Category Archives: Politics

The Provacateur

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Way back in the olden thymes, there was a guy calling himself Ken Kesey. He is famous with Baby Boomers for having led the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies and degenerates, who scandalized American society in the 1960’s. He and his crew drove a psychedelic school bus across country, hosting parties and handing out LSD. Tom Wolfe wrote about their early escapades in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Most people no longer recall that Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

That last fact is important. The movie version of his book is a classic that transcends generations. The movie was released 42 years ago and people still reference it today, even when they do not know it. It is like The Godfather or Gone with The Wind. Despite its status, Kesey is best remembered for a bus trip a half century ago. That is because his provocative hijinks came to represent a key element of the counter-culture movement we associate with the 1960’s and the baby Boomer culture that arose from it.

The provocateur has always had a role in human affairs. The court jester, in many respects, was the formalization of this role. The jester was the one person who could mock public piety – to a point. Eventually, the role of the formal jester was replaced by theater and then comedians and writers. The internet provocateur is an extension of this, and to some degree a revival of the classic jester. Kesey was jester for his age. Today, an Andrew Anglin is the jester of the modern information age.

For those unfamiliar with Anglin, he is the guy behind the website The Daily Stormer, which has been shutdown on numerous occasions. Whether or not it was actually shut down by his registrar is hard to know. If it was shut down because it was outlandishly offensive, or he cooked up the story as a prank, is not important. Whether it was a provocation or a prank, it has put the spotlight on the very real fact that on-line speech is now controlled by an oligopoly.

That is precisely the role of the provocateur. By breaking every conceivable taboo, Anglin is forcing a debate on the topic of speech. How much speech will be permitted and who will set and enforce the limits are fundamental questions that determine the arc of a society. In America, it has long been understood that the limits are immediate public safety and they are set after long public deliberation and due process. Everyone is taught the famous line about burning theaters for that reason.

Americans have also just assumed that free expression is too sacred that no one would dare violate it, but that is not where we find ourselves today. The people in charge believe they have found a loophole. They have outsourced policing speech to private companies, who can claim to be enforcing terms of service as private companies. Under the current arrangements, FaceBorg can ban any mention of the country Niger, even though it is perfectly legal to yell “Niger!” in a crowded theater.

That is the value of an Andrew Anglin. Yes, his Nazi routine is troubling and his followers on-line are embarrassing to those involved in politics. This was true of hippies and the Merry Pranksters too. Read a guy like David Horowitz and you will learn that people in the New Left worried greatly about the loose cannons and provocateurs. In the end they figured out it was best to just let those guys do their thing and not comment on the acts but focus on the larger moral issues they raised.

That is how a guy like Andrew Anglin should be treated. You do not want to be seen standing next to him at a public event, but you do want to be seen supporting his right to attend public events. You do not want to be paling around with him on-line or posting links to his stuff, but you do want to be the guy defending his right to be a Nazi asshole on the internet. When his antics threaten your assets, you want to be the guy who crushes him like a bug. The jester must always serve at the pleasure of the king.

That is what some of the important figures in this thing have to learn. Anglin causing trouble on Gab, for example, is fine up to the point where he puts the enterprise in jeopardy. At that point, the owner needs to quietly step on him. Similarly, alt-right big shots would be wise to comment about Anglin and his antics, but not get in bed with him. Anglin is a pyromaniac who can just as easily burn down your house as someone else’s house, so you do not invite him to stay in your basement, where you keep the flammables.

The thing to remember is provocateurs and jesters are important tools in modern political discourse. The key to victory is to destroy the other side’s moral authority. The most effective way to do that is to mock their piety and taunt them into revealing the face behind the mask they present to the public. When someone loses their marbles over being mocked by an Andrew Anglin, they inevitably say and do things that reduce their status in the eyes of the public. Do not be that guy and do not be the guy standing next to Anglin.

Lessons From The Bear

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For the last few years, the elites have been obsessed with Russia. The Bear Scare in DC over Trump’s alleged ties to Putin is just one element to the obsession. At some level, even the dullards in the media know it is nonsense, but the Cloud People are convinced that the public shares their hatred of the Russians. China and Israel are much more involved in our elections, but they are not suitable bogeymen in the minds of our betters. To them, the Russians are the scary monsters.

The Russia-Trump story is just a sideshow, of course. The neocon insistence that we start World War 3 over Ukraine is much more representative of the ruling elite’s hatred for the Russians. Steve Sailer has done yeoman’s work documenting the neocon warmonger’s efforts to stoke the fires of Russophobia. It is not just the neocons. The Left has gone down a similar path, accusing Putin of being the new Hitler and claiming he has plans to invade Europe.

