Category Archives: Politics

The Final Boss

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Since the concept of the “red pill” got going, there has been a debate about the progression one takes in the awakening. Logically, this implies that there is a final boss on this journey, some belief one must drop in order to finally become fully aware of what is happening behind the façade of life. Once you defeat that final boss, you see things as they are, not as they are presented. Of course, the nature of this final boss almost always reflects personal bias.

Strangely, the real final boss in this process may be the crux of the whole normie belief structure that gets ridiculed by dissidents. That last belief may simply be that the political class cares about public opinion. Even the most cynical among us still thinks that the people in charge worry about public opinion. They may have ways to fortify democracy against the voters, but they still worry about the voters. After all, no democracy can be completely fortified.

The reality is, they probably do not care at all. The people controlling the politicians certainly do not care. The unanimity of opinion among this group is why the two parties are barely distinguishable from one another. What is the main different between Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer? The people who animate the politicians have their aqendas and they do not care about public opinion. Most people get that, but they still think the pols care and they need to care.

The trouble is, there is no evidence of this. For example, it was rather obvious that the Republican Party threw the 2018 midterm to spite Trump and his voters. They could do this knowing that they would not suffer in any meaningful way. Sure, some back benchers in the party would have to transition into lobbying jobs or (gasp!) the dreaded private sector, but 90% of the caucus would do just fine. In fact, the bosses could expect to be rewarded for throwing the fight.

The last midterm was a similar display of indifference. If the parties really cared about the result, they would have pulled out all the stops. On the Democrat side, it was a chance to prove those election deniers were wrong. Joe Biden really was the most popular man in history. On the other side, the Republicans could have got their red wave of rebuke. Instead, both sides worked to make sure none of the populists got the support they needed to beat a system candidate.

The indifference of the political class is most obvious with what is going on in the town of East Palestine Ohio. There was a time not so long ago when the place would have been crawling with Democratic politicians, including the President. They would bring the media to show how much they care about the people. Instead, Pete Buttigieg is antiquing in Vermont and Biden is in Poland promising the people of Ukraine that he will take care of them forever.

Of course, the media could cover it on their own. It is the ideal story, ripped right from one of many movies over the years. We have a small town being victimized by a mean and indifferent corporation. It is as if someone decided to make a real life version of the movie Erin Brockovich. Instead, the media cannot be bothered and the reason is the political class does not care about it. More important, they do not care that the people might think they do not care.

The fact is, the political system in America reached a point where elections make no difference to the system. Over 95% of incumbents win reelection and those who lose land in cushy jobs. John Boehner now makes seven figures selling weed, after a disastrous run as Speaker. Paul Ryan makes seven figures sitting around one of the banks, making calls to Washington on behalf of the bankers. When the losers get rich the winners do not fear losing.

In the bigger picture, even a wave election does little to change the makeup of the political parties in Washington. If forty House seats change hands in a wave election, it means close to 400 remain safe. Look at the last twenty years and you see that maybe 60 Congressional districts can be competitive. Most years only about twenty seats are genuinely up for grabs. American Congressional elections are ceremonial. It is a big expensive show that means nothing.

What appears to have happened over the last thirty years is the political class has internalized this reality and they no longer care about elections. The contempt we see is not so much about public opinion, but about the lingering need to keep up appearances with regards to elections and public opinion. The leaders of both parties are increasingly irritated that they have to pretend to care about your opinion. They have better things to do than take questions from the slobs.

This reality is hard for Americans to accept. Central to the American identity is the invincibility of the marketplace. The “go woke, go broke” business reflects the enduring belief that public opinion matters. The fact that none of the woke are going broke does nothing to alter this belief. Something similar is in play with elections. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, people still cling to the idea that public opinion not only matters, but it matters to the politicians.

Even people on this side of the divide cling to this belief. The concept of the psy-op rests on the idea that the people in charge care about public opinion. In reality, the secret police just like their work. The same can be said for the busy bodies that police the internet for bad think. They are not shaping public opinion. They simply enjoy playing hall monitor. Contempt for the public and public opinion is now the coin of the realm in the ruling class.

That is the final boss. You can be red pilled about race, ethnicity, history or conservatism, but still believe public opinion matters. You only become fully aware when you defeat that final boss and realize that the people in charge are indifferent to public opinion and often contemptuous of it. The reason elections change nothing is the entirety of the political class is in agreement on most everything. Mainly, they agree that they are in charge and your opinion does not matter.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

An Imperial Disaster

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One of the most studied and debated events in human history is the decision by the Athenian empire to send an expeditionary force to Sicily. This happened in 415 B.C. during the middle of the Peloponnesian War between the Delian League led by Athens and the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Athens decided to send military support to allies on Sicily who were opposed to the dominant city state of Syracuse, which also happened to be an ally of Corinth.

The Sicilian Expedition is one of those events that offers something for everyone interested in the ancient world. The politics involved in the decision to send the expeditionary force are fascinating. Then you have the military side of things, which is one of the first examples of politics undermining military effectiveness. Of course, the political psychology around the war to that point is also important. Much of Athenian politics had been shaped by war.

The decision to send the navy to Sicily would turn out to be the turning point in the war with the Spartans. The expedition was a spectacular failure. In fact, it is on the list of great military disasters in human history. The defeat not only permanently weakened the Athenians militarily, but it also crippled their political culture. The politics of the region quickly moved against Athens, leading to the overthrow of the democratic system and the eventual defeat to the Spartans.

Like all great events in history, if you ask ten people with an interest in the topic, you will get eleven theories as to what happened and what it means today. Academic careers have been made studying the war and the events surrounding it. There is also the fact that Athens, despite losing the most important war in human history, continues to cast a shadow over the West. Sparta, on the other hand, is largely remembered for being a cartoonish version of a warrior state.

It matters to us today because the Global American Empire models itself after the Athenian empire. The Athenians had a moral certainty about themselves and what they did based on their form of government. Their system was superior, therefore whatever they did to spread their system must be righteous. Of course, spreading their system often meant overthrowing the rulers of neighboring city-states and installing their system, led by people friendly with Athens.

