Category Archives: Politics

The FBI’s Russia Shield

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The prevailing assumption regarding the Russian investigation is that it is a big nothing cooked up by bitter Democrats and promoted by the media to avoid facing up to the reality of the 2016 election. Once it became clear that the Podesta e-mails were causing trouble for Clinton, her people started chanting “Russian hacking” at every press conference, as if they had an exotic form of Tourette’s syndrome. It has all the hallmarks of a Clinton media fraud. They repeat something over and over, knowing the press will echo it.

The appointment of a special prosecutor has been viewed as an effort by the Trump administration to put the issue to bed. The press was never going to stop talking about and the Democrats were going to keep screaming about it. Name a special prosecutor and everyone has shut up about it. Mueller will spend a year and millions of dollars to discover there is nothing to the claims. That is the official version. What if it is something else entirely? What if the special prosecutor is just an excuse to handle some other matter?

The rule of thumb with political scandals is they fall into one of three buckets. There is the sex scandal, as with Bill Clinton. Then there are the money scandals, involving graft and public corruption. Hillary Clinton is the obvious example here. Then there is the personal scandal. This is the scandal where hurt feelings or a broken promise result in one member of the political class dishing dirt on another. Watergate was this type of scandal at its core. Mark Felt was angry at being passed over so he ratted out people to the press.

That is the odd thing about the Russia business. It has none of the markings of a political scandal. It works as a media event, as it ticks a lot of boxes for the press. They get to trade on salacious rumors for a while, without having to do any real reporting. Throw in some conspiracy theories and the Boris Badenov angle and it fills the news cycles for a few weeks. Otherwise, there is not enough to this Russian conspiracy to warrant a phone call from the FBI, much less a full blown investigation.

That is what makes the appointment of a special prosecutor so strange. The guy who convinced Trump to fire the FBI Director was Rod Rosenstein. He is pretty much a career Justice Department hand. Trump accepted his recommendation and fired Comey. Then Rosenstein ended up as the guy handling the phony Russia story after Sessions mysteriously recused himself. Trump then went on a rampage for a few weeks complaining about Sessions, even hinting that he may fire him over it.

Rosenstein then recommended a special prosecutor. The guy he recommended is a close friend of Comey and the former FBI Directory, Robert Mueller. In fact, Mueller preceded Comey in the job. Forgotten in all the excitement is the fact that Trump claimed the Obama people had bugged Trump Tower. The new was full of stories that the FBI may have a former Trump adviser on a wire. Of course, we now know that the Obama Administration was running a widespread domestic surveillance operation.

Then there are things that seem unrelated, but maybe not. Comey personally handled the Clinton e-mail probe. He is either a world class bungler or he had a reason to bungle it. Either way, he bungled it. He also appears to have perjured himself in his Congressional testimony. In one case, he later amended his testimony when it became obvious, he made false statements under oath. Maybe Comey was trying to hide something, but the more plausible answer is that he is just not good at this sort of work.

Regardless, there should be a whole bunch of attention on the FBI right now. At the minimum, they have been outlandishly incompetent over the last half of the Obama Administration. That should warrant a house cleaning. Alternatively, they may have been corrupted by the Obama Administration. It is clear that Samantha Power was abusing her authority with regards to domestic surveillance. It is reasonable to assume the FBI was compromised in some way during Comey’s tenure.

That may be what is really going on with the special prosecutor. The phony Russia scandal provided an excuse to bring in a political pro like Mueller to clean up the mess left by Comey and the Obama Administration. The FBI is not supposed to be spying on Americans without a warrant and they are really not supposed to be listening in on politicians. Someone signed off on bugging Trump Tower, during and after the presidential election. Who knows what other shenanigans have been going on?

The most likely answer for why a special prosecutor was appointed is that it was an easy way to get the whole thing out of the White House. Since the story is bogus and Mueller surely knows it is bogus, it will be a nice patronage program for a year or two and then the whole thing goes away. The second most likely answer is that Mueller’s job is to clean up the mess left by Comey and protect the reputation of the FBI, maybe even some other intelligence agencies. That way, no one gets hurt the problems are quietly fixed.

What this is not. is an investigation about Russia meddling in the election.

The Trump Gambit

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For a few weeks, Trump has been saying and doing things that do not seem to make a lot of sense. The black pill interpretation is that he has decided to cuck on all of his promises and cave into the establishment. Of course, the anti-Trump loons are claiming they were right all along and Trump is now finking on his stupid voters. Then you have the mouth breathers that hoot about 5-D chess all the time. The more likely explanation is that Trump is making a calculated gamble on himself and his read on public opinion.

Take the DACA controversy. Trump can count, so he knows the Democrats have far fewer members in both houses of Congress than the Republicans. He can cut all the deals he likes with Pelosi and Schumer, but those deals will go nowhere without the GOP leadership, as they control the legislative agenda. The game was to embarrass Ryan and Mitchell. By making it look like the Democrats were willing to work with him, he forced the GOP to make its own moves on immigration. It is petty, but it works.

The other point of the exercise was to get people talking about immigration in a way that works in his favor. News stories about “dreamers” makes him look bad. He rightly figured that his voters would get mad over his rumored cave and they would take it out on the GOP leadership. It would also trigger the immigration patriots to fire off a million proposals for fixing immigration. From Trump’s perspective, turmoil is good as it gets his people fired up, looking for a fight and it forces the GOP leadership to respond.

