Another Reboot

Posted on January 11, 2022 by thezman

Hollywood figured out a long time ago that they could make a lot of money on a sequel to a popular movie. They could count on attracting most of the original audience without having to think too hard or spend a lot of money. If the sequel was just the original with a couple new twists, then it was easy money. The reboot is a similar concept, except it relies on nostalgia to sell the concept. Fans of the original Star Wars movies could take their kids to the reboot of the franchise.

The general consensus is that the reboot and remake are a sign that Hollywood has run out of creative writers. The wrinkly brains are now in the technical end, making cool graphics and special effects. The writers arrive in a short bus. This cultural dead end where they just keep rebooting prior ideas has reached a point where they are rebooting reboots of reboots now. The only novelty is they are stripping away anything of interest and replacing it with ideology.

The same process has been happening with politics. The first little hint of it happened with Bill Clinton who was sold as his generation’s JFK. This played on Baby Boomer nostalgia, which has been powerful juju since the 1980’s. The first genuine political reboot was Obama. He was pitched as the black JFK, which was a foreshadowing of what has been happening in popular culture. Just as the role of JFK was being played by a black guy, everything on TV is now played by nonwhites.

The thing that was interesting about Obama was that despite all the talk about the future, they were obsessed with the past. His signature program, health care, was a re-do of the failed health care fight in the 1990’s. His Russian reset was a rebuke of Reagan’s tough approach to the Soviets. His Iran policy was a re-do of what happened in the late 1970’s under Carter. The Obama years were a series of remakes of old defeats by the Left, but this time they were the winners.

Of course, the Trump years had a strong undertone of nostalgia for the 1980’s and Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme. It was clear Trump planned to run a similar reelection campaign until Covid. The crazies, of course, relived the Nixon years, replaying the fantasy version where they got to actually impeach their foe, rather than have him resign. The Trump era was a very weird nostalgia trip for an aging political class unable to contemplate what comes next for them.

It appears that this election season, the Republicans are planning to release a reboot of one of their old franchises, the Contract with America. To great fanfare, Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, has unleashed the Commitment to America, which is a remake of the New Gingrich program. According to the poster, “Republicans helped build the greatest economy in a generation and the American way of life was thriving. We are ready to do it again. This is our commitment to you.”

The problem with the sequel was always that the original successfully followed the woman’s swimsuit model. It was long enough to cover the important bits and short enough to keep everyone interested. In other words, the original addressed all the important plot points and the characters had finished their arc. Reboots offer the chance to retell the original story with a slightly new angle. Today, of course, that means replacing the white males with strong diverse females.

The problem for the Republicans trying to reboot the Gingrich franchise is that most people recall that it was not a scintillating success. It was a clever marketing strategy that got Gingrich the speaker’s gavel, but exactly no one is romantic for the early 1990’s or has warm thoughts about Newt Gingrich. If anything, Newt Gingrich is a reminder that managerial conservatism was a disaster. It led directly to the “Big Government Conservatism” of the Bush years.

Looking at the site, it is clear that the Republicans went to Hollywood and snatched a few writers off the short bus. “Restore. Rebuild. Renew” is the answer to “Build Back Better” which is itself a hollow slogan. Under each word is a list of “promises” that are so vague and meaningless, you wonder if this is a deliberate insult. The top item under “Restore” is a promise to do the same things for Covid that the government has been doing for two years now. “What do we want? More of the same!”

Perhaps the most amusing and ridiculous claim under the “Restore” tab is the promise to address tech censorship. Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP is so mobbed up with Silicon Valley cash they should be forced to wear corporates logos on their suits like race car drivers. They have opposed every effort to do something about the gross abuse of civil rights by these firms. This is also true of Conservative Inc., which is bought and paid for by big tech money as well.

What is most remarkable about the plan is that it manages to avoid every issue of interest to the typical Republican voter. The Gingrich strategy was to sound like radical reformers, while not threatening anything important like entitlements. McCarthy’s strategy is to sound completely harmless while promising to let the crazies continue smashing the civic life of the country. You get the sense this is a promise to the oligarchs that they will have no trouble with the Republicans.

Notably, there is nothing in this plan on immigration. That is because the GOP is not just the party of open borders, but the party of aggressive importation of the least desirable people into your neighborhood. When you vote Republican, you are voting for your children and grandchildren to live as hated minorities. The GOP is the other side of the turd sandwich with regards to immigration. One side wants open borders and the other side wants to build massive welcome signs.

Getting back to the reboot topic, what this plan suggests is that the critics of Hollywood are correct about the lack of ideas. The Republicans have nothing to offer, so they are rebooting old campaigns. McCarthy has never had a job or met a normal American, so he has no idea who he is pitching with this slop. It sounds good to the feckless airheads in marketing, so he just assumes it will work. It will not get him in trouble with his handlers, which is what really matters to him.

Finally, what is shaping up in the 2022 midterms is a replay of the Biden strategy in the 2020 election. The Democrats hid Biden away and made the election about Trump being Hitler. McCarthy and the Republicans will hide under their beds and hope the public is sick of the Democrats. In other words, it is another election in which one side wins by default. The political class has nothing to offer, because from their perspective, everything is going great and you need to shut up.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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Coup De Jour

Posted on January 4, 2022 by thezman

One of the iron laws of the universe is that whatever the America Left is warning about is usually something they are plotting. Alternatively, whatever they are accusing others of doing is something they have already done. The Russian collusion stuff is the most recent example of this. They accused Trump of plotting with a foreign government, the Russians, but we learned it was official Washington all mobbed up with the Ukrainians, Chinese and anyone else with extra cash.

Of course, for the last year the ruling class has been yammering about the insurrection and the ongoing threat to “our” democracy. Meanwhile, they have been dragging people off to secret dungeons, harassing citizens for their politics, throwing people off social media and all the things we associate with a thug regime. Go back further and they spent four years claiming the 2016 election was rigged and then committed massive election fraud in the 2020 election.

