The Sales Job

Note: Last week a friend of ours, Jeff Winston, passed away leaving behind a young wife and a baby daughter. Jeff was the founder of White Art Collective, a group of musicians and artist who collaborated on artistic endeavors. A fund has been set up to help Jeff’s wife and daughter. There is no excuse for not hitting the goal this week, so please kick in a few bucks to the effort.


In the business world, it is rare to encounter anyone who is skeptical about marketing as a general concept. These people do exist, mostly in the accounting department or in the technical support areas of accounting. They have some sense of the real economic benefit of marketing campaigns, so they tend to be a bit more skeptical of the claims, but they have little say in the matter. The boys and girls in the C-suites are all sure marketing is the key to success.

This is why history books are full of bad ad campaigns. Even the dumbest ideas will win over some people, because it is assumed that all attention is good attention, so even a terrible ad can work. It is also why you rarely see marketing people get sacked for terrible ideas. The one notable exception are the white people who run afoul of the morality police. Put one picture of Hitler on your gigantic scoreboard and you will be fired before the game is finished.

A good recent example is the Bud Light controversy. It should have been obvious that hiring a pervert to sell working class beer was a bad idea. The customers for Bud Light are working men who want cheap beer. These are not the sort of people who squeal with excitement over the latest bourgeois decadence. Sure, the friends, colleagues and superiors of the horse-faced woman who cooked up the idea thought it was marvelous, but they would not be caught dead drinking Bud Light.

It took the executives of that beer company weeks to figure out that they had a serious crisis on their hands, primarily because they have been conditioned to think that anything that gets attention is good marketing. It never occurred to them that their customers would not want to be associated with a pervert. Instead, they were caught up in the excitement of having “gone viral.” It was only after the mockery reached the clouds that they fired the people responsible.

The truth of it is, most of what passes for marketing is nonsense. There is little empirical evidence to suggest it boosts sales. If Coca-Cola stopped running television ads, would people stop buying their products? Clearly not as the brand is globally recognized to the point where it is a generic term like Kleenex or Zipper. Coca-Cola could discontinue all advertising for a year and not see a change in sales. In fact, that would be a great marketing idea and it would surely go viral!

The same sort of psychosis grips politics. It is assumed that the formula for success works backward in that you start with having gained power. If you have power, you can do what you want, but you first must get power. That means winning an election, so you have to focus on that project. In order to win the election, you need to get the votes and that means getting the attention of the voters. In order to do that you need to market your candidate to the rubes out in the hinterland.

This is why the Ron DeSantis campaign is now circling the drain. They assumed that they first needed to make him a household name, so they contracted those who claim to know how to do this. Those people then hired lots of “social media influencers” who would talk about Ron DeSantis as if he is their old pal. Never mind that many of them are weirdos and conmen. After all, any attention is good attention and these social misfits have proven to be great at getting attention on Twitter.

Hiring a gold-plated phony like Bill Mitchell sounded like a great idea because he supposedly has half a million followers. It should have taken them five minutes to see that the follower number is fake. His account gets less engagement than many abandoned accounts, but what he does get is usually mockery. Even among the hardest of hardcore Trump fans Bill Mitchell was a ridiculous person when he was pitching himself as super-MAGA man.

The same logic was behind hiring Mexican Bill Mitchell. You can easily imagine the conversation when they made this decision. “He was on Tucker so those mouth breathers will listen to him.” They never stopped to think that it would be rather obvious that his support was purchased. That and his influence with Trump supporters was contingent on his support for Trump and his last name. When he was MAGA, he was the “barrio Nazi” but with DeSantis he is just Pete.

Of course, all of this rested on an assumption that is probably false. That assumption is that Twitter has an impact on public opinion. For those on Twitter every day, it certainly feels like it is the public square. To those not on Twitter every day, the vast majority of people, it is like every other social media platform they ignore. There is a reason that conversations in the real world about Twitter tend to be derisive. Twitter is not reality, but an alternative reality with little impact on reality.

This is probably true of the internet as a whole. Those old enough to have been online before the mouse recognized this reality forty years ago. Going back and forth with strangers on Usenet was a fun diversion from reality. You and everyone else were playing a role in a simulated world. When your internet time was up, you went back to work and forgot about it. Then when you had free time, you would pick up that thread about who is really the Nazi in the debate.

Like marketing in the business world, social media has become an article of faith in politics that is never questioned. Of course, you have to have a social media presence and of course you need to hire social media strategists. Imagine a big company not having a marketing department! It is the same mentality in politics, and it rests on the same assumption which is probably not true. At the minimum, the truth of it is far more limited than everyone assumes.

In the end, reality matters. If you are selling station wagons just when Chrysler introduced the minivan, no amount of marketing is going to change the fact that the minivan was a better family vehicle. If you are selling Ron DeSantis in the age of Trump, no amount of social media influencing is going to change the fact that he is just another conventional politician in an unconventional age. The best marketing is a product that sells itself, whether it is cars or politicians.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


The Low Trust Model

Note: Last week a friend of ours, Jeff Winston, passed away leaving behind a young wife and a baby daughter. Jeff was the founder of White Art Collective, a group of musicians and artist who collaborated on artistic endeavors. A fund has been set up to help Jeff’s wife and daughter. There is no excuse for not hitting the goal this week, so please kick in a few bucks to the effort.


A little more than two weeks ago Hamas launched their daring raid into Israel, killing many Israeli soldiers and civilians. The Arab – Israeli story has been on the back burner for a long time, due to relative calm between the various sides. The imperial wars in the region have ended, so the American political class has not had a reason to talk about how much they love Israel recently. This attack unleashed a great deal of pent-up Israel enthusiasm from the Cloud People.

Right after the raid, the Israel lobby in the United States swung into action, launching a massive public relations campaign in support of Israel. There was a contest between the chattering skulls over who could be the most extreme in their demands for vengeance on behalf of Israel. Like the response to the death of George Floyd, the reactions from all corners of the managerial class felt coordinated. The usual suspects were all using the same canned lines on social media.

That may explain why this massive public relations campaign has not had the effect the narrative writers expected. Two weeks on and most Americans are more interested in the NFL scores than Israel and Gaza. Then you have the large pro-Palestinian protests breaking out all over the West. Washington had about ten thousand people turn up to wave the Palestinian flag. Famous people like Dave Chappelle and Greta Thunberg have made anti-Zionism fashionable again.

