Category Archives: Politics

Lessons In Identity

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The so-called conservatives are muttering about how the choice of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate is an ominous example of identity politics. She was picked for her skin tone, they say, which is the worst thing possible. In their fantasy country, the only thing that matters is the content of your character. They have it all wrong, of course, but the selection of Harris does provide some good insights into how identity politics will work in the new non-white America of the near future.

For starters, Kamala Harris did not end up on the ticket solely because of her burnt orange complexion. That was how she was sold to Biden, who was still hurting from being called a racist by Harris in the debates. She was on the list, however, because she is the favorite of a powerful constituency in the ruling class. The Silicon Valley oligarchs backed her candidacy. They are an important part of the empire’s ruling elite, so they have a great deal of influence in both parties.

The reason Harris is so popular with Silicon Valley is the number of high caste South Asians in the executive suites of these companies. The old gag about the tech call centers and programming shops being located in India is still true, but the management suites are now increasingly filled with South Asians. This is why they lobby so hard for worker visas. This allows them to bring their co-ethnics over and begin the process of normalizing them into America.

Unlike the so-called conservatives, stuck in the past with regards to the contours of identity politics, the new tribes jostling for power in America play identity politics the old-fashioned way, the tribal way. It’s why Harris took to Twitter to celebrate Indian independence day with her people. Harris was not the only “American” politician to celebrate her people’s national holiday. Not to be outdone, Nikki Haley included a nice little graphic in her celebratory tweet.

It turns out that there is one group that plays identity politics as well as Jews and that is South Asians. They stick together wherever they find themselves. So much so they were able to elbow the Jews out of the Amsterdam diamond market. That is a remarkable feat, given the history and nature of the diamond market. In the United States, they are taking over the wholesale jewelry business. They are doing it on the power of informal agreements among co-ethnics.

That’s the real nature of identity politics, but the yesterday men are not entirely wrong in how Democrats play it. Even there, they miss the point. Barak Obama did not win with huge black support simply because he was black. He resonated with the black community in America because he strongly appealed to black identity. A mixed-race child of extreme privilege with a foreign sounding name was able to click with black voters like no black politician in American history.

Obama appealed to the strongest element within black America, which is black women, who dictate the size and intensity of the black vote. Obama looked and sounded like what every black woman fantasizes for herself and her son. He also married a very typical black woman, thus flattering black women. He had two children with her and gave them goofy fake African names. Obama may have been a mixed-race son of privilege, but he strongly identified with black identity by choice.

That’s how identity politics works. It is not the superficial nonsense about skin color or even ethnic heritage. This is what the yesterday men of both the Left and the Right fail to grasp. Identity goes much deeper. It is the essence of who we are, because it represents the long arc of history that led to our existence. It’s the confluence of history and biology. It’s why Africans are not African-American. It’s also why Kamala Harris is not a person of color to black Americans.

That’s why Harris was probably the worst choice for Biden. She helps bring in South Asian money from Silicon Valley. The tech monopolies will now swing into action in a million little ways to help their co-ethnics. She will titillate the upper middle-class whites who reliably vote Democrat. She will turn off blacks, however, who see in her what they see at the cash-only convenience store in their neighborhood. A foreigner leap-frogging them in the hierarchy of American identity.

There is another lesson in the Harris story. In the primary, even the media found her unpleasant, despite being paid by Google to promote her. Andrew Yang, in contrast, was a likable character, who had no institutional support, but was able to get grassroots and media support. According to the yesterday men, he should have got tons of elite support, based on his race. There are many more East Asians than South Asians, so by their logic he should have been a great candidate.

The difference between Yang and Harris is South Asians are very tribal, while East Asians are not very tribal. We see this in genetics and marriage patterns. India is a beef stew of various tribes, castes and ethnic groups. China, in contrast, is dominated by Han Chinese. East Asia tends toward mono-ethnic societies. Put another way, the biology of South Asia reinforces and encourages extreme identity politics, while East Asian biology tends to encourage uniformity and conformity.

In America, the East Asians that come here are the least ethnocentric of their kind, so they look to quickly assimilate. They name their kids Bob and Sally, take up golf and join the local Christian church. High caste Indians move here and name their kids Sinjar and Amala. They have a tandoor clay oven installed in their house and they find a local Hindu temple to join. In Asia, South Asians are as tribal as Jews are in the West, while East Asians are about as tribal as white people.

This is why South Asians get one of their own installed on the Democratic ticket, while East Asians are discriminated against by the Ivy League. South Asians and Jews are wildly over-represented in elite institutions, while East Asians and whites are ridiculously under-represented. So much so that the Democrats are comfortable putting a bitter bindi on the ticket and giving the affable Andrew Yang the stiff arm. He will have no role in the coming Democratic convention.

This is the shape of things to come. The Judeo-Puritan ruling class is now making room for high caste South Asians. Soon, saying anything unapproved about Indians will be as forbidden as holocaust denial. Native Americans will no longer be allowed to refer to themselves as Indians. Whites and East Asians will be the lumpen proletariat of the new Tribal States of America. Despite having numbers, they lack the ethnocentrism to make those numbers translate into political power.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Gaming The Election

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For most people who plan to vote in the upcoming election, the choice is clear and they don’t have to think about it very much. They know their guy is the right choice and the other guy represents the end of the world as we know it. There is nothing anyone could say to them to change their mind. In fact, the number of persuadable people probably rounds to zero. The issue in this election, like most elections, is which side is able to get their partisans to vote, either in person or by mail.

For dissidents it is not that easy. Once you make it to this side of the great divide you know elections are not a solution, but, at best, another opportunity to get more people heading in this direction. Supporting Trump in 2016 was about breaking the pattern so people were not as locked into the old political framing. After four years of Trump, we are faced with a new situation. Is a Trump win better for our side or is a Biden- Harris win better for our side? The answer is not obvious.

Often, our elections are the opposite of what we assume. The pull of partisan politics in a liberal democracy tends to warp the thinking of even the most cynical. In 2000 it seemed obvious that Bush was better than Gore, but in reality, Gore would have been the better choice for white Americans. Bush was the worst thing to happen to white America since the Emancipation Proclamation. Counter-intuitively, Bill Clinton was one of best presidents for white people in the 20th century.

