A story that has largely been forgotten, is the investigation into what happened with the intelligence services at the end of the Obama administration, into the start of the Trump administration. Trump has stopped tweeting about it and he never gets asked about by the media. Some elements of the Left are trying to keep the Russian collusion hoax alive, in order to push impeachment, but no one mentions the FBI scandal. What should be an important story is largely ignored by the liberal media for obvious reasons.

Despite the radio silence, the investigation appears to be continuing. A new witness has turned up, delaying the Horowitz report on the FISA abuse. The Inspector General lacks subpoena power, so people outside the DOJ don’t have to speak with him. For some unknown reason, this person has now agreed to answer questions. Since this person was in the State Department at the time of the FISA abuse, the assumption is she knows something about the foreign assets the FBI was using to get warrants.

Out of the blue, the Washington Post put out a big story claiming Joseph Mifsud was a Russian intelligence asset. The absurdity of the claim is less important than the timing, as no one was talking about this issue. For some reason, people in the FBI thought they needed to plant this nonsense in the press. The assumption is that he is cooperating with the new prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Barr. While little is known about his investigation, he has impaneled a grand jury and is subpoenaing witnesses.

That’s been the missing piece of this political puzzle for a long time. When Jeff Sessions recused himself, it allowed Rod Rosenstein and Bob Mueller to build a firewall around the FBI spying case. The only person looking into it was the inspector general, and he lacks subpoena power. That was the whole point of the Mueller investigation. His job was to bottle all of this up and run out the clock. When Trump fired Sessions and brought in Barr, the game was up. Mueller was sidelined and Rosenstein resigned.

At this point, the broad contours of the case are known. Elements within the DOJ and FBI setup an espionage operation on the Trump campaign. They used stories they planted in the media and friendly foreign assets to fabricate a case they presented to the FISA court in order to get warrants on Trump people. This allowed them to spy on the Trump campaign and presumably share the intelligence with the Clinton campaign, through FusionGPS, the political dirty tricks shop.

What is unknown at this stage is who authorized the operation. James Comey was head of the FBI, but he appears to be a patsy, as he is too dumb and timid to have pulled off this caper. It is entirely possible that this scheme was hatched by senior level people in the DOJ and FBI through their social network. At some point, someone in the administration was made aware of it. The text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page make clear that the FBI was riddled with left-wing fanatics.

There’s also the question of just how wide ranging was this conspiracy. The list of names directly implicated is over two dozen. There are another two dozen that seem to have had some connection to the caper. The connection with the Clinton campaign has been largely ignored, but it is entirely possible that the missing e-mails from Clinton’s illegal server are involved. Then there are the foreign intelligence assets that have been implicated. There are at least three foreign governments named thus far.

The biggest unknown is what exactly is happening with the investigation. Barr brought in what amounts to a special prosecutor. He has a hand-picked staff and is working on just the FBI stuff and anything related to it. That means he is looking into the handling the Clinton e-mail case as well as the FBI spy ring. Barr is also known to have a deep dislike for the Clinton people, so it seem unlikely he is preparing to broom the whole thing or drag it out until Trump leaves office.

Lost in all of this is the fact that the people involved in these conspiracy seem to really bad at their jobs. If you are a senior person in the FBI, relying on signal intelligence to track suspected enemies of the state, you should know better than to use simple text messaging to coordinate your conspiracy. Even when they knew their shenanigans were going to be revealed and they needed a cover story, they continue to use text and e-mail on government phones to coordinate their conspiracy.

Of course, everything about this case is political. If Barr moves to indict some of the people involved, they may be willing to cut deals to avoid prison. Because no one knows the full story, no one can be sure who will be ratted out by these people. This is a case that could quickly go from being about rogue FBI agents to a story about the overall corruption in Washington. With the 2020 election coming up, this case could be the ultimate political weapon for Team Trump.