We see the same thing with the American empire. In fact, it has become a defining feature of the system. For the last thirty years, Washington has been trying to overthrow governments around the world in defense of democracy. There is even an organization called The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which works with various tentacles of the American empire to overthrow governments around the world. The business of America is not business. It is regime change.

Like the Athenian empire, the American empire has found a way to embroil itself in a war with a land power. This proxy war with Russia over Ukraine has little to do with the facts on the ground in Ukraine and everything to do with the politics that drive the expansive polices of the American empire. Like the Peloponnesian War, this is just the latest phase of a war that goes back to the defeat of fascism, which is the analogue for the defeat of the Persians by Athens and Sparta.

Like all historical analogies, this one is far from perfect, but it does provide a lens through which to view current events. Looking at this fight with Russia as a continuation of the Cold War helps explain the actions of the people involved. For the people driving American foreign policy, the main enemy was always Russia. In fact, they were at war with Russian long before they set foot in the new Athens. World War II was just another chapter in that long fight.

This might seem like a stretch but look at the people running foreign policy for the American empire. The people named in Seymour Hersh’s piece on the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines is a who’s who of neoconservatives. All of them are members of the same club, which is led by Robert Kagan. The wife of Robert Kagan is Victoria Nuland, who runs Ukraine policy for the empire. She is also the person who engineered regime change in Ukraine in 2014.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is the fact that Robert Kagan is the ideological leader of the war party. He was born in Athens Greece. His father was Donald Kagan, “the Sterling Professor of Classics and History Emeritus at Yale University and a specialist in the history of the Peloponnesian War.” His book on the Peloponnesian War is excellent. His book on the Sicilian Expedition is also quite good, but more aimed at an academic audience.

Robert appears to have read none of his father’s books, as his cult has led the American empire into its own version of the Sicilian Expedition. The decision to bet on Ukraine is turning into a catastrophe. Instead of sending triremes to aid a supposed ally in order to undermine an opponent, as Athens did when she sent that expedition to Sicily, Washington has sent its prestige and military production capacity to Ukraine in a futile attempt to undermine Russia.

Much like the Sicilian Expedition, the Ukraine war has become a dynamic all its own, sweeping up everyone in the empire. The Europeans, which should know better, have gone along with Washington. In the process, they have revealed themselves to be nothing more than a collection of flunkies serving Washington. The rules-based world order that Washington has claimed to defend has also been exposed as a rigged game to serve the interests of the empire.

Probably the biggest parallel between these two events is how the political class in both cases failed to consider failure as an option. When news of the disaster reached Athens, no one believed it. No one had prepared the Athenians for the possibility of defeat, much less a catastrophe. Once reality sunk in, panic gripped the people as they processed what the disaster meant for the war. Everything about the Sicilian Expedition assumed victory was inevitable.

Something similar is brewing for Washington. For a year the war party has been feeding the political class stories about the Russians running out of weapons and Russian troops being forced to fight naked in the snow. Political leaders are given scripts with big talk about total victory and the dissolution of Russia. The public has been told nothing about the reality of the war. Once news of this disaster makes itself fully known, we may see panic and disbelief in Washington.

Again, historical analogies are never perfect. At best they help contextualize current events by providing an objective viewpoint. Washington is not Athens. Robert Kagan is not Alcibiades and there is no one playing the role of Nicias. Instead, the empire is led by spoiled children of the managerial elite that rose along with the American empire in the aftermath of Word War II. The disaster for this empire, however, will be just as real as it was for the Athenian empire.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Coming Election Show

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the chess game between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine, a post about the great neo-Nazi threat to Lagos and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

It is hard to think about it, but the first presidential debate of the next cycle will probably happen in the late summer, which is about six months off. Assuming the Republicans stick to the old calendar and do not follow the Democrat plan to rearrange the primary schedule, the first votes are less than a year off. That means the candidates are now preparing to kick off their campaigns. Whether we like it or not, another presidential campaign show is about to get started.

At this point, the action looks like it will be on the Republican side, as no one is prepping to challenge Joe Biden on the Democrat side. He may be a vegetable, but the people running the government think he is a useful vegetable. If the secret document business was supposed to push him aside, it did not work. Bernie Sanders has been bought off, so they do not have to worry about him causing trouble. The only plausible alternative is Gavin Newsom, who has done nothing so far.

That leaves the Republicans to put on a show for us. Of course, we know Trump is running and is the favorite at the moment. Mike Pompeo lost a bunch of weight to look better on television, so he is running. John Bolton says he will run as the blow up the world candidate. Nikki Haley has thrown her panties in the ring. Tim Scott is now preparing to announce soon. Amusingly, the yesterday men of conservatism think Scott and Haley provide ideological diversity.

The guy everyone is waiting on is Ron DeSantis. He has put on a good show in Florida, especially with regards to the cultural stuff. He gave Disney the business over their grooming stuff, so he has won over a lot of normal people. He recently stepped in to halt the AP Afro history stuff that amounted to little more than an antiwhite lecture, so he is not just picking low hanging fruit. In another age, DeSantis would be the ideal candidate to lead the Republican ticket.

What we see shaping up is a repeat of the 2016 primary. You have a collection of zombies that have no business in politics, but they are acceptable to the people who actually run things. Then you have Trump and DeSantis, who will be filling the Ted Cruz role in this performance. In 2016, the party could have rallied early to Cruz and maybe had a shot at stopping Trump, but they waited too long. This time many see DeSantis as the key to preventing Trump for a third time.

The trouble with that is most of the people running the Republican party are as delusional as everyone else in the managerial elite. They really think the voters are waiting for Captain Diversity to ride in and save them. Tim Scott is like catnip to these people, so they will be drooling all over him. Of course, Haley is a strong diverse female and everyone knows the world cannot get enough of strong diverse females, so she will get lots of support as well.

The wild card is whether the party will fortify the process for democracy. Politics is monkey see, monkey do, so the Republican party leadership is no doubt working on a way to fortify the process for democracy. Joe Biden was made the nominee when the party stepped into to fix the process and get around all of those voters who thought anyone was better than a senile old man. You can be sure the most devious rats in the GOP have been working the problem for 2024.

