A Surprise Ending

Posted on August 16, 2023 by thezman

The latest indictments of Donald Trump are a good example of how narrative is a controlling feature of the managerial state. This is the fourth batch of indictments and arguably the most ridiculous. The players on the side of the regime are like characters from a racial satire. The fact that they accidentally posted the results before the grand jury vote is what we have come to expect in the crisis of competency. It is as if the regime is trying to prove the critics are right.

Putting aside the idiocy of it all, the interesting bit is how narrative drives the actions of the elites even when the narrative is false. They come up with a scenario for how things will unfold in their favor over some period of time. This gains circulation among the elites and their key servants in the managerial class. Those key servants then announce the narrative to the media, who then scurry about repeating it in various ways until it becomes the consensus.

We see this with the Trump indictments. Before the first indictment, there were rumors about the Department of Justice looking into Trump. Then we had some stories about pressure on Merrick Garland to appoint a special investigator to look into Trump’s role in the January 6 stuff. It was at this point the key servants arrived to deliver the narrative on the Trump indictment. They wrote op-eds and appeared on cable chat shows to explain to the media what will happen.

What would happen is this. Trump would be indicted for mean words and one of three things would follow. He would be disqualified under the 14th amendment. He would drop out of the race. The Republican Party would disqualify him. All of this assumed that once he was indicted, his support would collapse. The only people supporting him would be QAnon weirdos and election deniers. This could then be used to pressure him if pressure were needed.

Once the official narrative was announced, the race was on to be the star of the show that got the ball rolling. The affirmative action guy in New York pulled the lucky ticket and indicted Trump for the crime of paying his bills on time. The excitement among the media was as if they were waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive. They were about to see the fulfillment of the narrative. Trump showed up, got charged and then continued campaigning as his popularity spiked up.

It took a little while for the media to figure out that the narrative was not playing out as they had been promised. CNN had a townhall hosted by their new you-go-girl that was supposed to be a roasting of Trump over his legal issues. To their horror, you-go-girl was not as good on stage as on the couch. Trump all but put her over his knee for a good spanking. Worse yet, the audience turned on the bimbo and laughed along with Trump at the idiocy of the whole thing.

Instead of backtracking on the narrative, we got two sets of Federal indictments of Trump, along with the same story lines from the prior indictment. The only thing missing was a Greek chorus chanting, “We got him this time. There is no way he escapes the narrative after this indictment.” Of course, in both cases Trump’s polling has gone up as people begin to see him as a victim of a malevolent system. At this point, the official Trump narrative should have collapsed.

Instead, we have a fresh batch of indictments. There is also word that other states with crackpot governors are looking to indict Trump. It is becoming something like the iPod craze back in the before times. All of the fashionable people in the provinces now want an indictment of Trump like the cool people have in the big cities. At this rate, the Europeans will be indicting Trump. Maybe they can drag him to the Hague for crimes against humanity for eating his steak well done.

Note that in each effort to push the narrative along the focus has been on humiliating Trump in the process. In this new show from Georgia, the first thing they did was announce that they will mugshot Trump and spread the pic online. The fact that they continue to think they can humiliate this man by making him more popular is a staggering indictment of these people. Trump will be selling shirts with his mugshot on them to raise millions for his campaign.

The Trump business is just a recent example. The war on Russia has been controlled by elite narrative framing. It is the same process. They created a narrative of Russian collapse and instead of updating the narrative in the face of disconfirmation, they reinvent the narrative with new features, like a counter-offensive or now the new spring of 2024 Ukrainian offensive. No matter what reality is doing, the narrative must be protected, even if it could bring disaster.

This is something to keep in mind as the economy falters this autumn. People in the dreaded private sector will tell you that things are not great in the economy, and it has all the signs of a recession. Inflation is not defeated, despite claims to the contrary, and oil prices are rising just in time for the heating season. The rise in the cost of money is starting to have its effect on the economy. Now China is admitting that it is headed to recession, due to slack demand from the West.

This is happening while the regime prepares to run the corpse of Joe Biden as the man who not only saved the world from Trump, but the man who singlehandedly saved the economy from disaster. The key servants have been out instructing the media on the new narrative about the economy. This means we will be flooded with stories about the economic miracle just as the economy is tipping into recession. Such a disconnect is the sort of thing that causes revolutions.

That is what may be the death of our regime. The people at the top of it live in a world of narratives that are independent of reality. They are so sure they can compel reality to fit their version of reality that they cannot imagine an alternative ending. The Tsar, no doubt, could not imagine an alternative ending to his narrative. The many people who met the national razor never were shocked by the end to their narrative. Our rulers may be in for a surprise ending too.

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The Cult Of Nick

Posted on August 15, 2023 by thezman

A few years ago, the fans of Nick Fuentes were no different from the fans of any of the other internet personalities that inhabit the video space. They liked his work and felt like they knew enough about him to like him personally. This is the unique aspect of video compared to audio and the written word. There is always a stronger emotional connection with the audience in the video format. Otherwise, Nick Fuentes was just another popular YouTube guy.

Since then, much has changed. Fuentes has inserted himself into the Trump story in ways that other political entertainers have avoided. He participated in the “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election. He was at the infamous J6 rally. He was by far the most enthusiastic supporter of Trump during that process. He also transformed from a commentator to something of a guru for the Zoomers. He was not just a YouTuber, but the cult leader of a youth political movement.

That is the way to think of the Fuentes operation now. His group is a cult of personality driven by people who believe in Nick Fuentes. He is not an entertainer or a political commentator, but the spiritual head of a movement. It is not just his followers who speak in these terms but Fuentes himself. He regularly reminds his followers that one day soon they will take over the world and remake it in their image. They are the change they have been waiting for, to quote a past cult leader.

In the modern age, the word “cult” conjures images of a lunatic leading a collection of naïve or desperate people. The words “UFO” and “suicide” tend to be attached to the word “cult” when describing an undesirable group of people. Neocons, for example, are often compared to a suicide cult. Then you have the image of the cult leader who is always a charlatan or crackpot preying on fools. The cult leader is never someone doing good things or operating from good intentions.