This is how you can discern the future in regime rhetoric. Regime-ology, like Kremlinology in the Cold War, is becoming a skill in this age. You read the regime organs like the Washington Post or New York Times not for the literal content, but for the esoteric content, the stuff between the lines. In order to be prepared for what they will do next, we have all been forced to be Straussian. Of course, we also have the opposite rule of liberalism to guide us.

This is why the stories about a potential military coup are interesting. This one from December got the ball rolling. It is framed as a warning of a possible coup by the imaginary army of insurrectionists, but clearly the authors are imagining themselves as a triumvirate saving “our” democracy. A couple of weeks later, the Pentagon assured us that they are ready to send troops into Washington and seize control of the government if people vote the wrong way in the next election.

You do not have to be a geezer to recall a time when such talk was strictly forbidden by the mass media and political class. In fact, they went out of their way to assure themselves and the public that no one in the army would ever think of such a thing, much less suggest it. You see, America was a republic with civilian control of the military, so such a thing was impossible. It was often implied that the greatness of the military was the result of its republican virtue.

It used to be that the far-left would have been berserk with anger over the suggestion that the military would be needed to secure “our” democracy. They hated the military and saw it as the enemy of democracy. An indication of just how much the Left has changed over the last decade or so is their reaction to that column. They think it is wonderful that the military is publicly expressing their loyalty to “our” democracy and promising to crush the alleged enemies of it.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at these ridiculous sissies in regime media cheering for a military coup. One of the interesting features of the managerial class is their assumption that the institutions exist to serve their interests. They never think for a second that the men with guns defending “our” democracy may realize they no longer need the managerial class to run the administrative state. Meetings are for men in suits, not for men in charge holding guns.

Putting that aside, this coup talk offers some insight into what the people in charge are plotting for the near future. The upcoming midterm election is of little interest as it just means the Republicans gain some seats. The focus is on the 2024 election, which they now view as the great battle between “our” democracy and the imaginary insurrectionists, otherwise known as Trump voters. They have no intention of allowing Trump to win and take office again.

This strikes normal people as a bit strange. After all, what was plain in the Trump years is he is no threat to the regime. If he returned to office, he is not going exact revenge on those who wronged him. He will crawl on his belly for their approval. The regime, on the other hand, cannot see this. They always project their own qualities onto their enemies and in this case, they assume Trump would seek murderous revenge. After all, that is what they would do if they were him. They will not allow it.

This offers another insight into regime thinking. They assume Trump would act like they would act if in the same position. That means they assume he will have them jailed and tossed into dungeons on made up charges. They see this as a threat to “our” democracy, which then justifies any means necessary to stop it. This is how the 2020 election was fueled by widescale fraud. They told their election volunteers that any means necessary was acceptable.

Looking ahead, what this suggests is that a military coup of some sort is in the cards within the next decade. Since the generals are all super-woke, it probably means something like a hybrid civilian-military junta. The leaders of the Democratic party will lock arms with the military leadership to “defend our democracy” by overturning the elections and imposing a form of martial law. Some Republicans will be arrested as conspirators and insurrectionists.

There is another thing evident in these posts that offers some insight into what will happen in the near term. These super-woke generals are just as delusional as the super-woke regime leaders. Would the rank and file in the armed services support a scheme to “defend our democracy” from Boomers waving flags? The most likely result would be a schism in the services. Instead of being a show of strength, a coup would turn into another display of weakness and incoherence.

Another iron law of the universe is that managerial regimes become decreasingly competent over time. This was what brought down communism. The Soviet system was so corrupt it was no longer functional in the end. That is the most likely end for the regime’s coup plans. The will is there but the system has simply become too incompetent and corrupt to do it. There will be tanks in the streets, but they will be broken down and abandoned like the regime itself.

The Bearded Weirdo

Posted on January 3, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up. This week it is about the fact that two years of Covid has revealed some unforgettable and unforgivable truths. Behind the green door, there is the first podcast of the new year.

Politics in a democratic society is always going to attract a lot of very strange people, but there is a range of acceptable strangeness. As a result, the weirdness tends to be normalized in that you just expect it. No one is surprised to learn that people in politics have the morals of carny folk, because politics is entertainment. We are not shocked by it unless the behavior falls way outside the norm. That is what makes the Jack Murphy scandal both amusing and interesting.

For those unfamiliar, Jack Murphy was a leader in the man-o-sphere scene, which is a broad term covering anti-feminism, the pick-up artists, men’s rights and the general discussion of manliness in the modern age. Murphy pitched himself as a bit from all of those buckets, but mostly the latter. He ran something called the Liminal Order and charged men $100 a month to learn how to be better men. He also had ornamental facial hair and worked for The Claremont Institute.

It also turns out that he produced gay porn and was into something called cuckoldry, which is a sexual fetish involving voyeurism and sex with strangers. If you are interested in the details of Mr. Murphy’s side hobbies, someone calling herself Megan Fox posted them at PJ Media. Of course, Jack Murphy is not really Jack Murphy, Irish he-man, but rather, he is someone named John Goldman, who is not Irish. It is hard to imagine how this story could get any more ridiculous.

Putting aside the seediness of it, this story raises a question that seems to be at the heart of most scandals. Did this guy not know how the internet works? He was selling gay porn on-line, so he had to know something about the internet. Did he really think that no one would ever look around at his internet life? It appears he made little effort to conceal any of this stuff. How is it possible he did not know he would get caught and why was he not prepared to answer for it?

You cannot write it off to hubris or ignorance. A quick search of his two names brings up this article from three years ago. He was working for the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 2018 as a finance manager. He was also posting as an alt-right character under his fake name at the time and the board found out about it. Interestingly, he was not fired from his job. In fact, the local ACLU came to his defense. Even so, he should have learned that there are no secrets on-line.

