Repo Men

Posted on December 17, 2019 by thezman

There used to be a time when the mass media covered the Federal Reserve as if it was Hollywood or a professional sports league. Whenever the Fed acted or the Fed chairman made a statement, it was big news. That has not been the case for a long time, mostly due to the mortgage meltdown. Worshiping the money men was no longer good copy after they came close to blowing up the world. Halfway through the Trump tenure, the media barely mentions the Fed or Fed policy.

Still, the central banks remain the most important government institutions on earth and this is particularly true of the Federal Reserve. They control the global economy, because they control the supply of money and credit. This is why the massive intervention into the credit markets by the Federal Reserve recently should be front page news. Something very big is happening and no one seems to know why, but the Fed is responding to it with $500 billion in new money.

Now, they are not just printing up cash and throwing it out the window. Instead, they are intervening in the repo market to head-off a market crash. For those who don’t know, the repo market is not where repossessed items are sold. The word “repo” is slang for repurchase agreement¹. A repurchase agreement is a short-term funding mechanism where one party needing cash, sells an asset to a party for cash, with an agreement to repurchase the asset at an agreed upon price.

A repurchase agreement functions in effect as a short-term, collateral-backed, interest-bearing loan. Much of what happens in the world of investment banks is reliant on the repo market. In order for these entitles to function, there has to be enough cash available in the system for these transactions to occur. Otherwise, borrowing rates go up, which means the cost of doing business goes up. Taken to the extreme, no cash available means the credit markets lock up.

Since the financial system is like a watch with gears interlocking with gears, one gear seizing up has the potential to seize up all the other gears. A frozen repo market could result in a cash crunch for banks, which locks up business and retail lending. That locks up the Main Street economy and we’re looking at bread lines. The economy, as we understand it, relies on a steady supply of money and credit freely flowing through the system according to the rules established by central banks.

As an aside, if the repo market probably sounds a lot like a pawnshop to you. A pawn shop offers short-term, collateral based loans. You take the family silver into the pawnshop and they give you cash. You agree to come back with the cash, plus interest, to get the family silver out of hock. If you blow the cash on a sure thing and are unable to pay the pawnshop, they take ownership of your item and sell it for cash. So yes, the financial system is built on the logic of the pawnshop.

Now, this move by the Fed is very curious. Clearly, something has caused this problem in the repo market, but no one seems to know the cause. It’s serious enough that the Fed’s balance sheet, currently at $4.1 trillion, will surpass its all-time high of $4.5 trillion. For several years now the Fed has made clear its intent to shrink its balance sheet. Therefore, this problem is serious enough to cause the Federal Reserve to change course and blow up its balance sheet.

The question is, what’s going on?

One possible answer is bad rule making over the last decade that has rewarded banks for hoarding cash. Instead of lending to one another, they are sitting on cash reserves. The risk-reward is better than short term lending. This could be due to a combination of market factors created by Fed policy and regulations on banks regarding their cash reserves. In other words, the government has created a distorted short-term lending market, through regulation and Fed policy that discourages short-term lending.

Another, more worrisome cause is that central banks have built a low-interest rate trap for themselves that they cannot escape. In lowering rates and intervening so aggressively in the market to stave off collapse a decade ago, they have created a system that cannot exist without low rates and aggressive intervention. Efforts to restore rates to historic norms or attempts to shrink the balance sheets of central banks threatens the very existence of the global financial system.

In such a scenario, the system controlled by the central banks becomes increasing complex with every intervention. Currently, the Fed does not know why the repo market is broken. They are simply reacting to the short-term effects. Their actions, however, will be part of the problem to be solved, a problem they don’t fully grasp. By the time they do understand the issue, they may have been forced to make additional interventions that further change the complexity of the problem.

Of course, a world of permanently low interest rates and unlimited intervention by the central bank is not a world controlled by the central bank. Rather, the central bank is now controlled by the system it created. The main weapons the central bank has used in the past to address systemic failure are no longer available. Taken to its logical conclusion, the financial system is a run-a-way train. The Feds do what they can to keep it on the tracks, but eventually, the inevitable happens.

In the long run, the story of credit money may be that it is simply a complex way to pull forward the benefits of economic activity, for the benefit of a few. Eventually, all of the pain avoidance with low interest rates and central bank intervention consume all of the economy to pull forward. Those accrued costs are reversed out all at once and system collapse in the result. The resulting political fallout then topples over the liberal democratic order and we enter an entirely new age.

That may sound overly apocalyptic, but consider how political institutions must weather a crisis. The people must not only want to preserve those institutions, they must trust the people running them. A great systemic collapse of the economic order would need a lot of trust in the political order to avoid revolts. At no time in the West has the current political order be less trusted. It needs the good economy to survive. That sound a lot like a house of cards waiting for the wrong decision.

¹Short primer on repurchase agreements.

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Right-Wing Cosmopolitanism

Posted on December 16, 2019 by thezman

The British election offers a good opportunity to see the detachment of official conservatism from the people they pretend to represent. Most of the conservative chattering class was quietly hopeful of a Labour Party victory. They would be justified in opposing what they sneeringly refer to as populism. Boris Johnson is a boorish loudmouth, who has an uncanny appeal with working class people, despite being a man of privilege. He’s the sort of guy conservatives think should not exist.

What baffles conservatives about Boris and Trump is that neither man goes in for the dorm room libertarianism that has come to define conservatism. They proudly talk about spending money on things like infrastructure projects and government services. They think the government should make the lives of the citizens better. The economy, as far as they are concerned, is about serving the people, a concept so alien to modern conservatives they confuse it with socialism.

