Category Archives: Politics

Do We Have A Brutus?

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For most people, the name “Brutus” brings to mind the Roman politician, who took a leading role in the assassination of Julius Caesar. Because the winners write the history books, he is also remembered as a villain, the guy who murdered the great man and sent the Roman Republic careening toward authoritarian rule. That is probably not fair to Brutus or the other members of the Optimate faction. Julius Caesar was no friend of the Republic, despite being the leader of the Populis faction, but that is how it goes with history.

There is another Brutus, one who is relevant to our age. Lucius Junius Brutus is remembered as the founder of the Roman Republic. Until the fifth century BC, Rome was ruled by a series of kings. According to Livy, The son of Tarquinius Superbus raped a noblewoman named Lucretia, who was a relation to Brutus. There was already great discontent with the behavior of the king and Brutus had many other grievances, but this was the tipping point. Brutus led the revolt against the king and established the Republic.

The story itself is worth relating. After she had been raped, Lucretia summoned Brutus, her father, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus and Publius Valerius Poplicola, whose name the Founders would use when promoting the Constitution. After she told them what had happened and how she had been dishonored, she committed suicide by stabbing herself with a dagger. Brutus pulled the dagger from her chest, held it up and immediately shouted for the overthrow of the Tarquins. The revolution started at that moment.

Hidden in that story, which is most likely apocryphal, is the logic of republican virtue and republican morality. Free men fight and die for their honor, for their liberty and for their posterity. It is a form of rule based on a set of ideals, rather than a practical arrangement among men. A king is a pragmatic compromise that works now. A dictatorial committee is just the best way to establish order in the moment. A republic assumes men are not angels, but it assumes each generation will generate enough virtuous men to maintain it.

Our first Brutus is remembered as an example of that republican virtue, not because he established it, but because he sacrificed for it. Brutus became the first consul of Rome. During his consulship, the royal family tried to subvert the republic in order to regain the throne. This is remembered as the Tarquinian conspiracy. Among the conspirators were two of Brutus’ sons, who were sentenced to death. Brutus gained great respect among his peers for stoically watching as the sentence was carried out.

We are a long way from those times, but we have similar challenges. The emerging conspiracy among career political appointees and intelligence officials, a conspiracy to overthrow the orderly functioning of the republic, is not a lot different from what the Romans faced 25 centuries ago. It is not hugely different from what faced them five centuries after the founding of the Republic. In the former case, a Brutus was able to rise to the challenge. In the latter, another Brutus was not able to answer the call.

In the current crisis, there are some similarities to both events. Those plotting against republican order are doing so claiming Trump is an authoritarian. They see his very existence as proof of some hidden conspiracy to overthrow democracy and install Trump as the 12th invisible Hitler, returned to usher in the Fourth Reich. That sounds ridiculous, but not unlike the plotters against Caesar, the people scheming to get Trump, justify their actions, not on merit, but against what they imagine Trump is secretly plotting.

Those defending the plotters believe it too. Like the conspirators, they have no choice but to believe it. They are calling the release of the memo a constitutional crisis, implying a grab for power by Trump. They have to go down this path, turning everything on its head, otherwise they are the villains. They need to see themselves as the white hats and they need the public to see them as that too. The men who assassinated Julius Caesar justified murder, by imagining themselves as the defenders of Rome for the same reason.

On the other hand, we have Trump, maybe the last man in the Imperial Capital, who still believes in the old ideal of America. Trump is a true civic nationalist. He is the first president in many generations to truly sacrifice in order to serve in office. He is a man of weird old America. He even sounds like where he comes from, which is no longer typical of a member of the political class. He came into office believing that his victory would be enough to convince the political class to go along with his reform program.

On the other other hand, Trump is the guy tasked by history to impose order on a chaotic American political world. Much in the same way Julius Caesar was faced with a choice between obeying the rules and permitting chaos, Trump is faced with the choice of letting things go on as usual or imposing the rule of law. If he yields to the will of the Senate, so to speak, he risks undermining the constitutional order. If he goes against the political class and business as usual, he risks war with the old guard and all that comes with it.

Trump is both the tribune of the people and the defender of the prevailing order. He is in a strange position; in that he is pushing for the sorts of reforms popular with the Populis faction and tasked with defending the order that makes it possible for the Optimate faction to exist. He is Lucius Junius Brutus, overthrowing the current order, but he is also Marcus Junius Brutus, motivated by a desire to defend the old order. It is like the confluence of two rivers of Western history. Time will tell if we have the Brutus to save the republic.

The Un-Americans

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One of the things that has always been true about America is that you never question someone’s patriotism unless you have strong evidence. Part of this is due to the immigrant back story of most Americans, but a bigger part is the fragmented nature of the country. Patriotism is the glue that holds the American Nations together. Different groups from different regions stick together because of a common national creed. This also works across class lines. The rich, the middle and the poor are equally patriotic.

