The Chevron Case

Posted on July 3, 2024 by thezman

Imagine if when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, they drew a sharp line between public and private discrimination. Maybe in Katzenbach v. McClung they drew a bright line around the Commerce Clause and ruled that as long as you were not conducting business across state lines, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not apply to your business. In other words, what if the court said that the principles of discrimination and inclusion apply only to the government?

The answer is we would have a vastly different world. Just consider the Katzenbach case in which the court claimed that the restaurant in question was not doing business across state lines, but it was possible that it could one day buy product from a vendor in another state, so the Commerce Clause applied. If the court had ruled rationally, we would now have a world where private discrimination was still legal, just as long as you did it locally, not nationally.

Of course, if the court had drawn the line between private discrimination and public discrimination, most of our race troubles never would have manifested, because normal life would not contradict official morality. A colorblind state is well within the spirit and sensibility of the American people. The liberty to associate or disassociate with whom you choose, for any reason you choose, is also consistent with the history and sensibilities of the people.

That is not what happened, and we have suffered a half century of demographic collapse as a result of the court imposing a new moral framework. It is a good example of how even small changes in the law can lead to a revolution in how people interact with each other and the government. We may be seeing another revolution brewing with the most recent court rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors.

The Loper decision ends what has been called the “Chevron deference” which is the longstanding principle where the courts defer to federal agencies with regards to regulations, interpretation of regulations and enforcement of regulations. Put simply, if a business or industry did not like a federal regulation, they had to convince the regulators to change it or get help from Congress. The courts would defer to the alleged experts in the administrative state.

What the Supreme Court has done in these two cases is continue to dismantle the logic that animated the Chevron deference and much of administrative law. They are going about it in two ways. One is the Court is saying that these agencies only have powers explicitly granted to them by Congress. Second, companies and industries can now go into the courts for redress. They can challenge the expertise of the regulators and the process used by the agencies to make policy.

This may sound arcane and boring, but keep in mind that most of the federal rules that directly impact your life are not passed by Congress. In fact, no one in Congress can tell you how most of the rules come into existence. The reason for that is the federal agencies craft the rules that regulate every nook and cranny of life. Until now, they did so without having to answer to anyone. Technically, Congress oversees these agencies, but Congress is full of simpletons.

What the Court seems to imagine is a new paradigm. If the Gaia worshippers, for example, want to ban gas stoves, they will need to get enough votes in Congress for a ban on gas stoves. Currently, they just have to cajole or bribe people in the administrative state and convince industry that they can profit from the new shenanigans in order to ban your gas stove. You, the citizen, have nowhere to turn to get your gas stove back.

There are now over 200,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations and few people have the slightest idea what they mean. This is why large companies have lawyers who interface with the agencies overseeing their industry. It is why small and midsized companies have trade groups. It is why there is a large army of lawyers whose specialty is administrative law. This is because the leviathan, which is the administrative state, has tentacles reaching into your most private matters.

What made this all possible was the habit of Congress, going back to FDR, to grant agencies in the executive branch broad powers to make laws, interpret those laws and enforce those laws. The way they did this is to give an agency a mission and then a budget to set off on that mission, which was used to lobby Congress for more money to expand the scope of the mission and underwrite various schemes that allegedly were in pursuit of their mission.

The direction of the Court is to ignore the vague powers granted by Congress and focus only on the specific powers granted by Congress. If Congress passes the Puppies and Rainbows bill that authorizes the Department of Education to do what they can to promote puppies and rainbows, the Court will not intervene. Once the DoE makes a rule requiring puppies and rainbows in the schools, then a school system can go to court arguing that the DoE was never granted this power.

There is a long road to go and many more court cases to define this new paradigm, but the end of that road is an administrative state that is limited by the specific powers granted to it and one that must defend its rules in court when challenged. For the same reason our coins have ridges, bills coming out of Congress will have to come with specifics, rather than pages of esoteric language designed to give the administrative state unlimited power to craft new rules.

In the short term, it means that every comma in those 200,000 pages of Federal regulations is now open to challenge in the courts. Inevitably, some popular rules will be struck down and that means Congress will be forced to pass actual laws reestablishing those popular rules. On the other hand, it also means there is a chance to get rid of odious rules that serve narrow interests. Getting a light bulb ban through Congress, for example, never would have happened.

It is not all puppies and rainbows. Rich people have been bribing Congress for generations and America presently has the worst class of rich people since the French Revolution, so it means lots of terrible laws from Congress. The difference is that this stuff will be out in the open where now it is in the shadows, allowing both Congress and its wealthy owners to play dumb and pretend to be something other than odious carbuncles strip-mining the middle-class.

Civil rights looked like a small change in private behavior in pursuit of a greater good, but it led to the demographic madness of the present. These rulings in pursuit of reducing the managerial state to mere bureaucracy may not look like much, but they threaten the moral authority of managerialism. Rule by experts no longer make sense when experts can be challenged. This may one day give people room to salvage whatever is left of the American experiment.

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Enjoy The Decline

Posted on July 2, 2024 by thezman

British Prime Minister Harold Wilson supposedly said that a week is a long time in politics, and we have certainly seen that recently. The documents case against Trump in Florida has continue to unravel as the government had to admit that they faked those photos of documents lying on the floor. The Supremes just handed Trump a huge win in the case brought against him over January 6, which came after the other ruling from the Supremes on the other January 6th cases.

Of course, sandwiched in between the legal triumphs was one of the most shocking debate performances in history. Biden’s Captain Pike look was not just bad in the conventional sense of bad debate performances. It made people want to turn away as it looked like an act of cruelty. It was made worse by the reaction of the media and the chattering classes. They went rocketing off demanding a new zombie to lead the fight against Trump only to find they are fresh out of zombies.

Things are looking good for team Trump. He is up in the polls and his opponent looks like he will drop over dead at any moment. The regime media is melting down and fighting with one another, rather than attacking Trump. It was one of the unremarked aspects of the debate, but a critical one. The moderators had to put all of their energy into helping Biden, so they had no time for their usual shenanigans. Trump was able to coast through unscathed.

