplus of violent stupid people.

It also means zero immigration. When 80% of today’s immigrants end up on public assistance, the immigrants of tomorrow will be nothing more than useless people to police, feed and house. Japan is the model to follow. They have no immigration and their population levels are about to drop in the coming decades. They are the only nation on earth that is truly ready for the automated future, as they have the demographics to meet a shrinking demand for labor.

There is one other zero and that is zero participation. The fact is the free-market and democracy work when the right answer is not obvious. As automation takes over more and more tasks, the number of issues that need to be hashed out collectively will diminish. Rule by robot means exactly that, which means voting and popular government will have to be reconsidered. What is the point of being mayor when there are no more patronage jobs to dole out to friends and family?

Civil War

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This was a popular item recently. It is a post about statistics, but the post got a lot of replies, because people think America is headed toward a civil war. Perhaps people with an interest in statistical methods worry about civil wars, in addition to methodological wars. It could also be that people fond of math know that society is fragile and it would not take much to topple it over. The distance between us and Somalia is not a big as we like to pretend.

Anyway, it is a good brain teaser. What would a civil war be like? The country is a vastly different place than the last time. The North is still richer than the south, but there is a Midwest, Southwest, West and Northwest now. More important, nothing is made in the Northeast anymore, other than trouble. The North is also the oldest part of the country, lacking a robust male population. By the standards of the last civil war, the North would be at a demographic, cultural and material disadvantage.

But that was then and this is now. Civil wars tend to be territorial and the regionalism of America is not what it once was. Lots of people from New England have moved south to the Carolinas, for example. Florida is full New Yorkers and is the retirement home to much of the Northeast. Northern Virginia is a region full of strangers, brought together by high paying government work. In event of war, people could move back to their home turf, but that seems unlikely.

There is also the fact that civil wars are almost always between the elites. The people are dragged into it by the warring factions at the top. In modern America, the elites have never been more unified. In fact, they are so united we now have one political party, the Uni-Party. The reason that you cannot tell the difference between the political opinions of Jonah Goldberg and Ezra Klein is that ideologically they are the same guy, with the same paymasters.

If there was to be a civil war in America, it would first have to start as a revolt and gain enough steam to be a genuine threat to the status quo. If a revolt grew into a serious threat to the interests of the ruling classes, then you might see some elements decide to throw in with the rebels. In all likelihood, it would be the younger, lower level members of the elites, looking for an opportunity to leapfrog their superiors. Alternatively, the revolt could quickly grow an elite of its own.

Of course, there is the racial angle. It is funny in a way, but the two groups convinced of the coming race war are blacks and white nationalists. The trouble with this idea is the time for a race war was sixty years ago. There were plenty of young black males thinking they had nothing to lose and plenty of young white males thinking they had everything to lose, Today, the only people thinking race war are mentally unstable black guys and white nationalists.

There is also the technological issue. The lesson of the last century is that conventional warfare was no longer a good way for settling disputes. Putting aside nukes, conventional weapons had simply become too lethal and too destructive. Prior to the Great War, winning meant gaining useful territory. Modern warfare means destroyed cities and fractured economies for both sides. In a civil war, modern arms would mean a terrible bloodbath for both sides.

New Englanders would love to re-enact Sherman’s march to the sea, but they would end up killing more allies than enemies. The economic cost to the North would be devastating. The degree of integration in a modern society would work against the instinct to destroy the other guy’s stuff. Throw in the regionalism issue above and conventional warfare with set-piece battles and troop formations is not going to serve the interests of anyone in the next American civil war.

There is also another problem. The US military is about 1.3 million people, but about 80% are in administrative and support roles. We have more people in uniform pushing buttons at a keyboard than carrying a pack in the field. Of that fighting force, about two-thirds are deployed at any one time. It is not an accident that our political class is not a fan of keeping large numbers of combat ready troops on US soil. In a civil war, the US military would probably disintegrate quickly.

Now, America has been waging non-lethal war on the world for a long time in the form of financial war and now information war. Economic sanctions are a form of warfare intended to create unrest in the target society. North Korea’s quest for nukes is the economic war we have been waging against them. The Bush people took steps to cut them off from the banking system and thus starve the regime of hard currency. That has made the elites of the regime much poorer and weaker as a result.

