Category Archives: Politics

Bad Seeds

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In a few years, the majority of children in the United States will be non-white. That means in a generation, the majority of adults will be non-white. Most white Americans do not understand this, but slowly they are starting to wake up to this reality. Whether or not our rulers fully grasp this or the implication of it is a mystery. It is entirely possible that their hatred for bad whites is so all-consuming that they have not thought it through. Or perhaps, as some people argue, the great replacement is the point of the project.

Regardless, the darkening of America will have consequences. This story on the 2017 NAEP test scores is a good example. The results, unsurprisingly, are not positive, but they are predictable. The race gap that has allegedly haunted the ruling class for generations has not changed a bit. Of course, that’s not in the press coverage, but you can easily find it by going to the source. The only change in the race gap happened when they added a category for mixed race, thus moving some blacks out of that group.

 

The comparison between whites and mixed race students is interesting.

 

Whenever these sorts of results are published, we get two predictable reactions. One is the Progressive lament about the schools. Left-wing Progressives will demand more money for the schools in order to fix all these terrible gaps. Right-wing Progressives will claim it is the fault of public schools and maybe unions. You can see some of that in the comments to the news story. The other response will be from the remaining stalwarts on our side of the divide, pointing out that biology refuses to yield to wishful thinking.

The thing is though, no one thinks much about what is going to happen as the the mix of students gets more swarthy. We are probably seeing that in these numbers. The gaps did not change, but the mix of students is changing. That means the results will continue to decline going forward. Maybe our rulers will keep yelping about the schools, but at some point, they will probably change the standards or start faking the data so the obvious is less obvious. That’s the thing about diversity. It can only work in a no-trust society.

Of course, it’s going to mean schools start competing with one another for white and Asian students. Since the foolish decision to desegregate schools, it has been a game of Old Maid, as school districts and municipalities employ clever ways to dump their unwanted blacks onto some other sucker. The future will have that plus rules to keep the children of ice people trapped in their schools. In time, a Democrat administration will create rules that prevent whites from moving away from blacks in order to “balance the schools.”

The state and city break down tells a familiar story. The test results track closely with demographics. A city like Detroit finishes at the bottom, because it is a black city, while Austin finishes at the top, because the black population is eight percent. The state breakdown is also familiar. It reveals that not all whites are the same, but the non-white population is very consistent. I took a look at the top-10 and bottom-10, along with the white population for each state. West Virginia is letting white people down.

The two outliers in the top-10 are states with high numbers of South Asians, as well as more blacks from the talented ten percent. The financial capital and the political capital of the world warp everything around them. Even Maryland feels some of it. Otherwise, the results track closely with the white population. That means if you want your state’s test score to improve, you need to attract Asian migrants and figure out how to encourage blacks to move to another state. You may want to pass on Hispanics too.

This is just one example of what happens when you get more diversity, but it is a good one. High quality public schools are largely an Anglo thing. It spread to the Continent, along with other liberal ideas, but is not a big deal in the rest of the world. East Asian societies are an exception. As America moves to majority-minority status and becomes a low-trust society, the very idea of public schools will probably disappear. How long before the people in charge figure out that testing is largely pointless and put an end to it?

Look around South America, that’s a pattern you see. The white population simply does not care all that much about the non-white population, beyond making sure they are not around them. A very similar pattern has existed in the Levant for centuries. Every hill and village is its own country. That’s the other thing about diversity. It breeds a callousness between different tribes of citizens. In one of life’s ironies, one of the first things that will die in the diversity paradise is civic nationalism. Ben Shapiro should plan accordingly.

Russiagate

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Like many people, I enjoyed reading the leaked John Podesta e-mails, back during the 2016 campaign. Most of it was nothing, but it offered a window into the smallness of the people who rule over us. These are people who put a lot of effort into telling us they are smart, sophisticated and engaged in important work. In reality, their inner lives are quite boring, because they are dull people, who have weaseled their way into the circus of national politics. Still, it was interesting to see who talks to whom in Washington.

The thing that has never made any sense to me is how the Clinton Crime Syndicate handled the situation. They instructed the press to ignore it, which they happily did, but the stuff was all over social media for weeks. It was like Team Clinton was unaware of the fact that the internet was where most people get their news. At the minimum they could have played the victim card and maybe got some sympathy points. Instead they went with blaming the Ruskies for hacking Podesta’s e-mail, which was obviously false.

It is easy to get confused about this stuff, as there is so much fake news blasted at us every day. The media has worked hard to rewrite the narrative so that the Russian hacking stuff was “discovered” after the election. In fact, Team Clinton started peddling this Russian hacking line in early October 2016. I recall the presser when Jennifer Palmieri appeared to have Tourette’s, as she kept blurting out “Russian hacking” to every question. It was as if she was having some sort of spasm during the presser.

That’s the main reason the event sticks in my mind. It was such a bizarre performance, I suspected the women was on drugs or possibly drunk. It sounded at the time like a ham-handed effort to shift the focus from Clinton’s troubles. Everything about the presser was odd and the claims made little sense at the time. People who had followed the release of the e-mails knew perfectly well it was a case of an old man using a simple password and letting someone get access to it. But, the press went along with it anyway.