Additionally, even dissidents can fall into the old Cold War mentality of judging candidates by their economic or foreign policy pretensions. The Democrats are the commie doves, while the Republicans are the capitalist hawks. Even at this late date, many dissidents still cling to their libertarian or conservative priors. Instead of thinking about the outcome that serves their people, they think about the outcome that serves their narrow interests as individuals. Group think is hard.

Then there is the bitter loser problem. Many people circulating on this side of the great divide were sure Trump was Hitler. When he turned out to be just another guy, they took it personally, as they personalize everything. Trump did not just get beat by the system, he deliberately finked on them. The only way to assuage their hurt feelings is to show that mean old orange man they are super mad at him. Richard Spencer, for example, is now “Bobbin for Biden” in this election.

If you can stand outside it all and just look at the two outcomes in terms of how they would serve the interests of dissidents, the choice is not so clear. The vinegar club that is now sour on Trump are right that four more years of Trump are unlikely to result in positive changes for our side. Trump is not an ideologue and he tends to personalize everything, so four more years means four more years of squabbling with illiterates on the cable chat shows, but not much else.

On the other hand, when the Left wins, they tend to make good use of their opportunity, so Biden winning means they will move the state in their direction. The most likely outcome of a Biden term in office is an orgy of globalism. Trump has caused the drive to global corporatism to stall, so the usual suspects will be eager to make up for lost time once the addle-minded Biden is in office. On the other hand, the culture war probably goes on hiatus, as it will no longer be useful to them.

Neither of those outcomes are objectively good or bad for dissidents. If you are a fatalist, then the Biden acceleration will be appealing. If you are in the camp that thinks buying time is important, then the Trump interregnum is appealing. Both of those positions miss the point. This is a culture war, so public policy only matters in regards to how it opens the culture to our arguments. In either case, the nature of the culture war changes very little, so both outcomes are a net neutral.

Now, a Trump loss would open one important avenue for us. It would reveal to those rank and file white people that the demographics have now changed and those changes are permanent. That silent majority they were sure exists is a myth. Instead, whites are effectively a minority population. Imagine Trump getting 70% of the white vote but losing the election. All that groveling to non-whites would suddenly become a bitter rebuke of the old civic nationalist politics.

On the other hand, Trump losing would be cast by Republicans as a rejection of racist and evil politics of the past. Both faces of the political class are ready for a campaign to convince those disappointed whites that the reason Trump lost is they foolishly supported a racist. Their path to redemption is to wash the feet harder. The ease with which these people convinced so many to wear their underwear on their head to ward off the virus should be a warning to the acceleration crowd.

The “win by losing” theory is like libertarianism, in that it sounds good in the classroom, but it is nonsense in the field. The fact is, Trump winning would give us more riots and mayhem, so the white awakening would probably accelerate. The fact is, more white people have become racially aware in the last three months than in the last three years, despite Trump’s groveling. There are much larger forces at work than one election, so the outcome is just one small data point.

That said, winning breeds confidence. Most of the people ready to vote Trump are more ready for the trip over the great divide than at any point in their lives. That transformation will continue, regardless of the outcome, but a little confidence never hurts. In a way, mobilizing to put Trump over the top is good practice for the sorts of politics that lie in the near future for these white people. They may not be ready to know it yet, but their pro-Trump activity is their first step into the future.

Greg Johnson pointed out, that small minds focus on people, while average minds focus on events. Great minds focus on ideas, but it is the combination of these that provides the full picture. Most of the partisan squabbling on-line about the election will be among one of those first two camps. What will matter is how this election serves the promotion of racial awareness among whites. More specifically, how will the outcome give whites confidence to look at the world racially?

The critical issue in this election is in how dissidents use it to promote their interests in their daily lives. Passing around this story to whites still trapped in the fog of old politics is more helpful than mocking those calling Harris a radical or a commie. Instead of mocking those “boomers’ trapped in the past, offer them a way forward by using this election to normalize racial politics for them. That’s the gift Biden gave us by picking Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Ultimately, the result of this election will matter very little. The demographic die is cast and there is no voting our way out of it. America will soon function like Spain after the fall of the Roman Empire. What will matter in this election and for the remaining elections is how dissidents use these opportunities to awaken white people to the reality of this age and provide a positive way forward into white identity politics. It is not about the man or the event, but about us and our ideas.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Absolution Ticket

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Joe Biden announced has running mate section, which immediately set off rounds of speculation as to why he picked Harris over the other options. The most interesting thing about running mates is the reason the candidate picked them. Otherwise, they tend to be forgotten. Look through the list of Vice Presidents and you see some familiar names, but you see guys like Elbridge Gerry and Hannibal Hamlin. Both were prominent men of their age, but meaningless today.

The curious thing about the Biden choice is it does not fit the popular theories for running mate selection. The most popular reason for selecting a running mate is they help in their home state. We know the old Rust Belt states will be where the election is decided, so picking a brown senator from California does not help there. Harris also has a strong hate-whitey vibe to her, which tends not to go over well with the white working-class types in these states.

Then there is the fact that Harris as the charm of a DMV clerk. In fact, she reminds people of every trip to get their license renewed. She is sour and unpleasant, even when she is professional and efficient. There is a reason she could not draw flies during the primaries. She was so obnoxious in the debates she was forced to drop out before the Iowa caucus. If it were possible for people to cast negative votes, she would have been the first to poll less than zero percent.

Usually when a candidate picks a former opponent, it is someone with an actual constituency or maybe they complement the candidate. Al Gore was a good partner for Clinton, because of his squeaky-clean image. George Bush made sense for Reagan, as Bush represented the traitor wing of the GOP. In this case, Harris has no constituency and she highlights the many flaws of Joe Biden. The only people who liked her were the executives at Google, who were already onboard.

That is the most popular theory at this stage. Biden is not all there, so it is assumed the selection of Harris was as much of a surprise to him as the rest of us. Instead the decision was made by his handlers and it was decided he needed more support from the tech oligarchs. He had the financial oligarchs and Israel was okay with him, so the final piece of the puzzle was to get the blessing of Google. He now has the blessing of all the power centers that run America.

