Category Archives: Greatest Hits

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.

The Tan Man’s Burden

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When I was a young man I had a job washing cars for a car rental place. Mostly the job was two or three guys vacuuming up the inside, shooting it with the deodorizer and then hosing it off. It was part-time work so there was a gang of part-timers working in shifts. For a young honky in the big city, it was an interesting experience because most of my colleagues were from the third world. There were a few other honkies and some American blacks, but most were immigrants from the third world.

One lesson I learned was that outside of America, the world is not black and white. In the States, race was always about blacks and whites. In the rest of the world, there are a lot of shades in between. There’s also a fair bit of tribalism too. The African guys had a low opinion of American blacks. One guy from Ghana used to tell me that only the stupid were caught by slave traders and shipped to the new world. The smart Africans stayed in Africa. West Indians also had a tough time with American blacks. They put a great deal of effort into separating from them.

The one guy I always remembered was a guy named Maurice, who was from the Caribbean and of mixed race. He was obsessed with his mixed race too. He never stopped talking about it. If he did not tell you he was mixed race, you would have assumed he was Spanish or maybe Cajun. In parts of the South like Louisiana you run into guys who are white, but they have some Indian mixed in, or maybe even a black or two way back in the family tree. They used to tick the white box, but now they tick the black box.

The thing about Maurice was he talked about his mixed race all the time because he was a man without a race. The blacks did not accept him as black and he just assumed the whites did not accept him as white. In all likelihood, no one cared. I know I did not care, but he cared very much. At the time, I just thought he was a guy with hangups, but looking back, I see now that being a mulatto is a strange curse. While it has no real social drawbacks in the modern age, especially for women, for whom it is an asset, the person of mixed race imagines it is a huge burden.

It may be a burden too. This story about Rodney Harrison calling out Colin Kaepernick for not being authentically black is a good example. Until this controversy, my guess is exactly no one cared that Kaepernick was half black, except Kaepernick, who appears to obsess over it. So much so he went overboard trying to prove he belonged in the black world, by affecting everything we would associate with black culture. His wigger act really is over the top and most likely the result of feeling like he has to be extra black in order to pass for black. He is a tanned and tatted Vanilla Ice.

It has been noted that Obama’s closest advisers are mixed race people who identify as black. Obama, of course, is of mixed race. He also has the added burden of having been raised abroad. His connection to the black American experience is theoretical, at best. Yet, he puts a lot of effort into being not white and one could be forgiven for thinking that maybe he nurses a grudge against whites. He did dedicate a book to his delinquent father, but has never had much to say about his white mother and white grandparents who raised him, other than a disparaging remark about them.

Being black in America has its own unique challenges. Being white in America is no guarantee of happiness either, but black people have some special challenges that are made easier on an individual basis by black solidarity. Talk to black professionals and one of the things they lament is the lack of black middle class institutions. The cookout with Ned Flanders is nice, but they want to be around other black people who share their outlook. It’s why the black middle class has struggled to cut off the black underclass. Racial solidarity is powerful stuff.

Mulatto man does not have anything like that as the mixed race people are roughly 3% of the population. The black-white portion of that is less than a third so the number of people with a black parent and white parent is very small. There’s never been an identity group for mulattoes so there’s no history or shared experience around which to build a racial identity. The result, at least for now, is a class of people with no tribe to call their own. They are not authentically black and they don’t believe they are accepted as white. That disengagement probably feels like a great burden to the person carrying it.

Trump And The Polls

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A new poll after the nomination of the old hag as the Evil Party candidate suggests she got a mild boost from the show. Of course, Trump got a boost after his convention, but then the polling companies changed their methods in order put Clinton back in the lead. There are other polls showing Trump with a big lead and probably polls showing a dead heat. With the election more than three months out and most Americans enjoying the summer, the wild swing in the polls seems logical. It is why partisans are prone to dismiss any poll that does not make them feel good.

Polling science is said to be much better now than in the past. After each election we are told the pollsters got it close to right. Once in a while they miss, like we saw with Brexit or the last Parliament election in Britain. Obviously, the polling was wildly off with Trump early on and he did over-perform against the polls throughout the primary. That suggests the polling companies have not yet figured out how to identity the voter pool. Or maybe the critics are right and the pollsters are lying to help the establishment.