Of course, this enmity toward Putin has had the strange effect of endearing him to many nationalists in America, especially the younger ones. Their minds are not tainted by memories of the Cold War or communism. Putin just looks like a strong leader, who embodies many of the qualities they admire. Then you have old paleocons like Pat Buchanan defending Putin, mostly because of old scars from warring with the neocons in the old days.

Guys like Steve Sailer try to pin the cause of this irrational hatred for Putin and the Russians on ancient ethnic grudges. It is true that all of the high profile Putin haters fit a certain ethnic profile. They also look a lot like the crew that tumbles out of the anti-Trump clown car whenever is screeches to a halt. It is fair to accuse these folks of being haunted by the hoof beats of Tsar Alexander’s men. The neocons were, after all, the ideological force behind the Right’s Cold War strategy for a reason.

That makes for a fun narrative and good way to taunt some of the more unhinged types like Bill Kristol and Max Boot, but it does not explain why the political class is uniformly anti-Russian. John McCain is nuts, but he is not looking under his bed for Cossacks every night. The same goes for most of the war party in Washington. They would much prefer to be killing Muslims, but they have found it necessary to spend a lot of time going on about the threat of Putin and the Russian menace.

Another possibility is a much less mystical one. Instead of epigenetic fear of a pogrom, perhaps the source of this great fear is much higher, in the billionaire class that rules the nation through the political parties. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, Western bankers rushed in to loot Russia and her former client states. Eventually, the locals rallied and a class of oligarchs rose up to seize control the assets and build their own power bases outside the state. Then Putin came along.

If you are a Sergey Brin, for example, the one thing that keeps you up at night is the thought of the state reasserting its authority over the oligarchs. Not that Trump is going to throw Mark Zuckerberg into prison or have Tim Cook sent to Siberia. The possibility of a modern Teddy Roosevelt, riding a populist message, promising to bring the billionaires to heel, is a realistic threat. Incentivizing the political class to demonize such talk is one way to hedge against that possibility.

It also makes Putin, and to a lesser degree the East, a dangerous example. It is not just their nationalism that bugs our oligarchs. Its that these countries cling to the outdated notion of state power being supreme. Our oligarchs, as we see with Big Tech’s efforts to subvert free speech, think the idea of the state is outdated. Instead, the new managerial state is supranational and subordinate to the people who finance it. The managerial state is to serve the oligarchs, not the people over whom it rules.

It is probably why the political class made such a huge deal out of Putin cracking down on homosexual agitators and feminist cranks. They were looking for a way to undermine his moral authority. In a better age, politicians would accuse enemies of preferring the company of men. In this age, politicians accuse their enemies of being sexually normal. Regardless, the point is to make the bad guys appear villainous and outside the bounds of human decency. Our politicians are the model our rulers prefer.

The least talked about aspect to all of this is that the West, particularly America, is probable less internally stable than Russian. You do not hear about widespread protests or dissident movements in Russia. The people of the Visegrad are pretty happy with their nationalistic politicians. They like having a patriotic ruling class. It is the West where we see the increasing use of coercion and top-down subversion, in the form of immigration, in order to keep the plates spinning.

The trouble for our oligarchs is that people will be loyal to a man or a cause. They will not be loyal to a committee. That is why there are no monuments to committees. There are plenty of statues of great men and shrines to the gods. That is the lesson the old eastern bloc countries learned. To maintain order, it required men with guns and willingness to use them. The people of the East learned that a man on horse is a better choice than ten men behind desks.

That is a lesson we are about to learn in the West.

The Lost Boys

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I suspect most people who read blogs like this get their news and commentary from alternative sources, rather than conventional outlets. People in our thing still watch the cable shows on occasion and drift over to mainstream news sites, but more as visitors than partisans. Listening to a guy like Sean Hannity rant about how the Democrats are the real racists is uninteresting. The old Red Team versus Blue Team stuff is no longer relevant to the sort of people reading sites like this one. Our politics is outside that stuff.

The few times a month I bother to scan National Review, I feel the same way as when I watch a B-movie from the 1980’s. It reminds me of that time I got to second base with Sally Sugar Pants, but the movie is still terrible. Even more so now. Reading one of the bugmen NRO employs to write copy, tub-thump about their principles, I wonder what it must be like to live trapped in amber. Conservative Inc is a Potemkin village, where the people carry on as if nothing has changed since 1984. It is creepy.

There is a reason, beyond the financial considerations, why these people cling so tenaciously to the past. They have nowhere else to go. They have always lived in a world, whose map is a tiny intellectual zone dominated by the Left. Around it is a blank space labeled “Here Be Monsters.” Even for those who figure out that the old Left-Right paradigm is no longer relevant, their fear of what is out there has them staggering around on the fringes of the old world, like homeless beggars looking for a place to lie down.