There’s also the theory that Harris is fully compromised, so she will be easy to manipulate by those dark forces everyone is sure exist. Her long career under Willie Brown, literally and figuratively, means she has a lot of skeletons. After the election, someone will put a pillow over Biden’s face and Harris will be installed as Google’s handpicked president. If Biden escapes the pillow, then she will be right there to make sure he follows instructions from Silicon Valley.

It’s possible that the tech oligarchs put pressure on the campaign, but those are the sorts of just-so narratives that appeal to the conspiratorial minded. The truth is, Warren would have brought plenty of tech money and support and she would have revved up the strong woman vote. Warren raised more money for Biden than anyone thus far, so she has strong support among the oligarchs. She’s also pretty good at getting under the skin of Donald Trump, something Biden does not do well.

The thing is, the process used to select running mates is well known. The staff starts with a wide pool of interested candidates. They poll all of them in various markets to gauge how they would do with voters. Then they quietly look into their backgrounds for the usual problems. Once they have the list down to a workable field, they get serious on the background checks and poll testing. Powerful party people are consulted on the options. Finally, the short-list interviews with the candidate.

In other words, all of the options put before Biden had the blessing of all the people that needed to bless the choice. The reason Harris was the choice rather than the governess of Michigan or the syrup lady from Georgia is Joe Biden liked Harris better than the other options. The most likely reason for that is she called him a racist, but was still willing to be his running mate. Biden picked the black looking woman who was willing to give him absolution for his white privilege.

It sounds nutty, but we live in a deranged age. This summer, the Left has been convulsing the country with demands that white people atone for their privilege and racism, so what better way than a ticket that reflects that sensibility? For people like Joe Biden, this is the national unity ticket. He is the symbol of the white people being pushed aside by the riot of non-whites. Harris is the symbol of the ascendant class of non-whites, ready to take over and forgive the old whites.

To most people, this does not register, but inside politics and inside the Progressive warrens, this is powerful magic. They really believe this stuff. An article of faith on the Left is that the sin of racism will only be cleansed from the nation when whites are no longer in charge of the country. The statue toppling and erasing of names from the history books are a symbolic spilling of blood to cleans our soul. Rather than human sacrifices, we are renaming celestial bodies.

For white liberals of Biden’s generation, race is the only salient issue. Most of these old Progressives came into politics because of the race issue. Those who came in for other reasons were soon bathing in the baptismal waters of race. They have spent their whole lives immersed in racial politics. They really do think racial justice is the key to their salvation. Biden was certainly hurt by Harris in the primary, so when she was eager to join the ticket, he felt like a man getting absolution.

This most likely means the narrative of the Biden-Harris campaign will be built around healing the nation’s soul. They will make the case that a vote for them is a vote to end the racial unrest. The peaceful and voluntary transfer of moral authority from the sinful whites of old America to the noble non-whites of new America will bring all of us into the valley of redemption. The salvation that was supposed to come with the election of Obama will instead come with the last breath of his running mate.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Selling Trump

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President Trump may be facing one of the most unusual re-election campaigns in the history of the country. Unlike most incumbents, his own party will be working hard to elect his opponent. The fact is, America is a one-party country. The two parties are just the two faces of the same crowd. Both faces hate Trump. The voters for his party, on the other hand, largely get this. Despite their best efforts, the Republican party is the home of populist white people.

The other problem for Trump is he can’t actually campaign. Both parties have conspired to lock most of the country down to the point where it is impossible to hold rallies, meet and greet voters and whip up support in person. The uniparty candidate is a drooling vegetable locked in his basement, so the uniparty is fine with it. The less people see of Dementia Joe the better. Trump on the other hand really needs the social proof that comes from holding rallies and campaign events.

Political campaigns are like a sales campaign, in that the goal is to both gain attention from the target audience and win over those willing to listen. Instead of selling a product or service, you’re selling a person. All the civic nationalist blather about the issues or the candidate’s positions is self-serving nonsense. The real goal of a every campaign is to sell the person to the majority. Men follow men and voters pick the person they like the best on a personal level, outside of partisan considerations.

In the case of an incumbent, the challenge for the people running the campaign is their guy is a known quantity. He has been in office and almost all of the people who voted for him the last time will be voting again. Maybe some of the opposing votes can be brought around, but the pool of potential voters is largely fixed. In most cases, re-election campaigns are run as base elections. The idea is to remind the supporters to get out there and support their guy on election day.

For President Trump, one possible way around this is to do what he did the last time and operate outside the normal confines. In 2016, he used his own plane to fly around to rallies staged at airports. This both prevented the uniparty rent-a-mobs from attacking his voters and made it easier for him to fly in, do his thing, and then head to the next stop. They also made great television. People were fascinated by what he was doing, so he got attention even from the people who are paid to hate him.

This time he can’t do that, but he still needs to find a way to offer that social proof those rallies provided people. One way to do that would be video chats. In the depression, FDR used fire side chats, broadcast over radio, to build support for his program. People listened and then talked about it the next day. This built support because people saw that their friends and neighbors were also tuning into these shows. Trump could do the same thing on-line with weekly videos.

The thing is, a crisis is good for the incumbent if he can be seen as the source of stability and safety. If from now until election day Trump is doing weekly half hour updates on the Covid issues, the economy and other issues that turn up, he can establish himself as the rock of stability. It would also force the media and Dementia Joe to respond to what Trump is saying and doing. It would both reassure his supporters and potential supporters, plus drive his opponents insane.

The other thing Trump will need to do is re-establish himself as both the tribune of the people and the hero taking on the dragon known as Washington. For his first term he has tried to cajole and convince the dragon to play nice. All he has got for his trouble is lawsuits, impeachment and a special counsel investigation. That has put off a lot of his supporters, who correctly wonder if all the tough talk was just that. Trump needs to pick some fights with the uniparty, especially the GOP side.

Trump has plenty of opportunities in this regard. The executive orders continuing unemployment insurance and small business aid was a master stroke, as it puts Trump on the side of the people, versus the petty ruling class. Trump needs to run against Washington in the same way Truman did in 1948. He has nothing to lose by irritating the Republicans. They already hate him. Even if the GOP loses the Senate, nothing would change all that much for Trump.