In a civil war, the tools of finance would come to bear. Assuming the civil war began as a revolt, the ruling class would first attempt to squeeze the rebels financially, by cutting them off from the financial system, making it hard to raise money. This means shutting down their PayPal accounts. Credit card processors would be pressured to discontinue service. When that failed, banks would be forced to close accounts and the seize assets of troublemakers.

This would also discourage members of the elite from getting any ideas about supporting the rebels against the senior elements of the elite. This would be augmented by the use of information war to undermine the moral authority of the rebels, thus starving them of ability to gain popular support. Humans are social animals and they instinctively seek to distance themselves from the taboo. That would mean using mass media organs to evangelize against the rebels.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. America, and the West, is teetering on the verge of civil war, but a modern, technological civil war. On the one side is the globalist elite, who have purged their ranks of anyone skeptical of the project. The brewing revolt is mostly the people willing to question the prevailing orthodoxy. The panic we saw last summer by the tech giants was motivated by a fear that the internet revolt was becoming a revolt in the streets.

This is the face of modern civil war.

The Mighty Whitey

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This post was making the rounds on social media over the holidays. What caught my attention was a comment someone made along the lines of “Stowe is the quintessential New England town.” I think the person meant it looks like what people think of when they think of New England towns. It is a picturesque little town and it is a wonderful place to live, not just for the architecture. The von Trapp family thought so, which is why they settled there.

Lifestyle sites love putting together lists like this. Cooking sites will have an annual “50 Best Restaurants” or “10 Best Overlooked Dining Towns.” I have an old copy of a cycling mag that lists the best rides in each state. I keep it in case I find myself in an unfamiliar state with some time for a ride. In the olden thymes, magazines would do special issues on America’s best towns. These sorts of articles are popular, because they mostly flatter the sensibilities of middle-class white people.

Looking at the list from Architectural Digest, I recognized many of the towns, but others were new to me. I have been to about half of them. Reading over the list, the thing that struck me as that all of them are very white. The first one on the list, Traverse City, Michigan, is 94.4% white. Blacks are outnumbered by Native Americans. Doing a little math, there are roughly 100 blacks in this town. This town probably has more left-handed lesbians than black guys.

Jacksonville Oregon is the next town on the list and it has more people describing themselves as “other” than calling themselves black. Here is a pic of the local high school basketball team. They do not win many games. It is not a town full of middle-aged divorced woman. The census says that the median age in the city is 54.9 years, with 65% of the population over 45. It seems that Jacksonville is a quaint little town for retired white people and some of their less ambitious kids.

Oregon is a state roughly as white as New England, so I looked at the next town on the list, Dahlonega Georgia. The Peach State is the fourth blackest state in the nation, with a black population of 40% and a sizable Hispanic population. The most charming small town in the state is 5% black. It is 90% white with a respectable number of Hispanics, but they are most likely laborers and service workers, as Dahlonega is now “the heart of the North Georgia Wine Country.”

Figuring that the good whites at Architectural Digest would be painfully aware of their whiteness, I took a look at the towns on the list in heavily Hispanic areas. One of the tricks Progressives use to get around their aversion to black people is they point to the Hispanics or Asians in their towns and claim the maximum diversity points. I have an acquaintance who swears he moved to Arlington Mass for the diversity. This is a town that is 2% black, but there are plenty of Asian professors and Hispanic maids.

Taos New Mexico is one of those towns that Boomer women like visiting, because they have warehouses full of turquoise dangle earrings and dream catchers. The last census says it is 61% white, but only 40% non-Hispanic white. Taos is less than one-percent black, which means there are 30 black people in the whole town. The high school basketball team is probably not particularly good. This is a funny town though, as it is more of a resort town that serves wealthy whites.

That is the common theme with all of the towns on the list with relatively low white populations. Marfa Texas has become a funky little arts town that is mostly Hispanic but has a small white population to run the tourism business. Bisbee Arizona became a hippie attraction and is now fully gentrified. You can be sure the readers of Architectural Digest are not taking trips to see the run down neighborhoods where the mostly Hispanic servant class lives. Still, the trend continues.

The blackest town on the list, interestingly enough, is Berlin Maryland. It is 68.8% white and 23.3% black. The town started out as a trading post for the Burley Plantation in the 18th century. This was tobacco plantations until the Civil War. The interesting thing about the black population, though, is it is declining quickly. In the 80’s the black population was close to 50%. By the 2000 census it was down to 30%. Gentrification follows the same pattern, even in small towns.