On the other hand, this could turn out to be the issue that rips the Democrat party to shreds over the next year. Joe Biden is the front runner, despite his recent problems, due to his association with Obama. How long before a rival asks him what did he know and when did he know it? Then you have Harris, who is connected to the Clinton political machine. This story could easily become a party scandal that unleashes all the old hatreds between the various tribes in the coalition.

The next year could be a lot of fun.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

Not so long ago, both political parties in the West had a strong hold on their members and controlled access to their ballots. If you wanted to be a Democrat, a Tory or a Christian Democrat, it required you to be a member of those parties. You had to be in good standing with party leaders. There was plenty of internal party politics, as that’s the point of party politics, but the parties themselves had firm borders. If you wanted to be in the party, it meant adhering to party rules and supporting the party.

Look around today and that’s no longer true. In the United States, both parties are devolving into loose affiliations of power centers. The Republicans have no control over the message, as members regularly contradict one another in public and they can barely perform the basics as a party. The Democrats are close to flying apart as the various tribes within the party put loyalty to the tribe ahead of the party. They may nominate for president someone who is technically not in the party.

In Europe, it is a bit different, as the parliamentary system allows for parties to break apart, forming new parties. Still, in Britain, Labor looks like a cult of personality around Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories are cracking into one camp of yesterday men clinging to ideas from the last century and a new camp around British independence. Then you have the party of Nigel Farage. No one really cares what his party is called or what sort of platform they are putting forth, as it exists as long as he exists.

Farage is a great example of what is happening all over the West. Politics in mass democracy inevitably devolves into coalitions around personalities, rather than factions based in group interests. The parties exist as vehicles for individuals, a legacy item from the era of factional politics. The system that is supposed to be the polar opposite of authoritarianism, ends up being a competition between little Napoleons, competing with one another in the mock warfare of politics.

One reason for this is that group interests are longer term, as they are generational, while individual interests are shorter term. Democracy rewards the here and now on an individual level, so an organizational model that is willing to sacrifice the now for later is always going to be at a disadvantage. It does not take long for someone within that organization to see the opportunity and promise to win now, thus elevating his status within the organization and eventually dominating it.

This was the case in Athens, where political parties never got going. Lacking a long republican period or a slow transition from monarchy, the Greeks went right to the full democracy phase. Granted, they did not allow women to vote, as the Greeks were smart, but they otherwise had a true democracy. Instead of parties, they had coalitions around an influential person. His followers would describe themselves as being with this person or that person, indicating the person leading a particular faction.

We see this happening in America, where both parties are unable to do much of anything when in power. The old-timers like Joe Biden lament the lack of cooperation between the parties, but what he is describing is the dysfunction within the parties. It’s no longer possible for either party to push through policy on party lines. On the GOP side, there’s always a jerk like Rand Paul to bugger up the works. On the Democrat side, the hard Left is always ready to subvert their own leadership.

Dissidents get mad at Trump for not doing what he promised, but a lot of his problems stem from the fact he keeps playing old party politics. He remains convinced that he has to get the Republicans behind his initiatives, through the game of horse trading among the factions. The same problem exists in the Democrat House, where Pelosi struggles to get anything done with a caucus made up of people that hate one another. Both parties are led by old people playing a game no longer relevant to this age.

In Europe, this decay of factional interest into cults of personality has an opportunity to flourish because of the parliamentary system. No one even cares what Macron’s party is called or that it even exists. In Germany, the old folks desperately clinging to power are simply Merkelists. In Britain, things are becoming more explicit as we have the Farage party, the Corbyn party and soon the Boris party, assuming he can avoid beating his girlfriend long enough to win the leadership race.

How this plays out in America is hard to figure, as forming new political parties has been made so difficult by the two main parties. There’s also the fact that America is continent sized country with lots of diversity. In fact, America is already a majority-minority country, when you take into consideration the diversity that exists within the white population. Then there is the fact that the ruling class is cramped into the tiny city on the Potomac, which is walled off from the rest of the country economically and culturally.