The other aspect of this, however, is Trump needs to be more than just a chaos agent, throwing sand in the gears of the establishment. Trump has been handed a unique opportunity in having an opponent who is clinically dead. Now one really knows what would happen if Biden wins. He will probably die in office. He has said as much during his campaign and made it a feature of his VP choice. Trump needs to exploit this and make himself the predictable outcome of the election.

There’s also the FBI matter that may be coming to a head. The temptation for Trump will be to personalize it, make it about these people hating him. Instead, he needs to use this in the larger narrative of Trump the tribune of the people fighting the corrupt dragon that is the ruling class. People like this plot, which is why so many movies are based on it. That and making Biden defend this corruption as the man of the establishment would be comedy gold.

Another thing Trump needs to do in this election is own his failures. Incumbents have a record and they need to own them, warts and all. In the case of Trump, he has the opportunity to turn many of his failures into positive qualities. He can talk about his naivete about the corruption in Washington. He can talk about how he was not prepared for his own party to undermine his efforts. He can talk about his trouble staffing his administration and having to rely on finks.

Another avenue unique to Trump is that his opponents are making it easy to turn their weapons against them. For example, what many of the local tyrants are doing in response to the virus could easily be compared to Nazi Germany. That would make his opponents insane with rage. He can also call them science deniers. Imagine a flippant comment about how people who cannot tell the difference between boys and girls want us to trust them on the complex science of a pandemic.

This is also a chance to force them to defend their pogroms against people excising their right to speak freely. Trump should do something bold like move to Gab or hire guys like Darren Beatty and Blake Neff as speech writers. The Left will squeal about hanging out with Nazis, but he can respond with how he is taking a stand in defence of our rights as Americans. In other words, it is about making a point and striking a blow against the scolds of cancel culture.

The thing with the Left is they always tell you where the holes in their lines are, by screaming bloody murder about them. They are not demanding everyone be banned from the internet because they feel this is their strength. The theatrics are a bluff, because they know as soon as someone with real power pushes back, the game is over and this stuff comes to a halt. Trump has real power. He can punch these cry-bullies in the nose and make them pay for their antics.

Finally, people vote for something, not against something. Trump needs to offer a positive agenda for his second term. Nationalist trade policies, responsible immigration policies, pro-American foreign policy. With Trump you get peace, stability and the opportunity to make a better life for your children and grandchildren. Contrasted to the vision of unrestrained hatred and anger on offer by the Left, a vote for Trump is a vote for tomorrow, while a vote for Biden is a vote for yesterday.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Mask Madness

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The petty tyranny of the Covid panic has gone from a genuine response to a public health concern to just another aspect of post-sanity America. People now wear all sorts of silly face coverings when going about their day for the same reason they wear pants or shoes. It’s just another thing that is required. Soon, it will be custom, like not wearing white before Memorial Day. The ever changing rules issued from local tyrants are now taken in stride like, the weather or earthquakes in California.

The mask issue is another great example of how American politics is just a morality play with the same roles every time. The Official Left strutted onto the stage warning about the great monster and how the democracy was at risk. Their solution was mandatory mask wearing like their sponsors in China use. The Official Right tried to minimize the issue and resisted for a while, but the Official Left whipped up their partisans in the crowd and the Official Right eventually relented.

Meanwhile, out in the crowd, the partisans of the Left now feel emboldened to harass people on the streets about masks, distancing and so forth. Normal people, of course, are still stuck in the world of facts and reason, but they are adjusting to life in a past-sanity world. A similar pattern happened with homosexual marriage. Normal people still think it is ridiculous, just as they think men in sundresses is absurd, but they navigate around it and the crazies that support it.

Unlike homosexual marriage and drag queens, the petty tyranny has a moral signifier to it that makes it tougher to navigate. The mask is the most obvious one. Spend time in a public setting and you can see the believers versus the compliant. The believers make sure their face muffler is firmly attached and is clean and new. They make sure it is on before they leave the car and they wear it all the way to the car. Normal people stick theirs on just before they enter a store.

The same is true of other aspects of this performance. At places that offer hand sanitizer, the faithful queue up, making sure to keep their distance, then make a big show of rubbing themselves down with sanitizer. Normals feel pressured to do it, but they look a bit out of place. It’s like the C&E Catholics taking communion. They just assume everyone knows they are going through the motions. Others, of course, just ignore it and go about their business.

What makes all of this more compelling, from an anthropological and sociological perspective, is no one knows if these measures have any impact. The people who say they are effective almost always have no math or science. They would not know the first step in thinking about how to test the effectiveness of these measures. The other side of the debate does not exist, at least not publicly. Those strongly opposed to these measures base their arguments in the law, not science.

The truth is, there is no reason to think any of these measures have a positive impact on the progress of the pandemic. That’s the first important thing to know if you want to think about a pandemic. It is a process. Assuming the new bug is not 100% lethal to those exposed and humans can develop an immunity to it over time, a pandemic follows a predictable pattern. There is the initial outbreak, where the most vulnerable succumb, then it spreads through the population and eventually burns out.

A pandemic burns out because eventually there is a critical mass of people who are immune to the virus. Maybe they have a natural immunity or they have developed one, but over time, the ability of the virus to find a new host diminishes and it can no longer spread to new victims. Of course, in the extreme, the virus just kills all those vulnerable to it and the rest survive. Some researchers think this could have happened in Philadelphia during the Spanish Flu outbreak.

The theory behind these counter measures was to slow the spread, so hospitals would have time to gear up for patients. The fact that the spread was not impeded in the slightest is a pretty good real-world test of the measures. Maybe in theory they could work, but we don’t live in theory. In reality, months of social distancing and mask wearing have had no impact on the course of the disease. In fact, in places like New York, their policies probably made it worse.

It is possible that all of these measures are bad idea. Take the mandatory mask wearing business as an example. Wearing a surgical mask in a medial setting as part of a protocol to maintain a germ-free environment is well established. Hospitals have very lengthy procedures for the staff, as well as regular training by people who are tasked with maintaining a clean environment. The mask is just one small part of a larger process to maintain a safe environment in the hospital.

In the regular world, where no such procedures are in place and no one is trained in the proper use of masks, or even using proper masks, the mask may be a bad idea. If you watch people in the wild, they are endlessly fiddling with their masks. We know a primary vector for a virus is people touching their face and eyes. A policy that increasing face touching is not a good idea in a pandemic. In other words, mask wearing may increase the spread of the virus in the real world.

