One of the toughest problems for dissident political movements to navigate is the army of grfters and subversives that are always on the prowl for easy targets. The Tea Party movement is a great example. The people who initially got involved did so for all the right reasons. They were nice, white middle-class people upset about what they saw happening in Washington. It was the sort of spontaneous civic nationalism that many white people still cling to as a solution to our present woes. It is the good sort of populism.

The trouble is, the movement was quickly swarmed by an army of grifters and opportunists, along with the body-men of the establishment. These people showed up offering help, organization and in some cases, a famous name to add credibility. Before long the whole thing became a bust-out, with the grifters carrying off what they could, before it collapsed in a heap.  The caravan of hustlers has now moved onto peddling neo-libertarianism as the antidote to both populism and identity politics.

Of course, something similar has happened to the Trump phenomenon. This story in Politico about various clowns and freaks in the MAGA movement is emblematic of what has become of Trumpism. Ali Alexander, one of the organizers, appears to be the spawn of Sammy Davis Jr. and an Easter Island statue. Judging from his postings, he takes a lot of drugs or suffers from psychotic episodes. The Tea Party, at least, drew a decent class of grifter. Trump’s baggage train is just freaks and lunatics.

In fairness to Trump and the millions of people who voted for him and still support him, they cannot do much about these freak shows. The media loves to promote old weirdos like Roger Stone, because it makes Trump look bad. He provides easy copy, and he is willing to be their Sambo, dancing at the end of whatever string they offer. People like Loomer, Molyneux and Cernovich show up because they sniff a few dollars. They are performers and they go where they can find an audience willing to pay them to perform.

The fact that the place was empty suggests politically active whites are starting to wise up to this stuff. Last year’s C-PAC also experienced a drop in attendance. Maybe people are starting to figure out that these events are just a way to keep them busy while their pockets are picked. Maybe white people are rethinking their politics. The utter disappointment of the Trump presidency thus far has probably been the worst thing to happen to this sort of political racketeering. It is smartened up the chumps.

Still, there is a pattern here. The Reagan years birthed Conservative Inc., which hoovered tens of millions out of the pockets of middle-class white people into various projects that never accomplished a thing. The Contract with America institutionalized the system into a permanent political-industrial complex. The Tea Party, of course, was a complete bust and now Trumpism is becoming an embarrassing freak show. Any resistance is either co-opted or turned into something embarrassing.

The thing that all these failed movements have in common is they accepted the premise of liberal democracy. From Reagan to Trump, all efforts to reform or challenge the system did so within the context of liberal democracy. They also assumed that the fight must take place on the platforms of the Progressive media. Inevitably, the media picks the most embarrassing members of the alternative to come up on stage. This happened with Reagan, Gingrich and even Bush. We see the same thing happening in the Trump era.

This suggests two rules for dissident politics. One is a variation of the oldest bit of political advice. Never been seen with crazy people or wearing funny hats. Professional pols have people who make sure they are never in the same shot as a crank or weirdo. Smart pols also avoid putting themselves in situation where they can look silly, like driving a tank wearing an over-sized helmet or getting goosed by a farm animal. For dissidents, it means staying clear of attention whores and people with heads full of nutty ideas.

More importantly, it means staying as far away from Progressive media as possible. This has been a topic for a long time on the Dissident Right, but the side in favor of engagement has always won. Their argument was that it was the best way to get the attention of the public. Today, that is not the case. Mass media is the worst way to get the attention of the public, because it is all click-bait, agit-prop, and tabloid nonsense. The fragmentation also means a much lower ROI. There are better ways to get the public’s attention.

Maybe that is a bit of white pill to take away from the failure of GrifterCon to attract much of audience this weekend. Maybe people now associate being in the news with being mentally unstable or being an unreliable degenerate. While a story about Roger Stone may get eyeballs on a news site, the people viewing it do so for the same reason people look at pictures of a snake trying to swallow a goat. The freak show has reached a point where it is self-discrediting. That would be a great development for dissidents if true.

Interpersonal violence tends to escalate quickly, where the combatants seem to go from wary suspicion to verbal confrontation and then trading blows. Anyone who has been in a bar fight understands this accelerated process. Two guys are playing pool, words are exchanged and suddenly a beer bottle is smashed over someone’s head. Sports fights follow a similar pattern. Two players get a bit heated and then suddenly, you have a bench clearing brawl. This even happens in the professional ranks.

