Note: The weekly Taki post is up. This week I respond to a critic who took me to task for saying mean things about libertarianism. Behind the green door there is the Sunday podcast on some news items of the past week.

Turning Point USA is one of the many grifts from Conservative Inc. aimed at corralling young people into the pointless enterprise of modern conservatism. It is the creation of the late William T. Montgomery, a former marketing guru. He decided to turn Charlie Kirk into the modern day Billy Ray Valentine of conservatism. The result was Turning Point USA, a campus group that holds events around the country. They host 6 National Summits and 8 Regional Conferences each year.

The most recent event, which was staged in Florida this past weekend, ended in a bit of controversy when TP-USA decided to ban someone named Brandi Love. She was scheduled to address a group of teenagers as a VIP. Brandi Love, in addition to being a distinguished contributor to conservative publications, is also a retired porn actress who advertises herself as such on-line. She now uses the skills that made her a star in the oldest profession to be a star in the second oldest one.

TP-USA knew who she was before they extended the invitation and they provided her with VIP access as an honored guest. Clearly, they saw nothing wrong with having an over-the-hill porn star promoting her work to teenagers. The reason they shifted gears is they were getting mocked for it by their critics on the Right. Their critics had a field day with it as another example of how TP-USA is just another grift peddling degeneracy in the name of conservative values.

In fairness to the organizers of TP-USA, they probably assumed there was nothing wrong with having an aging porn actress at their event. After all, the Federalist website has her as a featured contributor. Sean Davis, one of the founders of the site, must think she is acceptable for young people. His partner, Ben Domenech, made this clear on Twitter over the weekend. Later he blamed anti-Semites for getting her booted, which sets up an interesting moral dynamic.

It is these sorts of things that suggest the universe has a sense of humor. Brandi Love is the prefect representative of conservatism. She is an old whore well past her prime, desperate to keep what little audience she can. Of course, conservatism is also an old whore well past its prime willing to degrade itself for attention. When you look at it objectively, Brandi Love should have been the keynote speaker. She is the near perfect representative of the conservative movement.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this, but it points to the primary reason that conservatism was a complete failure. It was always hollow. Despite all their pretensions, they never really stood for anything. Conservatism was nothing more than a way for the unpopular kids to get a chance to sit at the cool kids’ table. The reason they welcomed an old porn actress to their ranks was to show the cool kids they were not a bunch of stuck up prudes. They liked degeneracy too!

Beyond that, it shows that the people running TP-USA know they have nothing to offer, so they have to rely on gimmicks. Last year they got grief for having scantily clad bimbos with t-shirt guns on stage like it was spring break. They are not offering young people a chance to be a part of something important. They are offering them a chance to get drunk and have easy access to whores. Clubs in Ft. Lauderdale have more dignity than to use these tactics to get attention.

Of course, we live in an age in which conspiracy theories turn out to be previews of tomorrow’s news, so you have to wonder if this was really an error. TP-USA has been pushing degeneracy to young people since its inception. They used to have promiscuous homosexuals speak to college audiences to promote sodomy. That is how Nick Fuentes got famous. He got his fans to show up at events and ask people like Charlie Kirk why he thought anal sex was a conservative principle.

Given the times, one can be forgiven for wondering if the whole point of this operation is to be the other side of the sandwich for young people. One side is left-wing antiwhite politics, while the alternative is libertine degeneracy. It is not as if this old porn actress tried to crash the party. People at the very top of the organization reached out and invited her as a VIP. It is impossible for them to claim they did not know who she was, as that is the only reason anyone knows who she is.

It is a good example of how the market corrupts. The people running this group are sure that the marketplace must always decide. That means they measure their own efforts in terms of box office. The more tickets they sell, the better they think they are doing, even if they are peddling smut to teenagers in order to do it. They probably think this was a good result, as it got them some unearned media. Conservatism submitted to the marketplace and became just another carny act in the process.

The good news in all of this is TP-USA seems to be collapsing. Their event was lightly attended, and their on-line shows had crickets as a soundtrack. Despite the fact that young people today are terribly naïve, they still retain the ability to see through these efforts to exploit them. Yesterday men peddling nostalgia for an age that will never return are not going to get far with young people worried about being hated minorities, even if the sales pitch is festooned with smut.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis. Their views of the world remain the same as they were at some point in the past. For some it is always 1985 and the biggest fear is the commies will get control. Some are locked in 1968 where they are trying to keep corporate interests from crushing the working man. These people live like modern people, but their worldview remains in the world of the past.

From the perspective of dissidents, the most obvious of these groups are the civic nationalist types. Long time users of Gab have suddenly been made aware of these folks after Trump and Trump fans were dumped from Twitter. The J21’er is a person who signed up for Gab in January of 2021. They decorate their profile with patriotic symbols and far too much information about themselves. Politics for them is right out of a civics textbook from the late 1980’s.