All of this is interesting for race realists, but it does speak to the great divide in the American culture. The sort of people reading Architectural Digest are the sort of people who enjoy lecturing the rest of us about race. These are the people telling us that diversity is our strength, but when it comes to where they live and where they visit, diversity is the last thing they want to see. Baltimore has some spectacular Federal architecture, but it is no one’s visit list.

The challenge before us in the Dissident Right is not to shake our fists at the gross hypocrisy of the good whites. That has been done to death by Steve Sailer. The good whites simply do not care. My acquaintance in Arlington Mass will forever hate me for pointing out to him that his town is as white as Reykjavik. The challenge is to convince the good whites that the rest of us want the same things they want. We want our towns to have the same complexion as their towns,

That would be mighty white of them.

A Foundation of Nonsense

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Math and science are built upon axioms. Very simply, an axiom is something that is always true by its nature. An example is the reflexive property in algebra. A number is always equal to itself. Axioms are the building blocks, from which new truths are discovered. A proof is an inferential argument for a mathematical statement, using other previously established statements. That means a proof can be traced back to those axioms that are the foundation of mathematics.

This is how we accumulate knowledge about the physical world. The proofs based on those building blocks are incorporated into new building blocks. The theorems and proofs multiply, slowly building up the stock of things we know to be true. Calculus was built upon algebra and physics was built upon calculus and so on. It why a student can quickly go from zero to trying to discover new truths about the world. They inherit a supply of things assumed to be true.

This accretive process of increasing our stock of knowledge is not limited to math and science. It is the way human societies evolve over time. We start with basic truths about the human condition and the realities we face as a society. Over time we acquire new knowledge, by building on what we know or that which we think we know. For example, libertarians rely on the concept of homo economicus. This asserts that humans are consistently rational and self-interested agents pursuing their ends optimally.

In theory, at least, this is the basis of democracy. One side builds a set of policies and proposals, allegedly based on the assumed truths. The other side does the same thing arriving at different policies. After a vigorous examination of the competing claims, a consensus is formed around one solution. If it works out, then that becomes part of society’s truths, from which new problems will be addressed in the future. That is not really how it works, but people believe it. It is axiomatic that democracy works this way.

What we know to be Western liberal democracy, assumes certain things about humanity to be true all the time. The blank slate is the most obvious example. Everything about our politics and culture assumes that humans are infinitely malleable. From school policy to prison reform, public policy assumes that people can be whatever they choose, because they have free will and a blank slate that can be erased and re-illustrated at any point in their life. You are what you make of yourself.

It is how our rulers arrived at the idea of open borders. Those foreigners can be re-purposed into tax paying Westerners, through education and enculturation, to pay the pensions of the native stock. Those Somali goatherds can be plopped down into Minnesota and over time, develop all of the habits of the average Minnesotan, just by emulation and proximity. Race laws are all based on the assumption that you can train people to stop noticing racial difference and therefore, end racism.

Of course, science is putting the lie to the blank slate. Genetics is filling out the truth of the human condition, which is that we are the result of our coding. We are the product of thousand of mating decisions made before us. Everything from our height to our sense of humor is baked into our genetic coding. Our health outcomes and our life outcomes are the results of that coding. Not surprisingly, the closer our coding is to others, the greater the similarities.

While no one is prepared to say free will is a lie, at least not publicly, no serious person accepts that we are infinitely malleable. The argument that you can change your personality is as nutty as saying you can make yourself taller or younger. This reality used to be a building block of Western thought but was “discredited” by the blank slate theorists, but it is now being reestablished by genetics. In other words, one of the main building blocks of modern social democracy is about to crumble.

That is a big one, but it is not the only one. Both Freudian and Jungian psychology still cast a long shadow over Western culture. Freud is no longer taken seriously, outside of his historical importance. The idea that your emotional state is the product of childhood sexual trauma is a click less realistic than phrenology. Jungian psychotherapy is also being overrun by neuroscience. Few people still think they can be talked out of their madness anymore. Instead, pharmaceuticals are used to treat diseases of the brain.

It is not just the quackery. The moral philosophy that underlies our political philosophy is similarly built on a foundation of nonsense. The Enlightenment thinkers all started by considering man’s natural state. It was either a harmonious communal existence or a brutal war like existence. From both starting points, they worked forward to build a model how man went from the state of nature to what was then civilization. The resulting moral philosophy is the basis of our political and legal philosophy today.