For all his faults, Trump is the prohibitive favorite. Tim Scott may be diverse, but his trophy case is empty. He sold insurance for a few years until he signed on to be a political performer and he has spent the last three decades being the diverse Republican at various levels. Nikki Haley is a strong diverse female, who spent eight year criticizing the South as the governor of South Carolina. She will go over well in Silicon valley and New Delhi, but nowhere else.

The only plausible challenger to Trump is DeSantis, but boring people tend not to do well in national politics. That and the uniparty does not like him. He has the same trouble as Ted Cruz, in that he exists somewhere between the populist base of the party and the elitists leadership of the party. Leadership sees him as a potential threat, while the voters see him as a potential fink. Given his personality and Trump’s name recognition, it is a tough spot for DeSantis.

None of this matters all that much. If you look at the map you can see right away the problem for the Republicans. When you tick off all of the states that the democrats have fortified for democracy, they start with a lock on the election. For any Republican to win in 2024 it means flipping states like Pennsylvania that have already cast their votes for Joe Biden, whether the voters know it or not. Many do know it now, so they will not bother showing up to play make believe.

This election presents the people in charge with a dilemma. On the one hand, Trump losing in the primary would let them claim that the popular unrest has been quelled and it is back to the old ways. The trouble is, they have fortified the general election for democracy and there is no way to explain it. If DeSantis is selected as the nominee and loses to Joe Biden, who is going to think that is legitimate? Even the people at National Review will start to question the result.

On the other hand, if they install their dream ticket, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, the voters will be too busy laughing to bother voting. Worse yet, they will get smoked in the general election thus discrediting the diversity scheme. The New York Times will demand that the Republican Party disband because its voters are so racist, they would not vote for diversity against dementia. It would be a hilarious result, but it feels too ridiculous, even for the Republicans.

You can see the problem. Having a vegetable atop the Democratic ticket when the election has been fortified for democracy quickly leads to absurd results. Once they started down the road of fortifying lections for democracy, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the pretense of legitimacy. In the fullness of time, the robot historians will say that the great mistake was in not coopting Trump. Reckless fury led to reckless actions that have made elections into absurd spectacles.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The End Is Nigh

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A popular narrative among libertarians, gold bugs, doomsday types and other pessimists involves the end of the dollar. Because of the structural flaws in fiat money, the abuse of the dollar’s reserve status, excessive money printing, the prettiness of gold or other factors, the world will one day decide that it no longer wants to use dollars and the dollar will collapse. Peter Schiff has built a media career using a combination of these causes to predict the end of the dollar.

There is an old joke about the market pessimists having predicted ten of the last three market crashes that applies here. The people predicting the end of the dollar, or the petrodollar as many prefer, have been making this prediction since Nixon closed the gold window fifty years ago. All of the predications have turned out to be wrong, but that has had no impact on the dollar pessimists. It turns out that there is good money to be made in being wrong about the dollar.

There are a number of reasons why the dollar remains the global currency, despite the abuse of it by the Global American Empire. This post on Revolver by an anonymous former U.S. Treasury official covers some of the major ones. The simple elevator speech on why the dollar remains the reserve currency is that the major powers of the global economy prefer it for now. China, Russia, India and the OPEC cartel continue to use the dollar as they work on the coming alternative.

That last bit is an important part of understanding what will come in the next decade with regards to global currency. The unipolar world controlled by Washington is slowly slipping away, being replaced by a multipolar world. For ideological and practical reasons, Washington is fighting this with all of its might. It is a losing fight as a unipolar world was an accident of 20th century history. It turns out that Samuel Huntington was right and Francis Fukuyama was wrong.

The great challenge of this age, it turns out, is that the emerging civilization centers of the world are emerging into the unipolar world. On the one hand, they need to remake the world order to reflect this new reality. On the other hand, they still depend in significant ways on the old structures from the unipolar order. They cannot overthrow the old order without incurring significant costs. Of course, there is the Global America Empire, which stands athwart history yelling “stop!”

In this regard, the dollar is a symbol of the current crisis, because it is the symbol, the primary tool, of the old unipolar order. Just as removing the dollar as the reserve currency would bring about significant economic costs, removing America as the center of the global order brings serious risks. Not the least of those risks is an increasingly unstable political class armed with nuclear weapons. Joe Biden prattling on about nuclear war does not inspire confidence.

The result is the emerging new power centers are becoming extremely cautious as they proceed down the path toward a multipolar world. China could take Taiwan by force if it chose, but that brings risks it is unwilling to assume. It is not just the cost of war, which would be significant, but also the cost of victory. The sight of an American carrier, on fire, sinking into the Pacific could collapse the American empire. That would take the dollar with it and everything that counts on it.

Similarly, the Russians could have hit back at the West over the economic sanctions, but instead it has simply chosen to avoid them. The reality is, every European country is looking for ways around the sanctions. These workarounds are costly and they are hollowing out their economies, but they are the better than alternative. For Russia, the sanction regime is mostly a nuisance, but it buys time as they and the other emerging global power centers build their infrastructure.

In a way, we are seeing a real world example of what Joseph Tainter described in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Collapse is only possible if there is no supporting structures surrounding the society. The Western Roman Empire collapsed because there was nothing around it. It was a complex society in isolation, as what surrounded it was a collection of tribal societies. America, in contrast, is deeply connected to the other complex societies.

Instead of collapse, what we are seeing is a controlled demolition. The Russians, for example, would welcome the return of rational governance in Europe, they would prefer to avoid radical change. An economic crisis could easily trigger a political crisis and unleash sudden political change. The last two times this happened have not been good for Russia. The first time brought Napoleon to Moscow. Of course, the last time it brought Hitler to Stalingrad.

China, India, the OPEC countries and even Brazil have similar concerns with what lies between the present order and the multipolar order that is coming. The Global American Empire, including its control of the global reserve currency, is an obstacle that lies between now and then, but it is a problem that must be carefully managed. The efforts by Washington provoke a crises in Asia and Europe are viewed as an effort to derail the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar world.