These people are not just lost in the past. They have plenty of examples in the media who are right there with them. This post in the American Conservative is a good example of the type. It is a long piece about the future of conservatism that reads like it was written in 1992. No mention of immigration, the  most important issue facing the world at this time. No mention of race and racial politics, which has convulsed the country since the end of the Obama administration.

The writer is a regular at the site so it is safe to assume his views reflect those of the editorial staff. It links to many other sites that wave the conservative flag, so it is in tune with the sensibilities of that old tribe. This is the right world to use as they exist like an isolated tribe in the Amazon, unaware of the world that exists outside their remote villages. This is one of the links in the post. It is a debate about conservatism by people who should be in a museum exhibit about the 1990’s.

It is not just a phenomenon of the legacy Right. The BreadTube phenomenon is an example from the Left that parallels the one on the Right. These are people promoting things like socialism, communism and anarchism, but from the perspective of the 1970’s when such topics were actually discussed by adults. They want to steer young people away from identity politics, but they also want to combat what they call “far-right extremism” that appears on YouTube and other places.

This is where you see the time warp. The people they consider to be far-right are people like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson. Not only that, they stick to an old 1970’s liberal view of politics when the Left was sure their ideas were so convincing, they could engage with their opponents and win every time. Like their analogs on the other side, they seem to have missed the last couple of decades. They are unaware of the fact that people get fired from their job for holding the wrong opinions.

Of course, the establishment Left itself is trapped in a time warp. The people banging on about structural racism and white supremacy also bang on about the dangers of corporate media and corporate power. They do so on global corporate platforms, often from the corporate offices. If people actually wore the labels of their supporters, the street protestors would look like NASCAR drivers. Their little outfits would be festooned with corporate sponsors. “This riot brought to you by Amazon!”

Listen to the people behind the Critical Race Theory stuff and they carry on as if it is 1955 and the imaginary Jim Crow stuff is real. They claim to be fighting the racism of whites and the oppression of the white power structure. They are weirdly unaware of the fact that none of this ever existed or exists today. Everyone with the least bit of power is on their side. Their people they are attacking are without any representation in the halls of power. For the antiwhites, time stopped in 1968.

Some of this is just human nature. People stubbornly cling to old ways of thinking about things out of habit. There were still supporters of the Whigs long after they had disappeared into the past. Ideology provides structure and a way to understand the world, so abandoning it is difficult for some. Until they find a suitable replacement, they stick with the old views. We see this with the Trump phenomenon. Many jumped on it simply as a way out of conservatism.

Then we have demographics. White people are the oldest tribe in tribal America now, so whites are going to be slower to adapt to the new reality. The fans of Ben Shapiro are old people mostly. He is what they hoped the future would be like and what they imagine it was like in their past. For someone who is 70 years old, it is tough to accept that all they fought to preserve will be washed away. The dream of returning to the civic nationalist paradise is better than facing present reality.

Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. The people locked in these time warps will eventually return to this part of the timeline. Again, you can see this on Gab. Many of those J21’er have quickly adapted to their new home. Every time a bell rings a new dissident is born and every day the bells are ringing, thanks mostly to the behavior of the ruling class. The behavior of the government the last year has collapsed many of these time bubbles.

Something similar is happening on the Left. Jimmy Dore, for example, is a man who considers himself on the Left. Yet, he is every bit as skeptical about the radicals as the typical dissident. Glenn Greenwald is another good example. Matt Taibbi is another guy who is having an awakening. These are people looking around and coming to the realization that their old views on things no longer track with reality. The old Left is starting to have their own red pill moment.

Political transformation is like the old line about bankruptcy. It is slow at first, often glacial, then it happens all of a sudden. The individual begins to break free from their time bubble and then all off a sudden they have their awakening. As is always true about the behavior of people, some are too timid to look up. They fiercely cling to their ole ideas like a dog with a bone. Their fight to remain trapped in the past is a weird sort of conformation. Some people will just be lost to time.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

People often join mass movements as a way to replace their own hated identity with that of the group. They immerse themselves in the movement or cause, losing themselves in the identity of the group. Their sense of who they are gets blended with the cause so that they are one with it. It is why their life is quickly organized around the cause they are in at the moment. Not everyone does this, of course, but every mass movement has true believers, people who become one with it.

This is why the true believer reacts to all criticism of the movement as if it were a physical attack on their person. They treat all opposition to their cause as a violent threat, because from their perspective, it is an attack on their person. Once who they are is indistinguishable from the identity of the group, any criticism of the group becomes a threat to their very existence. It is why reasoning with a true believer makes them more belligerent and hostile.

Another consequence of this fusing of identities is that the true believer tends to project onto others the things he hates or fears about the group. Since the very nature of the true believer precludes self-examination, it also precludes a critical examination of the cause they have joined. For the same reason they look at criticism of the group as an attack on their person, they cannot criticize the group. Instead, they project these faults and fears onto some external entity.