Property rights, the rule of law, the relationship of man and state, these are all based on those assumptions about man’s natural state. Libertarians and so-called Conservatives take the Lockean position that society is built upon the social contract. Those on the Left assume Hobbes was right and order must be imposed on society. Marxists further accept the materialist claims about the nature of man. All of the iterations and flavors of political ideology are rooted in one of those two broad assumptions about humanity.

Those assumptions are all wrong. We know that much now. Better archaeology and anthropology are helping illuminate the pre-history mankind. Evolutionary biology is also helping explain the fossil and archaeological record. Genetics, of course, are re-writing the map of mankind, explaining how we spread across the globe. What we are finding out is that man, in his “natural state” was not what Hobbes imagined nor what Locke imagined. Man’s “natural” state is much more complicated and much more local.

The implication should be obvious. As the underlying assumptions give way to new knowledge, the conclusions built on those assumptions must give way. If tomorrow we learn that two plus two is not always four, everything we know about the world stops making sense. If everything we thought we knew about man and civilization turns out to be wrong, we suddenly do not know a whole lot about how we should organize ourselves, other than the old rules are probably not going to work.

It seems today that Western societies are painfully re-learning things that were common knowledge a few generations ago. The old axiom, fences make good neighbors, was replaced with “diversity is our strength.” Every time a swarthy fellow blows up in the public square, we inch a bit closer to the realization that diversity is a nightmare. That is the part we see. The part we do not see, at least not yet is the crumbling of the foundation of the modern West.

The Future of White Nationalism

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At American Renaissance, I was introduced to an old guy from VDare, who seemed to experience the world strictly through the search functions of his phone. Someone told him about my site and the first thing he did was search for the site name and “white nationalism” to see if I had opinions on the subject. His first hit was a post where I called white nationalism the dumbest thing going. He tried giving me the business about it and I gave it right back to him. I will forever be off the VDare Solstice card list as a result.

In fairness to him, he was a good sport about it. In fairness to me, my criticism of white nationalism is mostly about aesthetics. That means it comes with baggage and that baggage is not easily overcome. When most Americans hear “white nationalism” they think of shitless rustics complaining about the coloreds. Getting modern whites to overcome the cult of anti-racism is hard under ideal conditions. Having Cletus as your sales rep makes it impossible.

That’s something the white identity people need to accept. For generations, Progressives have tightly associated racism with the South. The good white/bad white thing that John Derbyshire discusses is based entirely on this image. Bad whites shop at Walmart, like domestic beer and hate black people. Despite the fact that blacks have been moving back to the Old Confederacy for decades, black culture holds that the South is still aggressively racist.

Even if you can somehow get past the image problem, white nationalism is not some new concept developed by the alt-right. It has a history and it has a lot of veterans of its prior iterations. Those people are still kicking around. The web site Storm Front, in addition to being an FBI honey trap, is the home of the old White Nationalist guys, who used to follow guys like David Duke. If you borrow the language and symbols of these guys, you are inviting them and their ideas into your thing.

There are two problems with this. One is many of these guys were not the best people or the most stable people. Stepping way outside the moral framework is never easy, but it is a lot easier if you’re crazy. It’s also easier if you have nutty ideas that no one takes too seriously. Even the most generous evaluation of White Nationalism 1.0 says it was mostly a reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. It never came up with a plausible way forward politically or culturally.

Again, even if you manage to rehabilitate the language and symbols, you cannot get past the fact that prior efforts were a failure. A pretty good rule of life is that failure is assured if you follow in the footsteps of previous failures. It’s why adopting Nazi symbols is stupid.  Associating your thing with failure is just bad marketing. It also tends to attract people who find some sort of satisfaction in losing. New movements need need language and new symbols.

Putting all of that aside, prior iterations of white nationalism always suffered from the fact they were reactionary. At their very best, they could only offer a critique of the prevailing order. They had nothing to offer as an alternative, beyond demands to wind back the clock. Reactionary movements always fail in the long run for the simple reason that yesterday can never follow tomorrow. Even if everyone agrees the current arrangements are not working, what comes next is never the past.

There’s something else that prior white nationalists movements never got right. They assumed that a majority white nation was a given. If they could just get a majority of whites on their side, they would win the political battles over race. America is 70% white at the last census and will be majority-minority in a few decades. The issue today is not about keeping America white. That horse has left the barn. The question before us today is how whites will survive as a minority population.