One result of this has been a desire by leaders to not look like fops. Politicians, businessmen, even generals, have always done the every-man act in order to seem like one of the folks. We do not have a hereditary class, but we do have rich people. Rather than a rigid class system, the rich make sure to let the lower classes know they have the same duty to the country as everyone else. This soul and soil nationalism, rather than blood and soil, is what binds the social classes and the regional cultures together. At least it used too.

That is certainly not the way things are now. Our cultural and political leaders go out of their way to signal their hostility to the lower classes. In fact, it has become so common for our betters to sneer at us, they are competing with one another to prove just how much they hate Americans. Of course, they mean white Americans. The swarthy recent imports are the best, but the old stock, well, they are the worst, according to the people claiming to represent us. It really is remarkable just how much they detest us.

A commenter on Steve Sailer’s blog asked, in response to this David Brooks column, “Has there ever been another time in American history when American elites felt this comfortable expressing such open contempt and hatred for their fellow citizens?” It is a good question. Certainly, elites from some sections have hated the people of other sections. Virginia gentry, prior to the Civil War, thought the goobers from West Virginia were worst than Indians. New Englanders hate the South. Everyone hates Cleveland.

What we are seeing today is different. It is a public hatred directed at the fundamental nature of America, and by extension, Americans. Here is an example from Bill Kristol in response to an immigration segment on Fox News. What Kristol is arguing is that Americans, as in current citizens, have no right to discuss immigration policy. It is immoral for us to say anything about it. On the other hand, non-Americans, people not currently citizens, have a moral duty to cross the border and settle in your neighborhood.

Kristol is hardly alone. It is not strictly a Jewish thing either. Lyndsey Graham is not Jewish, as far as anyone knows. He no longer thinks America should exist. He denies that the current citizens have any right to exist whatsoever. Granted, he is a shrieking hysteric, prone to hyperbole, but there is only one way to interpret what he is saying. Being an American is no longer permissible. In fact, the underlying rationale of the open borders side is that the current Americans are just no good and need to be replaced.

Now, this turn in elite opinion has been a long time coming. In the Clinton years, suddenly comfortable Boomers started buying McMansions and pretending they were too good for the hoi polloi in flyover country. Progressive politics moved away from the bread and butter economic issues and onto esoteric identity politics. This snootiness was most apparent when the Left went to war on Walmart. Once Progressives stopped pretending to like normal Americans, the so-called Conservatives joined them.

Elites have always had a disdain for the lower classes. This has been true at all times and all places. Elites have also always had a duty to look out for the interests of the lower classes. The ruling class may not have liked the people over whom they ruled, but they were duty bound to look out for them and keep their opinions to themselves. What is happening in modern America is the ruling class is rejecting their duty to their fellow citizen, because they have contempt for the very notion that we are their fellow citizens.

There really is no example from history where the ruling class revolted and declared war on its subjects. That is where we are today in America. When Trump gave his State of the Union, most of the people in the building hated him because he holds onto the old fashioned belief that the American government should serve the American people. As far as they are concerned, he’s not just a class traitor, he is insane. After all, why would anyone think the people in charge have any responsibility to the rabble?

It used to be that “un-American” meant counter to the American system and the American creed. The people charged with policing that were the people in charge. Today, being un-American is a badge of honor for the people in charge. A US Congressman actually fled the building when the crowd started in with a patriotic chant during Trump’s address to Congress. You can be sure he was the toast of the city, a hero to his coevals in the political class. Bizarre as it sounds, America is a country now ruled by un-Americans.

Somewhere To Run

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One of the themes of this post at American Renaissance, was that there is no where for the race aware white person to go in America. The war on whiteness is happening at every point on the social structure and in every town in the country, even the rural areas where whites dominate. Wherever white people congregate, a cosmopolitan wrecker will be there to try and brown the place. Therefore, there is no running away from the slow moving white genocide being perpetrated on us by our rulers.

The generally accepted view of this process is it will play out in one of two ways. One version has Team Brown, which is the coalition of blacks, Hispanics, miscellaneous foreigners, Jews and white feminists, will become the new ruling class. The alternative, the Alt-Right version, holds that whites will become race aware and unite against the dusky hordes to form an ethno-state. In fairness, there is a CivNat version, which argues in favor of unicorn riding leprechauns, but no adult takes them seriously.

Looking at the current fight over immigration, it is not hard to argue with either vision of the future. Team Brown is unwilling to give an inch on their plans for unlimited non-white immigration. The only justification for this is they are seeking to replace whites in America via the miracle of open borders. Logic further dictates that even the dumbest tricorn hat wearing BoomerCon will eventually wake up to this reality. Think about how many people you know who were CivNat a decade ago but are race realists today.

Neither of those scenarios sound appealing and that is an important thing to keep in mind when looking down the road. Given enough time, human organizations faced with two bad choices will evolve alternatives. It is a natural result of seeking to mitigate the costs of each choice by addressing the underlying premises. In the case of American racial conflict, the underlying premise is that the future is a transcendent, winner take all, fight that will be decided in Washington and imposed on the rest of us.