It is easy to be skeptical of polling. The sample sizes are so small, it is hard to see how they can be representative of the voter pool. What is never disclosed is the number of people who refuse to participate. It is reasonable to assume that the hard thumping fanatics want to be polled, while normal people have better things to do with their time. A generation ago normal people may have been inclined to participate, feeling it was their duty as a citizen, but those days are long gone. The normies are woke.

Then there is that other reason to be skeptical. Everywhere you look the media is conspiring to deceive the public. A Muslim shoots up a gay club and we get stories about how he was a homosexual struggling with his sexuality. All of those stories were lies. We get a dump of DNC e-mails showing a clear conspiracy between the media and the party, but the story they tell us is about Boris Badenov secretly conspiring with Trump. If you are willing to lie like that, rigging polls is no great shakes.

That said, quantitative types will argue that some polls are fairly good. They get within a point or two of the results. Nate Silver’s new model was laughably wrong in the primaries, but his old model was pretty close to right in most of the primaries. He may have been off a few points, but he was picking the correct winner in every case. Investors Business Daily has been within a point the last few elections. They missed on the 2012 winner, but that was a close election and they were better than the rest.

The counter to this is that the range of possible results in any election is pretty small. Since the end WW2, the average difference in the popular vote is a little under nine percent. The big outlier was Reagan beating Mondale 58% to 40% in 1984. Most elections are within a 5% range so that means about five possible outcomes. In most of these elections, it was long clear who would win. Of those sixteen elections, only six had any mystery to them and that is counting 1968 and 2000.

Election Percentage Year
Barack Obama, Dem. defeats Mitt Romney, Rep. 3.86% 2012
Barack Obama, Dem. defeats John McCain, Rep. 7.27% 2008
George W. Bush, Rep. defeats John Kerry, Dem. 2.46% 2004
George W. Bush, Rep. defeats Al Gore, Dem. -0.51% 2000
Bill Clinton, Dem. defeats Bob Dole, Rep. 8.51% 1996
Bill Clinton, Dem. defeats George H. W. Bush, Rep. 5.56% 1992
George H. W. Bush, Rep. defeats Michael Dukakis, Dem. 7.72% 1988
Ronald Reagan, Rep. defeats Walter Mondale, Dem. 18.21% 1984
Ronald Reagan, Rep. defeats Jimmy Carter, Dem. 9.74% 1980
Jimmy Carter, Dem. defeats Gerald Ford, Rep. 2.06% 1976
Richard Nixon, Rep. defeats George McGovern, Dem. 23.15% 1972
Richard Nixon, Rep. defeats Hubert Humphrey, Dem. 0.70% 1968
Lyndon Johnson, Dem. defeats Barry Goldwater, Rep. 22.58% 1964
John Kennedy, Dem. defeats Richard Nixon, Rep. 0.17% 1960
Dwight Eisenhower, Rep. defeats Adlai Stevenson, Dem. 15.40% 1956
Dwight Eisenhower, Rep. defeats Adlai Stevenson, Dem. 10.85% 1952

The point here is that claiming you nailed twelve of the last sixteen elections means nothing. Where pollsters are measured is when the final result is a mystery or debatable. Silver getting the 2012 election right made him a star because everyone else got it wrong. His star has now faded because he blew the primaries so badly. It suggests he was just lucky for a while or maybe his great insight was just a moment in time. The mood of the country has changed and the polling methods have changed, so his algorithm is now worse than guessing.

There is also a new element here that we have not seen in our lifetime. The people in charge universally hate Trump. The media of both parties, the leadership of both parties, all sides of the chattering skull class, all of the beautiful people, everyone. They all hate Trump and the people backing Trump. This is a revolt of the elites and it is reasonable to assume that the pollsters feel pressure to put their thumb on the scales. If you are going to do that, this is when you do it because everyone is doing it.

Even if the pollsters are playing it straight, they are facing an impossible task. What will this electorate be like compared to previous elections? We know lots of new voters are turning up. That was the story of the primary. We know lots of people are changing teams. Nationals Review, The Federalist and Red State are now wearing their woman cards, backing a candidate they excoriated just a year ago. At the same time, old Lefty warhorses like Susan Sarandon are flirting with Trump.