Another question that comes up in these cases is how is it possible that these guys keep getting away with these scams? Charging men $100 a month to learn how to be better men is crazy, but not uncommon. Mike Cernovich used to run self-help seminars where he would charge people to be their life-coach. Ross Jeffries in the 1980’s ran seminars where he taught the art of seduction. YouTube is full of guys peddling something like this to desperate men.

The answer to the question here is that there are a lot of men in a modern society who can find no role as men in society. Just as childless women hopped up on feminism often turn into on-line harpies, men living in a feminized society often turn into desperate suckers willing to pay anything for fraternity. Murphy/Goldman was simply exploiting this need for fraternity and male bonding. He is a con-man who finally found easily exploitable marks on the alternative right.

Far-left types and feminists find this story very amusing, as they assume it says something about the imaginary Right they think they are battling. They are correct that this is a phenomenon on the Right, but that is only because there is no place for naturally occurring males on the Left. Otherwise, there is very little that is right-wing about the man-o-sphere. The politics are decorations that are used as a lure to draw in the desperate males looking for brotherhood.

The best you can say about the man-o-sphere, with regards to politics and political inclination, is that it is uniformly anti-feminist. The gamers, the pick-up artists and even the groypers entered politics through the anti-feminism door. The ugliness of feminism has driven males away from mainstream and left-wing politics. This is why Murphy/Goldman had to transform himself from a standard issue on-line lefty into a Trump supporting right-wing anti-feminist in order to work his grift.

Behind all of this is the fact that he found an easy home among people who are supposed to be more prudent and intellectually rigorous. In 2021, the Claremont Institute made him a Lincoln Fellow. For some reason, everything involving the name Lincoln turns out to be riddled with sexual degeneracy. Putting that aside, how is it possible that they did not know he was a faker? They surely did a background check on him before inviting him to the team.

You can look at this two ways. One is they were desperate for attention, so they just invited in someone who seemed to have a big audience on-line. Charlie Kirk, who is as dumb as a hamster, was also a Lincoln Fellow. In other words, it is the old guys trying to get some street cred by inviting in those who they think are the cool kids on this internet thing they have been reading about in the papers. They never thought to look into his background to see if he was also selling gay porn.

The other answer, the most likely one, is they knew he was a fraud, but they did not care as he was willing to play ball. It was the old quid pro quo. They would grant these “internet influencers” some intellectual legitimacy in exchange for them spreading the right message to their followers. They knew he was not an Irish he-man, but that did not matter, so they did not look any further. They just wanted access to his audience, so they never bothered to ask any questions.

That is a good lesson for anyone involved in political activism. Politics attracts a lot of weirdos, because we live in a liberal democracy, which favors carny folk. That means you have to know the back story of the people you wish to trust. If it does not add up or they are lying, then you are best to avoid the person entirely. The same way one judges a new coworker or new neighbor should apply more so in politics. The old Cold War term, “trust but verify” should be the way in dissident politics.

In the end, this story is nothing but a bit of momentary amusement, but it is another good sign as we head into the next phase of dissident politics. This scandal is not on this side of the great divide, but on the normie side. Murphy/Goldman had no influence on this side as this side has become much more skeptical about these guys who are on-line political entertainers. That suggests there is a maturing in dissident politics and an awareness of the weirdo problem.

How It Ends

Posted on December 28, 2021 by thezman

A little over a century ago, September 16, 1920, to be exact, a horse-drawn wagon packed with 500-pounds of dynamite exploded outside the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan & Co. bank on Wall Street. Thirty people were killed instantly and another ten died from their wounds. Over 100 other people were injured. The bombing was never solved, but everyone assumed it was done by anarchists. Anarchist terrorism was becoming common over the prior decade.

One consequence of the bombing was the federal government got serious about the communists and anarchists in the country. They rounded them up and deported them even though they could not pin the crime on them. The elites also gained a new perspective on immigration after this bombing. All of a sudden, letting anyone walk into the country was not so popular with rich people. Not long after, immigration was sharply curtailed, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe.

The incident is a good reminder of the reality of politics. Things that vex the people will be ignored until they begin to threaten the rich people. The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 did not register with the ruling class, because the people running the country lived on the East Coast. The terrible impact of immigration on the working classes was considered a feature by the wealthy. When the reality of immigration landed on their doorstep, their attitudes quickly changed.

Another example from the last century was medicine. For most of human history the best medicine was money. Rich people avoided the general fifth of society and they could avoid what passed for medicine. More people were probably killed by doctors than disease as hospitals were disgusting and until the 20th century, germ theory was unknown to doctors. Avoiding hospitals and having a private doctor, along with better food and sanitation was what kept rich people healthy.

The 20th century started to change that reality. The rich and poor packed into cities which meant that disease loads were much higher. The Spanish flu, for example, hit all classes of people, not just the poor. It also struck young people, which made it even more frightening. Polio was another scary disease. It had been around since forever, but urbanization made it more common. Numerous urban polio epidemics began to appear starting in the 20th century.

All of a sudden, polio was causing panic and civil unrest, as epidemics in major cities were reported by the mass media. Despite the fact most infections were mild and only a tiny number of people suffered long term effects, polio became a scary thing. One big reason for that is rich people were getting sick with polio. Unlike most plagues, this was not just a disease for the rabble. Polio was not sparing the wealthy. Just like that, finding a solution to polio became a top priority.

Public health is another good example of how the ruling class acts only when it serves their interests. Industrialization brought urbanization which brought disease to the doorstep of the rich. Unlike in the feudal order, the rich needed to be around the poor, who worked their factories and maintained their cities. Being near filthy poor people living in their own slop was dangerous, so the ruling classes set about improving public health and sanitation in the urban areas.

Politically, the ruling class of any society operates as Jeremy Bentham imagined all people would act if permitted. That is, the rich are motivated by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Discharging their duties is avoided until not doing so promises more pain than pleasure. They are only ever moved to act on behalf of the greater good when they feel pain. This is especially true in liberal societies, which select for sociopathy in the political class.