Of course, what baffles conservatives most about these types of politicians is they don’t seem to care very much for the cosmopolitan types, who decorate the salons of modern conservatism. Johnson won on the strength of his appeal the sort of native Britain, who no longer goes to London, because London is full of foreigners now. Similarly, Trump won on his appeal to whites in flyover country, who worry that their country is being turned into Brazil. Conservatives are baffled by this.

So much so, they just assume it is an illusion. Andrew Stuttaford, writing in National Review recognizes the facts of Johnson’s victory, but then says, “If the Conservatives are to repeat last night’s success in the next general election (currently scheduled for 2024) they will want to claw back some of those London voters.” In other words, despite the results, he remains convinced that the path to victory is chasing the non-white cosmopolitan vote in the cosmopolitan areas.

This is the same psychosis we have seen in America with conservatives. They demand the GOP bankrupt itself chasing a few black votes, at the expense of the vast number of white votes it can easily gain. It is a form of Stockholm syndrome. Conservatives have been captured by the Left for so long, they have now completely internalized the morality of the Left, to the point where it is natural for them. They just assume one sacred black vote is worth more than every single white vote.

Of course, people in cults cannot process disconfirmation, so they look for ways to explain the contrary results within the context of their beliefs. Quickly after the results were known, the so-called conservatives blamed the results on the antisemitism of Jeremy Corbyn. Also in National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty claims “Under Corbyn’s watch, Labour became a party in which anti-Semitism started to have free rein.” Yeah, that’s what caused millions to vote Tory.

Not to be outdone, the neocons are blaming magic miasmas that brought with them a foul odor of socialism. The Trotskyites at Bill Kristol’s new Persia-based outlet are blaming it on their old enemies in the party. Charlie Sykes writes, “And make no mistake about it, Corbyn’s Labour party platform was a progressive, democratic-socialist fever dream.” You see, according to these guys, Brexit and nationalism are wildly unpopular, but the scary socialisms is even more unpopular.

Another point here is that the so-called conservatives were completely taken in by the last-minute campaign by the mass media to claim the election was tight. One reason is they really wanted to believe it. Another reason, a more important one, is that they always trust the Left. They instinctively trust the left-wing media, despite having been lied to so often. It’s not an institutional trust or a desire for it, but a natural comfort for the sorts of people who control the left-wing media.

That is because conservatism in the English-speaking countries has become nothing more than right-wing cosmopolitanism. These are people who live in cities as strangers to everyone around them. Community is not based on history or tradition, but in a shared ideology. Ben Shapiro made this clear when he said “And by the way, I don’t give a good damn about the so-called “browning of America.” Color doesn’t matter. Ideology does.” This is the essence of cosmopolitanism.

It’s also not conservative. The reason conservatism exists is people naturally attach to their kin, their land and their traditions. This is the bulwark against radicalism, which seeks to replace normal human relations with ideological ones. Most people, as the saying goes, are conservative about what they know best. That means in the English -speaking world, most people are naturally conservative. It is this vast majority of whites that is now alien to the cosmopolitan conservatives.

This is why the first project of an authentic alternative is to claw back the mantle of conservatism from the cosmopolitans. Let them drift back to their kind in the party, to wrangle over false consciousness and the finer points of ideology. The authentic alternative to this is not a slightly different ideology, but the rejection of ideology as the foundation of politics. In order for there to be a genuine alternative politics, the cosmopolitan conservatives must first be driven from the temple.

The Trip Down The Stairs

Posted on November 26, 2019 by thezman

In the year prior to a presidential election, Thanksgiving is usually when primary races for party nominations begin to come into focus. Donors have had most of the year to assess the candidates and the voters are starting to pay attention. The first test is a little over two months away, so all of the candidates have their people in the field. The boots on the ground test is one of those unofficial measures that tell us something about the organic and financial support for each candidate.

According the polls, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is the favorite to win the Iowa caucus, currently polling at 25%. Warren and Sanders are tied for second at a little under 20% each, while Biden is at 12%. The Iowa caucus is not a great predictor, but it does tend to winnow the field. That means the four plausible candidates at the moment are the four at the top of the polls. The rest of the field is in low single digits. Mayor Bloomberg does not appear to be running in the state at this point.

New Hampshire has always been the bellwether and the numbers there tell us it is a four human race as well. The latest polls have Warren, Buttigieg, Sanders and Biden clustered together in the teens. Tulsi Gabbard is the only minor candidate showing any support, which bears watching. New Hampshire has a habit of elevating a minor candidate when the leaders appear weak. Gabbard is the chaos option for frustrated voters in the state. Bloomberg could also be an option.

Nevada and South Carolina are where Biden finds the most support. He leads the polls in both states, mostly on the brown vote. Biden’s support for Obama has turned into what appears to be unshakable support from non-whites. It is too early to tell if that is legitimate, but so far, he looks like the only option for blacks. Maybe after weak showings in Iowa and New Hampshire blacks abandon him. Voters tend to cluster around a winner, even if the winner is not their first choice.

What we have thus far is a field of candidates that all look like second and third tier players in a normal election. They are boutique options, appealing to a narrow slice of the party, while not appealing to the broader party. Buttigieg, for example, is popular with boozy wine aunts, but wildly unpopular with blacks. Warren is popular with the power women, but very unpopular with men. Biden, of course, is popular with blacks, but the rest of the party thinks it is time for his nap.

This is why Bloomberg has jumped into the race. He is a nasally weirdo from another planet, but he has enough money to buy the election. Despite being a very odd little guy, he is more normal than the other options. He can also offer the rage heads in the party an option that will fight Trump on his turf. Bloomberg will outspend Trump and he will be every bit as abrasive. The symmetry of two New York billionaires screaming at one another in 2020 could be too much to resist for Democrats.