At least for now, no poll, even those that make you feel good, should be trusted. We are in uncharted territory in many ways. The pollsters, even those playing it straight, are just as lost as everyone else. More important, the people we tend to rely on for information are feverishly working against our interests to a level we have never seen. If they are willing to claim Trump is working for the KGB, they will say anything and do anything. All bets are off now, so trust no one.

Intellectuals Versus Ideologues

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I think if I were to produce a defining characteristic of a true intellectual, I would say it is someone willing to consider possibilities that are not already on the table. When I say “true intellectual” I mean to distinguish the real thinkers from the pseudo-intellectual posers. The truly smart and curious are not constrained by or extremely interested in the current fads. When presented with a puzzle, they first try to imagine all of the possible solutions and then begin eliminating the impossible.

One of the useful lessons of mathematics is that there are some problems for which there are many answers. If you are presented with x – 3 = 0   or   x – 4 = 0 then you know x = 3, 4. In other words, X has more than one possible solution. A surprisingly high number of allegedly smart people struggle with that basic concept. When you get into more complex areas like human sciences, the range of solutions to a problem may include a combination of factors interacting to cause the observed phenomenon.

Therefore, the intellectual is someone that starts with the set of all solutions and narrows the list to those that are possible. The religiously minded, on the other hand, reverse the order of things. They first eliminate all the possibilities that fall outside the limits of their faith. A Christian, for example, will never consider the possibility that his faith is nonsense and Jesus was a fictional character. The Muslim will never consider that Mohamed was simply a medieval L. Ron Hubbard.

Throughout history, we have examples of the priestly class convincing the people that the calamity that has befallen them is due to their deviation from the faith. When the plague ravaged Europe, the religious were convinced it was due to God’s wrath. What else could it be? The English blamed the Viking invasions on the faithful falling out of favor with God. Revolutionaries blame the inevitable bad results of their revolution on enemies of the revolution.

Just to be clear, religion is vital to every society. Most people should not be thinking about all the possible causes of what is around them. Islam may be useless to Western civilization, but it serves a needed purpose in the East. Christianity was vital to the development of Western Civilization. In fact, it was what preserved the stock of human knowledge that was the foundation of the modern West. Today, the West would be better off if our leaders were Christians, instead of insane.

Even so, the difference between the intellectual and the ideological enforcer is all about the possibilities. A good example of that is in this post on NRO the other day from someone calling himself Mario Loyola. He is one of the thousands of public intellectuals living off the taxpayer at foundations around the Imperial Capital. His CV is here and you see the word “fellow” turn up a lot in his work history. Most of our “conservative” intellectuals have credentials from the liberal of institutions.

Anyway, his post is about black crime rates and the causes of those crime rates. This bit got my attention. “When America is ready for a real conversation about race, it will start here. It will ask honestly what the causes are. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that race has absolutely nothing to do with crime rates, and that government policies such as welfare are the real culprit, creating the urban blight and broken families that lead directly to crime.”

Let us first start with the phrase, “have a conversation.” When you want to kill time, you have a conversation about the weather. When you want to let someone else know things about yourself, you have a conversation. When you want to find answers to problems, you do not have a conversation. That is how you get fired. You are fooling around having conversations instead of doing work. In modern America, when a Progressive says she wants a conversation, you better run.

Putting that aside, the first thing Mario does in his “exploration of causes” is eliminate those that fall outside the permitted. In fact, he makes clear that he is not interested in that conversation at all. If you already have the answer, there is no need for further discovery. Once you find the answer, the next job is to tell the world about your wonderful insight. That is why scientists post the results of their experiments. It is how the stock of human knowledge increases.

Of course, Mario is not offering any evidence of his assertion. For this type of Progressive, race falls outside the set of acceptable causes so it is eliminated without further discussion. Because he is from the shadow end of the faith, he also feels the need to eliminate racism so he can focus on the welfare state. His post is not intended to start a conversation or begin the search for the causes of black crime. It is testimony in support of his particular brand of Progressivism.