The trouble for Trump is the election is still months away. The polls are looking better now, but nothing like one should expect. This 538 simulation has it a coin toss, which means Trump is the clear favorite. You have to assume the people running 538 have their thumbs on the scale. Even so, the fact that Trump is not up by forty points over a man who is half dead speaks to the core issue. That issue is the problem of America’s demographic collapse.

Here is a bit of math to illustrate the problem. In the past election, the breakdown by race was in line with past trends, despite the shenanigans. That means the percentage of the voters identifying as white had declined, while the nonwhite percentage continued to climb, especially the Hispanic share. Whites were 67% of the vote, while blacks remained at 13% and Hispanics are now at 13%. Here is what the vote would have looked like if everyone voted for either Trump or Biden.

2020
		Trump		Biden
Race	Vote Share	Win %	Vote Pct	Win %	Vote Pct
White	67	58%	38.86	42%	28.14
Black	13	12%	1.56	88%	11.44
Hispanic	13	32%	4.16	68%	8.84
Asian	4	34%	1.36	66%	2.64
Other	3	41%	1.23	59%	1.77
			47.17		52.83

Biden got 51.3% of the popular vote and Trump got 46.8% of the popular vote, so Biden lost more votes than Trump to third party candidates and none of the above. It should not take a mathematician to see the problem. Trump’s nonwhite vote is just 18% of his total vote and the ceiling is extremely low. He can bump it up a little with the black vote, but blacks see Republicans as the white party. Hispanics see the Democrats as the free stuff party, so the ceiling there is probably 40%.

The main problem for Trump or any Republican is that the white vote is shrinking and shrinking quickly as the baby boomers begin to age off. In 2016 the white vote was 70% of the total vote and in 2012 it was 72%. In the 1980 election 88% of the voters were white which is why the claim that we are going through a repeat of the 1970’s is wishful thinking by old people. Regardless, the white vote will be even smaller this time, which means Trump needs even more of it to win.

2024
		Trump		Block Of Wood
Race	Vote Share	Win %	Vote Pct	Win %	Vote Pct
White	65	65%	42.25	35%	22.75
Black	13	12%	1.56	88%	11.44
Hispanic	15	32%	4.80	68%	10.2
Asian	4	34%	1.36	66%	2.64
Other	3	41%	1.23	59%	1.77
			51.20		48.8

None of this is new math as it has been posted here many times, but the point is to explain how it is still possible for Trump to lose to a corpse. We are reaching a point where the only way a candidate representing the white middle-class can win the White House is if he gains the maximum share of the white vote. That maximum share is 80% as roughly 20% of whites suffer from high mutational load. These are the spiteful genetic defects we call the left.

Of course, there is a lot of time between now and November. The recent setbacks at the Supreme Court probably mean Trump gets jail time next week. In her dissent in the immunity case, Sotomayor spoke for the entire kook community when she said Trump could start randomly assassinating people once back in the White House. For kooks like the judge in the New York case, this means he must use any means necessary to stop the evil orange man from becoming dictator.

In other words, in a week the dogs will bark, and the caravan will move on from Biden’s death shuffle to Trump facing jail time. The regime media will have gotten the memo to stop talking about Biden and refocus on Trump. The fake pollsters will be churning out new fake polls, while the gremlins are printing off ballots. The point is the die is cast and there is no salvation at the ballot box. The most we can expect is some entertaining moments as we sink under the weight of demographic reality.

One Dimensional Chess

Posted on July 1, 2024 by thezman

Note: There is now a cinema behind the green door for those interested in watching me fumble through learning the ins and outs of video creation. There is a post about the Sean Connery classic science fantasy film Zardoz, a post about the economy and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Since the Thursday night debate at which Joe Biden looked like a hospice patient, there have been competing theories about whether it was a setup in order to push Biden out of the way or whether it was just another screwup. Basically, we have two competing theories of the crime. One says it is the work of those mysterious people in the hollowed-out volcano who control the world and the other theory says it is the work of people who are too stupid to run the machine they inherited.

The hollowed-out volcano theory side had the momentum on Thursday night as regime media started bellowing for Biden to step aside. It had the feel of that first weekend of the Ukraine war when every talking hairdo on television had a Ukraine flag lapel pin and was spasmodically saying “keev” at one another. The same people who were telling one another that Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack were suddenly competing with one another to condemn his family for rolling him out on stage.

The weekend was full of fake influencers and insiders assuring the internet that there were secret meetings happening at various places where the volcano people or their envoys would tell Biden to step aside. Bill O’Reilly, who most thought was dead, won the internet with a Seymour Hersh style scoop claiming that the decision to put a pillow over Joe Biden’s face had been made. Why anyone would think Bill O’Reilly has such privileged access is a topic for another day.

As the weekend wound down and the Great Pumpkin failed to rise from the pumpkin patch, the new narrative was that Jill Biden was preventing anyone from gaining access to Joe Biden in order to convince him to retire. Anyone who knows anything about the life of presidents knows this is impossible in the modern age. Since Reagan, the modern president is never alone. They have no control of their schedule. There are guards inside the toilet with them.

Anyway, this brings us back to those two main theories. It is becoming clear that the scheme to have the early debate was not part of a four-dimensional chess ploy plotted by the volcano people after all. It is entirely possible that some elements inside the regime pushed for the early debate in case Biden fumbled, but they did not have anything planned if such a thing happened. It is also possible they pushed for an early debate to get it out of the way, so people forget about it.

The truth is the political class no longer possesses second order thinking. This is the ability to think about the range of possible reactions to an action and then planning possible responses to those reactions. People with the ability to think this way weigh those possible reactions and then select their action in order to get the most favorable response, so they can then make their next move. Great chess players possess the ability to think many moves in advance.

The people running Washington lack this ability. It is why they are so enamored with narratives that often take the place of reality. They can only think about what they want as a final result, so they imagine a scenario that leads to that result and then work backward to some initial first step. It is at this point they launch their caper with their first move, just assuming everything they imagined will follow. Often, they celebrate as they are making that first move in anticipation of the prize.