When you look at the polling, support for Israel is just over fifty percent, but this is due to unwavering support from old white people. Outside of that group support ranges from “a pox on both sides” to mild opposition to Israel. Among the young and left-wing, the Palestinians are becoming the cool new victim group. College campuses are suddenly having to deal with students supporting the people their donors are trying to kill over in the Gaza strip. It is, as the cool kids say, problematic.

Clearly, the all-out media blitz has not had the expected result. The political class is still playing its role, as if the people are clamoring for it. Nikki Haley is running around promising to blow up the world if elected president. She wants to rename the Defense Department into the Offense Department. While she is clearly a psychopathic simpleton, her echolalic babbling is falling on deaf ears. It turns out that even the sorts of people who care about GOP politics are not moved by Israel.

One reason for this is that this media relations campaign looks like the public relations campaigns around previous moral panics. This looks like the George Floyd hoax or the Russian collusion hoax or the white nationalist hoax. It is the same actors playing the same roles with a new bogeyman. This style of gaslighting can only work so many times before gaslighting fatigue sets in with the public. These calls to arms over the latest bogeyman are becoming background noise.

There is also the fact that there is simply too much information and too many people skilled in peddling their own reality. The Israel lobby has billions of your money to spend on these campaigns, but there is a massive guerilla army of online volunteers working to counter them. The internet is full of pics showing bombed out buildings and dead Arab children, along with carefully constructed context. The misinformation war has been joined by this volunteer army supporting the Arabs.

Of course, there is the moral problem at the heart of it all. Yes, Hamas killing women and children in that raid is terrible. Yes, Israelis have a right to be angry and want retribution for the terrible act. No, revenge and retribution are not things Westerners have been conditioned to accept. Pulverizing Gaza as revenge for the raid strikes most Western people as barbaric. Appeals to our empathy is not going to change the fact that Israeli is blowing up hospitals now.

There may be another factor, something that underlies all of these other reasons for the failed media campaign. That is the reputation of all public people has collapsed due to their constant lying and tolerance of obvious lies. All the people chanting “Death to Gaza” are people who sat quietly while their fellows told outlandish whoppers about Trump, his voters, white people, Covid and many other topics. Many of these people have enthusiastically held abhorrent positions.

A good rule of life is to assume that people who lied to you in the past are lying to you in the present and they will lie to you in the future. The public square has been so polluted by official lies and people willing to repeat them in public that many people now assume everything is a lie. If Ben Shapiro was happy to lie about Covid, why would he be telling the truth about Israel? Why would anyone accept what the Biden administration has to say about anything at this point?

This is an underappreciated aspect of what happens to people when they transition from a high trust society to a low trust society. Send a middle-class man to prison and he will be victimized by the system until he gets smart. He then goes to the extreme, assuming that he can trust no one. In time, he figures out that he can trust certain people, but he can never trust the system. Low trust societies have the same sort of trust relationships that you will see in a high security prison.

That may be what we are seeing in America. For some people, it is assumed that everything from the system is a lie. Old people still trust the system, but young people have no faith in it. On the other hand, many people are learning to trust those who have earned their trust. All the highly choregraphed media in the world is no match for the word of that guy who has proven to be on the level. In fact, the media campaigns are creating the environment for this trust model to flourish.

This is not a novelty, as much of the world functions this way. In the Arab world, for example, not one accepts official sources at face value. It is assumed that the official story is cover for the real story. Arabs love conspiracy theories. In Eastern Europe, people treat politics as a separate sphere with separate rules. Seventy years of communism taught them to understand that the people in charge serve their own interests, not the interests of the people.

It is only in the West where people came to expect honesty from the ruling class and consistency in the rules of the system. The civic nationalist concept of good government is a WEIRD concept. The term WEIRD here means Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. It works as long as the societies and their ruling elites remain demographically Western. That is obviously no longer the case, so it is no wonder that the West is evolving a new model.

In the end, the aphorism credited to Lincoln, “You can fool all people some of the time and some people all the time. But you can never fool all people all the time” works better as a warning, rather than a description. A ruling class that keeps trying to fool most of the people most of the time ends up fooling themselves into thinking they are fooling everyone all the time. The end result is a ruling class that has the trust of no one and must rule by force until the end.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


The Road To Ruin

When studying the two great revolutionary events in European history, the thing that always jumps out is how revolution was something of an accident. In both cases, the ruling class had chances to avert disaster. The sovereign had people in his inner circle or just on the edge of it who warned about the brewing trouble. In the case of Tsar Nicholas, his ascent to the throne was due to the ongoing unrest. Yet, in both cases the ruling class never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Dig further into the many unforced errors and the root cause is often a stubbornness on the part of the king, the tsar, or the aristocracy. They looked at every small compromise as a potential slippery slope. Instead of taking advantage of opportunities presented to them by their disgruntled subjects, they dug in their heels and made themselves seem like the unreasonable party. As a result, they left themselves little room to make necessary reforms in order to head off disaster.

We may be seeing something similar in the battle to select a new Speaker of the House, which is now in its third week. Kevin McCarthy was booted from the post to start October because he broke all but one promise he made to secure the job. The one promise he kept was to reduce the number of votes required to bring forth a motion to vacate the chair, as in remove him from the job. Because he broke all of his other promises, this was the avenue to remove him.

The House Republicans are now struggling to find a replacement. The first choice, one supported by the donor class and the Democrats, was Steve Scalise, but he reminded the rebels in the party too much of Kevin McCarthy. Like McCarthy, Scalise owes his existence to his ability to spread donor money around to those who fink on Republican voters on behalf of the donor class. Trading one fink for another would have made the Freedom Caucus complicit in the finkery, so they demurred.

Next up is Jim Jordan, who is not exactly Tiberius Gracchus, but he is a serious man who is a capable political operator. He shares many of the views held by the Freedom Caucus and the back benchers of the party. This is why the people in charge tried to bump him off years ago with a phony sex scandal. They are now trying to revive that smear campaign to derail his Speaker bid. The zombies in the Republican caucus have now been activated against him.

Lost in the jibber-jabber and scheming is the fact that the donor class opposes Jordan primarily due to his politics. The Republicans sell themselves to their voters as a conservative party and Jordan is what you should expect from the sales pitch, but the donors oppose him because he is the sales pitch. They argue that having a Speaker who tries to act on the party platform is bad for business. In other words, they admit the party platform is nothing more than a scam on their voters.