Of course, what this suggests is the Democrats have no political talent in their ranks, which is why they have a field full of weirdos. It’s also a field of geezers. Warren, Sanders and Biden are in their 70’s. The younger options in the field are devoid of natural political talent and exist only because the donor class has to hire someone to play these roles. The Democrat primary is like a Broadway musical pulling people from the crowd, because they are short of professional performers.

In some respects, the Democrats are experiencing what the Republicans experienced in the 2016 cycle. It was a field full of nondescript nothings. It was why Trump won and why Bloomberg has a chance this time. In the 2016 debates, it looked as if all of the other candidates were in black and white, while Trump was in color. Voters could overlook all of his issues, because he was the only human option. That could be what gets Bloomberg a shot to win, assuming he gets on stage.

The bigger picture suggests the political system is in rapid decline. This generation of politicians has been in power for thirty years. They have done nothing to develop the next generation. In fact, they have prevented the talented from entering the system, in order to avoid the competition. The result is the next generation in the system is even more deranged and bizarre than the boomer generation. If Buttigieg is the future of democratic politics, democracy is on life support.

That’s what we are seeing. The political class is not a reflection of the people. That’s not how democracy works. They are a reflection of the system that recruits and develops the politicians. The reason the quality of candidate is in decline is the system itself is in decline. Both parties are now controlled by narrow interests at odds with the general public and needs of the country. The reason the general election will feature two septuagenarians is the system is running on fumes.

This is what decline is like. People on this side of the great divide like to think the end will be dramatic collapse or tanks in the streets, but that’s unlikely. Instead, it will be fits and starts down the uneven stairs of cultural decline. Trump is one of those steps with a long tread. The next few steps will have high risers and short treads. At some point, elections just stop happening either due to lack of interest or the inability of the political class to stage these made for television dramas.

At some point, a crisis will come and the public will have no confidence in the political class to address it. Some faction within the political class will use that to seize power and take control of the system. A temporary suspension of elections will slowly become permanent, as order is restored. America will no longer have the demographics or cultural will to operate the old system. The next step down is some form of authoritarian rule that manages the decline a bit better than the chaos of democracy.

Ukrainian Mysteries

Posted on November 25, 2019 by thezman

One of the puzzles to the impeachment stuff is why certain elements of the ruling class think this is a productive use of their time. The impeachment show put on by the Democrats last week struck most people as boring and weird. It was mostly a parade of people with funny sounding names babbling about inside baseball. There’s also the fact that the guy appointed to be the master of ceremonies gives people the creeps. Adam Schiff looks like frog peeping through the ice. He is a very odd man.

The bigger issue is no one seems to know what the crime is at the heart of this alleged scandal. We live in an age where the President bombs countries, overthrows governments and sends troops onto foreign soil whenever he likes. Demanding information in exchange for cash hardly seems important. The claim by the outrage mob is that it would have been perfectly fine for Trump to bomb Kiev or overthrow the government, but he crossed the line demanding they investigate criminality.

Of course, nothing in politics is as it seems. This impeachment stuff has other aspects to it. One is the outlandish corruption in Washington. The Biden family appears to have been taking massive bribes from Burisma Holdings, the dodgy energy company that operates within Ukraine. What exactly they were expecting to get is not all that clear, but it must have been worth a lot. They were not paying Hunter Biden tens of millions because he offered wise counsel. They expected something big.

Given the nature of the Washington political elite and Biden’s position within it, it is safe to assume a lot of people were getting paid by elements operating in Ukraine. They played some role in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. Some of the fake information used to defraud the court for FISA warrants came from Ukraine via the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. Of course, Mueller put Paul Manafort in jail allegedly because he had corrupt dealings in Ukraine.

This small unimportant country on the fringe of Europe seems to play an out-sized role in America politics. People forget that during the Obama administration, the foreign policy elite overthrew the elected government of Ukraine. Victoria Nuland was caught red handed working to disrupt the government in 2014. Nuland is one of those permanent party members who is never affected by elections. No matter who is in the White House, she is part of the team running foreign policy.

Of course, no discussion of Ukraine can be complete without mentioning that our greatest ally seems to have an obsession with the place. The Ukraine impeachment show looked like a Chinese restaurant on Christmas day. It was one Jew after another popping up to talk about the ancestral homeland. As Steve Sailer and many others have noted, American Jews have an obsession with their old stomping grounds in the former Russian Empire. Impeachment was shtetl porn for these people.

The Jewish obsession with that part of the world is a fascinating bit of history that never gets much attention. Third and fourth generation Irish Americans have no interest in Ireland. The same is true of Italians, Poles and even Mexicans. These groups have folded into the white American ethnic group. For Jews, the old country still looms large, even after close to a century. Look at the Russian sector of the foreign policy establishment and it is a sea of little hats.

This is probably why Russia is now a magic word in leftist circles. When the party wants to say something bad about someone, they claim the person is a Russian puppet or fond of Putin. Tulsi Gabbard, who has outrageously taken the position the Democrats had during the Bush years, with regards to endless war, is regularly accused of being a Russian agent by various rage heads on cable. For certain people, Russia will forever be the most hated enemy. The Jews really know how to hold a grudge.

That is one major reason for Ukraine being so important to Washington. It is the dream of these people to have Ukraine included in NATO, thus an official part of Europe. It is a symbolic liberation from the Russian Empire. The people from the Pale of Settlement can then claim to be European. It is an important psychological element animating much of the obsession and paranoia over that part of the world. That old need to not dwell alone is the invisible hand guiding all of this.