This is why you see the phenomenon of accrued joy. This is when the managerial class creates a narrative that leads to their desired end and then pulls forward the happiness they will feel for that event to the present. Here is an example where the person is feeling joy over an imaginary choo-choo train project. This will never be built and will probably never get started. He can imagine it happening though, so he pretends it will happen and celebrates as if it has happened.

Putting that aside, this inability to think more than one step ahead is augmented by the fact that these people are unable to think about anything other than their own desires and how to achieve them. They never think about what comes next. We have seen this for over two years in the Ukraine war. Every move by the regime is just assumed to be a game changer and there is never any thought given to how the Russians will react or what will happen after this game changer.

That is most likely what we are seeing with Biden. The people who run things knew he was a vegetable back in 2020. They picked him because they hated Trump and just needed a compliant body for the election. No thought was given to how they would manage a man with dementia, much less run him for reelection. Now they want to be free of him and his crooked family, so they let him stagger out on stage and make a fool of himself in that debate Thursday night.

Again, no thought about what comes next, just the first move. It is as if they assume that the world will magically fall into place for them and produce a young vital candidate who can appeal to the public enough to rig the next election. Instead, they will be left to choose from zombies like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. Neither of whom have support in the party or the general public. Of course, Biden has yet to step aside and very well may choose to stick it out, despite it all.

This lack of second order thinking has another strange result. The system now seems to select for people who prefer chaos over order. If you cannot plan more than one move ahead, then a world where planning ahead has no reward, a world of random chaos, reduces the benefit of that ability. In other words, the mediocrities are creating an environment in which having a mediocre mind is an asset. Their impulsive behavior creates conditions that reward first order thinking.

What all of this points to is a random walk to the Democratic convention. Over the coming weeks the various tribes of the regime will make their game changing move, float their preferred narrative to the media and create more chaos. Given his condition, Biden could drop dead before the convention or, if Allah wills it, drop dead a week after the convention thus leaving Harpo Harris as the nominee. Chance has a sense of humor, but it always favors those with a prepared mind.

You Can Never Hate Them Enough

Posted on June 27, 2024 by thezman

To great fanfare Julian Assange struck a deal with the American government whereby he would be allowed to leave a British jail and return home to Australia. Reportedly, the deal he accepted was to plead guilty to some charges in exchange for a sentence of time served in the British jail. The full details of the deal have not been released, but most likely he gave the government information they wanted or sufficiently demonstrated that he was not in possession of it.

This was always the primary issue. Secret documents and information leak out of the government all the time, but the government knows who leaked it. Most of the time the leaks are official leaks. Someone with authorized access to something hands it over to someone in regime media to publish. Once in a while the people at the top of the regime get mad about this habit and demand to know the source, and the regime reporter puts on a show of resisting but gives in at the end.

Generally speaking, what the regime cares most about in the case of these leaks is the source of the leak and the method they used. If regime information is getting into the public through unknown channels or by unknown figures, it can not only lead to things in the public the regime does not want made public, but it threatens the legitimacy of the regime for the people inside the regime. Blackmail, for example, only works when the victim is sure the blackmailer has control of the information.

A big part of what makes the managerial system of the Global American Empire work is the trust the people in the system have in the system. The yawning gap we see between the confidence of regime figures and their ability is due in large part to their trust in the system. For them, the system works, so they naturally assume their elevation inside the system is due to merit. A loss of control of the system could lead to a loss of trust and the whole thing spins apart.

Putting that aside, the only good thing about Assange getting released is that the worst people can no longer wave around that bloody shirt. For close to two decades, fringy irritants have been using the Assange case to demonstrate their moral purity and to defend the crackpot idea that journalism is a priesthood. Their defense of Assange always rested on the dubious claim that journalists have special rights and therefore must not be subject to the laws governing the rest of us.

You see, once you call yourself a journalist, you get to ignore the rules of decency, the laws governing private property and declare yourself a moral authority. You get to betray confidences and deceive people about your intentions. You also get to steal the property of others and use it for personal gain. All the while, you get to wrinkle up your nose as if you caught wind of a bad odor and lecture the rest of us about your moral goodness and our moral failings.

The game here was to hold Assange up as a paragon of virtue because he was upholding the highest standards of journalism. He was doing the same thing major media does all the time, namely revealing secrets about the regime. In reality, Assange was just trying to avoid an American prison. Like every other person calling himself a journalist, Assange was a dirtbag and a thief. He trafficked in stolen goods for personal benefit and when he got caught, he tried to avoid punishment.

If you are clear headed about this, the correct response to the Assange case is the opposite than that of the moralizers. Information is property and people who traffic in stolen information should be treated like any other thief. In fact, they should be treated more harshly. Stolen property can be replaced, but stolen information is often irreplaceable and the damage that ensues from its theft can last a lifetime. Information thieves should be killed on the spot.

In other words, the right response to the Assange case was not to treat him as a hero but to demand that all journalists get the same treatment. Imagine a world where doxers have to flee the country and hide out in embassies to avoid being sent to prison and you will immediately see the logic. Imagine if the people who stole Trump’s tax returns and gave them to the New York Times were sent to the gallows along with the people who agreed to publish them. Nice thought, isn’t it?

The defense of journalism has always been a moral perversion. The worst people a society can produce end up in journalism. The fact that they from time to time do harm to terrible people is not just used as a reason to elevate these garbage people, but a reason to sacralize their gutter morality. Journalists are good people, so the reasoning goes, because they are more degenerate than politicians. Assange was celebrated because he represented the ideal of this gutter morality.

Those calling themselves journalists, but lack a place in regime media, have noted that regime journalists have been silent on Assange. The main reason is regime journalists are moral nullities. They envy the attention Assange is getting, so they use the only power they have to smite him. The main power of regime media is the power to ignore, so they were happy to ignore Assange. There is no honor among thieves, so the thieving weasels of the media can never honor one of their own.

Despite his position at the bottom of the moral hierarchy, Assange was useful as a regime irritant, thus proving no life is entirely meaningless. Hopefully, his final contribution is to sink quietly into obscurity. The moralizers who have used his name to elevate the worst profession and the worst people will have to find a new bloody shirt to wave around in defense of the despicable trade. The rest of us can return to hating the worst people, because you can never hate them enough.

