Category Archives: Politics

The Lives Of Others

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Since most anyone reading this has been alive, there has been a debate in what is called the right in America, about what to do about the right. Going back to the middle of the last century, the debate is about replacing the opposition to the ruling progressives with something new or reforming the current opposition. Once side thinks the current opposition is too corrupt to be reformed while the other camp thinks a startup has little chance to succeed, so reform is the best course.

If you go back to the early days of the Buckley movement, you find the same sort of debates going on among those members of the “new right.” The Buckley people did not have much of an “old right” to worry about, as it had collapsed in the FDR years, but they had the issue of the existing institutions. Should conservatives seek to create their own institutions or seek to take over existing ones? In the end, it was a mix of both choices that resulted in what is called Conservative Inc.

It is also why there is another debate about what to do with the old right among people trying to form up a new right. The complete failure of conservatism was made clear in the Bush and Obama years to everyone not getting a paycheck from one of the many conservative think tanks and institutions. Paul Gottfried coined the term “alternative right” in this period while commenting on the failure of movement conservatism to conserve anything more than their positions.

Everyone knows what happened to the alternative right, but the sense that something must rise up to replace Conservative Inc is still with us. People like Christopher Rufo, Matt Walsh and Michael Anton, all see themselves in the process of creating a new right for the current age. Amusingly, all of them are linked to nodes of the old right, places like Claremont, Hillsdale and others. Like Dionysus, they hope the new right will be born from the thigh of the old right.

This gets to the impossibility of either approach to creating a new right. On the one hand, you need money to hire writers, thinkers and activists. Raising that money one small donor at a time is hard and unpleasant, at least from the perspective of people who imagine themselves leading the new right. That means going to the people who have lots of cash to spare. Those are the people who fund the old right, which means making an accommodation with the old right.

Of course, if the old right saw a need to reform itself, it would do it, so the reformers coming in to fix things run into a wall of resistance. The donors like the institutions as they are, but they would like a little youthful energy to spruce things up, which is why they invite in the reformers. Like men who spend a long time in prison, the reformers are eventually institutionalized by the entities they seek to reform. Before long they are leading the charge to purge a heretic.

This has been the cycle since the full flowering of the Global American Empire after the Second World War. The opposition to the prevailing progressive orthodoxy, on the one hand, maintains a wall between the establishment and the public, while on the other hand, selectively recruiting some reformers to provide energy and the facade of opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. Notice how all the members of the current new right sound like exhibits in the Reagan Museum.

It has always been assumed that what makes this system possible and so durable is the money supply. The golden rule says that the men with the gold make the rules, so if the donor class exists as it is, both the progressive orthodoxy and what is allowed to officially oppose it will not change. There is some truth to it, but there is more to it than just money. Even the money men find themselves constrained by a system that they supposedly control.

What has kept this system going is the social aspect of the commentariat. It operates as a subculture, separate from the larger culture. People have noted that Washington operates like a small town, and this is obvious in the commentariat. The people inside depend entirely on the system for their money, reputation, and friendships. It is a lot like how one percent biker clubs operate. You are either completely inside or completely outside the ecosystem. There is no middle ground.

This is why when it comes time to exile a heretic, all of his friends rush forth to condemn the man, often claiming to have never trusted him. On the one hand, they fear being associated with the heretic, but on the other it provides an opportunity to display their fidelity to the subculture. Like Brutus stoically standing by as his sons are executed for their participation in the Tarquinian conspiracy, members of the commentariat heap recriminations on former friends sent into exile.

As a result, everyone is always looking around for cues about what is currently acceptable within the system. When your livelihood depends on toeing the line at the office, you can think about getting a new job. When your social standing, friendships and family relations depend upon toeing the line within the political ecosystem of the commentariat, you can think of nothing but toeing the line. Everyone inside the system, even the donors, are terrified of being exiled.

This helps explain why our commentariat sounds so weird and alien. Our chattering classes are like the courtiers who live their lives walled up inside the king’s palace, talking amongst themselves. Everyone they know thinks the same things, says the same things and cares about the same things. Most important, they fear the same thing, which is the outer dark of exile. The result is a political commentariat that is isolated from the reality of the general public.

This model of the chattering class applies to the regime media, which is itself a subculture cut off from the general public. This model also applies to the managerial class, which now functions as a separate society, with its own economics, culture and morality, sitting atop the larger society. The thread that runs through all these subcultures among the Cloud People is fear of being expelled and having to live with John the Savage and the rest of the Dirt People.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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

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Dreams Of Purges Past

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Yesterday, internet activist Christopher Rufo posted on Twitter a long post denouncing, disavowing and anathematizing someone named Chris Brunet. Apparently, Brunet used to work for Rufo or maybe they were friends, but Rufo now finds that old association inconvenient to his current relationships and career choices, so he decided to do the predictable thing and denounce Brunet. It is a weird form of public piety that the conservatives inherited from communism.

For those of a certain age, this is familiar stuff. While the format is different from the old days of conservatism, the act is the same. That post reads like a Twitter version of Bill Buckley’s denunciation of Pat Buchanan thirty years ago. Interestingly, that famous essay is nowhere to be found online, but the book version is still available. Imagine someone writing a forty-thousand-word essay denouncing someone then being so proud of it that he turned it into a book.

That is the first notable thing about this bit of drama. Those familiar with the history of conservatism recognize this performance. The person putting on the show is doing it for an audience that is never named, but always assumed. The stated audience is either credulous, incredulous or confused by the performance. Everything about this age is a reboot, especially the stuff that emanates from the political class, so the “new right” is just a low-budget reboot of the old right.

