Category Archives: Politics

Civil War

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This was a popular item recently. It is a post about statistics, but the post got a lot of replies, because people think America is headed toward a civil war. Perhaps people with an interest in statistical methods worry about civil wars, in addition to methodological wars. It could also be that people fond of math know that society is fragile and it would not take much to topple it over. The distance between us and Somalia is not a big as we like to pretend.

Anyway, it is a good brain teaser. What would a civil war be like? The country is a vastly different place than the last time. The North is still richer than the south, but there is a Midwest, Southwest, West and Northwest now. More important, nothing is made in the Northeast anymore, other than trouble. The North is also the oldest part of the country, lacking a robust male population. By the standards of the last civil war, the North would be at a demographic, cultural and material disadvantage.

But that was then and this is now. Civil wars tend to be territorial and the regionalism of America is not what it once was. Lots of people from New England have moved south to the Carolinas, for example. Florida is full New Yorkers and is the retirement home to much of the Northeast. Northern Virginia is a region full of strangers, brought together by high paying government work. In event of war, people could move back to their home turf, but that seems unlikely.

There is also the fact that civil wars are almost always between the elites. The people are dragged into it by the warring factions at the top. In modern America, the elites have never been more unified. In fact, they are so united we now have one political party, the Uni-Party. The reason that you cannot tell the difference between the political opinions of Jonah Goldberg and Ezra Klein is that ideologically they are the same guy, with the same paymasters.

If there was to be a civil war in America, it would first have to start as a revolt and gain enough steam to be a genuine threat to the status quo. If a revolt grew into a serious threat to the interests of the ruling classes, then you might see some elements decide to throw in with the rebels. In all likelihood, it would be the younger, lower level members of the elites, looking for an opportunity to leapfrog their superiors. Alternatively, the revolt could quickly grow an elite of its own.

Of course, there is the racial angle. It is funny in a way, but the two groups convinced of the coming race war are blacks and white nationalists. The trouble with this idea is the time for a race war was sixty years ago. There were plenty of young black males thinking they had nothing to lose and plenty of young white males thinking they had everything to lose, Today, the only people thinking race war are mentally unstable black guys and white nationalists.

There is also the technological issue. The lesson of the last century is that conventional warfare was no longer a good way for settling disputes. Putting aside nukes, conventional weapons had simply become too lethal and too destructive. Prior to the Great War, winning meant gaining useful territory. Modern warfare means destroyed cities and fractured economies for both sides. In a civil war, modern arms would mean a terrible bloodbath for both sides.

New Englanders would love to re-enact Sherman’s march to the sea, but they would end up killing more allies than enemies. The economic cost to the North would be devastating. The degree of integration in a modern society would work against the instinct to destroy the other guy’s stuff. Throw in the regionalism issue above and conventional warfare with set-piece battles and troop formations is not going to serve the interests of anyone in the next American civil war.

There is also another problem. The US military is about 1.3 million people, but about 80% are in administrative and support roles. We have more people in uniform pushing buttons at a keyboard than carrying a pack in the field. Of that fighting force, about two-thirds are deployed at any one time. It is not an accident that our political class is not a fan of keeping large numbers of combat ready troops on US soil. In a civil war, the US military would probably disintegrate quickly.

Now, America has been waging non-lethal war on the world for a long time in the form of financial war and now information war. Economic sanctions are a form of warfare intended to create unrest in the target society. North Korea’s quest for nukes is the economic war we have been waging against them. The Bush people took steps to cut them off from the banking system and thus starve the regime of hard currency. That has made the elites of the regime much poorer and weaker as a result.

In a civil war, the tools of finance would come to bear. Assuming the civil war began as a revolt, the ruling class would first attempt to squeeze the rebels financially, by cutting them off from the financial system, making it hard to raise money. This means shutting down their PayPal accounts. Credit card processors would be pressured to discontinue service. When that failed, banks would be forced to close accounts and the seize assets of troublemakers.

This would also discourage members of the elite from getting any ideas about supporting the rebels against the senior elements of the elite. This would be augmented by the use of information war to undermine the moral authority of the rebels, thus starving them of ability to gain popular support. Humans are social animals and they instinctively seek to distance themselves from the taboo. That would mean using mass media organs to evangelize against the rebels.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. America, and the West, is teetering on the verge of civil war, but a modern, technological civil war. On the one side is the globalist elite, who have purged their ranks of anyone skeptical of the project. The brewing revolt is mostly the people willing to question the prevailing orthodoxy. The panic we saw last summer by the tech giants was motivated by a fear that the internet revolt was becoming a revolt in the streets.

This is the face of modern civil war.

The Rackets

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There was a time, back in the 1990’s, when it was fun to read the American Spectator magazine. Three things stick in my head about it. One is the fact that they would fail to print some months or it would be late. They always had money trouble. The other thing was the irregular size of the thing. Of course, in the 90’s, the distinguishing feature was the Clinton-hating. The only person who hated the Clintons more than R. Emmett Tyrrell, was his financier, Richard Melon Scaife. Those two really hated the Clintons.

I think the last time I bothered to subscribe was maybe a decade ago. I hit the website once a week, but a search through my logs tells me I have never posted about anything contained in the American Spectator. The only writer I recognize while scanning the site is Ben Stein, who I am glad to see is still alive. For some reason I was under the impression he was dead. Apparently, it remains popular. I checked the Alexa rankings and it is ranked #13,562 in the US. That means it is as popular as the most read alt-right web sites.