The Dangerous Game

Posted on June 25, 2024 by thezman

During the Cold War, planners concluded that nuclear war would most likely result from two closely related factors. One was the breakdown of communications between Washington and Moscow at all levels. It was not just the red phone between the Kremlin and the White House, but communications across both systems. The other factor that would lead to war was uncertainty about the other side’s intentions. This fear could result in runaway escalation ending in nuclear disaster.

The remedy for this was to maintain communications at all levels of government with the other side so that both sides knew the nuclear posture of the other. The American military had a range of contacts with the Russian military. The spy agencies had contacts with one another across a range of issues and regions. Members of Western media and the academy developed contacts with their analogs on an unofficial basis on behalf of the intel agencies.

The main reason the Cold War did not end in nuclear annihilation is that the two great managerial systems institutionalized communications in such a way that it became a specialty with career opportunities. In Russia, being an expert in some aspect of America meant a good life as a member of the new class. In America, having some expertise on Russia meant a comfortable life in the clouds. The Cold War standoff became a jobs program for both sides.

The selection pressure on both sides was for second and third order thinking, as both sides had an investment in the status quo. Foreign policy advisors in America thought about the downstream consequences of their recommendations because it could have a direct impact on their employment prospects. Similarly, on the Russian side, the pressure was always there to think about how the Americans would react as getting that wrong could mean being posted to the Urals.

This is what makes the present so dangerous. Washington’s proxy war with Russia lacks both the incentives to prevent escalation and the sorts of people who see it as their purpose to prevent escalation. Washington has cut off communications with Moscow and works to prevent others from developing their own channels. Europe has little contact now with Russia. The primary goal of Washington is to isolate Moscow, which means isolating the West from the world.

We see how this works in the recent beach attack in Crimea. Washington provides Ukraine with long range guided missiles. Ukraine lacks the ability to use them, so the American military provides the targeting and guidance of them, while the Ukrainians operate the ground-based launchers. Over the weekend, one of the missiles, which was armed with cluster munitions, hit a busy beach, killing half a dozen civilians and wounding hundreds of others.

This was most likely an accident. Either the targeting was wrong, as there is a military base nearby, or the missile malfunctioned. It is possible the air defense system knocked the missile off course instead of destroying it. It is also possible that the Ukrainians, in league with their neocon handlers, did something to target the missiles at civilian infrastructure, which has happened in the past. There is the rumor that the real target was the big Orthodox cathedral nearby.

The point is no one knows and more importantly, no one in Moscow knows what the intent was behind this attack. The Russians have stated that they think it was deliberate and they blame Washington. Moscow summoned the American ambassador, presumably to deliver a warning about future reprisals. Putin made clear that Moscow will retaliate, and it may not be against Ukraine. Everyone is left to guess as to what they mean but the empire has targets all over the world.

What has developed is a game of chicken in which the Biden administration keeps escalating, daring the Russians to respond, while the Russians try to figure out what Washington is actually trying to achieve. There is no benefit to the Russians in escalation, so they seek to avoid it. Logically, there is no benefit to the West in escalation, but they keep escalating, so Russia is left to guess as to what is the real motivation behind these escalations.

Where this leaves us is a place that is the reverse of the Cold War. There is no communication between the two sides and neither side knows what the other side is thinking or planning. On the surface, the Russian position is clear, but Western propaganda has anathematized accepting it at face value. The coordinated attacks on Nigel Farage from the entire political class is a good example. Merely pointing out the obvious gets you called a traitor.

It is easy to see how this can end horrifically. If the Russians, for example, declare a no-fly zone over the Black Sea, it is likely that Washington will keep sending drones toward Crimea and the Russians will have to knock them down. Washington will then send manned aircraft or maybe a British ship to threaten the Russian fleet. Such a situation could easily spiral out of control because one side thinks it can do anything it likes, and the other side knows it has to draw the line somewhere.

That gets to the heart of the matter. Over the last thirty years in the absence of that old Cold War system, the neocons have taken control of the foreign policy establishment to the point where there is no dissent in Washington. The system is now controlled by fanatics who lack second order thinking. Like all fanatics, the neocons see only that which satisfies their fanaticism. As a result, they imagine every move is furtherance of their goal of destroying their ancient enemy.

There is also the fact that America is a fading empire that still assumes Francis Fukuyama was right and this is the end of history. Thirty years of selecting for people good at enjoying the fruits of victory has left the managerial class in the West stocked with obsequious, narrow-minded dullards. A Jake Sullivan is in his position because he never asks questions and never has an original thought. These people are easily manipulated by the psychopaths of the Kagan cult.

The ultimate question that is being answered at the moment is whether the Global American Empire will go out with a bang or a whimper. In the fullness of time that will be the real history of this age. The emerging great powers of the world are trying to manage the decline of the West and the transition to a multipolar world, while the people running the West play a game of chicken. The reckless management of the Ukraine war suggests it will not end well.

Gradually And Then Suddenly

Posted on June 19, 2024 by thezman

The Brits are set to have an election on July 4th, ironically enough, and everyone expects it to be a terrible result for the ruling party. The Tories have been in power for a long time and have managed to break every promise they made when they gained power and make everything worse that they promised to improve. On top of that they have gone through a series of ridiculous people as Prime Minister. The current person in the job is an Indian little person who has never run for office.

The reason the Conservatives called what the Brits call “snap elections”, is the people who actually run Britain are worried about new right-wing parties. Snap elections are those called on short notice in some parliamentary systems. The logic behind it is that the ruling party can more easily rig an election when they are out of favor by limiting the time for the opposition to mount a campaign. Democracy depends on institutional skullduggery to maintain its legitimacy.

According to current polling, which is as fraudulent as everything else in the West these days, the Conservatives are at 21%, which is their lowest rating ever. This is why there is a campaign called Zero Seats. The argument is that the only way to break the corrupt system is to eliminate one of the two main parties. Since the Tories are as popular as rectal cancer, they are the best target. While unlikely, it is possible to see a scenario in which they become a fringe party.