The efficacy of mask wearing does not matter, as it is now just another amulet people can wear in public to express their adherence to a particular cult. In the case of the scolds yelling at people about their masks, they believe their mask loyalty is a license to harass the world. Social misfits at the bottom of the social hierarchy now use the mask issue to attack the normal people for not liking the mask policy. The mask is now just another part of the general madness of this age.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Riding The Tiger

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One of the properties of modern liberal democracy is the mass media, which today extends beyond the centrally control of media centers into the effluvium of what we call on-line culture. It is no longer the ruling class operating loudspeakers, pumping propaganda at us. Instead, it is anyone with power adding their own special musk to the air we breathe. As a result, the propaganda washes over us from every direction and no one can escape it, not even the producers.

This is why every corporation suddenly got the BLM bug within hours of that movement’s restarting its engine. The people behind this stuff spend all of their days in the steamy flatulence of racial grievance propaganda. They go to and run diversity workshops for and at their company. They attend conferences where this stuff is preached to them. They ride around in their cars pleasuring themselves to the soundtrack of that minstrel show called Hamilton.

The forest fire of anti-white agit-prop that spread across the mass media this summer was not as coordinated as it appeared from the outside. Most forest fires are the combination of disconnected events. Government neglect, the right weather conditions and some negligent migrants camping in a dry forest. The same is true of this cultural forest fire that still rages in parts of the country. The dry, brittle minds of the mass media makers felt the spark of racial outrage.

The thing is, the people who are at the top of the present social order are operating under two delusions. One is they think the country can be united. That’s why they can’t stop talking about the idea of uniting the country. For them, democracy means everyone spontaneously and enthusiastically agreeing with them. Everyone comes together in one voice, another common trope from our rulers, and belts out some show tunes from Hamilton, then sets about creating the perfect society.

The other delusion is they truly think they are the moral leaders of our society and they are fully in control of this machine they have inherited. It’s not reasonable to say they created it, as the people responsible for the current forest fire of agit-prop are too stupid to create anything other than a mess. The people responsible for staging the current racial theatrics are as much a product of the system and its drama. Like the elements of any forest fire, they came to power by unhappy accident.

The result we are seeing is endless offensive nonsense produced by people who see themselves not only as our moral and spiritual leaders, but as masters of this mass movement sweeping the country. They really do believe they are leading a great groundswell of popular support. In reality, most Americans find the whole charade ridiculous and are now becoming impatient with it. That’s why Joe Biden has suddenly turned on the woke calls to defund the police departments.

Biden, of course, has no idea where he is most of the time, so this has very little to do with him, but his handlers are busy poll-testing every imaginable idea. They will be responsible for selling an elderly dementia patient to the voters. This is going to be a base election, which is always the case when there is an incumbent on the ticket, so they need to maximize their partisan’s enthusiasm. What they have no doubt found is the typical black lady is no fan of defunding the police.

The people behind the “bleep the police” movement don’t interact with the cops, other than at their childish protests. If they did, they would understand the real complaint blacks have with the cops in our major cities. The criminals see the cops as a rival gang that has an unfair advantage. Everyone else sees the cops as wasting their time following their incomprehensible rules, rather than cleaning up crime. They see the cops hassling bangers, but not getting them off the streets.

The fact is, the people in charge and responsible for the mayhem we are seeing, are not master manipulators controlling the system. They are not play 4-D chess to maintain their power behind the scenes. They are riding a tiger that they poke and harass on occasion, without realizing it. The black murder spree in 2016 did not help the Left any more than the current riots will help them. None of this was planned. We are seeing the confluence of events no one predicted.

The Biden camp suddenly wheeling around on the police issue is a good example of why the Left usually wins. Despite their rhetoric, and they very well may believe the conspiracy theories they spout, they act as if they are riding the tiger. They move and adjust to stay on the back of whatever is happening. The Right, in contrast, acts as if they are sure some secret cabal is at the center of events, manipulating everyone like a master chess player controlling the board.

You see this when the Left loses. It’s not the clever work of Conservative Inc. that knocks them off the tiger. It is the Left’s own errors. They shift one way, when they should have shifted the other and some of their team falls off the tiger. We’re seeing that with Biden’s nomination. The Left panicked and installed Biden, when they should have picked someone young and energetic. An ambulatory candidate would be out campaigning right now in places like Texas and Florida.

This is why Trump cannot be counted out in November. He is a guy who thrives on chaos, which is why he always creates it. Trump is no longer a roll of the dice and in uncertain times, that’s a great asset. Dementia Joe, strapped to the tiger like a saddle, is the big gamble. What we may witnessing is not a revolution, but one of those times when the Left forgot they were riding the tiger and toppled off, only to be eaten by the tiger, or in this case, his keepers.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Sunset In Kansas

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It’s easy to forget, with all that is happening, but the racket known as democracy is the one thing not being forced to close by the local tyrants. The state of Kansas had its primary yesterday. The race of interest to white people was the Republican primary for the senate. Far left Rep. Roger Marshall faced off against the moderate former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Marshall, of course, had the support of both parties, as Kobach favors some minor limits on immigration.

Marshall won with the support of the usual GOP suspects. He got the endorsement of the U.S Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Farm Bureau, the National Right to Life Committee. If he wins in the fall, the tech monopolies and agribusiness will get a much-needed voice in Washington, but the people of Kansas will remain unrepresented in both houses. Of course, President Trump did nothing to support Kobach. Instead he spent his time tweeting about something.

It used to be that the three “I’s” controlled American politics. That was Israel, Ireland and Indiana. The money men, working class whites and heritage whites controlled the political process. It’s still the three “I’s” today, but they stand for Israel, India and the investor class. Politics is now controlled by the Israel lobby, open borders fanatics and the financial class. Even the very mild skepticism for open borders by someone like Kobach is completely out of bounds.

This race was interesting for another reason. Mitch McConnell organized a $15 million ad campaign against Kobach. The ads claimed he was a white nationalist who employed invisible Nazis on his staff. It is a great example of how today’s heated rhetoric from the Left becomes conservative dogma tomorrow. No one should be surprised if the GOP slips in some language into their platform condemning your ancestors and supporting the black lives matter nonsense.