That is a good entry point for understanding the commentariat. The Spectator is actually owned by a 501(c)(3) named The American Alternative Foundation. That appears to be a trade name. The real name is The Alex C. Walker Educational and Charitable Foundation, founded in 1968. A look at their tax returns says they have about nine million in assets and they take in about half a million in contributions. There are no paid employees listed on the tax return, so it is probably run by family members of the founders.

The interesting thing is the foundation’s mission, according to the website, is to promote environmental cleanup in Pittsburgh. How the American Spectator fits into that is a mystery, but it is a reminder that that these sorts of organizations take on a life of their own, usually becoming something the founder never intended. The reason for that is they are vehicles for rich people to funnel money into activities that they would just as soon not see their name attached. Then there is Robert Conquest’s Second Law.

Anyway, that is one reason publications like the American Spectator survive, despite not having many paying subscribers. They exist as a platform to promote ideas popular with rich people. It is not just the underlying funding mechanism. It is the nexus of not-for-profit think tanks and educational outfits. For example, here is a story that I spotted in the Spectator the other day, about the decline in test scores. This is an increasingly popular topic with the people highly skilled at not to noticing things.

At first blush, it looks like the sort of banal political blathering that makes up most of the commentariat. “We have to fix the schools” is one of those phrases that has become a bit of joke on the Dissident Right, but it remains wildly popular with Progressives and Conservative Inc. One reason for this is it helps finance that nexus of non-profits and unread publications that keep an army of liberal arts majors in six figure positions. The article in question was produced by an outfit calling itself the American Principles Project.

The American Principles Project is a 501(c)(3) think tank founded in 2009 by Robert George, Jeff Bell, and Frank Cannon. According to their mission statement, they are organized to promote immigration reform, education reform and religious liberty. I will note that what they mean by immigration reform is open borders. The foundations Latino Director is former Bush hand Alfonso Aguilar, who argued after Romney lost that immigration restriction positions would cost the GOP the 2016 election. Ooops!

If you look at their tax filing, you will see they take in a couple million a year in grants and donations. This is enough to pay six “scholars” an average of $140,000 per year, plus expenses. One of the scholars appears to be Maggie Gallagher. Double and triple dipping is a common practice in the think tank game. Having a spot at a foundation, plus a contract with a cable outlet and a range of side projects, means even a C-list chattering skull can live a comfortable life, without having to work hard.

Normal people wonder why the media is so corrupt and the answer lies in the financial arrangements. Cable news channels exist only because cable monopolies exist. The monopolies exist because they are sold by the government. The rich people who own these channels hire people to extol the virtues of rich people. The think tanks and foundations provide the content and experts, so the news presenters can have an easy time celebrating the rich people. It is a closed loop designed to close off alternatives.

The same is true on the print side of the media. The small sites like the Spectator cannot afford to pay writers, so they let think tanks post their agit-prop on their site, posing it as commentary. This helps promote their causes and it helps promote the people, who can decorate their CV with a long list of publications that have found their work so compelling, they just had to publish it! The media, at all levels, is a racket financed by monied interests in order to promote the policies and programs that are good for rich people.

There is a lesson here for the alt-right. The reason the people in charge are so desperate to demonize critics and declare their issues taboo is they want to scare away the financial support. There are a lots of rich people who sympathize with the alt-right, the Dissident Right and immigration patriots. What they need is a way to support the people they wish to support, without it being very obvious. That is the reason the 501(c)(3) was created. The political class wanted to conceal their money laundering from the public.

Lessons of Identity

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One of the remarkable things about identity politics is that the only group of humans not embracing identity politics are modern western white people. That is not entirely accurate, as some elements of the white population embrace identity politics. It is just not white identity politics. The groups that do embrace some form of identity politics, seem to look for groupings that are, to one degree or another, anti-white. That is the reality of identity politics. It is not just a thing whites do not do. It is something that only anti-whites do.

You see this in the election results from Alabama. Blacks hate white people and they have been trained now to see Trump as the face of white America. Blacks in Alabama correctly saw the election as a referendum on Trump and raced out to vote for the other guy. You can be sure that few of them had the slightest idea about the other guy. They just saw famous blacks supporting him, so they went out and voted their skin. The preliminary numbers show that black turnout was up compared to 2016. Blacks like identity politics.

“Bible believing Christians” were largely responsible for Moore winning the primary, but they have proven to be an easily manipulated identity group. They will vote for “their guy” but at the first hint that their guy does not tick all the right boxes, they will abandon him. In contrast, their guy can be a flaming liberal like a Jimmy Carter, or warmongering neocon like George Bush, and they will flock to the polls for him. The primary identity of “Bible believing Christians” is their desire to be embraced by the people in charge.

Homosexuals are another group that revealed themselves in this election. Matt Drudge was campaigning against Moore from the start, simply because Moore is old school on the sodomy issue. That is the definition of single issue politics. In that David French post I wrote about yesterday; he had a section on the gay stuff. National Review is now run by a homosexual activist, Jason Lee Steorts, who ran off Mark Steyn for repeating a fifty year old gay joke. Gays are homosexual first, everything else a very distant second.

The funny thing about identity politics in America, something the alt-right guys talk about frequently, is that whites are the only definable group that does not engage in identity politics. If every identity group in America was asked to send a representative to a flag convention, whites would be the only group not present. If someone did show up, he would have no idea what sort of flag to wave. He would probably just take one of his “I’m So Sorry” t-shirts and wave that around. No one would find this the least bit remarkable.