There is a Little Rascals quality to all of it. They put on the costumes of the past and reenact events as they think they happened, but in a high school musical sort of way, which makes it feel small and petty. Thirty years ago, Buchanan and Buckley were towering figures fighting for the right to define a sociopolitical movement they helped create, while Rufo and Burnet are two guys on the internet. To his credit, Burnett seems to appreciate the absurdity of it.

The resulting drama brings up another notable aspect. Then as now, the people doing the denouncing always couch their denunciations in moral terms, when it is obvious that they are motivated by money. Buckley knew there were loads of cash waiting for him if he denounced the paleocons. The neocons, Zionists and the Israel lobby were as flush with cash thirty years ago as they are now. They hated the critics of these things as much as they hate them today.

There is nothing wrong with currying favor with rich people. The “American experiment” is pretty much an institutionalized version of this habit. The market economy, after all, is nothing more than people with something to sell chasing after and flattering people who have money to spend. Democratic politics is the art of flattering wealthy interests so they will back your candidacy. There is a reason that one of the highest paid people at every Washington think tank is the fundraiser.

In theory, the one group most comfortable with this reality should be the conservatives, as they boast of being the most free-market of the bunch. Yet, they are the ones most ashamed of being men for hire. They cast all their actions in moral terms, often making it seem like they are engaged in the greatest of moral struggles. David French has made a career of nailing himself to the cross. So much so, in fact, that he has attained what all conservatives seek, a place at the New York Times!

It is a strange quirk of conservatism. Read the comments of that Rufo post and you see the phrase “moral clarity” turn up often. It is as if these people have a strange form of Tourette’s that only comes out when they are finking on one another. It brings to mind the famous quote from Emerson, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Whenever a conservative begins speaking of moral clarity, get ready for a load of arrows in your back.

The reason for this is the central contradiction of conservatism. They start by agreeing with the central premise of progressivism, which is that all people are equal and infinitely malleable. Hierarchy is therefore a construct. You cannot oppose an egalitarian ideology like progressivism by first agreeing with its central claim, so conservatives can never admit that they are simply doing the bidding of their patrons. That means they must invent other reasons which they call principles.

That aside, the sense that this is just recycled drama from a bygone age is due to progressivism becoming a backward-looking phenomenon. It evolved to its logical endpoint only to find nothing there. The modern progressive must content himself with refighting old fights with old enemies reimagined for this time. The new Nazi is the guy opposed to Israel carpet bombing civilians. The new Bull Connor is the guy wondering why the FBI is faking crime stats.

The new right is now following suit. They search around for someone to play the Pat Buchanan role or the Joe Sobran role. It will not be long before these guys pick a fight with the Birchers, which is still around, amazingly enough. Conservatism has always been the slow version of progressivism, so as progressives become a strange sort of antiquarian society, conservatives will slowly join them in the project. The left-right debate is about who hates the past the most.

Of course, what they truly hate is the future. Both progressivism and conservatism are artifacts of a bygone age. They reached their peak in the twentieth century at the zenith of the Global American Empire. That was an empire built for a world that not only does not exist, but the memory of which is fading into the past. Imagine conservatism and progressivism as two old ships engaged in battle as they slowly slip over the horizon, and you have a good sense of it.

In the meantime, they will continue to engage in their mock battles with each other and with themselves, pretending to believe that things have not changed and will never change, while terrified by the sense that they are changing. Like science, politics advances one funeral at a time. As the codgers of the old politics march off to the cemetery, they will be replaced first by their imitators and then by their replacements, who will create a new politics for their age and challenges.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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











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Democratic Theocracy

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Iran has been in the news lately and one of the interesting things about the coverage is Western media rarely talks about the president of Iran. In fact, almost all Iran stories skip the president entirely. This is highly unusual as Western media is conditioned to personify countries that are out of favor. The bad country becomes the ruler of that country and that ruler is always some form of Hitler. The closest they get with Iran is using a picture of the supreme leader in the copy.

One reason for this is Iran is a complicated place and Western media struggles with anything more complicated than the good guys versus bad guys narrative. Despite what most think, Iranian politics has factions and parties, with the winners being picked by the voters at fairly normal elections. Those factions and parties argue about all the usual things, including foreign policy. The current president ran on a platform of improving relations with the rest of the world.

The funny thing about Iran is that it has avoided what has happened with all prior revolutionary societies. They did not have rounds of purges or a great terror in which a strongman consolidated power. There is no cult of personality in the way most communist societies evolved. They are not dogmatically attached to a narrow set of economic policies. Instead, Iran has evolved into the world’s first explicitly democratic theocracy based in its form of Islam.

At the top of Iranian society is the Supreme Leader. He is appointed by the Assembly of Experts, who are elected to their positions. The Guardian Council approves all candidates for elected office, including those nominated to the Assembly of Experts, so the gatekeepers of politics are the religious authorities. The result is a political system that can debate and argue over public policy, but within the broad religious framing of the Islamic authorities.

This is why the West often talks about Iran as if it is a medieval society. In medieval Europe, the Church set the boundaries for secular government. The King had to be in good standing with the Church, but the Church needed to be in good standing with the king as he provided security. From the perspective of “secular” societies in the West, the Iranians have recreated a throne and altar society, something the West abandoned in favor of reason and democracy.

The interesting thing about the criticism is it comes with some envy. The managerial class of the West, especially in America, would probably prefer the explicit relationship between the moral and the practical. In Iran, if Islam forbids it, it is simply forbidden and that is the end of it. In America, banning the discussion of crime stats is forbidden for an extensive list of contradictory reasons sprinkled with magical thinking about the reality of the human condition.

This may be why Iran avoided the cycle of violence and authoritarianism that we expect to see with revolutionary societies. From the start, the morality of the revolution had been resolved. The main task was to first remove the prior regime and the Western influences that emanated from it. Once the old regime was gone, there was no void where the old morality existed, so there was no battle for who would decide how to fill the void and with what to fill it.