The truth is this is a fight of symbolism, not real policy. A Speaker Jordan will not be substantively different from Speaker McCarthy or Speaker Pelosi. Spending bills will be a bit more transparent, and they will not drop minutes before the vote. The bills themselves will not change. From the perspective of the economic elites who control the political system, they lose nothing with Speaker Jordan, other than a bit of their pride for having had to make this small concession.

That is the core issue. It is the same issue that turned the Trump years from a golden opportunity into an ongoing crisis. The people who are actually in charge could have gotten any deal they wanted from Trump. He would have signed off on amnesty, for example, as long as he got his wall money. The people in charge could not bring themselves to give a rube from the shtetl this tiny concession. Instead, they made war on him and the public as a whole.

We are seeing the same thing in the House. McCarthy’s string pullers were furious that he gave in on those small items to secure the gavel. They were apoplectic when he started to follow through on them. Lost to the mists of time is the fact he promised to release the J6 tapes in full. He gave Tucker Carlson a small taste and official Washington was incensed at this gesture toward transparency. He was forced to fink on the rest of his promises and blow up his Speakership.

Of course, all of this is possible because House elections have no impact on ninety percent of the House members. Only about forty seats are ever in doubt, so the only risk for the other four hundred members is falling out of favor with their party leaders, which means falling out of favor with permanent Washington. Make the donors angry and you get a sex scandal, an N-word scandal or something similar, along with a well-financed primary challenger.

This is what happened to Steve King from Iowa. He was solid on immigration, so the party had him knocked off. Kevin McCarthy colluded with the New York Times to post a fake story claiming that King used the N-word on a call. Immediately, McCarthy stripped King of his committee assignments and sponsored a primary challenger. By the time the truth came out about the call, it was too late for Steve King. Every Republican voting against Jordan has that story on their desk right now.

Of course, there are other issues working against Jordan. He has been skeptical of the Ukraine project. Far too many people in Washington are getting rich off that racket to tolerate skepticism. The reason the neocons have been able to push this project this far is they bolted it too the money laundering machine that is foreign aid. The money goes out to some foreign country and much of it returns in the form of consulting contracts, defense contracts and lobbying deals.

The biggest problem is the oldest problem. Like the ruling elites during revolutionary France and Russia, the ruling elite of the American empire are convinced the state exists solely to guard their interests against the Dirt People. Therefore, any concession, no matter how trivial or symbolic, is a threat to the system. In the hive mind that is official Washington, Jim Jordan leads to Donald Trump which leads to angry mobs erecting a gallows on the Capitol lawn.

History, however, suggests the opposite. Through the nineties, the economic elite got almost everything they wanted, by giving the hoi polloi a few crumbs now and again to perpetuate the myth of American democracy. Then the crumbs were replaced with rat poison, as the ruling class turned increasingly hostile and paranoid. Like the peasants in prior revolutionary eras, the best explanation we have for the behavior of our rulers is they hate us and want us dead.

All of this is a glimpse of what lies ahead in 2024. The people unwilling to budge on the Speaker issue are not going to budge on the Trump issue. The road to ruin for this ruling elite is the same road as that of prior elites. They are becoming increasingly ossified and stubborn. They miss every opportunity to lower the temperature because even small concessions are viewed through the lens of contempt for the people over whom they rule. The end of this road is the gallows.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


Mercenary Rule

In the novel Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein described a world ruled by a military elite called the Terran Federation. Only veterans of the military enjoyed full citizenship, including the right to vote. Those who did not perform military service retained their rights of free speech and assembly, but they could not vote or hold office. As is true of every system there were some exceptions here and there, but important government jobs were reserved for federal service veterans.

This idea of earning citizenship through military service has always had some popularity on the Right, for no other reason that it would seem to exclude the sorts of people who are living arguments against democracy. It seems unlikely that you will get too many people like Ocasio-Cortez in public office if she must first do a tour in the military, rather than just wink at customers as a barmaid. Even if she passed that threshold, military veterans are too serious to vote for someone like her.

Rule by warrior elite has an appeal because it conjures images of the Middle Ages in which a ruling elite arose from the warrior class. A world governed by an honor code just sounds better to right-wing people. It also brings to my Spartan society, which proved to be superior to Athenian democracy in the Peloponnesian War. A society rule by male warriors just feels like it would be better. At the minimum, it would avoid the problems that come with the feminization of society.

There is a less fantastic appeal to this concept. In the novel, this system arose in the aftermath of the collapse of 20th century Western democracy. That system proved itself unable to combat crime and juvenile delinquency. Interestingly, Heinlein also imagined a future in which the West teams with Russian against China. Another reason for the new system of military governance was due to the inability of fully democratic systems to confront the authoritarianism of China.

Another way of looking at this setup is in the larger context of the novel in which earth is at war with two alien species. The decisions that must be made in such a war cannot be left to lonely barmaids. They must be made by the people who have skin in the game, which in the case of earth, means the warrior class. Remove the giant bugs trying to destroy earth and a system controlled by those with skin in the game could simply mean a system ruled by property owners and families.

The Heinlein idea sounds good until you look around at present day America. Some of the worst people in public life are veterans. The obvious example is Lindsey Graham, who is arguably the wort human in the Senate. The reason we can say this is his mentor John McCain is now in Hell. When Graham joins him, there will be other veterans ready to fill the role. Richard Blumenthal and Joni Ernst will be the early favorites, but we will no doubt be spoiled for choice.

By the time Lucifer calls Graham home, Dan Crenshaw and Brian Mast may have parlayed their military service and general awfulness into the Senate. Crenshaw is the veteran’s version of Ocasio-Cortez. Mast has used his service and wartime injury to make himself Israel’s main representative in Congress. They have many other representatives in the imperial congress, but only Brian Mast wears the uniform of the Israeli military to work every day.

While the Heinlein model sounds good in theory, in practice it is probably better to ban veterans from public office. There certainly have been some veterans in Washington politics who have done good work for their constituents, but the terrible ones have done far more damage. The fact that veterans are so easily turned into weapons by the neocons suggests the military selects for the sorts of people who will gladly become a mercenary for whoever can write the biggest check.