That means the math is not about 50% plus one. Whatever comes to define white identity in the age of identity politics will have to appeal to and serve the interests of the vast majority of whites. That can’t just be a visceral hatred of nonwhites. Whites in America are low in clannishness. Old fashioned tribal signaling against the next tribe is not going to work. What comes next has to be an ideology that promotes a positive identity offering a promising future.

That’s probably the most encouraging thing to come out of the Charlottesville protest over the summer. The people involved began to appreciate the need to build new symbols and use new language. Even guys like Andrew Anglin are pushing his people to drop the Hitler images, beyond obviously satirical stuff. Mockery of taboos and irreverence for social norms has a place, but it can’t be the focus of a political movement, if it is going to draw in the skeptical.

The irony here is the New Left went through a similar problem. Before they were able to start the cultural revolution, they existed as an ad hoc counter-culture. The old commies from the CP-USA days tried to glom onto it, but the new radicals correctly saw that as a bad idea. They eventually purged their ranks of the old guys and their old ideas. Now, the cultural movement that seeks to destroy the New Left and the Baby Boomer culture is going through a similar process as it organizes itself.

The Plight Of The Edgytarian

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One of the more popular ways for people, with modest talents, to gain public attention is to be edgy. The best examples of this are the pop stars who have modest musical ability, but are willing to degrade themselves on stage, well beyond what is common. Comics used to play the edgy card, by dropping the F-bomb in their act or making increasingly bawdy sexual references. The game is to set yourself apart from the other mediocrities by saying and doing outlandish things. That way, the public pays attention to you instead of others.

You see something similar in the commentariat. There are millions of people able to talk and write about public issues well enough to succeed on stage. It is not that hard. Most TV presenters are remarkably stupid, but they can learn to read from the teleprompter and look into the correct camera. The Atlantic Magazine has shown how easy it is to create a black intellectual with the TN Coates experiment. Getting on TV or getting a perch at a big site, therefore, requires something else, something to set you apart from the crowd.

That is where the edgytarian comes in. These are the folks who stake out the turf just on the fringe of what the commentariat has deemed acceptable. Bill Maher is a good example of a Left edgytarian. He says the things that most Progs are thinking but avoid saying for fear it is over the line. There are Right edgytarians too. These are the guys who will make a joke about feminists or dissent from the orthodoxy on trannies. They are not full blown heretics, just a bit reluctant in their enthusiasm, which makes them bad boys.

Left edgytarians have always had it easy. They just needed to find the limit Progressives had set to the Left. The edgy Prog put his right foot on that line and his left foot outside the line. That way, he is outside the acceptable, but not out there where people like Jill Stein live. His only worry was the line would move faster than he could keep pace, as the line always moves in that direction. Dave Letterman went from edgy comic to creepy old man in a couple of decades, because he could not keep pace with the changing line.

Right edgytarians have always had a more challenging problem. They needed to find the line the Progs set on the right and place their right foot on that line and their left foot inside the line. This means living in fear of the line slipping inside of their left foot. That is why they make a study of Prog fashion. To suddenly be outside the bounds of acceptable is death. Inevitably, theirs is a life of defending the line between themselves and those to their Right and keeping pace with the ever changing line of what is acceptable to the Progs.

Even more troubling for the Right in general, but especially the Right edgytarian, is that the Progs can willy-nilly declare someone a heretic retroactively. That means the edgy guy can suddenly find himself being hurled into the void because of past statements, which were just inside the line back then, but are suddenly heretical. It is why conservative commentators always have rabbit ears. They are always watching for sudden changes in the zeitgeist so they can get ahead of it. It is why they love the word “zeitgeist.”

The successful Right edgytarians figured out how to avoid this problem by going into the safe zone as soon as they had anything resembling success. Jonah Goldberg is a good example of this type. When he was a blogger, he played the edgy card, but as soon as he had some success, he raced to the safe zone and became Mr. Conventional Wisdom. In the 90’s he was doing pop culture references and scatological humor. Today he so boring and tedious, he manages to make John Fund sound like a wild man.

It is the smart move though. Look at Gavin McInnes. He burst onto the scene as the hyper edgy nighttime guy on Red Eye. He was mocking the JQ, race and sex, all the while being the middle-aged wild man. Then he got named by the inquisition over heresy regarding homosexuals. Then he was seen in public with known hate thinkers. No matter how many marital aids he jammed up his rectum, he was suddenly off-limits. His choice was to go to the dark side or find a new act. He is now doing a grumpy dad act on CRTV.