It is not a great surprise that our public debates are echo chambers. Biology has become forbidden knowledge. So much so that few know anything about it. That is because biology is at odds with egalitarianism, the foundation stone of the Progressive faith. Once you accept that nature does not distribute her gifts equally among all men, Progressivism is untenable. It is akin to saying Christ was fictional or Mohamed was a con-man. That can never be allowed, no matter how many people die.

The Case of the Citizen Truly Stated

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In the English Civil War, a group of renegade soldiers, along with political supporters in London, began demanding radical reforms like universal suffrage, religious tolerance, equality before the law and popular sovereignty. The Levellers did not last long, but they remain an important turning point in Western history. Their radical idea was that a man must consent to be governed and therefore have a say in how he is governed. This is a seminal moment in Western history. A nation would be defined by its people, while empires would be defined by their territory.

Another way to look at it is that a nation is a group of people, who decide their borders, their customs and how they will govern themselves. The consent is not just from citizen to the state, but from citizen to citizen. An empire, in contrast, is whatever land the ruler can hold and the people within it. His relationship to the people is transactional. He guards the people, enforces the rules and the people pay taxes. The people have no obligations to one another, at least in a legal sense. Their only duties are to the king as a subject, while they remain in the kingdom. L’Etat, c’est moi.

The critical thing here is that a citizen has obligations to his fellow citizens, while a subject only has obligations to his ruler. The former is the model we have had in the West for a long time now. In America, it has been the only model. All the blather about the propositional nation stuff obscures this fact in an attempt to justify mass immigration, but even within that mythological concept of America, the citizen is defined by his relationship to his fellow citizens. It’s not the government who defines the citizen. It is the citizen that defines the state. As such, the citizens get to decide who is and who is not a citizen.

That’s the problem the open borders types refuse to address. The government of a nation is just an extension of that agreement between the citizens. It’s even written into the American Constitution, right at the very beginning.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In a nation, the government is defined by the people – literally. The people decide who is and who is not “the people” by whatever means they find agreeable. As with any contract, social or otherwise, the parties enter into it voluntarily. We don’t think of it that way, because we are born into our citizenship in most cases, but the fact that we can renounce our citizenship means it is always voluntary. Further, the fact that the state cannot revoke it means it is not a contract with the state. It is a contract with our fellow citizens.

In a land of no borders, there can be no social contract. What would be the point? If anyone can wander in and get the benefits of the contract, without first consenting to the terms of the contract and gaining the agreement of the counter party, what value can there be in citizenship? Citizenship becomes a suckers deal, just as it was in the Roman Empire when citizenship simply meant you paid taxes and had to provide men to the military. In the world of open borders, citizenship is all obligation and no benefit.

In such a world, it will not take long before the calls of patriotism fall flat. After all, what is patriotism but the moral obligation of a citizen to his fellow citizens? Patriotism is the spirit of the social contract. To their credit, the open borders crowd agrees that their vision of paradise is one where all human relations are transactional. Everyone acts in their self interest. So, why would people serve jury duty? Volunteer at their kid’s school? Serve in the military? All of these things assume a moral duty to your fellow citizens. In the borderless paradise, no one owes anyone anything.

Even in the paradise of open borders, order must be maintained and the interests of the wealthy protected. When calls to patriotism and culture are no longer tools available to the state, force is what’s left. This custodial state we see being rolled out by our rulers is not due to a breakdown of the citizens willingness to uphold their part of the social contract. It is the breakdown of the social contract that is causing the growth of the custodial state. Put another way, the state is not just failing in its obligations, it is nullifying the compact between citizens. In fact, they are obliterating the very concept of citizenship.

In response to the Leveller’s call or democratic rights, Henry Ireton responded,

No person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here — no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.

How is this different from the arguments of the open borders proponents? They argue, that no one has a right to say who can walk into your country. They say, no one has a right to determine who is and who is not entitled to to the blessings of liberty. Ireton rejected the concept of citizenship. Those who demand open borders are doing the same thing. Instead of a king, they promise a custodial state to rule over us, to keep us safe, accountable only to those with a permanent interest in it.