This may be the result of the volunteer military. Despite all the patriotic blather, the American military is composed of mercenaries. They structure their pay to attract the types of people they need. The military does not restrict itself to citizens, as military service is one way to win citizenship. Due to the lack of white men joining the ranks, the military is now looking to recruit foreigners. The fact is the relationship between the institution and the soldier is purely transactional.

Another reason for the terrible veterans rising up in the political ranks is the nature of all democratic systems. Voting bestows authority on the people doing the voting. Win the crowd and you are right, morally, and factually. Of course, the best way to win the crowd is by convincing them you are a virtuous person. If the people assume you are a good person, they are going to give you the benefit of the doubt, which means you will win those 50-50 debates against someone without your reputation.

John McCain leveraged this reality by waving around the flag with one of his damaged arms, while reminding everyone he was a prisoner of war. His initial foray into politics came soon after he returned home. He commissioned a long article in a big foot magazine about his deeds as a POW. His physical injuries won him sympathy and his tales of heroism won him respect. Who was going to challenge John Wayne McCain, especially when it came to military matters?

Another reason military service should be a disqualifier is that it is the worst possible training for democratic politics. In theory, politicians in a democratic system are in office to represent their constituents. Maybe those constituents are determined by geography or by ideology, but they are always real people. Those real people are living in the real world living normal lives. The ideal representative is one who has lived as his constituents and alongside his constituents.

Outside of congressional districts that have a large military base, life in the military is alien to civilian life. The military trains you to be a useful cog in a vast bureaucratic machine in which none of the cogs get to make many choices. The choices that do arise come with a well-defined list of options. Most important, the military comes with a floor as long as you do the minimum. Real life does not come with a floor. You can do all the right things and still get dealt a bad hand by reality.

Of course, all of this is an argument against democracy. It is a system that selects for the worst sorts of people. These are people who seek to use any means necessary to win over the crowd in order to profit themselves. Whether it is Ocasio-Cortez shaking her boobs in front of the camera of Crenshaw waving the bloody shirt around, the point is always the same. Democracy rewards the politicians who are adept at turning your virtues into a vice so they can exploit them.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


Manna From Heaven

One of the many problems with most conspiracy theories is they contain a central contradiction on which the theory depends. Usually, it is of the type where the villain is both omnisciently genius and incredibly stupid. The “deep state”, for example, is able to know every thought and action of every person, but they have been outwitted by the collection of aluminum foil hat guys. The central villains of most conspiracy theories are the same people who built the Death Star in Star Wars.

Another big problem with conspiracy theories is they confuse opportunism with skillful planning, as we see with the fighting in the Levant. The internet is full of theories about how Mossad or the IDF or Netanyahu deliberately let Hamas stage that raid so they could use the ensuing crisis to advance their agenda. The real goal was to clear out Gaza or maybe instigate a wider war in the region. Like 9/11, this attack was a five-cushion bank shot by the deep state.

In reality, the most likely answer for how this started is stupidity. Israel politics have been a mess for a long time now due to demographics. The Mizrahi Jews, sometimes called Oriental Jews, are those who never left the region. They are growing in number and pollical power. As a group grows in power, it tends to come at the expense of another group, or it is perceived as such. In Israel, the group threatened by the Mizrahi are the Ashkenazi, who dominate the ruling elite.

One result of this growing internal conflict is the Jewish state is not working as well as people have come to expect. The reputation of the Jewish security apparatus was made in the wars with the Arabs but also in support of the neocon wars against the Arabs during the Bush years. As is always the case, success brings complacency and that is how they got the Hamas raid. The Israelis were caught letting their guard down and the result was the Hamas raid.

That does not mean they are letting a crisis go to waste. The Dresden-like assault being waged on Gaza is one example. It is unnecessary and gratuitous, but it does sure up support in Washington, where the neocons are desperate for a win. The site of blown-up buildings and dead Palestinians not only gives people like Ben Shapiro some cheap thrills, but it also gives him a reason to whip his white audience into a frenzy of support for the war machine and its neocon operators.

It is also good for the Washington establishment. It feels like old times in the imperial capital and that is just what the doctor ordered. The rebels in the House GOP caucus have been silenced because we are at war now and no one has time for their complaints about corruption and Republican perfidy. The result is the compliant Kevin McCarthy will be replaced by the equally compliant Steve Scalise as Speaker, rather than the more independent Jim Jordan.

It is also giving Washington an excuse to cut Ukraine loose. All of a sudden no one is taking those calls from Zelensky. In between sobbing fits, White House spokesbot John Kirby made clear that Israel is now the priority. He said that “we are coming to the end of the rope on Ukraine funding” which is very bad news for Ukraine. That was a signal to regime media to wrap up their “coverage” of the war and put the whole thing on ignore and instead focus on this new war in the Levant.

This is also a golden opportunity for the Pentagon. The imperial war machine was not built to fight a land war against a peer. This has been rather embarrassing for them over the last year in the Ukraine war. From a public relations perspective, Ukraine has been terrible for the Pentagon. Now, they can switch back to their preferred role of bombing lightly armed militias. This has the added benefit of getting the flag waving yahoos excited for the war machine again.

The biggest winner in this could be the neocons who have been searching for a way to get invited back into the Republican Party. As everyone knows, a neocon cannot enter your house uninvited, so they have been searching for a way to get the Republicans to throw out the welcome mat for them. This is proving to be just the ticket, as every presidential candidate is now in a race to the sea in an effort to be the most bellicose with regards to killing Muslims.

This has the added benefit of letting them use their version of no enemies to the right, which they successfully used in the Bush years. You see, this new threat to America in the Levant is too important to risk dissent. That means Donald Trump and his criticisms of the party have to go so the more serious people like Nikki Haley can lead the party against Joe Biden and his Iranian deal makers. The fact that team Biden is run by the Kagan cult, just like Nikki Haley, will be ignored.

Of course, what will follow is new limits on speech online. The usual suspects are demanding that the social media platforms ban anyone questioning the official narrative on the war. Anyone doubting the crazy stories, for example, will be smeared as an apologist for Hamas. Maybe even an antisemite. In an ideological society, the bogeyman is always a reason to crush dissent and the regime now has a fresh new and familiar bogeyman, so the results are predictable.