This was not always the case. The ancient world had many cults, and no one thought it strange for someone to be in a cult. Often, a cult would organize around a place where something special happened. Then you had mystery cults like the Eleusinian Mysteries, which dated back to the Greek Dark Ages. The Norse had cults that often revolved around personal or household gods. Of course, the ancients had many cults of personality centered on a charismatic figure.

That is how we need to think about the Fuentes phenomenon and other cults of personality that we are seeing. The ancient Greeks did not have political parties as we think of them, but personality cults that played a similar role. In the Roman Republic, politics revolved around strong popular figures. The more a society embraces the democracy idea, the more inclined they are to look to individuals who can lead the people in the direction they want to go.

Look back at American politics and you see the trend. Reagan was a highly charismatic figure whose support was mostly personal. Clinton was another highly charismatic guy whose support was entirely personal. He was compared to the acronym figures of progressive lore, as if he was the return of the king. Obama was obviously black Jesus for progressives. He never said anything of substance, but his followers would swoon when he spoke. Trump, of course, is a similar figure for his followers.

This is where we pick back up on the Fuentes story. To his followers, he is the young Trump or maybe the heir to Trump. While Fuentes never says this explicitly, his presentation suggests he understands the connection being made. He often talks about Trump as an imperfect messenger, which naturally implies that Fuentes is the new and improved version who can see the flaws, but still support the man. The cult of Nick is sure he will be president one day.

This may seem a bit weird, but it is important to keep in mind that this generation thinks about things wholly in the context of the internet. Clout is the currency of this world and that comes in the form of audience. That audience does not have to be in favor to count for clout points. You can have clout when lots of people oppose you. This is why Nick claims to be the most censored man on the internet. What he is saying is that he is the most important man on the internet and thus the world.

Because of our interconnectedness, the cult-like aspects of the Nick Fuentes movement jump out when you interact with it. For starters, all of his fans say the same things about why they like Fuentes. He has clout, of course. He also gets the message out to the biggest audience. He is the most successful leader in the history of “the movement” which is never explained. To what end is never addressed. What matters is that Nick Fuentes is famous, so he has clout.

That is where you see this as a cult of personality. Question the members and you will find that they have no agenda beyond supporting Nick. Press further and they do not know Nick’s agenda or even think about it. They trust Nick. The closest you will get is he wants to restore America to a white Christian nation. By Christian they mean Catholic, only because Nick Fuentes says he is a Catholic. He also wants to remove the Jews from power, even though he has Jews in his movement.

The Jewish aspect is a big tell, as far as whether this is a cult. Go to a Fuentes event and you will find Jewish supporters. The most committed Fuentes followers will welcome them without much thought. Key figures in the Fuentes operation are Jewish, despite Fuentes railing about Jews every day. This weird contradiction is the sort of test of faith you always see in a cult of personality. The truest believers easily accept the obvious contradictions and still love their leader.

Similar to the Jewish issue is the political issue. When pressed, the followers of Nick will say they are the only force opposing the system. In order to overthrow the system, they plan to take over the system through conventional means like elections or participation in mass media. In other words, they oppose the system by supporting it and they will overthrow the system by taking it over and using it to impose their vague version of a white Catholic democracy.

This is where things get interesting. If you manage to pin down one of the more intelligent members on these contradictions, they shift gears and tell you why it is important to not have a coherent agenda. They will say that ideology is the enemy because it is Jewish or liberal or some other scare word. This comes from Nick Fuentes who says this whenever he is pressed on specifics. In other words, the followers closely mimic their leader to avoid thinking about it.

In fairness, there is nothing going on here to raise alarm. This is not a suicide cult or terrorist cell headed for disaster. Nick Fuentes is not Jim Jones. Most of the followers are primarily drawn to the irreverence of Fuentes and the movement. If you press hard enough, the most committed will confess that much of what they are doing is sort of a performative lampooning of society. The Cult of Nick is bathos and pathos to create an emotional experience that is the only real point.

This explains the appeal, despite the many missteps of Fuentes. The young males attracted to this are from a common demographic. They are from white middle-class suburbs outside the South. Most were raised by women, and their play was exclusively online in the form of gaming. The intensity of the “groyper movement” provides something real compared to the synthetic reality of their upbringing. It also is largely free of women, which makes sense in this context.

Ironically, it also has the intense youth culture aspect that drove the 1960’s counterculture youth movements. The Boomers did not trust anyone over thirty and the Zoomers agreed with them. This is not Peter Pan syndrome, but a sense that their unhappiness is due to the failings of adults. The Boomers blamed the adults for squandering the promise of America on war and money making. The Zoomers blame the Boomers for doing the same thing.

That brings us to where this is headed. It has been assumed that Fuentes will follow the same arc as other e-celebrities. In time he would do things to ruin his clout and end up on the bench with people like Richard Spencer. That has not been the case. His wacky adventures with the mentally unstable Kanye West only made him more popular with his young fans. It got him attention, so it got him clout. In this regard, Fuentes is a unique figure in that all publicity is good publicity.

The challenge for this cult is time. Fuentes is twenty-four and his typical follower is in his late teens and early twenties. In five years, Fuentes is no longer a kid. His core followers will be entering the work world. There will be new young guys hunting clout with Generation Alpha, perhaps using Fuentes as a foil. In other words, the Cult of Nick will need to transition from the Neverland of internet culture to the hard reality of the material world that has all of those nasty adults.

This assumes the material world remains the controlling factor. Just as the Zoomers are an inflection point in history, the Cult of Nick could be an inflection point in how politics are conducted in an internet democracy. Fuentes may feel like a stranger in a strange land to those anchored in the analog world, but he could be the leading edge of the digital age that will sweep away the analog age of politics. Perhaps the Fosterite Cult of Nick becomes the Church of All Worlds.

