Like the Democrat convention, the Republican convention is mostly about the past, in that it is packaged and marketed to people who no longer exist. The Democrats put on a show that would have been great for their coalition of a generation ago. The Republicans are doing much of the same, tailoring their pitch to white civic nationalists, feeling generous in their prosperity. It’s a lot of happy warrior stuff, even though the warriors are too old now to be happy about anything.

American politics has been increasingly backward looking since the end of the Cold War and the rise of the Baby Boomer generation of politicians. No group has been as nostalgic, especially for their own past, as the Boomers, so it makes some sense that their politics would be backward looking. Clinton was supposed to be their generation’s Kennedy, while Obama was their Martin Luther King. Of course, every Republican has been one of their favorite bogeymen from their past.

The odd thing about Baby Boomer political nostalgia is it is both a longing for a past that never really existed, but also a nostalgia for a present that never occurred. On the Left, this manifests as fond memories for the 60’s revolution, of which they played no part, but also a sadness for it never living up to the promise. Most of the Boomer politicians lived normal middle-class lives. They were never street radicals. Then there is the fact that the cultural revolution was the work of their parents.

Conservatives have a similar thing going on. For them, the past starts in the 1980’s as the peak expression of post-war America. They don’t dream of going back to the fifties, because that would be racist. Instead it is the 80’s, when there was no racism, but it was still great to be white. On the other hand, there is the sadness that the Reagan revolution never amounted to much more than the conversion of America into a continent sized economic zone with an army.

There is more to the backward focus than generational nostalgia. The dynamic that emerged after the last industrial war has reached its end. The Left-Right political dialectic that rose up in the 1950’s was a product of the Cold War. It was a power sharing arrangement within the new ruling class of the new empire. The Left would hold sway over domestic issues, while the Right would run foreign policy. Economics was where they would hold mock battles during elections.

Once the Cold War ended, that dynamic stopped making sense. It is why the neocons are so desperate to revive tensions with Russia and continue the crusade against the Muslim world. They oppose a confrontation with China, because they have no cultural connection with the East and they see financial opportunities there. The people who finance their lifestyles are getting rich in China. The old dynamic was very good for the usual suspects, so they desperately want to revive it.

Something similar is happening on the Left. The stuff we are seeing with left-wing agitation and rioting is like a weird cargo cult. They are reenactors playing roles they heard their grandparents talk about at family gatherings. Those behind it are trying to conjure a familiar bogeyman from the past. They desperately want Bull Connor to show up with fire-hoses and attack dogs. They’ll settle for idiots in homemade armor, just so they can pretend it is yesterday.

It is common to call the 1960’s a cultural revolution. Some say it was the sexual revolution or maybe the youth revolution. Still others point out that the revolution started in the 1950’s with black civil rights. The great cultural upheavals that transformed the country started soon after the war and petered out in the 1980’s. The scene then shifted to the financial and technological revolutions that took America from the industrial age into the current age. The revolution never ended.

This is something the Bolsheviks figured out before anyone else. A society that moves from one static state to another is not revolutionary. It is merely adjusting in order to preserve the old order. A revolutionary society is one in which change is constant, because the revolution never ends. Of course, everything ends, but a real revolution never ends on its own. It must be extinguished. Otherwise, every change fuels the next change, which fuels a subsequent change.

This was the case with the Bolsheviks. The revolution carried on through the war and into the Cold War. Eventually, after Stalin and then Khrushchev, the people in charge had enough revolution and they entered a period of stasis. Despite all the rhetoric, Russia became a very conservative empire in the 1970’s and remained so until it collapsed in the 80’s and 90’s. Interestingly, the radicals were also right about what would happen once the revolutionary fires were extinguished.

Unlike Russia, America has remained in a revolutionary state. In fact, once could argue that the revolution started before the great industrial wars. You could probably date it to Gettysburg or maybe the Social Gospel movement. Some argue that the Civil War was a second founding of the nation, a rework of the first, but repairing the flaws in the original founding. This would then be the birth of the revolutionary America, the genuinely revolutionary America, that exists today.