Trump did not get this far by not understanding the political map. He knows he is the leader of the White Party, which has been forced to vote within the Republican Party. He certainly never says it like that, but he is an old school New Yorker. He understands the skins game better than most. His opposition is not the Democrats. His enemy is the GOP, which has traditionally served to blunt the interests of the White Party. Therefore, Trump needs to keep the fires burning for the coming fights in the Republican primaries.

You see glimpses of what is coming in the Alabama Senate Race. The White Party is lining up behind Judge Moore, mostly because he is not on the side of Mitch McConnell. Trump has endorsed the establishment guy, claiming to do so out of party loyalty. At the same time, an army of Trump surrogates are in the state endorsing Moore. Even Trump has given mixed signals about his endorsement of Luther Strange. There is a wink-wink quality to all of it. It is theater and everyone in the audience is in on the gag.

Next year, there will be a slate of candidates running against GOP incumbents, promising to support the Trump agenda. There will be Democrat challengers making the right noises on immigration and trade. How successful these challengers are will depend a lot upon how things go in Washington the next six months. That is the message Trump is trying to send to guys like Ryan and McConnell, who seem to be trapped in a fantasy world where the 2016 election never happened and they are beloved figures on the Right.

From Trump’s perspective, the result on Tuesday opens up opportunities. If Strange pulls a miracle and wins the election, then Trump will be tweeting about how he can deliver votes even for a bozo like Strange. If Moore wins, then Trump will tweet that he tried to be loyal to McConnell and the GOP, but they refused to learn from past mistakes. In a few hours, no one will remember that he endorsed the loser. Instead, the story will be about the impending disaster for the establishment GOP in the coming primaries.

There is risk to what Trump is doing in Alabama. If Luther Strange wins, the White Party will be discouraged and may start to turn on Trump. At the minimum, it gives the anti-Trump loons ammunition to accuse Trump of finking on his base. It could also embolden guys like Ryan, who are convinced that Trump has no base. On the other hand, a win by Moore and the same cucks will argue that Trump cannot deliver votes, so they are wise to oppose him. You can be sure they have those op-eds written and ready to send.

It is a gamble, but Trump is a guy who thinks he can make something out of anything, as long as he has options. Whether it was by design or serendipity, this election is a referendum on the GOP establishment. The most likely outcome, according to polling, is a Moore win and maybe a big win. Trump will not only take credit for it but start to bet his winnings on the belief he can scare the GOP into passing his agenda items. They may hold the result against him, but Trump is betting they cave and play ball with him.

The reason it is a good gamble is the pressure on leadership will now come from their own ranks. Ryan and McConnell can keep discipline as long as they can promise their members, they will keep their seats. If the rank and file start thinking they are safer with Trump or that Trump will back their challengers, then it is game over for Ryan and McConnell. They have to play ball. From Trump’s perspective, he has everything to game and nothing to lose. Ryan and McConnell cannot hate him more than they already do.

Judicial Anarchism

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Russell Kirk argued that there are three cardinal ideas in Western civilization. There is the idea of justice, the idea of order, and the idea of freedom. Justice is the process that protects a man’s life, property, natural rights, status and his dignity. Order is the principle and the process to ensure that a people will have just leaders, loyal citizens, and public tranquility. Freedom is the principle that a man is made master of his own life. These three great concepts are the cement of American society.

Some nations have order without justice or freedom. China is a modern example of a tyranny where order is maintained, but there is no justice or freedom. Somalia is an example where there is freedom, but no order or justice, the libertarian ideal. There can be no justice, of course, without order and freedom, which is the point of the American experiment. Our society is a regime of ordered liberty, designed to give justice, order and freedom all their due recognition and respect.

Most everyone in the American chattering classes, takes order for granted, in fact, they never think much about it. Instead, they spend their energy fretting over liberty and justice. That has been the basis of the political divide in our ruling class since the end of World War II. The Left has largely been focused on justice, particularly the ideas of status and dignity. The Right has focused on liberty, particularly with regards to property. Both sides of the political class have always assumed order was a given.

Of course, order is not a given. The Roman Republic is a good example of what happens when order breaks down in the ruling class. The elites slowly stopped enforcing its own rules on the ruling class. Whether out of necessity or convenience, order slowly broke down. By the time Marius and Sulla came along, playing by the rules was a sucker’s game, if you were in the ruling class. That set the stage for a strong man willing and able to ignore custom and seize control of the state.

The other way in which order breaks down is the example of Weimar Germany. The political class lacked the means and the moral authority to impose order. The chaos on the streets is commonly blamed for the rise of you know who. The disorder following the collapse of the Soviet Union is blamed for the rise of the oligarchs. History is full of examples where the ruling class either lost control or lost the moral authority to maintain control. Every revolution in history follows this model to some degree.

What we are seeing in modern America is a strange combination of how order breaks down in a society. The American ruling class is concluding that the rules really do not work for them. They do not have the will or ability to simply toss them aside and impose a new order, but they refuse to allow the old rules to limit their power. That is what is happening with the chaos we see in the courts. Judges, who are members of the ruling class, are willy-nilly overthrowing the constitutional order.