This probably explains some of the Bernie Bros too. They no longer can tolerate Progressive Globalism, but they fear association with the Right, so they have staggered over to 19th century socialism. They do not really embrace Bernie Sanders or his anachronistic politics, but they have nowhere else to go. It is a form of populism they can embrace, without changing parties and supporting Trump. The Bernie Movement is just a convenient doorway for them to sleep in while the world sorts itself out.

My sense is libertarians got a boost in the 90’s and 2000’s when Gen X and Millennial males decided that Clinton degeneracy and Bush stupidity were not their bag. Libertarianism was a safe place to hide. On the one hand, it allowed for mocking of the Left, but it also allowed for a rejection of Bush-style conservatism. The reason libertarianism is now collapsing is that so many of those folks have made the trip over to the Dissident Right. Most of the alt-right is former libertarians, for example.

Still, there are a lot of people who broke with conventional conservatism in the Bush years but remain lost in the wilderness. Rod Dreher and the people at American Conservative are good examples. A guy like Dreher gets that people like D’Souza are venal grifters and neocons like Jeff Flake are clueless airheads. He gets, to some degree, why Trump resonates with whites. The trouble is he remains stuck in that old Progressive paradigm, where politics is a binary world of Left versus Right.

The center remains to be grabbed by a politician (or political party) that can move to the left on economics while either moving to the right on social issues, or at least making a firm stand against the loony leftism that has taken over the Democratic Party. A tolerably center-right party would not necessarily campaign for socially conservative initiatives, but it would stop using the federal government to push the causes of the progressive fringes.

This is complete nonsense that only makes sense if you refuse to acknowledge the last 25 years of political history. He is basically describing a less personally degenerate version of Clinton or a less violent version of Bush. In other words, unable to consider any of the areas outside the well mapped safe zones of conventional politics, lost souls like Dreher stagger around reinventing the same stuff over and over, with decreasing levels of enthusiasm. Even these so-called centrists get tired of the same gruel.

Dreher is not an exception. There are lots of people who find themselves wandering around unfamiliar terrain, but relying on the same old maps they got in the 1980’s. They are like people transported from that era, wearing thin ties and listening to Flock of Seagulls on their Walkman, baffled by the sites and sounds of the current age. They know the world has changed and is changing rapidly all around them, but they stubbornly cling to what they know, mostly out of fear of those monsters on the map.

As I am fond of pointing out, a political map devised by 18th century radicals has little value today. The spectrum with Right at one end and Left on the other no longer exists. The political map is now ideological spheres that do not overlap in most cases. Where they do overlap is in the area of public policy and not ideology. You are either in the ideological camp based in biological realism or you are in the camp that embraces the blank slate and egalitarianism. If you reject both, you are a lost boy, staggering around in the darkness.

That is the challenge for our team. The blank slate is taking on water, but that does not mean their members will rush to the lifeboats of the Dissident Right. As I pointed out in the most recent podcast, bringing these people out of the darkness is a slow process. They first have to come to terms with the fact that their political map is no more useful than a map of America from the age of sail. Of course, it also means punching holes in the old paradigm, making it hard for guys like Dreher to cling to those moderate fantasies.

The Corrupt Midget

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News brings word that the pint sized pundit, Ben Shapiro, is going to Berkeley to give another speech. Judging by his twitter activity, he is hoping it will attract Antifa and be shut down by the city. It is hard to know exactly. He could also be playing it the other way, hoping the event goes off without a problem. That way, he can blame the growing army to his right for the recent crackdown of speech by our masters. Like all of the boys and girls who color inside the lines, Shapiro needs to believe safety is a virtue.

Either way, this stunt is just that, a stunt to draw attention to himself, as well as an effort to re-establish his brand of Progressive punditry, as the extreme edge of acceptable. Calling Shapiro a Progressive may strike some people as weird, but that is the truth of it. He embraces all of the blank slate arguments of the Left. He takes, as a given, that the Left’s moral framework is the default for society. You see that in his twitter rants about the alt-right. Shapiro is a man of the Left, just the lagging edge of it.

Shapiro is also a notorious pen for hire, a guy who will say anything if you write a big enough check. He used to say nice things about Trump and the issues that Trump is now championing. Then the Wilks brothers hired him to be an anti-Trump loon, so he went full-on NeverTrump last year. Now that there is money to be made on the Trump train, Shapiro and all the other faux right-wing grifters have gotten on-board with Trump. One gets the sense that if Antifa writes him a check, he could be persuaded to support communism.

Of course, as that Charles Johnson piece reminds us, Shapiro was in on the Michelle Fields hoax a year ago. For those who have forgotten, she claimed to have been assaulted by a Trump campaign staffer at an event. Shapiro and several other fake conservatives demanded Trump quit the campaign over it. Shapiro even quit Breitbart over it, coincidentally just when the Wilks brothers check cleared. Video later revealed that the staffer in question merely brushed past Fields and she had been lying.