Of course, this leads us to the Roman example, where the Republic was dominated by a handful of powerful men. This rivalry eventually led to one of those men conquering his rivals and the republic. The Europeans may be headed to a non-violent version of the Crisis of the Third Century, a form of war-lordism, while America is headed to some form of non-violent Caesarism. Historical analogies are never perfect, of course, but the comparison is useful for seeing down the road for what comes next in the West.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

The Democrats kicked off their year long process to select a party nominee for the 2020 presidential election and it felt like 2016 all over again. Instead of watching the debate, which would have been a horrible way to spend an evening, I scanned Twitter for reactions to get a feel for how enthusiasts were reacting in real time. This was something I did in the 2016 during the Republican debates. It turned out to be a much better gauge for how people were reacting than what was coming from the media.

Three things were fairly obvious, based on Twitter. One is the Democrat media was instructed to sell the hell out of Warren, which they tried hard to do, but Warren gave them little to work with after she read her prepared lines. What they are going to learn is what people in Massachusetts know about her. Like all pols, she can read from a script and seem quite good. On her own, she reveals herself to be quite dull. Her serious egghead presentation is just an act. She is a pseudo-intellectual poseur.

Another thing that was made obvious to enthusiasts is that Beto O’Rourke is just a slacker who has been getting by on his looks. The media likes him because he has the RFK routine down cold. He knows how to charm left-wing Baby Boomers. The trouble is, once you get past the horse teeth and hairstyle, you’re left with a guy who probably spends his free time reading comic books. He is in politics because it requires the least amount of effort for the best possible lifestyle. Otherwise, he is a bum.

The third thing that was obvious reading left-wing twitter is they could not stop noticing Tulsi Gabbard. The Democrat media was programmed to ignore her, so they will ignore her, but the lower ranking members, who don’t get to see the memos from the party, were noticing their hell out of Gabbard. She was the only candidate who said anything of substance picked up by the enthusiasts. The rest were judged on style. Gabbard was noticed because she made valid points about foreign policy.

Just as with the Republican Party, much of the Democratic base is largely ignored by the party. From this side of the political spectrum, it is hard to pick up on this problem, as white liberals do seem to obsess over trannies and foreigners. The truth is, the eventual winner of this primary will have to appeal to white middle and upper middle class voters. It’s why Creepy Joe Biden is the leader, despite being dead. His working-class Joe routine appeals to a very large segment of the Democratic base.

Forgotten in all the celebration of degeneracy is the large isolationism vote inside that white voting bloc. It is a peculiar form of isolationism, as it tarts itself up as sophisticated and realistic, but in reality it is people who would prefer it if America disengaged from the rest of the world and focused only on domestic issues. Gabbard, with her well thought out anti-war positions, is probably tapping into that vote. She may be the only candidate in the field that is explicitly anti-war and dovish.

She’s also skeptical of Israel, which is another factor that never gets discussed, but has always been under the surface on the Left. There was a time, not so long ago, when anti-Zionism was a popular stance on the Left. The party leaders may have been co-opted by the Israeli lobby, as has happened with the GOP, but that skepticism of Israel and support for the local Arabs remains in the rank and file. Gabbard makes no bones about being open minded with regards to our unconditional support for Israel.

Now, after these debates, it is a tradition for Matt Drudge to run a poll on his site. These polls are not scientific, of course, as if there is such a thing. The main flaw in these polls is you can vote a million times if you are that bored. They could filter out repeats based on IP address, but even so, there is no way to know if the people voting are Americans eligible to vote. Still, they say something about the enthusiasm for the candidates or lack of enthusiasm in the case of some. Gabbard won the poll going away.

Like 2016, where Trump would win these polls hands down, the party media is reporting an entirely different response. The Nation apparently wrote their reaction pieces in advance. Similarly, the Daily Kos followed party instructions and celebrated the sleepy night for Warren as a great triumph. The New York Times and the Washington Post are all aboard the Fake Indian Express as well. Everyone got the memo and they are busy trying to gaslight the Progressive voters into thinking Warren is the one.