As Daniel Horowitz wrote last month, the Federal judiciary is claiming power for itself, that it has no constitutional basis. Judges are just making things up so they can overturn laws and thwart the constitutional power of the President. The Founders contemplated rogue judges, so there are provisions for removing a judge from the bench. That is fine for one judge here or there, but no one has ever thought about what happens when the whole judiciary goes rogue. The remedy may be too dangerous to attempt.

Take a look at the list of suggestions in that article. Having states ignore Federal courts is not a small thing. it is a click away from secession. If a state legislature elected to go this route, they would be placing themselves in legal jeopardy. A federal judge could order the arrest of the speaker of the state house or the governor. Would the governor respond by having the judge arrested? It is not hard to see how this can get out of control, pitting the political class against itself, but also against factions in the public.

In a rational, liberal society, there should be debate and division, within the context of an agreed upon set of rules. What the court is doing in America is questioning the very idea of rules. They are claiming for themselves the right to make up whatever they feel like in the moment, in whatever incoherent fashion they choose. This is not judicial activism, so much as it is judicial anarchism. The founders never contemplated such a thing and our political class assumes that this is impossible.

A break down in civil order always ends the same way. Whether it is the result of civil war in the ruling class or a war between the ruling class and the people, there is a collapse in moral authority. Everyone loses respect for the old rules, which kept the old order. What comes next is also predictable. A man on a horse rides in and has the will and the means to impose order. That is what comes next if the political class does not suppress what looks like a revolt from the bench. Otherwise, someone else will.

Clarity and the Written Record

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One thing that has stuck with me from the American Renaissance conference is something Jared Taylor said in his speech to open the show. He talked about how for the longest time, he was a lonely voice in the wilderness. His events were lightly attended and ignored by the media. He was sure that he was merely keeping a record. He said this while pointing out how quickly things had changed. A few years ago, his event got fifty attendees and now it had hundreds with hundreds turned away.

It resonated with me because it brought to mind the life of Cicero. Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of Rome’s greatest orators and writers. No writer in the history of the West has had greater influence. Well into the 19th century, European writers were influenced by his style. He was also an immensely important politician. He was consul during the Catilinarian conspiracy, having the conspirators executed. During the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, he agitated for the return of traditional republican government.

Following Caesar’s death, Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony, attacking him in speeches. For his trouble, he was proscribed, as an enemy of the state, by the Second Triumvirate and consequently executed in 43 BC. His severed hands and head were displayed in the Roman Forum, as a final revenge of Mark Antony. Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited with initiating the Renaissance and inspiring political theorists like John Locke to embrace the republican form of government.

Cicero is relevant to our age for the simple reason that he kept a record during the last days of the Roman Republic. Fifteen hundred years later, educated men in the emerging West, would be inspired by and cautioned by the writings of Cicero. There was a record of what was happening in the late stages of the Roman Republic and a record of those who tried to prevent it. Without that record, without the thoughts and words of those ancients, who fought the coming darkness, there may have never been the West.

This is why Rome was of great interest to the men of the Enlightenment. The American Founders were all students of Greece and Rome. They understood that when Rome fell, the West was plunged into an intellectual, economic and cultural darkness. These were men aware of the fact that they were coming out the other side of what happened at the close of the Republic. They naturally looked to Rome for clues as to how they could avoid the same fate, when producing new forms of government.

As we enter the late stages of the American Republic and the last days of what we have always known as the West, keeping a record may be the best we can accomplish. The fight will be fought, but only a delusional optimist can be blind to reality. Whether it is citizens being hunted down for heresy or weird looking foreigners demanding the disenfranchisement of natives, for the crime of hate speech, the signs are all there. The ruling elites of the West no longer have any faith in liberal democracy or the rule of law.

That may seem overly pessimistic, but just look at the immigration debate. Trump won the most improbable of victories on the promise to reverse decades of insane immigration policies. His position is actually the moderate one. A large percentage of Americans would shut down all immigration. Trump has merely promised to crack down on illegals and do something about the visa rackets. In the case of DACA, his position is to enforce the law, rather than perpetuate Obama’s policy of flouting the law.

Despite his moderation, the ruling elite is fighting him at every turn. His own party in Congress is not just blocking him on immigration reform. They are proudly attacking him over it. Politicians are cautious by nature, which means they live in fear of being on the wrong side of voters. Yet on this and other issues, they boast about giving their voters the bird. It is tempting to say they are bought by moneyed interests, but this looks more like insanity than corruption. Our political class is suicidal.

That is just one example. The broad appeal of populist polices on trade, taxes and social issues should have resulted in a wave of populist politicians. Trump is a terrible politician and his many quirks make him ill-suited for politics. Imagine a polished professional running on the same issues as Trump. Yet, we do not see anyone noticing these issues. It is as if the entire political class has been infected with a virus that makes them act against their own interests, by alienating their own voters.

Debating the causes of what is happening is part of keeping a record, just as doing what can be done to arrest it. One has to have hope that the fever will break, but if it does not and we continue on the current path, documenting the insanity of our age is an important part of the fight. We may lack a Cicero to shape the way in which we think of our age, but Julius Caesar and Mark Antony are not showing up either. In an age of mediocre tyrants, we will have mediocre chroniclers of our age. Keeping a record is all that can be done.