Counterintuitively, it means that the only real way for people in a liberal democracy to get the attention of the political class is to threaten their lives. We saw this last January when a very peaceful group toured the Capitol. Within hours the city was turned into an armed camp. The same people who claim drug crimes are impossible to police and make excuses for black violence were suddenly able to find every last protestor and lock down the city for months.

This is something to keep in mind when wondering when the lunacy of the Covid panic will come to an end. Right now, it is great fun for rich people who are not required to play along with the loons. The politicians have to participate in Covid theater, but in private they think it is just a big goof. They take pleasure in mocking the crazies and their ornamental face gear. They think it is hilarious that the masses just go along with the ridiculous measures that serve no purpose beyond humiliation.

This nonsense ends when the ruling class decides it ends and that happens when the cost to them gets serious. Economic trouble is one obvious way the cost quickly becomes intolerable. That may be what lies ahead in 2022, as another round of Covidian theater craters a struggling economy. Someone taking a shot at one of these provincial politicians is another possible wakeup call. Organized resistance is unlikely, but a localized “event” is certainly possible.

Regardless, reason and reality are not going to end this lunacy. For the rich it is just an amusing game of human chess. For their servants in political office, it is a way to pretend their lives have meaning. Of course, there are plenty of stupid people willing to degrade themselves in order to feel like they are part of something. What puts the brakes on this dynamic is when the war comes home to the rich people. Until they start to feel the pain, Covid mania is a feature of life in the West.

It is an interesting lesson in the reality of democracy. Since democratic government selects for sociopathy, the result is a government that is far less responsive than allegedly autocratic systems. The dictator or king can be motivated by a sense of duty to his office or his legacy. Elected officials are motivated purely by pleasure and pain and they are extremely low in empathy. It turns out that democracy works only when the people are prepared to use violence.

This may be why democratic systems precede autocratic ones. It is not that mob rule becomes unreasonable, but that violent mob action becomes the only reasonable response to the indifference of democratic rule. The mob hangs their elected officials and the rich are suddenly moved to act by installing a dictator who will address the concerns of the masses. In other words, democracy is not mob rule but rule by sociopath, which is remedied by the strong hand of leadership.

Abracadabra

Posted on December 20, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Instead of the normally optimistic post, this week is a look at the court fights that lie ahead. No Sunday podcast this week, but I do have a post up on the Ray Epps story. This insurrection show trial could turn out to be an amusing and embarrassing debacle for the regime.

One of the striking features of public discourse in a liberal democracy is the narrowness of language used by people with speaking roles. This narrowness of language reflects the narrowness of acceptable thought. The people allowed on stage signal their conformity to the hive mind by using the approved language. This means using the popular words and phrases of the moment. It is why the mass media resembles fireflies at dusk, blinking at one another as if they are coordinated.

A ridiculous example was the aftermath of the 2010 election when Barak Obama came out and said his team had been “shellacked” in the election. This is an old fashioned term that used to be common in sports. The media, unfamiliar with sports and sports metaphors, spastically repeated it. They were sure their cult leader has just invented the term and they seemed to be sure it was designed to cure their pain. For weeks they found a way to insert the term in every story.

It was not just monkey-see-monkey-do with them. There was a strong odor of incense about how they kept repeating it. This mysterious new word was like a sound in the darkness telling one another of their presence, The repeating of it was a way to move past the disconfirmation of the election. Instead of facing the fact that Obama was not Black Jesus, they reassured one another that their beliefs were valid. The use of the leader’s new word was a form of re-confirmation.

We are seeing something similar happening in the aftermath of the failure to pass Biden’s big spending bill. The term Build Back Better has become a bizarre abracadabra phrase for the true believers. They are sure that every problem can be solved with Build Back Better. The far-left activists who chased Senator Kyrsten Sinema into a toilet were chanting “Build Back Better” as if they thought the phrase would magically transform her into a believer.

Senator Joe Manchin refused the Build Back Better sacrament over the weekend, thus scuttling the bill for this year. The result has been a flurry of incantations in the media using the term to mean everything. Here we have CNN explaining how the faithful were let down by the running dog heretic Joe Manchin. The phrase is used half a dozen times but there is no effort to explain what it means. Everyone knows that it means the final push to promised last stage of history.

Here we have a story telling us the long dark winter Joe Biden has been promising for two years is finally upon us. The reason is the Build Back Better plan was defeated by the forces of darkness. Goldman Sachs is now saying the economy, like the earth when Persephone returns to the underworld, will now go into a period of mourning over the loss of Build Back Better. How or why this will happen is not discussed, because to do so would possibly offend the gods further.

The fact that the bill itself is meaningless gibberish that only exists as a concept adds to its mystery. Since no one can point to the text and find fault, because the text is just word salad at this point, makes it unassailable. This allows the believers to cast onto it all of their hopes and dreams. Build Back Better is just a catchphrase to mean the great leap forward into the last stage of history. As a result, the believers are baffled as to why Manchin opposes this unalloyed good.

The fight over this bill is a good reminder that conservative explanations for left-wing behavior are mostly wrong. If they were about money and power, they would have done something different here. The fact that they have all of the money and power yet still engage in this ritualized behavior is another important point. The religious fervor over Build Back Better, the moralization of the slogan, suggests these people are acting from some sort of religious impulse rather than politics.

The root of that impulse is the assumption that once everyone agrees on the morality of something, the solution is self-evident and beyond debate. It is why they cannot accept that Manchin and others could be right that the trillions in new money creation proposed by the believers could create terrible trade-offs. There can be no practical objections to the plan when the morality of it is settled. There must be something else at work, which is why they will turn Manchin into Trotsky.