In that context, the nostalgia and tumult we are seeing today is another chapter in the story of revolutionary America. As Fidel Castro said, revolutions are a fight between the past and the future. In present day America, the future is a land of different tribes with no shared history, language or culture. The past is the America both sides of the fading ruling class celebrate in their conventions. The thing that is certain in this fight is the future always wins, which is what we are witnessing.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Republicans kicked off their 2020 convention promising to do a better job than the Democrats in this age of panic driven virtual reality. Instead of disembodied heads floating on screens it would look more like a convention. They even had some people gathering in a physical place in North Carolina. The Democrats tried to make themselves look cool by relying on Zoom sessions for all of their activity. The result was it looked like something a YouTube grifter would put together.

To make that point early, they had Charlie Kirk open the show for them. While he is pretty much just an enormous empty head attached to a stick figure, he was standing behind a podium giving a normal speech like a normal person. The fact that he was selected to open the show should remind the Fuentes – Casey crowd that modern politics is entirely disconnected from popular opinion now. They effectively exposed Kirk as a fraud, but his backers still like him and that is what matters.

In fact, the whole TP-USA operation is a good entry point for people coming to this side of the great divide in understanding the reality of democracy. The rich people sponsoring Kirk and his operation are like the people who back boy bands. The record companies assume the kids have to listen to something, so if they flood the zone with their material, they get the sales. In the case of Kirk, they know the political kids will join something, so they control the options they can join.

After Kirk, it was the usual parade of diversity we have come to expect from our ruling class propaganda events. There was a woman then a black football player and then a black Democrat politician. Both from the South. In diverse America, blacks and women can identify as “southern” but it can never be a white guy. Then it was some Hispanics of various types and then the girlfriend of one of Trump’s kids gave an impressively weird speech about something. It was just weird.

After appealing to all of the constituencies that will never vote for Republicans, they had Jared Taylor come out and give the case for white people. He made the case that even though the GOP is full of actual cuckolds, white people have to vote for someone, so it may as well be the party that occasionally supports their interests. While Trump is not a white nationalist or an even a racist, he is the embodiment of implicit whiteness, while Biden is the manifestation of the current anti-White pogrom.

Obviously, that never happened and will never happen. The diversity crap irritates everyone on this side of the great divide and many on the other side as well, but the sad truth is most GOP voters lap that stuff up. It is why Trump does it. Generations of Americans have been indoctrinated into this cult of diversity. White people get misty-eyed when they see a black or brown endorse “their side.” It is both validation and flattery, a one-two punch that still works on normal whites.

There have been many ways of describing the established politics. The inner party – outer party construct makes the Republicans the colorful paint job on the Progressive vehicle at the heart of our politics. The kosher sandwich is a phrase popular with the anti-Semites to describe the false dichotomy of democracy. People get to vote who they like as long as that person supports the system. The NRx guys used the term cathedral, while neo-liberal critics used the term motte-and-bailey.

Another way to think of it is the Republicans and conservatives operate like an invisible fence that rings what is acceptable political discourse. The people are wearing shock collars, so when if cross the line they get the jolt. If they stay over the line, the juice is shut off, but if they try to cross back, they get the full blast. The result of this is the zone of acceptable politics is ringed by those who wandered beyond the barrier and now look in wishing they could return.

It is why the alt-right scared the Left so much five years ago. When they were just suburban white guys making jokes about diversity, feminism and multiculturalism, they threatened this construct. People could look outside the barrier and see normal people having fun, not wearing their shock collars. Then the alt-right put on funny costumes, strapped on their collars and marched right into the barrier. Their conditioning was too much and they played the role the Left needed them to play.

It is one of the paradoxes of dissident politics. The Left bans dissidents from the parts of the public square they control. Dissident then demand to be allowed back onto these platforms, often destroying themselves doing it. This serves the interest of the Left, by reestablishing that barrier in the minds of the people. If the damned just go off and enjoy their life outside the barrier, indifferent to being excluded, it undermines the logic of the system and the legitimacy of the gatekeepers.