The thing about Hillary Clinton and her people, is they lie a certain way. Most people either deny or provide an alternative narrative that is intended to lead the curious down some other path of inquiry, that avoids the truth. A politicians that gets in a jam will deny knowing about the issue or provide some alternative version of events, that shifts the focus onto some other bad actor. The thing with Hillary Clinton is she likes lying in a way that often reveals some unknown caper she and her people are currently plotting.

Reading the excellent site Conservative Treehouse the other day, I spotted a story on the time line of the FBI scandal. The one thing they do well is put all the news stories and known facts into easy to read timelines. Down in the post they have a screen shot of the text messages between some of the plotters who were manufacturing the fake FISA warrant, claiming Trump’s campaign was plotting with the Russians. Look at the dates. The Clinton Russian hacking claims started right in the middle of that timeline.

This explains that bizarre presser in the campaign and the decision to go with what seemed at the time to be a silly strategy. Someone, most likely Loretta Lynch, told Clinton about the wiretapping of Trump Tower and the spying on the Trump campaign, under the false pretext of Russian meddling. Hillary Clinton, being a notorious bungler, could not help herself. She and her flunkies decided to go with Russian hacking as their strategy to deal with the e-mail stuff. It is speculation, but it fits the timeline and the Clinton pattern of lying.

The other piece of this is the phony dossier the Clinton people paid for that was eventually used by the FBI to get the fraudulent warrants. The Nunes memo puts the date for when Christopher Steele shopped this to the FBI as early July, right after Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton in what was supposed to be a clandestine meeting. It was always assumed that Lynch was there to pass intel onto Bill Clinton, but it is entirely possible that the meeting was about Clinton giving Lynch information they could use against Trump.

I thought from the beginning that the Mueller investigation was an effort to conceal the FBI shenanigans from the public and the political class. Comey was proving to be mentally unstable, so Rosenstein engineered his firing and then recommended a special counsel to investigate the entirely farcical Russian hacking story. Mueller would then put the conspirators on his team, and they would hoover up the evidence of their crimes and keep it sequestered. In time, it would be quietly buried and everyone would move along.

What appears to have happened is someone was onto the caper before Trump took office, possibly the IG, and tipped off some members of Congress. The severity of the problem has scared the political class. If this was just one or two crooked FBI agents, leaders of both parties would grandstand on it and the agents would have been fired. With this case, only a few people appear to be willing to speak publicly at all about it. It’s as if no one wants to be within range of this if the facts every become clear.

That would explain Comey’s pointless book and media tour, obliquely pointing the finger at Loretta Lynch. It would also explain longtime Clinton henchman George Stephanopoulos doing his best to make Comey look like an idiot. Of course, Lynch has been out trashing Comey as well. The Clinton machine wants to make sure Comey is the bad guy in all of this and a desperate Comey is trying to paint himself as a tortured saint. All of which means this was a caper run at a higher level than Andrew McCabe.

Nth-Generation Politics

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The concept of fourth generation war is credited to the paleoconservative thinker William S. Lind and it remains a popular topic on the Dissident Right today. The idea is that rather than direct conflict between professional armies, 4GW conflicts are ones where non-state entities, possibly sponsored by a state actor, use propaganda, subversion, terrorism, and disinformation to undermine domestic support for state actors. The weak non-state actor uses stealth and cunning to bypass the strength of the state actor.

The concept is not without its critics. The term “fourth generation” implies it is new or part of a natural progression. The term “guerrilla war” dates to Napoleon and the Vendée could be called a fourth generation war, even though it occurred in the age of first generation war. The use of subversion and psychological war date to the dawn of settled societies. The non-state actor, using irregular tactics against a state actor, possessing superior military strength, dates to the rise of the state itself.

This is more of a language issue, than anything else, but the concept is a useful starting point, when thinking about social conflict in the modern age. For example, the Left’s fetish for doxing heretics is a facet of the new kind of politics in the surveillance state. It is not just the unmasking, but the fact that the heretic will be known forever, just by putting his name in a google search. Everyone now has a permanent record, so the people in control threaten those who challenge them, with a negative entry on their permanent record.

Another aspect of this is the moral role of corporations. It is one thing to have your name plastered all over the internet as a heretic. It is quite another to find yourself banned from the internet. Social media companies are not just companies selling your personal information. They see themselves as morality police. Instead of jailing dissidents or banning inconvenient speech, the ruling class uses its social control to threaten the social capital of their enemies. Whatever you want to label it, ours is the age of social war.

The question though, is what does the other side look like in this social war? Given the disparity in power, resistance to the ruling orthodoxy will have to be irregular, but within the narrow bounds of the law. It will also have to operate in the social sphere. An obvious example is the meme war that the alt-right waged on social media during the last election. The swarming of mainstream accounts with mockery and criticism scrambled the signals in the Progressive echo chamber. Conformation became cacophony for them.

That was an ad hoc response, but going forward, a more complex and organized effort will inevitably develop. You see hints of it with the Identity Evropa guys. They stay out of the spotlight and perform guerrilla marketing style actions, like hanging banners over highway overpasses and putting up posters around Progressive strongholds. The subtle message being sent is “We are in your neighborhoods, walking among you.” It is a form of psychological warfare that encourages the dissidents and freaks out the Progressives.