That is the thing about ideological societies. The ruling elite can always take advantage of a crisis because it exists to manage crisis. Whether it is in containing counter-revolutionary forces or the inevitable crisis that arises from the irrationality of the ideology, the first task of a ruling class in an ideological society is to use every crisis as a means to advance the interest of the regime. Once Hamas parachuted into Israel, the regime had a crisis and they never let a crisis go to waste.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


Whither Rufo-ism

Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.

Then you have the more professional and perhaps sincere players who operated on the fringes of conservatism but now see a chance to spread their wings. The Claremont crowd, for example, is working hard to create a New Right based on the primitive notion of natural right, supplemented by appeals to the classical liberalism of the Framers along with large dollops of Lincolnism. Claremont subscribes to the apocryphal version of the founding and Lincoln promoted by Harry Jaffa.

It is from this world that we get Chris Rufu, the guy best known for waging jihad against critical race theory in the schools. He also has waged campaigns against the sexual exploitation of children in the schools. He worked in support of the Florida bill to ban child pornography in grammar schools. He now has a book out titled, America’s Cultural Revolution, which describes the New Left and how it gained power. Paul Gottfried reviewed it here and Charles Haywood here.

Most of what Rufo describes in his book has been kicking around dissident circles for the last decade, mostly due to it kicking around paleo circles for decades. Contrary to the claims of conservatism, the New Left was never an economic or purely political movement, but a cultural and spiritual movement. With the collapse of 20th century conservatism and the cultural revolution of the last decade, this reality has become clear to everyone except libertarians.

Rufo is not without his critics. In fact, Rufo-ism is a very modern political phenomenon in that it is as much about its critics as its content. Thanks to the cultural revolution and the internet, we now live in a purely Schmitt-ian world, as in the German philosopher Carl Schmitt. Politics is only about friends and enemies, so Rufo-ism is becoming one of those points of the friend-enemy distinction. In a follow up post, Paul Gottfried talks about some of Rufo’s critics.

One of the interesting things about the critics of Rufo, as well as his supporters, is the dog that never barks. That dog is race. This is odd, given the material at the heart of his current project. Critical Race Theory is about race. Then there is the fact that Rufo spent much of his early time on this protect lecturing white people that the real victims of CRT were black kids. He put most of his effort into shooting down the idea that CRT is antiwhite, on the grounds that the term is “racist.”

This is an important part of Rufo-ism and the milieu that spawned it. These are people who are opposed to any discussion of race. It is not that they oppose the New Left’s view on race but that they embrace the New Left’s view on race more completely and sincerely than the Left embraces it. Rufo does think race is a social construct and it must be eliminated from all discourse. This New Right imagined by Rufo, Claremont and others is not just colorblind, but colorless.

It is tempting to assume this is just the old conservative two-step. They embrace the moral claims of the people they oppose but they have a different and more lucrative proposal for how to achieve them. Of course, there is the constant fear of being called “racist” which has haunted conservatism since the Old Left declared discrimination the greatest sin and diversity the greatest good. In other words, it is tempting to think Rufo’s act is an effort to avoid the R-word.

This is a reasonable suspicion, but it does not appear to be the case with Rufo nor the other popular figures from Claremont. Rufo married outside of his race and has mixed-race children, so unlike his New Left critics, who live like White Nationalists, Rufo’s “lived experience” comports with his stated views on race. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in this subculture. Further, the Claremont view of politics leaves no room for race or even natural inequality.

There is another reason for the aversion to race. Rufo is a science-denier. He rejects biology as we know it. He worked for the Discovery Institute, which peddles crackpot theories like intelligent design. Of course, the Claremont people largely reject the last two thousand years of scientific progress. They instead embrace the Straussian belief that nature comes with a secret code book on how humans should act. If you say Aristotle’s name enough times, the secret is revealed.

The starting place for the New Right is the assumption that humans are infinitely malleable in terms of character. What you are as a person is determined by the society into which you are born. If you get the moral code of society right and enforce that morality through the institutions, you end up with virtuous citizens. Since virtue in their view is a life lived to the benefit of the polis, there can be no place for things like race, because that undermines their idea of virtue.

If this sounds a bit like Marxism, it should, because this is the basic assumption of Marx and most radical thinkers. Once you assume that morality is an objective truth that lies outside of collective agreement, it means there can be only one truly moral way to organize human society. The goal of politics, therefore, is to discover it and then ruthlessly enforce it. Instead of historical materialism as the moral authority, the New Right embraces their interpretation of classical philosophy.

Putting aside the underlying philosophical reason for their embrace of colorless politics, it sounds a lot like the colorblind politics of the old conservatism. In the 1980’s conservatives were sure America was ready to move beyond race. Everyone had the same opportunity and society would finally escape the long shadow of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Race would still exist. It simply would not matter in our behavior as citizens and as a society.

The New Right is more reactionary, but the idea is the same. Instead of the optimism of the 1980’s, they are informed by the pessimism of the present. While they agree that discrimination is the worst sin, they see the antiracists as bad as the racists they claim to oppose. The New Right wants to use any means necessary to remove any discussion of race and biological reality from the public square, mostly because they see it as a tool of the people they claim to oppose.

From a dissident perspective, this New Right seems doomed to failure because reality is undefeated, but that view suffers from a flawed view of success. The New Left, like the Old Left and it antecedents since the Mayflower needs a dancing partner, one that shares its ultimate goal. That means something will rise up to take that spot now that the old Buckley-style conservatism is caput. Rufo-ism is a good bet to be what fills that void on the New Left’s dance card.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


Trouble In The Levant

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the classic historical drama, Doctor Zhivago, a post about demographic reality and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.


A good rule when trying to understand anything in the Middle East is to first assume that nothing is as it appears on the surface. This is the land of endless intrigue and a land nearly devoid of candor. Another good rule is to assume all interested parties are lying, even those outside the region. This is especially true of anything concerning Israel, which is usually at the center of intrigue. Naturally, that is the place to start when analyzing the recent fighting in the Levant.

For those living off-grid until this morning, the Arab militia group Hamas launched a series of daring raids into Israel from the Gaza strip. They overran Israeli border posts, blinded radar systems, and attacked IDF garrisons. Once inside Israeli, they attacked some sort of outdoor rave that was going on at the time, killing hundreds of people and taking many of them as prisoners. Israel is now promising to genocide the Arab population in the Gaza strip in retaliation.