The Crisis At The Window

Posted on August 10, 2023 by thezman

For about six months, starting last winter, Western media talked about a Ukrainian counter-offensive that was supposed to change the direction of the war. These stories coincided with stories about the delivery of various types of equipment, along with expert opinions from retired generals. Late in the spring Washington sent reliable toadies over to Kiev to see the plans and then talk to the media about how the Ukrainians were preparing to deal a death blow to Moscow.

As we get into the heart of August and the third month of the offensive, it is clear to most everyone that it has been a disaster. First came the images of Western armored vehicles trapped in minefields. Images of burning tanks were then followed by video of Ukrainian soldiers struggling to escape the same minefields after their armored vehicles were disabled by mines. Then came weeks of reports in the West about revised tactics that achieved nothing along the front.

As things stand, the most enthusiastic Ukraine supporters say that the counter-offensive has managed to capture about ten square miles. In reality, the Ukrainians failed to make it through the security zone of Russian defenses. This is the area in front of the first defensive lines that are used to slow an attack. In the south, Ukraine managed to capture a few abandoned villages, but relentless Russian attacks from artillery and airpower turned those into Ukrainian cemeteries.

At the start of the offensive, independent observers and Russian sources said the Ukrainians had enough resources to continue their offensive into August. At that point they will have exhausted men and material. At that point, they would have no choice but to stop offensive operations and fall back into defensive positions. Otherwise, they would be forced to cannibalize their lines and leave themselves open to Russian attacks in other areas along the line of contact.

That may have been a generous assessment. Over the last couple of weeks Russian forces in the north have steadily pushed the Ukrainians back. Ukraine has just moved their northern headquarters west to get clear of the Russian advance. They have also ordered the evacuation of Kupyansk, an important town located on the bank of the Oskil River in the Kharkiv Oblast. Reports suggest the Ukrainians simply lack the manpower and equipment to defend the area.

Washington is in a panic because they promised everyone that the Ukrainians would easily smash through Russian lines in the south. The plan was to rush through to the Sea of Azov, thus severing the land bridge between Russia and Crimea. Once that happened, attacks would begin on Crimea. The Russian army would either revolt after the humiliation or simply collapse, causing political chao in Moscow. It is hard to believe, but this was the official narrative.

Interestingly, the narrative was not just another pack of lies from the Kagan cult, but an official assessment from the Pentagon. It has been Western military doctrine that the way to defeat the Russians in a land war is with a rapid, concentrated attack on their defensive lines using armor and infantry. Here is a paper on the topic from 2017 and here is a recent video discussing it in connection with this war. This strategy actually goes back to the Cold War days.

The short version is that Russia organized its army around groups of 800 to 1000 men that operate independently within the defensive formation. These units have, tanks armored personnel carriers and artillery. The NATO strategy was to send overwhelming force at these units, forcing them to retreat in order to preserve their equipment. Russia is known for trading land for resources. They did this in the Kharkiv region last year and in the Kherson region last spring.

What Washington did not notice is that the Russians have moved away from the Battalion Tactical Group to more flexible arrangements based on the situation, terrain, and their own resources. In the south when Ukraine launched its main attack, they did not face battalions, but divisions. Further, the Russians had prepared complex defensive positions designed to trap advancing armored columns. In other words, the Russians read that paper and were ready for it.

Another thing Washington did not notice is that the Russian army has changed in other ways since the Cold War. They have a wide range of electronic warfare systems that work well against modern weapons. They also have incorporated drones in massive numbers that are highly effective against Western armor. The internet is full of videos where a Lancet drone takes out a Ukrainian armored vehicle. The Russians have quickly become the masters of drone warfare.

The main reason the Ukrainian offensive is a catastrophe is the side with the trillion-dollar annual budget has not updated their understanding of the Russian army since the last century. They have not bothered to notice what has been happening on the battlefields over the last eighteen months. Instead, the world’s most expensive military has gone along with the crackpot plans of the Kagan cult, either not understanding what is happening or indifferent to the inevitable results.

The Ukraine war is becoming a microcosm of the crisis of competence. It is not just the scarcity of talented people in the ranks. They still exist in sufficient numbers to keep the system operating reasonably well. The issue is the selection pressure at the top is for true believers and sycophants. The only way to get in the room to discuss the Ukraine war is to be fully on board with the dream of destroying Russia or be willing to humiliate yourself by telling these people what they want to hear.

Imagine the tag team of Victoria Nuland and General Milley replicated throughout the managerial system. Nuland is the maniacal imbecile in charge for no other reason than zealotry, while Milley is the oleaginous flunky with the credentials to provide legitimacy to the rantings of Nuland. The competent are driven from the room, leaving this combination to chart public policy. The general decline in competence that is driving demographics, is driven by this combination at the top.

In the movie Braveheart, Longshanks returns from France to confront his son who was charged with putting down the Scottish revolt. His son has his “advisor” with him, who makes the mistake of speaking out of turn. This is what has happened in the West, except Longshanks died of a heart attack and his son is in charge. The advisor now busies himself telling the son what he wants to hear. Meanwhile, outside the castle walls, the kingdom rattles toward collapse.

By Any Means Necessary

Posted on August 2, 2023 by thezman

There are many theories for why the Roman Republic became unstable and eventually collapsed into what we think of as authoritarianism. Given America’s republican history, the collapse of the Roman Republic has been something like Banquo’s ghost, especially for those who call themselves conservatives. Each new innovation is a threat to the republic. The progressives have the same fear, despite their obvious disdain for the republican concept. Caesarism haunts their dreams.

The funny thing about the fall of the Roman Republic is that it was largely the result of trying to save it. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he did not think of himself as the destroyer of Rome. He was saving Rome. Sure, he was violating important rules of the Republic, but Rome was too important to worry about petty things. While the idea of a republic assumes that the means justify the ends, saving the Republic was based on the ends justifying the means.

Caesar could not have existed if not for the example of Sulla. He became the key figure in the struggle between the optimates and populares factions. The former backed the supremacy of the senate, while the latter supported the popular reforms of Sulla’s former mentor, Gaius Marius. Sulla marched on Rome in an unprecedented act to defeat the populares and then did it a second time to deliver the final defeat at the Battle of the Colline Gate.