How To Sell Soap

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No one is excited about scrubbing a stain from the carpet. If you own a pet, you never look forward to their accidents on the rug or their decision to put their dirty paws on your best trousers. Cleaning up messes, figuring out how to get that stain off the couch cushion, getting the carpets cleaned, these are chores we all do, but we do not look forward to them. It is just a part of life, like cutting the grass or cleaning the gutters. No one goes on lawn care vacations or stain removal holidays.

If you are in the business of selling soap, you have to get over the fact that the mere mention of your product makes people think about a boring task or the dog leaving a pyramid on the rug. No matter how good your product is at doing its thing, if it brings negative images to the mind of the customer, they will associate you and your product with unpleasant thoughts. It why portable toilet vendors pick cheeky names for their companies. They want you laughing when you think of them.

The infomercial guys, who sell miracle cleaners, are good examples of people who understands how this works. They are super upbeat and they do small things to flatter the viewer. “You have frequent parties and one of your guests spills red wine on your brand new carpet!” He is saying you have good tastes and people like you, which is why everyone comes to your house to be sophisticated and cool. It is cheesy, but flattery works for a reason. The pitchman makes his audience feel good about the sale.

These guys also know how to avoid negative associations. They love using the red wine example, even though their typical customers drink beer from a can. Red wine is a stand-in for blood. If they used a severed hand to drip blood on the white cloth, people would be horrified and associate the product with a negative image. No one fondly remembers getting their hand caught in the snowblower. Instead, the pitchman uses wine and talks about you being the cool kid on the block with lots of parties.

Everyone has had a mishap. You are working around the house; something goes wrong and you are running for the first aid kit. In the process you made the hall carpet look like a crime scene. Or you are at work and you do not notice the paper-cut and now you have blood on your favorite shirt. That miracle product to get the red wine stain out is just what you need, but you do not want to be is reminded of it by the happy pitchman on television. It is why the good pitchman avoids creating negative associations.

Even the high energy super-positive TV pitchmen run into a problem of negative associations. That is because Americans associate the lone pitchman with the grifter, the con artist and the guy who takes advantage of the foolish. That is because we have a long tradition of these guys. The snake oil salesman, the patent medicine salesman, various door-to-door salesman, are all stock characters for the disreputable sharpie who blows into town and sells you a monorail.

You may be the most honest guy on earth, but as soon as you get out there to sell your soap as the fast talking pitchman, most people are going to think you are, at the minimum, a liar. It is unfair and unjust, but you will never change that perception. You can be the most honest and forthright soap salesman on earth, but that view of you and your kind is etched into the culture. It is why those TV guys always rely on objective authorities or unimpeachable demonstrations. They know you do not trust them.

Life is unfair sometimes.

The point of all this is that if you want to sell a product, you have to avoid associating it with negative images held by the public. That means you are going to have to use red wine instead of a severed hand to demonstrate stain removal. No, you will not be true to your faith, but you will get customers. You also have to accept the fact that a lot of stuff happened before you came along. If you associate yourself with confidence men of the past, people are going to assume you are a con-man too. That is reality.

Good salesmen never lose sight of reality. That is the problem with outsider political movements. They allow themselves to be trapped in narrow ideological ruts so any sales effort, which deviates in the slightest from dogma, results in civil war. The only pitchmen the ideologues accept are the guys waving around the severed hand, talking about how their product is great at cleaning blood stains. Any concession to public sensibilities is treated like heresy. The result is a self-ghettoization of the movement.

This has always been the problem with the libertarians. You can get a large audience in favor of limiting state regulation of commerce, but you are never getting a critical mass around the idea of abandoning paper money. You can talk people into loosening up marijuana laws, but no one is signing up for legal meth sales. That is why the limit on libertarians is to have some of their language appropriated by Buckleyites. Otherwise, they are seen as a collection of eccentric weirdos.

That is what is happening with the alt-right. The core believers refuse to give in on basic tactics, like banning Nazi gear or minimizing the JQ stuff. The result is anyone that tries to soften the image is attacked as a traitor. That is what you see with the Stormies. Anglin can’t accept even the token compromises at a site like Gab, so he goes to war with it. This ensures that his followers never stray from the ghetto that he has created for them. It also means potential recruits have a reason to ignore him.

This does not mean the alt-right is condemned to having fat guys in their tighty-whities, dancing around at their events. To avoid that fate, they need to produce leaders with the credibility to swat down guys like Anglin, when he gets out of control, but also aware of the fact that growing the movement means appealing to the general public. That means softening the pitch and making some compromises. They do not have anyone capable of doing that at the moment, but they better find some.

TV And The Cloud People

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The other day, Tucker Carlson told someone that Trump trusts television more than he trusts the pollsters, when it comes to judging the public mood. Having spent years working in TV, Trump not only knows a lot about it, but he thinks the good TV people know more about public tastes than the political professionals. The political class, of course, roared in laughter. They think Trump is a rube, of course, but they are also sure they know more about the Dirt People than the Dirt People know about themselves.

This is another case where Trump’s common sense serves him well. The people who have long careers in television all have something in common. They make it their first priority to give the public what they want. Whatever political or personal agendas they have are secondary to putting on a good show. Unlike a pollster or political operator, the guy pitching TV shows has skin in the game. He has to be good at gauging public attitudes or else the show flops. The pollsters never suffer for being wrong.