That is easier said than done, which is why the old regime staggers on. Trump won because he is the most unconventional politicians in forever and he will be re-nominated at a thoroughly conventional convention. It’s not that the people organizing it are deliberately trying to undermine him. It’s just that like everyone inside the system, they only know the system. They have been immersed in it their whole life. It is their reality. They are just parts of a whole they do not fully comprehend.

That is the dissident project, when you think about it. It is not about injecting heretical nanites into the existing system in order to transform it from within. It is not about launching an assault against it, like it is a city to be sacked. Those both serve to validate the system. It is about contradicting the underlying reality of the system, by constructing an independent reality. Dissident politics must exist outside the current construct as a genuine alternative.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

One the distinguishing features of modern liberal democracy is the personal nature of political fights. Disputes are no longer disagreements over policy or clashes between interest groups over the spoils of government. Instead they are highly personal matters, in which both sides are defined by their unwillingness to compromise. In fact, the unwillingness to find any compromise with the other side is what comes to define the partisans. Everyone is defined by their enemies.

The term “partisan” in the way it is used in modern politics was coined by Lenin as a counter to bourgeois objectivity. The Marxists argued that since class interests determine ideology, there is no point in thinking about non-partisans politics. The partisan should fight for the interests of his class, or in the modern sense, his identity group, even if that contradicts the interests of society as a whole. The modern partisan is supposed to care only about winning for the good of his group.

Obviously, the partisan has a personal stake in his politics, in that he is fighting for his class, tribe, identity group and so on. The partisan stands to benefit personally if his class carries the day, but that’s not the point of politics. The union activist, fighting to unionize a shop, benefits from the spread of unions, but his reason for unionizing is it is good for his class. Similarly, the member of a minority group would advocate for his people, because it is good for his tribe.

That is another strange aspect of modern politics. There is a disconnect between the partisan and the cause he champions. Affluent white female liberals, for example, have no practical connection to the issues they champion, other than the nonsensical concept of intersectionality. In the partisan sense, they should be on the side of those defending the cultural hegemony of bourgeois white people. Instead, they champion causes that threaten their lifestyle.

This combination of deeply personal politics and disconnected partisanship results in a highly emotional, disembodied politics. The upper middle-class female who is overly officious with the lazy sales clerk is mocked as a “Karen” by the sorts of people who should be the defenders of order. The epithet is liberally tossed around by people claiming to be conservatives. The result is two sides defining themselves by their hatred of the other, despite their shared interests.

One reason for this is partisan politics only makes sense when the stakes are high for the partisans in the fight. A century ago, when union activists were fighting for worker rights, the workers had a lot to gain. The employers had a lot to lose in the practical sense, but also in terms of their political position. In a post-scarcity world, the stakes are low, often non-existent. Black Lives Matter has nothing to gain or lose. The most they can hope for is a temporary trophy on social media.

Another reason for the highly personal partisanship is the long shadow of second wave feminism on our politics. Feminism in the second half of the last century not only came to exert greater influence on the culture, but it became highly personal. Just as ideological partisanship triumphed over objectivity, personal politics triumphed over dispassionate issue advocacy. Feminism not only feminized our politics, it turned into an emotional hair-pulling contest. It’s always personal.

Personal partisanship is highly negative. The modern partisan no longer is defined internally by his class, tribe or identity. He is defined by his enemies. Modern political identity is a dynamic between adversaries. The woke are defined by their opposition to imaginary racists. Because they are imaginary, they end up attacking normal people, who respond by attacking imaginary communists. Everyone must be defined by who they oppose, making them a slave to their enemies.

The reason the political class has been silent on the urban unrest this summer is from their perspective, they have no dog in the fight. The woke warriors pulling down statues are not threatening the ruling class. They are threatening the invisible Nazis. The BLM people pulling people out of their cars and killing them are not threatening to attack the ruling class this way. In a world where political action can only occur in the face of an enemy, the ruling class has no reason to stop the madness.

The irony of liberal democracy is that it is supposed to result in the public will being expressed in the laws passed and enforced by the state. Instead, it results in the general will being sublimated to petty squabbles and negative identity. The people in power are free to act without fear of public disapproval. Even if the voters are unhappy with the politicians, they are going to spend all of their time attacking imaginary adversaries, because that is the source of their identity.