Interestingly, Sulla was made possible by the man he eventually defeated and who he once served in his own efforts to save the Republic. Gaius Marius was a general and a statesman who won the Cimbric and Jugurthine wars. In doing so he held the office of consul an unprecedented seven times. Prior to Marius, the custom was to retire from politics after reaching the position of Consul, but the Republic needed the skilled Marius, so to save the Republic exceptions were made.

Of course, the reason for those extraordinary circumstances was that the opposition in the Jugurthine wars had been able to bribe Roman senators. Jugurtha was a king of Numidia who claimed the entire kingdom of Numidia. This was in defiance of Rome, but he was able to first bribe some senators to get favorable terms and then he bribed Roman generals when war started. Rome needed to make exceptions for Marius because the best Roman citizens were no longer trusted.

You can probably start with the founding of the Roman Republic, the day Brutus stood and watched his own sons be executed for their role in the Tarquinian conspiracy, and chart the exceptions made until Caesar crossed the Rubicon. At first it was mostly personal corruption, small things that were overlooked to keep the peace. Over time it was exceptions to the rules for expediency’s sake. Each time an exception was made, it laid the groundwork for the next exception.

In the future, the robot historians will do the same thing charting the arc of the American republic as it made exceptions here and there, all in the name of expediency to save “our democracy” from some evil. In each case, the people breaking the rules or violating custom have justified what they were doing by claiming that they were breaking the rules in order to save the system. As with the Roman Republic, the American republic has fallen victim to those who claiming to save it.

We are seeing this with the latest batch of indictments of Donald Trump. In fact, the Donald Trump story arc is a microcosm of the process. It started with the so-called conservatives openly siding with their alleged opponents. You see, they were breaking their word because the greater good demanded it. This was the start of a process by which each new violation of the rules and customs is normalized and justified, thus making the next more egregious violation possible.

That process kicked off by Conservative Inc. has led to the last batch of indictments of Donald Trump, which now come with the promise of a rigged trial. The case has been assigned to one of the more corrupt and partisan judges in the system. Unlike the previous charges in Florida, which came with a judge that maintained the façade of impartiality, this judge is a crook and lunatic. This case may as well be held in the Oval Office with Hillary Clinton has judge and jury.

This now paves the way for the Republican Party to change their rules in order to keep Trump off the ballot. They will no doubt claim they are doing this to save the party or save the republic. You see, they are not succumbing to corruption or merely breaking their own rules. No, they are sacrificing in order to save the system from something they say is much worse than breaking the rules. In this process, there is always something worse than breaking the rules.

It is one of the ironies of the human condition. All human societies begin with the question, “who are we?” The answer is a set of rules that define who is in and who is not in the society. Inevitably, there are people who slither in seeking to undermine those rules by looking for loopholes and exceptions. Before long, some people start to see the rules as an obstacle. As the rules give way to this process, the only way to save the rules is to abandon the spirit of them entirely.

Of course, we have the expression “crossing the Rubicon” for a reason. When Caesar made the decision to march on Rome, the Republic was over, as there was no way to put it back together, even if Caesar was defeated. We see this happening with the political persecution of Trump. The people doing it are not going to be talked out of their next brazen violation of the rules. The only way to stop them is to physically remove them from society by any means necessary.

The Great Dilemma

Posted on July 26, 2023 by thezman

Imagine one of your friends tells you that the governor of your state was caught on video robbing a liquor store. Not only that, his brother pistol-whipped the clerk during the commission of the crime. Most likely, you would want proof. Your friend then sends you a link to a Twitter thread on the subject. Knowing the volume of nonsense on Twitter, you then go to mainstream news sites looking for something on this incredible story, but everywhere you look you find nothing but silence.

This would present a dilemma. On the one hand, you trust your friend and the story does seem legitimate. Upon further inquiry you find some stories tucked away here and there that confirm the tweet. Independent news sites are howling about the crime and the refusal of the mainstream media to notice it. The dilemma is not about believing the story is true but about trusting your own judgement. If all of the serious people are ignoring this story, why should you be outraged by it?

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is daily life in America. Events that should warrant national coverage go unmentioned, while trivial nonsense gets wall-to-wall coverage from all of the regime media organs. Compounding it is the fact that the stuff getting covered comes with truckloads of official lies and narratives designed to trick the audience into viewing the facts presented in a way that leads to an inaccurate understanding of the event in question.

We are in one of those moments today. Hunter Biden, the crackhead son of Joe Biden, is due in court to plead guilty to some minor crimes. Not happy with a sweetheart deal that is an affront to the idea of the rule of law, one of his lawyers called the court yesterday, pretending to be a lawyer for the Republicans, who had filed a brief with the court contesting the sweetheart deal. This fake lawyer successfully convinced the court clerk to withdraw the Republican filing.

This is not a small thing. The massive corruption involved in this plea deal should warrant Watergate level coverage. Instead, regime media and the volunteer army of online toadies pretend it is normal. Putting that aside, no one would know about this outlandish effort to mislead the court if not for people on Twitter. The Drudge Report has no mention of it. Memorandum, the news aggregator popular with media content creators, has no mention of this event.

In fairness, there is a CNN post on it, but you have to dig around to find it. The three primary media organs of the regime are silent. There is no mention of it in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. Putting aside the Nigerian levels of corruption in this case, the absurdity of this stunt warrants attention. Calling a court clerk the day before an appearance and pretending to be a lawyer for another party in order to trick the court is Hollywood comedy stuff.

As an aside, think about the sort of people who look at an event like this and conclude it is not worth mentioning. It is a good reminder that partisanship is not primarily about rooting for your side, but a hatred of the enemy. The regime’s media organs actively participate in these coverups because they hate the people they imagine are on the other side of the hive walls. They are not covering for the Bidens because they love these people, but because they hate you.