Of course, there is the possibility that Jews obsess over that part of the world, because that is where they have hidden the Ark of the Covenant. Instead of a government warehouse in the Midwest, it has been stashed away in the Pale of Settlement. The Jewish people have been there for a long time and their origin story is shrouded in mystery, so maybe that’s the big secret. Is that any more absurd or ridiculous than anything else in the bizarre impeachment charade?

In the end, the weirdness of this whole affair is probably why impeachment has not resonated with the public. All of these odd-looking people with foreign names strike most Americans as outsiders. They are not the sorts of characters that have meaning to them, because these are not people they can relate to as fellow citizens. The pudgy Ukrainian colonel looks like a flunky from a Bond movie. Most Americans wonder why we have a Ukrainian general working in the White House.

What impeachment and the various scandals of the ruling class demonstrate is just how foreign the ruling class is today. These are people so divorced from the daily reality of Americans, they may as well live on another planet. They can’t even put on good political theater now. Instead, it is a parade of their buddies from an obscure part of the imperial establishment. They would have been better served offering up spectral evidence that Trump is a witch. That would be more relatable.

The Wilderness Of Mirrors

Posted on November 18, 2019 by thezman

A general rule in democratic politics is that nothing anyone says or does should be taken at face value. James Jesus Angleton famously described the espionage game as a wilderness of mirrors, a term he borrowed from T. S. Eliot. The same can be said of democratic politics. Everyone assumes that everyone else is operating from a hidden agenda, so no one plays anything straight. That is something to keep in mind when examining the weird impeachment show the Democrats are staging.

Conventional wisdom says this is an extension of the long running tantrum that began after the 2016 election. The Left, spiraling into revolutionary madness, is demanding vengeance for 2016. Party leaders, fearing a schism in the ranks, went along with what is a ceremonial process. Pelosi has refused to initiate a formal impeachment inquiry, as that would trigger a legal process that could easily get out of control. Instead, she has gone along with what is turning out to be a melodramatic fishing expedition.

Now, Adam Schiff is mentally ill. That’s not an amusing criticism, but an obvious fact based on his bizarre behavior and deranged demeanor. He is not too far from demanding witnesses play leapfrog while entering the hearing room. He’s not the first party member to serve while suffering from mental illness. David Wu, a congressman from Oregon, went around dressed as a tiger. The reason for this circus could simply be that the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum.

If we assume that not everyone has gone insane and that these lunatics were allowed off their leash in order to serve some other purpose, the question is what? It’s clear that they have nothing. If Pelosi allows this to move to a formal impeachment process, then she would be betting that this nothing stands up to what the White House would offer into evidence, which would be very bad for everyone in the political class. The party leaders are not going to roll those dice heading into an election.

All of this, of course, is against the backdrop of the investigation into the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. What should have wrapped up a year ago is supposed to be reaching some sort of denouement. Supposedly CIA officials are hiring lawyers and the Inspector General is ready to issue criminal referrals. U.S. Attorney John Durham is making the sorts of inquiries that suggests he is serious. Despite the foot-dragging, it looks like something may finally happen on that front.

This impeachment charade may very well be a part of some political negotiating going on between Democrats and the White House. The IG report has been delayed for months, so it is not unreasonable to think there is backroom dealing going on that is holding up the release. If there are to be indictments, then those who are indicted will surely consider cutting a deal. This impeachment stuff could be a stall to give the party time to cut deals with those who will take a fall and keep quiet.

There’s also the possibility that this impeachment stuff is a stall for time so the party can figure who did what exactly. One of the interesting aspects of the 2016 spying plot is the number of people involved. If it was a small group of conspirators, this would have been swept under the rug a long time ago. The scale is no doubt slowing the official inquiry, so it probably has slowed the unofficial ones as well. Maybe that’s the real point of the impeachment show. The party is still sorting the issue.

On the other hand, many of the people involved in the impeachment charade were involved in the spying plot. The outside lawyers conspiring with Schiff’s committee, were also involved in setting up the fake evidence in the Russian hoax. Some were working in the DOJ during the plot, while others worked on Mueller’s team. Much of the news “reporting” on this is being done by “reporters” who had worked hand and glove with the conspirators during the plot. We’re back to the lunatics running the asylum.

What could be happening here is that the Schiff committee is really trying to get a handle on what the administration knows about the Ukrainian corruption and the seditious plot. These hearings are about getting administration people to secretly tell Schiff what is known about these scandals, maybe talk about what the IG has been doing over the last three years. In other words, it is not about fishing for dirt on Trump, but fishing for what Barr has on the conspirators.

Another angle to that is the Ukraine plays an absurdly large role in American politics for some reason. The scandals of the Obama years always seem to have some roots in the place. Maybe that reason is a bigger, much scarier bit of corruption involving Ukraine that no one wants made public. At this point, the image of Hillary Clinton’s cackling visage should come to mind. Her off-the books e-mail system seems to have a role in all of this. Maybe she sold Ukraine something big.

There is one other facet here to consider. The genesis of this impeachment stuff was the revelation that Joe Biden and probably many other party members, were taking bribes from Ukrainian officials. That probably ended Biden’s campaign as he has been fading ever since. Maybe this Ukrainian stuff was just a way to get that information into the public domain, either by the White House or by party radicals. This is the sort of scheming these people do as a matter of habit.

Of course, you can go the other way with this and maybe the whole point of this was to get the White House to reveal the Biden stuff. If that came from some other source, the party media could not dismiss it as political shenanigans. By raising questions about Trump and Ukraine, the White House had to reveal what they had on Biden and anyone else getting their beak wet in Ukraine. That’s a bit of 4-D chess, but it is a common practice in politics. Accuse the other side of something outrageous in order to make them talk about it or disclose their own schemes about it.