That is not the only future and probably not the likely one. Look at what is happening in the states. The other day I wrote about one of the consequences of the marijuana legalization efforts at the state level. Here we have, for the first time in generations, the states forcing policy changes on the Federal government. In fact, the most likely result is the states will force the Feds to retreat from this area of civic life. The regulation of recreational drugs will be a local issue. Replace “marijuana” with “discrimination” and the enormity is clear.

Another thing going on in the states is the idea of disaggregation. When you look closely at the CalExit thing, what you see is not a secessionist movement, but a reductionist movement. California is too big to manage as a whole, so the culturally homogeneous areas will be broken off from the culturally Progressive zones, to form at least two states, but there is no reason the concept could not result in three or four states. California has forty million people. Rhode Island has a little over one million people.

What is going on in California is possible because of something that has been going on with Progressives for the past thirty years. They have been self-ghettoizing. The ethnic cleansing we see going on in coastal cities is so Progressives can have swanky urban centers in which they can live. When you look at the last electoral map, at the county level, you see the slow re-segregation of the country between Team Brown in urban areas and Team America everywhere else. The blues will get bluer while the reds get redder.

This cultural reorganization of America is undermining the premise of a unified national culture dictated by our coastal elites. Therefore, that winner take all fight is becoming less and less likely. Further, the Progressive instinct to leave, unless they can dominate all others, an instinct they inherited from their Puritan forebears, is one cause of this reorganization. It is why Progressives are talking about abandoning the national model in favor of the smaller, local, more autonomous model. Peaceful separation, so to speak.

It is important to keep in mind that Team Brown seized on open borders and mass immigration when they began to lose the support of white ethnics. Progressives controlled the national government from the Civil War forward but had to rely on urban white ethnics for building a coalition. Once those voters started joining Team America, Team Brown needed new voters and we got the 1965 Immigration Act. Then twenty years later they built on it with the 1986 amnesty. Open borders are a defensive strategy.

If Trump is able to strong arm Republicans into ending wholesale immigration, Team Brown’s strategy for dominating the nation is foreclosed. When even minor setbacks, like the 2016 election, results in calls for retreat, it is reasonable to wonder if the Progressive pendulum is about to swing the other way, away from national dominance back toward local autonomy. It has been a little over two hundred years since the Hartford Convention. Perhaps this is the end of a long cycle and the return to normalcy.

Memo Weeeeee!

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The House has voted to release the infamous four page memo that many think outlines the broad contours of how the FBI and Department of Justice abused their powers to aid Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Some responsible people, who have read it, have indicated it is important. Other responsible people, who have read it, are working hard to prevent its release, presumably because it is important. Democrats have refused to read it, so they can go to their favorites media outlet and lie about its contents.

That is one of the back stories to this whole affair. If you are permitted to read a top secret document, you are not permitted to say anything about it. In some cases, you are not even permitted to say it exists. On the other hand, if you get wind of some top secret document squirreled away in the security apparatus, you are allowed to say anything you like about what is in it. That is why guys like Adam Schiff refuse to read this stuff. That way, they are free to make up whatever whoppers they think are best, on media chat shows.

The funny thing about this is the memo probably has no new information. Lots of people have been following the news and piecing together the broad outlines of what happened during the Obama years. Conservative Tree House has been doing long essays connecting the dots for a while now. Doug Ross has been maintaining a timeline of events using media stories, most of which were likely sourced to people involved. For example, it is clear that Devlin Barrett has been getting his scoops from Strzok and Page.

Public information suggests senior people in the FBI decided to help the cause by providing the White House, through the Department of Justice, with surveillance information on Americans connected to the Republican candidates. The DOJ would then ask for the names of these people, what is known as unmasking, knowing that this would get out to the broad circle of political people with access to the security briefings. They would in turn leak this stuff to their favorite media people or to the Clinton campaign.

This has all the fingerprints of a Clinton caper. Their game has always been to relax all of the rules, so it was hard to spot their malfeasance. At State, Hillary was obviously selling influence and possibly state secrets. In order to avoid anyone noticing it, her correspondence and all of the secret material her people accessed was left unguarded in a dozen places. That way, if counter-intelligence people noticed something, they had a million rabbit holes to inspect, looking for the source. It is called hiding in plain sight.

It appears to have been the game played by Team Obama. Crooked FBI men would find some excuse to listen to foreigners, who regularly talked to American officials. This would be included in the daily briefings sent to the White House. Susan Rice would ask for the names of the US citizen to “get a better understanding of the material.” This is the sort of shenanigans that is hard to find, as long as it never gets out of hand. A leak here or there to the media to embarrass someone is not going to draw too much attention.

The guess is that things did get out of hand. Like a movie crime thriller, the conspirators found themselves in the third act of the five act structure. Events overtook them and they made some bad choices. We are now into the fourth act where things have turned bad for many of the actors. Odds are some well intended people tried to shield the FBI from embarrassment and lied or covered up things from investigators. Others succumbed to hubris and thought they could bring down the President on behalf of their cause.