Putting that aside, what compounds the media silence on this story is the outrageousness of it. The law firm involved is not a fly-by-night operation that represents drug cases. Jessica Bagels, the lawyer who pulled the caper, is Director of Litigation Services at Latham- Watkins. This is what they used to call a “white shoe” law firm that represents power players in politics and finance. These are the sorts of people Hollywood uses in conspiracy thrillers like The Firm.

Of course, this casual acceptance of corruption speaks to the general rot that has become the defining feature of the ruling class. It is not that these people are breaking the rules for personal gain. It is that they no longer have any respect for the spirit of the law that is supposed to animate our society. These lawyers think nothing of tricking a court clerk because they have no respect for her or the system. In fact, these lawyers hold the legal system in contempt.

The only reason anyone knows about this latest Hunter Biden caper is that there are still people in America who respect the spirit of the law. They are outraged enough about this case to follow it and post what they learn online. There are still millions of Americans who feel the same sense of outrage, so they follow these people on places like Twitter. Despite the best efforts by regime media, this information still makes it into circulation and people are rightly angry about it.

This returns us to that dilemma at the start. The choice between trusting yourself or the weight of official media rests on a more important conflict. The people who think it proper to trick the court operate from the belief that any means necessary is acceptable in order to achieve their goals. The ends justify the means. The other side of the dilemma are the people who reject this. They think the means justify the ends and that we must always respect the process.

Therein lies the problem. The process no longer has the means to control these corrupt forces in the system. The only solution is to abandon the rules and use whatever means are required in order to remove the rot from the system. What this example shows is that the people who think the end justifies the means will always defeat the means justify the end unless the latter makes an exception and embraces the ethos of the former in order to restore order. That is the great dilemma of this age.

Nature Finds A Way

Posted on July 25, 2023 by thezman

Despite being our greatest ally and an obsession for Republican party leaders, few have noticed that Israel has been in disarray for years. Politically there is a battle between two main factions that see no room for compromise. This has now spilled into the streets in mass protests over a new law curbing court power. Internationally, Israel has never been less significant. Its main patron, the American Empire, is busy trying to start a nuclear war with Russia and China.

At the moment, tens of thousands of Israelis are rioting over plans to overhaul the legal system, limiting the power of the courts. This plan is championed by the conservatives, led by Bibi Netanyahu. The point is to give the parliament more power by limiting the courts’ ability to annul laws passed by the parliament. Israel is a single chamber parliament where the prime minister is the leader of the ruling coalition, so it means two thirds of government are run by the prime minister.

There is a bit of the familiar lunacy in these protests. The people setting fires and destroying things claim the other side is committing acts of violence. This is the old “your speech is violence; our violence is speech” business we have come to expect from the regime toadies throughout the empire. They also claim that limiting democracy through the courts is the only way to defend democracy. Democracy means rule by the permanent ruling elite, contrary to the public will.

What is really happening here is demographics. For generations, liberal Ashkenazi Jews has ruled Israel. Liberal in this case means pro-Western. They aligned Israel with the West, primarily the United States, turning it into a beachhead for the empire in the region and a staging ground for Jewish activism in the West. The reason Republican presidential candidates swear allegiance to Israel is because of the massive amount of influence Israel has in Washington.

This is changing as the number of ultra-orthodox and non-Western Jews grows relative to the population as a whole. The simple fact is the pro-Western population has not been having babies, while the very conservative population has been producing around six births per female. The guys with the fur cylinders on their heads have been winning the most important political battle, the fertility battle. Netanyahu now represents this very conservative demographic in Israeli politics.

These ultra-conservative voters are not particularly interested in courting Western opinion or in buying influence in Washington. They are focused on making Israel a Zionist paradise free of non-Jews, especially the Palestinians. They are also not interested in the endless political intrigue that defines the Middle East. Imagine if the Amish were hyper-violent and they seized control of Pennsylvania. That is what is about to happen to Israel as the ultra-orthodox take over politics.

Of course, the political turmoil and civil unrest should be making Israel more vulnerable to Arab attacks, but no one is worried about it. The reason is the surrounding Arab countries do not care that much about Israel, other than as a source of Western shenanigans in the region. Officially, the Arab world remains opposed to Israel, but unofficially they have other concerns. The Arab-Israeli wars were a long time ago and much has changed since then.

This reality is reflected in the population. The typical Arab in that part of the world is indifferent to Israel and Jews, but there remains a minority that obsess over the topic, so everyone just ignores it. The truth is Jews and Arabs are fine doing business with one another and living in peace. The exception is in the Palestinian territories, but the truth is no one likes the Palestinians. They are the least sympathetic party in the region and their only supporters are on the American college campus.

The subtext to the unrest in Israel is the declining influence of the Global American Empire on Israel and the region. Twenty years ago, Washington would have stopped this legislative agenda in Israel with one phone call. Today the Netanyahu regime has no fear of the Biden people. They see what is happening in the world and are thinking about the world that comes after the American empire. Israel in the post-America world will not have the luxury of indulging in liberal niceties.

The post-American Middle East may be more stable for the simple reason that Washington will not be pitting one group against the other. China and Russia are ready to fill the void left by America and they care only about business. The Russians are poised to become the dominant energy power in the world, while China is the manufacturing base of the world. Neither country sees unrest in their interests, so they could be a calming influence on regional politics.

Putting that aside, the critics of the Israeli plan to limit the courts are right to say it is an erosion of democracy, as long as you use the managerial definition of democracy, which means rule by the managerial class. What these changes represent is a frontal assault on one of the main sources of power by their managerial class. The other power center for them is the secret police. American-style liberal democracy is on the retreat in Israel because it is on the retreat everywhere now.

What is happening in Israel is an example of the great chain of causality. Politics are downstream from biology and culture. Israel is a land full of people who like wearing strange headgear as they furiously argue with one another over what John Derbyshire once described as “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” Israeli politics will not resemble Western politics because Israeli is full of non-Western people.