When it comes to politics, at least, the only definable feature of white identity is self-sabotage. That was on full display in Alabama. Moore was cast by the Left and the so-called Right as the white identity candidate. They were not explicit, but that was the message they wanted to send. White voters responded to this by staying home. The political class will spend the next year crowing about the result. They should be proud of their work. It is no small thing to get a far Left candidate elected in Alabama.

The biggest lesson of the Alabama race is something that the Dissident Right has been discussing for years now. The American political class has evolved to thwart anything resembling identity politics among majorities. Cosmopolitan globalism cannot work unless the population is deracinated and atomized. The whole point of our politics is to prevent anything resembling a transcendent majority to counter the power of the semi-permanent political class. Social democracy only works if everyone is at one another’s throat.

That is a big reason the political class has locked shields against Trump. It is exactly why they despise Bannon. While Trump is not a white identitarian, he fully grasps the importance of demographics. Bannon is viewed by the political class as a white nationalist in a tricorn hat. As long as America is majority white, any hint of white identity is seen as a mortal threat to the system. They are not wrong about that. If whites start voting their skin, both parties collapse and we end up with a vastly different ruling class.

Finally, there is a tendency for many on the Dissident Right to think that identity politics is an inevitability. That is the lesson of history everywhere except the white world. Rhodesia and South Africa had white ruling classes. In both cases, whites were just as enthusiastic about fighting one another as in maintaining their position. Rhodesia is no more and South Africa is well on its way toward a white genocide. Even as the bodies stack up and the black parties become more blood thirsty, whites refuse to embrace their identity.

In fact, this is the lesson of Europe. The Mongols and Muslims both found that Europeans were not incredibly good at uniting for a common purpose. Serendipity and geography were the great enemy of these invaders. On the other hand, Europeans have been spectacularly proficient at making war on one another. It is entirely possible that the competitive evolutionary pressures that advanced the cognitive skills of whites, compared to other racial groups, also makes them unable to cooperate with one another across ethnic lines.

An expression I am fond of using is “You learn more from your failures than from your successes.” For the people promoting identitarian politics, last night was a reminder that the people in charge are really good at pitting one group against another. They are especially good at pitting one group of whites against another, so they will fink on their own guys and harm their own interests. Most of the whites who stayed home, rather than vote for Moore, will be out blaming the whites who voted for Moore in the primary.

It is also a reminder that Trump is not particularly good at being President. He is not just an imperfect vessel for populist politics. He is a cup with a hole in it. It is not all his fault, as he is a saddled with a party that is just an extension of the Democrat Party. Last night should be a reminder that this is a long game. Trump will be impeached or voted out of office. His utility was always as a way to discredit the system and damage the Republican Party. That means it will only get uglier, but it is what must be done to break the system.

America’s problem is not demographics. It is the white people currently in charge.

The Life of Bugmen

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I take some pride in having pegged David French as a nutter as soon as he started turning up in so-called conservative publications. In all candor, I came to that conclusion before there was hard evidence to support the claim. He just reminded me of every fanatic I have ever met. He had the crazy eyes and the fanatic’s tendency to go overboard. The lack of an internal governor is the hallmark of the fanatic. Now, of course, French is well known as a NeverTrump loon, with a bad habit of wrapping himself in the flag.

In addition to being a crank, French is a good example of the soulless bugman that is now a feature of Conservative Inc. These are establishment men, who stand for nothing, because they traded away whatever integrity they possessed for a small salary and place in the system. In addition to peddling conspiracy theories about President Trump, they are now tasked with convincing conservative voters to vote against their own interests. Now, that means voting for Doug Jones over Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race.

The trouble is there has never been a starker choice for conservative voters. Roy Moore is staunchly pro-life, while Doug Jones wants to put abortion mills in the nation’s grammar schools. Moore is an immigration patriot, while Jones is an open borders absolutist. Moore is a social conservative, while Jones embraces the Progressive social agenda. Of course, the big issue is that Moore will be a reliable vote for Trump’s judicial nominees, while Jones will be another vote against anyone to the right of Chuck Schumer.

This glaringly obvious set of facts presents a problem when trying to convince conservatives to not vote for Moore. The first card played by the bugmen is always to dismiss the target as unqualified. That was the game they played with Trump, dismissing him as a reality TV star. In the case of Roy Moore, they keep insisting that he has wacky ideas about the law and government. Unsurprisingly, that is the first point in that French column. David French is not clever enough to be anything but ham-handed in his work.

If they cannot use their claims to authority as a means to dismiss the target, they resort to character assassination. This was the tactic they tried on Trump, by trying to paint him as a sexual predator and abuser of women. Somewhat comically, the bugmen played this card on Moore, planting absurd stories about him from 40 years ago. Bugmen lack a spine, as well as a soul, so they just assume everyone is as weak-willed as they are, when it comes to standing up to pressure. They always get this wrong.

In the end, the only thing left for these guys is to lie, and that is the one thing that comes naturally to them. Somewhat amusingly, French finishes his column with:

Anyone who tells you that your choice is limited to pro-abortion Doug Jones or an incompetent, unfit apparent child abuser like Roy Moore is simply lying to you. If you are a faithful conservative, you can write in a different name or stay home. You can reject the choice served up by the plurality of Alabama GOP primary voters and simply say, “If you want my vote, you have to do better.”