In theory, the way out of this is an impersonal partisanship. A return to the old style politics where activists work on behave of the interests of their group, indifferent to the interests of others, unless there is conflict. The point of conflict always being the advancement of group interests. In reality, the attraction of personal politics is probably too great to overcome. It is simply natural to respond in a personal way to personal assaults from those who stand in the way of your cause.

Impersonal partisanship, therefore, must start with the disengagement from the political, both formal and informal. The successful groups in the future will be those who have organized outside the system, defined their interests and seek to advance them without regards to the interests of other partisans. That will mean successful outsider politics habituates an indifference to other identity groups. They simply become objects to overcome or navigate around, but otherwise uninteresting.

The impersonal partisan will be one who invests his time in building the strength of his own group, without regards to the actions of others. Instead of reacting to the actions of other tribes, he acts only in the interest of his group. The healthy identity group does not have friends or enemies, only interests, so the partisan is one who has no investment in personal politics, only the interests of his group. By resisting the main weapon of liberal democracy, the impersonal partisan can effectively fight for his cause.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Political conventions are probably the dumbest aspect of American politics, especially in the modern technological era. Half a century ago, they still made some sense from a logistical perspective. Getting all the national and local players together in the same physical place was the only way to maintain the network. It was also a television event that gave the party a chance to make their pitch. They also brought in the donors for the grip and grin sessions that seem to work on rich people.

Today, the old-style convention looks increasingly like a pointless relic. The only people who need to meet in person these days to talk politics are dissidents and that’s because of the pogroms against white activists. The people in charge can avail themselves to all the modern technology of the day. As far as a television event, the convention looks ridiculous to most modern people. It’s like watching a movie from the 1970’s, where people are using pay phones and wearing suits on airplanes.

The parties stick with them mostly because politics is a risk-adverse game. These days, every campaign has pollsters and consultants telling the campaign what to do. Inevitably, they say the same things over and over, as that is the low risk strategy for the consultants and pollsters. If the campaign does the normal stuff and fails, the candidate gets the blame. If it succeeds, then it proves the tried and true methods work. That’s why the parties stick with convention format.

As silly as it all is, the convention does offer some insights into what is happening behind the scenes of the party. That was clear on day one of the Democratic virtual convention now in day three. The people hired to produce it were not creative wiz-kids given the challenge of creating the first virtual convention. Instead, they hired people who make corporate videos and infomercials. Anyone who has had to consume corporate video saw the fingerprints on day one.

That tells us the people running the DNC and the Biden campaign are just as old in their thinking as the people running the party. Joe Biden (77), Nancy Pelosi (80) and Chuck Schumer (69) hit middle age before the typical voter was born. They were set in their ways before the first ISP came into operation. These are analog people living in a digital age, by avoiding anything new and different. This virtual convention was made for people who put their face right up to the screen in a Zoom session.

Thus far, the convention tells us that there is a serious rift between the young woke crowd and the old guard. The choice of speakers to highlight is the tell. They featured the genocidal Andrew Cuomo and Obama’s Wookie on the first night. They gave Bernie Sanders a few minutes and a canned speech. The Bernie wing is not happy, which is why they are rioting in their strongholds, so using the first night to remind them who is still in charge of the party was a message.

Maybe the most amusing part of the show thus far was the angry guy routine done by Andrew Cuomo. He did his thing sitting at a desk, like a corporate CEO addressing the company by video conference after a big round of layoffs. The point was to be inspirational in a tough time, but instead it was angry and bitter. The only thing missing was a threat that if morale did not pick up, the beatings would continue. Cuomo is the argument in favor of sending the sons of politicians into exile.

It’s also clear the party bosses don’t understand what they have unleashed with the anti-white rhetoric. They did the old corporate diversity crap on the first night, but it was actually worse than the corporate diversity training videos. It did not address anything that has been happening for the last few months. The use of the Buffalo Springfield song would have gone over well with the 70-plus crowd, but by that point it was well past lights out in the nation’s rest homes.