This brings us back to the dollar. If the world avoids catastrophe, then it will avoid the sudden uncontrolled collapse of the dollar. Instead it will be a slow transition to a world of multiple trusted currencies that rely on separate financial systems. Those currencies will be linked to the only true global commodity, which is energy. The relative strength of each currency will reflect the trust and accuracy of the corresponding financial systems that make transacting in the currency possible.

What this means is the petrodollar will slowly become the petro. All the large global currencies, including the dollar, will be pegged to the supply of energy, plus or minus the relative trust of the political systems of the issuing society. Again, this assumes the world avoids catastrophe. If a controlled demolition of the Global American Empire proves impossible, then all of those off-grid living videos you watched will suddenly and explosively come in handy.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Paradox Of Liberal Democracy

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the great awakening, a post about the 1980’s classic comedy Trading Places and the Sunday podcast. This week the plan is to do some more Ukraine stuff, given the uptick in war news. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The communists were fond of picking at what they claimed were the inherent contradictions within capitalist societies. They argued that these contradictions were irreconcilable and would eventually bring down the system. The accuracy of their claims is debatable, but the examination of contradictions within a system is a perfectly valid analytical technique. Conflicts in logic are often the cause of defects in a system and not just political or economic systems.

In fact, software developers spend much of their lives hunting down these sorts of errors in the code. Perhaps the cause was poor coding or maybe it was the business logic which defined the code that was flawed. Those bugs in the software are the result of one set of rules contradicting or overriding another set of rules. One user enters data and gets one result, while another user enters data and gets a different result, despite both users expecting a similar result.

This software analogy is further useful in that the users will lose confidence in the system if these internal contradictions are not resolved. Systems are sets of rules and if the user of a system cannot trust the rules, they cannot trust the system. Many software systems have been scrapped due to a collapse in confidence. The same holds for political and economic systems. Some communists thought if they could exploit the contradictions in capitalism, confidence in it would collapse.

When we look around at the general lunacy that has come to define the West, it is often assumed that the lunatics are operating outside the rules of liberal democracy and that is the cause of the lunacy. “If we just go back to our constitutional principles” is the call of every civic nationalist in the comment sections of Conservative Inc. No doubt the people in support of the lunacy have similar claims about their opponents not following the new rules of blessed progress.

What if the reason our age is so deranged is the rule-set that defines the ideology we call liberal democracy? What if the crisis facing the West is simply the result of a system that contains irreconcilable contradictions? People are naturally reticent to think like this because liberal democracy has been sacralized. Democracy means good, so anything it touches must be good. Liberal democracy is even better because it contains two words that have come to mean morally good.

If we take a step back and look at what liberal democracy means in theory, it may help explain why it is increasingly deranged in practice. The off the shelf definition of liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under a representative democratic form of government. The word liberal here means the political philosophy based on individual rights and liberty. Individuals are equal before the law and equal in their political relationship.

A liberal society, regardless of the political system, will be defined by things like equality before the law and the rule of law. Further, those laws are written down so everyone can understand them. Those laws also codify things like the right to own property, the right to speak and organize in order to address the government, and a market economy that is open and transparent. There are other things that can be part of a liberal society, but in general it is a society based in individual rights.

Democracy, of course, is where everyone gets a say. In theory, everyone participates equally, but this is obviously not possible in a large society. As the political theorist Robert Dahl showed, you cannot have a true democracy in a large society. Instead you have the features of democracy to one degree or another. You can have free and fair elections in which everyone can participate, even though many people will simply choose to ignore the process entirely.

There you have liberal democracy in a nutshell. It is a set of rules based on liberal moral philosophy where the people, through direct voting and through indirect representation participate in the rule making of society. Right away you can see a problem. If the people can make the rules, then they can vote to get rid of those rules that are based in liberal moral philosophy. The public could be persuaded that free speech is a bad idea and vote to suppress political speech.

Now, the usual suspects will jump up and down and say this is not so because those liberal rules are placed outside the democratic process. They are based in nature, maybe, or rooted in the ancient traditions of the people. In fact, they are written on a piece of paper which is kept in a museum. That way everyone knows that those rules are off limits to further tinkering. This is obviously not true, which is why America is shaking itself to pieces over those timeless rules.

Liberal democracy has the same problem that any democratic system has in that the people are the source of all authority. Those timeless rules based in human nature are deemed timeless by people who pretend they are based in human nature. They are not, in fact, rooted in a moral authority outside man. Since an axiom of all democratic systems is that no parliament can bind subsequent parliaments, all rules, even the timeless ones, are open to question.

In theory, liberal democracy has the same problem as communism and libertarianism, in that it has no answer for what happens when people change their minds. It has no answer for what happens when a decent number of people decide that those liberal rules are no longer working. If authority lies in the people, which is true of all democratic systems, then whatever rules you make, however you describe them, will be subject to the whims of the people.

Communists solved this problem by creating a new class of people who will be the vanguard of the revolution. The party makes sure that the rules remain fixed, so that the people never get any wild ideas about communism. Libertarians, of course, solved this problem by never coming close to creating a libertarian society. Even in their solons where everything exists in theory, they never solved this problem, because there is no way it can be solved.

Interestingly, the post-Marx culturalists landed on what they think is a solution to the internal contradiction in liberal democracy. They relied on anachronistic language to appeal to their audience at the time, but in the modern age, repressive tolerance has become the solution to popular dissent. In modern hands, this means those who are deemed a threat to our democracy are surrounded by the defenders of democracy and threatened with destruction if they continue.

Putting that aside, liberal democracy has no solution within the ideology of liberal democracy to the paradox of liberal democracy. If the people are sovereign, it means their are the authority for all the rules of society. That includes those foundational rules that the creators would like to think are immutable truths. When the people are the source of authority for the rules of society, they can change even those immutable rules of the universe if they so please.