It is all speculation at this point, but what is not speculation is the two serious threats this poses to the constitutional order. The first and most serious is we have a Praetorian Guard problem in Washington. By allowing the security agencies to spy on Americans, on behalf of political factions, they are being setup as king makers. Imagine if they were able to frame up one of Trump’s kids, or even Trump, with phony intelligence. From that point forward, every politician would have to kiss the ring of the intelligence community.

Similarly, the massive holes in the intelligence system open pathways for foreign governments to subvert the nation and subvert the political order. It has been forgotten, but there is some possibility that MI6 had some involvement in this caper. Fake intelligence was fed to British intelligence, who then laundered it and sent it back to US intel agencies for use in FISA warrants. That could explain why Trump has gone out of his way to give Theresa May the cold shoulder, while treating Macron like a son.

The question at this stage is whether the political class can take the necessary steps to fix these problems. The Democrats have descended into madness, incapable of carrying out their basic functions. This is due to Progressivism morphing into a mystical suicide cult. At the same time, Republicans are afraid of their own shadow. Digging into the corruption of the Obama administration means they could be accused of racism by the Left. They would rather see the nation burn to a crisp than suffer that indignity.

There is another thing that is probably spooking the political class. How long has this been going on? One of the great unsolved riddles of the Obama years was the sudden, overnight transformation of Judge Roberts from opponent of the individual mandate to defender of it. There are serious people in Washington who worry about the consequences of revealing a wide ranging political scandal involving the nation’s top intelligence officials. Despite it all, there are still some patriots left in Washington.

Who’s In Charge

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The alt-right boys are fond of talking about the various red pills and how their issue is the “ultimate red pill.” They are not entirely wrong. People are willing to accept some things more than others. All of us bob around in an ocean of agit-prop, pumped out by the people that rule over us. That is, though, the ultimate red pill. All the stuff we believe about democracy, our political order and the intentions of the people who rule over us, is mostly nonsense. Our ruling class is no different than any other in human history.

Steve Sailer is fond of talking about the Deep State, mostly as a way to explain how the people in the ruling class collude with one another against the interests of the voters and their elected officials. It is not a conspiracy, with Ernst Blofeld controlling the world from his secret lair. It is more like a community of like minded people, who exist within the high ground of the society. They hire one another, they socialize, their kids marry each other and they try to keep elected officials from screwing up their grand designs.

A good recent example is Alexei Navalny. He is the latest Russian opposition leader to cause trouble for Putin. He was recently arrested for trying to stage a protest of Putin’s run for another term in office. Navalny was just another guy until he spent time at Yale in the World Fellows Program. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, he became a crusader against financial corruption in Russia. It is not like any important people in America have connections to Yale. It is probably just a massive coincidence.

Putin, of course, is enemy number one for the Washington political elite. That means Mr. Navalny will be celebrated in the American media, while reliable politicians are sent out to tell us how Putin is the next Hitler. No one voted for this and no one in the elected class gives a damn about Alexei Navalny, but the people who were there before the politicians showed up, and will be there after they are gone, do care so everyone cares. It all sounds conspiratorial, but it is just the way countries run, even America.

Another example of this is this story about John Forbes Kerry causing trouble in the Middle East. He is telling the Palestinians to not cooperate with Trump as he expects a new president within a year. It’s totally a coincidence that Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor, was in the same prep school as John Forbes Kerry. In fact, they were on the lacrosse team together. Now, only a conspiracy nut would think there is any connection here. What are the odds that these two classmates talk about politics?

Again, it is not some wide ranging, multi-generational conspiracy. Every society has its elites and those elites control the state. For example, twenty-two families have controlled Guatemala since 1531. Another twenty-six families have married into this core group of elite families. The result is one percent of the population, the descendants of the Conquistadors, has controlled the country for over 450 years. It is why their political elites tend to look like Old World Spaniards, rather than the indigenous Indian tribes.

In the case of America, year after year our elite colleges turn out a new crop of boys and girls from the best families. Many go into government, some go into media, others go into finance. Most go onto live self-actualizing lives in the top floors of American society. Their parents and friend’s parents help them along wherever they land. If it is government, they bounce from assignment to assignment, eventually landing in one of the Senior Executive Service positions. Or even better, a presidential appointment.

What does this all mean?

It means elections do not matter all that much. Sure, getting Trump rather than Clinton is important, but that is just an exception to the rule. Clinton, Bush and Obama were pretty much the same guy. Their administrations were stocked with the same cronies that stocked the other administrations. Maybe they had slightly different ideas on how to sacrifice white Americans in the service of Israel, but otherwise they were on the same page on the big stuff. The people voted and then the people in charge ignored them.

Of course, this means those super-Progressive women are crazier than you think. These women, walking around thinking they are revolting against the patriarchy, are actually the vanguard of its defense. The proof that liberalism is a cult is that the members are sure they are a revolutionary vanguard, defending the status quo against the general public. That is a degree of madness that exists only in mental hospitals and revivals. It is why there is no reasoning with a Progressive. They have descended into madness.