The thing is though, the TV shows also tell us, the Dirt People, something about the people who rule over us. Hollywood is, after all, the class of people in American, whose duty it is to sing the praises of our rulers. It is also their job to sell the public on the official cultural agenda. Whatever fads or social issues are being pushed by our ruling class, will be praised in our TV shows and movies. It is why all of our action heroes are barren cat ladies now. It is why commercials are now full of race mixing.

On rare occasions, the people making this stuff reveal things about themselves and about the ruling class in general. Someone recommended the series House of Cards to me the other day, so I have been watching a few episodes a night over the last week. As far as this stuff goes, it is not as good as I would have expected. The chattering classes swooned over it when it came out, but it is not in the same league as a show like Breaking Bad. Still, it is not terrible and it is easy to see why people would enjoy it.

Usually, political dramas are terrible because the makers are more concerned with selling a political agenda. The shows are just thinly veiled political ads for the Democrat Party and various Progressive agenda items. That means lots of shows about abortion or sexually confused people being roughed up by the honky. House of Cards, at least so far, avoids that stuff and sticks to the intrigues of the main characters. People, especially women, like watching that sort of thing.

The fascinating thing is that is the politicians are portrayed as true masters of the universe. Everyone is portrayed as shrewd political operators. The main character would make Machiavelli blush. Usually, Hollywood portrays politicians as evil and stupid or sincere and naïve. House of Cards is a one long celebration of the genius and cleverness of the political class. It is not the issues they champion that makes them wonderful. It is their nature. They are simply better than us.

That is made clear in how the politicians in the show deal with Dirt People and the news media characters. The Dirt People are all dumb and helpless without government. The main character solicits a rib joint in the first season. Once this gets out, the rib joint gets famous, but the inherent defects in the proprietor and his Dirt People habits, lead him to failure, as he inevitably does stupid Dirt Man things, like try to help his son. The main character is forced to cut him loose and let him slide back into the muck.

The portrayal of the news media is the most interesting. On the other hand, they are universally portrayed as loathsome clingers, who serve only to drag down the Cloud People. The female reporters are whores, who will bang anyone for a story. The males are feckless and stupid. The one exception thus far in the show is the owner if a newspaper that is supposed to be the Washington Post. The owner of it is a Katherine Graham like Cloud Person, but her people are all loathsome Dirt People.

This is the most interesting part of the show thus far. I am into season two now. The main character has murdered one reporter, had one framed for a serious crime and scared another off to the hinterlands. He also has engineered the termination of a big shot editor at the Washington Post. None of this treated as a big deal. These news media types are so low on the food chain in the mind’s of the writers, which throwing one of them in front of a speeding train is no big deal. Even Trump does not hate the media that much

It is easy to overstate these things, but House of Cards is one rare example of the Hollywood people revealing things about themselves and their masters. It may be the result of Netflix producing it, rather than a Hollywood shop. For generations, the people making TV shows have stuck to the script when it comes to the class structure in America. Alternatively, this was deliberate. The makers wanted to flatter the political class by telling them things they tell themselves. The result is a window into the political class.

The Idiot

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The Idiot is a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Like most Russian literature, it is a big book full of complicated characters, with funny names. The central character of the novel, Prince Myshkin, is a young man whose good intentions and decency are taken to be stupidity by the worldly characters of the novel. The title is intended to be ironic. His naivete is assumed to be due to stupidity. The novel is a study of what happens when such a person is put in a world populated by people lacking basic decency and morality.

Our cultural elites use something similar to promote the values of the ruling classes through movies and television. The movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the classic example. The twist our betters put on it is the innocent adventurer taking on the corrupt system holds all of the values cherished by our actual ruling class. Meanwhile, the fictional villains are always people who sound like the critics of managerial state democracy. Even so, the basic theme is the same. We have the naïf versus the cabal of the cynical.

Whether as propaganda or psychological study, the central question is whether a corrupt and malignant system can be changed or defeated by a morally good person. The Hollywood version will on occasion have the white hat defeated, for the purpose of reinforcing some element of the one true faith. Usually though, the good guy triumphs over the system. This propaganda has been so effective, most American honestly think that by assiduously obeying every rule they will one day have their country back.

One of those Americans seems to be President Trump. The back story to his run is that he was motivated to run, after being disrespected by various on-line propagandists like Jonah Goldberg. Trump could not understand why a billionaire like him was mocked, by guys like Goldberg, who are nothing more than servants to rich men like Trump. To Trump, this made no sense. He was motivated to run in order to prove to these people that he could do anything they can do, but even better. There is nothing bigger than President.

Since his victory, Trump has been searching around for some way to be accepted by the political class. He assumed that winning the election would also win him the respect of official Washington. Instead, they locked shields to oppose him, even installing a special prosecutor to dig around in his life for a way to impeach him. Unable to figure out why he is treated like a skunk at the picnic, he has flailed around looking for something to give away in order to get the respect he craves.

Now, he is willing to fink on his voters by breaking every promise he made during the campaign. That is why he is dealing with Chuck Schumer. The sole reason for Schumer to exist in Washington is to guide troublesome Republicans through the process of committing political suicide. In the case of Trump, that means going for amnesty, abandoning the wall and supporting candidates who hate him. It is not enough that Trump fink on his voters. He must humiliate himself in front of them as well.