A good example is this post from the neocon website the Bulwark. The neocons, of course, have been driven berserk by Trump and the rise of populism. They were sure their scaly tentacles were so tightly wrapped around the Republican Party that it was nothing more than their personal golem. Then Trump comes along and shatters that certainty by sweeping the primaries. Not only that, but he also pointed the finger at them as the reason for why things have gone wrong in America.

This is a good bit of evidence that whatever it was, neoconservatism had transformed into a weird political cult. The first generation had practical reasons for the transition from Trotskyists to Buckley conservatives. They saw that the American Left was getting cozy with the Soviet Union. It was not so much their flirtation with communism, but their friendliness with the ancient enemy in the East. The neocons dropped their own communism and became libertarian Cold War hawks.

The following generations, on the other hand, were not so clever. Bill Kristol, for example, has been wrong about everything for thirty years. He thought Dan Quayle would make a good second for Poppy Bush. He though Sarah Palin would make a good second for John McCain. Quayle and Palin were decent people trying to do the right thing, but their appeal to Kristol was that he believed he could outwit them, which meant they were not the sharpest tools in the toolshed.

Putting that aside, you really see the cult-like aspect in this post. It is pure projection of neoconservative defects onto their enemy. The post’s subhead says it all. “Claiming to love America while believing that it is broken and that many of your fellow citizens are your enemies.” These are people who spent the last six years claiming that Trump and his voters need to be exterminated on the grounds that they are evil. Bill Kristol wants to genocide the “lazy” white working class.

Later in the post we get this gem, “In his public addresses, President Biden has made a conscious effort to speak to all Americans. Donald Trump, by contrast, typically reverts to the language of us-versus-them…” This is the sort of thing you get from someone who is no longer engaged with reality. It is also the way a cult member projects the defects of his cult onto enemies. The hive-minded neocon is projecting the things he most despises about his cult onto the enemies of the cult.

The transformation of neoconservatism into this bizarre hyper-violent subculture raises an interesting set of questions. Was it always a blood-soaked political cult obsessed with bringing about the end times? On the other hand, is this what happens when a bespoke identity cult loses its primary purpose? After all, neoconservatism was built for the Cold War, so when that ended, their purpose ended. Like a hive who loses its queen, the remaining members of this cult buzz around in anger.

There is another angle here. The first generation of neoconservatives went through a period where they aggressively attacked their former host. It was as if they were trying to purge themselves of the old identity to make room for the new one. That could be what we are seeing here. The current neocons are shedding their old conservative skin in order to grow a neoliberal skin. This will allow them to attach themselves to what they think is the permanent new order in Washington.

Additional support for this the tone and language in their posts. Note that in the past they differentiated between “Trumpists” and conservatives. Increasingly they conflate the terms, using them as synonyms. Note also they are not trying to reconcile with their old allies in Conservative Inc. Instead, they have retreated into their own ghettos while they go through the transformation. The next chapter of neoconservatism will take place within the neoliberal order, they hope.

It is an interesting phenomenon to behold, if you can avoid being emotionally drawn in by their projection. Perhaps that is another reason that cults project their hatreds, fears, and insecurities onto others. It is a distraction. The endless feverish attacks on alleged enemies draw the eye away from what is happening in the cult. That old self-loathing, the desire for self-abnegation, at the root of the true believer, results in a group behavior that always seeks to distract from what is happening in the cult.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

One of the weird aspects of liberal democracy is that the state takes every opportunity to celebrate itself. Every public event has rituals before the event where members of the state are marched out to be cheered by the crowd. Sporting events have a weird North Korean vibe to them. July 4th has always been a chance for the office holders to celebrate themselves. This year, the F.B.I. decided to hold a parade in the city of Philadelphia to let us know they are always on the job.

Patriot Front is the latest carnival act to get a chance to perform on the big stage of democracy, at the direction of the usual suspects. They are based in Texas, but decided to hold a parade in Philadelphia over the long weekend. Allegedly, they got a permit from the city, but their event looked ad hoc. They showed up, danced around just long enough to get media attention and a reaction from locals. Then they got back in their vehicles and headed for parts unknown.

Some will no doubt say it is unfair to assume these guys are just another honeypot cooked up by the secret police, but that is the way to bet these days. The Oath Keepers are looking like they were created by the secret police a decade ago. This exhaustive deep dive by Darren Beatty into the origins of the group and the dodgy nature of the founder should cause everyone to rethink the authenticity of these groups. The best you can say about any of them is they are led by unstable people.