It also means changing the current trajectory of the nation is not happening at the ballot box. As Steve Sailer noted today, the people in charge have gone insane. The orgy of anti-Americanism, particularity the hatred for whites, is a group psychosis. Fixing this is not going to happen with elections. It changes when the ruling class changes and that probably means the swankier parts of Cloud Country will experience car bombs, IED’s and assassinations. One Arthur Bremmer is worth an election full of ballots.

President Coach

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When I was a kid, I played a lot of sports. The one coach I hated was my freshman football coach, whose name I no longer remember. He was the classic Type-A personality, at least what popular culture has come to think of it. The guy was always on edge, ready to explode into a purple faced rage, which meant everyone around him was always on edge too. The guy found a way to get under everyone’s skin. He had some way to needle every player on the roster, often with some sort of nickname.

The thing is though, the guy managed to squeeze out more from the roster than logic said was possible. In my case, I was always just at the point of wanting to bash his skull in with my helmet, but I channeled those pleasant thoughts into execution. I was not giving that prick the satisfaction of making a mistake. Even though I hated the guy, he did make me and my teammates better players. I still recall the joy of winning with my teammates, but I don’t remember the coach’s name.

My guess is everyone who played sports growing up had at least one of these types of coaches. Bill Parcels was famous for playing head games with his players. He was big on keeping every player on edge, even his stars. At the NFL level, the psychological aspects of coaching are more complex, but the underlying strategy is the same. You make the players doubt themselves in a way that results in their natural hyper-competitiveness kicking in, so they push themselves to the edge of their potential.

I’ve been thinking about this watching Trump torment Congress, especially the Democrats, over immigration. He’s not just making the open borders people nervous with his rhetoric. He is getting under the skin of his allies and his own staff. The blockheads in the gentry media are calling it the Jell-O strategy, but it is a safe bet that none of them ever went outside as kids, much less played competitive contact sports. In the world of high-pay, low-work professions, the hard driving boss does not exist.

What Trump is doing with his comments about DACA, in particular, but immigration in general, is keeping the issue boiling. That is Trump’s natural style of negotiating, but it has the benefit of keeping immigration patriots slightly ticked off and highly engaged in every aspect of the process. Congress has seen their e-mail flooded with messages opposing amnesty. Their voicemail boxes are constantly full. This puts pressure on Congress to do a deal and get the issue off the agenda for the midterms in ten months.

Steve Sailer compares Trump to George Steinbrenner. It is a good comparison as they both have a similar style. Both men understood that pressure reveals character. The great players, the great deal makers, rise to the occasion when under pressure. On the other hand, the fakers and losers crack under pressure. If you read Trump’s book or listen to people with whom he has done deals, you see that he is always looking to bring things to a boiling point, where everyone is under the gun to get something done.

That’s what Trump is doing with DACA. He’s cleverly made this the goal of the Democrats, thinking they will push themselves to the breaking point to get it. At the same time, the laundry list of immigration reforms has become the all or nothing end game for immigration patriots. Trump’s public statements are keeping the good guys fired up and willing to hammer Congress on the finer points of immigration. Every time Trump says something positive about DACA, the phone lines melt in Washington.

There is no question that this style of managing people does get the most from those willing to give their all. It also boils off the people who like to talk about maximizing their opportunities, but unwilling to do what it takes to accomplish it. In the realm of sports, this result in better teams. Bill Parcells was a wildly successful coach because his style gets the maximum from the roster. Trump’s success as a businessman and media personality is largely built on getting the most from top people in their respective fields.

Whether this will translate to politics is hard to know. One constant that comes through from people who have done business with Trump is that he is exhausting. The never ending competition and wrangling over details wears people down. In business, you can always get new people when the old ones wear out. In politics, you can’t easily get new supporters. His style could end up exhausting his base. How many times can someone call their Congressman, enraged about immigration or trade policy?

That’s a question often asked of sportsball coaches. How long before they wear out their players? How long before the team stops responding? The great ones seem to get that and they make sure to reward their players so they keep wanting more. Trump’s zingers on twitter or when speaking in front of a crowd may serve that function. He has an uncanny way to saying the obvious in a way that outrages the enemy and amuses his supporters. Perhaps that’s enough for President Coach to get us over the goal line.

Black Nixon

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If you read the Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon, what jumps out to a modern reader is just how weak the case was against the President. Impeachment is a political action, so the rules of evidence we see in a courtroom don’t apply, but even so, the allegations seem weak in comparison to those against Bill Clinton. The case against Nixon was what we would now call a corrupt enterprise, like a mobster. Bill Clinton, in contrast, was accused of specific crimes that he committed while in office.

In both cases, the key question to be decided by the political class was what was best for the political system. The guilt or innocence of either man was a secondary consideration, outside of the impact on the political system. In the case of Nixon, his decision to resign, rather than fight impeachment, was all about defending the political order. Whether or not it was proper to run Nixon out of town or allow Clinton to remain in office is debatable, but the calculus at the time was about the best interests of the political order.

In fact, it was the political nature of both cases that led to vastly different results. In the case of Nixon, the move to impeach him was the denouement to a long war between Nixon and the Washington establishment. They wanted him impeached because they hated him. On the other hand, the impeachment of Clinton was unsuccessful because the ruling elite decided to defend him. There was no doubt that he was guilty of perjury and he brought dishonor to the office, but Washington insiders were willing to give him a pass.