Of course, an aspect of the social war has been with us since Dan Rather was exposed back in the Bush years. The last two decades since then has been a steady discrediting of the main propaganda organs, by pranksters, honest citizens and partisans. Every time some dope on cable falls for a Sam Hyde prank after a shooting, the mainstream media becomes a bit more useless as a weapon. Trump won the White House largely by riding the fake news wave. The mass media has been turned into a liability.

In all probability, a weapon the resistance will use against the orthodoxy is a take on what the guerrilla movements have always done to conquerors. Occupying forces inevitably rely of collaborators to control the local population. Targeting collaborators and their handlers not only scares the collaborators, it sows distrust in the occupiers about the reliability of the collaborators. In a prior age, this meant violence. In the information age, it means operations that turns the paranoia of the Left against its own people.

We see glimpses of how this will work whenever “It’s OK To Be White” signs turn up at a workplace or college campus. The company hustles everyone off to a re-education camp and the college campus has a day of mourning. When Greg Conte was revealed to be a member of the alt-right, the school spent the rest of the school year investigating its staff, looking for heretics. Now, imagine if Conte was not a heretic, just a guy caught up in a witch hunt, orchestrated by subversives pulling a clever prank on the school.

Following this through to a logical conclusion, the ruling classes of western societies will be engaged in an endless war to undermine the moral legitimacy of their own people. The resistance will be engaged in a war to discredit the factual legitimacy of the ruling classes. One side cannot be trusted because they believe the wrong things, while the other side cannot be trusted because they lie all the time. Eventually, the people will have to decide if they want to side with the heretics or side with the liars.

That’s what is unique about this new brand of social conflict. In prior guerrilla wars, the public was nothing more than camouflage for the resistance and an obstacle for the occupiers. In the information age, the public is the battle field. Instead of winning turf, the goal is to win the crowd. Good humor, cleverness and daring are more useful than power and intimidation. The hail fellow well met is hard to hate, even when he is causing trouble. The severe prude is impossible to love, even when she is right.

To their credit, the people in charge have understood this for some time. It is why they have unleashed the social media hounds on the heretics. At some level, they know they cannot win playing straight up, so they cheat. The other side is still too disorganized and leaderless to have a coherent plan, but there are signs they are figuring it out. Ultimately, the dissidents need to win turf by winning converts and that means exploiting their freedom of intellectual movement, to outmaneuver the people in charge.

Nothing Is Ever On The Level

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After the crooked FBI agent, Andrew McCabe, was finally fired by Mister Magoo, there were posts in official media about the wrongness of it. After all, he would lose his pension, we were told, because of politics. Of course, that was never true. He would lose some extra benefits, but it would be a drop in the bucket. A former FBI man of his status will land in a high six-figure job. Given his status he could even end up at a financial house, making seven figures.

Soon after that round of stories, a new set of stories popped up about his crowd-sourced fundraising effort. He was up on GoFundMe. The point of the stories was to show that the public was rallying to the side of this poor man, a victim of the evil Donald Trump and his Nazi minions. Regardless of the agit-prop, there was no doubt that he was raising a lot of money. Then, it turned out to be a complete fraud. The whole thing was an elaborate PR effort from a lobbying firm.

Andrew McCabe recently raised over half a million dollars from small donors by way of crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. McCabe’s cash-collecting prowess was buoyed by several #Resistance-linkedpersonalities and MSNBC’s own Rachel Maddow, who suggested McCabe should run for office because he’s so good at raising money.

Was this apparent “grassroots effort” actually a PR campaign put together by high-priced, well-connected, and experienced PR professionals in order to take advantage of the #Resistance’s seething anger at the Trump administration? A Monday report in Slate suggested as much. Law&Crime can now confirm that some of those allegations are true, while some of them appear to oversell the issues at hand.

Most likely, the firm behind this scheme provided the logistics, but also the seed money to get the fund going. The theory behind this stuff is that people will donate if they see other people donating. If other people are giving to this guy’s fund, then you may feel more comfortable giving money, because you assume it is the right thing to do, based on the fact others are doing it. This is marketing 101. Companies often use various forms of indirect peer pressure to sell product.

Of course, there is another angle to this.

Melissa Schwartz is a crisis and communications consultant who currently works for The Bromwich Group. After previously working for then-Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Department of Justice, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (where she served under her once-and-future boss), Schwartz joined The Bromwich Group as their chief operating officer in 2012. She’s also McCabe’s present spokesperson.

The Bromwich Group is a K Street consulting and PR firm headed by Michael R. Bromwich. Immediately prior to founding the firm, Bromwich served as the first director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management under President Barack Obama. As a former mineral extraction regulator, Bromwich promised that his firm would never lobby for energy industry clients. Prior to this role, Bromwich served as the Inspector General for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton.

Given the people involved, would it surprise anyone if McCabe is eventually found stretched out in Fort Marcy Park? That’s most likely been carefully explained to the McCabe family in detail. Even the most generous reading of events suggests McCabe is a man who knows too much. For now, the syndicate is looking out for him, but eventually he’ll have to be dealt with in a more permanent manner. You don’t want to be the guy selling him life insurance right now.

That aside, it is a good reminder that nothing is on the level. Politics has always been crooked, but the degree of dishonesty is different. Rachel Maddow is a dunce, but the people running MSNBC are not stupid. They knew what this firm was doing. They probably offered to help promote it. Today, it is prudent to assume everything in mass media is a carefully considered PR campaign. The point of the media is to bamboozle the public in some way. Nothing is on the level and no grift is too small.