The Oath Keepers are not an outlier. The Proud Boys, which was started by Gavin McInnes, went from goofy fan club to paramilitary operation. Instead of drinking beer and celebrating western chauvinism, they were rolling around in the dirt with Antifa and other state-sponsored extremist groups. It turns out that the guy who took over the group was a “serial informer” for the secret police. This is  pattern with these groups that goes back a very long way. It is the default position.

The essential tool of all secret police operations is to use unstable informers to infiltrate the target group. The reason this works is outsider politics tends to attract people just looking for a home, many of whom are unstable. Go to a Libertarian Party event and it feels like the day room of a local insane asylum. One of the results is people organizing outside the system will encounter a lot of crazies. They get used to seeing them, so the one that is actually an informer slips through.

A good example of how this works is the Bolsheviks. A fellow named Roman Malinovsky was a prominent Bolshevik before the revolution. He was also an agent of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. He was able to become close friends with Lenin and Stalin, two highly paranoid and suspicious men. Malinovsky even setup Stalin so he could be arrested at a social event. He was so good at his work that even when everyone was in jail but him, they still did not think he was a spy.

Malinovsky was always the most enthusiastic supporter of the cause. This is what won him notice from Bolshevik leaders. He was a guy who never deviated from the party line, however it was being expressed by the leaders. It was why Lenin could not accept that he was a spy, even when the evidence was clear. It is always hard to distrust the guy who is your most loyal supporter. Eventually he was betrayed by his ex-mistress and the Bolsheviks had him killed.

Another reason the secret police find it easy to infiltrate outsider groups, especially those claiming to be on the Right, is that they are usually run by stupid people who never learn from the past. Look at this Patriot Front outfit. The “flag and costume” act has been a failure in America going back to George Lincoln Rockwell. The general public find it weird and off-putting. The only thing these antics do is isolate the group from normal society, making them easy targets.

What did the Patriot Front people think they were doing? They already managed to get themselves put on the terror watchlist. If they were hoping for attention by the Feds, they need not worry. Was anyone in Philly going to be impressed with this stunt and say to themselves, “You know, I think I may consider becoming a fascist”? Was this event going to bring them positive coverage from the media? As Jason Köhne noted, the only thing it did was drag young men further into the abyss.

Politics in a liberal democracy is a drama run by the ruling class. Think of it as a big stage on which politics is acted out for the masses. In America, this means the Left opens the show by demanding action against some threat to “our democracy” or demanding action to defend a victim group. Their fluffers go into the crowd to get the audience excited for the next drama. The actors perform the familiar story, sometimes combining the two into a single story.

At this point, the so-called conservatives waddle onto the stage in their comfort-fit chinos and golf shirts. They dismiss the claims of the Left, either claiming they are  exaggerating or that the issue is just not important. The crowd is encouraged to boo and hiss at them, which causes their knees to shake. Before long, some of them break ranks and join the Left in jeering at their old colleagues. The crowd keeps booing and the conservative are eventually run off the stage.

Every once in a while, for reasons science has yet to explain, the conservatives do not start to shiver and quake. They hold their ground. This is when the the spotlight illuminates the right side of the stage and we see the Hitler outfit. Over the sound system comes, “Who in the crowd will perform this vital role?” Sure enough, some idiot from a group fond of weird flags runs up on stage, dons the costume and begins to strut around on stage as the crowd throws rotten vegetables.

This is what the Patriot Front did over the weekend. They also took credit for defacing the statue of the blessed George Floyd, peace be upon him. These guys are performing a vital role in the political drama. This is why the Feds are endlessly trying to coopt and create groups that will perform this role. It turns out that the supply of idiots willing to do this without prompting can never meet demand. The secret police make sure the supply is always there so the show can keep staggering on.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the panopticon, which is a type of prison designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The system allows all prisoners to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. The image that comes to mind is of a single eyeball in the sky that is always scanning for rule breakers. The key is the uncertainty. You never know if you are being watched by the guards of the prison.

This is a powerful image that always comes to mind when people realize that their rulers are spying on them. It is the wrong image. America is not a panopticon, but a synopticon. This is a concept conceived by Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen that means surveillance of the few by the many. Mathiesen belonged to the prison abolition movement which advocated for the elimination of prisons and prisons systems in favor of anarchist inspired alternatives.

The world in which we live today is one where everyone is spying on everyone, except the rulers, all the time. The local business installs cameras outside the warehouse to prevent vandals from defacing the walls with graffiti. Those cameras record everything and store it on the cloud. The owner is told the video stays on the cloud for seven days, but in reality, it is there forever. It just gets moved to a different database, accessible by the security state whenever they think to use it.

All around us, the vast network of recording devises uploads data to various databases that are harvested by the secret police and stored in their systems. Americans don’t think we have secret police, but Americans also think their votes count. The main feature of liberal democracy is it keeps the people living in a fog of self-delusion about who is really in charge of society. That is what we see with the secret police. They have no name and no location, so they do not exist for most people.