Of course, people do not actually go from zero to eleven in the blink of an eye. It just appears that way to the outsider. There is an underlying hostility between the parties that simmers until one or both conclude that violence is the best option or the only option. In a bar fight, the guy taking the first blow often assumes the other guy is about to do the same thing. In a sports melee, normal male honor requires each side to match the escalation of the other side until a fight breaks out.

This pattern can certainly play out in other areas of life. In fact, rulers have always understood that general discontent among the rabble is like a dry underbrush. It only takes a spark, and you have a forest fire. In the case of civil unrest, a simmering discontent in the community, or among a sub-group, can quickly turn into a riot. The Rodney King riots in 1992 are a good example. The black underclass had developed a deep hatred for the cops, so when the cops were acquitted, that was the spark that set off the ghetto riot.

More recently and on a smaller scale, the shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue is an example of a member of a sub-culture who went from zero to mass shooter in one afternoon. He did not pick the target at random or even because they were Jewish, but rather because they were part of a subversive group throwing open the gates to the country to foreign invaders. In other words, like the guy slugging someone at a bar, the shooter thought he was acting rationally, and violence was the only rational option.

The point being, whether it is the seemingly incoherent and ad hoc violence of a bar fight or sports melee, or a person or group committing social violence, the actors arise from predictable conditions and act quite rationally. There is a degree of predictability to their actions, if you are willing to notice. It is why bouncers in bars keep an eye on the males competing with one another for females. It is why sports referees look for guys getting agitated and send them off the field to cool down and get their head back in the game.

In modern America, there does not seem to be anyone in charge willing to play the role of bouncer or referee. Instead, the people in charge are like the guy with the stick in old-time bare-knuckle fights. They are trying to get the combatants to go at one another, rather than keep them under control. The deployment, tolerance, and protection of Antifa, for example, is a deliberate provocation. The people in charge not only hope these idiots hurt someone, but they also hope white men will defend themselves so they can be railroaded by the courts.

At a smaller scale, the vicious and petty war on white men seems like it is designed to create an American Anders Breivik. Every day, the news brings stories of a white guy getting fired from his job because he told the wrong joke, liked the wrong social media meme or simply was not enthusiastic enough for Progressive fads. This story about a sportsball fan fired because he was upset at the black coach of his favorite sportsball team is a good example. The celebratory tone of the story should be noted.

Now, what is driving these hunts for the impertinent white guy is the deadly virtue spiral among the ruling class. The dingbats in the media who spend their days hunting down bad thinkers and getting them fired, are acting from a desire for attention. The people at the company who play along with it are acting out of fear. Is this a replay of the Reign of Terror, where radicals spiraled out of control in an orgy of violence? Or is it the Great Terror, where Stalin locked in his control by killing off anyone that could threaten him?

The historically appropriate analogy is debatable, but what is not debatable is modern America is not 18th century France of 20th century Russia. In a multi-racial society, where the old majority is being swamped by former minorities and those former minorities are told they must hate the old majority. The atmosphere is nothing but kindling. A prudent ruling class would be acting as firemen, hunting down anything that looks like a spark, over- reacting if necessarily, to prevent a blaze, they may not be able to control.

That is possibly a clue about what our ruling class truly fears. Much of the political talk on the Left after the 2016 election was about how they may have jumped the gun and created a bit of backlash. The BLM murder sprees the summer before the election certainly opened a lot of eyes to the reality of what comes next. The relentless hunting down of internet racists could simply be an effort at calming their constituents. A black guy, enraged by racists memes, going on a shooting spree would be bad for the cause.

Alternatively, the hunting down of internet racists could simply be another sign that the ruling class is oblivious to what is happening. Hanlon’s Razor says to assume stupidity in these cases. The people who rule over us are strangely unfamiliar with violence. They know it only through their televisions. It is why they have embraced the Antifa mobs. To people unfamiliar with violence, those black clad idiots look like what managerial class types imagine revolutionaries look like. They do not know what they do not know.

Either way, social discontent can easily turn to social unrest and then violence. The people in charge are loading the forest with dry underbrush and kindling, while flicking matches at one another. Maybe they do not see the danger. Maybe they fear the wrong things. Perhaps they want to see it all burn. Regardless of the motivation, the conditions for political and social violence are just about perfect. One of the matches the idiots in the media are flicking into the underbrush will eventually set the world on fire.

Over the weekend, something that kept popping into my mind was that the paleocons have never spent much time thinking about what they did wrong during their long struggle with the neoconservatives. They spend a lot of time rehashing old fights and discussing the things they fought, like the Civil Rights Act or the Reagan amnesty, but they always seem to stop at the water’s edge. It is almost as if they agree with the left that these policies were inevitable, due to the tides of history.