That is the thing about our chattering classes. They are never called to answer for their perfidy. Fields still gets on TV as a pundit, despite having been exposed as something of a sociopath. Shapiro was never pressed to explain his role in that affair. National Review is happy to give him a platform, as no doubt the Wilks brothers are stroking checks to them too. There’s little doubt that Sloppy Williamson was paid to write those insane anti-Trump columns last year. Even by his standards, they were a cornucopia of crack-pottery.

Since Charlottesville, Shapiro has been taking every opportunity to condemn the alt-right and you see that in the linked twitter rant. The game he is playing is the moral equivalence strategy. He keeps equating the alt-right with Antifa, comparing what you do not see, with what you do see. People hear about the alt-right, but they see black clad lunatics toppling over statues and smashing windows in street riots. Chad and Stacey out in the suburbs can be forgiven for confusing the two and condemning both.

That is the role guys like Shapiro play for the Left. These so-called conservatives happily define the boundaries between what is and what is not acceptable on the Right. He and his fellow pens-for-hire are the palace guard, defining the outer boundary of the political Right. It is why they are more worked up over the alt-right than the violent left-wing mobs of Antifa. The former is a real threat to their position, while the latter is good for selling books no one will read and building their media brand.

The other angle Shapiro is working is the flattery fraud. He invests a lot of time and effort in presenting himself as the thinking man’s right-winger. That in itself reveals something about him. His appeal is that smart normies can feel like intellectuals because they listen to Ben Shapiro. The fact that he can say he supports free speech and in the same thread condemn the speech of everyone to his Right reveals him to be a pseudo-intellectual moral nullity. He is an obsequious rumpswab, who will say anything for a dollar.

It is just another example of the corruption of the Official Right™. They may as well be actors, hired by the Left to play a role in the Prog political drama. They will never bite the hand that feeds them. It is why they are falling all over themselves to signal to the Left that they are perfectly OK with cracking down on dissident speech. It is not about ideology. It is about the paycheck. If the boundary of the Right gets pushed out, guys like Shapiro are no longer useful. It is why their guns are always pointed at us, rather than the Left.

Alt-Jew

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Someone contacted me saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It is not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They do not recruit so they do not attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There is another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I have had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I am not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It is hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They will worry about discipline later.

There is another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It is not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase, I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.

None of this means that Jews are suddenly going to lift Richard Spencer up and carry him to the throne of the ethno-state. It just means that demographics and shifting politics spare no one. Liberal Jews are old and not particularly fertile. Orthodox Jews are young and extremely fertile. Conservative Jews fall somewhere in between, but probably represent a much more practical alternative for American Jews who wish to remain American and Jewish. In a majority-minority world, everyone is going to have to pick sides.

For a distinct minority, it will also mean a return to strict ethnic solidarity. That means policing stuff like this that only serves to encourage the worst response from other groups in the population. Whether or not that happens or how it plays out is a mystery, but what is certain is that in the future, everyone will be voting their skin. That is how multiculturalism works. There is no place for modern liberalism, much less liberal Judaism, in a world of identity politics. Alt-Jew may be the only way forward.

Killing Chickens

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Ralph Waldo Emerson said “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” We are all familiar with it and its meaning. When you challenge authority, you better win, as authority cannot tolerate challenges. It’s why the people in charge are so ruthless in dealing with challenges to their power. They instinctively know that to do otherwise means being displaced. In all probability, they got to where they are by subverting or knocking off their predecessor.

That’s what we see going on with the Trump administration. The rules of the game, as designed by the political class, were supposed to prevent a guy like Trump from winning the Presidency. Instead, both parties would hire approved actors to put on a show, pretending to be bitter rivals. The voters would re-enact these mock battles among themselves, getting into arguments on-line and with friends. Then one candidate would “win”, pick a staff from the political class, and the party would keep going.

Trump was supposed to have his vanity run, then bow out in the primary, before he became too much of a distraction. The political class was so sure this would be the case, they never bothered to address Trump until it was too late. They thought they had it gamed out in the general election, but then those idiot voters did the wrong thing and voted for the wrong candidate. This challenge cannot stand, which is why they have been going berserk. The threat must be addressed, by any means necessary.

There’s another expression that is useful now. It is an old Chinese idiom. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey”, which refers to making an example out of someone in order to threaten others. This was a popular aphorism during the Cultural Revolution where Chinese officials would routinely make an example of a deviationist to remind anyone else with heretical ideas that there are consequences to challenging authority. The college professor paraded around school and forced to confess to made up crimes let the other professors know who was really in charge of the school.

That’s what we are seeing with the coordinated assault on various dissident websites, like the Daily Stormer and now Stormfront. Neither of these sites are a great threat to the established order. The Stormer is a satirical site, the suppression of which proves just about every point the proprietor ever made about the ruling class. Stormfront is an old White Nationalist site that was content to mind its own business. But they both contain the word “storm” which is now a trigger word for the ruling class, so they were targeted.