Another aspect of this morality-politics dynamic is that politics is now a sign of moral ambiguity or worse, dissent from accepted morality. Logically, if politics ends when the morality is settled, the continuation of politics means the moral issues have not been settled or some oppose the settled morality for some reason. What lies behind the structure of the Build Back Better bill is to end politics by delegating what should happen in the legislature to the administrative state.

Put another way, what the Left seeks is an end to politics, but they are not interested in debating the morality. From their point of view, the moral issues are settled so the task now is to stamp out the remaining political resistance. Given the slim differences between the two parties, they are not mistaken. A big Republican win next November will probably mean the Build Back Better plan gets passed as a way to “unite the country after a contentious and divisive election”.

Regime-ology

Posted on December 14, 2021 by thezman

Back in 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about an alleged rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus” story was a bombshell story that became a national controversy. It seemed to confirm everything the Nth-wave feminists were saying about the scourge of white males raping white women on the college campus. All of the usual suspects rushed to the nearest outlet to display their outrage over the incident.

Of course, this later became known as the “Virginia Rape Hoax” as the story was completely fake. The only things about it that were true is the star of the story was a human who attended the university and the writer used her real name. Otherwise, the story was a total fabrication and a ridiculous one at that. Sensible people noticed huge problems with it from the start. The two big clues that it was fake were that it read like a bodice ripper and the villain was named Haven Monahan.

In retrospect, this story was a turning point for mass media. By the old rules, everyone involved would have been shamed out of the public eye. The writer, Sabrina Erdely, would have been drummed out of the profession. Jackie Coakley, the coed who was the fake victim, would have been destroyed by an angry media. Erdely faced no repercussions and still works in the media. Coakley was mostly ignored and has gone on with her life, not having suffered from it.

The news was always biased and lots of reporters fabricated stories to fill up their stories, but there was always risk to being a fabulist. Stephen Glass, the guy who cooked up legendary whoppers while at the New Republic was drummed out of the business and the reputation of the magazine was destroyed. Jayson Blair. the black New York Times reporter was fired for making up stories. Imagine a black reporter being fired today for anything, much less for slandering white people.

Prior to the Rolling Stone story, a reasonable person knew the media was biased toward left-wing causes and left-wing institutions. They would favor the Democrat over the Republican, for example. They would promote left-wing causes and ignore or dismiss right-wing issues. After the Rolling Stone hoax, the prudent person assumes that everything in the media is fake. The question is, what is possibly true and what is the agenda behind the proposed narrative.

In other words, reading the American media has taken on the same quality as reading the Soviet media in the Cold War. You read it like you read any piece of fiction in that you are looking for clues in the narrative to discovery the deeper meaning. Instead of Kremlinologists, Americans have to be regime-ologists. The regime media offers clues about what is going on behind the veil. Those clues help understand the workings of the inner party and what they are plotting.

Take this story in Yahoo News about a high-tension cloak and dagger affair that supposedly happened in Washington during the Trump years. The story has a female heroine named Ali Watkins, who is a strong independent female journalist working for the New York Times. It has a villain, a shady character named Jeffrey Rambo, who worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The two of them engage in a high stakes game of cat and mouse in the capital.

The story seems ridiculous and oddly familiar. The reason for that is it is ripped from the ham-fisted television shows about rogue government agencies. Of course, the main character is described like someone from female fantasy literature. Instead of the villain being named Haven Monahan, he is Jeffrey Rambo. The story does not describe him as having a thick New York accent or dropping from helicopters with a bayonet between his teeth, but you just know it happened!

There are some things about the story that are true, like the names of the two main characters, but the story is most assuredly fake. The first clue the story is made up is that this fantastic story is in Yahoo News, rather than the New York Times where the protagonist works. Instead, it is at a C-list outlet written by a nobody whose prior work was reporting on the FBI. Dumping these stories on nobody reporters is standard practice for the regime. It is part of the subterfuge.

Another clue is the main character. She is not the strong independent female journalist speaking truth to power. She is the tramp who was having sex with James Wolfe, the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee. He was busted for giving her information that she used in her stories. She denies it but this is not an issue in dispute, so we can add liar to the morals charges. Watkins at the time was in her mid-20’s and Wolfe was in his late-50’s.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wolfe was the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee for 29 years. This means he was one of a small number of people seeing the nation’s most sensitive intelligence data. In other words, he was a professional spook who knew the game. Most likely, in addition to getting some young flesh ,he was also using Watkins to peddle disinformation. This is not a new game between “young reporters” and old DC hands.

Using our regime-ology skills we quickly see that the drama of the story is mostly fake and intended to get attention. The real story is the FBI is peddling a story to the media that both damages another agency and helps their friendly media. They picked Jana Winter because she has nothing else going on, is desperate for a break and has been a willing stenographer in the past. She will not ask too many questions. Again, this is old hat in the game of media manipulation.

That raises the question as to why this story was planted by the FBI. There is the special prosecutor glacially investigating the Russian collusion hoax and the FBI’s role in promoting it. The Trump people did use the “rogue agency” in question to uncover the Wolfe-Watkins operation. It is possible Durham is using the same assets to investigate the FBI or allies. It could also be another smear job against Trump that will be later used in the campaign against him.

At this point, it is hard to know, but it is good practice in reading the media in order to tease out what is happening behind the veil of secrecy. Given the effort put into writing this whopper, it will come up again at some point. All we can know is there is trouble inside the security operations. One branch is not happy with another and is now taking their war to friendly media. Perhaps soon people will be airbrushed out of official photos, a practice popular in authoritarian regimes.

The Assange Case

Posted on December 13, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast as well as some thoughts on the Army – Navy football game.

Thirty years ago, the typical right-wing person would have held a dim view of whistleblowers and their media accomplices. Those whistleblowers were always left-wing people with the strong odors that come with it. They were motivated by left-wing morality rather than republican virtue. Their complaints about the government were motivated by their opposition to America. These stories usually made those who stood for republican order look like the villains.