Prince Rupert’s Revenge

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There was a time when it was possible to have cordial and even friendly relations with people on the Left. I spent many hours debating my lefty friends over drinks, about the defects of various central planning schemes. Anyone my age or older remembers the way these debates would go. One side talked about economic justice for the working class, while the other side talked about the glory of free markets. Usually, the “right-winger” would bring up the Soviets.

Often, one side or the other would get mad, but it was rarely personal. People get hot in political debates, mostly because we are social animals. Conflict with people inside our group vexes us. It makes us uncomfortable. That was the thing. Liberals and non-liberals could operate in the same peer group. The reason is the Left and Right back then, agreed on the goals. Both sides wanted prosperity. The Left believed socialism produced plenty, while the Right believed a rising tide lifted all boats.

Thinking back, a strange thing happened in the 1990’s, with regards to my own debates with lefty friends and acquaintances. The debates in the 90’s were almost all about the peculiar personal lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Right was always scandal mongering and the Left was conjuring novel defenses for the degeneracy of Bill Clinton and the personal corruption of Hillary. These revolved around Red Team/Blue Team scat fights, that had little to do with policy or ideology. It was just ritualized tribal warfare.

That changed instantly with the 2000 election. All of my lefty friends and acquaintances went insane overnight.  They hated Bush with the intensity of a fanatic. The wars made it impossible to have a discussion with the Left. Granted, many of us were naïve about the lunacy of the neocons, but the Left’s opposition was never more than shrieking madness. How does one debate someone who thinks Halliburton controls the weather and attacked New Orleans?

I remember thinking my lefty friends would return to sanity after Bush left office, but that never happened. A few stopped foaming at the mouth, but for the most part, they crossed into a realm from which there is no return. In the Obama years, they went from one peculiar fad to the next. One week it was homosexual marriage, while the next week it was claims about sex being a social construct. There’s simply no discussion, much less debating, these issues with them.

Looking back, it’s useful to think about the fight between the Left and the Right as a set-piece battle on an agreed upon battlefield. At the center of both sides was economics. The Right had religious archers and the constitutional conservatives on the flanks, but the center of the army was formed around economic issues. Similarly, the Left had race hustlers, second and third wave feminists on the flanks, but their main line troops, the center of the line, were economic Utopians.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had an enormous impact on the ruling classes of the West. In America, it meant the center of the Progressive army broke and fled in all directions. The flanks, however, the racial justice warriors, the gender dragoons and exotic identity battalions rushed into the center, forming a new main line of the Left. The Right, despite carrying the day, was too busy setting up battlefield trophies to notice that the Left had reformed around sexual and racial fanatics, so they promptly surrendered.

A curious thing is happening to this new center of the Progressive battle line. Their moral certainty about the innate equality of man and his infinite malleability, is crumbling in the face of scientific reality. The release of David Reich’s book is the latest direct hit on Boasian anthropology. The response from the soft sciences, which has been a key intellectual authority for the blank slate Progressives, looks like a panicked flight from the battle field. They simply have no answer to science.

The tent pole holding up modern Progressivism is the assertion that all humans are essentially the same and that the observable differences are trivial. All of the Left’s arguments spring from that belief. It’s why they insist the magic of white privilege is the reason black crime is so high or rape culture is why girls don’t go into STEM fields at the same rate as boys. In other words, magic is a plausible answer, as long as reality is ruled out as an option. Biological realism explodes the center of Progressive theology.

That’s what we see happening all over the human sciences. Twenty years ago, some guy in a cardigan could claim that racism was learned behavior and their was no biological basis for race. He could be held up as an intellectual authority and therefore, a moral authority. Genetics is undermining the intellectual authority of those preaching cultural anthropology, multiculturalism and the blank slate. The main line of the Progressive army is suddenly looking like a bunch of primitives chanting oogily-boogily.

It’s tempting to say I’m getting ahead of myself, but we have millions of people relying on DNA services to map their ancestry. Genetics is promising new cures for disease and soon, people will be able to get their intellectual destiny for $50. It will not be long before some clever fertility lab begins offering bespoke artificial insemination, using donors with desirable traits, based on their genetics. People are becoming habituated to the idea that humans are different, because of biology, not culture.

The question, of course, is where does the Left go now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, what we call Progressivism was mostly a Protestant crusade. In the 20th century, they shifted to embracing  the economic utopianism of socialism, with racial and sexual politics as side acts. For the last three decades, the dream of sexual and racial utopias has been the dominant theme of the Left. Once the blank slate is broken on the wheel of biological reality, what comes next?

The answer could be nothing. There are many currents to American history, but the dominant one is what John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War. It is our inheritance from the mother country. The story of America has been the good whites and bad whites, the Roundheads and Cavaliers, fighting for control of the country. It’s also a conflict of visions, where the Roundheads always embraced extreme egalitarianism, while the Right has embraced the natural hierarchy of man.

November Rain

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The conventional wisdom says the Republicans are headed for a bloodbath in the November midterm elections. Sadly, it will not be a literal bloodbath, but it could be a big swing in the House. The Senate is a different issue, as most of the seats up this time are currently held by Democrats. Many of them are in states that tilt Republican and many are held by blockheads like Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. The House is where the Democrats have a chance to claw back larger capitol offices.