Most likely, the media will just ignore Gabbard for now. They will no doubt have been told to celebrate Creepy Uncle Joe as the winner of the second debate. In case he sexually assaults one of the women on stage, they probably have been told to have some material on Harris ready. They have some sidebar pieces ready to tell the faithful that the homosexual is a rising star in the party. The point is to make sure Sanders gets no positive press from the debate. This time, he gets taken out early.

What we are seeing is something that does not get noticed on our side. That is, the Left is almost as angry about their politicians as normal people. Our side gets mad because the Republicans keep chasing the votes of people who hate them. Something similar happens on the Left. The old fashioned pro-working class types have no representation in the party. The foreign policy doves have no one addressing their issues. Those aging white ethnics, who supported Sanders last time, have no voice either.

If 2016 was the year Conservative Inc. finally cracked, 2020 could be the year Progressive Inc. has its crisis. Like the Republicans, the Democrats are a party that really only represents the foreign money that bankrolls its operations. They no longer speak for actual voters. Someone like Gabbard, who stands out from the crowd by nature, can tap into the resentment within the ranks, by simply mentioning the many taboos issues ignored by the rest of the field. She could be the Happa Trump.

For now, as we saw in 2016, the media will do what it can to gaslight the voters, by selling the cold turd sandwich that is Biden and Warren, while carefully ignoring anyone that the party fears. If the result of these preliminary rounds is rising support for Gabbard, we will see if the Progressive Industrial Complex really did learn from the 2016 debacle. The gaslights will be on full for the rest of the summer, as they use all the tools to get the result the oligarchs want from this election.

Support the media that supports you. Those of us toiling in the dissident fields can’t do this without your support.  Five bucks a month is less than the price is a craft beer.It’s cheaper than a night of gaming with your virtual friends. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

Political and social activism is most effective when it reveals some moral contradiction hidden from public view, reveals perfidy by the ruling class or exposes some immoral activity by the rich and powerful. Activism is about changing the moral battle space so that the critics appear to have the high ground, while their targets appear to have something to hide. What the activist is doing is using morality to even the fight, but also using the disparity in power to amplify their moral claims against their opponent.

Every movie or documentary about activists takes great pains to portray the activists as plucky and sincere. They are driven by a hunt for truth or justice. They sacrifice for their cause in order to right some wrong. Meanwhile, the target is always big and powerful, motivated by lower instincts like greed, ego or power. It’s why the rich and powerful, who bankroll left-wing street activism, take pains to launder their money and support through not-for-profit front groups like Propublica.

There is another component to effective activism that may be the most important in the modern media battle space. That is the element of surprise. Those posters someone created that read, “It’s OK To Be White” worked because the Left did not see it coming. They were unprepared for how to react to it. Worse yet, their normal instinct to surround a threat and scream at it compounded the problem. By calling it heresy, which is what they mean by racist, they revealed their moral contradictions.

The street artist Sabo works a similar angle. The Left has a big blind spot when it comes to the arts. They assume they have a monopoly on artistic expression, because so many of their cult members pretend to be artistic. It is a bit of the self-flattery that is integral to modern Progressivism. Sabo turns that against them with clever and very well done guerrilla street art that lampoons liberal self-regard. Not all of it is effective, but some of it hits the Left where they never bother to defend themselves.

This is something right-wing activist need to consider, especially when it comes to guerrilla tactics like street actions. Unlike the left-wing activists, which have the full support of the ruling class, the Right must always be looking for soft targets. The Left can mass up a bunch of zombies to fill a street and have their media organs broadcast it around the world. The Right must operate like guerrilla fighters, probing for weak spots in the perimeter, so the actions have to be small and precise.

For example, the Left is largely blind to the realities of immigration. For them, it is a purely moral issue at this point. They don’t even understand the financial interests of people like the Koch Brothers or the Silicon Valley oligarchs. That’s a pretty big blind spot that can be exploited. Instead of a banner drop over a highway, a better target is the apartment complex that runs migrant flophouses on behalf of local employers. It’s a soft spot that is undefended and the Left is not prepared to react.