Probably the most famous example is Daniel Ellsberg. He is the man who released the top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in the Vietnam War to The New York Times and Washington Post. This was in 1971 and Ellsberg was a fanatical left-wing antiwar protestor. He violated a number of laws in releasing those documents, but he was on the Left, so it was okay. Left-wing lawbreaking was always okay as long as it served left-wing interests.

That was another country ago. Today, the typical right-wing person has a new respect for the government whistleblower. You see this with Julian Assange, who is being transferred to the United States for a show trial. The only people speaking out about his treatment are conservatives. Here is a story in Breitbart that manages to tie Assange to an old paleocon concept. It is one of those times when you know they do not know the source of the phrase, as otherwise they would never use it.

The Assange story is a good example of how partisanship within the mainstream makes rational discourse impossible. When Assange was leaking information damaging to the Bush crusades, they were not fans of Assange. Of course, the Left loved Assange and treated him like a modern day Che Guevara. When WikiLeaks embarrassed the Democrats then the Left suddenly hated Assange. It took a while, but eventually the conservatives figured out how to back the whistleblower.

Interestingly, those same conservatives have nothing but contempt for Chelsea Manning, the sexually confused former Army soldier who provided documents to Julian Assange back in the Bush years. For a lot of reasons, Chelsea Manning makes for a troublesome hero for them. Of course, Democrats moved heaven and earth to get their favorite crossdresser out of prison. Then “she” turned on them, as it were. Saying bad things about the police state is no longer left-wing.

These cases, and you can probably put Edward Snowden in there as well, present some interesting dilemmas. The biggest conundrum is the role of the media in these sorts of affairs. They are the platform for disseminating the information being leaked by the whistleblowers. They also shape the narrative around the leaks to paint the person doing the leaking as a hero. The TV tabloid 60 Minutes recently did a puff piece on the leaker, Reality Winner, painting her as a hero.

In a rules-based society, people who break the rules should suffer consequences commensurate with the damage done by the rule breaking. A general principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that the punishment fits the crime. If the crime, however, prevents a much larger crime from occurring, the rule breaking ceases to be a crime and becomes a public service. While this theory makes sense to a sensible person, its abuse by the deranged and dangerous suggests a serious flaw.

Then there is the issue of the media. In the old analog days, it was easy to make an exception for the press. In these cases, they were treated like neutrals. Even though they knew the material they were reporting was illegally obtained, they were allowed to report on it because a free press trumps government secrecy. In the digital age where we no longer have a free press or actual reporters, this no longer makes sense. The media is just the marketing arm of the unofficial ruling party.

Can we have a civil society in the digital age when billionaire public relations firms are able to work with the state to embarrass opponents? This is what we saw with Trump when the New York Times got his tax returns. Clearly, someone in the IRS or Trump’s accounting firm stole the documents. Then they handed them to the press. This is trafficking in stolen goods. If the item in question was a piece of art from Trumps’ office, everyone involved would be in prison.

This is what makes the Assange case interesting. Whether the rulers know it or not, they are putting this idea front and center. If WikiLeaks is not allowed to publish leaked material, then how can the New York Times do it? There are only three solutions to that puzzle and one of them is the farce of a free press is now over. In other words, if only regime supportive media is protected, then we no longer have an independent media with constitutional protections.

On the other hand, if the courts decide Assange gets the same protections as the New York Times or Washington Post, then the age of secrets is over. In the digital age it is simply too easy to spill the beans on official shenanigans. This then spills into personal areas, as rich people make for good headlines. The NDA’s famous people make their staff sign suddenly mean very little. The only solution for the ruling class is to pump out even more disinformation through official organs.

The third option is the courts begin to nibble away at this media exceptions, which is something the Supreme Court has hinted at recently. If possession of stolen goods is the same for the media as it is for everyone else, then these sorts of cases become very complicated for the media. Suddenly, the SPLC publishing e-mails from one of the people they are harassing becomes a criminal case. At the minimum, it becomes the basis for a civil case against the outlet.

Taken together, all of this points to a central question that lurks beneath all of the recent troubles in America. Can a large culturally authoritarian society like American maintain itself in the digital age? The Assange case is only possible in the digital age and the contradictions it reveals are also only visible in the digital age. In fact, much of what ails modern America is made possible by the Internet. It may be that a secular theocracy like America is impossible when information flows even semi-freely.

Political Cosplay

Posted on December 7, 2021 by thezman

Politics in a liberal democracy is first and foremost performative. Getting attention is the first goal for political types and they do that by comporting to familiar roles. How well they play those roles, as in any type of theater, establishes their status in the hierarchy of the political theater. Some actors, of course, take a short cut and play one of the various fools or jesters in the political drama. If done well this is a fast-track to attention, but the role itself is always on the periphery of the main show.

If most people were operating from self-interest and had a reasonable sense of their self-interest, political theater would not exit. For example, why would people line up to vote when they know their votes will be ignored? Most people know this to some degree and the science bears it out, but people still vote. In fact, voter participation has gone up as the effectiveness of voting has declined. The theater of democratic politics blinds people to the futility of it for some reason.

This is most obvious in the cosplay brand of politics. This is where people dress up in strange outfits and play make-believe on the streets. Antifa is just cosplay for people with a taste for violence. Instead of playing characters from their favorite TV shows, they play characters from their misreading of history. The black outfits make them the heirs of the Schwarze Scharen or maybe the red makes them the modern day Rotfrontkämpferbund or the post-modern Khmer Rouge.

Their view of themselves and their role in the political drama is as imaginary as the characters they are playing. No one bothers to ask any of them why they go around smashing windows and harassing people. Why do they show up at some right-wing political event? What is the point? There is no practical point. They do it because politics for them is a real life fantasy game. They have to show up at these things to keep the game going. That is the whole point of it.