Then there is the planted story about Obama cautioning the party about going too far into crazy land. These stories are written up and handed to sites like The Hill by the party, as a way to communicate to party members. This brings us back to the decision by Pelosi to allow a fake impeachment inquiry to proceed. Given the lack of public interest and the lack of any evidence of wrongdoing, this whole thing may have been a concession to the crazies, a concession that may soon be withdrawn.

Finally, any rumination on this impeachment charade has to acknowledge the lack of interest by the public. The media had their amplifiers turned to eleven. The actors on cable chat shows were given the right lines and the show opened with as much fanfare as possible. Like the new Terminator movie, it has been a flop. People took a peak and then stopped looking when they saw nothing there. Schiff really thought this was going to be a hit, but he may have been the only one.

At this point, the Cloud People are so divorced from our reality they are left to guess as to what interests the Dirt People. What we could be seeing is the fantasy world of the Cloud People in the inner party’s radical ghetto slamming into reality. They are suddenly learning that the rabble does not share their obsession with the orange golem that haunts their dreams. This impeachment show was just a big ceremony by the ruling class that failed to resonate with the general public.

Failure Analysis: Alt-Right

Posted on November 7, 2019 by thezman

With the leaked audio of Richard Spencer’s embarrassing tantrum after the Charlottesville riot, the book can finally be closed on the alt-right. If there was anyone still using the term as anything but an epithet, they will no doubt drop it. The first political movement to grow out of internet culture has come and an ignominious end. While it may no longer be a thing, examining what they did right and what they did wrong, especially what they did wrong, can be useful for dissidents.

The primary reason the alt-right failed was that it was never a coherent movement with an intellectual center. It was just a ragtag collection of people with a gripe about something going on in the culture. There were those who recently discovered Kevin McDonald, so they worked that angle. Others had discovered race realism and figured out why libertarianism was a dead end. Then there were the boys who did not like what was happening with feminism. The alt-right was a grievance society.

Reaction to social trends can certainly be the starting point of a cultural or political movement, but it can never be the end point. If the whole point of your politics is to stand in opposition to something, you’re not part of a movement. You are part of an obstacle that will eventually be removed. That is what literally happened to the alt-right, piece by piece, over the last few years. One tribe of the alt-right after another was anathematized and then marginalized by the Left. Now it is gone entirely.

Now, some would argue that the concept of the ethno-state was the vision of the alt-right, but that was another reason it failed. Richard Spencer would have been more successful claiming he was going to lead the alt-right back to the Shire, so they could reunite with their hobbit brothers. Setting your goal as the creation of a what is basically white Wakanda is not serious. As a theoretical construct to use as a critique of multiculturalism it could have been useful, but as a goal it was absurd.

The thing is, racial nationalism is not a new thing. Arab nationalism was a legitimate movement in the middle of the last century. There was a pan-African nationalism that rose up in the later years of colonialism. Both failed in their stated goals, because race is a terrible way to organize people. Loyalty starts with family, then extended family and finally the extended family of ethnicity. Race is a general grouping of people that corresponds to the big geographical groupings. Race is not ethnicity.

This is why American dissidents need to be careful to acknowledge the geographic diversity of occidentals in North America. The old stock Yankee living in New Hampshire may share the same opinions on biology as a Southerner, but they will remain men from different tribes. This diversity among white people in America is why the people in charge have been so successful. They exploit these differences to turn a majority population into a hated minority. That reality must be respected.

That brings up another failure of the alt-right. It never had intellectual heft. Richard Spencer liked to cast himself as a philosopher, but he was always a dilettante, more concerned with media attention, than thinking about politics. He was a lot like Barak Obama, in that his fans would say he was inspirational, but they could never tell you anything he said that was memorable, other than the gaffes. His innumeracy prevented him from making an affirmative argument about biology.

Otherwise, no one filled the intellectual void at the center of the alt-right. Some of the writers for Counter Currents gave it a go, but they were always a bit wary of what was going on with the alt-right. Others would turn up with an essay here or there, but the movement never attracted anyone who was well read and prepared to articulate the main ideas that allegedly animated the alt-right. Instead, it was Spencer rambling on YouTube videos about Faustian man and the ethno-state.

Of course, one reason the movement failed to attract smart people toiling in the intellectual fields of bio-diversity is the movement had a lot of cranks. In fact, the alt-right seemed to be a crank magnet. It was a freak show of e-celebs, who were never all that interested in politics. Guys like Milo and Cerno are good examples. For them, politics is a vehicle to internet stardom. Serious people interested in serious politics will not get involved with a movement that welcomes freaks and weirdos.

That is the one great lesson from the alt-right. No organization can survive incompetence at the top. Whether you are forming a local group to clean up a park or you are organizing for a larger political goal, you have to have high quality people at the center of it. The alt-right made a fetish of not purging people, but that became a doggy door for the worst sorts of people to enter their movement. No matter how cheeky or clever your internet memes, you can’t win counting on losers.

Self-policing, of course, gets a lot easier in real life organizing. On-line, people are free to play any character they like. In real life, people quickly sort the wheat from the chaff, so excluding grifters and lunatics gets easier. Good people tend to boil off the bad people, through the natural social mechanisms. That is the most important lesson of the alt-right. The internet is not real. It cannot replace real life organizing. If there is going to be a resistance to what is happening, it must happen in the real world.

High On Their Own Supply

Posted on November 6, 2019 by thezman

A common misconception among the more cynical on this side of the great divide is that the people running grifts like TP-USA are all in on the grift. That the front men are just as aware of the con being worked as the people who finance them. While that can be true, it is not always true. In fact, in most cases the front man is a true believer, who really believes the stuff he is preaching. That’s why the backers picked him. They did not have to worry about him having a crisis of conscience.