This may explain some of the convulsions of the West. Christianity and the carryover from it provided the moral center of the progressive ideology. That slowly gave way to opposition to communism in the Cold War. Once the great struggle had been won, there was no longer a moral purpose to the progressive ideology. What flowed into it was whatever was kicking around the institutions. Fringe lunacies suddenly had a clear path to the center of the progressive moral universe.

Once again, we see that Marx was right about politics. At the highest level, it is about the battle over moral questions. Once the moral questions are answered, there is no need for this sort of politics. Instead, politics is reduced to debates about how to address the mundane practical issues of governance. For thirty years Iran has only had to worry about defending itself from the West, while for the last thirty years the West has been searching for a new god to replace the old one.

What you see in Iran is something the West cannot reconcile and that is the limit of reason, which is the moral. The ideology of the West rests on the assumption that all moral questions have a reasonable answer, so all moral limits that cannot hold up to reason must be invalid. Iran does not struggle with this dilemma, because the moral limits are beyond question and they are right there in the Koran, as interpreted by the religious authorities.

Put another way, what Iran has in excess is the answer to the two most important questions for any society and they are “who says?” and “why not?” The answer to both questions is well known to everyone in Iranian society and therefore the questions never need to be asked. In the West, there are no answers to those questions, so the closest we get to an answer is the jungle of rules against discussing anything that challenges the sensibilities of the managerial class.

What we see with the contrast between Iran and the West, particularly America, is a contrast in two forms of democratic theocracy. Iran starts with the issue of morality as a settled matter and implements democracy as a means to sort practical ends. In the West, democracy is a moral end in itself, but the result is endless debates over what will be temporarily viewed as timeless truths. Iran is the mirror of American in terms of the relationship between the moral and the political.

There are other reasons why Iran is what it is, not the least of which is that it is full of Iranians who can date their society back to the ancients. Islam also has a vastly different view of the natural world than what evolved out of Christianity. Even so, the fact that Iran has survived as a democratic theocracy provides a clue for how American progressivism could survive as well. Otherwise, it shakes itself to pieces searching for something to fill the void that lies at the center of it.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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











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Generations

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Lost in the commentary about the vice-presidential debate is the looming generational issue haunting the political system. On the stage that night was a member of Generation X and a Millennial. J.D. Vance is not the first Millennial to enter politics, but he is the first one to enter the main stage. At forty years old, he would be the third youngest vice president ever, if Trump wins in November. Walz would become the first member of Gen-X to accomplish anything in politics.

Walz and Vance are good examples of their generation. Gen-X was known as the slacker generation, mostly because they were not politicized like the two waves of Baby Boomers that preceded them. They just wanted to do what they needed to do in order to get a decent job and enjoy their life. With the massive boomer generation ahead of them, ambition was pointless, beyond the personal. That is pretty much how it has played out for this relatively small cohort.

Tim Walz fits this profile. He kicked around in his youth, unsure what he wanted to do with himself as an adult. After a while he went back to college. He joined the National Guard because his father told him to join. He then got a job teaching because that was available and required the least effort. Serendipity got him into politics where good timing seemed to be his best asset. Like his generation, Tim Walz is a guy to whom life has happened, rather than a guy who attacked life.

In contrast, the life of J.D. Vance is like a well-executed battle plan. Millennials are strivers and box tickers. Encouraged from the womb by their mostly Baby Boomer parents and teachers to attack life with a detailed plan, this is a generation that started building a resume in kindergarten. Everything about their primary schooling was aimed at getting into a good college. College was about landing in the right career and their careers have been the accumulation of credentials.

That describes the life of J.D. Vance. One path out of poverty was the military, so he went into the military. That opened the path to college, so he went to the best college he could and got the best credentials he could get. Those credentials opened the door to a career in the swankiest of careers in venture capital. Unlike Walz, nothing about the life of J.D. Vance is due to chance other than his current position. One does not have much control over the choices made by Donald Trump.

The result of this generation gap was evident on stage. Walz probably would have arrived in his Elmer Fudd costume if they let him, for no other reason that it is more comfortable than a suit. He probably watched sports instead of prepping for the biggest moment of his life. Vance, on the other hand, was a machine. He crammed for the test because it is what he has done his whole life. He went to the debate to ace the exam and that is exactly what we saw.

You can expand this out to the top of the ticket. It is both symbolic and ironic that the race is between an old white guy who speaks for the America that is slowly slipping away and diverse girl boss who exists only in the imagination of the bitter, angry managerial class. Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer, but he is a man with the Baby Boomer sensibilities. He is a guy who thinks the economy is the country, so a good economy means everything is fine.

Harris is a Baby Boomer X’er, but her alien existence places her outside of what most people would understand by the term. She was born and raised outside of the country by parents who were not Americans. If a writing team from Hollywood took a break from ruining classic movies and were tasked with creating a story involving politics, they would make the star a diverse girl boss like Harris. She would be smart and sober-minded, however, miraculously always coming out on top.

The Harris as diverse girl boss from the movies can be taken further by the fact that she has never earned anything in her life. This is the way it works in film. Diverse girl boss never has to struggle and doubt like the traditional white lead. She is just given everything she needs by the writers. That is Kamala Harris. The biggest challenge of her life has simply been showing up without her dress on backwards. Now she expects to be handed the presidency.

The one thing missing from the picture is the hysterical female Millennial. Another feature of that generation is that strivers like J.D. Vance have had to navigate the hysterical female Millennial with a head full of feminist nonsense. Female Millennial hysteria as escapism is probably worth a book treatment. Much of the lunacy of the last twenty years has been driven by childish girls who became girl bosses rather than wives and mothers with a stake in their community.