Of course, their analogs are the flag and costume characters who are eager to play their part in the drama. Since the 1960’s anti-Semites have been staging flag and costume shows. They play the part of the Freikorps in this endless replay of the interwar years in Germany. The credit for this belongs to George Lincoln Rockwell who landed on the idea of playing dress-up to get attention. He dressed up as a cartoon Nazi and marched around with his followers.

For fifty years now anti-Semites and make-believe Nazis have been doing flag and costume parties in the public square. They say they are trying to draw attention to their issues, but that is part of the fantasy. After more than fifty years, everyone is well aware of the issues they support. In reality, it is just political cosplay. Like the Antifa people, it is all about maintaining a fantasy version of politics and history. Instead of the hammer and sickle eventually winning the game, it is the swastika.

What lies beneath cosplay politics is escapism. Like libertarianism, this type of political theater is a way to avoid reality. There is the personal reality of the players themselves, who are low-status people with no role in society. They will never be the important people they dream of being, so they play one in minor politics. At a higher level there is the grim reality of liberal democratic politics. No one wants to face the fact that the will of the people plays almost no role in the affairs of men.

The absurdity of political cosplay plays another role. It allows people who turn away from these ridiculous performances to believe their brand of performative politics really do matter. Serious Progressives, for example, condemn street violence as it distracts from their important issues. Conservatives condemn the “Nazis” because they make them look bad in front of their liberal friends. Cosplay politics gives them an excuse for why their performative politics is equally ineffective.

This addiction to performative politics is the primary manifestation of the narcotic of liberal democracy. Once a people accept the “general will” as their god, they have an unshakeable believe in the power of persuasion. They are forever convinced that if they can just win the next election, have the right performance, they can gain the backing of the general will and the wheel of history will turn their way. Heroin addicts have a better grasp of their circumstances than people in a democracy.

The Roman poet Juvenal is credited with coining the term “bread and circuses” to explain how rulers gain public approval. To generate public approval, they use public spectacle and satisfy the base requirements of the people. As long as people are fed and entertained, they are compliant. Juvenal’s actual point here was to condemn the people for selfishly going along with it, but over the centuries the expression has come to mean a ruling ethos, especially in democracies.

The magic of liberal democracy, at least in the short run, is it becomes something of a self-licking ice cream cone. The people, in search of bread and circuses, create their own circuses in the form of political theater. To underwrite the drama they endlessly seek to improve their conditions in order to have more time and money for the political circuses they are creating. The people in charge just put their thumb on the scale in order to direct the activity to their benefit.

Therein lies the real alternative to modern politics. Since there is no voting your way out of democracy, the only solution is to boycott it. If the audience fails to show up for the great political drama, the players have no purpose. Performative politics requires an audience as that is its point. Boycotts are not as fun as playing dress-up or voting harder, so it is at a disadvantage. It may be that the only solution to the narcotic of democracy is for the people to vote themselves to death.

Parallels And Precedents

Posted on December 6, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. This week I take some gratuitous shots at the sperg-right over the racist AI story from last week. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast where I gas on about the news of the week.

Michael Anton, the person responsible for the famous Flight 93 essay endorsing the great gamble on Donald Trump, has a long essay up at The New Criterion arguing that we live in unprecedented times. Those who make predictions about what comes next for the West are foolishly assuming that present patterns are the same as past patterns and therefore they will play out the same as they did in the past. He lays out why the current patterns are unique and therefore unpredictable.

Interestingly, his essay rests on this assertion: “let’s first consider the one historical parallel that all sides of this debate draw on for precedent: the rise, peak, decline, and fall of Rome.” This essay is part of a series, so it is possible the task given to the writers was to draw comparisons between the West in general or American in particular with the Roman Empire or even the Roman Republic. The entirety of Anton’s essay is comparing Rome to America.

Comparisons to Rome have been popular in America for a very long time, mostly because the American republic failed in the middle of the 19th century. This is one of those things that intelligent people have known is true but agreed not to discuss outside where the peasants can hear. A major part of the ruling class ethos has been the maintenance of the republican myth. Some on the Right will still insist that America is a republic and not a liberal democracy.

That is why comparisons to Rome have been popular. Either as a self-deception or as a way to avoid discussing reality, the worry that America could follow the Roman Republic into empire has been a staple for a long time. What makes this present age unique is that many people simply accept America as an empire. Much of the ruling class now prefers the word “democracy” over republic. When was the last time a politician said, “we must defend our republic”?

Anton takes a different approach in knocking down the comparison to Rome, mostly to focus on the great threats to the current order. The fact is though, Rome is not a great guide to understanding the present age. If you are looking for an example from the classical period, then Greece is your best option. Like America, Athens became a democratic empire that never understood itself to be an empire. In dominating its neighbors, it was sure it was liberating them from tyranny.

The other comparison between Ancient Athens and America that works well is in the totalitarian nature of its politics. The Romans put on shows to entertain the masses, but the Greeks staged shows to indoctrinate and control the people. Dionysian theater was about maintaining the prevailing moral orthodoxy. Today, mass media is about controlling the moral framework. Like the Greeks, Americans are hooked on the narcotic of endless morality tales reinforcing their beliefs about themselves.

If one wants to take this comparison back to the origin of America, you can go back to the English Civil War. That is a version of the Peloponnesian War and the American Civil War was a replay of it to birth America a second time. In both cases, it is the democratic side that prevailed over the Spartan side. That makes for a much more interesting comparison as the Athenians were lucky to have lost to the Spartans, so we may be seeing a form of alternative history with America.

If the Classical period is not your thing, then we have an empire closer to home that makes for an interesting and useful comparison. The American empire is looking similar to the Soviet empire at the end. The ossified and geriatric ruling elite is the obvious starting point in the comparison. Like the American empire, the Soviet leaders did not prepare for their departure from the scene. Instead, they purged anyone with ambition and the result was a poverty of talent and vitality at the top.