That appears to be the case with Charlie Kirk, the deformed looking fellow that is the front man for TP-USA, the synthetic grassroots college group. After hooligans disrupted his college tour with difficult questions, he has reportedly been threatening to quit the show, as he was so distraught over what is happening. He was unprepared for anything but an adoring audience of fellow believers. He expected his college road show to be him evangelizing to fellow zealots. Instead he is being mocked.

When you stop and think about it, it is easy to see that he is not a cold, calculating schemer running a complex grift. For starters, he is not that bright. That’s clear by how badly he has handled the questions from the hooligans. Even a young con-man is quick on his feet when in a jam. That’s what leads them into the grifter lifestyle. Kirk, on the other hand, is completely unprepared for the push-back he is getting, because he just assumed everyone in the crowd believed the same nonsense he believes.

In fairness to Kirk, he is not alone in believing nonsense. The Bush years are a great example of how you can fool most of the people for just a little while, if you give them a reason to feel they are sacrificing for a larger goal. The flag waving and talk of spreading democracy to the barbarians was powerful magic. For people in a fading empire, with an uncertain demographic future, a moral war to make the world right again was a beautiful reprieve from their daily reality.

Now, there are cynical grifters in these scams. Dan Crenshaw, the congressman from Texas, is a great example. Like John McCain, he as figured out how to wrap himself in the flag, while peddling the nonsense paid for by the usual suspects. He’s running around trying to convince young white men to throw their life away on pointless wars in the Middle East, while telling them the future is going to be brown. If one wanted to conjure a modern example of pure evil, Pirate Dan is a good start.

In many ways, these Potemkin movements ginned up by the usual suspects mirror what is done in the pop music business. The sharps who have run that business since the inception, are always fishing for a new act. When they find one, they flood the market with copies until the public losses interest. Then it is onto the next act. Meanwhile, the boys and girls trying to become pop starts are sure they are getting noticed because they have talent. The carny folk prey on those wishing to be stars.

The difference between what is happening with the political hucksters and the entertainment rackets is there is no feedback loop. Music producers have to move product. Movie makers have to sell tickets. The political theater generally lacks such immediate returns. Both sides of the ruling class can rig the venues and seed the audience with fellow grifters, thus having the effect of being popular. Eventually, the people running these scams start to fall for their own con.

That may be what we are seeing with TP-USA. The same sorts backing this racket successfully made that ridiculous hobbit Ben Shapiro a star. They even made the odious Dinesh D’Souza a star in the last election cycle. Of course, they were able to quickly turn the Tea party into a racket. Running these scams has been so easy for so long, they got sloppy. They made the mistake of getting high off their own supply and started making mistakes. The result is the ongoing debacle of TP-USA.

The lesson though is that humans are built to believe. It is a part of our nature that is probably the oldest part of our nature. Belief probably co-evolved with language as a way to allow us to share complex thought and abstract concepts. While modern Americans may have stopped participating on traditional religion, that desire to be a part of a shared belief is still there. People will believe in something. The question is what will they believe and to what purpose will those beliefs point them.

The alternative to the cynical nonsense from the usual suspects is not just a rebuttal of their assertions. It is also an alternative set of beliefs, which in the simplest sense is an alternative vision of the future. “This is who we are and this what we do, because this is the future we want for our posterity” is what holds a people together. Politics is not an argument about the present, but the future. Offer a more promising vision of the future and people will come to believe they can achieve it.

That’s really what these scams are about, when you examine them. They keep conjuring one fake youth movement after another so the young don’t start thinking about a better future than what is on offer. If young whites suddenly stop believing in consumerism, they will believe in and fight for something else. If they stop thinking brown is beautiful, not only is Pirate Dan out of a job, demographic replacement becomes a rallying point around which to oppose the ruling class.

Chaotic Evil

Posted on November 4, 2019 by thezman

Over the weekend, the news brought word that Greg Johnson had been arrested in Norway on incitement charges. The details are still coming out, but the basics are that a far-left group claimed he was a terrorist and the Norwegian authorities just took their word for it and had him detained. Presumably, they will deport him from the country and try to have him banned from the continent. That is a popular tactic for radical extremists to use in Europe to harass Americans they don’t like.

Of course, calling these domestic terror groups radical or extreme is just a way to express contempt for them using common language. It’s not an accurate description of where they stand on the political spectrum. When Antifa or the SPLC can dictate terms to the political class, they are neither radical or extreme. They are the mainstream, well within the conventional of the ruling class. It is what we use to call normal people, with their rules and procedures, who are now the outliers.

This is a lesson that dissidents have to internalize. Many on this side of the divide are stuck in the past, with regards to the political landscape. They assume we live in a rule-based society, in which one can appeal to a neutral authority for relief when the Left violates the rules. If that world ever existed, it is long gone. We live in a soft authoritarianism, where the rules are whatever the people in power say they are at any point in time. It’s not rule of law. It is rule by left-wing fanatic.

As such, the old Chinese curse should always be at the front of the mind of the dissident. That curse is, “may the government become aware of you.” The Chinaman, having lived under some form of authoritarian bureaucracy for thousands of years, is conditioned to understand the reality of his relationship to society. The Chinaman knows that the bureaucrat can and will inflict unlimited cruelty as only a bureaucrat can, if given the opportunity. The wise person avoids making himself known to them.

In the case of modern dissidents in the modern West, it means avoiding any and all contact with the crazies the managerial class deploys as lures and traps. That’s the only utility of groups like Antifa, Hope Not Hate and the ADL. Their role is to keep beating the bushes in order to lure dissidents out into the open. Then they can attack, giving their handlers in the bureaucracy the excuse to bring the hammer down on the people involved in the skirmish. If a few left-wing street activists are harmed, so be it.