The Ruling Elite

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Sine the usual suspects began to control popular culture, the image of the ruling class has been the WASP. The caricature was of a horse faced, toothy guy named “Prescott” that liked to wear a tennis sweater draped over his shoulders. Alternatively, it was the old guy sitting in a leather chair at his club, reading the Financial Times while smoking a pipe and drinking brandy. The point of these caricatures was to highlight the ethnic and cultural divide between the people in charge and the rest of us.

Like all stereotypes, the origins of this are rooted in fact. For a long time, the ruling elite of America was WASP and somewhat inbred. A relatively small number of ruling clans out of New England ran government, finance and foreign affairs. The Brahmins were folks who traced their roots to the founding. They went to the best schools, knew the best people and accepted their duty as the caretakers of the nation. They were of course, almost always Episcopalian.

This is no longer reality in America. It remained a popular stereotype because it is comforting to people. The rulers are not there because they are better. They were born into it or they had connections that allowed them to gain access to power. The ethnics still carry on like the world is run by guys named Pemberton. Jews, of course, love this social construct and are endlessly reminding us that they were kept out of golf courses by the WASP elite.

Despite the mythologizing, the fact is we no longer have a WASP ruling class. The real ethnic nature of the ruling class in America is Jewish. As I pointed out in my Mokita post, Jews are smart and we live in an age when being smart counts for a lot. The stereotype of the Jewish banker or Jewish lawyer is obviously true. The titans of global finance are all Jewish guys. The US Supreme Court is 30% Jewish and Obama has a Jewish guy warming in the bullpen to replace Scalia.

The argument has always been that Jews dominated banking because of historic discrimination and that’s not entirely false. Catholic prohibitions against usury allowed Jews to dominate the lending business, but that does not explain why Hollywood has always been dominated by Jews. It does not explain why 30% of the Fortune 1000 are people of Jewish descent. Jews are one percent of the population, but represent 47% of major American sports team owners.

Sport #Owners Jews Blacks Asian Whites Other
NBA 51 34 3 1 12 1
MLB 30 10 0 0 17 3
NHL 32 15 0 1 14 2
NFL 32 10 0 1 20 1
Total 145 69 3 3 63 7
47.59% 2.07% 2.07% 43.45% 4.83%

Ownership of sports teams is a great metric because it requires more than just money to own a team. You have to have connections in the elite. These sports leagues are clubs and they don’t just let anyone join. These are clubs for members of the American elite to show they are at the top. It’s the ultimate trophy for the most connected. The fact that close to half the people in sports ownership are Jewish is a reflection of the new American ruling class. It’s guys named Herb, not Prescott.

Despite this amazing dominance, Jews still act as if they are a put upon minority, scrambling to make a go of it in the teeth of ethnic hostility. The show Mad Men, from what I understand, is based on the myth that the Jews were kept out of advertising until last week. The guy that invented the ad business in America was a Jewish guy from Chicago back in the 1920’s. Then there is the whole golf club business that Steve Sailer writes about a lot.

It’s a powerful bit of mythology that probably works as motivation for young Jewish kids setting out in the world. Every ethnic group in America, except Germans and the English, has a similar sort of mythology. The Irish swear that their uncle Seamus was denied jobs because he was Irish. Italians claim they have been forever slandered by the whole Mafia thing. Poles work the Catholic angle. East Asians are quick to remind everyone about Fu Manchu and coolies.

Someone has to be the ruling elite in every society and having Jews in charge is probably not the worst choice. A ruling elite that nurses a grudge against the society over which it rules, because of past discrimination, sounds a lot like Syria where the Alawites angrily rule over Sunni majority. America is a not Syria, so there will not be a violent uprising against the ruler sect, but it does mean Jews will have to stop whining and accept their role as the ruling elite.

It also means that Americans will have rework their idea of the aristocrat. The Talmud is a best seller in South Korea because Koreans want to be successful so they are setting out to emulate the most successful ethnic group. Eventually, Americans will do the same thing. Instead of a striver changing his name to “Blake Ashcroft” and claiming Mayflower ancestry, the ambitious will change their name to Murray Goldblatt and claim Holocaust ancestry.