These two events are relevant to our age, especially the case of Nixon, as evidence emerges of serious corruption at the end of the Obama years. It has been clear for a while that the ridiculous Russian hacking stuff and the special prosecutor were a smokescreen to conceal something else. Months ago, I made the point that the most likely thing being concealed was corruption within the FBI. It was the most obvious answer, as Mueller, Rosenstein and Comey were the guys leading the charge on it.

What we are learning now is the Department of Justice was most likely compromised by the same people corrupting the FBI. This story from The Hill reveals that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was coordinating with FBI Director Comey on the Clinton e-mail scandal. Given the relationship between Lynch and the Clintons, it is safe to assume she was keeping them up to speed on the process. It is also possible that Lynch never stopped working for the Clintons and was steering the investigation.

The link between Peter Strzok, the Chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section, and the Clinton operation is important, because of what is being learned about what the FBI was doing during the election. This detailed write up from Conservative Treehouse is impressive, but quite long. It pulls together all of the public information related to the top-secret memo floating around Washington. Serious people are talking about what is in that memo, characterizing it as the worst scandal in American history. That’s not nothin’.

The narrative that explains all of this is that high ranking people in the FBI, maybe even Director Comey, were working with the Justice Department to help Hillary Clinton in the election. That has seemed clear for a while now. What is becoming clear now is Fusion GPS, the political dirty tricks operation, functioned as a cutout for the FBI and the Clinton campaign. The FBI shared secret intel with Fusion, who then sold it to the Clinton campaign or distributed to the media at the direction of the campaign.

There is a word for all of this and it is called treason. It is one thing for a career intelligence officer to go bad and start selling intelligence to a foreign government. That just a part of the life of a nation state. It is an entirely different thing when senior members of the political class are working to undermine the fundamentals of the political system. It is the sort of thing that results in hangings or civil wars. It’s why the infamous memo has not been released, despite the fact it could be leaked or declassified by the White House.

That is what brings us back to Dick Nixon. The mere hint of abuse of the FBI and CIA by the political side of the White House was considered enough of a threat to warrant impeachment. What we have here is worse than anything Nixon was accused of doing, even by his fiercest critics. Stuff that is orders of magnitude worse went on in the Obama White House. Imagine senior FBI men, faced with federal prison, agreeing to rat out major political actors. Imagine them pointing the finger at Obama or his top aides.

Again, this is fundamentally a political problem, but it cannot be ignored. That is probably why no one is in a hurry to release that memo. It is not just about partisan politics. Imagine how blacks would react if we had a full blown political crisis that paints Obama as worse than Nixon. That is looking increasingly possible. People have forgotten about the systematic abuse of the IRS, using it against conservative activists in the run-up to the 2012 election. There is only so much that can be swept under the rug to protect Obama.

This will not end well.

An Immoderate Age

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Last week, this ridiculous article in the New York Times generated some attention on alt-right social media, mostly because it allowed for some petty bickering. Anytime the media does a story on alt-right people, the guys not mentioned take the opportunity to say bad things about the guys that were mentioned in the story. John Derbyshire said everything that needed to be said about the Times piece in this post at VDare. In it, he referenced his old column on the topic and the corresponding version from Jared Taylor.

Taken together, it is good example of how the hive mind is unable to address reality on its own terms. Mx. Audrea Lim, of the New York Times piece, cannot consider the possibility that there could be more than two opinions on a subject. For her and the others in the Progressive hive, there are good people, the people inside the walls, and bad people, those outside the walls. The good people hold the correct opinions, while the bad people have other opinions, which are all bad. That is as much of the world she needs to know.

As you see with Derb and Taylor, there is a wide range of opinion on the Dissident Right about subjects like race, identity, immigration, race-mixing and diversity. Even the alt-right has a diversity of opinion on these subjects. Calling any of these people “white supremacists” is about the dumbest thing possible, but it is just one of the many scare phrases Lefty has for those outside the walls. Not only are there few, if any, white supremacists on the Dissident Right, there are more than a few non-whites.

The fact is, the Dissident Right, in all its permutations, exists because our Progressive overlords lack the capacity to understand nuance. Take miscegenation, for example. It is a fact of life that some small number of females, of any race, will have a mating preference for males outside their race. Males are far less choosy, as their biology favors the shotgun approach to reproduction, while the female favors the rifle approach. This reality is just salt in the stew of life and if left alone nothing anyone need worry over.

For people in the hive, this is an impossibility. You either completely and totally embrace something, or you completely and entirely reject it. It is why they squeal about homophobia if you are not enthusiastic about the latest perversions. The Progressive mind cannot accept the possibility of being indifferent to something. It is why our television shows and movies are now packed to the gills with race mixing. Even though our rulers live like Klan members, there is no limit to the amount of race mixing they will pack into the culture.