What makes life suddenly perilous for edgytarians of both varieties is the old paradigm is breaking down. Progs are rocketing into fads that are essentially the habits of the functional mentally ill. You cannot be more edgy than a guy in a bloody sundress, who just castrated himself, while belting out Helen Reddy tunes. On the Right, the people who would be the audience for guys like McInnes are losing interest in chasing that shadow and are instead wandering out into the new world of new politics.

The result of all this is our official discourse is suddenly becoming very dull. Reading a modern political site feels like you are re-reading articles from the 80’s or 90’s. It is the equivalent of listening to pop songs from three decades ago, while everyone pretends it is new and original. Of course, pop culture has become moribund, as well. Hollywood does nothing but churn out remakes and sequels. Music has become so dull that even the elevator people refuse to play it. Comedy is no longer funny.

That is what distinguishes this counter-culture movement from the 1960’s version. In the old days, the game was to get to the main stage and be slightly outrageous. The hippies and radicals were all about freaking out the squares. Comics like George Carlin were all about pushing the envelope, from their perch on the big stage. Radical politics was about being radical within the established parties. The edginess was never authentic as it was simply a means to an end. The point was to eventually be mainstream.

Today, a guy like PewDiePie has fifty-seven million subscribers to his video channel and his videos average 2.5 million views. He has no interest in going mainstream. A guy like Milo was better off avoiding the official media entirely. His attempt to be an edgytarian has made him into a sad joke. Of course, the new politics is completely off the mainstream reservation. Today’s counter-culture is not a reaction to the old culture so much as an abandonment of it. It is an ad hoc, chaotic effort at something entirely new.

That is why being Mr. Edgy is a dead end street now. A guy like Gavin McInnes is smart enough to figure it out, which is why he is putting on the cardigan and scanning old shows like Leave It To Beaver for material. You cannot be edgy in a world where the gap between what is allowed and was taboo is impossible to span. You see this in comedy where guys like Andrew Anglin and The Right Stuff can never possibly “cross over” and do their thing in what is now the mainstream. They are all in on this side of the divide.

There is an old gag where a chicken and a pig talk about opening a restaurant. The chicken suggests they call it “ham and eggs.” The pig declines, saying, “I’d be committed but you would only be involved.” That is what is going in the culture. For years, the edgytarian could just be involved in fringe culture and the dominant culture. Now, everyone must be committed. you are either fully on one side of the chasm or on the other side. To mix metaphors, those who try to be both fall into the void.

More Devil’s Dictionary

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A couple of months ago this post generated a ton of suggestions. It seems like a worthy project, as our rulers keep producing new words and phrases to fool us. In the fullness of time, someone is going to write a book on how marketing techniques infiltrated the minds of our rulers, like a virus, causing them to increasingly rely on cheap marketing gags to communicate to themselves and the rest of us. The result being a ruling elite that sounds like commercials for laundry soap.

With that in mind, here are some new additions to the list.

Show your support: This is always a demand from a company or organization for you to buy their stuff so they can spend the proceeds on themselves, while taking credit for some good deed. Currently, retail chains are having their cashiers harass customers into giving money to the Red Cross for hurricane relief in Houston. The end result will be a photo-op of the executives posing with the Red Cross, handing them a big check, so they can claim to be supporting the community.

Inclusivity: The rallying cry of modern terrorism. Every organization that is about to be assaulted by tackle-faced social justice warriors gets a committee on inclusivity. This a place where lunatics plot to destroy the organization. Google started one of these and is now in free fall. Node.js is the most recent to be attacked by the ISIS of the West.

Affirming: Lesbians and middle-aged cat ladies are riddled with self-doubt, because they chose a lifestyle that is at odds with human biology. This leads them to create organizations, usually within other organizations, which are designed to tell them that they made the right choice, even if nature says otherwise. Protestant churches have all become affirming as they embrace every anti-Christian lunacy.

Brave: The Progressive religion is built around the concept of the struggle. Prog loonies all imagine themselves as paladins fighting the monster called fascism. Therefore, anyone who sallies forth into the public square to preach the good word is called brave. The irony is that it is safe. Antifa is called brave, while the people they are beating with clubs are called cowards.