The absence of this character from the current drama is probably the biggest white pill of this election cycle. Even in the unserious world of modern politics, the hysterical female Millennial is shunted over to the side when the adults are talking. In this regard, the rise of J.D. Vance could be signaling a return to normalcy once the Baby Boomers shuffle off to the shuffleboard courts. Perhaps the answer to the harpy all along was to simply ignore her while getting the job done.

One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself. One reason the media has been told to hate him is that he is seen as a traitor. This is the main reason the system hates Trump; he betrayed his class. This suggests that the new left and right in our politics are managerialism versus culturalism.

The main take away from this election cycle for Baby Boomers and Generation-X should be that your time is done. The people who will be running things starting now are the people in their thirties and forties. That means our politics and culture will reflect the sensibilities of this generation. The least ethically centered generation in American history will be defining the nation. Millennials are an end-justifies-the-means generation and maybe that is what will be required going forward.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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











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Normal Versus Crazy

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Political debates in America are rarely worth the effort to watch mostly because they are not genuine debates. Instead, they are something like a joint press conference where the candidates also get to shout at one another. In a general election, the candidate of the stupid party always agrees to allow the candidate of the evil party to invite his friends to be the moderators. The resulting show, and it is mostly just a show, is about the stupid party candidate fending off the others.

There are exceptions to this farcical aspect of our elections. Once in a while something will happen in the show to address a lingering concern of the public or maybe bring out something about one of the candidates that people have suspected. The most obvious example is the Trump – Biden debate in the summer. People suspected that Joe Biden was a vegetable, and this was confirmed in the debate. The subsequent response from regime media led to his ouster.

There was some of this in the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz last night. Unless you live in Minnesota or Ohio, you had no reason to know these guys until now. Vance was a rising star in the GOP, so he is a bit better known than Walz, but hardly a household name. Before winning the VP lottery, Walz was an unknown governor from flyover country. The debate was a chance for both men to introduce themselves to a national audience.

In the case of Vance, the regime media has been attacking him daily. They started with the “weird” campaign in the summer and then moved onto a narrative that says he is dragging down the Trump campaign. They even floated stories about Trump dropping him, which were all nonsense. His performance in the debate show put to rest any concerns the media campaign may have planted in the minds of voters. He was sharp, prepared and dominated the evening.

What normie got to see in Vance is a guy who is extremely smart and confident, but also extremely normal. He wove in his backstory when required, which is highly relatable, but he did not wave his bio around like a bloody shirt, which is something modern politicians do constantly. They have to be the hero of their story. Vance came across as down to earth, despite owning the room quite easily. Even the regime media had to admit that he dominated the show.

Walz on the other hand came across as a strange combination of Uncle Fester from the Addams Family and a highly caffeinated Mr. Magoo. Most of the night he was maniacally scribbling things on a pad he brought with him. One got the sense that he was taking notes so he could tattle on Vance to the teacher. Obviously, someone told him that smart people take notes in these things, so he practiced doing what he thought smart people do when taking notes.

Of course, the main takeaway from the night for Tim Walz was his comically weird facial expressions when staring into the camera. You half expected him to put a lightbulb in his mouth. It was the sort of behavior that crystallizes a suspicion of him in the minds of the typical voters. This is a very strange man. His overly-caffeinated Elmer Fudd routine might be fine for the folks back home, but for the rest of the country it suggests there is something disturbing about his private life.

Normally this would not matter, as people do not think too much about the vice-presidential candidates. At most they suggest something about the presidential candidate’s strengths or weaknesses. In this case, it matters a lot because there are questions about both party candidates. This election is not just about Trump versus the Blob, but about the future of Republican Party, on the one hand, and the trust in the regime candidate on the other.

What Harris needed in her running mate was someone who could reassure the white population that they could trust a boozy bimbo. Harris may be a simpleton, but the people around her are competent. The narrative they were going for was what they thought worked in 2008 with Obama. The young diverse hero supported by the old white establishment man. This story would be diverse girl boss supported by middle America white dudes in the person of Tim Walz.

Instead of salt of the earth middle-aged white guy, the Harris campaign got wacky old guy who gives people the creeps. The debate simply underscored the fact that the regime candidate is a ham-and-egger thrown in at the last minute. On the other hand, Vance looked like the guy who would take over the populist movement after Trump retires and actually have the skill to implement the agenda. Last night highlighted the fact that this election is a choice between normal and crazy.

Of course, the specter haunting this election is the rigging. Will we see waves of phony ballots mysteriously turning up in the dead of night again? It is hard to rig two elections in a row and always a bad idea to try it. That is the main reason to think they will try to rig this election. The regime is in the phase where they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If rigging this election is the worst thing they can do, you can be sure they are thinking about it.

That aside, if Trump does win the election, one reason will be that he picked the right sidekick this time. It shows he learned from the last time and that he is thinking beyond the mere vanity of his politics. He will also have been blessed with an opponent that reminds people of their last trip to get their license renewed. Her choice of Uncle Fester as a running mate confirmed that she has no business make lunch decisions, much less making important decisions in the Oval Office.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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











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The Port Strike

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The International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike as of midnight in the first major port strike in the United States in decades. Twenty years ago, dock workers on the West Coast struck for eleven days. The ILA has not gone on a strike since 1977, so this is a historic event for that reason alone. If the strike lasts more than a few weeks, then it will be much more than a historical event. About half of the cargo that goes in and out of the country flows through the affected ports.

The bankers estimate that the strike will cost the economy five billion per day, but that is a number plucked from the air. What we learned from the Covid fiasco is that American supply chains are extremely fragile, so any interruption will have unpredictable long-term consequences to the economy. This is also when consumer goods for the Christmas season begin flowing into the country, so delays will result in shortages which will disrupt the biggest retail period of the year.