In the larger sense, the happenings in Israel are another chapter in what will be a haphazard and often chaotic retreat of the Global American Empire. The war in Ukraine is one of those chapters. There is a good chance that a war with China over Taiwan will be another chapter. Like weeds growing through a sidewalk, however, the nature of the world is slowly pushing through the cultural and political norms imposed on the world by the Global American Empire and returning to its natural state.

The Stars

Posted on July 19, 2023 by thezman

Imagine if tomorrow members of the Biden administrations, including Biden, start going around in public in the nude. They show up at press conferences and photo sessions fully naked. Now further imagine that no one in the media bothers to notice this and continues as if it is perfectly normal. Maybe the cable channels start to add a “clothing disinformation expert” to their rotation of fake experts. Regime toadies decry nakedness disinformation from Russia.

Of course, this will be joined by waves of volunteer auxiliary toadies on social media defending the new policy. All of a sudden, as if they just got a new firmware update, they are off the Ukraine train and on the naked train. They start harassing normal people, demanding that the normals defend their opposition to the new nakedness, as if walking around naked was always common and the normal people suddenly decided that it was not acceptable. Naked Twitter becomes a thing.

Maybe this sounds ridiculous, but given the age in which we live, it should be one of many absurdities on the list of probable things. We live in an age in which outlandishly stupid people are presented as experts. The president just had another bizarre press conference with the Israel president. Of course, Biden mumbling to himself as he reads his script is nothing compared to his bizarre sniffing of children. Biden alone is enough to fill up the bizarro land bingo card.

In other words, what is strange about this time is not the steady stream of weird and bizarre behavior, but the normalization of it. Everyone reading this remembers a time when the media would have had a field day with a president struggling to make it through these perfunctory events. They would have made excuses like he was tired, or it was a bad camera angle, but they would not have continued like it is perfectly normal for the president to be a senile old coot.

That is something to keep in mind as the next chapter in the plan to disqualify Trump from the 2024 election unfolds over the next months. The ironically named Department of Justice has informed Trump that a grand jury is investigating him for crimes that probably do not exist. This is the first step in bringing an indictment, which means another theatrical arrest of the former president. The same cranks and crackpots who would be pro-nudity will be cheering this online.

As if it was all coordinated, Jeb DeSantis had prepared a little script where he not-so-subtly cheers the prospect of Trump being removed from the race. Given that the only way Jeb wins the nomination is if Trump is removed, this is not surprising. The naked opportunism is not the part that matters. What matters is it is clear that his campaign is based on the assumption that the system is so corrupt that no one will complain when the frontrunner is legally barred from running.

There is an old saying in sports that pressure reveals character. People never exposed to pressure often mistakenly think pressure makes character, but you see that the former is correct with Jeb DeSantis. In the hothouse of Florida politics, he looks like a strong leader. In the pressure of national politics, he has failed every test. Worse yet, he cannot seem to get past Trump making fun of him. Instead of being a strong leader, we see he is a small, thin-skinned twerp of man.

Putting that aside, the normalization of lawfare is well underway. Again, as if it were coordinated, the media is pretending this is normal. They make no effort to ask if this is how a healthy political class should operate. Instead, the game is to shift the focus from the propriety of this behavior by the government. The question in that post could be said as, “given the outlandishly lawless behavior of the Biden administration, is it now okay to arrest people noticing that behavior?”

It is not just Trump getting the Stasi treatment. In Michigan, the secret police have arrested sixteen senior citizens for the crime of participating in the 2020 election process as alternative electors. The media is trying hard to disguise the fact that these people are very old, but here are their ages. Three years after the fact, the regime is rounding up old people and threatening to put them in prison for the remainder of their days, because they dared to participate in the system.

This is not normal. The regime toadies will work hard to make it seem normal, but what we are seeing is not normal. Sissies in conservative media will mew about this being banana republic behavior, but this does not happen in the third world. They lack the human capital to operate a police state. This is what happens in a modern state undergoing a soft coup against the system itself. America is becoming a police state run by alien weirdos who hate the majority population.

More important, it is becoming the new normal. Once Trump is removed from the ballot, people will come to accept that they are not allowed to have candidates that address their issues, unless the people in charge approve. The pundits will turn themselves into experts on judging if a candidate is acceptable to the people in charge. While we will lack a formal council of political clerics like Iran, the unofficial council of clerics will make their voice known through the pundit class.

Imagine if tomorrow you are at a social event, and everyone is naked. You are still wearing clothes, trying to explain why you are the normal one. Your conservative friends tell you that nudity has always been a conservative value. One of them produces a pic on his phone of Martin Luther King giving a speech naked. He says to you, “Democrats are the real clothists.” At that point, the pressure on you to strip down and submit to the new normal may be too much to resist.

What we are living through right now is the choice Vaclav Havel described in his story of the green grocer. We can submit to the official lies, pretend that arresting old people for questioning the source of the official lies is perfectly normal. The other choice is we choose to live in the truth. Most will submit because that is easy, but some with refuse and remain living in the truth. They will win and we know this because the communists are gone, and Havel’s words are still with us.

The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world;
And without care of having any rest

We mounted up, he first and I the second,
Till I beheld through a round aperture
Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;

Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.

Anemoia And Hauntology

Posted on July 17, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the singularity of war, a review of the classic film, From Here to Eternity and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

One of the oddities of the Obama administration was that it seemed as if they were working from a list of wrongs they were determined to right. Those wrongs were what the Left counted as their failures over the decades. A part of Obama being viewed as Black Jesus was his ability to heal the past. This was necessary as those old harms were what tied us to the present. It was only by righting those past wrongs that we could break free and enter the glorious future.

The most obvious example was the health care stuff. This proved to be a disaster for the Clinton administration, but that is not how the Left saw it. They viewed it as a betrayal and a defeat that had to be addressed. This is why the eventual policy was nothing like they promised or anything anyone would call reform. That was never the point of the exercise. The point was to have a redo of that old defeat and this time the good guys would win and erase that loss from memory.