The other interesting McConnell angle is that he now runs the GOP. Trump is not even a figure head at this point. He is a non-factor. Both parties are now preparing for the Biden presidency and will make sure a guy like Trump is never allowed to step foot in Washington ever again. They said Nixon ushered in the imperial presidency. McConnell is now ushering in the legislative supremacy. Both parties have locked shields to impose their will on the executive branch.

That really is the story of the last four years. Disaffected whites rallied to put Trump in the White House to send a message to both parties. It was not that people were charmed by Trump or thought he was a great man. White people backed the pompous and crass Trump as a rejection of official politics. A good chunk of whites were sick of the wars, the open borders, the corporate piracy. Voting for Trump was a rejection of the status quo in an effort to wake up the political class.

The political class responded by making sure this never happens again. Look around at Republican races since 2016 and you see a maximum effort to eliminate anyone that supports populist policies. The Democrats, of course, have spent the last four years turning Washington into a circus of conspiracy theories. Instead of cutting a deal with Trump, which would be easy, they are working with their friends in the GOP to undermine Trump at every turn.

In the fullness of time, the 2016 election will be viewed as the last legitimate presidential election in America. Using the excuse of the pandemic, states are ushering in vote by mail schemes. As Gandhi once said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” What that will mean moving forward is the wrong votes will be shredded by the party men counting the votes. There will be no way to audit this process, so voting will become ceremonial.

Then there is the fact that the vote counters will be the wokest of the woke. If you vote the wrong way, your name will be leaked to the right people and before long you will be facing the mob. The point of the secret ballot is so people feel free to be honest in their choices. The point of the mail in vote is to make sure you know someone will be looking over your shoulder as you fill in the ballot. Feel free to vote your conscience, but they will feel free to make you suffer for it.

One other thing from the Kansas race worth noting. The party man got the support of the National Right To Life Committee. There is no better example of the corruption inherent in democracy than the anti-abortion movement. For generations they have been hoovering up millions and have nothing to show for it. A candidate opposing abortion may as well claim he opposes leprechauns riding unicorns. It is the most meaningless position in politics.

In the end, it is another reminder that there is no voting your way out from under a corrupt ruling class. The only solution for that is the hangman. If the interests of white people were represented in the ruling class, then they would be represented in the House and Senate. The ruling class of America no longer has any connection to the average white American, so the interests of white people are ignored. There is no solution to that problem at the ballot box.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Our Sound And Fury

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An old axiom is that the first casualty of war is truth. The facts of the matter stop being important, so both sides feel free to say what they like about the other and the issue at the center of their dispute. Similarly, truth is an early victim of partisanship, as the partisan is only interested in the interests of his group. By extension, one can say that truth is always an early victim of politics. The sides have their interests, which are tied to the people whose interests are being served.

Of course, what we think of as truth is tangled up in the language. In communist countries, the full expression of partisanship in their political struggles meant the language was often humorously dishonest. More than a few men were condemned to death for the crime of being “a bourgeois traitor to the proletariat.” In war time, enemies are described in the most absurd and grotesque terms. often, those epithets stick with the losers as we see with the last European war.

This connection between language and truth is useful, if we can step out of our own partisan sensibilities, in assessing the rationality of a society. North Korea is a good example of this. The gap between official truth and actual truth is so broad in many cases, it lurches into caricature. Iran is another example. Her leaders make claims that strike most people as deliberately ridiculous. This wild language is the result of a great gap between official truth and the actual truth.

Of course, this is turning up in our own society. We live in an increasingly unreasonable age, so the claims of partisans become increasingly unreasonable. The absurdity of calling Trump a dictator, for example, could be excused as fashionable exaggeration, but the people doing it are not exaggerating. Similarly, they are deadly serious when they claim he and his supported are racist, who want to bring back slavery. Their absurd language, reflects absurd beliefs by absurd people.

There is an argument that healthy politics will necessarily have a high degree of exaggeration, as the participants seek to persuade. Since persuasion is the key to democratic governance, the people coming up with these outlandish arguments are, in a fashion, displaying support for the system. They still believe in the fifty percent plus one model, so they pull out all the stops to convince others. Their over-the-top language is, in effect, a signal of their support for democracy.

Maybe there is some truth to it, but we have lots of examples outside the narrow realm of retail politics to suggest otherwise. Look at the great conflagrations on the streets of our cities this summer. Much of it has been organized by people who claim to be opposed to fascism. That’s their reason to exist. Like the communist of old, they oppose fascists and defend democracy. The fact that there are no actual fascists in America does not seem to matter much to them.

The closest thing we have to genuine fascist in modern America are the people claiming to be anti-fascists. The old commies considered capitalists and the middle-class as enemies to their cause. Modern communists have corporate sponsors, are loaded down with consumer goods and come from the middle-class. It’s as if they are on some weird vacation where they get to pretend to be left-wing radicals from a century ago, while not giving up their Wi-Fi access and vegan lunches.

Those corporate and political sponsors of the ant-fascists are defending a political-economy that would be very familiar to the old fascists. Our modern ruling order is a combination of political and corporate interests, with the welfare of the people being the stated objective of both. Large swaths of political power have been handed to corporate giants, in exchange for defense of their corporate interests by the state. It’s why every corporate ad tells us how much the care about us.

America is a fascist country now. It may lack the snappy uniforms and martial order one tends to associate with fascism, but the political-economy of the country is much closer to fascism than Marxism, Capitalism or Republicanism. It is feminine, bourgeois and passive-aggressive, but fascist nonetheless. It will not be long before the official creed of our liberal democracy is, “Everything for the community, nothing outside the community, nothing against the community.”

Now, it should be noted that there are people who occasionally hoist the banner of fascism, but their claims are just as disconnected from reality. Usually, they begin and end with antisemitism, as if that is the only characteristic of fascism. If their politics advance much beyond that, it looks much closer to a crude form of Bolshevism than anything one could classify as fascism. The fascists of a century ago would have viewed them as just another enemy on the street.