One of those people is not Tucker Carlson, however. His organization was visited by someone claiming to be a whistleblower. This person provided information to them from their texts and e-mails that could only be known by Team Tucker. The claim was that the NSA was using its super-duper spying tools to harvest their data. The idea was to find something they could use to get Tucker fired and then place it in the media. This is something the FBI does when framing people.

Like most Americans, Tucker takes his rulers at face value. If the government is spying on someone, it is in an official capacity from an official office. That is not how the secret police work in the American synopticon. The secret police are instead a loose network of fellow travelers that occupy positions inside the large institutions, both private and public. It is a secret society in which the membership is informal and rooted in shared beliefs and access to information.

In the case of Tucker, it is unlikely that the NSA was using its super-duper listening tools to gather up his e-mails. Whether such a thing exists is debatable. This data exists in databases both private and public. There is no need to sniff every packet on the internet in real time when millions of people volunteer to capture, collate and store the data on private systems. When those systems are maintained by people in the loose network that makes up the secret police, getting access is never difficult.

A good example is the insurrection hoax. The banks and mobile carriers were quick to volunteer their services to the hoaxers in the inner party. They provided mobile phone data and credit card data without being asked. All of a sudden, within hours of the event, the FBI and DOJ were getting waves of information about people who may or may not have been at the event. In the synopticon, the FBI is reduced to errand boys when it comes to framing enemies of the system.

In the case of Tucker, this is probably an operation not aimed at Tucker, but at his fans out there in flyover country. The secret police send this guy to tell Team Tucker that they are spying on him. They probably got some stuff from Google or Apple to use as a prop in this little drama. It is entirely possible the operation is being run out of Silicon Valley and the FBI official they are using is just a fellow traveler. His credentials as a high-ranking government agent adds authenticity to the caper.

Of course, Tucker ran straight to the camera to report on what happened, because that is what you do if you are a journalist in a democracy. There is the value of the self-delusion maintained by liberal democracy. If Tucker saw himself as a subject in an authoritarian surveillance state, he would have evaluated this event from that perspective and kept quiet about it. He would have assumed they were targeting him, hoping he would blab about it on television.

Now, if this operation is not about spying on Tucker in order to get him fired, then what is the point of it? The primary tool of control in both the panopticon and synopticon is psychological, not informational. The theory is that the uncertainty and lack of privacy instills submissiveness. The prisoner, never sure when he is being watched and what is being watched, begins to assume his captors are always watching and know everything about him, even his innermost thoughts.

This has always been a key feature of the secret police. They want their targets to think everyone and anyone could be a spy. Since the ruling class sees every white person in America as a potential threat, the secret police are trying to make sure every white person knows they are being watched. Getting Tucker, a guy who thinks UFOs are real, to play along in this drama is not terribly difficult. Millions of white people who watch Tucker are now thinking they are under surveillance.

In every corrupt regime, the secret police are a symptom of the rot, but they also reflect the nature of the ruling class. The KGB in post-war Russia was highly bureaucratized, reflecting the nature of the regime. They slowly began to ignore organized crime, as that was hard to address, and focused on trivial crime. On the other hand, the Okhrana, which was the Tsars secret police, was a highly personal operation. It was ad hoc and relied on individuals to infiltrate enemies of the Tsar.

In a liberal democracy like America, no one really knows who is actually in charge, so no one knows the nature of the secret police. There are formal institutions, just as we see in politics, but those institutions never do what the people want, which is what you see with elected officials. Just as with elected officials, there always seems to be a hidden agenda with the security forces. It is as if there is an invisible hand on the levers of power that is only known by what it does.

Just as the secret police reflects the nature of the system, it also gives us a sense of the system’s overall health. The more threatened the ruler, the more willing he is to use explicit force to intimidate his opponents. The confident ruler is willing to play cat and mouse, often for his own amusement. We saw this with he Tsar as century ago, where he was willing to be more explicit in the use of violence. The less secure he was in his position, the more willing he was to shoot people.

What we are seeing today is an effort to public intimidate opponents. Torturing political prisoners in secret DC jails and now advertising a domestic spying operation suggest genuine fear in the system. They really do believe that Trump was put in office by a secret conspiracy against them. This paranoia and fear is driving the explicit use of force by the rulers. That invisible hand is moving from the shadows, into the open and becoming more obvious in order to intimidate the enemy.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week it is a language lesson in how to communicate in your new country. There is the Sunday Thoughts podcast up behind the green door, for those who enjoy the sound of my voice. This week I spent a lot of time making sport of General Milley.

It has been observed that people who claim to be free thinkers are always people trapped in the narrowest lanes of dogma. They somehow confuse their love of conformity for rebelliousness. On the other hand, people who do question the prevailing orthodoxies tend not to think about it very much. Instead, they follow their nose on the alternative path, even if it violates a taboo. This is why genuine free thinkers tend to be victims of the revolutions they initially support.