Now, there are some things to keep in mind when thinking about this stuff. One is the mass media is just the propaganda wing of the Democrat party, so they will be endlessly gas lighting us from now until November. Then there is the fact that the gerrymandering of House districts has made most of them bulletproof. About 15% of seats are truly competitive now. There’s also the fact that the Democrat freak show tends not to show up in midterms. T

To get some sense of what could happen this November, I took a look at the district by district results in presidential races over the last three cycles. If a Republican held a seat during the Obama years, it is a safe bet that the seat is solid GOP. If a Democrat held the seat, despite blowouts in 2010 and 2014, the safe bet is the seat is solid Democrat. The result is 183 seats that the GOP will always win and 194 that Democrat will always win.

That means there are 58 house seats that are in play this election. Redistricting and local issues will always play some role. Then there is the fact that solid districts can swing to the other party because the default candidate is weird or corrupt. Still, the fact that incumbents win 85% of the time and we have 13% of the seats in the contested column, means the real election will be over roughly sixty seats this fall. The “Great Shellacking” in 2010 resulted in 63 seats swinging to the GOP.

Another aspect to this midterm is the fact that Hillary Clinton did not win any of the solid GOP districts and she only won in eight weak Republican districts. Even more interesting, she won in just five toss-up districts. The Democrats perform like a regional party, with a small number of high intensity zones. This has been true since 2006, when the Democrats last had a good midterm. In order to win a toss-up district, they have to put up a candidate that does not remind the voters of his party’s leadership.

There’s also the local flavor. A district like Arizona’s 2nd is a good example. The district went Clinton in 2016, but had been solid GOP for the previous four presidential elections. In 2012, the Democrats won the seat, but lost it in 2014. The Republican incumbent then trounced the Democrat in the 2016 election, despite the district tipping to Clinton. Voters don’t always punish their representative, just because his or her party is run by idiots. The idiot you know is better than the idiot you don’t know.

The challenge for the Democrats is to find 26 seats held by Republicans that they can flip this November. Assuming the solid districts on both sides, there are 58 “in play” districts this election, give or take. Of those, 33 have been pretty reliable for the GOP. That’s defined as going Republican in presidential elections, even when the Democrats won the White House. That leaves 25 truly vulnerable Republicans in the November midterm, plus or minus the results of redistricting, bad candidates and so forth.

Now, the party holding the White House often does poorly in the midterm elections, as the loyalists of the party out of power are full of anger. They’re still mad about losing the last time. Here’s the breakdown of midterms going back to Reagan.

Year President Approval House Senate
1982 Reagan 42 -26 +1
1986 Reagan 64 -5 -8
1990 Bush I 57 -8 -1
1994 Clinton 48 -52 -8
1998 Clinton 65 +5 0
2002 Bush II 67 +8 +2
2006 Bush II 37 -30 -6
2010 Obama 45 -63 -6
2014 Obama 41 -13 -9

Democrats do vastly worse in midterms than Republicans when they hold the White House. This is a familiarity breeds contempt issue. The average net loss for the Republicans is about 12 seats, with a high side of 30 under Bush in 2006. That 2006 election is probably the absolute bottom for the GOP. The Democrats rely on outlandish lies to get their way into majorities, so they suffer greatly in midterms. Their average loss is 31, which reflects a swing back to normal after a presidential election.

The GOP can look at history and figure they probably hold the House just on inertia. Even when the voters are really mad at them, like 2006, the losses are not catastrophic, despite the claims by the media. After the 2008 election, the media was carrying on about the dawn of the Progressive utopia. In reality, the country remained mostly Republican in inclination and that was proven out in the following midterm. The fact is, the GOP is the majority party in America, because it is the party of the white middle-class.

Now, the one sure way to keep the House in the hands of the GOP is to make sure the Republican president in popular. Reagan was suffering in the polls and his party suffered as a result. Bush was popular in 2002 and his party did well. Clinton was very popular in his second midterm and his party did well in that election. If the GOP wants to avoid a disaster this November, they would be wise to help Trump get over 50% in the polls. The obvious way to do that is help deliver on his campaign promises.

Day Walkers

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In the novel I Am Legend. the hero finds himself as the lone survivor of a pandemic that turns people into a form of zombie-vampire. The infected get a fever, appear to die, but then come back to life turned into a blood thirsty monster. The book is credited with starting the genre that remains a popular concept for movies and TV series. The book is a little more realistic, in that the monsters are not un-dead. They are merely infected with some sort of virus.

Unlike most Hollywood versions, the book sets up an interesting set of conditions that makes the hero’s story plausible. Again, the infected are not rotting corpses running around randomly looking for brains. Instead, the infected have a degree of awareness and sentience. They coordinate their efforts, plan ahead and seem to understand what is happening to them. They are also strictly limited to nighttime activity. That means they come out well past sunset and retreat before dawn.

This sets up the bulk of the book. The hero has about fourteen hours per day to operate without fearing the vampires. The story is set in Los Angeles, so weather is not an element of the story. He uses his time to make his home impenetrable, scavenge for supplies and research the cause of the pandemic. Because he has nothing but time, he eventually figures out that some sort of a virus has infected everyone and he uses this information to get better at killing the vampires as they sleep .