It is not all bad news for the Conservatives. Their historic dance partner, Labour, is polling at just 41%, which is terrible given the status of the Tories. Like America, the game of see-saw the parties play says that when one face of the ruling class is unpopular, the other face is popular. Right now, in the UK, both faces of the ruling class are unpopular, which is why they forced snap elections. No respectable person wants to see a new party rise up and challenge the system.

Just in case, the regime has brought Nigel Farage back from America where he was committed to stumping for Donald Trump. Farage is now the leader of the Reform Party, which is the heir to the Brexit Party. He created that after he successfully led the winning side in the Brexit referendum. The party was created to force the regime to follow through on the referendum, which they did not do. It is one of the reasons UK politics are such a mess now.

The only reason any of this matters is it is a good way to see how the system adjusts to defend itself from public discontent. The British regime is just the mini-me of the American regime, so it is a microcosm of what happens in America. The scale is smaller, and the system is slightly different, but we see all the same tricks used by the regime to make sure it is always heads they win and tails you lose. One of those tricks is to co-opt discontent into an acceptably pointless channel.

You can see how it works in the program the Reform Party posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, the other day. They put immigration at the top because this is one of the top issues that is rustling the voters. To the untrained eye it all looks good, but to the trained eye the fraud is quite clear. The point of their program is to not question the moral claims behind immigration, but to put a fence around that morality so the question is how to best manage mass immigration.

Look at the first point. “Freeze non-essential Immigration.” The only reason to have the term “non-essential Immigration” is if you have “essential Immigration”, which is a moral claim held by the people Farage claims to oppose. Who decided that any immigration is essential and essential to whom? Was it the bankers who actually run the country or was it the managerial elite who adopted it as a luxury belief? Who decides what is and what is not essential about immigration?

Here is another example. “All asylum seekers that arrive illegally from safe countries will be processed rapidly, offshore if necessary.” Logically, the UK should never receive any asylum seekers as by law and logic, asylum seekers go to the nearest safe country for temporary refuge while the home country is in turmoil. The UK is a set of islands bordered by countries that are stable “democracies” so there can never be a case where anyone seeks asylum in the UK.

The point of this weaselly language is two-fold. One is it is the natural obsequiousness that infests all Western right-wing parties. They have the slave mentality, which means they are always bowing and scraping before the people they pretend to oppose with regards to the moral claims of the ruling elite. The other reason is it tend to work as people just see the headlines and never think about the qualifiers. Owning the libs is a universal concept in Western democracies.

Of course, putting an entertaining clown like Farage up as the front man is a great way to distract from this reality. People are mad and lack the sophistication to understand the issues in detail, so Farage provides a vent for their frustration by pretending to be on their side, when in reality he fully supports the moral framework that is the root cause of their frustration. Farage and his Reform Party are what James Carville once called “boob bit for the bubbas.”

The genius of the trick is it will work. Reform is now polling within a few points of the Tories at 16% in the government polls. In other polls they are in a statistical dead heat with the Tories. If they overtake them, then the people angry at the system will claim victory for having knocked out the Tories. Meanwhile, gangs of Muslims are chasing their daughters through the streets. If Reform flops, then they can focus their energy on being angry at Labour for a few years.

For Americans, this should sound familiar. The usual suspects co-opted the Tea Party to become a subsidiary of the Republican Party. What could have been a threat to the system was quickly neutralized. The current populist groundswell has been slowly co-opted by oleaginous grifters who run around wearing red caps and talking about Trump like he is Orange Jesus. Meanwhile, Trump’s platform is now no different from what Jeb Bush was offering in 2016.

This may sound black-pilling and depressing, but the white pill in what is happening with populist parties all around the West is they are gnawing away at the legitimacy of the system by forcing these reactions. The dullards in the UK fall for Farage, but there are lots of people who have gotten wise to this stuff by watching him work. In the U.S., the Trump phenomenon has opened the eyes of many to the reality of the system, simply by seeing the system react to Trump.

In other words, the process by which a system loses its legitimacy is through its various mutations to defend itself from challenges. The number of people wondering if the system should be saved is a measurable number now, thanks to the struggle the system has undergone to defend against even mild reform. The same is true all over as people increasingly notice the unwillingness of the system to give an inch on critical issues like immigration and culture.

The old line from Hemingway about bankruptcy being gradually then suddenly applies to all complex systems. Failed populist uprisings and Potemkin opposition movements are the gradually portion of the show. With every failure to get even a tiny concession from the system, the system loses legitimacy. At some point, and no one ever knows when it will happen, the suddenly part of the show begins. In order to get there, you have to work through the gradually part first.

Modern Youth Politics Inc.

Posted on June 17, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about my experiments with time travel and a series of daily travelogues about my time in Motown for AFPAC, which was much more interesting than I expected. Subscribe here or here.

Symbolism is one of the aspects of all politics, regardless of political system, which tends to get missed by political people. This is especially true of those we call the right, who are often deep in the weeds of ideology or theory. They are like experts on paint who are more concerned with the type of paint used by the great artist than the actual painting he created and its larger meaning. You see this with the reaction to the Nick Fuentes movement that just had its big party this past weekend.

Since he started to gain a following, critics have struggled to find a good way to attack him, as they often get tangled up in the symbolism. He became a national figure during the 2016 MAGA movement, but shot to the top with the 2020 election, where he toured the country holding rallies in the “stop the steal” days. He would gather up young fans and give speeches via bullhorn outside of state capitols. It was reminiscent of the radical protests of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

That was the point, more than the actual content of the protests. It is a form of guerilla marketing in which the counter to the well-financed and carefully choregraphed messaging from the regime is the apparently organic rejection of that message and the people behind the messaging. In other words, the point was not what they were saying at these events. The whole point of the event was to tell the world they exist, despite the mass propaganda from the regime.

This has always had another function for Fuentes. It tells the disaffected youth that there is a place they can go to be with other likeminded people. They see these things happening on their preferred platforms. They get talked up in the online spaces these young people frequent and most importantly, they get criticized by the sorts of people who make good foils for Fuentes. Like all good political animals, Fuentes tends to attract the sorts of critics he needs to make his points.