In the current age, this contrast is especially stark. The people claiming to be the wild and crazy guys of politics are not only conventional, but they also tend to be wedded to the oldest ideas. They also enjoy full support from an increasingly authoritarian regime, while claiming to oppose authoritarianism. A good example is someone like Tim Pool, who is a perfect example of how the regime creates its own opposition. He thinks he is a rebel while broadcasting from regime platforms.

The Right is festooned with housebroken rebels. This is a legacy of Bill Buckley, who defined the opposition to the Left within the bounds of the acceptable. It was the Left, of course, that decided what was acceptable. Over the last 70 years, every great purge was led by the Buckley crowd. The Birchers, paleocons, populists, immigration patriots and so on were denounced and purged by Conservatives, after the Left decided they were no longer allowed in polite company.

In the current age, the contrast between the swelling hordes of people outside the bounds of the acceptable and the so-called conservatives is glaring. It was not always so, which would explain why so-called conservatives carried on as if they were rebels trying to topple the system. In the 1990’s, for example, Conservative Inc. could plausibly argue that the paleo remnant turning up at Ross Perot rallies or Ron Paul events were just a noisy minority, not the real alternative to the Left.

A similar dynamic seems to be at play on the Left. The internet is full of people claiming to be the real Left. They tend to rally around people like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez as the rebels against the system. Unlike those conventional thinkers in the mainstream media, the democratic socialist are the real rebels. They are the ones challenging the established order. The fact that democratic socialism is the plaything of a billionaire currency speculator never seems to matter.

This false consciousness is understandable among the street gangs and rioters recruited to cause mayhem. Most of the people were see smashing windows and bellowing about Nazis are just day labor hired for the task. The typical “black bloc” is populated with drug addicts, homeless people, and random losers. They are organized by the children of managerial class types, building their resume. Nothing opens doors in the managerial class like a turn as a street radical.

The real puzzle comes with the branded radicals. In this case, “branded” should be read as corporate branded. The Young Turks, for example, imagine themselves to be rebels fighting corporate media and corporate politics. They take their name from the Young Turk Revolution that toppled the Ottoman Empire’s monarchy. Cenk Uygur, one of the creators, describes himself as a young insurgent. He and the others are leading a revolution from the Left against the system.

The fact that his channel is the creation of the system, operates on the platforms of the system and is funded by the people who benefit the most from the system seems to be lost on him and his audience. What makes the whole thing even more amusing is that Cenk Uygur is a middle-aged man. The only thing that would make their enterprise more ridiculous is if the “Young Turks” were a collection of octogenarians working from the human resource department of Goldman Sachs.

If you want to see just how much American politics has been corporatized and homogenized since the end of the Cold War, look at the Left. The typical left-wing person in America will defend to the death the right of Apple or Amazon to exploit their workers in order to make a profit. The far-left of American political discourse now arrives at the debate dressed like race car drivers. They are the house slaves of the American political plantation, but think they are John Brown.

One reason for the political discourse being dominated by deluded corporate flunkies is it pays extremely well. Cenk Uygur would be spending his days in traffic court if not for his willingness to play this role in corporates politics. Instead of struggling to pay the mortgage, he gets to live in a mansion. This is where Bill Buckley was a pioneer back in the before times. He made selling out into a highly lucrative career by making it look like a principled stand against his paymasters.

That explains the cynical, but what about the truly deluded? The internet is full of people volunteering to carry the torch for corporate conservatism or corporate progressivism, while thinking themselves as free thinking rebels. These people volunteer to be sheep while thinking they are wolves. The people showing up at this summer’s Trump rallies are not doing it for money. The losers calling them fascists on Twitter are convinced they are fighting the racist system.

The simple answer is that the supply of people who are not terribly bright, but sure they are on top of things is quite large. Even if 20% of the population falls into this category, the system has an army of noisy simpletons it can control. That is more than enough to drown out the real opposition. It also creates social proof. People unhappy with the system can find a corporately controlled mob to join. The fact that it is safe inside the Cenk Uygur and Tim Pool tents adds to the appeal.

There is another reason. This quote from John Derbyshire’s We Are Doomed is useful in this context. “The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”

That is what these sorts of politics satisfy. The fans of Cenk Uygur or Tim Pool get to feel like they are on the winning team. They are also told that the tides of history or the immutable facts of the universe are on their side. The exaggerated size of the audience offers the social proof and the pseudo fellowship of on-line communities. Most important, they get to hate on the bad guys. That is the real draw of this sort of corporate sponsored politics. You get to safely hate your enemies.

What never intrudes is reality. When Tim Pool says “I am not afraid of being challenged or wrong” he means that in the context of corporate sponsored politics. He is perfectly willing to sit down with the folks sponsored by Amazon or Apple to talk about the latest pronouncements from Team Walmart. What will never happen is any of these people sitting down with someone who genuinely questions the premise of corporate sponsored politics or the system that makes it possible.