This active revisionism turned up in all sorts of places. They had Hillary Clinton pose with Sergey Lavrov holding a red button. This was part of the Russian reset initiative designed to restart relations with Russia. In reality it was about soothing the wounds from the Reagan years when the Left lost the Cold War debate. The same vibe permeated their Iran initiative. Like the Russian reset, the Iran reproachment had no utility in the present. It was all about the past.

This backward-looking politics is plain now. The retreat into the past has jumped from the establishment Left to the establishment Right. This is not surprising, given the conservative habit of following the Left from one fad to the next. Here you have a collection of flunkies from Conservative Inc. doing cosplay. Instead of dressing up as characters from Japanese cartoons, they are pretending to be their favorite characters from the conservative movement.

Someone on Twitter referred to these people as Reagan Van Winkles. They went to sleep in the 1980’s and just awoke in the present, unaware of all that has happened over the last forty years. It is a clever line and there is certainly some truth to it, but these people are aware of the present. What they want is to go back to sleep and wake up in the 1980’s, as if the present is a terrible nightmare. They are live action role playing in order to take a timeout from the present.

Note the flavorless language. Sixty years ago, when the founders of the Buckley cult were getting started, they used language designed to inflame the passions of the great white middle-class, which they sensed was quietly seething at the cultural changes that had been unleashed by the Left. The language in that statement is so devoid of human passion that is could have been written by software. The point is not to excite the reader, but to put him asleep so he can dream of better times.

What makes this stuff weirder is that most of the people doing it are not old people trying to relive their youth. Nostalgia is understandable for old people, especially those nearing the end of their career. These people are experiencing anemoia, a nostalgic sense of longing for a past they have never lived. None of the “signatories” of that goofy list of principles were alive when Buckley started his cult. Many of them were barely aware of the world during the Reagan years.

On the other side of the old political consensus is hauntolgy, a sense that unfinished business from the past is haunting the present. Like Banquo’s ghost, the old failures in the old causes torment the neoliberal. It is not as if they learned from the old failures, but that they must find some way to make it right. The backwardness of left-wing politics is akin to the people in a horror movie putting an ancient cemetery back in its original state so the dead can finally rest.

In fairness, it is not just conventional politics that is backward looking. Most of the race realists want to go back to the past. They imagine a world similar to the 1950’s, except everyone knows the failures of trying to integrate blacks and whites. The harder core imagine they can go back to the interwar years and be their favorite uncle. Young Nick Fuentes is one click away from wearing a George Lincoln Rockwell costume while locking arms with the hip-hop community.

What all of this points to is the sense of dread than hangs over the American empire as it staggers through its end phase. Everything that it is, everything that defines the American identity is in the past. The only conception of the future is one that is somehow a repeat of the past, real, or imaginary. For a culture that has no future, the present represents the terrifying final step into the abyss, so the only option is to turn to the past and find comfort in reliving it.

Perhaps this weird backwardness is an essential step, and it will burn itself out as the present struggles become too much to ignore. On the other hand, maybe this is just the price of victory in the Cold War. The losers had to get on with the business of creating a new future, while the winners wanted to savor the victory. Our backward politics is the result of a victory party gone on for too long. Regardless, what comes next is not the past, but the future, and it will not include any of these people.

The DeSantis Dud

Posted on July 11, 2023 by thezman

When Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he was running for the Republican Party nomination, it seemed like the predictions where true. He was going to be the antidote to Trump, if not Trumpism. For a few weeks everyone was talking about this guy as if he was a viral video. Then all of a sudden, he disappeared. The media stopped covering him, other than when he insulted their sacred cows. His social media influencers are desperate for attention but are mostly ignored.

There were two schools of thought on DeSantis. One school said he would run as Trump without Trumpism, meaning without the antics. He would make the case for the same issues but do so in a more conventional manner. The other school of thought said he would be the Ted Cruz of the race. He would stake out a position just inside Trump so he would not scare the sissies, but he would still get some respect from the more hardcore members of the party voting base.

Both options rested on an assumption that Trump eventually would be removed from the nomination process. Maybe the regime would put him jail. Maybe the weight of the many indictments would force him to quit. Perhaps the Republican Party would combine the two and change the rules to exclude Trump. Regardless of how, the underlying logic of the DeSantis campaign rested on Trump being eliminated. DeSantis was running as the guy who comes after that event.

Instead, DeSantis has staked out a third path, the boring path. Rather than being Trump-lite or being a kinder, gentler Trump, he is Ned Flanders. A look at his YouTube page explains why no one talks about DeSantis. His lead video is titled “America is Worth the Fight” which is what you expect from a white box consulting firm that creates generic videos for local politicians on a budget. It is the sort of ad Republicans in safe suburban districts run when a Democrat is in the White House.

After getting some heat from the usual suspects for the ad tying Trump to the pride campaigns, they deleted that ad and rolled out the “Mammas for DeSantis” ad campaign that some idiot consultants thinks are clever. They think it is clever because they think the people who vote in Republican primaries are morons. They also repeatedly use the bot-phrase “game changer” in their media campaign around these new videos, which is what you get from consultants.

What the campaign is telling us so far is they have no idea why DeSantis is running, and they have no idea who will be voting in the election. The campaign is being run by people who exist in the Potemkin village that serves as the imperial capital and all of them think if they wish hard enough, it will be 2012 again. That was the peak of the political class, where their manufactured man, Barak Obama, had won reelection over the least authentic human on earth, Mitt Romney.

The results are what you expect from such a dreary campaign. A state poll released yesterday is a good indication of what is happening. Trump now leads DeSantis in Florida by twenty points. Sure, Trump has a big presence in the state, but DeSantis is the sitting governor and he just won reelection in a landslide. The voters there like him and want to like him. What this suggests is they like him as their governor, but they do not like the idea of him being president.

This is the pattern everywhere. In state after state, DeSantis has seen his polling settle into the low-20% range. After people got to see him, they were not impressed, and his initial support has started to drain away. The main reason, of course, is he is not answering the only question that matters in this primary, “why should you vote for anyone other than Donald Trump?” If you cannot provide an answer, the answer is provided for you, and it is not a good answer.