One of the first things that will happen is conservatives will be told by conservative media to blame the dock workers. The reason for this is conservatives are idiots who do what they are told by the people they claim to oppose. The regime would like to turn this into a problem for Trump if possible, so they are busy filling the teleprompters of Fox News with squirrely rants about the greedy union guys. The vegetables that consume that slop will then regurgitate it on social media.

The fact of the matter is there are no good guys or bad guys when it comes to the strike itself, but the port system is an indictment of the economy. There is no reason for one company to control ports up and down the coast. Ports should be controlled by the states and encouraged to compete with one another for cargo. This makes for better port operations and eliminates the prospect of a crippling port strike. It also encourages modernization and efficiency at the ports.

The reason this is not the case is our ports are primarily skimming operations, rather than a part of a manufacturing and export base. What America primarily exports does not require seagoing vessels. Transgenderism, homosexual pride parades and cultural subversion are shipped around the world on the back of the dollar. What comes back are container ships full of consumer goods. A collection of people then skim a little from each container that reaches an American port.

This gets to why the dock workers are striking. They want protection from automation that will eliminate jobs. This will strike most people as nuts as they have been conditioned to think automation is a good thing, because that is what the television has told them, but in reality, most automation is about socializing the costs of business and privatizing the profits. Automating the ports will not result in lower consumer prices, but it will make the port operators richer.

If the point of the American economy were to make things and then sell them around the world, the ports could never be allowed to function as they do today because it would interfere with selling things around the world. That is not the point of the American economy, so the main function of ports is to skim from imports. This is why one main operator controls the East Coast ports. Consolidation makes it easier to institutionalize the skim.

None of this is to suggest that the dock workers are victims. Senior members of the ILA make four and five times what the typical American earns. Most of the guys on strike make six figures plus very generous benefit programs. The reason it is impossible to get a job at the ports is they control the labor force, which means they only allow friends and family to get jobs when they come open. The docks are pretty much a government created medieval guild system.

That is the other thing about the ports. The labor situation is a creation of the federal government over the last half century. In the middle of the last century, the mafia got control of the union pensions and immediately looted them. This brought in the feds who eventually restructured the union, so it was free of gangsters in track suits, but was filled with gangsters from the government. Both sides of the current contract dispute are the result of decades of government management.

Of course, there is a political angle to this. The Biden admin has done nothing to prevent the strike, which is interesting as they moved heaven and earth to head off the rail strike last year. That was when Biden thought he was going to be allowed to run for a second term. Now that he is drifting off into retirement, no one in the admin can be bothered to work on anything other than Ukraine and Israel. Kamala will be left to deal with the politics of a port strike.

This is where things get interesting. Pennsylvania and Michigan are union states, so the white remnant will be watching this strike. These are people who have always voted Democrat for economic reasons but detest the other stuff from the party. They like Trump, but wisely distrust Republicans. There is an opening for Trump the deal maker to take the union side without pandering. Harris, on the other hand, does not have any good options on this one.

In a way, the ports are a good model for our ruling class. Everyone involved in the ports is doing well, better than they should expect, but everyone involved in the ports is sure the system is screwing him. That is because the ports exist in isolation from the rest of the economy. It is a world unto itself that only interfaces with the rest of society, rather than operate within the economy. It is how high-earning people on both sides of this strike can think they are the little guy.

Another reason for this is the bottleneck mentality. Ports are a bottleneck and everything that passes through is taxed. In this way, the ports are just like our banking system or the information system. That means the real competition is over how much you get to tax what passes through the bottleneck. To the people inside a bottleneck system, it always feels like it is a zero-sum game, and their slice of the overall pie is never the biggest slice of that pie.

In the end, the union will get what they want as there is no real reason to not give them what they want. Their cost just gets tacked onto the cost of goods that flow through the port to your local Walmart of Amazon distribution center. Just like those Walmart’s and Amazons, the cost of the ports are socialized. With no fear of competition, there is no concern for the profit margin. You get to pay more for stuff, so the dock worker and his manager get to go boat shopping this spring.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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

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The Lincoln Exception

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The reason the small groups of humans in the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution started working together was primarily safety. Two groups cooperating could not only better defend themselves from other groups, but they could defend the assets they shared from outsiders. That water source or the good hunting ground could not only be exploited through cooperation, but it could be defended and eventually cultivated by kin groups cooperating with one another.

We do not know why kin groups started to cooperate exactly, the above is logical speculation, but we do know that humans eventually settled down and eventually, the point of their organization was to guard their property. Whether it was to guard their hunting grounds or more easily guard the stuff they created with their labor, the point of organization was to protect the people and their stuff. From this stage forward, the point of human organization became property.

When exactly the concept of private property came into existence is impossible to know, but at some point, humans began to recognize ownership. Logically it started with what we now call personal property, the things that come from labor. Grog’s hunting kit was Grog’s hunting kit, and he had a right to defend it or give it away. Similarly, this land was the land of Grog’s people, and they defended it. Other groups made similar claims and before long their relations were based on respecting this.

Most likely, the concept of private ownership of land evolved from the ownership of personal goods, but we are left to guess. What we know is that as far back as we have records, human societies had sorted the difference between public ownership of land and private ownership of land. The Greeks and the Romans, for example, had laws governing private property. Plato was famously opposed to private property, while Aristotle was strongly in supported of it.

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, private property became the foundation for what would come next in Europe. Large landowners organized to defend their lands and eventually the feudal system evolved. Feudalism was the set of reciprocal relations between the warrior elite, who also happened to be the class who owned all of the land. It was the ownership of land that determined the new ruling elite that would eventually rule Europe.

The model of ownership in the medieval period was one where the king or prince owned the land but granted rights to it. Technically, all of the land in the kingdom was the property of the king, but most of it was controlled by lower members of the aristocratic order and the church. The king was, in effect, the most important landowner among the land-owning class. Property was the basis for relations among the ruling class and between the ruling class and the people over whom they ruled.