In a way, the corporate sponsored rebel is the commercialization of the old tactics used by state security agencies. The FBI does not have to run COINTELPRO, because YouTube and Twitter do it for them. Instead of agents from the state secretly supporting the accommodationist wing of the opposition, corporate America hires them, gives them a big platform and the freedom to operate on-line. The rest fall in line because they just assume the marketplace has spoken.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The sales pitch for the American political system is that it is a robust debate between two distinct political parties. The Republicans and Democrats are coalitions of interests opposed to one another. The groups that make up each party are held together by a shared ideological outlook. The Republicans are the conservative party, and the Democrats are the liberal party. The political process adjudicates the disputes between the parties over public policy and the result is a compromise.

In reality, America is a one party system. It has been since Gettysburg. The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes. The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.

As for those two ideologies, they are just two faces of a single ruling class ideology that is something like a religion now. There is left-liberalism and there is right-liberalism held together by a common moral framework. Like the old Bolsheviks, the left side of the American ideology is maximalist and radical. It wants to usher in the promises of the revolution right now. The right side is more cautious, preferring an evolutionary approach to ushering in the promised utopia.

Unlike the old communists, the American ideology has always existed in a popular political system, so it is built to sell itself to the public. The main role of the right-liberals is to protect the left-liberals from themselves. They function as barrier between the tenets of the one true faith and any questioning of the faith. The left side is the heart of the beast, driving the agenda and pushing society along from one fad to the next, always chasing the avatar of egalitarian paradise.

This arrangement has worked amazingly well. Perhaps too well. It has been over a century since there has been a threat to the system. Anarchists and communists at the start of the last century started to get some traction, but they were never really a threat to the basic arrangements. Otherwise, it has been smooth sailing for the uniparty system for generations. The left-liberals are free to dream up new social innovations without being disturbed and the right stands quietly at guard.

The trouble is the party is looking like a freak show inside a hot house. For example, the Air Force now has drag shows to boost morale. To normal people, this is completely nuts (pun intended), but to the people in charge it is perfectly normal. In fact, they think it is bizarre that anyone would question it. They are not entirely wrong, as the people who arranged it will never be pressed on it. The politicians all agree that drag queens are who we are now, and the press echoes the sentiment.

Where the ruling orthodoxy finds itself is in a place where there is never a need to explain themselves and defend their positions. The right-liberals never challenge the left-liberals on orthodoxy. Both sides just put on shows where they pretend to disagree, but then kick back together after the show to laugh about it. The right-liberals have insulated themselves from defending their position. They tell themselves that they are simply too good to discuss these things with their critics.

The folks at the Daily Wire are supposed to be the smart kids of conservatism, but they spend their days making sure the hothouse is airtight. Ben Shapiro’s one venture outside the tightly controlled environment of his life ended in disaster. Ever since that public relations debacle his people have made sure that no one can utter a discouraging word in his presence. In fact, that whole scene has become a closed shop, never interacting with anyone outside their hive.

It is not just the pundits who have become hot house flowers. Look at what happens to the military leaders when they go before Congress. This guy went before Congress and told one whopper after another. To outsiders, he looks like a complete fool, but inside that room he is just par for the course. Anyone reading this could have wrecked him with a few simple questions, but no one in the room has the intelligence or the temperament to question anything.

This is the motivation behind the mass censorship and de-platforming. The people inside the political system are incapable of defending or even discussing their positions and they live in fear of having to do it. It is not so much that the critics have great arguments or have superior debating skills. That is a silly conceit. It is simply that the people outside the system, the dissidents, are comfortable defending their positions and discussing them in public. They can take a punch.

This underlying sense of weakness is probably what lies behind the persecution of the January protestors. January 6th, from the perspective of the ruling class, was an emperor has no clothes moment. The torture and torment of the protestors is as much about reassuring themselves that they are tough and in charge as it is about sending a message to the Dirt People. The ruling class revealed themselves to be cowards and now they are lashing out in a fit of petty spite.

All ruling elites have an abundance of sissies and ridiculous people. They are the entertainment and decoration for the serious men who run things. Those serious men are made serious by regular contact with reality. Remove that contact and those serious men become as silly and ridiculous as their retainers. That is where the empire finds itself now, ruled by fops and popinjays living in a hothouse. They live in fear of someone opening the door and letting in reality.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

A popular concept in right wing politics is the gatekeeper or sometimes called the controlled opposition. This is the person or group that appears to be in opposition to the Left, but is an insulation layer between the Left and genuine critics. The function of the gatekeeper is to prevent people from abandoning the political morality of the Left, while at the same time making sure to lose every fight with the Left. They channel opposition into positions that can never succeed.