This is one of those issues that angers middle-class white people. They don’t know about these flop houses, often operating on their edge of their towns. They don’t know the mechanics of smuggling in these indentured servants from India to work in programming shops and engineering firms. That’s never presented on Fox News, because the Murdochs would never allow it. Revealing the perfidy of the ruling class by bringing these flophouses to public view will rustle the right people.

That’s just an easy example of low-hanging fruit that dissidents tend to ignore. The Left is so powerful and so explicit in how it wields power, it has a gravitational force. It draws even its harshest critics into it, so they must fight on left-wing terms. Immigration becomes a moral issue pitting the romantic immigrant narrative against the cold-hearted nativists over what to do with illegal immigration. The real opportunity, however, is legal immigration, which has a much greater impact on white people.

The thing that right-wing activists need to keep in mind is their target audience is often incredibly naive about the world. The reason so many college kids fall for the TPUSA scam is they grew up in nice suburban neighborhoods with nice bourgeois parents, who think we still live in an orderly republic. More important, the people in charge are very good at concealing the truth from these people through control of the media. As a result, even though the result of the great replacement are all around them, they don’t see it.

The most red-pilling act is when that hidden reality is suddenly made plain. Tell the typical Baby Boomer about books being banned or banks closing down accounts of political activists and their blood boils. Even though this stuff is plastered all over social media, they don’t see it, because they are trained not to see it. For most of their lives, banning books is what happened in backward communist countries, not in a place like America. There was never a reason to think about it.

That’s an important thing to keep in mind for all dissidents. The shared reality of the modern age is carefully and effectively manipulated to keep people blind to what’s happening around them. The people running the media are good at their craft. That’s why guerrilla tactics like those “It’s OK To Be White” were so effective. The people in charge have grown used to a predictable enemy. They don’t know how to respond to those sorts of tactics. That’s their weak spot that can be exploited.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

In 2016 there was the Trump Train, now we have the Biden Boat or, given his age, the Biden Buggy. According to all of the polls, even those in keys states, Joe Biden is the clear favorite to win the nomination. He’s polling at around 30%, which is twice his nearest rival. In fact, the latest batch has him with three times the support of Bernie Sanders, who has been in the second seat for a year now. Everyone else is in single digits, bobbing up and down with the news cycle.

Of course, there is a lifetime between now and the first votes. For a guy like Biden, who is pushing eighty, that could be literally true. He is by far the oldest man to run for the nomination and would be the oldest man to enter the White House if he won. Trump set the record when he was elected in 2016, but Biden is a decade older. It remains to be seen if the media will allow that to be an issue. Right now they seem to be tasked with selling good old Uncle Joe to the voters, as the sensible antidote to Trump.

In fairness, Biden really is the Democrat version of Trump. They appeal to the same demographic. Biden has been pitching himself as “working class Joe” for close to a century now. It’s his go-to line whenever he is out campaigning. He tells voters about how everyone has known him as “working class Joe” or sometimes he uses the phrase “lunch pail Joe.” The fact that he has never done a minute of honest labor in his life never seems to matter. The old working class whites like it.

Like Trump in 2016, Biden is the last dance for a demographic about to disappear over the horizon. Trump found a way to win over voters, who remember back to All In The Family with fondness. Either they remember their dad as the Archie Bunker type or they were the Archie Bunker type. Biden is making a similar appeal, but with a decidedly romantic tone that recalls the Democrats past, when they talked about a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage. When the party was white and male.

While Democrats still need white votes, they are now the party of non-whites and increasingly the party of anti-whites. That’s probably what has all those old union types scrambling onto the Biden Buggy. They are tired of having to vote for someone that hates them. They are tired of pretending they are embracing their dispossession. It’s their last chance to have one of their guys at the top of the ticket. That’s why stories like this work for Biden. It sells to working class whites.