Property in the American sense of it has always been tied to labor. The Framers were not only influenced by Locke on this matter, but also by their society that was created by the individual labor of the people. Their reality was based on the observation that you own you and therefore you own your labor, which means by default you own the produce of your labor. In fact, the American concept of rights originates from this Lockean idea of self-ownership.

This is why in the fullness of time Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights will be viewed the same as we view Sulla’s march on Rome. It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. If there is no cost to breaking the most important rules, the future tyrant is born. There is a straight line from Sulla to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today.

We see this with the controversy over publishing the private information of J.D. Vance that was stolen from the Trump campaign. The FBI says it was Iran that stole it, which means it was not Iran that stole it. There is little doubt that the FBI has moles in the Trump campaign, stealing everything they find. It is also certainly the case that the secret police have gained access to their computers. The FBI no doubt handed this to the usual degenerates to publish online.

The “free speech” people argue that this is an essential role of journalism, so they should be free to publish it. In other words, there is a journalist exception to the most fundamental right of property. That is what they never want you to notice. The people trafficking in this sort of material are trafficking in stolen goods. The information in that dossier is the property of J.D. Vance. In good faith he permitted the Trump campaign to use it to evaluate his fitness for the running mate slot.

What “journalists” are claiming is a special right to steal your property and not only use it to profit themselves, but to harm you with it. Imagine you lend your car to a friend and Uber then steals it and uses it to deliver food. Then they claim Uber is an essential part of the economy, so they have a right to your car. You should have been more careful about who you let use it. In fact, because they gave your car to a black guy, you are a racist for wanting your car back.

What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.

In fact, privacy has now become a form of sumptuary law. If you are in favor with the powerful, you do not have to worry about free speech advocates rummaging through your garbage looking for dirt. Notice how so-called journalists are always the last to know about important things. On the other hand, if you are out of favor with powerful people, then you are subjected to the synopticon. The eyes of the regime pierce every aspect of your life, searching for what they can use to ruin you.

In the end, the reason America is increasingly tyrannical is the logic that flows the Lincoln exception to property rights. Once the principle was invented that you are no longer constrained by the ancient rights of property, if you can establish the moral high ground, the relationship between the American people and their government shifted from one of rights based in property to one of privileges based on whatever spurious moral claims are popular with the ruling class at the time.

This is how we got things like the Sullivan doctrine and the Brown standard from the Supreme Court. Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. In fact, you can no longer claim to own you, as “our democracy” might require the sacrifice of you, whether you like it or not. The moral tyrants get to decide these things and you have no choice in the matter.

Where this is heading is to a pre-modern concept of society. Instead of private property being the default and communal property as the necessary exception, we are heading to a world of communal property as the default. Everything about you is assumed to be property held in common. The exceptions are those things deemed necessary to keep society functioning. The goal is to narrow the exceptions until we reach some sort of communal singularity in which the individual is obliterated.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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











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Trouble On The Edge Of Empire

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In the end phase of an empire, there are two political dynamics. One is the intense, internal politics among the ruling class of the empire. These are the people fighting to hold onto the power of the empire, but also fighting with one another to maintain their slice of the shrinking pie of benefits. The other politics are on the fringe where the beginnings of alternative power centers grapple with reality and the decreasing ability of the empire to provide necessary protection.

For the American empire, one of those fringes where politics is happening as a result of the decline of the empire is Europe. The Germans, for example, have had a set of local elections that were all bad news for the provincial rulers, which in this context is the coalition government led by Olaf Scholz. The parties that make up the ruling coalition of Germany did poorly, and in the case of the Greens catastrophically bad, in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg.

Worse yet, the winner, in the public relations sense, was the hated AfD, or Alternative for Deutschland, which came in second in Saxony and Brandenburg and won for the first time in Thuringia. The AfD gaining support is a disaster all by itself, but doing so in Brandenburg is a fascinating development. This is the base for the SPD, and they needed shenanigans to prevent the AfD from winning the election. The CDU threw its support to the SPD to block the AfD.

Another bit of subtext to this is that a new party of former leftists, in the German sense of the word, has created an anti-immigration party around Sahra Wagenknecht, called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance or BSW. They came in third place. That means two anti-immigration parties are surging. On top of that, the Green Party appears to be losing all of its support everywhere. In Brandenburg they failed to meet the minimum threshold to gain any seats in parliament.

Of course, the German political elite is not taking this well. As we see all over Europe, the parties that pretended to be ideological opponents for years have come together to thwart these outsider parties. Germany, for example, has been ruled by the “traffic light coalition”, which would be like the Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Greens forming a new coalition to fend off the Constitution Party in Congress. It gives the game away to maintain control of politics.

This is the same thing we saw in France over the summer. The anti-immigration party led by Marie Le Pen surged to the lead in the first round of elections for the National Assembly, so all of the other parties teamed up to prevent the Le Pen’s party from winning an outright majority in the second round. Of course, the parties in this grand coalition to stop mean words has immediately started to attack one another because the only thing they have in common is corruption.

As in Germany, the bit above the waterline is the immigration issue, but beneath the surface there is a bigger issue. The political elites of Europe no longer look like European political elites. Instead, they are these weird, cosmopolitan citizens of the world types whose success is pegged to their slavish loyalty to an international economic elite centered in London and New York. There is an alienation rooted in their transnational transactionalism to which the locals are reacting.

Of course, immigration is the tangible manifestation of this. Immigration only makes sense if the immigrants are a net benefit to the locals. This only works in boom times when everyone is feeling generous. It is not boom times in Europe, but the immigrants continue to pour in, which suggests there is another reason behind immigration enthusiasm among the political elites. This is where the sterile, technocratic alienness of the political class comes into play.