Elections in America are almost always binary choices. This election is a binary choice between the Democrat and the Republican. If conservatives listen to the bugmen and stay home, Jones will win. That is how it works. The inescapable logic of French’s argument is that he wants Jones to win. He lacks the guts to say it, but that is what he is doing. The whole point of his effort against Moore, and the work of other bugmen his handlers have deployed, is to damage Moore so that Jones is able to win the election.

That is the irony of these efforts. Conservatism is, if nothing else, a practical acceptance of the world as it is. The choice in an election is between two less than ideal options. If there is ever a time when you have the perfect candidate in a race, it means you are dead and are in heaven, where you get to vote for Jesus Christ. On this earth, the choice is always between two flawed men. French’s argument, in addition to being childish and stupid, is the exact opposite of the conservative position with regards to political choices.

Moral nullities like French like to bang on about their principles. He has the habit of posting pictures of himself from when he was a rear echelon guy in Iraq. It is a cheap tactic he learned from John McCain. He is the type of guy Ralph Waldo Emerson had in mind when he wrote, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” That is because the talk of principles from bugmen like French is just another tool of the trade. His job is promoting the interests of his masters. That is the life of every soulless bugman.

The Fourth Stage Of American History

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Over a century ago, Robert Lewis Dabney noted that Northern Conservatism never conserves anything. It makes a show of resisting whatever Progressive fads are currently popular, but in the end, it always gives in and eventually, embraces the fad as a principle of conservatism. He was probably not the first to note this, but his description remains the most famous, among those who traffic in taboo thoughts. His description of conservatism as a shadow that follows the Left is a great image that captures their nature perfectly.

The Dissident Right often uses a version of Dabney’s description to describe the modern conservative movement. What gets lost is the fact that Dabney was describing northern conservatives. This geographic split has been erased from the modern mind, as the people who won the Civil War slowly, but surely, erase everything but the history of the North from the nation’s memory. That last bit is critical. One of the distinguishing features of 20th century American conservatism was its Yankeeness.

One reason for this, of course, is that Progressivism is rooted in the North. In fact, it has been pretty much confined to what Colin Woodward called Yankeedom. This map is useful for understanding the demographic contours of American regionalism. Those dark blue areas are where Lefty walks the streets unmolested. It only makes sense that the loyal opposition would be located in the same areas. The colleges and universities growing the next generation of Progressives, also produce their conservative analogs.

There is another angle to this. There were fifteen presidents before Lincoln. Six of them were from Yankeedom or the Midlands. The rest were from the Tidewater or the South. Virginia used to be called the Cradle of Presidents because seven pre-Civil War presidents were from there. Only one post-Civil War president, Woodrow Wilson, has been from Virginia. Of the thirty since the war, twenty-five have been from Yankeedom or from the Midlands. There have been nineteen from parts of the country that fall into the dark blue portion of that linked map.

Since the Civil War, America has been dominated by one region of the country. It stands to reason that politics would be rooted in this region as well. Because Progressives, in various manifestations, are dominant in the North, they have been the driving force in America politics and culture as a whole. Naturally, any reaction to this would be culturally rooted in the North as well. Put another way, politics in America has been a lover’s quarrel between the two halves of Yankeedom since the Civil War.

This arrangement probably would have collapsed a century ago, but world events interceded to lock things in place. The Great War, the Depression, World War Two and then the long nuclear stand-off with the Russians locked things in place. With the nation at risk, any effort to upset the domestic political arrangements would be quickly swatted down. The reason our politics are in a flux now, with the old arrangements collapsing, is there is no longer an exogenous force to lock things in place. Normalcy is returning.

This is why the gap between Progressives and the Buckley Conservatives seems so small all of a sudden. The stand-off with the Soviets was not just a military and political conflict. There was a moral and philosophical conflict. That magnified the differences because it cast them against the backdrop of the larger dispute between Eastern authoritarianism and Western pluralism. Once that backdrop was gone, what was left was two sides squabbling over trivial items and competing for the love of financial backers.

It is also why politics turned into a screaming match after the Cold War ended. There were no big areas of dispute, so they had no choice but to pretend that the trivial differences between the two sides were enormous divides. That was the crucial insight of the Clinton people. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by bellowing about how Bush the Elder did not know how grocery store scanners worked. Clinton, Bush and Obama were basically the same guy, but the political class carried on like they were polar opposites.

What all this means is that we are in the transition period between the third and fourth phases of American history. The first phase was the Colonial Period that lasted up to and included the Revolutionary War. Then there was the Constitutional Period that lasted until the Civil War. The third period was the Yankee Imperium, which lasted from the Civil War through the end of the Cold War. What comes next is debatable, but it is clear that the rest of the country is going to have a say in the political life of the country.

One thing that is certain is that the political arrangements, both formal and informal, will change as the nation transitions to what comes next. The great centralization of power over the last century to implement the Yankee moral vision domestically and build out the empire around the world is not made for a world of identity politics, regionalization and an empire in retreat. We have legal and political institutions for white people to manage disputes between white people. Those are useless in a majority-minority country.

One final thought on this. These phases of American history have been punctuated by violent conflict. The people who settled and founded the country were not gentle, passive souls. The Colonial Period ended in War. The Constitutional Period ended with the Civil War. It is reasonable to think that this transition period will have its violent elements before we settle into that fourth phase. We live in a low violence time, so civil war is unlikely, but the coming years will most likely feature harsh, regional disputes.