The book is worth reading, even if you have seen all of the zombie shows. The purpose here though is the math of the situation. The surviving humans in such a situation, where society is slowly being conquered by a weird rage virus, would be faced with a simple problem. They own the daylight hours and therefore must use that time to overcome their disadvantage at night, when the infected come out to hunt. Put another way, they must win more in the daytime than they lose at night.

Let us assume a scale of zero to ten. The infected have the maximum ability at night, so they are a ten for the ten hours a total darkness, because their senses are tuned for it by the virus. Humans, in contrast, usually sleep at night. We can still operate, using artificial light and other contrivances, but at best we are maybe a three. Some people will be better than others, but over all, the human effectiveness is a three. Simple math gives the vampires a 100-to-30 edge at night.

Now, things change in the daylight. The ten ours when the sun is clearly in the sky gives the humans their best advantage. It is the ultimate advantage because the vampires are in their sleep phase. The humans are at a ten in the daytime, while the vampires are a zero, so this changes the math to humans 130, vampires 100. If we take the in between hours around dusk and dawn, and give the vampires a five and the humans an eight, then the overall math is humans 132, vampires 120.

The thing is though, the humans have a period of unrestricted movement. This unlimited advantage during the day means they can reset the battlefield every day, giving themselves a little edge in the nighttime. They could vampire-proof their compounds and expand their safe area by going around and clearing the vampires out from their hiding places. This is what happens in the book. The hero gets so good at killing vampires in the daytime, that their numbers rapidly diminish.

This makes for a bad movie, so the script writers make the humans extra stupid so they never take advantage of their assets. They also make the infected super-human or able to defy the laws of physics in some way. They know the audience will side with the humans and they know people like being in the underdog role. The long running television series, The Walking Dead, has the infected magically animated, even as their flesh is long past the point of being useful.

This is the mistake outsider political movements often make. They see themselves as the humans, fighting some evil, rather than viewing themselves as the virus infected zombies looking to overthrow the natural order. What makes the Matheson book so good, is he looked at the situation from the point of view of the infected. In the book, some of the infected begin to figure out how to operate in the daytime hours. This completely changes the math.

When Richard Spencer walks onto a college campus to give a speech, he is no different from an infected zombie vampire showing up in a camp of humans, to sell the benefits of vampirism. It is no wonder they set upon him with a fury. More important, he is operating in their space, where they have an infinite advantage. It’s a fight that the infected cannot win, because they have no ability to operate in that environment. The same is true of planned public protests.

Just as the vampires in the novel carried the day by adapting to the daytime, the alt-right needs to become day walkers. If instead of a Spencer strolling on campus to get killed, imagine an alt-right guy getting an IT job at the NY Times. Imagine if Pax Dickinson was still operating as a CTO at a major media company. It is the reason the Left is obsessed with doxing people. They lie awake at night thinking about day walkers getting inside the wire.

The alt-right and affiliated groups need to forget about confrontation. Sure, some of their members and supporters are there just so they can brawl with Antifa, but an army of Chris Cantwells is an army of vampires that are useless in the daytime. There’s nothing to gain from losing by playing by their rules. The alt-right needs to go underground, in order to become day walkers, with the ability to walk among the Left in their own areas, learning how to turn their advantages into liabilities.

Demockery

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Reading about the new spending bill, it is tempting to get outraged. Even if you do not care about the spending, the other stuff tucked into it is outrageous. For example, there is a provision to limit border wall construction to a 33-mile stretch of nowhere. There is no money for the wall itself, as if it would matter. This means the project is dead, unless Trump goes Pinochet and starts throwing lawmakers out of helicopters. In this area, your vote in 2016 meant nothing. Suckers!

That is just one thing. In a 1.3 trillion dollar bill that is over 1,300 pages of unreadable government speak, you can be sure there are thousands of “screw you” provisions in the thing. Since the government now uses a special language known only to a handful of monks imprisoned in the capitol, the bill is unreadable. Take a look at the Ceiling Fan Energy Conservation Act and try to understand what it is. The absurdity of it is the only thing that is easy to grasp.

Of course, not a single comma is in any bill without a bribe to the legislator responsible for slipping it into the bill. The reason there is a such a thing as the Ceiling Fan Energy Conservation Act is the ceiling fan makers bribed a politician to make an alteration to the law that favors them in some way. The Alleviating Stress Test Burdens to Help Investors Act is one of those things that seems like a joke, but sadly, it is a serious effort to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The response from the slightly less Progressive chattering classes will be a form “these Republicans are setting themselves up for disaster in the fall.” That is true. The GOP is looking down the barrel of a wipe out in the fall election. This monstrosity of a spending bill will make it worse, but they do not care. The reason is the people running the GOP will retain their seats and positions. They will move into slightly smaller offices next year, but that is just how the game is played.

From the perspective of the ruling class, a Democrat House is the ideal solution to their Trump problem. For the remaining two years of his tenure, nothing will make it out of the House that can pass the Senate, and nothing the President wants will pass either house of Congress. Trump will go into his primary against someone like Ben Sasse, financed by globalist money, having nothing to show for his first term in office. The blob will attack Trump as a do nothing president..