It is not just in the heart of the EU where this “us-versus-them” cultural dynamic is turning up in practical politics. Italy has quietly started to limit immigrants while not offending Brussels. The Italian economy relies on transfers from the rich, intelligently managed economies of the north, so the Meloni government has to tread carefully in order to avoid regime change. She has managed to remain popular, while quietly addressing the immigration issue.

At the other end of the EU, the Nordic countries are experiencing something of a revolution in thought on immigration. Denmark has been quietly hostile to immigration, but now Sweden is becoming publicly hostile to it. The Swedish government is now paying immigrants, even those with citizenship, to leave Sweden. This is an enormous change in attitude, as Sweden was the most fanatically pro-immigration country in the EU just a few years ago.

Something that may be working in the favor of nationalist parties and activists in Europe is the lunacy in the Anglosphere regarding immigration. Vulgar simpletons like Keir Starmer are a warning to the continent. Despite having support from just one of every six British voters, the Starmer government is aggressively waging war on the natives on behalf of the immigrants. What is going on in the UK and America is proof that those “far-right” parties are right about what lies behind immigration.

All of this has been helped along by the proxy-war against Russia. After the effects of the initial gaslighting wore off, Europeans started to notice that their political elites were far more enthusiastic for Ukraine than their own countries. They also noticed that their political elites were happy to sacrifice the welfare of their people for Project Ukraine in order to curry favor with Washington. The American empire was happy to inflict misery on Europe if it furthered their petty fights with Russia.

Where this has left Europe is as a collection of provinces that no longer enjoy the protection of the empire but are governed by a provincial ruling class that enjoys the financial benefits of empire. The growing awareness of this reality is causing the clodhoppers of Europe to revolt. The continent is far from breaking free from their Anglosphere masters, but the politics of Europe are opening the gates to parties and politicians who will seek liberation from empire.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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

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.

Death By Openness

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In the early days of the internet, people started to notice that there was another side to the mass accumulation of information online. The information piling up in databases and data centers was not just public information, but also what had always been assumed to be private information. Pictures of your home and maybe even you outside cutting your grass could now turn up in the public square, without you knowing it. Lots of things about your life were now public information.

Suddenly, a degenerate with free time could figure out things about you that he could not know in the past. Of course, this became a temptation for people to nose around in the lives of coworkers and neighbors. The more information that piled up online, the less privacy everyone could expect. Quickly we were moving into glass houses and subjected to the unwanted gaze. The only place where you can be free of the gaze is in your own mind, and even there the synopticon is hunting for data.

Of course, in typical American fashion, the same people gathering up your private information and making it public now sell services to keep your private information as private as possible in this age. On the other hand, people told by the state to gather your private information for things like banking are reckless with their security, so it is regularly stolen and published by gangsters. Again, in typical American fashion, the reckless people never pay a price for it.

We are quickly reaching the point where nothing is private and anything of private value will be stolen. One result of this is no one cares about the private. The rise of profilicity is a response to the collapse of individual privacy. Since no one has a private life, what distinguishes us is the public profile we create. This profile is just about disconnected from the person playing the profile. In other words, the collapse in privacy has eliminated the value in having private things.

It is tempting to blame this on technology, which is the mistake made by privacy advocates in the last century. In typical American fashion, they assumed there was a mechanical solution to a moral or spiritual problem. In the case of privacy, they assumed new rules to guard your privacy would prevent the people who laugh at the concept of a rules-based society from harvesting your privacy. Unsurprisingly, privacy has collapsed despite the rules.

The reason for the collapse in privacy in America goes back to the civil right revolution in the middle of the last century. When the ruling elites transitioned from a rights-based moral framework to the civil rights moral framework, they had no choice but to abandon the concept of personal privacy, despite claims to the contrary. This is why Europe has been much better at enforcing privacy laws. They never had a civil rights revolution, so they have not fully internalized its moral structures.

The way to understand this is to think about the moral spectrum in the political order of 19th century America. The “good” pole was where the state played no role in the decisions made by the citizens. People were on their own to sort things. The bad pole was where the citizens needed permission to do things. The concept of individual rights was not to carve out a free space for the citizen. It was to carve out space for the state to do the narrow purposes of collective security.

The civil rights revolution in the middle of the 20th century abandoned this old spectrum, which had been discredited, at least in the collective reasoning of the emerging managerial class, in the great struggle against the economic crisis of the 1930’s and the war on fascism in the 1940’s. What the civil rights revolution did was replace this old and largely civic moral paradigm with a new paradigm. The goal of which was not maximum liberty but maximum access.

The open society concept, popularized in America by Karl Popper and now George Soros, is the end point of this new moral paradigm. The new poles are openness, access, and diversity at the “good” end. The bad end is discrimination, which can only come through the mechanism of barriers to entry, so the ultimate bad thing in this new society is the locked door. The goal of the open society is to find every locked door and bust it down in order to maximize openness.

One of the immediate results of this moral revolution at the top was the end of public discrimination through the violent overthrow of the old segregation systems, in both the North and the South. What followed was pogrom after pogrom to breakdown every locked door that could be found in private America. Men’s clubs, for example, were forced to accept women or face endless litigation for discrimination. The Boy Scouts were handed over to pedophiles for the same reason.

Long before degenerates were googling your name looking for private information, the state was hunting around for locked doors on the assumption that there were private people collectively closing themselves off from others. If one wants to look for the logic behind the claim that nonwhites have a right to access white people, it lies in the fundamental logic of the open society. In a world where discrimination is the ultimate evil, everyone has a right to everyone, even their intimate life.