Another indication of the general detachment from reality is the use of Republican turncoats in this convention. The idea is to use these faithless finks to show undecideds that even the Republicans are abandoning their man. Most people unsure about voting for Trump already hate the GOP. That’s why they tend to sit out elections. Trotting out Colin Powell and John Kasich just reminds them that they hate the same people who hate Donald Trump. It has the opposite of the intended effect.

Another insight that can be gleaned from this thing is the party is deeply worried by the overall lack of enthusiasm for their guy. The first night drew roughly half the audience they drew in 2016. The party then ordered their media organs to bump the numbers up in subsequent stories. In this age of lies, we can expect the media to claim the Biden speech was watched by every human on earth, but the reality is this thing and his campaign are not all that interesting to people.

Now, it should be pointed out that the lock downs have broken all the normal patterns of behavior with regards to media consumption. The sports leagues are experiencing their bad television numbers. People working at home are no longer talking about sports and TV shows with co-workers. There are no live audiences, so the social proof has been removed from sports. This convention may be suffering from the same thing. People are disconnecting from mass media due to the lock downs.

Putting that aside, what comes through in this convention is that conventional politics has reached the end of the road. The Democrats will soon be the brown party and their cries of racism will sound even more absurd than they do today. Whatever replaces the Republicans will be the white party and calls for constitutional principles will sound as absurd as the whining about white privilege. This convention and its reliance on 50-year old pop culture references is the end of the end.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

For obvious reasons, 2020 will go down in the history books as one of the strangest years in American history. The virus response alone would make it a very strange year, probably an inflection point. It will be the year when the post-normal period in America society started. What may make it the most historically significant year in history is it will be known as the year when partisanship tipped into madness. This is the year when the ruling class went insane and took the rest of us with them.

The latest bout of insanity is over the United States Postal Service conspiracy to subvert the upcoming election. The Left is on their social media platforms warning that Big Stamp is part of a silent coup to award the election to Trump. Fevered lefties are posting pictures of themselves guarding mailboxes. The actress Jaimie Lee Curtis posted this on her Twitter account. The invasion of the mailbox snatchers has become a very real thing for the people on the Left.

How exactly anyone can think the post office is going to rig an election is a lot like the Russian collusion hoax. It is best understood if you don’t think about very much. The ballots go into the mailbox, something magical happens and then Donald Trump steals the election! Instead of the Russians using mind control to alter voter behavior in the voting booth, it is the postmaster using special powers to alter ballots inside the box themselves or perhaps making them disappear.

Of course, given the universality of the Opposite Rule of Liberalism, this means the Left is already hard at work with a plan to spoil ballots in the postal system. Their push for vote by mail is part of an existing scheme to trash votes from Republican areas, while stuffing the mailboxes in Democratic areas. Of course, their street thugs will be justified in burning mailboxes in white areas now. You can be sure Antifa will be staking out the post offices in white areas of the country too.

The legacy Right argues that these antics are just part of the Left’s scheme to gain power and impose their Marxisms on us. This is a recurring theme of Tucker Carlson’s nightly monologues. The Left just wants power! Of course, the Left has power, near absolute power, in fact. They have shut down large swaths of the country just because they are sad about Donald Trump. They now let blacks murder white people without facing real consequences. That’s real power.

Like conservatism itself, this sort of bourgeois objectivism is just a carry-over from the olden thymes when it was assumed reason ruled the day. There must be a reason for why people act a certain way in politics. Money, power and sex were assumed to be the set of plausible reasons for all political corruption. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the legacy Right clings to this mode of thought, mostly because they think to do otherwise opens the door to this sort of analysis.

We are at the point with the virus and now the post office conspiracy to conclude that madness is what lies behind all of this. Partisanship is the heart of liberal democracy, which means it must keep beating to exist. It also requires an antagonist, some group or some concept that it must oppose. It is the enemy that gives the partisan purpose and defines his life. Partisanship is a war against the other. Without the other, the partisan has no object onto which he can aim his fury.