This is already happening at the fringes. Guys like John Podhoretz are constantly demanding to see Bar Mitzvah photos because they believe people are faking their Jewishness in order to gain access to the club. Whether or not people are “trying to pass” is tough to tell. Podhoretz is an evil little slug. He could just be trying to damage his betters in the community. Still, it is not far-fetched. There used to be a time when you had to prove you went to Choate before gaining access to the elite.

On the other hand, Jewish fertility rates in American are around 1.9, with the highest being among ultra-orthodox sects at 4.1. The Jews in charge are not breeding and it only takes a generation or two of these sorts of TFR’s before Jews in America begin to look like the Amish. Then there is the inevitable out-breeding and falling away from the faith that challenges all religious minorities. It is entirely possible that Jews in America are at their peak and are about to experience a slide into oblivion.

The Custodial State

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When I was a kid, the police I knew looked something like this picture. I think this is a sheriff’s department photo from the Midwest.

SecondShiftPatrol2014

The cops back then were local guys who often had done a stretch in the military and then got a job as a local cop. Maybe they had ambitions to be a state trooper. Most were fine working as a county or town cop because they got to stick close to home and the job was not all that difficult. City cops had it tougher because they had real crime, but city cops came from the city so they knew the score before they signed onto the force. For many, the action was the attraction.

It was not an idyllic age. There was plenty of real crime and plenty of real criminals for the cops to apprehend. Take a look at homicide rates over the last century and you can see that we live is a relatively safe time. Crime has ticked up a bit recently, but nothing like we saw in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

United_States_Homicides_and_Homicide_Rate

back then, the cops had radios, revolvers and fast cars for traffic duty. When I was a kid, radar was becoming common for traffic duty and it created a lot of friction between citizens and cops. Suddenly, the cops felt like highwaymen to a lot of people. CB radio probably got popular in the 70’s because it was a way for motorists to warn one another about radar traps. I don’t know that for certain, but someone once told me that and it jives with my memories as a kid in the 70’s.

The point of this trip down memory lane is to point out that it was not so long ago when cops were just guys in the neighborhood. The only people who saw them as an adversary were up to no good. That’s not the case today. This is what the cops look like in the typical American town.

deadstate-conspiracies-in-reality

Every time Donald Trump has a rally, we see employees of the DNC and George Soros out attacking people and we also see cops in battle gear. They look like extras from a Star Wars movie, kitted out in black and Darth Vader helmets. The point of the outfit is to be intimidating and look dangerous. These are not citizens hired to enforce the law. These are agents of the state ready to crack heads.

This is a scene from the Trump San Diego rally a few weeks ago:

TL_Trump_Protests_San_Diego_Stone_160527_12x5_1600

Now, you can say that riot control is dangerous stuff so the cops need to be dressed like storm troopers. The fact that we managed to control mobs for generations without having militarized cops is the obvious counter argument. We could also arrest the people financing these riots, which would pull the plug on all of this without having a massive display of force. But, where’s the fun in that? No, the state wants the display. That’s the point.

It’s tempting to call what we are seeing an “emerging police state” and there is an argument in support of that claim. It used to be the politicians feared the people. They could be voted out of office and if that did not work, they could dragged from their office and hanged from the nearest light pole. They have no fear of that today. Those guys with the gas masks, body armor and full-auto rifles stand between you and the rulers. That’s right gun grabbers, the cops now have mil-spec automatic weapons.

The West is not East Asia so “police state” is the wrong way to put it. The security forces in America will not be opening fire on peaceful crowds. They will not be driving armored vehicles through protest camps like we saw in China. Instead, it will be beanbags, rubber bullets and other non-lethal crowd control tools. It will also be endless surveillance from the state and corporate partners.

Sept, 29, 2015. San Diego, CA. USA| Cameras in the alley by the Hi-Lite Theater where police shot and killed a manI.|Photos by Jamie Scott Lytle.Copyright.

Sept, 29, 2015. San Diego, CA. USA| Cameras in the alley by the Hi-Lite Theater where police shot and killed a man.|Photos by Jamie Scott Lytle.Copyright.

If you read this interesting story on the geezers who pulled the Hatton Garden Heist, the thing that should jump out at you is the causal celebration of the custodial state. The robbers were, in part, caught by the use of CCTV. Like most cities now, London is under 24×7 video surveillance by the authorities. On my way to the office, a two mile drive, I pass 12 security cameras and two speed cameras. They are watching us all the time now.