It is important to note that it has been a long time since someone has come along with the skill of Fuentes in terms of generating excitement. There is an electricity around his events that you never see at other political events. He understands his audience because in reality, Fuentes is his audience. He is trying to create the sort of excitement he and they learned about in history class. He is building a youth movement that mirrors what he thinks it was like in the Reagan or Kennedy years.

This is why the marketing of Nick Fuentes and American First looks like it is put together by profession marketing people. He and his entourage arrive at their impromptu rallies wearing the American First gear, which you can buy at the AF store and the crowd always has the same look at feel. He is always surrounded by guys holding up their mobile device who are surrounded by young men in blue blazers chanting the familiar chants that have become a defining feature of this thing.

While it looks like great marketing, it is genuinely organic. Much has been said about the fact that this generation is the first to be socialized online, but they are also the first generation to be saturated in and socialized by marketing. To old people, the thoroughly commercialized culture of today feels alien and weird. To the young people raised in it, it feels normal. It is simply a habit of mind. The people you see at a Fuentes rally are just falling into the role that fits them best.

In a way, it is as if life has become a video game. They play the character that they feel comfortable playing. Instead of being the barbarian character in the online game, they are the guy holding the cell phone up next to Nick. The archers fall into the role of standing in the back yelling the familiar slogans at Nick. Of course, there are the Leroy Jenkins characters at these things. That would be the black guy dressed as Playa Maga or the has-been grifters like David Duke.

This is what trips up his “right-wing” critics. They see the assorted kooks and weirdos that turn up at these events and then fashion an argument against Fuentes and his followers that often reduces to petty jealousy. Fuentes is doing what many of them said was impossible, mostly because they lacked the skill and courage to try and do the things that Fuentes is doing in terms of public demonstration. Calling Fuentes a grifter is a way to feel good about losing.

When you talk to the people at a Fuentes event, and in Detroit they were everywhere Saturday evening, they will tell you that people like Sneako are not really part of the movement but something like the court jester. They lack the sophistication to explain it, but they sense that the point of these colorful characters is to decorate the public face of the movement as something like an inside joke. The critics do not get it, which is why they are not in it.

Therein lies the genuine problem for this thing. It is like everything else in the modern mass media age in that it is just a thing you do until the next thing comes along. It is why Fuentes has had to keep shifting the focus and changing the characters in what is more like a long running reality television show than a political movement. Every season you get a new character and some new issues. It is not that it is a grift or he is not serious, but rather this is what this generation thinks is serious.

Another way to think of it is the films from twenty years ago where the walls between virtual reality and reality break down and you have a character from the digital world enter the real world or vice versa. This is what is happening for a generation raised on mass media, mass marketing within the context of virtual reality where the worst thing that can happen to you is your character dies. The politics of this generation are the politics of the internet, not the meat space.

Politics as professional wrestling is fun for the twenty-somethings who are naturally drawn to it, but in time they will have to have real lives. You see this transition in some of the older young people who are now working and on their own. Standing outside a Nick rally yelling those slogans feels foolish to them. That is the most likely way this thing unfolds over the next few years. The youthful excitement and superficiality will give way to more mature and serious politics.

This raises the question of the expiry date for Nick Fuentes. All pop stars who court the youth audience run into the same problem. There comes a point where their act goes from opportunistic to weird. They get too old for their market. Fuentes looks like he is a teenager, so he has time, but at some point, he will have to follow his older audience into a more mature form of politics. The question that remains unasked and unanswered is whether he will lead them or follow them.

The Euros And Ukraine

Posted on June 13, 2024 by thezman

During Covid, one of the questions that kicked around was how would the public react when they found out the government was lying? The answer is we do not know as the whole thing has been thrown down the memory hole for the most part. The truth about Covid has slowly seeped into the public consciousness, but no one asks them about it and no media outlet discusses it. The best anyone can tell is that the Covid lies have become a part of the general cynicism.

We will soon get another case to see how the public will respond when the truth is nothing like what they have been told by the media. In the case of Project Ukraine, this test will happen in Europe where the local media talks about the war in Ukraine in terms that have always been fanciful. It was European media that gave us the “Ghost of Kiev” and the babushkas knocking down fighter jets with canned goods. They continue to feed their public outlandish stories about the war.

Those with an interest in the war and access to the internet can find out what is actually happening on the battlefield. The facts are often blurred by the fog of war and the bias of the people doing the reporting, but with some patience you can get a good picture of what is happening in Ukraine. It is even possible to get a sense of what is happening outside the war zone as there are still plenty of Ukrainians posting stuff to popular apps like Telegram and Instagram.

Very little of this reality gets into Europeans media. Instead, they produce content like this from the UK Telegraph, which is supposed to be a serious media platform, not the typical British tabloid. Not only are they “reporting” that Ukrainian “wonder weapons are decimating the Russians”, but they also have a special section with high production quality explanations of those wonder weapons. In other words, this is a highly choregraphed bit of propaganda designed to deceive the public.

The wonder weapon stuff is mild compared to some of the other posts you will find about Ukraine in the Telegraph. This one claims the Ukrainians are about to seize Crimea because their squadrons of unicorns are showering the place with magical fairy dust they shoot from their ass. That is not an exaggeration, as magical farting unicorns would be more plausible than the contents of the actual post. The whole thing is a fantasy with no basis in reality.

It is not just the UK media that is gaslighting the public. The German media is full of similarly nonsensical stories. Here is the Ukraine page for Bild, which you can use Google to translate into English. Die Zeit is probably the most respected news site in Germany, and it just copies and pastes whatever Kiev, or the neocons send them about what is happening in the war. While not as ridiculous as the UK media, the continental media is gaslighting its public just as hard.

The problem is the war is going horribly for Ukraine. The Russian army is slowly and methodically grinding the Ukraine army into bits. Every month the Ukrainians are forced to fall back at some point along the line of contact. The Russians have knocked out the power grid of the country, which means there is no electric for up to twenty hours per day in some areas. The Ukrainian army is literally snatching men off the streets and sending them to the front due to a lack of manpower.