The risk, of course, is that this sort of talk will alienate black voters, who now make up 25% of the Democrat primary. Biden is considered a righteous honky, because he was Obama’s Stepin Fetchit for eight years, but blacks are notoriously fickle. If Harris can get some traction, they could easily abandon Biden for her out of racial loyalty. This stuff can also rustle the females, who are already worried about Joe and his habit of sexually assaulting women in public. Women are close to 60% of the Democrat vote.

Even so, the Biden bubble fits with a pattern in Democratic politics that goes back to the Reagan years. They looked at Reagan’s victories and concluded they needed to go Hollywood, which they did in a major way. The modern chat show format, for example, is a result of Clinton era media strategy. After Bush won in 2004, using a quantitative approach to reaching voters, they went all in on “big data” to elect Obama. After Trump beat Clinton in 2016, they will look for their Trump this time.

One challenge for team Biden is how to run as the nostalgia candidate, while pretending to be the candidate of the future. Given that his future will end at any minute, his credentials on the issue are not very good. More important though, the Left is about the glorious tomorrow, not the forgotten past. Look at their successful leaders and they were young and endlessly yapping about the future. Joe Biden may be as old as JFK, but he is no John Kennedy. He’s more like Walter Mondale.

The obvious challenge for Biden is his age. In his prime, he had a habit of saying nutty things that sunk his previous presidential ambitions. As he has aged, the tendency to say crazy old guy stuff has gotten out of hand. Like the habit of feeling up girls on stage and smelling their hair, his public utterances make people uncomfortable. For a man pushing eighty, weird public statements and moments of confusion will give even the most enthusiastic Baby Boomer pause.

His handlers have kept him under control, for the most part, by keeping him away from the public and the press. The media will do what the party tells them, but it is not hard to imagine some young ambitious activist working for the Post or the Times accidentally asking Biden the wrong question. At the debates next week, you can be sure the other candidates will try to get the old guy off his game, hoping he has a senior moment that will remind the public he was in office before they were born.

This is why the media activists are pumping air in the tries of the Warren campaign. She is the fall back candidate for when the party has to take the keys away from the Biden Buggy and put Uncle Joe in a home. She is no spring chicken herself, but her handlers are not wiping oat meal off her chin either. Her new economic pitch is aimed at the same old white people Biden is attracting with his lunch pail Joe act. That and she can appeal to angry single women and the snotty cosmopolitans.

It speaks to the age that both parties in the 2020 presidential election will be running explicitly nostalgic campaigns. Trump is a crude reboot of the Reagan years. His new slogan, Keep America Great, is a call back to the Morning in America ads Reagan used on his re-election campaign. Biden and maybe Warren are running as throwbacks to another age, when Democrats were the party of working class whites. Despite the celebrations for the browning of America, everyone seems to miss the old days.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I know have a PayPalsetup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

A familiar phenomenon in dissident circles is for the super-black-pilled to come out of the woodwork, anytime someone suggests reforming the system in any way. They will properly inform the reformists that the current system is beyond hope. Either the problems are past the point where reform can work, or the system is so corrupt reform is impossible. There is a sense in some corners of the dissident right that even talking about engaging politics is corrupting. This Spandrell post is an example

Another spin on this is to write-off all political actors as gatekeepers, assigned by the state to prevent dissidents from changing minds. The alt-right boys tend to go down this road, finding a way to describe figures like Nigel Farage as insufficiently authentic, because they hold some positions they don’t like. These guys are super-black-pilled on Trump right now, because he turned out to be a politician. It is another way of rejecting engagement in politics, as a pointless and possibly complicit activity.

This is an age old problem for outsider politics. Radicals in the past argued that engagement in formal politics was an endorsement of those politics and as a result, a sellout of the movement. There are still some IRA-types holding out against the Good Friday Agreement. Various communist movements in South America would suffer from schisms, because one faction wanted to join the political process as a party, while the other faction wanted nothing short of a communist revolution.

The salient question for modern dissidents is whether dissidents should engage in formal politics. Was it a good thing for Nigel Farage to win the EU elections, or did it prevent something better from happening? Is it better for Trump to win in 2020 or will it just prevent progress on dissident causes? In the case of Trump, since it is a future issue, is it better for dissidents to back some other candidate, in order to demonstrate to white voters that fake nationalism is a loser and can never be tolerated?