This is why America has become increasingly chaotic as it has become increasingly democratic since roughly a century ago. In a time when a limited number of men of high status controlled the rule making, respecting those limits on the popular will was not just possible, it was necessary for their survival as a class. Once authority began to expand through expansion of the franchise, the cancer of democracy began to eat at the rules and the reasoning behind those rules.

As is true of other ideologies, the only way to make them work is to find some authority outside mankind to legitimize those fixed rules. Theocratical liberalism, for example, could work if the holy text codified the liberal moral code. A liberal dictatorship could work, assuming the people at the top saw an advantage in maintaining the liberal order for their people. Tradition could also work as a useful authority. Even belief in the simulation could work if explained properly.

In the end, liberal democracy suffers from the same central defect of all radical ideologies, which is that it seeks to free man of coercion. The liberals dreamed of a world free of political coercion. The Marxists dreamed of a world free of economic coercion, while the post-Marxists dream of a world free of cultural coercion. As the last radical ideology standing, liberal democracy promises a world free of all coercion, which is a direct threat to society itself.

It turns out that humans evolved to live in societies and societies are nothing more than a system of rules. In order to maintain the rules, people must often be coerced into abiding by the rules. Therefore any ideology that promises to eliminate coercion is promising to destroy that which makes society possible. Liberal democracy is a direct challenge to the very idea of human society. it is a suicide pact, which explains the the lunacy of the current age.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Brother And Son

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One of the tricks the Clintons popularized for getting around rules and protocols was the sudden collapse in enforcement of the rules and protocols. Instead of violating one specific rule that was hindering them, they would violate all the rules. This way they could blame the system or just unintended errors. This made it hard to see the specific rule they were violating, which made it hard to see the caper. They hid their crimes in an avalanche of sloppiness.

This seems to be what the Bidens were up to when Joe was Vice President. His brother and son wanted to trade access for cash, a common political crime. Influence peddling is probably the second oldest crime. If you can get some important guy to do something or entertain doing something, that has tremendous value, so you sell that ability to people who want to influence the important guy. This is pretty much how all legislation is devised and passed into law in Washington.

This is also how politicians monetize their position. Maybe the wife gets a job at a high powered lobbying firm. Maybe the family members get jobs at companies that just happen to support the politician. Sometimes, as with Nancy Pelosi, the spouse gets to partner with someone with lots of insider access to make incredibly shrewd business deals using that insider information. Of course, the spouse, as we saw with Pelosi, is the conduit for some of the insider information.

For congressmen and senators, this is all perfectly legal. For the Vice President, it is completely illegal. Joe Biden could slip his brother some information about pending legislation or regulation, but he could not trade on the really good stuff. That is the international stuff involving high level access to the President. The Vice President is not allowed to auction off classified information either. He has access to information that is priceless to foreign players, but it is not for sale.

This is where Hunter comes into the picture. This is also where the Clintons came into the picture as well. You see, when Hillary was running the State department, her pervert husband was traveling the world giving speeches. Those audiences were pouring billions into the Clinton foundation in the form of speaking fees. Team Biden, no doubt, looked at this and thought they could do the same. Get Hunter and Jim Biden out there working the international market for cash payments.

The problem for the Bidens was two-fold. One they did not have a foundation to launder money through, so they had to produce some new conduit. The other is Hunter was a crackhead and Jim has no useful skills other than being Joe’s brother. If they start getting hired to do speeches, people will notice. It is beginning to look like the plan was to have these two idiots get big contracts and consulting gigs with foreign players, in exchange for something more than access.

This is why Joe Biden was sprinkling secret documents all over the place. You see, his son and brother had access to the family homes and offices. If Joe were to carelessly leave secret documents at these places, totally by accident because he is getting old and forgetful, Hunter and Jim could accidentally stumble upon them. Maybe they would see something in those files that they could use in their dealings with the foreign players like China and Ukraine.

Breitbart has a story documenting when Hunter lived in the family home and when those documents were in the family home. Of course, Hunter claimed at the time to be paying rent of fifty thousand a month. Now, he was on drugs at the time and spending his days doing those drugs with prostitutes, so maybe his claim about spending that much for rent was just what you get from a druggie. After all, he left his laptops containing intimate details of his life with a repair shop.

The Washington Free Beacon digs further using Hunter’s laptop to establish the timeline of Hunter living at the house and working for the Chinese. The angle that the conservative media is pursuing is that Biden’s reckless handling of secret material was far worse than what they are accusing Trump of doing. Trump kept his secrets in a big vault guarded by the secret service, not a crack addict. That is the stick they are supposed to fetch, so they do not look at the other angle.

The real angle here is the brother. No one is looking into Jim Biden, who has been a business partner with his brother for fifty years. This ProPublica article on Jim and Joe’s long and complicated business relationship details how the two of them have worked in tandem through Biden’s career. Unlike Hunter, Jim does not have a crack problem or a taste for hookers and naked selfies. He operates a complex web of financial companies and financial transitions.

If you wanted to launder money, there is no better way to do it than through a series of interlocking financial companies that move money around daily. Maybe Jim hears or sees something when visiting his brother and maybe he mentions that to an overseas client who maybe plops a few million into one of Jim’s deals. A little here and little there and before long a man who spent his life working for the government is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Funny world.

That is the old Clinton trick. If Biden were handing his brother’s intel, that would turn up on the radar of the spooks eventually. If Joe is just sloppy and lots of people have access to that intel, then that means the leak could be anyone. If the sloppiness ever came out, then the conservative media would have Hunter to chase around, rather than Jim who is not as fun to profile. It sounds overly clever, but politics selects for people who are good at cooking up schemes like this.

Just as we will never know the extend of the Clinton crimes, we will never get the real story on the Biden corruption. Whoever is getting this story into the media has real power and motivations they will never reveal publicly. Maybe the whole thing is a setup and it has nothing to do with corruption. Maybe the corruption was so egregious that even the spooks were offended by it and they are exacting some revenge. Either way, the place to look here is the bother, not the son.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The New Anti-Science Right

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about Ukraine, a post about Biden and the Sunday podcast. Since there is interest in it, I will be doing a weekly post on the happenings in Ukraine. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Way back in the heyday of conservatism, a common charge leveled at them from the Left was that they were anti-intellectual. Generally, this meant that conservatives did not appreciate free verse or post-modern art. You see, the Left read books and appreciated the arts while the Right read the Bible and fired off their boom-sticks. It was not so much an argument against the intelligence of the Right, but rather a class argument against the uncouth people entering politics.