For example, one camp of the former alt-right that still goes in for the fascist language and aesthetic wants a centrally planned economy. They want one government bank to provide all banking services, like the post office. They have even flirted at times with the term National Bolshevism. Putting aside the historical partisanship, no fascist, when fascism was a real thing, would have embraced this type of economics. In fact, they would have rejected it as anti-fascist.

Then there is another camp that embraces the ethno-state. Richard Spencer gets the credit for popularizing the idea, but it was not his invention. The idea has been around in Europe since at least the 19th century. The Bolsheviks, of course, would have completely agreed with the notion of a unified people. They would have limited it to the proletariat, but they supported the end of the nation-state. The fascists, in contrast, completely rejected the elimination of the nation state.

Those are just the easiest examples. When you look around, our language is now disconnected from our political reality. The labels used to describe the various sides in political fights historically meaningless. Those saying they are defending democracy are in fact trying to eliminate it. Those who supposedly want authoritarianism really want something closer to a bourgeois civic utopia. Conservatives fight anyone actually trying to conserve anything and liberals oppose actual liberalism.

The madhouse nature of our political language has a lot to do with the rise of mediocrity to positions of power. Maybe nature has withdrawn her favor and we are an increasingly stupid species. Maybe our system rewards the ignorant. Maybe there is some other reason for the dominance of simpletons in our politics. Stupid people communicate in basic language, so they have borrowed the crude juxtapositions of the last century and repurposed them into new partisan labels.

This is what makes this age so maddening to the sober minded. Even accounting for the fact that objectivity must yield to partisanship, there should be some truth content to the partisan rhetoric. Their partisanship should actually be in furtherance of their interests or the interests of the group they claim represent. The lies and misrepresentations should have some purpose. What’s the purpose of “Anti-fascism brought to you by Amazon World Services”?

Another possible explanation for all this is Fukuyama was right in a sense that we have reached the end of liberal democracy. There’s no way forward, so people rummage around in the past for the outfits of the ancestors and then go out on the public stage and reenact old fights. Politics is now a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Our House Of Cards

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Adolf Hitler once said, “There is nothing new under the sun. There are just new ways of expressing the same ideas.” There is some truth to this, which is why we have so many ways of saying that history repeats itself. At least we like to think it repeats itself, as that’s a comforting thought. It means the answers to today’s problems, no matter how vexing, exist in the past. All we have to do is rummage around in the past for a similar time and take a look at the solutions from that period.

There are exceptions. The French Revolution is one of those novel happenings that had no precedent in the known past. The Bolshevik Revolution looked a bit like the French Revolution, but turned out to be something different, mostly because the Bolsheviks were students of the French Revolution. Sometimes things are different enough to be treated as totally new. We may be experiencing one of those times where the conditions are unique enough to feel as if there is no precedent.

Older pundits are fond of comparing the current cultural revolution to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s. They make the comparison because they were around for the first one and they go in for nostalgia. They also see that the people cheering it on in the halls of power are often people who participated in the cultural revolution of the past. You can be sure that many oldsters on the Left think what is happening today confirms their forever youth.

There are some big differences though. For one, the rebels of the past were actually rebelling against something. They did not have unlimited corporate and institutional support. The cops were told to beat the crap out of the rioters in the 1960’s by the political class, both Democrat and Republican. Today, the political class, both Democrat and Republican, is on the side of the rioters. We saw that in New York, Washington and now Portland and Seattle.

There’s also the fact that the rebels of the past had an agenda. It may have been childish and silly, in a college sophomore sort of way, but it was an agenda they could talk about in public. They wanted more personal freedom. They wanted the war in Vietnam to end. They wanted public aid for poor people and blacks. The current rebels talk about nonsense like social justice and privilege. All they can muster is pointless slogans they heard on-line.

A couple generations ago, the Silent Majority could look at the situation and imagine an end game. For example, they could connect ending the Vietnam War with ending the anti-war protests. That meant voting for Nixon in 1968. They could see a connection between loosening social mores and clearing the streets of hippies. On the other hand, they could imagine law and order politicians instructing the cops to clear the streets of the hippies and protesting students too.

Today, there is no silent majority. The great demographic changes that have been wrought by those ascendant rebels of the 1960’s has reduced the white population to about 60% now. About 20% of that population is on the side of the rioters, just as long as they stay away from their mansions. Some portion has walked away from politics entirely, due to the aforementioned changes wrought by the rebels. The Silent Majority is just a bitter minority now.

That’s an aspect to this that gets little attention and makes this very different from the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. The geezers cheering their grandchildren burning Starbucks keep expecting the jackboots of the Silent Majority to show up like they did the last time, but those jackboots are now on golf courses in Boca. No matter how much they provoke their imaginary enemy, there is no response. This reboot of the 1960’s is missing the thing that made it possible, that Silent Majority.

Another novel item is that the now silent minority has nowhere to turn for the solution to this cultural revolution. What is it that they can give to the people burning and looting the cities to make them go home? How does one answer the call for social justice or the end of systemic racism? What would those things look like? These chants and incantations have no practical meaning. They are moral signifiers borrowed from the grievance studies programs on the college campus.

More important, there is no electoral option either. The Democrat party is actively cheering on this lunacy. Joe Biden is running an extortion campaign, where a vote for him means an end to the violence and Covid lock downs. How realistic is that when his party is cheering for the mayhem, promising to take it to a new level after they win the final election. It is not hyperbole to say that a Democrat sweep in November means the end of elections. What would be the point?

Of course, the Republicans are revealing themselves to be entirely bankrupt. Their response to the unrest is nothing. They are too busy crafting yet another giveaway to their corporate paymasters. Trump is nowhere to be found. He occasionally tweets something stupid, but otherwise he looks like a beaten man. In fairness, he is a beaten man, beaten by a political class that is corrupt beyond reform. For that silent minority, there is no political option to end the current madness.

This is a novel problem for Americans. If you are a white person in a place like Seattle, what are your options? If you abide by the law, you have your property destroyed and possibly your life threatened. People are being shot in their cars now as they try to go about their business. Gun sales are booming, but the people buying the guns imagine themselves defending their life and property within a system of laws. What happens when they realize there is no system of laws?

If you read about the deliberations of the decision-makers in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the thing that stands out is their sober mindedness. They were very worried that America was on the cusp of social collapse. The decision makers of today, that means political and corporate leaders, seem to think American society is an indestructible object they can abuse without consequence. They are carrying on like reckless children, incapable of imagining any consequences to their behavior.