What the registrars have done in both cases is steal the domain from the rightful owners, thus shuttering their sites. It’s brazen and illegal, but that’s the point. The message being sent is that the people in charge are not constrained by the law. They can do as they please. If you are a trouble maker out there, who has invested time and money in his site, you might want to watch what you say. Otherwise, a big tech company will steal your property and shut you down. That’s the message being sent with these acts.

It’s why they are picking on these two sites. Small guys operating on the fringe are easy for everyone else to dismiss. This encourages others to think, “well, they were asking for it. As long as I don’t do what they did, I should be OK.”  If they went after a bigger name or a site with deeper pockets, they create a sympathetic martyr and find themselves in court defending the indefensible. The one thing the people in charge have, or at least they think they have, is moral authority. Stormer and Stormfront are safe chickens to kill.

There is a corollary, of sorts, to that Chinese idiom. If they set out to scare the monkey, they better scare the monkey. Otherwise, they risk pissing off the monkey and the rest of the monkeys. That’s the delicate balance authorities must strike in times of crisis. There is a risk of squandering their moral authority and legitimacy. Make an example of the wrong guy and they risk a rebellion. It’s not always easy to know, as the reason a crisis exists is the rulers have lost touch with those over whom they are rule.

After the election, I made the point that Trump was a warning shot to the ruling class. They had to reform and Trump was that opening for them. If not, the next guy was not going to be as easy to deal with as Trump. That’s the lesson of history. The people challenging the old order start out hoping to work with the old order. They become radicalized or replaced by radical elements, only when the old order refuses to cooperate. The whole point of popular government is to accommodate this reality about human society.

The people who rule over us are sending a message of their own and have decided to make a few examples, to kill some chickens. The question they don’t know, what no one knows, is if it will scare the monkeys. The evidence so far is that all the ruling class has done so far is piss away their moral authority. “Attacking Nazis” rings hollow when you’re simultaneously trying to erase the Founding Fathers from the public square. It just makes the “Nazis” a useful tool for those wishing to gain the moral high ground defending speech.

For now, we just have a few dead chickens and a troop of increasing angry monkeys.

Affirmative Action And The Managerial State

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Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.

–Goethe

It is our nature, whenever we are examining the failings of our enemies, to assume the absolute worst motives and purposes. We want our enemies to be evil, so all of their mistakes and failures are proof of their villainy. This is particularly true in politics, where there is no benefit to acting honorably. In fact, the normal virtues are vices when it comes to jockeying for power in an organization. The truth is, though, our enemies are rarely evil and their mistakes are usually due to stupidity.

That is worth thinking about as we rocket into the custodial state, ruled over by layers of management. The people in charge are rarely in their positions due to merit. They are there because of serendipity, rumbswabbery or maybe they ticked the right boxes to satisfy the diversity engineers. Spend anytime around the Imperial Capital and you figure out that management teams are usually built for the team photo. The corporate partners of the state are suffering the same problem.

That is a good thing to keep in mind when following the Pakistani IT scandal. The latest is about the chief of staff to Yvette Clarke, a Congressman from New York. According to this story in the Daily Caller, her chief of staff casually signed off on what appears to be a theft ring operating inside the Democrat Congressional Caucus. The facts thus far suggest the Awan gang was running the oldest of scams. They would sell computer gear out the back door and claim it was stolen. F

Mx. Clarke is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so it is reasonable to assume that her staff is not working math problems in their free time. Outwitting them is a challenge to no one. These are people that, in a better age, would be pulling a cart on a farm somewhere or unloading ships at the docks. They also believe that by ticking the right boxes, they are exempt from the rules that apply to the blue-eyed devil. That means they do not spend much time learning about those rules or complying with them.

That is the feature of this story thus far. Everyone on all sides of this thing can tick one of the correct boxes. There are no white men implicated in this scandal. Based on the news accounts alone, it is hard to imagine the Awan brothers getting extremely far with this fraud in the private sector. They were not particularly good at their work and they made salary demands no one would meet. Even small companies do rudimentary background checks on new employees and contractors. The Democrats never bothered to do any of it.

Now, there could be a nefarious motive behind all of this. The Paki IT people reportedly gained access to all of the Democrat’s data, including e-mail. That means they had lots of embarrassing material on their bosses. It also means their bosses were scurrying around looking for a way to cover their asses for having let these guys gain access to their systems and data. It is not unrealistic to think that blackmail and extortion were at the heart of this thing. No one wants to private correspondence made public, especially Democrats.