Free Speech In The Custodial State

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A point I am fond of making is that without freedom of association, you cannot have any other liberties. You can have the appearance of choice, like when you stand in the breakfast cereal aisle at the grocery store, but you can never have real choices. The state not only puts you in that supermarket, but they also put you in the aisle, along with a bunch of other people. In order to prevent a riot from breaking out, the state must supervise your speech, your actions and make sure you focus on picking from the options on the shelves.

Whether or not our rulers know this is debatable. A feature of post-modernism is that the people in charge forget everything learned by prior generations regarding the human condition and human society. People used to know the link between free association and other liberties. It is why the state regulated public airwaves. Because it required effort to avoid speech broadcast over the air, that speech had to fit community standards. Speech that took effort to consume, like pay services, were free from state censorship.

Anyway, the Left is in something close to a full panic over the oral arguments in Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The reason for this is the way Judge Gorsuch questioned the attorney for the homosexuals. He correctly pointed out that the “remedy” for the alleged discrimination, is to force the baker to say things in public that he would never say and that he finds offensive. Gorsuch did not say this, but this is how Chinese communists punished heretics in the Cultural Revolution.

Colorado Civil Rights Commission

Put another way, the “remedy” for those not wanting to associate, in this case do business with another group of people, is to frog march them into the public square and force them to say things they think are false and possibly evil. Of course, it is the only remedy, short of genocide, which is possible in a society without freedom of association. Once the state can force you to be around other people, people you may not like, they have no choice but to supervise your speech, your thoughts and your every move. You are a slave.

That is the reality of the custodial state. The people in charge see themselves as your caretakers, like a babysitter or care giver. In reality though, you are their slave, because like a slave, you no longer control your body. They control where it is and what it is permitted to do. In this particular case. the state is trying to force this baker to perform his services for the homosexuals. The efforts to punish him are no different from a slave master flogging a runaway slave. It is to send a message to the rest of the slaves.

The homosexual Slate writer senses this reality, but he cannot bare to face it because it means questioning the One True Faith. Even worse for him is that homosexuals have created an identity, a sense of worth, based on this notion they are a protected class, given special liberties. A white man can be run out of his job by Antifa loons and no one from the local Civil Rights Commission is coming to his aid. Homosexual terrorists can stalk the nation’s Christian bakers and they get the full support of the state.

What makes this case frightening to the Left is that there is no way for the court to rule in favor of the baker, which does not undermine the foundation of the modern special rights movement. Let us say they carve out a religious “exception” to the laws providing homosexuals with special status. The court is, in effect, saying that religion ranks higher than sexual proclivity. The gays move down a peg. What happens when the court has to choose between Jews and Nazis? Or Muslims and Jews? It quickly becomes untenable.

This is also why the Court will have no choice but to rule against the baker. The three lesbians and Breyer, of course, are predictable votes against liberty, but Kennedy and Roberts have proven to be dependable defenders of the Progressive movement. Kennedy authored the ridiculous gay marriage ruling, after all. Roberts is smart enough to see how ruling for the baker will unravel the Progressive project, so he will probably produce some tortured logic to justify the state compelling forced confessions from heretics.

This is the other consequence of eliminating freedom of association. The cost of restoring it always appears too high. Most Southerners before the Civil War understood that slavery was untenable, but the cost of ending it was worse. That is what is facing the guardians of our custodial state. They know the regime cooked up to address blacks in the 1960’s can only lead to tyranny, but unraveling it offers near term costs that seem more frightening than whatever comes at some later date. Things will just have to run their course.

It will not end well.

 

Theories Of The Crime

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The recent developments in the so-called Russian hacking case have proven that it was never about Russia. It was about “other stuff.” This seemed obvious for a while, but now we know for sure. The two main figures singled out as part of some conspiracy to do something with the Russians, were found to have done nothing with the Russians. They have been charged with unrelated crimes. The public statements of Robert Mueller make clear that he is not investigating Russian involvement in the election.

This was not hard to figure out. I posted about this here and here. The chants of “Russian hacking” from the Clinton camp were always ridiculous. Lots of foreign governments meddle in our elections. That is not new. What they are not doing, because it cannot be done, is “hacking” the election. Instead, the public information has always supported the idea that the people involved in this probe were trying to hide something. The question is what are they trying to hide and why would they go to these lengths?

So, what is going on?

The first thing to note is that all of the recent scandals seem to include one of the people now involved in the probe into the mythical Russian hacking stuff. Robert Mueller was the delivery boy in the Uranium One deal. He delivered a uranium sample to the Russians on behalf of the United States government. He then handled the investigation of the shenanigans around the Clinton Foundation and the money that came in from Russian sources, just around the time when Hillary was pushing the Uranium One deal.

Of course, Mueller was the mentor of James Comey, who took over for Mueller as head of the FBI. Comey is one of those guys you see in Washington, who is a lot like the career assistant coach that finally gets to be head coach. Everyone loved him as the second banana and assumed he would be a great top banana. He gets the top job and suddenly, everyone realizes why he was a career assistant. Comey’s main role was in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal, which he managed to botch in ways no one imagined.

Comey’s blundering is reminiscent of Janet Reno. The Clintons picked her to run Justice because she was stupid, incurious and easily controlled by assistants. Reno was never bright enough to realize that her assistants were making sure she never asked the wrong questions or looked in the wrong places. That seems to be the role Comey played in the last years of the Obama administration. He staggered around thinking he was being the good citizen, when in reality he was being controlled by political operatives in the FBI.