There is, ironically, a private benefit to this. Certain members of the ruling class benefit through the anathematization of preference. In a world where it is immoral for you to prefer not to associate with certain people, it is unacceptable for the masses to prefer that certain people not have access to power. At the same time, the ruling class as a whole benefits from the fact that it is close to impossible to organize opposition when everything must be done in plain sight.

The collapse of privacy is the logical outcome of the civil rights revolution and the synopticon that has involved to enforce it is a practical necessity. Humans are naturally self-organizing and naturally self-segregating. Unconscious bias is not just a weapon to compel submission to the new racial hierarchy but a way to condition the populace to question their own minds. A people who naturally feel in conflict with what they are told is the shared collective morality will remain docile.

Of course, much of the behavior from the ruling elite in the open society is designed to prevent asking basic questions, like who says discrimination is bad? Who or what is the moral authority for this claim? Why is diversity good? Why are my preferences less valid than the person on the television preaching about diversity? The collapse in individual and collective privacy makes it much easier to hunt down those asking these questions before they get too much of an audience.

The ultimate question is can such a system last? There is a reason why there are so few prison riots and history has not been kind to slave revolts. It is not just force that keeps the prisoner under control or the slaves from revolting. In every prison, inmates outnumber guards. Slaves always outnumber the overseers. What keeps them under control are the moral chains that tell them they deserve their position. A nation in such chains is as unlikely to revolt.

On the other hand, if the prisoners know the guards cannot rely on the state to protect them, the prisoners will begin to question the morality of their position. Similarly, if the social structures that make slavery possible collapse, then the slaves quickly overthrow their masters, even if it means their own death. One of the consequences of the open society is a deeply paranoid and conspiratorial ruling elite. They know more than anyone how near run things are for them.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack 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 through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. 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.

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 People They Desire

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A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

In every organization of scale, and society as a whole, the focus of attention has shifted from things that are easily measured and understood in terms of practical impact, to things that are not quantifiable. At the same time, it is increasingly assumed and asserted that these intangibles are more important than the tangibles. The practical impact of inflation on the household budget is not important, but whether a political candidate can show they share your values is monumentally important.

You can see this change in how Harris and Trump present themselves. Trump has rattled off a list of things he says he will do if elected, like eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, which he says will boost the middle-class. These are claims that rest on the agreed upon math of economics. Harris, on the other hand, talks about her plan in soft, intangible terms. What matters to her, and what she thinks matters to you, is that she shares your values as a middle-class person.

Notice that no one ever tries to explain exactly what they mean by “share your values” or describe the actual values. Is it even possible to share the values of another person, since values are subjective? This sort of therapeutic language is deliberately vague, as it is entirely emotive. When someone says she shares your values, she is saying you are on the side of good and she is on the side of good. There is nothing more being communicated with those words.

This shift from the objective to the subjective goes beyond how the political candidates present themselves to the public. Increasingly, people and events are viewed not in practical terms but in the context of an evolving set of normative standards that have no clear truth value. What is “wellness” and why do we care? Ask ten people and you get ten answers to those questions. Wellness is a thing we believe exists and it is either good or not good and good is what we should want.

Another example is the reaction to the Israeli terror attack on Lebanon. Blowing up random people is supposed to demoralize Hezbollah. This is a claim that has been repeated, even by Israel haters. Why would anyone think this and so what if it gives some Hezbollah guys the blues for a few days? What is supposed to happen as a result of this case of the sads? Not only does no one know, no one asks. The practical issue is no longer of interest. It is all about the psychological.

The Ukrainians launched an attack on the Kursk region of Russia last month and according to everyone involved, the main purpose was to “psychologically impact Russian civilians” and embarrass Putin. Again, why would anyone think such a result was likely or would matter? Did they think Putin would delete his Twitter account and call off the war, because he got owned on the internet? The answer must be yes, as this has been a theme in the West since the war started.

What we are seeing is an orientalization of the culture. Saving face and losing face are things that we associate with East Asian societies. An important person is found to have failed in his duties, so in order to avoid losing face and shaming his family and associates, he kills himself in a ritualized fashion. His honorable choice in the end absolves him and his associates of his dishonorable behavior. This means behavior is controlled within this cultural construct.

In the West, this shame/lack of shame concept has been embedded into the binary politics of progressivism. Someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, is terrible at all of the practical things related to politics, but she upholds the honor culture of progressive politics, so she is an honored elder of our politics. Trump brings shame to the democracy and refuses to let himself be killed, so he deserves assassination. The fact that he is good at politics and is right about most things is irrelevant.

One reason for this is the feminization of the ruling class. Relations between men are controlled by honor and duty. Relations between women are based in shame, so as women have taken over areas of the ruling class, the values have shifted from a foundation in honor and duty to one of shame. In a world run by people biologically tuned to care about looking good, how things look is paramount, so it is no surprise that a feminized ruling class now cares about saving face.

Probably the biggest fact, however, is the ruling class of the American empire has not had to worry about the duties of a ruling class for a long time. By the end of the Cold War, the domestic stuff was on autopilot. As long as the Fed controlled the money supply, recession and social unrest were not a concern. The only remaining concern was relations with Russia and once the Cold War ended, foreign affairs stopped being a game controlled by adults.

That last bit is the important part. Along with the feminization of the ruling class has come the infantilization of politics. It used to be said that “politics ain’t beanbag” but now it is closer to dodgeball. Instead of serious men making decisions with practical consequences, politics is now a playground for adult children. The reason our politics reflect the language and attitudes of the academy, is like the academy, the political class is an adult daycare center.

This is why the information space is full of assertions about soft concepts like the morale of guerilla fighters in Lebanon or the political class of Moscow. It is also why facts and charts have no impact on public attitudes. Increasingly, the sensibility of the general public reflects the sensibilities of the adult babies who parade across the screen, pointing and jeering at one another. People may not get the government they deserve, but the rulers get the people they desire.

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