The willingness to sign off on theft of this magnitude is also a red flag. It is hard to say you did not notice what was happening when your name is on it and the theft amounts to ten percent of the budget. Throw in the extraordinary efforts made at the highest levels to protect the Awan gang from investigators and a skeptical man will start to think there is more here. It has all the contours of an extortion racket. At the minimum, the Democrats may have been trying to hide gross negligence and the mishandling of information.

Still, the way to bet here is that the people involved were morons. Even the Awan gang operated like a comedy act from old movies. Their car dealership scam was so clownish and amateurish it is a miracle they did not get bagged for that. The thumbless way they ran their scams makes it hard to believe they were expertly shaking down professional shake down artists like Wasserman-Schultz and Yvette Clarke. Politicians are rarely smart, but they are ruthlessly shrewd and they know how to work a con.

When you put this story into the mosaic of recent news stories, the pattern that emerges is one where stupidity is the primary feature of our betters. The foolish way Google handled their trouble should make everyone think twice about letting them manufacture driverless cars or protect your personal data. The reckless actions of PayPal, slamming shut accounts of dissidents, without any thought of the consequences, suggests the people making these decisions are dangerously stupid.

Of course, the recent shipwrecks by the Navy have a similar feature. These were easy to avoid errors, engineered by people who checked the right boxes. Maybe that’s unfair, but patterns are often unfair on the individual basis. The facts of life are unfair. A military that is hell bent on having trannies on submarines and refuses to acknowledge the pregnancy problem aboard ship, is not going to worry about social promotion and the consequences that arise from it. After all, diversity is not just their strength, it’s their reason to exist.

Everyone knows that even a committee of really smart people is never the sum of its parts. People in STEM fields will make this point about work teams. Start adding in stupid people with conflicting agendas and the team’s effectiveness will rapidly degrade. The smart people are suddenly burdened with the additional task of mitigating the damage done by the stupid members. Start scaling this up to custodial state size organizations and the same Smart Fraction issues faced by Detroit come into play with managerialism.

In the early stages of the custodial state, we may be seeing a fatal flaw. That is the pseudo-meritocracy, a mix of affirmative action and credentialism, may have internal contradictions that make the system unworkable. If you want to have a massive custodial state, you better select for the best and brightest, regardless of diversity. Alternatively, you can have diversity, but you better not give them too much power or empower too many of them.

In other words, you can diversity or managerialism, but not both.

The Broken Clock

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Even the least educated among us knows something of ancient Egypt. For instance, there is a strain of Afro-centrism that insists the ancient Egyptians were black. They go through the list of pharaohs, pointing out how each one had distinctly African features. The “Hotep” thing grows out of this. The sort of people who attend a Juneteenth festival will have the word “Hotep” attached to them in some way. Black businesspeople will put this on their business card or website to signal to other blacks that they are down with the cause.

It is complete nonsense, of course, but the reason we know it is nonsense is the Egyptians preserved their past in memorials of stone, often filled with hieroglyphs so precise that we can know the exact order of their rulers, four thousand years after their time. The Egyptians were so careful preserving their dead rulers that we have fully intact mummies in our museums. Using modern science, we now know how they looked in life and how they fit into the emerging genetic mosaic of the human family.

The Egyptians had a strong sense of time and their place in the historical timeline. Time was an important part of Egyptian culture. They had crude water clocks and a surprisingly good calendar. Memorializing the dead has only one purpose and that is so future generations know their past and their place in the timeline. The Egyptians put so much effort into preserving their past is they naturally assumed they had a future. The names and deeds of those who came before them would have use to those in the future.

In contrast, the Dorians burned their kings, as well as any record of them. Other than a few references here and there in later Greek writing, we do not know the names of their kings. They did not see any reason to preserve this information because they lived in the moment. The past was meaningless, because the future was meaningless to them. Even in the age of Aristotle, the Greeks could not know if Leucippus, the man credited with inventing Atomism, was a real person or the dates of his life.

The Cult that rules over us has forever lectured against the past, claiming that it is what prevents us from reaching the glorious future. The future is never defined, it is just assumed, but the past is full of a detailed list of monsters. The rage-heads, running around defacing statues and demanding people named “Jefferson” change their names, are not making detailed arguments about who should and should not be memorialized. These are not people with a sense of the past. They are raging against the ideas of having a past.

The proof of this is they quickly moved from rebel flags to Confederate statuary to pretty much every white man who is now dead. There are calls to rename Disney World because old Walt was a Jew hater. The Red Sox are trying to erase the name of the man who founded the franchise. Tom Yawkey was a man of his age and racist by modern standards, but so was every other human on earth just a few years ago. The rage-heads are erasing the name, not the man, because they simply want to erase the past.

Returning to the Greeks, they have an expression that is important to keep in mind while the rage virus runs through our society. “A Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” The opposite of that is true. What we are seeing today is barren young women cutting down memorials because they remind them of the fact, they have no future. The high presence of infertile women in these mobs is suggestive. One day, the cat will die and they will be alone.