After the Cold War, it was no longer possible for the Left to use a class argument against the Right, when their champion was the Snopes clan. There was simply no way to present the Clintons as sophisticated and erudite. Compounding it was the obvious fact that their politics looked like daytime television. These were crude, uncouth people who brought with them a collection of vulgar carny freaks. By comparison, the talk radio guys looked sophisticated and measured.

That was not the end of the anti-intellectual claim. It transformed into a claim that the Right was full of anti-science believers. You see, the Left was now armed with the latest ideas from the social sciences, while the Right was armed with superstitious nonsense from their sky god. Never mind that the social sciences are closer to astrology than actual science. They had studies and the word of men with impressive sounding titles to show how much they bleeping loved science.

Since the end of the Cold War, this has been incredibly effective magic. Just look at how the conservatives curled up in a ball when the Left started waving around their studies about the Covid pandemic. Most of them did not hold up to scrutiny, but the conservatives were unwilling to scrutinize them. Instead, they were happy to embrace policies that they allegedly opposed as a matter of principle. They accepted the grotesque violations of civil liberties because science!

Science, of course, is about debate, when you stop and think about it. Theories are proposed to explain some observed phenomenon. Those theories are tested and challenged in a formalized process. Simply put, science is about broadening the debate about the natural world within an agreed upon process. The exact opposite of science is telling people to shut up because science. This is exactly what happened with Covid and the conservatives were happy to agree.

What appears to be happening is that the Left’s claims against what they call their opposition are being embraced by their opposition. Just as many conservatives in the 1980’s relished their populist, working clash aesthetic, the new conservatives forming up seem to be embracing a rejection of science. They are going to stand on antiquarian ideas from the long lost past and reject the human sciences. This is what you see in this book review by Sohrab Ahmari.

The book and the review are a long form version of the old internet meme about Democrats being the real racists. You see, race never existed until it was invented by bad people to do bad things. Before those bad people, no one had ever noticed the vast differences in people. Then those bad people came along and coined the word “race” and then created “race science” to divide people along entirely arbitrary lines, that while easily measurable, are a figment of our imagination.

Now, Sohrab Ahmari is not working math puzzles in his free time. He is a discount Dinesh D’Souza. An exotic guy who orbits around conservative politics, looking for a place to land. D’Souza got his big break when he stabbed the great Sam Francis in the back on behalf of the Washington Post. Ahmari got his break when he noticed people making fun of David French on Twitter then penned a column based on what he read called Against David French-ism.

Sohrab Ahmari is at the center of the new Right so even though he is no one’s idea of a deep thinker, he represents the new opposition being created within the managerial elite to be the Left’s new foil. He is not an exception. Look at the Yoram Hazony project and you see an even stronger opposition to science. In the tenth item, he writes, “No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test.”

The fact that no one says such a thing makes his opposition to it rather weird, but that is not the point. Anyone who has taken in Hazony’s live shows will have seen how he acts when the human sciences are mentioned. In his first show he said something along the lines that the “race scientists” are incredibly good at marshalling the facts to support their arguments, so it is best to avoid debating them. In other words, this is not a pose for him, but a cornerstone of his worldview.

In fairness, some of this hostility to the human sciences is due to fear of mean words from the Left. If you are going to be the useful idiot to the people atop the prevailing orthodoxy, you have to make clear you are no threat to their worldview. Controlling the morality of race has been a highly effective weapon for the ruling class and they are not going to let that weapon drop, even in the face of reality. They are certainly not going to trade it away just to create a new useful idiot.

That said, there is a genuine contempt for the human science on the Right, both the new Right and the old Right. Part of it is due to the fact that once you accept biological reality, whole areas of debate are closed down. Worse yet, important areas of social life are reduced to the tough choices. A big part of democratic politics is reality avoidance, so reducing policy options to coldblooded trade-offs is no fun. Universal human equality is much more fun than biological reality.

A bigger issue here may simply be intelligence. For a long time, the smart fraction was selected into areas like philosophy and theology. Once theology was dropped from ruling class interest, the smart fraction was recruited into things like the amusingly named political science and then political economy. The rise of actual science began to change the selection pressure. For a few generations now, the smart fraction has been selected into STEM and even finance.

The result has been a dumbing down of political philosophy. A dunce like David French can pass himself off as a deep thinker, as long as he keeps up with the latest fads and picks the right enemies. No one else around him is going to notice that he moves his lips when he reads. In such a world, the increasingly complex world of the human science can easily look like black magic. Declaiming against “race science” is not just an in-group signal but a defense mechanism.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Chaos And Control

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The closest thing we have to a universal principle of human society is that all elites are primarily concerned with maintaining their status as elites. No matter how the society is organized and for what purpose, the number one priority of a social elite is maintaining themselves as the elite. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the point of society, from the perspective of elites, is to maintain the elite. Any benefit to the people is either to maintain the standing of the elite or a happy accident.

It is tempting to think that the best way for an elite to maintain itself is to make sure the people over whom it rules is happy. A good king keeps his people in peace and prosperity, so the people are happy to have him as king. The trouble is, there is always someone who thinks they can do a better job than the king. Good times or bad times, these people will look for their opportunity. Of course, in good times, a new elite can form up outside the system and potentially rival the existing elite.

It turns out that good times bring dangers to an elite. In fact, good times are more of a problem than bad times, because in bad times the elite can use the emergency as a way to rally the people. Roosevelt used the Great Depression to rally the people around a set of alien ideas called the New Deal. His massive expansion of the state was totally at odds with American tradition, but times were tough and the people trusted him, so they went along with his radical ideas.