Ben Shapiro is the most obvious example. His primary role is to funnel all opposition into a dead end. His answer to the tech monopolies, for example, is to tell people to build their own new internet. After all, only a communist would demand the government prevent private actors from trampling your rights. Of course, he always tone policing the language of the people he claims to represent. The point is also to cleanse the language of rhetoric that could be effective against the Left.

What gets little discussion is just how this happens. There is an assumption that the people playing the role of gatekeeper know what they are doing. This is that bourgeois objectivism that is the bane of right-wing politics. It is the assumption that all political actors are motivated by self-interest. They are keenly aware of those interests and their actions reflect it. Therefore, people on the Right assume the gatekeepers are acting with purpose and are probably in league with the Left.

A good example of this is the CRT business. Parents around the country suddenly learned that the schools are teaching their kids that white people are born evil and their only way to salvation is to hate their ancestors. The gatekeepers immediately leapt into action to lecture them that saying CRT is antiwhite is wrong. Suddenly, the purpose of conservatism is to prevent anyone from noticing that the cultural revolution is explicitly and overtly antiwhite. It almost seems coordinated.

There is a familiar pattern to how the system has responded to opposition to the antiwhite pogroms launched by the party. The defunct social media platform Parler was not about creating an alternative to Twitter, so much as creating a regime-acceptable alternative to the genuinely open platform Gab. When that failed, the usual suspects were ready with another version called Retalk. Many of the people promoting this effort were anti-Trump cranks now trying to lure his audience.

An underappreciated aspect of the gatekeeper production system is just how quickly it spits out hollow clones of legitimate opposition. Once Nick Fuentes started getting national attention, the clone machine started making copies. Here is a fake America First clone produced soon after the election. Fuentes has been promoting the term “America First” for a while. He sells branded products and his supporters wave big flags at rallies with that slogan, so the system just cloned it.

The system also appears to be trying to clone Fuentes himself and his imitators among the young generation. Here is a group called American Moment, formed by four young gay men to be an acceptable version of the groypers. The system men were out flogging it as if it were coordinated. Here is National Review promoting it. Here is American Mind, promoting itself by promoting the fake groypers. As if by magic a group of nobodies was suddenly a topic of conversation.

In the effort to co-opt Fuentes and his youth movement, we see a pattern emerge in how gatekeepers are created. First, we get the fake version of the genuine alternative mentioned in conservative media. Then what quickly follows is a halfhearted negation of the fake version of the alternative. This pseudo-dialectic is supposed to draw in those unhappy with the system. They have to pick a side in this fake debate. The point is to exclude the genuine opposition from the process.

The sandwich technique is a staple of liberal democratic politics. Since few arguments in favor of the status quo can withstand scrutiny, they create a set of false choices to contain all discussion. In economics the choice is “free enterprise” versus “communism” with regards to corporate corruption of society. In other issues, like the race debate, one choice is an absurdly immoral position and defeatism. You either buckle under or you are a Nazi, and you deserve the assault from the Left.

Of course, the main project of so-called conservatives is to figure out a way to create a fake Trump in order to sideline the populist and nationalist opposition to the corporatist uniparty monopoly. Trump did not get anything done in office, but the system still fears him, because of the bad thoughts he arouses in the people. Trump running in 2024 would both reveal the ridiculousness of conservatism (again) and generate the sorts of conversations that the regime considers dangerous.

The first version of fake Trump is J.D. Vance. He is a more successful version of the character Keven Williams has played at National Review. That is, a guy from flyover country who abandoned the people and culture that produced him in order to confirm the biases of the managerial elite. He provides them with authenticity, by displaying a sympathy for and a knowledge of the Dirt People, the great dispossessed, but he confirms the Cloud People patronizing view of them.

You will notice that the system defends itself with rhetoric. Democracy is all about winning arguments, not establishing, or accepting truth. It is why democracy produces so many sophists. It is also why Twitter is so popular with regime lackeys. People with the natural instinct to defend their masters and a gift for doing so in a few sentences can become heroes on the platform. A system built on clever rhetoric and logical fallacies is naturally good at defending itself with the same tools.

This natural defense does have its limits. A decade ago, the Tea Party movement was easily coopted by corporate flunkies. This time it is struggling to do the same thing with the populism Trump rode to office and the growing dissident movement. The fake groypers, for example, cannot draw flies. Their YouTube shows should have crickets as the background noise. This is despite the hype and protection. Fuentes and his merry band draw tens of thousands to obscure platforms.

It could very well be that this natural defense mechanism only works if the system itself is viewed as fundamentally legitimate. Once people begin to think the system is rigged or inherently corrupt, the defense mechanisms not only fail, but they also become proof of the corruption. National Review outsourced their management to Bangalore recently because the site no longer has an audience. In other words, the failure of gatekeeping is a sign of systemic failure.

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!

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

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.