That is not who we are: This is one of those phrases that is not intended for the wider audience. It is almost always said by a so-called Conservative in reaction to something normal people are doing. The person saying it is trying to signal to The Hive that they are not associated with the bad thing in question. When Paul Ryan says to his voters, “This is not who we are” he literally means he is not one of the dirt people in his district.

Send a message: This is another code word that people in The Hive use in public, but it is not intended for the public. When a politician talks about “sending a message” he means to signal his virtue to the rest of The Hive. The message to the rest of us, if any, is that the person saying it should probably be hurled into the ocean before she gets us killed.

Problematic: This is a favorite of Prog loonies. It means the speech or act in question could be ruled heretical. The problem is they lack the words to condemn it and an easy escape route to run away from it.

Troubling: This is the same as problematic.

Vibrant: This is a favorite term to mean no white people. A neighborhood is vibrant when it is full of boarded up houses and gang-bangers with pit bulls.

Sustainable: This is one of those words that should be included in the humor section, but the people who coined it have no sense of humor. Anything that is labeled “sustainable’ is always something that is not sustainable. Alternatively, it may be sustainable, like organic farming, but will require a great die off of humans. Whenever you hear this word, assume the person using it fantasizes about putting you in an oven.

Accepted: This is when some outlier or fringe population forces the majority to forgo its own preferences for those of the outlier or fringe population.

Passion: This is what happens to Progressive white women in the modern era. They are suddenly gripped with passion. Like Hitler, whose passion for killing Jews was all consuming, passionate women are obsessed with killing erections. Passionate women are always wildly unattractive and ear-piercingly obnoxious.

Growth: This is always used in economic debates to signal that something is good for rich people. A pro-growth policy is one that allows the rich to hoover up more money from the middle-class. When pundits accuse a politician of promoting polices that will hurt growth, it means the billionaire who owns the pundit is vexed with the politician.

Toxic: Any argument or fact that can be screamed away, because it is obviously true, is called toxic. The users of this word believe that the magic of their incantations will make the dis-confirming thing go away. Normal men being normal in public, for example, is branded as “toxic masculinity.” White people not robbing liquor stores or shooting one another over sneakers is “toxic racism.”

Sharable: This describes something that appears to be free but is used by the true owner to harm others or steal their property. Progs call doxing, for example, a sharable strategy. Tech companies like sharable technology because it means they get to install their spyware on your phone or computer.

Dialogue: This is when a Prog loony screams at you and you sit and take it. You are having a dialogue! If you refuse to put up with the lecture, then you are being divisive and polarizing, which is both troubling and problematic. It means you could be suffering from toxic racism.

A Post About Fake News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doubt is on our side.

Devil’s Dictionary

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Maybe it has always been true, but it seems like we live in an age of esoteric language or pseudo-language. Everyone is familiar with the gag of using “undocumented worker” in place of “illegal alien.”  Janitors became sanitation engineers and teachers are now educators. It is a part of how the American Left makes war on our civilization. By destroying the language, they destroy the truth. If words no longer have common and concise meanings, then there is no truth, only force.

There is another aspect to this. The Progs create pleasant sounding phrases and neologisms that are packed with danger. It is a natural outgrowth of the passive-aggressive tactics popular with the Progs. The new word or phrase is not intended to clarify or explain idea, but to warn people that the official truth has been decided and any further debate will be seen as a challenge. As everyone knows, the Left responds to a challenge with violence so the new phrase means “shut up or else.”

With that in mind, a running list of words and phrases, which have a more ominous meaning beyond the literal, seems like a good project. This will be one of those posts that could be updated over time both for entertainment purposes and to build out a comprehensive language guide for the normie trying to navigate his way through the theocracy. Perhaps one day some smart crime thinker will create a mobile app, like a universal translator, for normal people to use when dealing with HR or reading a mainstream news site.

Have a conversation: Whenever you hear someone say they want to have a conversation about something, what they mean is they want to shut down all debate and impose their will with regards to the subject. Having a conversation about marriage led to the end of the homosexual marriage debate in favor of the sodomites. Having a conversation about race means Progs screaming at white people about racism and white privilege. Having a conversation always means sitting through a lecture.

Secure the border: Whenever the topic of immigration comes up, someone will start chanting about the need to secure the border. The reason for this is so they can avoid talking about immigration, without looking soft on immigration. What they really mean when they use this phrase is they have no interest in the topic and you are a racist for bringing it up, but they will throw you a bone just to shut you up.