The first question to ask is how was it possible for such a large, complex operation to happen in a walled ethno-state like Israel? The IDF is a fully modern, high-tech military that is supposed to be the best in the word at defending against insurgents, yet they were caught unawares by Hamas. Further, Mossad exists to monitor these populations for exactly these sorts of threats. Somehow, poorly armed militants were able to organize this without being detected.

Adding to the intrigue is this story in the Wall Street Journal claiming inside information on how this was planned. Since we know regime media does no independent reporting, it means the story was recited to them by the regime. Is it plausible that Washington knew about this while Israel knew nothing? How likely is it that Washington knew about this and did not relay warnings to Israel? Maybe the story is a fake planted by the neocons to paint Iran as the villain.

Regardless, this attack could not come at a better time for the Israeli government, which has been in crisis for a year. Not so long ago there were large protests over constitutional reforms pushed by the Netanyahu government. Some thought civil war was possible, due to the scale of unrest. Those protests reflect a larger demographic problem within Israel. The old liberal ruling class stopped having children, while the ultra-orthodox continue to breed like rabbits.

A full-scale mobilization and war on the Palestinians is just the thing to suppress dissent and whip up support for the state. After all, this is the reason that Washington has been on a war footing since 1945. All of the parties in Israel will now have no choice but to fall in behind the Netanyahu government, at least until the emergency is over and the hostages are returned or killed by the IDF. The early results suggest the plan is to annihilate Gaza and drive off the remaining population.

There is another benefit. For decades Israel has been trying to get the United States to attack Iran and topple the Iranian regime. This was the neocon plan in the Bush years, but the debacle in Iraq forced them to table the idea. Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran, so a slaughter in Gaza could provoke Iran, which in turn would give Washington an excuse to attack them. The bodies were not cold and Lindsey Graham was out reading this exact script to the media.

Israel and the neocons are not the only people dancing on rooftops over what they are calling Israel’s 9/11. The Saudis are probably taking a sigh of relief. Washington has been pressuring the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel, something they would like to avoid as it would complicate their relationship with Iran. Both countries are now in BRICS and slowly working through their longstanding issues. Of course, China and Russia are promising both sides support in this effort.

The Saudis have not made it this long by luck. They understand that the world is changing, and they know their role in this new world will change with it, but they are not going to get ahead of things either. They probably want to see how things develop with Russia and China before alienating Washington. If they can remain on good terms with all sides for now, they have more cards to play. This new flare up in Arab-Israeli tensions give them an excuse to slow-play Washington.

Then we have Iran, which is going to get the blame from Israel and the neocons for instigating this attack. Whether Iran did or did not greenlight the attack is debatable, but they have real power in this game. They have also cultivated strong relations with Russia and China, who would love to play a bigger role in the region. This new war gives Iran a reason to invite both counties into the process of finding a solution to the conflict, thus strengthening Iran.

That is another angle to this that does not get mentioned. Washington has been slowly pushed out of regional politics, outside of Israel and the garrisons in Syria. With the massive drain on the American war machine in Ukraine, is Washington capable of launching a war against Iran? Can Israel sustain their war without new supplies from Washington, which may be low on weapons too? In 2006 Israel actually ran out of certain munitions fighting Hezbollah.

In other words, Iran may be calculating that this is now the time to reset the game board in order to setup new negotiations. Imagine a scenario in which both China and Russia are pushing for a regional peace conference, but Washington and Israel are pushing for war with Iran, but neither has the means to do it. Just as every other Western empire has exhausted itself in the Middle East, Iran may be thinking the Global American Empire has exhausted itself and is ready to leave.

This brings up another angle. The Russians are the big winner in this for the simple reason that the West now has to choose between Israel and Ukraine. Washington had to requisition 80% of Israel’s reserve munitions for Ukraine. They scoured the empire for weapons and ammunition. Facing a second front, they will have to choose and everyone on planet earth knows who will win that one. A hot war in the Levant is going to make for a very cold winter in Ukraine.

This may not be the worst thing for Washington. Ukraine is a loser that will only end poorly, so putting that war on the ignore list and focusing attention on this new front in the Middle East could be a blessing in disguise. Right now, the volunteer army of Ukraine experts are rebranding as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran experts, so the Ukraine war can be quickly forgotten. The power of regime media is the power to ignore, so if they ignore Ukraine, everyone ignores Ukraine.

One interesting sidenote to all of this is the conservative zombies chanting about how weakness in Ukraine has led to aggression against Israel. They have no idea why they are saying this, but they are not entirely wrong. The failure in the proxy war with Russia has exposed the rot in the American system. Decades of looting and grifting have left the empire unable to follow through on its threats. As a result, the world is becoming less afraid of Washington’s bluster and bullying.

That is the subtext to all of this. The fossils from the Reagan-Bush Museum are not wrong when they say Israel is the only Western outpost in the Middle East. It is just that the West is in decline and that means these outposts will be abandoned or overrun as part of the process of decline. If Israel is to survive it means becoming something other than an outpost of the West. If the West is to survive, it means abandoning these outposts and setting about the task of renewal.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


Numbers

If you were a young person in the 1980’s and caught up in the swelling conservative movement, you needed to know the numbers. Conservatism, to a great degree, was about making rational arguments which meant starting with the numbers. Things like the budget deficit, economic growth, crime rates and inflation were a common part of the conservative counter to progressive claims. At its most basic, conservatism was rational while liberalism was emotional.

For a while it seemed like the conservatives had carried the day on this issue as the public discourse slowly mirrored conservative discourse. When public figures talked about politics and social issues, it was about the numbers. The media would make a day of covering the latest speech by the Fed chair. Alan Greenspan became a rock star who gave speeches to huge crowds. Every politician made sure to have the Congressional Budget Office bless his latest idea.

Through the Bush years, economists took the place of the court astrologer, providing empirical authority to every normative claim. This reached its peak in the first Obama term when they said that every dollar spent by the government created more than a dollar of economic activity. A line of people with impressive sounding credentials provided the math of this claim. This was the argument in favor of the massive spending program unleashed by the Obama administration.

It was not just politics that got the numbers treatment. After every Super Bowl, the media would spend a day or two crunching the numbers to prove that you were the only weirdo who did not set aside the day to watch the big game. Television ratings were a mainstay of media coverage. The stock market became the central measure of social happiness, with cable channels dedicated to telling us the numbers and what the numbers meant for your happiness.