What Ukraine war watchers have known for a long time is that at some point, the Ukraine army will not be able to keep fighting. At some point, the Russians will decide it is time to end the war on its terms. Given that this is a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, the assumption is the fall is when things come to a head, just in time for the presidential election. Maybe it will happen sooner or maybe later, but at some point, reality will burst through those European headlines.

From a distance, it is hard to know if the firehose of nonsense about the war is fooling the European public. The recent elections suggest that at the minimum the public is tired of the ruling parties putting the welfare of Ukraine ahead of the welfare of the European people. It is possible that the Euros have been wise to the media nonsense about Ukraine, but simply care more about other things. Like Covid, it is hard to know as no one bothers to find out what the public thinks.

Unlike Covid, the collapse of Project Ukraine is not going to be easy to sweep under the rug by ignoring it. With Covid, the liars scurried off with their bags of cash and the pols declared victory as they let their foot off the neck of the public. The general public was simply happy to get back to normal. That is probably not going to work with Ukraine as there is no benefit to putting the topic in the past. There will simply be what the media claimed to be true and the truth, which is the opposite.

Compounding the problem in Europe is the fact that the leading politicians have made Ukraine their signature issue. In the U.S., the pols have been giving it a good leaving alone for a year now, other than the big funding push in February. Note that as soon as that bill passed, they changed the subject. In Europe, the political class has made Ukraine a test of their legitimacy. Therefore, when the Ukraine army surrenders, they cannot shrug and move on to other issues.

One of the lessons of the Soviet era was that the accumulation of lies eventually saps even the most repressive regime of legitimacy. The Soviet system fell apart when no one could think of a reason to support it, not even the people at the top of the system who benefitted from it the most. In this way, Ukraine and Covid may be analogous to Afghanistan and Chernobyl. These are events that delegitimize the system by making clear that nothing it says or does is on the level.

America Inc.

Posted on June 10, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about grammar robots, a post the general weirdness of dissident politics and the Sunday podcast, which thankfully had nothing to do about Trump or the anti-Trump kooks. Subscribe here or here.

One of the criticisms of the paleoconservatives is that they never got around to formulating an explanation for why the managerial state emerged. They did a good job describing it and how it differed from the straightforward administrative bureaucracies that have been a part of society since Diocletian. How the bureaucracy transitioned from instrument of the ruling elite into a ruling elite itself has remained a bit of mystery, with only some stabs here and there at an explanation.

The fault probably lies with Burnham, who was the first guy to create a political theory from observing the emergence of the managerial system. He wrote his most famous book, The Managerial Revolution, during the Second World War when the Nazis were at the peak of their power. Therefore, his understanding of managerialism was shaped by the militant authoritarianism of it. Burnham was still a communist, so this no doubt played a role in his understanding of managerialism.

The emergence of managerialism in interwar Europe is easy to explain simply by pointing to the conditions that prevailed after the Great War. Fascism emerged on the losing side of the war because of the chaos that emerged as a result of the collapse of the old order and the general lunacy of liberalism and communism as they fought to fill the void left by the old order. Fascism rode the popular demand for a return of order to power in places like German and Italy.

Once in power, the fascists had to actually govern. The existing institutions they inherited were either badly damaged by the war and the post-war chaos or antiquated holdovers from the prior era. Managerialism provided both a blueprint for governing but also a source of authority. Gather up the best people and set them to work rebuilding infrastructure, the economy, and the state. Once they began to make progress, public support for the system provided the necessary legitimacy.

This model for managerialism being a modern, industrial response to both the collapse of the old order and the chaos of the present works pretty well for the emergence of it in communist Russia. The collapse of the tsarist system and the Russian civil war left Russia as a chaotic mess. Into that void flowed Stalin first inside the party and then as something of an industrial age tsar. He gathered up and developed an army of people to manage, govern and control the new Soviet society.

That same process does not work for America, where managerialism emerged at the same time as it did in Europe. Many have noted the parallels between FDR’s New Deal revolution and the emergence of fascism in Europe. Until the war, many New Deal progressives were fans of Mussolini. They never liked Hitler, due to his crudeness and antisemitism, but they liked Mussolini. There was in the 1930’s a great deal of cross pollination between the two systems.

America, however, was not emerging from a failed war and its political order was not destroyed as a result of it. On the contrary, America was remarkably stable in the aftermath of the economic collapse in the 1930’s and the political system seemed to be working very well. There is no doubt that FDR revolutionized the relationship between the citizen and the state during this period, but he did not do so in response to the loss of legitimacy of the old arrangements.

It should also be noted that the managerialism that emerged in America was different from the militaristic version that emerged in the fascist countries, which built upon trench socialism. Similarly, Stalin’s managerialism was a way to recapture the collective spirit of the revolutionary years in which the Bolsheviks finally seized power and won the civil war. The managerial revolution of FDR was softer and an outgrowth of volunteerism of early America.

Therein lies a clue as to why managerialism emerged in America. Through the 19th century, Americans were largely governed by local association. Other than the post office and military service, the typical American had little reason to think about the federal government. It was an abstraction. Even state government played a limited role in his life compared to local government and the community associations that defined the life of most Americans.

The industrial revolution changed America by urbanizing large chunks of the population, thus destroying rule by association for large numbers of people. The shift from industrial work also changed the relationship between the man and his work by making it individualistic rather than communal. The failure of a farmer impacts many more people than the farmer and his family. The failure of a factory worker is a burden only on the worker and his family. Work became a solitary pursuit.

Like the rise of managerialism, the rise of individualism is one of those things that many recognize as a problem, but no can explain. Why all of a sudden did Europeans stop thinking collectively and start thinking individually? Racial solidarity among Europeans was so natural it did not require a vocabulary to describe. Today we have a vast array of labels to describe white ethnic and racial solidarity, despite the fact that it barely exists and only in the virtual reality of the internet.

As work isolated men from one another, the natural response was to think individually and see the man next you as competition. This was obviously good for the factory owner, so work in many cases became a competitive arena, a Hobbesian existence where the owner harnessed this war of all against all to increase productivity, reduce costs and maximize profits. The result was a class of citizen who was no longer defined by community but by alienation from community.