It is this ahistorical nature of the American Left that is at the root of this incoherent and pointless violence. The Left organized a great PR campaign in response to Charlottesville, but they threw it all away in an orgy of violence over the last week. The reason is they are locked into the moment, a moment bound on all sides by a rage against nature. They cannot think about how today’s action will be viewed tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow for these people. All that matters is the catharsis.

Men have always contemplated their place in the timeline. The Irish used to say that the past is a nightmare from which they never awake. This was, of course, in relation to the troubles. Faulkner had Quentin Compson, his character in The Sound and the Fury, obsess over his family’s past, which was a stand in for the Old South. The Compson family was the emblem of the old, post Civil War South. Quentin finally smashes his pocket watch, a family heirloom, snapping off the hands, before he drowns himself in the Charles River.

That is the end for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. What has kept it going for generations was an easy to find collection of devils against which they could rally the true believers in a great cause. They have run out of devils and now they are digging up old graves, in an effort to bring back devils from the past. This rage will end in a great fire onto which they throw the old culture of America. Finally, when they have burned the last of it, they will throw themselves on the pyre, perhaps with some help from the rest of us.

Tyler Cowen Is A Bigot

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Tyler Cowen is a deadbeat who lives off the paycheck of others. That’s not his official title, of course. He calls himself an economist and he “works” at George Mason University as a professor, but he seems to spend most of his time travel writing and doing restaurant reviews for his blog. It’s a good life. He is paid $225,201.00 per year to not teach any classes, based on his web page. Instead he writes books no one reads and maintains a busy travel schedule at taxpayer expense. He posts on his blog every day, too.

And he hates you. That’s the only way to read his latest post.

Given what’s happening in the country, with regards to the populist uprisings, immigration, identity politics and anti-white racism, his post could be read as a way to rub salt in the many open wounds. It’s a cry for attention. Another way to read it is to signal to the rest of us, that like the royals of that bygone era, he and his class see themselves as above it all. They live in the cloud and the disruptions caused by the Cloud People are of no consequences to them.  This is his “let them eat cake” statement.

Cowen is an example of what has happened to America over the last three decades. His world can be described as a low work, high reward life. He lives in Fairfax County, one of the richest counties on earth. He putters around at his hobbies, never feeling the least bit of concern about his job. Government never has a recession and never fires anyone. He is not living like a rock star, but his earnings put him firmly in the top-10%. It’s a great life and everyone should experience it, but you can’t. You have to pay for it instead.

By paying for it, it is not the cash that it takes to finance the multi-trillion dollar skimming operation that is national government. The reality is, as Tyler Cowen would be happy to explain, the rich pay most of the taxes. The bottom half of earners pay little in taxes to the Federal government. The middle-class is not taxed too heavily. No, It is not the checks you write to Washington. Paying for it means the endless war on you, your past and the culture you consider to be yours and your ancestors. Your tax is their hatred of you.

It is one of the unanticipated consequences of the managerial state. People like Cowen should be grateful for a lifestyle few can experience. Logically, he should look around and want to conserve as much of America and American culture as possible, as it is what has allowed him to live. Instead, he bitterly hates the world that made it possible for him to exist. Like a spoiled teenager, he is perpetually lashing out at the people doing what is necessary to make it possible for this coddled class to live a life of leisure.

This pampered class hates you and wants you replaced. That’s the point of the Cowen post. He certainly knows that the reason NoVa “works” as a multi-culti paradise is that trillions are hoovered off from the rest of the nation and used to make his the adult daycare center run smoothly. He knows it, but that’s not important to him. What matters is that he lets you and his colleagues know just how much he hates the Dirt People outside the walls of his world of make believe. He’s a bigot. He hates Dirt People.

All over America, the people in charge are sending this around, laughing about how they are erasing you from the history books. They think it is funny.

Of course, if the roles were reversed and three honkies were posing in front of the toppled over statue of Martin Luther King or a vandalized holocaust memorial, the New York Times would be issuing a another fatwa against the honky. Nothing will happen to these three or any of the people who toppled it over. That’s because what’s driving this is not the agency of black people. They are simply reacting to the prodding of bigots like Tyler Cowen and the rest of the pampered class. It’s monkey hear, monkey do, as it were.

Ironically, Tyler Cowen lives on a street named after the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana. He is best known for the quip, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The past is full of guys like Cowen. They were a feature of the French Revolution. They were a feature of the Cultural Revolution. They were there cheering the Bolsheviks when they seized power. It was all good fun until the knock was at their door. The knock comes because men full of hate for their side have no friends.