That is where we find ourselves at the end of history. There are no more worlds for the America Left to conquer. They own every square inch of real estate in the high ground of America power. The so-called opposition from the so-called conservatives mostly consists of bowing and scraping. Conservative Inc. is a room full of broken men, crying and groveling for relief. The invisible bogeymen of fascism exist only as avatars on the internet and snarky comments on Twitter.

Without a real enemy, the partisans are left to invent them. It turns out that the Russian collusion hoax just one manifestation. What drove that conspiracy was the belief in secret forces aligned with the evil Donald Trump. Then it was the Ukrainian hoax and now we are dealing with a postal service conspiracy. Even the virus response is explained by this need for an enemy. What should have been a minor inconvenience, was turned into a cultural revolution.

You see the madness in their everyday language. The Left demand “safe spaces” where they get to say what they like, within the confines of current dogma, and they are free of contrary facts or opinions. Note it is not just contrary opinion. The safe space is free of any bits of reality that contradict the faith. That’s why they say language is violence or that silence is violence. The need for an enemy is so strong they are willing to create imaginary ones to play the role.

What will probably set this year apart from all others is that this is the year when the madness reached a point where the majority of white people decided that there is no dealing with these people. How does one even talk to someone who thinks the post office is out to get them? How can you even have a conversation with someone that is sure the Russians rigged the last election? Within living memory people like this were involuntarily committed to lunatic asylums.

Barring a great reversal of current trends, it will become clear to a growing number of white people that the course of events has once again made it necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which connect them with another. There is no way to reach any sort of accommodation with people who think the mailbox is out to get them, so there is no longer any point in trying. Like all busted relationships, the end begins when one party no longer wants to fix it.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Joe Biden announced has running mate section, which immediately set off rounds of speculation as to why he picked Harris over the other options. The most interesting thing about running mates is the reason the candidate picked them. Otherwise, they tend to be forgotten. Look through the list of Vice Presidents and you see some familiar names, but you see guys like Elbridge Gerry and Hannibal Hamlin. Both were prominent men of their age, but meaningless today.

The curious thing about the Biden choice is it does not fit the popular theories for running mate selection. The most popular reason for selecting a running mate is they help in their home state. We know the old Rust Belt states will be where the election is decided, so picking a brown senator from California does not help there. Harris also has a strong hate-whitey vibe to her, which tends not to go over well with the white working-class types in these states.

Then there is the fact that Harris as the charm of a DMV clerk. In fact, she reminds people of every trip to get their license renewed. She is sour and unpleasant, even when she is professional and efficient. There is a reason she could not draw flies during the primaries. She was so obnoxious in the debates she was forced to drop out before the Iowa caucus. If it were possible for people to cast negative votes, she would have been the first to poll less than zero percent.

Usually when a candidate picks a former opponent, it is someone with an actual constituency or maybe they complement the candidate. Al Gore was a good partner for Clinton, because of his squeaky-clean image. George Bush made sense for Reagan, as Bush represented the traitor wing of the GOP. In this case, Harris has no constituency and she highlights the many flaws of Joe Biden. The only people who liked her were the executives at Google, who were already onboard.

That is the most popular theory at this stage. Biden is not all there, so it is assumed the selection of Harris was as much of a surprise to him as the rest of us. Instead the decision was made by his handlers and it was decided he needed more support from the tech oligarchs. He had the financial oligarchs and Israel was okay with him, so the final piece of the puzzle was to get the blessing of Google. He now has the blessing of all the power centers that run America.

There’s also the theory that Harris is fully compromised, so she will be easy to manipulate by those dark forces everyone is sure exist. Her long career under Willie Brown, literally and figuratively, means she has a lot of skeletons. After the election, someone will put a pillow over Biden’s face and Harris will be installed as Google’s handpicked president. If Biden escapes the pillow, then she will be right there to make sure he follows instructions from Silicon Valley.

It’s possible that the tech oligarchs put pressure on the campaign, but those are the sorts of just-so narratives that appeal to the conspiratorial minded. The truth is, Warren would have brought plenty of tech money and support and she would have revved up the strong woman vote. Warren raised more money for Biden than anyone thus far, so she has strong support among the oligarchs. She’s also pretty good at getting under the skin of Donald Trump, something Biden does not do well.