This is not to say that Trump is just a craven liar. He is one of the few people in the financial elite who embraces those old ideas of civic responsibility and fair play that used to define the American elite. Trump is from an age when it was your duty to uphold the rules and be a good example to others. He naively thinks that is how things still work. They do not, which is why the ruling elite looks at him as odious interloper. They do not hate him as much as they hate what he represents. They also think he is an idiot because of it.

One of the main critiques, from the Dissident Right, of Buckley Conservatives, is that they naively cling to ideas that are no longer applicable. Waving around the Constitution, for example, when the document is now interpreted to mean the opposite of what the Founders intended, is idiotic. The foolish embrace of principal, when it means sure defeat, is proof that the alleged opposition to the managerial state is either composed of fools, or traitors sent to subvert any real opposition to the status quo.

Now, much of what comes from the alt-right is ignorant chanting that is not based in anything but frustration with their fringe status. Even so, they are not wrong to point out that the Civic Nationalists and the alt-lite are naive and foolish to think they can talk the other side into turning away from their suicidal course. Every attempt to affect change within the system, is bound to fail, as the rules of the system are designed to protect and perpetuate the status quo. The people in charge are not going to quit on their stool.

“We’re not voting our way out of this” is a popular way of making this point. That is not entirely true, but it is a useful way to put it. Simply electing people who say the right things is not changing a system that has been corrupted to defend the interests of the two percent. The system, as it stands, must be subverted and destabilized. That does not happen at the ballot box. That is what we are seeing with Trump. He is being swallowed up by a system designed for that purpose. You do not beat it by playing by the rules.

It is hard to know if Trump will pull out of his death spiral. He has shown a willingness to reverse course if he feels he has made an error. It is also possible that he fears Mueller has something on him or his kids and he is hoping to trade away your future for his dignity and freedom. Maybe it all just part of the chaos that Trump seems to enjoy. Regardless, it is another reminder that the people putting their trust in the system are idiots. The system is not the solution to out problems as a society. The system is the problem.

Old Think

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The other day, Andrew Torba was scheduled to appear on the Tucker Carlson show so I figured out how to find it off the underground TV system. I no longer have a TV subscription, so I have to rely on the web for this stuff. Cord cutters can say what they like about services like Kodi, but it is a hassle compared to regular cable. So much so, in fact, that I rarely watch television. Instead, I download movies and TV shows and binge watch when the spirit moves me.

Anyway, I found a stream and tuned in to the show. I did not know when Torba’s segment was scheduled so I had to sit through the whole thing. Watching Tucker interview some old guy, I felt like I had gone back in time. I have not watched these shows in a long time. I get my news on-line. I skip the Blue Team – Red Team hooting that makes up political banter in the mainstream press. In fact, I barely notice most of what passes for current events discussion.

The Torba piece was short. Carlson spends little time on-line. The things Torba said about intent platforms censuring people was obviously news to Tucker. He was genuinely surprised when Torba explained the realities of who controls the internet and the power they have over speech. The reason for this is no one in the mass media understands any of this stuff. They live in the media bubble and the sorts of things we experience on-line are alien to them.

This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the old days when people were coming home every night to a dozen CD’s in the mail from ISP’s offering a free month of internet, the mass media was unaware the internet existed. I recall laughing myself silly one night, watching a couple of airheads on the local news in Boston, talk about “the mysterious underworld of the internet” as if it was the back room at Rick’s Cafe. They carried on like the internet was an opium den.

It is another example of the great divide. We are at the point now where most everyone under the age of fifty is getting their information from on-line sources. The median age for the TV chat shows is mid-60’s and the age for traditional print publications like magazines and journals is seventy. The people working the chat show circuit are people who came into the business from newspapers and political magazines. Even the young people on TV are living in the old mindset.

When you consume news on-line, you scan the high points until you land on something of interest. On a daily basis, I visit maybe ten sites. I do not read every word. Often, I just skim and move on. Social media provides a feed to skim the news. Information about the world is now a stream and you can dip your cup into as you see fit. Since you can absorb vastly more information by reading, the on-line experience is more informative and more customized to your interests.

News consumption in the information age is on-demand. You take what you want, when you want it, at the speed you want. The old model was an on-supply model. You got what they gave you, on their schedule and their pace. Sitting there watching Tucker and his guests plod through each segment was painful. I no longer have patience for the banter and mugging that is traditional television. I just want the facts and do not have any interest in their attempts to color it with their personal touch.

It is not just an age issue, but that is certainly a big part of it. The young people you see in the mass media are just fogy-ish as an old fogy. They are positive that the old model is still relevant. They create the news and supply it to you in doses they believe you can handle. Meanwhile, most people have consumed the stories via their social media accounts long before they turn up on the chat shows or big shot news sites. People tuned into see Torba inform Carlson about what was happening with speech on-line.

The people in charge get this to some degree. That is part of why they are berserk for cracking down on dissident speech on-line. Trump was elected because an ad-hoc army on disaffected people went on-line and drove the news cycle, while the people in charge were selling that old hag Clinton on TV chat shows that no one under the age of sixty bothers watching anymore. Their efforts to match this have resulted in memes like “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” where the old thinkers are made to look ridiculous.