This alienation inevitably led to unhappiness as man is a social animal and evolved to be so within small groups. The emergence of masses of Americans living in big cities fighting one another for wages lead to a disenchantment of the world. The rise of urban political machines was one consequence. Another consequence was a looking inward for spiritual happiness. When community can no longer provide a larger purpose to life, the only option is to seek it individually.

The shift from community man to individual man naturally leads to the individual abandoning his duties to the community. Self-government rests on the assumption that the bulk of the citizens have a moral duty to the whole. Who they are is not just what they have or even what they contribute to the whole. A big part of what defines the community man’s sense of self is the success of his community. Individual man lacks this entirely, so he has no reason to participate.

This is the same void of order into which managerialism flowed in interwar Europe and post-tsarist Russia. The tutelary state that emerged in America in the 20th century was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but simply filled the void left by a growing population of people uninterested in anything outside their window. Urban and now suburban peasants needed the protection of the state because as atomized individuals, they were no longer willing to participate in their own protection.

This is why the state has also become a church of sorts. Much of what the managerial state does is moral guidance. Painting rainbows on crosswalks and then daring anyone to defile them is intended to create sinners so the priests of the system can punish those sinners thus providing the needed moral instruction. What used to be done by community pressure and the local minister is now done by credentialled members of a faceless and remorseless managerial class.

Managerialism is the natural form of government for an industrial people as it mimics the life of the industrial worker. Republican government and aristocratic government reflected the reality of the people, who were primarily organized around communal activities like farming and trade. Twentieth century America turned into a continent-sized business park occupied by one business, American Inc. Like every business, America Inc. needed a management class, so it got one.

The question is can this model survive the post-industrial age? America began to deindustrialize fifty years ago. The old industrial model of governance has tried to adapt to the transition to the information economy, but managing information is vastly more difficult than managing capital and labor. In fact, it may not even be possible to manage information without poisoning the minds of the managers. The current crisis may simply be due to this problem.

On the other hand, it may be that you cannot have a society organized around marshaling data and data frameworks. Perhaps America Inc. is simply a legacy business parasiting off the societies that continue to make things, fix things, dig things from the ground and invent things. Perhaps the end point of managerialism is the same for all antiquated business models. The current crisis is the struggle to avoid the inevitable bankruptcy of the managerial system.

Escalatory Delusions

Posted on May 30, 2024 by thezman

Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.

If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.

This is the engine that has been driving the war in Ukraine. For close to a decade the Russians have objected to what Washington has been doing on its border in Ukraine, but Washington has responded with the promise of more of what the Russians found objectionable, rather than search for a compromise. Once the Russians crossed into Ukraine, Washington unleashed the sanctions war and promised even more punishments, including the promise of regime change.

Throughout the war, the approach from Washington has been to create some artificial red line for themselves or Russia, and then cross it in such a way as to suggest all future red lines will be crossed. Currently NATO is having a debate about launching long range missile attacks on Russia, from NATO countries or with NATO personnel, while pretending it is being done by Ukraine. This is the bully threatening the kid who refuses to back down with something worse than backing down.

Unreported in the West, Ukraine has been using Western supplied drones to attack early warning radar stations in southern Russia. These are part of Russia’s nuclear defense system. They play no role in the Ukraine war, but Ukraine’s handlers are having them do this as a form of escalatory dominance. The point is to signal to the Russians that the West is not afraid of nuclear war. The madness of this is obvious, but to a great degree that is the point, to seem mad.

We see a similar thing shaping up with China. Washington is going out of its way to provoke China over the issue of Taiwan. Various officials have been sent to the island for no other reason than to antagonize the Chinese. A big package of weapons has been shipped to Taiwan and Washington has increased the number of military personnel on the island. Washington regularly talks about how it is actively preparing for a war with the Chinese over the issue of Taiwan.

A great example of how the concept of escalatory dominance controls how American ruling elites deal with the world is the last trip by Anthony Blinken to China in which he went out of his way to insult the Chinese. The State Department insisted on Blinken visiting China, where he held meetings with Chinese leaders. He then went out of those meetings and threatened them with sanctions. This was done to let the Chinese know that there is no red line Washington will not cross.

This is not just a foreign policy strategy. The reason Trump is waiting to hear a guilty verdict is the regime has always assumed that if they cross enough red lines with regards to the rule of law, Trump or his supporters will fold. For going on four years, it has been ever increasing violence against both the rule of law and the customs that have controlled our politics. The point of each new escalation is to warn that there is no limit to what they will do unless you obey.

It is the unquestioned assumption in Washington that there is always some threat they can issue that is so terrifying that the other side will back down that has led them into a crisis for the regime. Half the country now thinks the courts are corrupt beyond reform thanks to the lawfare unleashed by the regime. We are remarkably close to the point where a majority of Americans think we are ruled by lawless gangsters, which even in easy times is an impossible state of affairs.

The crisis gripping the West is due, in large part, to the fact that the system now selects boys and girls with no practical knowledge. Never having had their bluff called and walking away with a bloody nose or a black eye, they just assume such a thing is impossible, so they are free to escalate their threats. It is not so much that their threats work, but that they ought to work. In the artificial reality in which these people live, the ought is the same as the is.

The Trump trial is a good bit of foreshadowing for how this widely held delusion about escalatory dominance will end. At some point, the bluff is called, and the bluffer has to either follow through or their raison d’etre evaporates. This is the story of the bully who finally has to fight and gets beaten. It is not the beating that ends his reign as a bully, but the fact that someone stood up to him. This is what is happening with the lawfare against Trump, who has called their bluff.

Unlike the schoolyard, the end of a regime that relies on escalatory dominance is not so simple and tidy. The regime now has to hope the Trump trial ends in a hung jury so they can maintain their stance. An acquittal has them looking like fools and a guilty verdict has them in a crisis far worse than Trump winning the election. Soon, the bluff will be called over Ukraine and Taiwan. Once this happens, the regime has no answer other than the unthinkable.

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