The thing is, the process used to select running mates is well known. The staff starts with a wide pool of interested candidates. They poll all of them in various markets to gauge how they would do with voters. Then they quietly look into their backgrounds for the usual problems. Once they have the list down to a workable field, they get serious on the background checks and poll testing. Powerful party people are consulted on the options. Finally, the short-list interviews with the candidate.

In other words, all of the options put before Biden had the blessing of all the people that needed to bless the choice. The reason Harris was the choice rather than the governess of Michigan or the syrup lady from Georgia is Joe Biden liked Harris better than the other options. The most likely reason for that is she called him a racist, but was still willing to be his running mate. Biden picked the black looking woman who was willing to give him absolution for his white privilege.

It sounds nutty, but we live in a deranged age. This summer, the Left has been convulsing the country with demands that white people atone for their privilege and racism, so what better way than a ticket that reflects that sensibility? For people like Joe Biden, this is the national unity ticket. He is the symbol of the white people being pushed aside by the riot of non-whites. Harris is the symbol of the ascendant class of non-whites, ready to take over and forgive the old whites.

To most people, this does not register, but inside politics and inside the Progressive warrens, this is powerful magic. They really believe this stuff. An article of faith on the Left is that the sin of racism will only be cleansed from the nation when whites are no longer in charge of the country. The statue toppling and erasing of names from the history books are a symbolic spilling of blood to cleans our soul. Rather than human sacrifices, we are renaming celestial bodies.

For white liberals of Biden’s generation, race is the only salient issue. Most of these old Progressives came into politics because of the race issue. Those who came in for other reasons were soon bathing in the baptismal waters of race. They have spent their whole lives immersed in racial politics. They really do think racial justice is the key to their salvation. Biden was certainly hurt by Harris in the primary, so when she was eager to join the ticket, he felt like a man getting absolution.

This most likely means the narrative of the Biden-Harris campaign will be built around healing the nation’s soul. They will make the case that a vote for them is a vote to end the racial unrest. The peaceful and voluntary transfer of moral authority from the sinful whites of old America to the noble non-whites of new America will bring all of us into the valley of redemption. The salvation that was supposed to come with the election of Obama will instead come with the last breath of his running mate.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

President Trump may be facing one of the most unusual re-election campaigns in the history of the country. Unlike most incumbents, his own party will be working hard to elect his opponent. The fact is, America is a one-party country. The two parties are just the two faces of the same crowd. Both faces hate Trump. The voters for his party, on the other hand, largely get this. Despite their best efforts, the Republican party is the home of populist white people.

The other problem for Trump is he can’t actually campaign. Both parties have conspired to lock most of the country down to the point where it is impossible to hold rallies, meet and greet voters and whip up support in person. The uniparty candidate is a drooling vegetable locked in his basement, so the uniparty is fine with it. The less people see of Dementia Joe the better. Trump on the other hand really needs the social proof that comes from holding rallies and campaign events.

Political campaigns are like a sales campaign, in that the goal is to both gain attention from the target audience and win over those willing to listen. Instead of selling a product or service, you’re selling a person. All the civic nationalist blather about the issues or the candidate’s positions is self-serving nonsense. The real goal of a every campaign is to sell the person to the majority. Men follow men and voters pick the person they like the best on a personal level, outside of partisan considerations.

In the case of an incumbent, the challenge for the people running the campaign is their guy is a known quantity. He has been in office and almost all of the people who voted for him the last time will be voting again. Maybe some of the opposing votes can be brought around, but the pool of potential voters is largely fixed. In most cases, re-election campaigns are run as base elections. The idea is to remind the supporters to get out there and support their guy on election day.

For President Trump, one possible way around this is to do what he did the last time and operate outside the normal confines. In 2016, he used his own plane to fly around to rallies staged at airports. This both prevented the uniparty rent-a-mobs from attacking his voters and made it easier for him to fly in, do his thing, and then head to the next stop. They also made great television. People were fascinated by what he was doing, so he got attention even from the people who are paid to hate him.