It is tempting to cast this as a bad development. The Fake News phenomenon has simply been met with a guerrilla version of it. Mike Cernovich peddling Pizza Gate on twitter is just as corrosive as the New York Times making up stories about Trump. It is important to remember that the news has always been fake. In the 18th century factions had their newspapers promote false narratives in favor of their faction. It is the source of the Sally Hemmings stuff. Yellow Journalism was a thing before radio existed.

The only question today is the impact of the speed and volume. Fake News delivered by town crier can be mulled over and debated. Propaganda posing as news in the daily paper only comes in once a day. For people glued to their computers and mobile devices, being immersed in a solution of fake news, agit-prop and craven nonsense is a fact of life that is new to our age. Maybe it cancels itself out and all of it becomes background noise or maybe is erodes public trust and begins to set off panics. Or something else.

 

The BQ

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We live in an age of great inequality. In fact, some economists think America may have greater inequality now than at any time in human history. Americans do not think about it too much, as generations of indoctrination about class envy have made questioning such things seem un-American. That and the middle-class may be swamped with debt, but they have all the trappings of prosperity. Even poor people are fat.

Few people on this side have much to say about economics. The main reason, obviously, is that demographics take up most of the space. A big part of the aesthetic is ignoring the trivial things like tax policy, in order to remain focused on the bigger topics that are assiduously ignored by our rulers. That and the subject is full of libertarian hucksters, peddling apologies for globalism and the billionaire class.

The Left has always argued that inequality is immoral on its face. They may not use that phrasing, but that is the underlying assumption behind their arguments for taxing the rich and redistributing wealth. Perhaps that can be debated, but there’s little doubt that great inequality brings with it great social and political change. A society with relatively small differences in wealth, where there is economic equilibrium, is unlikely to lurch into unrest or reckless adventures.

When Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, he became king of a country that could be described as a three-legged stool. The Church held 25-30% of the land in the country and had a monopoly on moral authority. The aristocracy, including the king, held an equal amount of land, but had a monopoly on secular authority. The rest of the land was owned by the commoners and petty nobles. The result was a balance of power between the three key elements of English society.

Henry is best known for his serial adultery and his habit of having wives sent to the gallows, but his biggest contribution is the destruction of the Church as a force in British political and economic life. The Acts of Supremacy, passed in 1534, recognized the King’s status as head of the church in England and, with the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1532, abolished the right of appeal to Rome. The king had effectively assumed the moral authority that had once been the monopoly of the Church

This was made possible by the oldest of political tactics. When Henry seized Church lands, he used these to buy support from other nobles, as well as large land holders who also sat in Parliament. Naturally, Parliament was strongly in favor of not only seizing Church lands, but supporting their good friend, the King, in his efforts to assert his authority over the Church. When he seized Church lands, the crown ended the economic power of the Church and its moral authority.

This had a radical effect on the politics and culture of England. Hilaire Belloc argued in The Servile State that it was this reorganization of capital in England that gave birth to what we call capitalism. In this case, capital was land. When land was distributed between the people, the state and the church, the concentrated use of capital was impossible. Once the crown and nobility seized the property of the Church, capital was for the first time concentrated in a small number of hands. This allowed the propertied class to dominate English society.

This was clear after Henry VIII died. A dozen years of violent political turmoil followed his death. Edward VI never made it to adulthood. Lady Jane Grey was queen for nine days until Mary I, with support of the nobles, deposed her. Bloody Mary made it five years before dying and then began the reign of Elizabeth I. This also corresponded with the birth of the British Empire. Whether or not any of this would have happened if Henry had not sacked the Church is debatable, but it is clear that the change in English economic order was an inflection point.

Another example is what happened to the Roman Republic after the defeat of Corinth and Carthage. The Republic had been at war with both city-states, off and on, for over a century. In 146 BC, the Romans finally defeated and destroyed Carthage and then provoked a war with the Greeks. They defeated the Greeks at Corinth, destroying the city and its population. The male population was killed and the females and children were sold into slavery. Rome was the undisputed power in the Mediterranean.

Something else happened. Those slaves that poured into the Republic from the conquered lands first ended up in the hands of the wealthiest landowners. This influx of cheap labor allowed the large land holders to replace their native labor, which flowed into the cities, not having anywhere else to go. The small landowners suddenly found themselves at a disadvantage, as the larger landowners had an army of slaves to work their land. The result was a great economic re-ordering of the Roman Republic.

It is not an accident that this sudden change in political and economic of fortune changed the nature of the Republic. The constant campaigning created a class of soldier that was more loyal to his general than to the Republic. The turning over of large tracts of land to slave farming resulted in a new problem, slave revolts. The Servile Wars, the Social War and two civil wars dominated the Late Republic. It has this title because the Republic came to an end with Julius Caesar and the founding of the Roman Empire under Octavian.

The relevance of all this to our age should be obvious to those who have been following what is going on with our tech oligarchs. A generation ago, arguments for taxing the rich got little traction, because no one had any real fear of the rich. That and they were not so rich as to feel alien to the rest of us. Today, the billionaire class feels like they are from another planet and they are a real threat. They are advocating for policies that promise to dissolve the ties that bind the nation together.

A popular issue on the Dissident Right is that the old framing of politics, based on the blank slate and egalitarianism, is no longer relevant. Race and demographics are what will define politics going forward. That is true, but none of that will matter if the West is going to succumb to what amounts to techno-feudalism, where a relatively small number of oligarchs control not only capital, but information. Addressing the threat to free speech means addressing the Billionaire Question.