Tyler Cowen and the men of his class hate you. The reason for that is he knows that if we ever get anything close to the libertarian world he claims to support, he’s standing on a street corner selling pencils. He knows he and his kind are just overgrown toddlers living in perpetual adolescence. Without the Dirt People to keep him safe and supporting a system that makes his world possible, he’s nothing and he resents you for it. He resents that you can live without him, but he cannot live without you.

It is easy to look at that picture and feel disgust toward the blacks posing on the toppled over statue. Maybe that is our future. Maybe the world of tomorrow is blacks camped out in the ruins of the American Empire. The great ethnic and racial strife that will define the coming battle for the West may not end well. The reason the Tyler Cowen’s root for the other side is that no matter how it turns out, the future will not include under employed economists who spend their days writing Yelp reviews about kebab restaurants.

The Potemkin Society

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A Potemkin village is a fake community built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is. The term comes from stories that Grigory Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to fool Catherine II, the Russian Empress. After she passed, the village would be disassembled and then reassembled further down so she could pass another nice village. The story is probably exaggerated, but the concept is a useful one so the term has stuck with us.

It is a useful term that came to mind in the run up to the Charlottesville rally. It came to mind after the riots in Berkeley. In both cases, you have fake cities that exist for no real reason, other than there is a government run college in them. In both cases, the people in charge are ridiculously unserious people, who should not be in charge of a convenience store, much less a small city. That is because the people who put them into office are just as ridiculously unserious. They are adult children playing grownup on the public dime.

This is not just a small city issue. The general lack of seriousness among the political class seems to be a byproduct of managerialism. Look around Washington and it is a parade of naive, clueless airheads produced by our finest colleges. It is not just an American phenomenon. Europe’s leaders are ever bit as ridiculous. The Europeans are creating a class of politicians that are close to fictional. Emmanuel Macron, the new leader of France, may as well be a hired actor, which is why he is a disaster.

Now, Macron’s problems are not all his own making. France, like the rest of Europe, is a financial knot that can never be untied. A lot of it has to do with being vassal states for the last 70 years, but a lot of is demographics resulting from socialism. When you make having babies expensive, people stop having babies. Macron inherited a country that is old, expensive and in debt. Still, he is proving to be incapable of doing the serious business of building coalitions and getting his program implemented.

That is the thing you see all over Europe. The political elites carry on like administrators of a university, rather than serious political leaders. Europe is facing an invasion from the south and instead of addressing it, they engage in public pose downs. The few serious countries, like Poland, find themselves on the receiving end of the elite’s wrath, not because they are wrong, but because they are making the barren spinsters running the EU look bad. The European Union is no more serious than a faculty lounge.

Again, this is probably as much a result of managerialism as anything else. The way Western politics is run is that some segments of the political class are paid representatives of the financial elite. Another segment relies on popular support for their position. Then there is a group of professionals, who do the hard work of figuring out how to get things done. Managerialism does not produce this class of leader. Instead, it is pompous dilettantes and hired men, whose loyalty is bought by the billionaire class.

Even the financial elite struggles with a lack of seriousness. Kevin Plank is supposed to be an important businessman, yet he goes in for ridiculous showboating like this. Under Armor makes overpriced underwear that they primarily sell to blacks and teenagers. In a just society, it would not exist, because it preys on the worst instincts of the weakest minds in society. But men are not angels and there will always be rich men who make money off the poor and stupid. The least they can do is act like adults in public.

But that is a rare thing in the financial elite these days. Google is the most recent example of how unserious people are incapable of managing simple difficulties. Instead of strutting around like a retarded peacock, the Google CEO could have easily made the whole thing disappear. A check and an NDA would have put a quick end to a trivial issue. Instead, he let some old lesbians lead him around by the nose and the result was a fiasco that promises to drag on into the court for years.

The common thread in our public discourse is that our leaders are more concerned with playing make believe than doing their duty. That is why the word “duty” is never mentioned in public discourse. When was the last time anyone heard a politician or a rich man talk publicly about his duty to society? The closest you get is some halfwit sportsball player talking about how he needs to give back to his community. Otherwise, we are ruled by a class of people with the maturity and fortitude of prep school teenagers.

That is what managerialism curdles into in time. What the giants of our side, guys like Sam Francis and James Burnham could not see in their time, is becoming clear in our time. The credentialism and parochialism of the managerial state produces people barely capable of working on a local school board committee. Their lack of exposure to the realities of the human condition cripples them spiritually. They become ruthless, overgrown adolescents playing dress up as they ascend into positions of authority.

That brings us back to Berkeley and Charlottesville. If the political class is unable and unwilling to manage the antics of Antifa and Jason Kessler, what are they going to do when smart and resourceful antagonists come along? The morons waving flags and throwing piss-bombs at each other are the easy problem to manage. The hard problem are the well organized guys with goals beyond getting themselves on TV. As I have said many times, Trump was a warning shot. The political class better get serious in a hurry.