The hive minded also struggle with abstract reasoning. Richard Spencer likes using the concept of an ethnostate to explain his opinions on race and identity. It is a useful way of getting people to break free from the concrete world of the here and now to imagine an alternative ordering. Spencer is not advocating for a new country to be carved out of Canada as a new white homeland. It is a mental model meant to illustrate certain points about race and identity. The hive minded, however, assume he wants a honky homeland.

Diversity is the salt in the stew. Some races like more than others, but no people wish to be overrun by people not like them. The Chinese have always been careful to limit the number of non-Chinese into their lands and limit where they can go in China. Africans tend to murder anyone not in their tribe. Europeans, in contrast, are fine with cosmopolitan cities, where you see lots of diversity, as long as the home team remains in charge and atop the social structure. Like seasoning, diversity works in moderation.

That is the core problem in the modern age. Our rulers lack anything resembling moderation. If a little immigration is good, then they want unlimited immigration. If a few temporary guest workers are good, they want the entire white workforce replaced by helot labor from over the horizon. The vulgarity of having Americans train their foreign replacements at places like Disney is driven by a near total lack of moderation. If one Hindu is good, a whole building full of them will be heaven on earth!

We live in an immoderate age. We saw that in the past election and we are seeing it now in the efforts to craft immigration reform legislation. No one would oppose a small, limited amnesty for some illegal invaders, who have been here for a long time. As long as it comes with tough measures to limit further invasions and protections against future backsliding on the issue. Trump’s wall creates a permanent lobby in Washington in favor of border protection. Programs like e-Verify alter the hiring culture to prevent labor abuse.

The package of proposals from the White House is reasonable and sensible. It is a practical response to a public policy problem. If the compromise includes legalizing a few hundred thousand invaders, a civilized people can accept it. But the people in charge are incapable of moderation, which is why they blew up the talks and are demanding a blanket amnesty with no conditions. Again, the hive minded can only understand the world in binary terms. It is those inside the walls versus those outside the walls.

There is no reasoning with fanatics. As much as many on our side want to believe that practical issues are what is behind the multicultural madness, the fact is the people pushing it are not reasonable people. They are all or nothing people. That is why this cannot end well. The people in charge either succeed in pulling the roof down on the rest of us, or the rest of us are forced to do what is necessary to dislodge the lunatics that have seized the high ground of the culture. Moderation is not the answer to fanaticism.

This will not end well.

Fences Make Good Neighbors

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During the election, when Trump was still just an annoyance, the obvious way to cut him off at the pass was to co-opt his issues. This is a tried and true way for establishments to neutralize outside challengers in electoral politics. In the case of Republicans, they just needed their guys to take immigration and trade seriously. A guy like Kasich was perfect, as he had been fairly good on both issues in his career. He could have been the reasonable guy and stolen both issues.

That did not happen, of course. Instead, all of the candidates went the exact opposite direction, thinking that their ticket to the winner’s circle was to be the most over-the-top anti-Trump loon on the ballot. It was a crazy thing to watch. No matter the reason, the decision has turned out to be a big one. In the fullness of time, it will be looked upon as one of those small decisions that had world changing consequences, and not just for Americans. News brings word that Mexico is looking for a Trump of their own.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s campaign rhetoric can make him sound like a Mexican Donald Trump.

The left-leaning front-runner in Mexico’s presidential race is overtly nationalistic, pushes “Mexican people first” policies and peppers his speeches with anti-establishment slogans that thrill the working-class Mexicans who flock to his rallies.

But while his style might be distinctly Trumpian, his policy prescriptions could not be more different. Indeed, the election of the former mayor of Mexico City could be disastrous for Trump and his administration, creating an even more charged relationship between the two countries that could reduce cooperation on border security, trade and immigration.

That worries U.S. politicians and business leaders, including House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas), who was not shy about expressing his disdain for López Obrador at an event last fall hosted by the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce.

“I do not want to see President [López] Obrador take office next year,” McCaul said, adding he fears the Trump administration could increase those chances if it mishandles talks on revamping the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.

We live in a time when every event will be cast as bad news for Trump, every Trump move will be bad news for us and all the good news will be pitched as bad news in the long run. This was the pattern in the Reagan years. The booming economy was always bracketed by stories about the homeless and stories about middle-aged men working at fast food joints. That is what we see here. Mexico electing a nationalist may or may not be bad news for Mexico, but it is unquestionably good news for Trump and America.

The one card the globalists have to play against the nationalists is that globalism promotes peace and cooperation among national elites. The rulers of European countries meet over cocktails and wildly expensive appetizers, rather than on the battlefield. Cooperation, between Mexican elites and American elites, means cordial relations between the two countries on issues like trade, drugs and migration. If every country is going for nationalists leaders all of a sudden, the globalists no longer have that card to play.

In the case of Mexico, their elites are so corrupt they make our elites look like good government idealists by comparison. As Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out, Mexico has been run by an organized crime family for generations. The Bush family is monstrous, but they are nowhere near as toxic as the Salinas family. That said, populism in that part of the world tends to mean crazy Marxists and deranged academics, who also happen to be Marxists. Making Mexico Venezuela is the most likely result of populism.