Even if Trump does not face a primary, it may not matter. The interesting thing about how Washington has responded to Trump is they have mostly ignored him. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are a click away from starting a cable channel where they laugh at Trump voters 24×7. They run Congress as if Jeb Bush won the 2016 election. Sure, they feign outrage in the media, but that’s just theater. For the most part, they have ignored Trump, making him a completely inconsequential factor.

It does not have to be this way, but Trump has proven himself to be strikingly incompetent at the basics of politics. Part of that is the professionals in DC have figured out that all they need to do is put a microphone in front of him and he will eventually harm his own cause, by blurting out something stupid. The political class has come to terms with the fact that the White House is now just a carnival they visit once in while to be amused and outraged, but otherwise they can ignore it.

This is part of a larger problem with cosmopolitan globalism. The people in charge ululate endlessly about democracy, but the political class is immune from the effects of democracy. In years with high turnover, incumbents will win 85% of the races and those that lose, lose to be people backed by the donor class. Democratic government has always been about representing monied interests, but usually those interests are diverse enough to create competition between the factions.

In the age of cosmopolitan globalism, the monied interest all agree on the big stuff and most of the little stuff. The Koch Brothers are cast by the Left as evil monsters, but they support all the same stuff the rest of the billionaires support. The difference between a Tom Steyer and a Charles Koch is purely aesthetic. The former likes to dress up as a man of the green people, while the latter wants to play libertarian. In reality, they both support post-nationalism. That means open borders and global piracy.

The funny thing is that even as both parties take turns giving their constituents the finger, the public engages even more intensely with the process. My rather mild and measured critique of Trump’s gun grabbing the other day, elicited howls of protests from the MAGA hat people. Post-national democracy is a group version of battered wife syndrome. The more the ruling elite abuses the public they claim tp represent, the more the public defends them.

Still, the voting public seems to have developed a biological trait that allows them to justify endless abuse heaped on their heads by politicians. Perhaps it was always there, but re-purposed for life in liberal democracy. Through the Middle Ages, peasants and townsfolk put up with the excess of the aristocrats, rallying to defend their lord, as if it were a noble thing to do. Maybe that is what we have today. Voting is the pageant, but the social relations are still the same.

That said, at some point, one has to assume the public will notice that voting makes no difference. Right now, voting seems to make things worse. If a populist candidate or party does well, the political class punishes the voters. The results thus far suggest staying home is the best way to promote your interests. Eventually, even Trump voters will figure this out and disengage. On the other hand, maybe at some level we know it, but politics is just a way to pass the time, like going to the movies.

Winners And Losers

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Mass movements always reach a stage where they can break through and become legitimate social forces or they can fizzle out and die. They either take the next step and begin to attract a larger audience or they are a boutique fad. The neo-reaction movement of a decade ago is a good example of the latter. It was important on-line for a while, but then it lost steam and faded away. Its two main idea men have moved onto other things. The alt-right is at that point now.

If a movement is going to outgrow the pot in which it was a seedling, the people in leadership need to regularly reassess. The New Left in the 1960’s went through several such resets, finally becoming an intellectual and cultural movement that swept the major institutions of the country. One of the early re-thinks for successful movements is purging previous failed efforts and failed leaders. The New Left figured out why the old CPUSA guys failed and made sure to avoid the same mistakes.

Last summer the alt-right fell into the trap of Charlottesville and allowed themselves to be aligned with the bogeymen the Left has been using for generations to scare white people away from identity politics. Guilt by association is powerful stuff, because it works in a mass media culture. The result of locking shields with various white nationalist groups on TV was that the alt-right has become tied, in the public mind, to people who have been unstable and unreliable.

The alt-right, if it is going to be anything, is going to have to build its own thing, clearly separate and independent of the old white nationalist guys of the past. It has to stand alone and that means cutting all ties with the guys who like marching around in public pretending to be the freikorps. Whatever arguments can be mustered in their defense, there is no getting around the fact these groups have had half a century to make their case and they have failed miserably at ever turn.

Exclusively racist groups are not the only failures of the past. The paleocons were smart, creative and energetic, but they were outmaneuvered and eventually purged by the political elite. It is hard not to admire guys like Paul Gottfried and Pat Buchanan, who have spent their lives fighting the good fight, but it is also hard not to notice that they failed. Sam Francis was a great thinker and everyone should read him, but there is a reason these guys lost.

The reason they lost is they made the mistake of thinking the other side was reasonable and amenable to their arguments. The paleocons wanted to be in the club, not burn the club down. It was this desire to belong that was used to derail them. Even today, after all that has happened, these old guys still talk like this is just an argument between friends rather than bloodsport. If the alt-right is going to thrive, it has to accept that what comes next is revolution, not reformation.

Another useful lesson from past losers is the chain of causality. For as long as anyone has been alive, right-wing movements have started with politics first, hoping to rally people to sway elections. The result in every case was the effort being hijacked by political opportunists, who quickly set about trading the goals of the cause for entrée to the political class. The Tea Party is the most obvious recent example. It was an authentic grassroots movement that was quickly hijacked.

The one thing about rejecting the losers of the past is it clears the mind so you can objectively examine the winners. The winners of the post-war cultural revolution won for a reason. One reason is they built their politics on top of a cultural movement. The 60’s counterculture started long before the radicals of the 70’s started taking over Democratic politics. In other words, there were lots of people ready to support someone that spoke their language and understood their perspective.