Then there is the infamous “dodgy dossier” that was cooked up by a firm called Fusion GPS. This firm is run by former Wall Street Journal reporters. They exist to do opposition research for the political class. What we know is the Clinton campaign paid them for something. The NeverTrump loons paid them for something. The FBI relied on them to justify their Russia probes. We also know they are fighting Congress tooth and nail to prevent any of this being exposed to sunlight. So is the DOJ for some reason.

Then there is the fact that the FBI was bugging Trump Tower. Their justification was, wait for it, Russian gamblers. It is surely a coincidence and there is no reason to think they were listening to Trump. The fact that the DOJ was routinely unmasking Trump people, so they could listen in on their communications, was probably no big deal. Well, it was important to General Flynn. The FBI charged him with lying to them, because they had the electronic records contradicting his statement about his dealings with foreigners.

Then we have Obama appointee Rod Rosenstein, who seems to be in the middle of just about everything. There is a John Dean vibe to this guy. He was the one who wrote the long memo to Trump, recommending that Comey be fired. Then, coincidentally, he was the guy who recommended the appointment of the special prosecutor. Even crazier, he is the guy who picked Bob Mueller’s name out of nowhere to be on the list of options for President Trump. He just happens to be an old friend of Bob Mueller. What a coincidence!

Finally, the last member of the dramatis personae is Andrew McCabe, the second in command at the FBI. He came to fame when it was revealed that while he was leading the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail shenanigans, his old lady was taking fifty grand from Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe. Mrs. McCabe was running for local office in Virginia and the governor, out of the blue, suddenly took an interest in her political career. He raised a bunch of money for her, just because he is that sort of guy.

Theories of the crime?

The first thing that is obvious is that the same cast of characters keep turning up in these different scandals. Rod Rosenstein, Bob Mueller, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, these names keep popping up in all of the not obviously related matters. Maybe it is a coincidence, but there is a Tammany Hall feel to it. No one guy is obviously guilty of anything, but criminality seems to hang over them like a bad odor. It is possible that the FBI has become a rotten precinct and infected some in the Department of Justice.

Another possibility is that these guys were turned by the Clinton machine and they got sloppy in the year prior to the election. They assumed Clinton was going to win, so they wanted to show their enthusiasm and loyalty by going the extra mile during the general election. After all, everyone in official Washington was sure Clinton was going to win for at least six months prior to the election. John Dean went to great lengths to conceal his own perfidy during the Watergate years. We have a gaggle of John Deans here.

Of course, there is the Trump factor. Maybe these guys figured they could clever their way out some embarrassment by maneuvering Trump into appointing a special prosecutor. Then he and his people would not get too curious about this stuff as no one dares take on a special prosecutor. They just assumed Trump would be like a normal politician and roll over for them. Instead, Trump is banging away at them. Suddenly we have serious people saying Trump should fire Mueller and bring in someone fresh.

Back when Trump started running in the primary, I started calling him The Mule, after the character in the Asimov novel. For two years now, everyone who has dared to take on Trump has been blown to bits, usually by their own hand. It is quite remarkable. The arc of the Trump political career is littered with the obituaries of people who foolishly challenged him. The fact that Trump has maneuvered all of the main actors into the same box now, suggests he may have been ahead of these guys all along.

Family Friendly

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If science suddenly noticed that birds were laying fewer eggs, they would ring the alarm and warn of a coming bird-apocalypse. The assumption would be that humans were doing something to make the birds unable to reproduce. The same would be true of any species that saw its fertility decline. The starting assumption of biology is that all living things are built primarily to reproduce. That is the biological imperative. With one exception, a drop in an animal’s fertility must be due to some exogenous factor. That exception is humans.

In the West, human fertility rates have steadily fallen for over a half century. This is celebrated by our betters as the hallmark of human progress. Anytime the subject of fertility rates is raised, the knee-jerk response is to start hooting about women being more educated and having more options. The underlying assumption is that stupid people have lots of kids while smart people have few children. The implication of this is that the people who built Western Civilization were stupid, because they had high fertility rates.

The whole “women are more educated” argument is not really an effort to understand why fertility rates, especially white fertility rates, have fallen. Rather, it is an effort to not understand it. It is a deliberate distraction, a way of shifting the focus from a problem that cannot be addressed by the Left, whether it is the materialist Left of Europe or the spiritual Left on America. To even acknowledge that the purpose of women is to have children gnaws at the extreme egalitarianism that animates the Western Left.

To some degree, efforts to level off fertility in Europe make sense. There are lots of people on the Continent who do not always get along with one another. Generations of warfare pounded home the message that stable societies, respectful of national borders, is the way to keep the peace. Keeping fertility rates at something just above replacement was an understandable goal. In America though, that is not an issue. The country is mostly empty space with lots of room to expand. Americans should be breeding like Africans.

It really is an odd thing that has happened in America over the last fifty years. Starting in the 1960’s, motherhood became something close to a badge of shame with our cognitive elites. This rather quickly oozed into the upper classes and then the middle class. As a result, public policy has been altered to discourage childbearing. Just look at the hysterics from Progressive women anytime they do not get their way. They immediately start howling about how they will not get easy access to abortions and free prophylactics.

This came to mind when I saw a tweet by the left-wing political science professor George Hawley, commenting on the GOP tax bill. He linked to an essay he posted about public policy and fertility rates. For those familiar with this territory, the points he makes and the errors he commits are all familiar. France may have a TFR of 2.08, but the French people do not have that TFR. The invader population has rocket high fertility rates, but the French, well, not so much. Steve Sailer touched on one aspect of this in a Taki post.