What voters are seeing thus far is that DeSantis is not a risk taker. He is instinctively a cautious guy. Instead of roaring out of the gate with an affirmative campaign based on a set of key issues he thinks are important, he is rolling out a message that has been market-tested by the same people who get hired by fast food chains to market test their latest ad campaign. Inevitably, they lean toward avoiding controversy as no consultant ever gets fired for being too cautious.

The first debate is six weeks away, so the DeSantis people have time to retool the campaign in order to reintroduce their guy to the country. As it stands, the people on the stage will be Trump, DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence and maybe Chris Christie. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum is trying to buy his way on stage through some sort of gift card scheme. Trump has hinted that he could skip this debate, or he might be in jail by then.

Assuming no changes, this is a one-shot deal for DeSantis. Ramaswamy will steal the show with his Kwiki Mart act. He will avoid attacking Trump and instead spend his time telling older white people that they are the best. Christie will be a fat loudmouth who will spend his time insulting Trump. The midgets will be boring extras. In other words, DeSantis is going to have to find a way to get attention, without sounding like a kook while also providing an affirmative case for himself.

What this will require is risk taking. Over the next six months his campaign should be rolling out ads that send the regime media into orbit, while his campaign refuses to talk to them about anything. Instead, DeSantis spends the time shaking hands, talking shop, and building relationships with the locals in Iowa and New Hampshire. This creates anticipation for the debate and will bait the moderators into focusing on him and his provocative ads, while he calmly answers their questions.

There are no signs that this will happen or could happen. Chance favors the bold and so far, his campaign has been everything but bold. Their campaign is based on something removing Trump from the ballot before people start voting. That is why DeSantis may not make it past New Hampshire. If your success depends on others acting in your interests, you are unlikely to succeed. Winners take risks because they are not afraid to lose. The DeSantis campaign is too afraid to win.

Death By A Thousand Lies

Posted on July 6, 2023 by thezman

On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.

In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.

Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.

The response from the media was much different when the Twitter Files revealed the level of cooperation between Twitter censors and the government. The primary response was to ignore the whole thing. This is the real power of the media. They can simply ignore a story and let it be buried under a mountain of nonsense about carny folk or conspiracy theories about things like global warming. The second response was to trash the reputation of Matt Taibbi who did the reporting.

So far, the media response to this injunction is what you would expect. On the one hand, they are treating it as a partisan issue. You see, it is the nasty Republican states that are hassling Biden for no reason at all. On the other hand, this ruling is preventing the government from defending our democracy against election interference. The brave disinformation researchers are now prevented from doing their work to protect you from words and sounds that threaten our democracy.

Disinformation is information that is intended to deceive, usually from an official source, like the media or the government. This is an easily solved problem by having an adversarial relationship between the government and the media so both sides police each other. Instead, the media has teamed up with the state to battle this invisible fiend who is attacking our democracy. It is tempting to call this language Orwellian, but it is too ridiculous and insane to be Orwellian.

This is a feature of managerial polyarchy that does not get attention. An enormous amount of time is spent on imaginary things. The Russian collusion hoax probably cost over a billion dollars in the end. It was something that obviously did not exist, because it could not exist, but for the people in the hive it had to exist, so they treated it as if it were as real as a rose bush. Take a tour through the fever swamps of the hive and you will see plenty of people who still believe in it.

Then you have the innate need to credentialize everything. Since Grog sold a faulty wheel to Trog, humans have been trying to deceive other humans. In fact, the second oldest profession rests on this very idea. Of course, you cannot have public debate without people trying to convince others of things that are not true. The argument in favor of democracy starts with accepting this trade-off. You accept false opinions in order to encourage the free flow of ideas.

Suddenly, the people who used to claim to be the guardians of this idea are obsessed with disinformation. So much so they will help the government crush anyone who dares say anything that has not been approved. Of course, this means there must be disinformation researchers and disinformation experts. Colleges are now offering courses on the subject. How long before we see someone with the title “licensed disinformation researcher” on a cable chat show?

Notice no one ever asks what a disinformation expert does. The most likely reason for this is the people in this racket could not tell you. Here is the Wilson Center’s page on their disinformation project. Nina Jankowicz is listed a senior fellow. Read her bio and you will see that her only gainful employment has been as a professional liar, spreading government propaganda. Perhaps the theory here is the same as the government hiring former criminals to solve crimes.

If you put “disinformation expert” into a search engine you get millions of links to stories featuring them. If you search on how to become a disinformation expert, then you will see tumbleweeds on your screen. Everyone seems to accept that this profession is real, but no one has the slightest idea how you get the title. One would think that someone in the media would do a deep dive into the topic, but that would risk being accused of disinformation and who wants that?

What this reveals is the inherent decadence of managerialism. Since all authority lies with the expert, every opinion must have an expert behind it. The demand for experts is unlimited, so you end up with experts in things like disinformation. The same process unleashed the army of bigots known as antiracism experts. In place of a holy book or the word of the local shaman, moral authority lies with the expert, so the managerial system manufactures an expert for every normative claim.

There is a practical value to this for the system. These make-believe jobs provide work for the swelling army of credentialed mediocrities. There are now millions of people calling themselves “open-source intelligence researchers.” What this means is they spend all day on Google, going past the first couple of pages. This is the town busy body for the digital age. They work with the disinformation experts to get you banned from Twitter for noticing things.

It is tempting to focus on the un-American aspects of these censorship campaigns, but the fact is America stopped being a rights-based society long ago. The important issue is the vulnerability it reveals. The regime is employing armies of people to control information online and failing miserably. It turns out that the unguarded entrance to the Death Star is a well-formed meme. This probably explains why they are treating Douglas Mackey like his public enemy number one.

It is a sweet irony that a regime that is built on a foundation of lies thinks that its vulnerability is clever lies on Twitter. They are not wrong about this. The regime of lies was possible because people trusted the system. People living in a world of lies are not going to trust the system and they are certainly not going to trust the people who are responsible for the world of lies. They will seek out alternatives. It turns out that the answer to the Big Lie is millions of little lies.

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