I watched a documentary about the Weather Underground and one of the things that jumped out to me was a statistic. By the middle of the 60’s, Students for a Democratic Society had 100,000 members. The thing is, the group started small or grew quietly, focused more on building membership than activism. Groups like Identity Evropa may seem overly cautious, but the only way they can grow on campus is if the people in charge ignore them. Revolution grows in darkness.

Another valuable lesson from the New Left is they built independent organizations well outside the mainstream. Many of the fads of the era strike us today as being loopy and weird, but they served a valuable purpose. The radicals of the 70’s, who began invading the academy and politics, were born from these counterculture groups. Living outside the Eye of Sauron is even more important today, now that we have a full blown surveillance state.

Related to that last point is something else worth noting. The radicals of the 60’s and 70’s took every shot to establish who was inside and who was outside, especially when dealing with the media. They would charge establishment media a fee to attend their events but grant free access to their guys. They would use insider language in public events, to make sure you knew if you belonged. It was highly effective at attracting and keeping people in the movement.

The alt-right, mostly through serendipity and dumb luck, has a chance to be a legitimate right-wing mass movement. That is not going to happen if they keep blundering into unforced errors. The fiasco of the Traditional Worker’s Party should be a wake up call for the people leading the alt-right. They have to get smarter and they have to stop screwing up. The alt-right needs to get smart, or it will die. That means learning from the winners and the losers.

Yesterday’s Election

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There was a special election to fill the seat for Pennsylvanian’s 18th congressional district  yesterday and it appears the Democrat has won. The district had gone for Trump by 20-points in 2016, but the lackluster baby boomer the  Republican Party put up could not be bothered to campaign, much less notice the issues important to the voters. The Democrat, on the other hand, sounded more like Trump on most issues, than his own party. He was lying, of course, but people will vote for a liar over someone who appears to hate them.

The yesterday men of the Left are pointing to this and claiming it is the sign of what’s to comes next fall.

The Democrat candidate claimed a congressional election in a Republican heartland in Pennsylvania, as a vote seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s performance as president remained officially too close to call early on Wednesday.

n an ominous sign for Republicans eight months before national midterm elections, official results with all ballots from voting booths counted showed moderate Democrat Conor Lamb leading conservative Republican Rick Saccone by a fraction of a percentage point.

Trump won the Pennsylvania 18th Congressional District that they are contesting by almost 20 points in the 2016 presidential election.

With TV networks, which often call U.S. elections, yet to predict a winner, officials were continuing to count several hundred absentee ballots to try to determine the result.

Democratic sources said that, once those ballots were included, they expected Lamb to have won the election by more than 400 votes.

“It took a little longer than we thought but we did it. You did it,” Lamb, a U.S. Marines veteran, told cheering supporters late on Tuesday.

Speaking before Lamb claimed victory, Saccone – who has described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump” – said the contest was not yet over.

The Democrats are looking to replay what they did in 2006 where they rounded up a bunch of reasonable sounding people to run in Republican districts. Voters, revolted by the GOP, were willing to give the reasonable sounding Democrats a shot. It was a cynical ploy, but what made it important was the shamelessness. Usually, political parties scheme to fool the voters behind closed doors. In 2006, the party was right out in the open about what they were up to and they laughed about it afterward to their friends in the press.

It is why this coming midterm is probably going to follow a different course. For starters, the Democrats that are winning are doing so in opposition to their own party. Conor Lamb ran around saying nice things about Trump, while the Republican sounded like every generic Republican the voters have come to hate. The Left will want to pitch this as a referendum on Trump, but really what is shaping up is a referendum on the GOP establishment. They do nothing but foot drag and obstruct the Trump agenda.

It is also a warning to the Democrat leadership. Their coalition of fruitcakes is an unreliable voting block. You will note thus far that they have won these special elections by appealing to white voters, not left-handed bisexual trannies of color. Conor Lamb sounded like Democrats used to sound in the 1950’s, talking about bread and butter issues in a language normal people can understand. White people will vote for a person who is pro-white, regardless of party. That is a lesson the Washington elite has yet to learn.

The thing is though, the establishment of both parties is locked into a model of politics that belongs in a museum, rather than a modern campaign. The old Left-Right framework is no longer relevant. Within the white vote, the issue is nationalism versus cosmopolitan globalism. The establishment of both parties continues to operate as if the politics of gesture is still salient. They still play the Fukuyama end of history stuff, where all the big issues have been decided, so what’s left is pointless gestures and meaningless symbols.

Phase change in politics is a slow moving thing as the people being phased out never come to terms with their own fate until it is just about sealed. The generation of politicians running both parties are creatures of the previous era. They evolved to fit that era and, in many respects, they are the perfection of that era. The best politicians of any age usually reach perfection just as they are no longer needed. That is America today. We have a political class perfectly designed for 1992, but utterly useless for our current era.

What this means is a period of contentious and contradictory elections, as the voters and politicians try to figure out what works. In the demographic age, democracy can only evolve in one direction and that’s people voting their skin. This is the lesson of history and the inevitable result of biology. Baby boomers are, for the most part, locked into the civic nationalist model. Younger generations are adapting to the new reality.