Today, no one discusses the numbers. Someone arguing for a policy on the grounds that it is good the economy sounds like someone arguing for free silver. In fact, it is the primary criticism of Conservative Inc. They do not care about crossdressers chasing your son around the playground or the tidal wave of brown people pouring over the border into your neighborhood. They care about the carried interest deduction and locking in tax cuts that few experienced or remember.

What is the current projected federal deficit? Without googling it, few people would know, and most people would not bother to do it. The same is true of the total federal debt, which used to be a headline topic. How much does the Federal government owe and to whom do they owe it? Washington is embroiled in a huge drama right now set off by the Federal budget debate and no one bothers mentioning that about forty percent of what they spent is borrowed.

One reason no one talks about the economic numbers is they have become inconceivable large, so they have no impact. People can grasp a million and they can sort of grasp a billion. Being a millionaire would be nice and being a billionaire would be awesome, but trillionaire? It is probably better than billionaire, but what is bigger than anything you can imagine? The thirty-plus trillion federal debt is a meaningless number because it is outside of what most people can imagine.

There is a bigger issue that applies to all the numbers. Decades of lying about the numbers have made all of them suspect. The totally fake economic data pumped out in the Obama years sunk the credibility of the court wizards. When those people with impressive credentials put on their serious faces and said that taking money from you and giving some of it to your neighbor would grow the economy, even the most innumerate started to question the math.

It is not just the big stuff where lying has undermined the trust in the numbers that used to be the guideposts of society. Television ratings are obviously bogus or not as meaningful as claimed. If the people making the content cared about ratings, they would not have smeared their feces all over popular content. Ad makers would not have replaced most of the white people with nonwhites. They certainly would not have every white woman paired with a black guy.

Probably the most egregious offender of the numbers are the tech companies, who clearly fake all of their numbers. How many users are really on Twitter? No one knows but we know the official number is a lie. We can clearly see that the follower counts and impressions are fake. Before buying Twitter, Elon Musk made the rather obvious claim that the site was riddled with bots and fake accounts. Once the deal closed, he stopped talking about the bots and fake accounts.

There is more to the general fakery than the unreliability of the numbers. It is that it reflects a collapse in trust. When the government claims inflation is under control, but you keep seeing your expenses climb, you are reminded by the numbers that the people in charge cannot be trusted. When some new personality bursts on the scene claiming to have a huge audience, but no one you know heard of the guy until last week, you cannot help but wonder if it is a lie.

The numbers of life are not supposed to tell us what we ought to do, but to be a measure of what we are doing. If we cannot trust the numbers or the people issuing the numbers, then we cannot know what they are doing. We have no way of judging what is being told to us or if it is on the level. The only logical response is to assume the numbers are fake and the people issuing them are lying. A society with unreliable numbers is a society run by unreliable people.

Of course, this is most clear in politics. The most important numbers are the votes counted on election night. The logic of democracy is that everyone gets their say, then everyone votes and the side with the most votes wins. Along the way polling tells us how the various arguments and people are doing. If all of these numbers are fake, then what is the point? If the numbers at the soap box and the ballot box cannot be trusted, you are left with the numbers in the cartridge box.

Since the end of the Cold War, American society has travelled along an arc that started with a trust in the numbers and the people behind them to a place where no sane person trusts the numbers or the people behind them. That is probably why it feels like this pirate ship of a society called America is sailing into dangerous waters. Odds are just numbers, and the odds say that in a world without reliable numbers, the most likely outcome is the ship eventually sinks.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.


No Enemies On The Right

Charles Haywood of Worthy House has a post up explaining and defending his concept of “No Enemies On The Right”, which he originally formulated as “No Enemies To The Right” last December. He used that original phrase when discussing the jihad led by Rod Dreher against a schoolteacher who was accused of heresy. Dreher was doing his Christian piety act to both attack someone who could not defend himself and to curry favor with the people he pretends to oppose.

Dreher panicked when Haywood used the phrase “No Enemies To The Right” because it would be very bad for business if people embraced it. Like everyone in for-hire conservative politics, Dreher exists to attack people to his right. That is his reason to exist and why rich people fund his operations. What we insist on calling the Right in America is primarily a policing operation. They impose the morality of the Left on the rabble that the Right is charged with keeping at bay.

Over the last year, Haywood has defended his original argument, refining it as necessary, in response to criticism. Haywood has no interest in becoming the Emily Post of right-wing politics, but his continuing work on this concept is producing something like a rulebook of right-wing etiquette. His ten-point outline for what he means by “No Enemies On The Right” should be viewed as a useful guide for discourse between the various groups in dissident politics.

The slogan “No Enemies On The Right” is not new to Haywood. Those around way back in the alt-right days, which feels like a lifetime ago now, will recall this was a slogan with some of the more popular figures in that space. In fact, it was the motivation for organizing the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. The idea was to both bring everyone together but also break the pattern of the Left pitting one group against the other to enforce their moral code.

Amusingly, before the alt-right used the term, it was a popular way for the neocons to stamp out dissent during the Bush presidency. They argued in the runup to the 2004 election that their war plans were too important to let the many lies of the Bush administration divide the Right. Their basic argument was “Sure, Bush is Lyndon Johnson, but the Democrats are worse, so you have to hold your nose and vote for the guy who is the opposite of what we promised.”

Of course, like everything political on the Right, this concept has been lifted from the Left, which coined the term “No Enemies to the Left” during the French Revolution for the same reason Haywood is promoting his version today. Opposing the King and the aristocracy was too important to let petty squabbles drive the many opponents of the regime into the ghetto of endless quarreling. Overthrow the system first then everyone can argue about what comes next.

There is an obvious appeal in this age. The one thing everyone outside the political class can agree upon is the system now only works to serve the interest of the people at the upper reaches of the system. There is a zero-sum game mindset in the ruling class where they assume what is good for them is bad for the people, so what is bad for the people must be good for them. The result is a system run by people who hate the people over whom they rule.

The logical answer is to hate them back. Since the people have numbers, the only way to use this advantage is to unite enough people under an opposition banner that has as its singular goal the removal of the ruling class. This is why this idea terrifies the house slaves of Conservative Inc. They know exactly what this means, which is the toppling of the people who keep them in the lifestyle they think they deserve. From the point of view of people like Rod Dreher, it is Only Enemies On The Right.