Social collapse comes when the majority stops accepting the legitimacy of the system and the authority of those in charge of it. The one result of the street rioters and their corporate and political sponsors is they may get what they want. The majority may stop accepting the legitimacy of the system. That silent minority may lose all faith in the system and the people running it. That would be us one step from the edge, when all respect for authority collapses and takes society with it.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Judas’s Priests

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It is popular in various dissident warrens to characterize mainstream conservatism as a collection of spineless sissies. Sometimes they are drawn as naive idealists who get taken by their more cynical opponents on the Left. Other times they are described as fools operating under a set of “principles” that make it impossible for them to fight the Left effectively. While some of that is certainly true, the reality is conservatism has been a cynical confidence game for a very long time.

Probably the best example of that truth of conservatism is Jonah Goldberg, formerly of National Review and now head of something called The Dispatch. For a couple of decades, Goldberg has played the role of affable right-wing dufus. He was the doughy, easy going every-man, who liked popular culture and goofing off, but was also one of those instinctively conservative guys. He was not going to quote Edmund Burke or even Bill Buckley in his posts. He would quote the Simpsons.

It was a great role for him to play, as he is no one’s idea of an intellectual, but he also has the disheveled goofball look popular in the movies. It was also an effective way to get people to overlook the fact that he was never a natural conservative or even much of a conservative. He was an actor playing a role. He started out in his acting career working for Ben Wattenberg, a far Left radical in the 1960’s and 1970’s, who got on the public television gravy train in the 1980’s.

Wattenberg was associated with the American Enterprise Institute, the symbol of conservative racketeering in Washington. This is the financial engine for the so-called neoconservatives, which means it is staffed with left-wing activists posing as conservatives, in order to promote an imperialist foreign policy agenda. They also peddle libertarian economics on behalf of their corporate sponsors. Ben Wattenberg was one of the first models to roll off their production line.

Goldberg was also a creation of AEI. It was his first job out of college, which is where he was paired up with Wattenberg to be trained as a subversive. Once ready for action, he was installed at National Review. He was then assigned the task of creating their on-line presence, which is where most people became aware of him. His frumpy every-man act became popular with a new generation of conservatives, looking for something more in line with the slacker culture than the Ivy League culture.

This is a good example of how a tiny group of people came to control the conservative establishment in the last century. In order for a conservative writer to get access to a conservative platform, it meant passing muster with a thicket of gatekeepers trained by and controlled by operations like AEI.  If you wanted to write for NRO, it meant getting vetted by Jonah Goldberg. To write for the print side, it meant being vetted by some other think tank approved gatekeeper.

Of course, the main source of control was money. AEI and Heritage are the bottleneck in conservative fundraising. AEI brings in over 50 million in contributions each year, while Heritage hauls in close 100 million. They also control the flow of cash into hundreds of smaller, less well-known non-profits. These operations underwrite conservative publications and conservative book writing. They will bulk-buy a book, thus providing the writer with a nice royalty.

If all of this sounds like a racket, that’s because it is a racket. It is more cynical than that though, as the people running the rackets are terrible people. They lie about what they are doing, causing otherwise well intended people to support things that go against their stated interests. They con rich people into giving them money, which gets used to support the lifestyle of these grifters. They also use their power to attack anyone that challenges their hammerlock on official opposition.

A good recent example of this is something done by Jonah Goldberg. Back in 2018, a woman named Emerald Robinson got a scoop that many so-called conservative publications had been secretly taking cash from the tech monopolies. They were being paid to support the tech monopolies stranglehold on political discourse. Payola has always been a problem with Conservative Inc.  and this looked the latest example of their penchant for pay-for-play shakedowns.

Now, Emerald Robinson was a reporterette for something called One America News Network (OANN), which is an independent media outlet that aims to serve the grassroots conservative. Their audience is the sort of people who support Trump because he is opposed by people like Jonah Goldberg. They are the talk radio crowd that skews more Huey Long than Bill Buckley. Robinson now works for Newsmax, another one of those types of operations.

Goldberg was dispatched to trash her, which he was happy to do. First, he trashed her personally on Twitter. Then he posted a piece on NRO, smearing her as a “failed-actress-turned-faux journalist” and an idiot. He also claimed she had no real evidence to support her claim. He finished by writing, “Look, I honestly suspect Robinson makes up many of her “sources” and that she’s a fake reporter while claiming to wage a war on “fake news.” That’s a serious charge.

It turns out that Goldberg was lying. Google was giving money to National Review and dozens of other so-called conservative operations. His paymasters at AEI were part of the operations to shower Conservative Inc. with payola, so they would do the bidding of the tech oligarchs. There’s simply no way Goldberg did not know this when he smeared Robinson, so his lies were conscious. They required forethought. He also lied when he knew all of his fellow racketeers knew he was lying.

The truth is, the people running Conservative Inc. are not just idealistic naifs being rolled by the bare-knuckled lefties in politics. They are not excessively principled ideologues playing by a set of rules that prevent them from winning. In reality, they are evil subversives grifting off the destruction of the country. They are selling out the people they claim to represent and they do it with enthusiasm. They are soulless grifters, willing to say and do anything to keep the con going.

What makes them especially evil is that they are preying on the most vulnerable people in the country. These are the average white people who have no representation in the halls of power. Mostly, they are happy to be left alone to live their lives. These are the people who trust the system. They are willing to trust others to look out for their interests in Congress and their state legislatures. The GrifterCons prey on these people like jackals, stealing their money and selling out their interests.

The thing that puts these people in a special category is the audacity of their conniving and grifting. When their perfidy is noted, they carry on as if they are the victims of some new pogrom. The American Right has been consumed by army of Judases swarming traditional America like a plague of locusts. Washington has been their playground, their Garden of Gethsemane, for generations now. The best the Right can hope for now is that these people are remembered as well as their inspiration.

A Sad Note: The proprietor of The Woodpile Report died last week. He was a great promoter of the sorts of content you find here. He had a big audience, so when he linked to someone, he sent a lot of traffic their way. I will forever be grateful for his support in linking to me on a regular basis. Rest in peace Ol’ Remus.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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