Emergencies are a great way to bind the people to their current elites. Unless the elite proves to be unable to unwilling to face the emergency, the people will give their existing rulers the benefit of the doubt. Throughout the Cold War, Americans were willing to tolerate all sorts of trouble, because the threat of nuclear war made the idea of challenging the elites seem risky. There was plenty of cultural turmoil, much of it from the top, but the great American middle never wavered.

That gets to the other way elites maintain power. By pitting one group against another, the people are too busy with that to question authority. In fact, self-interest leads them to appeal to the exiting authority to resolve the conflict. If crime suddenly becomes a problem in your town, those complaints about the cops suddenly go away as long as the cops do something about the crime. By keeping the masses busy with various small issues, elites can defend against the formation of rival elites.

This explains the turmoil of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The race revolts, youth rebellion and cultural revolution were not grassroots phenomenon. All of these things were the product of the exiting elites. Look into the background of the radical leaders of that period and most of them came from elite backgrounds. Once their radical days were done, they went into positions within elite institutions. Even those who committed serious crimes were welcomed back home.

The second half of the 20th century was a game of good cop – bad cop on the American people by the ruling elite that emerged after the war. The bad cops created cultural mayhem that “freaked out the squares” while the good cops appealed to the people’s patriotism and decency to fight the Cold War. One hand created division while the other hand created unity. Often these two forces were pitted against one another to the benefit of the ruling class.

During the Cold War, this system served the elites very well. The threat of nuclear war forced the agents of control to contain the agents of chaos. At the same time, the agents of chaos understood they had limits. The two sides of the ruling class were not always in balance, but they always returned to balance. The chaos of civil rights gave way to the control of racial peace. The cultural chaos of the 1960’s and 1970’s gave way to the control of the 1980’s.

Ever since the end of the Cold war, this system has been in crisis. Without the threat of nuclear annihilation, the agents of chaos have no limits. At the same time, the agents of control no longer have to worry as much about the façade of democracy. The crusades against the Muslims brought some stability to the problem, but the Muslims were never a serious threat like the Soviets. For the last two decades the agents of chaos and control have been running wild.

This explains the ridiculous things we see today. On the one hand, the security state is wantonly violating civil rights in order to maintain control. The extent of the crimes committed by the FBI is unknown, but what is known is shocking. On the other hand, the super-rich finance crackpot schemes to unleash crime waves and pervert the law to torment the people. Throwing open the jails and appointing pro-crime prosecutors is the definition of societal madness.

The standard explanation from conservatives for what we are seeing is that the people behind this stuff want money or power. The trouble is the people behind this stuff already have money and power. In fact, they have more money and power than any ruling elite in human history. Western elites, especially the American elites, make the aristocracy of 18th century France look poor and impotent. Clearly, the motivation behind this behavior is not money or power.

What we may be seeing is the organic death of a ruling elite. The 20th century selected for a certain type of person in the American ruling class. One type was the agent of chaos and the other type was the agent of control. There was no selection pressure in favor of prudence or moral scruples. The great crises of the 20th century provided something like an electric fence around the elite. Over time, these conditions produced an elite incapable of self-limit.

Like the panda bear, our elite has evolved down a dead end. They thrash around looking for some great crisis to serve the same role as the Cold War, but that was a unique period in human history. It cannot be replicated. Meanwhile, the agents of chaos and control explore the outer limits of their sociopathy. Unencumbered by the fear of destruction, they keep pushing the limits, while simultaneously creating the conditions for their own demise.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

What Is National Conservatism?

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National conservatism, a movement created by Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony, has gained some degree of respectability over the last decade. People associated with the movement have been given space on mainstream platforms. His conferences get a large crowd of academic types, most of whom get a speaking role. The event is one part academic conference, one part networking event. Of course, it is all made possible by billionaire Peter Theil who underwrites it.

Therein lies the first puzzle. Look at the collection of people associated with the movement and it is hard to find common ground. Peter Theil calls himself a libertarian, but he supported Trump. Granted, the space between Trump’s 1980’s civic nationalism and libertarianism is not that great, but most libertarians threw their dresses over their heads and went squealing into the night when Trump arrived. They joined their friends on the Left in calling him a fascist.

It gets fuzzier when you see paleos like Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy, along with varieties of the “new right” like Michael Anton and Josh Hammer. The only thing these people have in common is support for Trump. Otherwise, they do not have much in common with one another, at least on the surface. Then you have people like Rod Dreher and David Goldman speaking at these events. Hazony’s events are the bar in Star Wars for dispossessed right-wing intellectuals.

Things get more muddled when you look at where some of these people come down on the key issues of the day. Here is John O’Sullivan giving a speech about Ukraine at the most recent conference. He clearly knows nothing about the Ukraine or the war, but he is happy to defend the Global American Empire’s meddling. Here is someone writing the “national conservative case” for arming Ukraine. He thinks war with Russia will help in the war with China to come.

Those two are not outliers. Here is Yoram Hazony making the rather farfetched claim that Ukraine was just minding its own business when for no reason at all Russia decided to invade them. If one were to take Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, at face value, you would expect him to take the opposite position. After all, Hazony’s book is an argument against empire and it is the Global American Empire that is the cause of the war in Ukraine.

Of course, no one can read Hazony’s book and not see that it is mostly a way to give Europeans the language to defend Zionism. The prevailing ideology of Western elites is explicitly anti-nationalist. An ethnostate like Israel falls far outside of what Western elites consider acceptable, so you can see the problem. Israel ethnically cleansing the West Bank does not fit the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pogrom. The Hazony project is mostly a way to square that circle to Western conservatives.

As an aside, Hazony makes the claim in his book that a people have a right to a homeland if they have the ability to keep and maintain it. He makes this qualification for two obvious reasons. First, it sets a size limit for a nation. Otherwise, three people could get together and demand independence. The other reason is it allows for the easy dismissal of Arab claims in Israel. The Palestinians have no claims because they cannot keep their own lands.