The primary weapon of the soft authoritarian is the lie. Because they operate inside a thicket of rules and regulations, they know a well-placed lie can turn those rules into a spider web, tangling up the victim for years. In the struggle to free himself, he may make addition mistakes, allowing other spiders in the system to vomit forth their digestive acids onto the victim. Even if the victim can free himself, he has lost time and resources, making him weaker and more timid.

This is on full display with the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. The people involved are not very bright. Most are the sort who, in a saner age, would be manning a rural Post Office branch or maybe stamping forms down at the title office. In a soft authoritarianism, they rise through the ranks, spinning their webs on behalf of the system, getting rewarded for their treachery and deceit. That plot was a revolt of sexless bureaucrats lashing out a reminder of what they are not.

This sort of ruling system attracts a certain sort of person. The type that enjoys tangling people up in a web of lies is a timid sociopath, who hates himself and therefore the world that created him. These are people who can only enjoy what they feel as pleasure by witnessing the suffering of others. Look around the Left and you see sexless, passive males and bitter deranged females. These are people who live to inflict misery on others, hoping it will bring them relief from their own miserable lives.

What this means for dissidents in the West is cleaning the mind of those old civic nationalist notions of a lawful society judged by neutral arbiters. That world does not exist and cannot be conjured into existence. There is no shaming these people into acting like normal people, capable of living in a civilized, orderly society. They are chaotic evil. They have no respect for rules, other people’s lives, or anything but their own desire for revenge against a world that has made them some hideous.

It’s why moaning about the collapse of free speech in the West is just self-flagellation, unless it is to convert people to the dissident cause. The ethos of the modern dissident is to never allow an outrage to go to waste. Use every incident to force the civic nationalist to confront the reality of his situation. For now, the best that can be done is to spread a quiet cynicism about the system. A society of cynical people is much more expensive to rule than a population still under the ether of civic nationalism.

More important though, it means operating in the shadows. The days or organizing in public, holding well-advertised gatherings and participating in constructive public debate are gone. That reality will surely make many angry and indignant, but for a dissident to have any hope, he must always accept the reality of his situation. Otherwise, he will always be drawn into that web of lies and deceits that are spun to ensnare the people into the soft authoritarianism of the neo-liberal order.

The Children’s Crusade

Posted on October 30, 2019 by thezman

For the longest time, the Conservative Movement operated as the screeching gates of Tartarus that kept the damned from reentering politics. This worked because they had some great thinkers and writers, who functioned as adamantine columns. For the politically engaged, especially the youth, these writers provided the convincing arguments and critiques from the Right. That’s what made Buckley-style conservatism so effective at gate-keeping. They had high quality gate-keepers.

It was this effectiveness that was probably the undoing of Buckley conservatism in the long run. By the 1980’s, being an acceptable conservative was a good job at a good wage, so few were willing to risk being hurled into the great pit of despair. As a result, those gates and their adamantine columns were not maintained. The great writers faded away one at a time. The system itself grew corrupt, attracting grifters and lunatics, who saw Buckley conservatism as a means to an end.

As a result, even those grifters are moving on from conservatism. Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes are now peddling their warmongering fetish to Progressives. As Paul Gottfried pointed out in a recent essay, they are just drifting Left in search of an audience willing to buy their shabby neoconservative act, while dressing in the rags of Conservative Inc. The movement is left to hiring homely child actors like Charlie Kirk to run around peddling whatever it means to be a conservative these days.

An example of the callow mediocrities charged with keeping the gates is this recent post at National Review. It is a review of the Andrew Marantz book about various scary creatures he encountered on his adventure outside the hive. Simply on technical grounds, this is something that never would have made it past the editors thirty years ago. It is a dilettantish effort at comparative analysis and a ham-handed effort at gate-keeping, while accusing Andrew Marantz of trying to be a gate-keeper.

The ridiculousness of the post is made plain in the penultimate paragraph when he writes, “For all that Marantz gets wrong, everyone should agree that far-right extremists should have as little influence as possible.” That right there is exactly what dissidents mean when they accuse these guys of being gate-keepers. The writer just concedes to the Left, the people he allegedly opposes, the basic premise that those most feared by the Left can be systematically excluded from public debate.

Later in the same paragraph he writes, “Their gatekeeping either will be too tepid for progressive activists or it will enrage the Right, which will hit back — by revoking their protection against liability under of the Communications Decency Act, or with antitrust enforcement against Big Tech, or with a culture war that puts the would-be gatekeepers squarely in the crosshairs.” In other words, the point of the post is not an attack on the Left, but a friendly bit of advice to help them maintain their power.

Of course, the absurd assertion that the Right will become enraged and hit back at the Left is so lacking in self-awareness that it reads like a troll. The defining feature of Buckley conservatism is its steadfast unwillingness to fight back. They never get enraged about any of the excesses of the Left. Instead, conservatism is just a collection of sob sisters warning that one of these days, not now, but soon, they will stand up on their hind legs and do something. It’s why the word “cuck” stings them so much.

Notice also the unwillingness to address the excesses of the Left with regards to the public space. Marantz is making the case that the rich and powerful should crush the people he does not like, but dig deeper and it is really a way to justify what the Left is doing already. In other words, the mobs of heroin addicts and mental patients called Antifa are just a response in lieu of more responsible elements stepping in to control dissident opinion. Marantz is trying to justify what is already happening.