A similar pattern, though less pronounced, is seen in the US. White fertility rates are below replacement, while black fertility is still above replacement. Although the homicide rates among blacks probably requires a different definition of “replacement.” Hispanics have the highest fertility rates. In other words, simply looking at TFR for a country that is slowly being overrun by a third world population will lead to errors. In majority white countries, the salient issue is not TFR, but white fertility rates, relative to the whole.

Putting that aside, we return to the original question. Two questions, actually. Is it simply that whites are choosing to die out or have whites simply wandered down a cul-de-sac, in terms of public policy, which is having adverse effects on white fertility? One way to tease this out is something that Steve Sailer did after the 2012 election. He looked at how white women voted, relative to their marriage habits. In places where white women can and do marry, stay married and raise children, whites vote Republican.

Another way of putting this is that where affordable family formation is highest, you get more families. Despite being run by a cult, Utah is a wonderful place to raise a family. It is like the set of Leave It to Beaver, but the size of a European country. At the other end, a state like Massachusetts is wildly expensive and hostile to family formation. Those who do choose to marry and start families, often move to other states. The decades long migration, north to south and east to west, has largely been driven by cost of living.

None of this answers the basic question. Is it crackpot public policy driving down white fertility or is some weird desire for extinction? The latter is impossible to know, so the prudent course is to assume the former is the correct answer. That is basic logic. This means any movement that is explicitly for preserving the nation’s racial character should promote public policies that are explicitly and overtly pro-family. That is the part of Hawley’s post that is correct. The GOP should be fanatically pro-family, not pro-business.

This especially holds for the dissident right. The alt-right is all over the map on public policy, because they get bogged down squabbling over aesthetics. Oddly, the best thing they could do, in terms of “optics”, is cast themselves as the extreme end of the pro-family spectrum. Redefining pro-women to mean pro-mother would go a long way toward rallying white Americans to their cause. After all, being for something always trumps being against something, even when the thing you oppose is awful. Positive always beats negative.

The Corporate State

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In America, the First Amendment allegedly guarantees the right of the people to publicly speak and debate public issues. It also guarantees the right to peaceably assemble for political activities. Most important, it guarantees the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. It used to be that every American child learned this in grammar school civics. It was the defining concept of what it meant to be an American. It is what distinguished Americans from other citizens and subjects of the world.

The only people talking about free speech these days are fringe heretics in the Dissident Right. All of our best people now agree that the only way for the people to be truly free is to require everyone to get permission from the authorities in order to have an opinion. It is the only way to keep the peace in a multicultural society. After all, diversity is our strength and nothing is more sacred than our diversity. Therefore questioning diversity is no different than calling for violent revolution. We embrace all opinions, except the wrong ones.

The trouble our betters have is that the pesky First Amendment is still a part of the Constitution. Passing crime-think laws in America is much more difficult than it is in a modern utopia like China. Unsurprisingly, the way around this problem, the inspiration, comes from China. Instead of having the government censor speech, the government leans on monopolistic “private companies” to police the media. It’s not an accident that the tech giants all worked with the ChiComs to build out the Great Fire Wall of China.

America is now a world where you need permission to speak. If you post heretical material on social media, the tech giants shut off your access. If you keep at it and find ways around the censors, the authorities send the mass media after you. That’s what happened with this fry cook in Ohio. He kept saying unapproved things, so the Times was sent in to investigate and raise awareness. He is now in the process of being un-personed. Thank goodness Carlos Slim is here to defend us from these people!

Most Americans look at these complaints about speech and just roll their eyes. After all, they still have thirteen flavors of the same official opinion on their cable system and, let’s face it, the only people complaining about this stuff are bad people. The trouble, of course, is that this stuff never stops with the bad people. Having found a clever way to get around Constitutional limits on the state, the people in charge  are now applying these new techniques to get around the fundamentals of self-government.

That’s what we see here with this story about the credit rating agency Moody’s, dictating policy to cities and towns.

Coastal communities from Maine to California have been put on notice from one of the top credit rating agencies: Start preparing for climate change or risk losing access to cheap credit.

In a report to its clients Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds. If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default.

“What we want people to realize is: If you’re exposed, we know that. We’re going to ask questions about what you’re doing to mitigate that exposure,” Lenny Jones, a managing director at Moody’s, said in a phone interview. “That’s taken into your credit ratings.”

Americans have figured out that climate change is mostly a racket cooked up by rich people and fanatics to skim money from the public. Americans are willing to go along with low-cost virtue signalling, like toting around grimy canvas sacks to the food market, but no one is on-board with returning to the Bronze Age to please Gaia. As a result, local politicians will pay lip service to global warming, but they have no interest in acting on it, even when offered bribes. It’s a good way to get voted out of office.

The way around this is to have private firms do what the stupid voters refuse to do.That’s compel government to enact the polices the greens demand. No one can get mad at Moody’s. They are just a private firm acting in their interests. Unless you’re some sort of America-hating commie, you must support private business. This is just how the market place works. You’re not against the free market, are you? It’s not hard to imagine a time when credit agencies and banks assign credit ratings to politicians in advance.

In 1881, Pope Leo XIII commissioned a study of what is now called corporatism. The result was a definition that imagined society as an organism. Within the organic state were natural groupings of men, to whom the state delegated power to organize labor and capital, on behalf of the state, within their sphere of control. A generation later, the Charter of Carnaro was a constitution built on these concepts. Most historians view this as the direct precursor to Italian fascism.