Here’s What You Need to Know: This is a favorite of female millennial writers, who imagine themselves as brilliant because they got a gold star from their lefty teachers in school. It is a phrase that sets themselves up as the arbiter of what is and what is not worth knowing about a topic. Unsurprisingly, what never needs to be known is anything that contradicts the one true faith. As soon as you see this in a post, it means that what you need to know is they are right and shut up.

Conservative Principles: Alternatively, “first principles” or “principled conservative.” The Conservative Industrial Complex loves throwing this around to benefit themselves and damage anyone questioning their project. As soon as you hear Official Conservatives™ talking about their principles, it means they are either about to throw in with the Left against you or they are preparing to surrender on some cultural issue.

Fact Check: The lefty scolds love this phrase. They fact check the crap out of everything, except their own beliefs. Those are off limits because you are a racist. As soon as you see this phrase, you should assume that what comes next is some senseless nitpicking that let us them dismiss anything they find unpleasant. For instance, when a normal person says migrants suck off the welfare system, they will “fact check” this and claim that “not that many” migrants go on welfare. So, you are a bigot and shut up.

Inclusive: This means normal people need not apply. Something that is inclusive is something that excludes the things normal people consider to be normal. A club that is inclusive, for example, will be full of homosexual males, blue haired lesbians and people with fashionable mental disorders. Inclusive is code for fringe weirdos only.

Disturbing: Progs say this to let other Progs know that what is being described or witnessed is taboo. It is a favor they do for one another.

Divisive: Since uniformity and conformity are the highest virtues of Progressivism, anything that contradicts the tenets of the faith are labeled “divisive.” This lets coreligionists know that the person or argument is a major hate crime. This is also a mortal sin. There is not much worse than being divisive.

Polarizing: Like divisive, this word is used for people or ideas that contradict the faith but have not yet become mortal sins. The person or idea is causing conflict in the cult, but not so much that it is a threat. This is a venial sin.

It is Complicated: This means it is not complicated, but we are going to pretend it is so we can get a bunch of our friends jobs in the bureaucracy. Health care is complicated, for example, so it means thousands of jobs for liberal arts majors out of swank private colleges.

Intellectual Case: The abuse of modifiers in modern language is rampant. What exactly is an intellectual case, versus a regular case or perhaps an emotional case? When you see this phrase, just assume the person using it is a chattering class mediocrity trying to convince you that his preferences are canonical and everyone else is just stupid.

Moral Narcissism: Abracadabra words are so common; it is easy to blow past them without noticing. Here is a popular example. This should be read as “magic bad word” as it has no meaning beyond that.

There is a lot more work to be done: Politicians love saying this, usually after they rattle off a long list of their alleged accomplishments. Professional barnacles also love using this phrase when promoting whatever cause it is they represent, a cause that is fully funded by taxpayers. In both cases, it means nothing will ever be solved and the racket will go on forever or until the treasury is empty.

Get our fiscal house in order: This is the politician or pundit saying he would like to rob you and your posterity of their last nickel.

Unity: This always means “get whitey.” When the black street leader calls for unity, he means to declare a war on the honky. When homosexuals want unity, it means attacking straight white males. It is why you never hear normal white males call for unity. Everyone would interpret it as a call for mass suicide.

Healing: This means the people in charge have figured out how they are going to sweep the disconfirmation down the memory hole and refocus on the crime thinkers. For instance, after a Mohamed explodes or goes stabby, the government officials declare it a random incident of domestic violence and say it is now time for healing. It is always a cue for their surrogates in the media to stop talking about the story.

Come Together: Shut up

Diversity: No white men.

Slashed: The tiniest of decreases, usually so small that no one will notice. An agency’s budget is “slashed” when the managers do not get their usual lavish raise but have to suffer with a small increase. Government programs are slashed when they get all the money the need, but not what they wanted. In a sense, “slashed” means the government just took a chunk out of your paycheck.

Woke: This is the sound a white woman makes when she is about to say something outlandishly stupid.

Outspoken: This is a compliment for someone, who is holding the megaphone, bellowing at the crowd on behalf of the one true faith. A normal person would assume it means “speaking against the current order” but in our modern managerial age, it means the opposite. An outspoken person is someone railing against the non-conformists and deviationists for their gross hooliganism. Stalin was outspoken.