Nowhere in the piece will you find any push-back to what the Left is currently doing with their terrorist tactics. In fact, Conservative Inc. has been silent on these issues, because ultimately, they agree with them. In their historic role as the gate-keepers, they are always willing to take help from their friends on their Left. The only bad guy in the post is the people both Left and Right agree is their shared enemy. That enemy is the swelling number of people willing to fly the black flag of dissident politics.

Again, the writer is young and inexperienced, so it would be uncharitable to make more of this than is required. That’s the thing though. There was a time when Conservative Inc. did not have to rely on rent boys for content. Someone this age with an interest in writing should be covering high school sports for a local paper or maybe submitting articles to his college journals. That’s where you learn to form your thoughts and express them in a compelling manner, not the flagship of conservatism.

That’s what conservatism is reduced to these days. They operate like a grooming gang of creepy geezers, cruising the college campus for young people so dull and joyless they think pleasing an audience of seniors is cool. Charlie Kirk, an old person’s idea of a young person, is used not so much to sell whatever it is Conservative Inc. is peddling these days, but to keep young people from looking outside the bounds of conventional politics for answers. Charlie Kirk is a far cry from Russell Kirk.

In a time when many dissidents are feeling a bit low about the state of the fight, this should be a source of encouragement. When the flagship of Buckley conservatism is relying on kids like Nicholas Phillips, they’re finished. If the gate-keepers think a ridiculous dimwit like Charlie Kirk is their big gun to defend the citadel against the barbarians, it may be time to open the gates. Children’s crusades are always the last desperate effort of an exhausted combatant.

The Sham Of Democracy

Posted on October 28, 2019 by thezman

Over the weekend, the news brought word that someone calling himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed by special forces in Syria. According to President Trump, “He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” He apparently blew himself up using a suicide vest. Presumably, real men are boastful and arrogant as they deploy their dynamite vests. Or maybe real men simply allow themselves to be captured and sent off to Guantanamo Bay.

Of course, we cannot even be sure this actually happened. The Russians are telling the world they doubt this thing happened. They point to various factors that would seem to contradict Trump’s story. This is a bit ironic, in that the people accused in the biggest hoax in American history are now claiming this is a hoax. You get the feeling that maybe the three-year long Russian hoax has caused the Russians to suspect that American politicians are not the most honest people in the world.

All that stuff aside, this news event is another example of the incoherence of modern American politics. Two weeks ago, Trump was boldly and proudly saying he was pulling troops out of the quagmire of Syria. This was confirmed by the Left, which claimed his decision was resulting in a genocide. The pols owned and operated by the Israeli lobby, which is the Republican party and most of the Democrat party, were kvetching about how this was all very bad because of something about whatever.

Now we have Trump out crowing about those troops that were supposed to be out of Syria, conducting an operation in Syria to kill some guy. Even nuttier, this guy he had not mentioned until this event, was literally Hitler. Of course, the Left, who regularly tells us Trump is literally Hitler, is now less than enthusiastic that Trump is doing what they demanded he do last week. In effect, the man they say is literally Hitler, went ahead and killed the guy he says is literally Hitler, so that makes Trump literally Hitler.

This whole story reveals that democracy in the current age is just a sham. At every point, the various camps pick a side, which could very well be the opposite of what they said last week. It’s as if each of these events is a play put on by the political class, where the actors draw lots to see who plays which role. Today one party is anti-war, while tomorrow the other party will play that role. Like actors boasting of their versatility, our politicians are proud that they can take any side on every issue.

Further, why in the hell is America in Syria? You’ll note there was never a debate about this or resolutions passed authorizing the use of the troops in Syria. According to available timelines, it was under the Obama administration that America started to get entangled in the Syria mess. In 2011 he authorized aid and intelligence support to irregulars battling the Syrian army. Presumably, this came from American troops in Northern Iraq, a place he claimed to have withdrawn all US troops.

By 2012, the Obama administration was openly supplying weapons to various groups of irregulars going under names no one in his administration understood. Now, in 2012 there was this thing called an election going on in America, in which this stuff is supposed to be debated. Mitt Romney, the alleged opponent of Obama and leader of the opposition party, proposed doing exactly the same things Obama was doing in Syria, but promising to use different rhetoric to justify it to the public.

This is, of course, why the public is slowly beginning to sour on the ruling class of America and democratic politics in general. If democracy was a real thing, someone in politics would have proposed not getting tangled up in the Syria mess. Instead, everyone agreed to angrily disagree with one another about the right way to agree with one another on a plan none of them understood, a plan put forth by the military-intelligence complex that runs American foreign policy. It was just a show.

For his part, Trump, who is pretty much a naive civic nationalist, is saying sensible things about these endless conflicts. Despite his faults, his instincts on this stuff are correct most of the time. He wants out of the whole region. As he said, the biggest mistake the country made was getting involved in the Middle East. The trouble is, he is not actually in charge of anything. Two times now he has ordered troops out of Syria and we still have troops in Syria. Now we have new raids in Syria.

Clearly, the people really in charge of American foreign policy decided to let Trump know who is really in charge, so they conducted this raid. That leaves Trump little choice but to act like it was his idea. Despite his good instincts, he is slowly being turned into another organ grinder’s monkey for the military-industrial complex. It is another example of how voting makes little difference in a democracy, because the people in charge simply ignore the results of the elections.

The fact is, until the Israel lobby decides they no longer need us in Syria, America will be involved in the Syrian conflict. The army of lobbyists, crawling over Washington like aphids, paid for by foreign interests and the military-industrial complex, will never stop bleeding the nation dry. Only when the American middle-class collapses and there is no more cash to be stolen from them, will the endless wars come to an end. That’s the beauty of democracy. It completely consumes the fools who support it most.

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