Part of it, of course, is the losing side never wants to spend a lot of time dwelling on their own failures. Even the humbling experience of being hurled into the void is not enough to overcome ego. We see that on this side of the great divide, where some alt-right figures simply cannot come to terms with the screw-ups. This reality does not prevent others from being objective about these things. History may be written by the winners, but the great lessons are always on the losing side.

One lesson that was more obvious in the past than in recent days, is that the paleocons always assumed the other side would be bound by the rules. They were plenty suspicious of the left, but they could never bring themselves to think of them as outside the set of rules that decent people applied to themselves. You see this in their willingness to participate in politics. Read old paleoconservative writing and they never question the basics rules of the game.

The one exception was Sam Francis. In Beautiful Losers he wrote about the difference between what he called the Old Right and the New Right. For him, the former was the conservatism of the 19th century, which was legalistic and theoretical. The latter was the Buckley style conservatism in the Reagan years. This was a conservatism willing to engage in the nuts and bolts of politics. He predicted that their embrace of the liberal rules would eventually lead them to embrace liberal ends.

He was right about the Buckley crowd, but the paleos escaped that fate, only to be hurled into the outer darkness, spending their time either trying to maintain their orbit around the progressive sun or lamenting their fate. The paleos were not good at building alternative institutions and as a result they were always living like outlaws in a kingdom run by the left, with so-called allies willing to act as sheriff. The people hurling paleocons into the void were always their friends on the Right.

That is one of the more obvious truths about past failures, but another less obvious mistake remains unexamined. Some time ago I was sent a link to this post by Thomas Fleming, about how to begin the fight again with the Left. It is a well-written post by a great writer, so it is worth reading simply on aesthetic grounds. It has one flaw, however, and that is it repeats the same mistake paleos and others always seem to make when plotting an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. That is, the obsession with principles.

A point I have become fond of making, particularly at secret handshake societies, is that principles are the things winners create after they win, to justify their winning. Winners always create an origin story for themselves that suggests their dominance is the product of the moral order. The fetishization of Lincoln, for example, happened after the winners at Gettysburg were firmly in control of the conquered. The spasmodic hooting about unity we hear from the modern Left, is an aspiration they rejected when they were the rebels.

A mistake paleos and others often make is to assume that having a goal requires a well-reasoned set of principles, by which they mean morals. Some goals contain within them all the justification they need., For example, Jews want their promised land to be an explicitly Jewish country. Similarly, White Nationalists want a land of their own that is the exclusive domain of whites. In both cases, the goal is the principle, and the principle requires no further explanation. To do otherwise suggests the goal is negotiable.

Similarly, paleos were prone to negotiating with themselves. The endless debating over principles is just an excuse for not moving forward. It may not be intentional, but that is the result. When the conqueror sets out to sack a city, the one thing he never does is wait until he has a detailed administrative plan for managing the city after the siege. The winners of life never lose sight of this truth. Principles are the things you create after the victory to lock in your gains and give the people a reason to celebrate your dominance.

Another thing that all forms of conservatism in the democratic era have struggled to understand is the role of the pseudo-intellectual trimmer. These are the sorts of people who attach themselves to right-wing movements and immediately begin working to turn them into useful losers. A good recent example of this is Ross Douthat, who thinks the goal of his tribe is to infiltrate populist movements and then purge them of anything useful, turning them into a uniform that poseurs like himself can wear in the morality play.

This is exactly what happened with the Tea Party. What started out as an authentic white middle-class revolt was quickly hijacked by charlatans. In fact, the grifters arrived so quickly it looked like the Normandy invasion. These types of people operate in the same way English pirates operated in the age of sail. That is, the people in charge give them a free pass, if they meddle in the affairs of dissidents. The Right has never figured out how to defend itself from this attack or even tried to understand it.

Finally, the thing that got many paleos in trouble is they could never figure out how to keep the lunatics out of their thing. I’m talking about the people who cannot control themselves and say nutty things in public. The Buckelyites just purged anyone they saw as bad for their racket. In fact, it is what defines them. Paleos hated this about the Buckleyites and the neocons, but they never found an alternative. As a result, they were often put in the position of defending people who maybe should have been reprimanded instead.

The alt-right is a good recent example of this. What started as an edgy internet movement was plagued by old school nutters from the white nationalist subculture, as well as by loons who simply lack self-control. As a result, they became defined by guys like Chris Cantwell, instead of people like Mike Enoch. An outsider movement can only be successful if it offers a respectable face to the skeptical public. Policing the ranks for lunatics and subversives is a requirement, but one past movements never mastered.