It’s why the people in charge increasingly talk to us like we are pets, barely able to understand them. They see us as zoo animals. It’s also why they are increasingly cavalier about bucking the will of the people. Paul Ryan laughs at so-called conservatives as he helps Obama push through his agenda in the remaining months of his rule. Angela Merkel is indifferent to public sentiment because, well, what are they going to do about it? How many divisions do they have?

At some point, maybe sooner than we realize, the pols in Washington will decide they have had enough with the voters. It’s simply too much of a hassle. Some excuse will be trotted out so they can pretend to one another that it is necessary or temporary, but voting will come to an end. The people will protest, but the state will have men in body armor pouring out of APC’s holding MP-5’s. In the name of public safety, the protests will be broken up and the people put back in their enclosures.

Welcome to the custodial state.

The Great Heathen Army

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In the fall of 865, dragonships began to beach on the shores of East Anglia. Led by the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok, the initial groups of ships, maybe a hundred at most, swelled to maybe a thousand or more. The Great Heathen Army, as the vikingrs would come to be known, was now invading England. The word “vikingr” simply meant “pirate” which was a good description of the Viking raiders in the 9th century. They sacked cities, sold stolen goods, traded in slaves, and largely lived off the land, so to speak, but traveled by the sea.

The English were well aware of the Norse raiders. The Vikings had been sacking English towns since 793 when they looted the monastery at Lindisfarne. The king of East Anglia, Edmund the Martyr, assumed that these raiders could be paid off as others had been in the past. So he rushed out to welcome them, taking selfies with Ivar the Boneless, while Viking onlookers posted to their Faceberg page. OK, I made that up, but Edmund did make a deal with the Vikings. He paid the Norse what they demanded so they would go away.

One of the demands made by the Vikings was an unusual one. They wanted horses, lots of horses. These were people willing to trade in anything, but transporting horses by sea is not easy and it requires special skills. They wanted a lot of horses, enough to equip an army, so the task of transporting these animals for sale would have been daunting. Horses are big animals and prone to panic. A large animal thrashing around on your long-ship would be a bad result.

There’s some debate as to how they did it or even if they did it. The next time history notes the Viking horses is in the fall of 866 when they turned up in Northumbria, a kingdom about 150 miles north of East Anglia. Maybe they went over land, but there are no records of this. Maybe they build barges to carry the animals. They were great seamen so that’s plausible. They could also have kidnapped some locals who would help them handle the animals in transit.

On All Saints Day 866, the people of Eoforwic were doing what was common in the Middle Ages, which was partying like it was 866. In that time, the fall was when you celebrated and relaxed. The harvest was in, food stores were topped off and the bulk of the farm work was done for the year. Townfolk were the middle-class of the day. Land owners, minor royalty, merchants and traders lived in the city, so they were better off than the peasantry and could afford to cut loose a little.

The Northumbrian kings Aelle and Osbert were enjoying the good life in their capital when reports arrived about dragonships landing north of the Humber. Unlike prior raids in Northumbria, this one was not just a raid on some coastal towns. The Vikings, led by Ivar and Halfdan, were leading an army on horseback as well as on foot. More important, there were thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. This was the largest army to set foot on the island since the Romans.

This was an enormous army and it was quickly on top of Eoforwic. History from this period is not always reliable, but the best sources suggest the Vikings led a night raid on the city, which was another amazing trick for a people known as sailors. The unprepared Northumbrians were no match for the Great Heathen Army and Eoforwic fell in the fall of 866. Aelle and Osbert escaped, but, Northumbria was now a Norse kingdom. Eoforwic would remain the capital of the Danelaw until the last independent Northumbrian monarch, Erik Bloodaxe, died in 954

The city of Eoforwic is a mouthful to say, even for modern sophisticates. The Norse really struggled with it. The name comes from the Roman name for the settlement which meant “place with alder trees.” The “wic” was tacked on after the Romans left and it means “village.” The Norse eventually shortened it to Jorvik and then finally to York. Place name drift is nothing new but in this case we have a clear understanding of how and why it happened. The Vikings simply could not or would not pronounce the town name correctly.