The answer becomes even more complicated if you accept, as is the case for most dissidents, that there is no electoral way out of the troubles created by electoral politics. That is, the solution to liberal democracy is not at the ballot box. The ballot box is the problem, so its perpetuation is a continuation of the problem. Logically, participating in the democratic process means perpetuating that which you oppose. Even if that is not correct, and it is not correct, there is that sense of hypocrisy hanging over it.

There’s also an unspoken truth that plays a big part in the debate. Politics is a form of ritualized combat. The groups form up, lock shields and do battle. For those in the groups, there is that sense of shared suffering and shared triumph that can only be achieved in group activity. For dissidents in America, for example, to participate in Trump’s campaign, feels like a temptation. They are getting the short term joy of that group activity, at the expense of the long term goals of their movement.

The danger of disconnecting from conventional politics, whether in the formal sense, as in elections, or the informal sense, as in meta-politics, is self-ghettoization. This has always been the problem with white identity politics in America. It has existed as a sub-culture that is out of tune with the rest of white America. Whenever they pop up in public, they seem weird and alien. In Europe, far-right politics suffered the same problem, usually devolving into fascists cults without a coherent reason to exist.

So, there is the dilemma. On the one hand, engaging in conventional politics runs the risk of expending energy on pointless and discouraging ventures that could possibly corrupt the movement and the dissidents. On the other hand, not participating runs the risk of becoming a weird sub-culture that has no impact on the culture war. Instead, it becomes a reason to do nothing, but congratulate one another on their isolation from the dominant political culture. Either road appears to be a dead end.

The reason this dilemma exists, is dissident politics, at least in America, has never matured beyond the juvenile state. In the post-war years, Buckley-style conservatism started as a legitimate reaction to radicalism, but never matured beyond a parlor game, so it was easily co-opted. The reaction to it, paleo-conservatism, went down the engagement path, but was always reactionary in nature. It never matured past being a long critique of liberal democracy. It was commentary, rather than a movement.

In contrast, the New Left that emerged in the 1960’s, from the remains of communist movements in the prior generation, did mature past this point. As a result, it was able to engage in politics, as the corrupter, rather than the corrupted. At the same time, it was able to stand apart from politics, providing a long running argument against it. The New Left was successful as a political movement because it had a clear agenda, taking over the institutions, and a clear purpose, to turn those institutions into weapons.

Modern dissidents, of course, face a very different battle space than the leftists of the past century. The New Left faced an establishment that was more or less sympathetic to at least some of their goals. They also could free-ride on other movements like black civil rights and the anti-war movement. They were also working in an industrial state, not a technological surveillance state. These are all critical differences that make the New Left a bad example for modern dissidents.

Still, it is a starting point for dissidents. The movement has to mature past the point of confusing activity with goals. A mature and self-aware movement will instinctively understand that the agenda is fluid and immediate, but also subservient to the larger goals of the movement. For example, if supporting a particular candidate weakens the opposition or advances some small part of the agenda, then engaging in politics is correct. If there is nothing to be accomplished in a given cycle, then sitting it out is correct.

The point being is that for a mature dissident movement, politics, whether reformists or adversarial, are about the larger goals. Trump winning election is not an end, but one of many opportunities to weaken the resolve of the people in charge and rally those who oppose them. Once that utility has been extracted, then the political activity of supporting Trump loses its value. This is true of activism and meta-politics. The goal is always to weaken the resolve of the other side, while boosting the spirits of dissidents.

The radical’s long march through the institutions was not implacably dogmatic. They compromised and adjusted, doing what they must to win each small battle, often turning defeat into a bloody-shirt to rally the faithful. Dissidents will need to make a long march through white bourgeois culture. It is not about capturing the institutions, but about capturing the foundation upon which they must rest. The New Left scaled the walls to capture the city. Dissidents will need to tunnel underneath it.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I know have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!