There is another advantage to this mode of thought. It forces clarity on the politics of dissent that helps flush out the poseurs and profiteers. Those committed to the larger project will refuse to condemn anyone on their side for crimes against the regime or regime orthodoxy. At most they remain silent. The poseurs and profiteers are always quick to point their bony finger at someone and condemn him for violating the morality of the opposition, like you see with Rod Dreher.

There is one major flaw with the “No Enemies On The Right” concept. It makes it difficult to police the ranks for lunatics and crackpots. Populist politics has always struggled with the weirdo problem precisely because it is unwilling to criticize anyone willing to join the fight against the Left. You can chant “No Enemies On The Right!” until you are blue in the face, but you must have some way to filter out the lunatics or you end up being defined by them.

There is also the problem of what constitutes the Right. The drug addled Antifa marchers oppose the system, but they are not of the Right. Jimmy Dore, the old school progressive comic, opposes the regime, but he is a socialist. The Grey Zone people oppose the America military machine, but they are communists. There has to be something more than opposition to the Left or you end up putting a leash around your neck and handing the other end to people you hate.

This leads to the third problem, which Haywood addresses in his seventh item in his list of “Tenets of NEOTR.” Disagreement is vital for any opposition to the regime as this is the only way to improve the opposition. Ideas need to be debated and that often results in hurt feelings, which leads to public disputes. Chanting “No Enemies On The Right” in these times will just alienate the people in the dispute. There needs to be a way to argue but in a way that keeps the focus on the enemy.

Finally, there is no escaping the fact that this is not a new idea and prior efforts at practicing it have failed. There is a reason it has failed. The main reason is the people chanting it were never really serious about it. Instead, they tended to use it as a shield to ward off criticism. This is how we got to Charlottesville. The way forward with this concept must be to go back and address the past failure. That means more discussion about “No Enemies On The Right” with the aim of getting it right.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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The Bleep Show Goes On

The regime held another audition last night for the role of token opposition candidate in the presidential election tentatively scheduled for next year. This time they held the audition at the Reagan library, which was appropriate given that all of the actors sounded like exhibits from the 1980’s museum. They even used some clips of Reagan as prompts so the performers could spit out their favorite lines. It gave the whole thing the desired retro feel.

Fox News produced the event, as they did the prior event, but this time they used the B-team to put on the show. In the first event they treated it like one of the phony talent shows that are a staple of broadcast television. They had a drone flying around the auditorium and they introduced the performers like a wrestling show. It was vulgar and crude, but appropriate given the reality of things. The whole thing is just another chapter in an ongoing big lie.

Perhaps having been too obvious the first time, they were more subdued this time, running a standard debate style show. They also used their B-team actors to play at moderating the thing. They had a chirpy little blond woman who was disorganized and flustered the entire night. They had some old guy who must have missed his flight to Heathrow at LAX, so they made him a moderator. The third wheel was a Spanish woman with a spray on tan that was starting to peel.

Most of the night was the performers saying the prepared and rehearsed zingers while everyone else talked over them. It was clear that everyone was instructed to talk over Ramaswamy so that is what they did, often just mouthing what appeared to be gibberish, or vamping as they say in the business. The result was a cacophony of voices while the chirpy little blond hopped up and down in her seat trying to get the performers to stop talking over one another.

Why anyone thinks people will sit through this is a mystery. They could easily solve this problem with the use of shock collars. If a performer talks over another performer, he gets enough voltage to disable him for a few minutes. Maybe employ trap doors under their feet as a sort of timeout. If the performer keeps breaking the rules, the door opens, and he falls into a garbage pit. He then has to climb the stairs back to the stage, covered in garbage, and retake his spot.

Of course, the fact that this would be an improvement over what they are doing is an indictment of the system. If the ruling class treated elections seriously and they cared about public’s opinion, these vulgar displays would never happen. The performers, who would be actual candidates with real agency, would refuse to participate. That is not our reality, so we get these vulgar displays. If you were trying to humiliate the voters, you would not do anything different as far as these shows.

There is some value in watching these things. You get a sense of the narrative from which the regime is operating. It is clear they still think Trump gets put in jail, exiled, or bankrupted so he cannot run. They just had a judge steal his company the other day, so that part of the script is still operative. That means the midget wrestling shows they are putting on are for picking the lucky loser of next year’s election show. One of these losers will get the golden ticket at the convention.

Last night it was clear they have soured on Noble Black Guy. Tim Scott got little action and was pushed off to one side. They could be sidelining him to keep him fresh or they could be moving onto another actor. Neocon Nikki got the star treatment most of the night and the regime produced a bunch of fake polls for her. They have been planting stories in regime media claiming that she is the “insurgent” candidate. Imagine calling the consummate insider an insurgent.

You have to respect the neocons. They may be evil, but they never abandon their project, and they always plan ahead. Despite the results in Ukraine, they still dream the dream of thermonuclear war, so they keep reaching their tentacles into the process to promote those who share their dream of extinguishing humanity. Even though they have publicly abandoned the Republican Party, they see an opening to get one of their sock puppets the nomination and they are seizing it.

The trouble for them and the regime is that the people are coming to understand that there are people with the impudence to distort the truth so infamously as to put forth a shriveled hag like Nikki Haley. She and her scaly backers are not the solution to the political and cultural crisis. They are symbols of it. Only in a morally bankrupt system can degenerates like this flourish. If a meteor struck the Reagan Library last night during the show, the world would be a better place.

Sadly, it will not come to that just yet. Instead, it was merely another reminder to Republican voters that their party hates them. All of the actors were handed lines to say mean things about Trump, who is now the face of the party’s voters. The only thing they did not do is take turns spitting on a picture of Trump. The star of this portion was a fat slob they trucked in to repeat Borsht Belt zingers about Trump. The usual suspects still think this stuff is hilarious, which is a topic all its own.

In the end politics is always about the desires of the ruling class. No matter what the people think, the people in charge want what they want. They will never be talked out of being the ruling class. On the other hand, if what they want makes it impossible for society to operate, then we get a new ruling class. At this point, all of the trust is gone so they have to keep Netflix running, sportball playing and the grillers grilling, so no one notices the cracks spreading all around us.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

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











.