The point is that cooperation between private interests and public interests is not a new thing in Western society. What’s new to our age is the scale and power of private interests. Under fascism, the state defines society and everything is subordinated to the state. In our age, the roles will be reversed. The “private” interests will define the state and public interests will be subordinate. The state, of course, will exist only as a theoretical construct, as borders and boundaries are antithetical to global interests.

From the perspective of the modern elites, it is an ideal solution to the problems of self-government, democracy and multiculturalism. Instead of government representing the various interest groups in society, government will now look like a corporate HR department. It will safeguard the interests of senior management. Instead of town hall meetings where citizens address their elected officials, we’ll have leadership seminars where management shares their vision with the populace.

This will not end well.

The Shadows Grow

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On election night last year, Fox News rolled out Britt Hume to editorialize on the results and what it meant for conservatism. Hume went through the list of things that he said defined conservatism over the last number of decades. He then pointed out how Trump rejected these items, in full or in part, to win the GOP nomination and then the general election. Hume’s definition of conservatism sounded like a lunch order. It was just a list of policy goals, like cutting taxes, reducing regulation and free trade.

That’s because over the last several decades, Official Conservatism™ has been reduced to a soulless list of agenda items, based on the same assumptions about the human condition as Progressivism. In many cases, the official Left and the official Right agree on the same goals, but disagree on tactics. Tax policy is a great example. Both sides agree that tax policy is about social engineering, by rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others. The debate, such as there is, is about which behaviors to prioritize.

The critique of Official Conservatism™ from the Right is rooted in the observation that Conservatives now agree with Progressives on base assumptions about the human condition and human organization. Humans are infinitely malleable and human society has no organic, natural form. As a result, both Left and Right now share a moral code, which is a Progressive moral code. This has reduced conservatism to an assistant’s role, where its primary job is to police the Right and purge those who threaten the moral order.

For the last 25 years, the institutions of Official Conservatism™ have done a good job of imposing their will on the other elements that allegedly make up the coalition of the American Right. Social conservatives have been coerced into supporting globalist economics. Foreign policy realists have either been purged or forced into accepting the neocon position. Everyone has been marinated in immigration romanticism to the point where even the most sensible will genuflect when passing the Statue of Liberty.

The trouble is, the old paleocons were right all along. The hip and modern version of conservatism, what the alt-right boys call Boomer Conservatism, has been a complete failure, even by its own standards. Globalism has not made the typical American more prosperous. In fact, we have experienced a decline in living standards. Wars of choice to bring the joys of social democracy to the savages have resulted in America looking like a police state. The effort to spread liberty has made all of us less free.

It is the area of social policy where Official Conservatism™ has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s not just the trannies stalking the girl’s restroom or the degenerates running wild in the public square. Those are the sorts of things that can be rectified in an hour, if the state feels the need. The real disaster is in the institutions that define the culture at the street level. Social groups, churches, even religion itself, has seen its legitimacy undermined by the new consensus forged between the Left and the Right.

This post on National Review the other day by Ramesh Ponnuru is about the rethinking of this arrangement by social conservatives. He is working off this essay by the editor of First Things, a religious-right operation founded by Richard John Neuhaus. Ponnuru’s post is mostly hyperventilating and hand-waving, in an effort to not address the main observations made by the author. Guys like Ponnuru never imagined they would need to defend themselves from their Right, so they have no way to do it, other than dismissal.

One thing that stands out about the First Things post is the acknowledgement that the bargain struck between traditional Christianity in America and the political Right was deal salient in another age. It no longer makes sense in a post-Cold War America where the challenges are purely cultural. This is a critique of Official Conservatism™ that is popular with blogs like this one. The marriage of convenience between social conservatives, anti-communists and libertarian economists stopped being convenient when the war ended.

Now, First Things is not about to embrace the alt-right, or even biological realism anytime soon. You see that in the post, where the author goes through the usual rituals to signal his fidelity to anti-racism. His discussion of Charlottesville brings to mind a man trying to bury something that keeps rising to the surface no matter how much dirt he piles on it. The thing that is rising from the earth, despite his frantic efforts to cover it up with scare words, is the realization that the old moral paradigm is no longer useful in this age.

For the longest time, Official Conservatism™ was defined by the three key elements of its coalition. Social conservatives, free market libertarians and hawkish anti-communists made up the Grand Army of the Right. They even sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the GOP convention. Once the Cold War ended, the anti-communist leg no longer had a reason to exist, which is why the coalition spiraled out of control. Social conservatism had always been a junior partner, but after the Cold War it was reduced to window dressing.

Fundamentally, the Dissident Right, of which the alt-right is a part, is a reaction to the failures of American conservatism. If Official Conservatism™ is unable to keep men in sundresses out of the girl’s restroom, what good is it? The answer from the Dissident Right is that it is no good at all. Seeing elements of Official Conservatism™ begin to openly question their arrangements along the same lines suggests the shadow of the Dissident Right is starting to reach the walls of the Orthodoxy. They are noticing us.

It goes beyond noticing though. Read conventional right-wing journals and what you find is a vapid recitation of 1980’s dogma, salted with references to Buckley and Reagan. It’s like listening to disco. Read sites on the Dissident Right like American Greatness and you find thoughtful criticism and reasoned attempts at making sense of the current age. The shadow of the Dissident Right is growing, because relative to the legacy right, the people in this thing are intellectual giants. Ideas do matter and we’re the ones with the ideas now.