This time he can’t do that, but he still needs to find a way to offer that social proof those rallies provided people. One way to do that would be video chats. In the depression, FDR used fire side chats, broadcast over radio, to build support for his program. People listened and then talked about it the next day. This built support because people saw that their friends and neighbors were also tuning into these shows. Trump could do the same thing on-line with weekly videos.

The thing is, a crisis is good for the incumbent if he can be seen as the source of stability and safety. If from now until election day Trump is doing weekly half hour updates on the Covid issues, the economy and other issues that turn up, he can establish himself as the rock of stability. It would also force the media and Dementia Joe to respond to what Trump is saying and doing. It would both reassure his supporters and potential supporters, plus drive his opponents insane.

The other thing Trump will need to do is re-establish himself as both the tribune of the people and the hero taking on the dragon known as Washington. For his first term he has tried to cajole and convince the dragon to play nice. All he has got for his trouble is lawsuits, impeachment and a special counsel investigation. That has put off a lot of his supporters, who correctly wonder if all the tough talk was just that. Trump needs to pick some fights with the uniparty, especially the GOP side.

Trump has plenty of opportunities in this regard. The executive orders continuing unemployment insurance and small business aid was a master stroke, as it puts Trump on the side of the people, versus the petty ruling class. Trump needs to run against Washington in the same way Truman did in 1948. He has nothing to lose by irritating the Republicans. They already hate him. Even if the GOP loses the Senate, nothing would change all that much for Trump.

The other aspect of this, however, is Trump needs to be more than just a chaos agent, throwing sand in the gears of the establishment. Trump has been handed a unique opportunity in having an opponent who is clinically dead. Now one really knows what would happen if Biden wins. He will probably die in office. He has said as much during his campaign and made it a feature of his VP choice. Trump needs to exploit this and make himself the predictable outcome of the election.

There’s also the FBI matter that may be coming to a head. The temptation for Trump will be to personalize it, make it about these people hating him. Instead, he needs to use this in the larger narrative of Trump the tribune of the people fighting the corrupt dragon that is the ruling class. People like this plot, which is why so many movies are based on it. That and making Biden defend this corruption as the man of the establishment would be comedy gold.

Another thing Trump needs to do in this election is own his failures. Incumbents have a record and they need to own them, warts and all. In the case of Trump, he has the opportunity to turn many of his failures into positive qualities. He can talk about his naivete about the corruption in Washington. He can talk about how he was not prepared for his own party to undermine his efforts. He can talk about his trouble staffing his administration and having to rely on finks.

Another avenue unique to Trump is that his opponents are making it easy to turn their weapons against them. For example, what many of the local tyrants are doing in response to the virus could easily be compared to Nazi Germany. That would make his opponents insane with rage. He can also call them science deniers. Imagine a flippant comment about how people who cannot tell the difference between boys and girls want us to trust them on the complex science of a pandemic.

This is also a chance to force them to defend their pogroms against people excising their right to speak freely. Trump should do something bold like move to Gab or hire guys like Darren Beatty and Blake Neff as speech writers. The Left will squeal about hanging out with Nazis, but he can respond with how he is taking a stand in defence of our rights as Americans. In other words, it is about making a point and striking a blow against the scolds of cancel culture.

The thing with the Left is they always tell you where the holes in their lines are, by screaming bloody murder about them. They are not demanding everyone be banned from the internet because they feel this is their strength. The theatrics are a bluff, because they know as soon as someone with real power pushes back, the game is over and this stuff comes to a halt. Trump has real power. He can punch these cry-bullies in the nose and make them pay for their antics.

Finally, people vote for something, not against something. Trump needs to offer a positive agenda for his second term. Nationalist trade policies, responsible immigration policies, pro-American foreign policy. With Trump you get peace, stability and the opportunity to make a better life for your children and grandchildren. Contrasted to the vision of unrestrained hatred and anger on offer by the Left, a vote for Trump is a vote for tomorrow, while a vote for Biden is a vote for yesterday.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!