Still, the right answer for Americans is for our rulers to put pressure on Mexican elites to stem the flow of drugs and migrants into America. The dirty little secret is that the migrants coming over the border are not Mexicans. These are Central Americans given safe passage and aid by the Mexican government. The same is true of the drug trade, which is a key source of revenue for the Mexican ruling class. It is not an accident that Mexican Donald Trump is promising to amnesty drug war criminals.

The bigger issue though is a tough talking Mexican president would crystallize support in America for a hard line with Mexico. Americans may have doubts about Trump, but they will rally to his side in a dispute with a foreign leader. With a booming economy, fear of economic repercussions loses its bite. That and good times give American presidents more room to maneuver on the world stage. The last thing the Mexican ruling class needs right now is a head of state who is going to be a foil to Donald Trump.

The truth is the Mexican ruling class needs to be on good terms with America. If the cost of doing that is reining in their criminal element, that is good for the people of both countries. Mexico does not have to be Afghanistan, where warlords run the countryside, living off criminal enterprises. If Trump’s rhetoric helps put pressure on the Mexican political system, forcing a degree of responsible government on them, that is good for Mexicans and Americans. if not, then we just need to build a big wall on the border.

The New Zeros

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In the coming decades, Western nations are going to be faced with a number of problems stemming from the technological revolution. We are now post-scarcity societies, where we have more than enough food, medicine and housing for our citizens and even some non-citizens. The pruning force of scarcity is no longer doing its magic to keep the population fit or even sensible. The next big problem is what to do with the tens of millions of extra humans, no longer needed to contribute to society.

The hardest part of the automation wave will simply be language. What do you call people who no longer have any purpose, in terms of producing goods and services through their labor? For as long as anyone has been alive, the small slice of the population that has fit this definition could simply be dismissed. The underclass is assumed to be lazy or anti-social. Trying to fix this has been a good way to keep the useless off-spring of the middle classes busy in social work.

When the numbers swell as automation eliminates the need for human labor in wide swaths of the economy, it will be impossible to dismiss the idle. When many of the idle are people who formerly occupied office jobs or semi-skilled laboring positions, blaming their condition on a lack of ambition is not going to be possible. The current labor participation rate is about 63% right now. In the coming decades, that number will fall below 50% due to automation and demographics.

The other challenge is how to support the swelling ranks of the useless in a way that keeps them from causing trouble. The hot idea currently is the universal basic income, which is being experimented with in Finland. In the US, some states are talking about how to replace their welfare programs with something simpler like the UBI. Libertarian economists like the idea of the UBI, because it theoretically allows the under classes to participate in the market economy, unencumbered by the state.

The trouble with this idea is math. If all citizens have a floor, in terms of their basic income, whatever that floor is, will be the new zero. The only possible way to have a negative income, in real terms, is if someone is paying their employer. There may be some bizarre situations where that exists, but in the main, zero is the smallest number that can appear in box #1 of your W2. If that number is bumped up by the UBI, that becomes the new zero, the lowest possible.

Imagine the government decides to help BMW sell more cars, so they offer every citizen $5000 if they spend it on a BMW, rather than some other car. BMW is now facing a wave of people coming into American dealerships toting a $5,000 check. The logical thing for BMW to do is raise the price of their low end models by $5000. That way, they do not increase production costs, but they increase the profit per car. In effect, the floor for entry level buyers was just raised by $5000 by the government.

There is a fairly good real world example of this. The government decided to do something to help working class people get into college. Since many need remedial help, before taking on college work, the scheme was to offer a subsidy to be used for community colleges. The students would use the money to prep for college then head off to a four year university, presumably using loans and aid at that level. The result, however, was the community colleges just raised their tuition.

The UBI would most likely follow the same pattern. By guaranteeing that no one would earn less than some amount, in lieu of traditional welfare payments, the absolute floor becomes the subsidy level. In effect, the new zero becomes the subsidy so all other wages would be based off that number. It is really no different than printing up money and dropping it from helicopters into the ghetto. The UBI would be as inflationary as debasing the currency.

The truth is the zeroes that our rulers will be forced to address are zero population growth and zero TFR among the surplus populations. For example, you could fix Baltimore in a generation with mandatory Norplant for the underclass. A generation of childless females means the last generation of 80 IQ residents. The reason Baltimore is a violent city is not an excess of hard working, college educated STEM workers, but a surplus of violent stupid people.

It also means zero immigration. When 80% of today’s immigrants end up on public assistance, the immigrants of tomorrow will be nothing more than useless people to police, feed and house. Japan is the model to follow. They have no immigration and their population levels are about to drop in the coming decades. They are the only nation on earth that is truly ready for the automated future, as they have the demographics to meet a shrinking demand for labor.

There is one other zero and that is zero participation. The fact is the free-market and democracy work when the right answer is not obvious. As automation takes over more and more tasks, the number of issues that need to be hashed out collectively will diminish. Rule by robot means exactly that, which means voting and popular government will have to be reconsidered. What is the point of being mayor when there are no more patronage jobs to dole out to friends and family?