In order to address the BQ, the Dissident Right is going to have to break free from the old moral paradigm with regards to class, inequality and economics. The fact is, no one will care if Mark Zuckerberg drowns in his bathtub. The things that the vast bulk of Americans care about do not depend on getting cheap stuff on-line. The billionaire class is no more essential to society than any other luxury good. They are tolerable unless they become a burden.

That’s going to be hard for our side and it is going to be even more difficult for the sort of people attracted to the Oaf Keepers or the PoofBerries. That is the effect of a few generations of telling people that it is un-American to think ill of the rich. Even so, part of breaking free from the old thinking will be adopting a new brand of economics, along with tackling the realities of demographics. You can be pro-white all you like, but that is of no use if you are a serf living on the modern version of a feudal estate.

The Nazi Tar Baby

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Thirty-five years ago I sat in history class, as one of my fellow classmates told Father O’Connell that Hitler must have been a liberal because he was a socialist. The old man smiled and said, “Then that would mean Teddy Roosevelt was an actual moose.” It took a minute, but eventually we got the joke. You can call yourself a leprechaun, but that does not make you a leprechaun.

Where to put fascism, especially Nazism, on the political spectrum is a big topic due to the use of Nazi iconography by some movements and the defensive position of most conservatives on the issue. It is also important because our rulers are making the claim that any resistance to their nation wrecking program is fascism. Everyone is now required to have an opinion about a political movement that stopped being relevant close to eighty years ago.

The first thing to note is that relying on a two-dimensional political spectrum cooked up by 18th century French radicals is not a good way to understand the world. Even the updated Cold War version that places internationalism at one end and nationalism at the other is of little value to our current age. Embracing the ahistorical Progressives worldview that insists history started when they synthesized their current worldview is equally foolish. It leads to nothing but error.

There is also the fact that there are no Nazis or fascists today. These movements were outliers that existed in the narrow space book-ended by the Great War on one end and the Second World War on the other. The late historian Ernst Nolte argued that fascism, broadly defined, was a reaction to the violence and mayhem created by the Russian Revolution and the spread of Bolshevism. It should be noted that Bolshevism was also an outlier movement that has long since died off.

This is a point that Paul Gottfried makes in his book on the history of fascism as a political concept. Note the difference between concept and ideology. An ideology has a tight, well defined set of rules, while a concept is vague. Progressives took the dead ideology of fascism and turned it into a political concept to include the set of people who oppose the Progressive project. As the opposition adjusted, the definition adjusted to meet the new threat. As a result, fascism is as meaningless as it is non-existent.

Any effort to connect modern political movements to fascism, therefore, is nothing more than rhetoric or cynicism. The conditions in which both fascism and Bolshevism were born no longer exist and are unlikely to exist again. To Western Europeans of the age, the excesses of communism were frightening. It is eastern origins appeared sinister. The ad-hoc and incoherent response called fascism, to what appeared to many people as a foreign conspiracy to bring down the West, was, in context, quite sensible.

Putting fascism on the right of your antiquated political scale probably makes sense, as it was opposed to what is on the left end of that scale. That means, of course, you are embracing a base assumption of Progressives. They argue that all opposition to them is reactionary and incoherent. Therefore, nothing on the Right can exist in isolation. It can only exist in opposition to the Left. In that regard, they are correct about fascism. It was a devil with an expiry date that has long passed.

A more reasonable argument, with regards to fascism and the Western Right, is that fascism was a rearguard action. It was a final last desperate gasp of the old culture before it was destroyed by liberalism. Fascism therefore is a grab bag of items from the ancien regime, bolted onto some modern industrial economics and sold to the public with modern public relations techniques. That would put fascism on the Right, but only when it is defined on a spectrum that has not had relevance for close to a century now.

The fact is, debating the place of fascism and the relevance of Nazism to our current age is a pointless waste of time. It lets grifters like Dinesh D’Souza peddle books to well-meaning normies and it lets internet pranksters generate some laughs, but otherwise, fascism, as a political force, has no relevance in our age. It is as salient as free silver or calls to restore the king of France. There will always be people clinging to the detritus of past failures, but there are people that believe they are space aliens too.

The great divide today is not over economics. It is demographics. The cultural struggle that is developing, therefore, will be how our people will thrive in a world of modern challenges and modern threats. What will drive politics in the West, in the coming decades, is what Steve Sailer calls the world’s most important graph. How to survive as a people in a world dominated by races unable to escape the Neolithic, is not something contemplated by Bolsheviks or fascists.

The debate itself underscores the fact that we are at the end of a cultural cycle, one born in the Great War, defined by the Second World War and formalized during the Cold War. Modernism as a cultural force has come to an end. Those in charge of the brittle husk that is the prevailing orthodoxy keep reaching into their past for villains to maintain support among the faithful. Those in opposition find themselves without fully formed alternatives in the present, so they look to the past.

Regardless, the place of fascism on the political spectrum then or now is as irrelevant as the spectrum itself. The arguments putting the fascists on the Right only make sense in the context of the long gone era in which they were born. Putting them on the Left only makes sense in the context of the dying era, if you are hoping to squeeze a few more bucks out of the rubes. Hitler is irrelevant to the current age and will have no more bearing on what comes next than Genghis Khan or Henry VIII.