Another good parallel with the Soviets is the people in charge just assumed they represented the will of the people. The American ruling elite does not have dusty old books about political theory to justify their belief in themselves as the authentic voice of the people, but they believe it, nonetheless. Central to the identity to the managerial elite is their belief in themselves as the expression of the ideals of the system. Like the nomenklatura, the managerial class thinks things going great.

The other selling point in the comparison between the Soviet empire and the American empire is they are the product of the same dialectic. Communism proposed, fascism opposed and the synthesis was liberal democracy. Alternatively, communism and liberal democracy both assumed they were the answer to the great question of history, the solution to the struggle forward. In the end, neither was the answer to anything because history is not a solvable puzzle.

What is most interesting in Anton’s essay is what is not mentioned. For example, the Roman Empire in the last two centuries was a system run by people who had no hand in creating it. Waves of barbarian invaders had changed the complexion of the people over whom the empire ruled. The leaders also stopped being Roman in the sense that they had connections to the Roman elite. We see a similar pattern emerging in the West as immigrants flood Western lands.

There is also the fact that the Roman Republic failed when the economic arrangements supporting it failed. The influx of slave labor after the defeat of Carthage and Corinth changed the economics of the republic. We have a parallel to this age with the reliance on helot labor by Western capitalism. The economic model of fifty years ago no longer exists in the West, so it naturally follows that politics must change. Again we see the people problem as a precedent to our own age.

Of course, one can look for parallels in the rhythms of time. In the case of America, it could very well be the end of a historical epoch. The ideas of the Enlightenment have been fulling explored through Jacobinism, various forms of socialisms and communism and finally liberal democracy. Like all of those prior failures, this one is doomed to crash into the rocks of biological reality. The end point of man’s journey is not a paradise of peace and freedom, but rather the extinction of the species.

Anton’s essay is useful in that it focuses attention on the present trends that threaten civilization, but this is not an age without precedent. In fact, his premise is a bit of a strawman that allows him to avoid the central questions that lie at the heart of the current crisis in the West. It is not a crisis of historical patterns or ideology, but rather a crisis of people. Either the people of the West want to live or not. The real crisis is that there is no agreement on that answer.

Aborted Future

Posted on December 2, 2021 by thezman

Conservative Inc. has been abuzz with excitement over the abortion case recently argued before the Supreme Court. They think this is the big win they have been promising for more than half a century. The five “conservative” justices appear ready to overturn Roe and even Roberts seems to be leaning that way. Oral arguments seemed to center on whether they should reverse Roe entirely or try to find a piecemeal approach to begin the process of reversing it.

One of the ironies of this is that this was made possible by the man Conservative Inc. declared an enemy of their cult back in 2015. If the court does overturn Roe, you can be sure no one in the dying cult of conservatism will have the principles to both admit they were wrong and give Trump credit for the result. They will just pretend none of that happened and use the event to scam their donors one more time. Conservatives never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.

Putting that aside, some may be tempted to think this is a sign of some pushback against the forces of darkness. Roe was always bad law as it involved the court in an area of politics for which it is poorly equipped. Courts are crude instruments best suited for broad issues. Abortion is a purely moral issue. In a big multicultural society like America, there is never going to be agreement on such an issue. It is best left to local communities and the states to work out a compromise.

What Roe was all along was a symbol. The Yankee ruling elite could impose their values on the rest of the people. Roe and other rulings from the court were about maintaining that political arrangement dating to Gettysburg. If the court does reverse Roe, it should be read as the first sign of the Yankee retreat. In the fullness of time, the homosexual marriage ruling in the Obama years ruling will be viewed as the last great legal victory of the Yankee imperium.

Of course, the decline of the old Yankee ruling elite coincides with the demographic decline of heritage America. Abortion was always an issue for middle and upper- middle-class white women. The first generation of white women to enjoy abortion was the Baby Boomers. They wanted it so they could be “free” of the patriarchy. Then they wanted it for their daughters. Today, both cohorts are past childbearing years and the young generation is mostly nonwhite.

We saw something similar with family issues. When the Boomers were having kids, we were inundated with movies about having babies. Education was the top concern among middle-class voters. Then it was college tuition. Notice that politicians now only talk about education with regards to the whiteness of it. Good schools and cheap college are no longer a top priority because those are white people issues and white people with kids are a dwindling minority.

If the court does overturn Roe this summer, you will see some grannies and Nth-wave feminist lesbians out making noise. The Left will do a nostalgia tour, pretending it is 1970 all over again. They will pull the old signs out of storage and reminisce about the old days when they were hip and cool. Like so much of our politics, the response to overturning Roe will be another magical mystery tour of the past. Then it will be forgotten along with the events around it.

One contrary take on Roe that deserves consideration is that abortion was originally about personal privacy. The court was agnostic on the morality of abortion, but it was sure the state had no role in a private medical decision. There was a zone of privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. Even though privacy is never mentioned in the document, most agree the idea is important. There is a line between the public and private and there should be prohibitions against violating it.

In oral arguments, the court did not seem interested in that angle and the pro-abortion arguments did not emphasize it. This is a sign that the notion of the private space, the zone off-limits to prying eyes, is no longer important. This could be a read as an acknowledgment by the court that the concept of privacy is now dead. All of us should expect to live naked in full view of everyone. The public, and by extension the state, have a role in your private life and decisions.

The cycles of history are both large and small. The period following the Second World War kicked of a demographic and cultural cycle in America. That cycle existed within a larger cycle kicked off by the Civil War. You can say that America itself is a cycle within the larger cycle of English speaking people. Often when one cycle ends it creates the necessary elements to begin a new historical pattern. Sometimes the end is not the beginning of anything. It is just the end.

The abortion issue probably signals the end of the post-war cultural and demographic cycle that has been driven by the Baby Boomer generation. Ironically, it is things like abortion that will have killed this cultural period. A politics and culture dependent on middle-class white people is not long for the world if middle-class white people are throwing their babies in the dumpster of abortion mills. Abortion was a self-inflicted gunshot to the womb of heritage America.

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