Today, England and Scotland are being invaded by Muslims. London is now a Muslim city. You could, if you wished to be accurate, call it the capital of the Western Caliphate. In Scotland, the native populations are now converting to Islam in large enough numbers to suggest a trend. The Norse invaders converted to Christianity, but this new wave of invaders is determined to convert the local population to their faith. Mosques are springing up all over blighty, while Christian churches sit empty.

If your summer vacation plans take you to England, pay attention to what the Muslim invaders are calling the local cities and towns. In a generation, those will be the official names, just as we currently call the old capital of Northumbria “York” instead of Eoforwic. This may seem far fetched, but just a few generations before the Great Heathen Army landed in England, everyone would have thought Norse dominance of England was far-fetched as well.

The Umman Manda

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Thirty years ago, most Americans felt they could, to some degree, relate to the people who ruled over them. The politicians did not tool around in armored vehicles or have armed men in mirrored sunglasses guarding them. The so-called “public servants” were not highly compensated, even if they did not work hard. The members of the commentariat were few in number and they worked hard to present themselves as normal people. There was a gap, for sure, but it did not feel like a huge gap.

A lot has changed and today it feels to most people like we have been colonized by pod people from another planet. They sort of look like us and make familiar noises, but they are not us. They are alien. Every day they say things that suggest they are just visiting our planet. President Obama makes the sort of “gaffes” a person makes when they have been trained to sound like a person, but maybe did not pay strict attention in human class. Hillary Clinton often sounds like a stroke victim learning to talk again.

Today, of course, there is an army of chattering skulls, experts and commenters we see on TV and on-line. Unless you live in one of the guarded combines around Washington or in a swank building in Manhattan, you will never run into these people on the street. They live apart from the rest of us. That is why they sound like graduate students on an anthropology study. They peer out at us and then describe to each other what they think is happening. To them, we are just talking monkeys in a game park.

The foreignness Americans now feel toward their rulers is rather weak compared to the alienation the rulers feel toward the people. Decades of telling each other scary stories about racist, misogynistic and bigoted Americans has left most of them fearful of normal Americans. The universal response from both the Left and the so-called Right, to the rise of Trump, has been to compete with one another for who can produce the vilest epithet they can fling at the Trump voter.

Some elements of the ruling class still think they just need to adjust some settings in the enclosures and things will calm down. They write long letters to one another about “connectedness” and how Trump is really just leading a rear guard action of losers and misfits. When that gets boring, it’s back to telling campfire stories about how Hitler has come back from the dead and is organizing the Final Final Solution on twitter. Listen to the mainstream press and you would think the streets are teaming with skinheads, brown shirts and Klansman.

If you are a normal person, you can’t help but feel like an alien in your own country when you see stuff like this on twitter. A normal person at a Trump rally is set upon by a mob and our so-called betters howl with approval. All those lectures we used to hear from the ruling class about free speech and protest being the highest form of patriotism suddenly ring a little hollow. So-called conservatives care more about democracy in Iraq than in America. The liberals care more about the foreign invaders than the safety of Americans.

This great divide that has opened up between the ruling classes and the people is largely the result of globalism. The source of the great fortunes is no longer tied to countries or cultures. Global money bankrolls government and the petty royalty that lives off government. The result is the people in charge have divorced themselves from the people over whom they rule. The Cloud People define themselves by their opposition to and essential difference from the Dirt People.

Over the last few decades as this has evolved, it was one big party for the government class. No matter which party won the election, the money still poured into the Imperial Capital to finance the petty royalty that lives in the suburbs around the city. Six of the ten richest counties in America are connected to DC. Two are outside the financial capital of the world, New York City. Good times or bad, the last three decades has seen their wealth and prosperity grow.

For the people in charge, particularly the commentariat, the American people have become the Umman Manda. These were people who poured south into Mesopotamia in the second century BC. The name, depending upon the source, means “the horde from who knows where” or, and my favorite, “the scourge of the gods.” To the people peeking at us through the windows of their car services and telescopes, the public is just a formless mass of savages that threaten the established order. It is why they hate what is happening. It is why they will stop at nothing to end it.