The fact that this argument is best applied to Israel is never addressed. After all, Israel would not exist without the British then the Americans. The entirety of Israeli foreign policy for over half a century has been to use any means necessary to gain favor with great powers in order to fend off the Arabs. Israel is the product of empire. Now that the Global American Empire is looking weak, Israel is now cutting the Ukrainians loose in favor of the Russians.

Putting that aside, the question remains, what is national conservatism? At this point, the best answer is that it is a holding area for people not welcome at reputable events who never want to be associated with disreputable events. For example, Jason Richwine is welcome at a Hazony event, but at that same event Hazony will rage against “race science” like a grievance studies major. Mark Krikorian is welcome, but anyone associated with VDare is banned.

The result is that national conservatism is sort of island of misfit toys. The only thing holding them together is a desire to get a seat at the table. Thiel’s money lets them put on extravagant conferences at world class facilities, which draw in famous people looking for some street cred as an outsider. For example, Marco Rubio, a product of Conservative Inc., gave a speech at Hazony’s event and now talks about himself as an implacable foe of the Washington political establishment.

Otherwise, national conservatism is a term without meaning. The nationalism expressed by people like Hazony is situational. Israel can build settlements in Arab areas because it is in their national interest. Russia, meanwhile, is guilty of imperialism when she moves to defend ethnic Russians from Ukrainian fanatics underwritten by the Global American Empire. This sounds like the same old neoconservatism that has plagued us since the middle of the last century.

As for the conservatism, there is not much agreement. Hazony claims that American conservatism is rooted in Burke. The umbrella group that sponsors his activity is called the Edmund Burke Foundation. On the other hand, the Claremont people that freely circulate in these events reject that claim. They are Lockeans, at least with regards to the American founding. Others are social conservatives rooting their moral claims in the authority of their religion.

There is nothing wrong with heterodoxy. In fact, more events where disparate people can socialize and debate is a good thing. As a movement, however, there has to be something more than Peter Theil’s money and estrangement from the cool kid’s table of the prevailing orthodoxy. Without a common goal or even a common narrative, it is just a collection of outsiders desperate to get back in, terrified of the ominous sounds coming from the darkness to their right.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Friends & Enemies

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One of the truths of democratic politics is that enemies tend to be forever, while friends tend to be temporary. The reason is politics is personal. When someone does something to harm you in politics, you take it personally. You remember it long after the harm has been forgotten. When someone does you a favor, in contrast, it tends to be transactional, as the person doing the favor is acting from self-interest. Favors are impersonal, while harms are always personal.

This is something Kevin McCarthy is learning right now. His climb to the speaker’s chair has been sidetracked by a small group of malcontents. They oppose him becoming the next Speaker of the House because they do not like him. More important, they think he is a shameless liar, so they do not trust him. The reason they think this is that Kevin McCarthy is a shameless liar. To get where he is he had to knife people in the back, because he has no other qualifications for the job.

It will never be said publicly, but his role in knifing Congressman Steve King in the back, at the behest of the donor class, burned up his capital. If he is willing to work with the New York Times to ruin a Steve King, how can anyone in the caucus be sure he will not do the same trick to them? Politics is a sleazy business, but the reason to be in a party is to have the protection of the party. McCarthy broke an important rule so he is a man with few friends, only money to spread around.

Another truth of politics is that when you take a shot at the king you better not miss, which is where the anti-McCarthy forces are right now. They have to hang together or they will hang alone. Just in case that is not clear, the self-aggrandizing sociopath from Texas, Dan Crenshaw, gave one of his typical tantrums to the press, calling the holdouts forever enemies of the uniparty. In Hell right now, Stalin is slapping John McCain on the back why saying, “That’s your boy!”

The unspoken truth of this fiasco is that this would not be possible if the FBI had allowed the Republicans to sweep the midterms. If it had been a red wave, McCarthy would have had no trouble getting the votes from all of those newly minted House members excited to be in Washington. Instead, the FBI only allowed the GOP to gain a small majority to keep up appearances. That gives this small band of holdouts the chance to throw a wrench in the works of the uniparty.

This brings up the question that no one in the media dares ask. That is, why is it just fifteen members of the party opposing this oleaginous snake? For a long time, we have been told that most of the party is conservative, but the leadership is the problem, always cutting deals with the Democrats. If the conservatives could get control of the leadership, then things would change. It turns out that conservatives are as rare as hen’s teeth in the Republican Party.

The truth is, George Washington was right. No man is so virtuous as to resist the highest bidder and that is axiomatically true in politics. Marjorie Taylor Greene switched teams for the promise of some legitimacy. The party promised to let he pretend to be a serious person in exchange for her support of the uniparty. It turns out that those stories about old Marge being a cheap date were true. It is a good reminder that character is your best guide, even in the sleazy world of politics.

Of course, this whole affair is shining light on a truth about our politics. Democracy is just a show to conceal the real power in society. The holdouts know that they will get nothing from this, even if McCarthy steps aside. The guy who takes his place will be dancing the tune the donors call. Again, for the holdouts, this is not really about principle. They just hate Kevin McCarthy so they are taking their shot. In the end they know the Speaker will be a puppet of the donors.

This affair also suggests that the donors and their puppets in the two parties are tiring of the game of make believe. Once it was clear that the people are too docile to push back against things like lockdowns and mask wearing, no one in charge had any reason to worry about fooling the people with the democracy show. They can have this embarrassing food fight in public, because who cares about the public? Certainly, no one in either party or the pirates that control them.

It is why the right way to view it is as just another carny act on the stage that is liberal democratic politics. It is all sound and fury signifying nothing, but there is no harm in enjoying the suffering of the people made to perform on the stage. Given the age in which we live, expect the holdouts to be bought off or threatened by the FBI and this whole thing comes to end today. McCarthy is human filth, but he does what he is told, so the donors will probably save him.

Even so, there is a lesson for dissidents. Politics is always about friends and enemies, not abstract ideas. The goal is to increase your pool of friends, while limiting the pool of enemies you create in the process. Politics is always personal. Those who go out of their way to create drama and stir up conflict are always bad for your politics, so the best course is to avoid those people. You may not always be able to count on your friends, but you can always count on your enemies.

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