Immigration Morality

Posted on December 4, 2024 by thezman

One of the remarkable things to happen in the last election cycle was the preference cascade that quietly happened regarding immigration. Five years ago, the best you could hope to hear from normie and the people who prey on him in the political system is that “illegal immigration” is bad. They still clung to “legal immigration” as some sort of magical incantation that put them on the side of angels. Then suddenly, normie was holding up signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”

There is a practical reason for the change. Trump ran on the immigration issue in 2016 and to the surprise of the beautiful people, it was not disqualifying. They were sure they had properly anathematized the issue but there was Trump talking about Mexican rapists and Muslim bans. They responded with violence against Trump supporters and the usual stuff about Hitler. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was using the administrative state to clamp down on immigration.

That created a contradiction. On the one hand, the Cloud People were attacking the Dirt People for being anti-immigrant bigots, even though the Dirt People continued to hold romantic views on immigration. On the other hand, the negative results of immigration were slowly declining as immigration declined. Then like a windstorm, Biden comes in, opens the border and suddenly everyone is now getting to see the results of open borders policy in their neighborhood.

Imagine the government starts doing something about the snake problem, thus reducing the snake problem, but at the same time telling you that you need to stop complaining about the snakes. Since you see fewer snakes, you can go along with the program as it tracks with what you are seeing. Then the government starts dumping snakes in your yard while still calling you an ophiophobe. The scales fall from your eyes and the eyes of others, and you get a ophiophobic preference cascade.

It is far too soon to tell if Trump is serious about immigration, but it was the one thing he did well in his first term. Fighting the Republican Party, the courts and the administrative state, they still managed to reduce illegal crossings to a trickle. They also slowed up the legalization process and the visa process. Now that immigration has a bad odor about it, especially among the economic elites, he should be able to make some lasting changes to the system in his second term.

This tracks with the last crackdown on immigration a century ago. After immigrants started killing rich people, culminating in the Wall Street bombing, rich people suddenly had their own preference cascade experience. It turned out that romantic notions about immigration were no defense against bombs, so they started demanding reform to the immigration system and finally the end of immigration entirely. For most of the 20th century, America suffered little from immigration.

Another aspect is the morality of immigration. For a long time, the nation wreckers kept the debate within economics. Immigration in the general sense was good for the economy, thus it was assumed to be morally good. The sequence was to first sacralize the economy, defined in the interest of the ruling class, then declare things like open borders good for the economy. That meant only a bad person who hates the economy could oppose immigration.

This worked in the abstract until real issues that cannot be addressed economically brought the issue back into the domain of morality. Coeds being murdered by Mexican migrants, Hattians eating your pets and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings cannot be dismissed with economics. The Haitian cat-eaters were a great example of how some people benefit from immigration, while the rest suffer. It showed that immigration privatizes profit and socializes costs.

What we see happening is that immigration is becoming a moral issue. In addition to the cat eating stuff, the name calling has lost its punch. Suddenly, people not only started to realize that everyone else is tired of immigration, but they were also tired of being called Hitler by degenerates and deviants. Those old people waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at Trump rallies were the result of people suddenly free from the old moral constraints on the immigration issue.

The rich people are noticing. Elon Musk was doing the old civic nationalist stuff about legal versus illegal immigration in the summer, only to see his posts buried in negative comments about the morality of immigration. Trump has toned that stuff down as well, which means he no longer feels the need to bend the knee to the plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty. It will not be long before libertarians are writing about the damage done by Emma Lazarus.

In a larger context, this is just the start of a process that will have to reach back to the root causes of the immigration issue. For example, there are millions of able-bodied men in the social welfare system. There are millions of people in pointless cubicle jobs who could be in productive work. The social welfare state was not a solution poverty but a solution to upper-middle-class people feeling sad about poverty. The result is a vast warping of the economy, especially labor markets.

Instead of addressing this colossal mistake, the workaround was to both import millions of low-cost workers into America and export industries to low-cost countries through the fiction of “free trade” policies. De-industrialization and immigration share the same root cause, which is the bourgeoise progressive fantasies about the just society that took over the ruling classes in the last century. It is another reminder that ideology is just another word for morality.

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The Antidote

Posted on December 3, 2024 by thezman

A central feature of the democratic society is mendacity. The more democratic the culture, the less honest the participants. The reason for that is simple. The goal in a democratic system, whether it is a marketplace for goods and service or a political system for setting public policy, is to win the crowd. You do not necessarily have to win a majority, but you need enough to lie about having a majority. To do that you must say anything to bring the mob to your side.

This is the reason we know or care about Socrates. Ancient Athens was a democratic society, where rhetoric was the prized skill. The reason for that is status was rewarded to those who could win over their fellow citizens through argument. Inevitably the truth stopped mattering very much, as people tend to believe a good story, especially one that flatters them, over objective reality. Socrates skillfully argued in favor of the truth over rhetoric, so the Athenians voted to kill him.

Lying is a funny thing as everyone lies about something, usually in a moment of weakness or in an effort to be prudent. As a result, normal people think of lying as a thing you do reluctantly. You lie about not having broken something at work, even though in the long run honestly would be your better option. You tell the friend that his new car is great, even though you think it is ridiculous for a middle-aged man to be driving around in a Miata. It hurts to say it, but friendship requires it.

While everyone lies, most people are honest. They think the truth matters, even if the truth is unwelcome. You want the doctor to tell you the truth about your health, not because it will have an impact on your health, but because it is your health, and you have a right to know the truth about it. This sense of entitlement with regards to the truth stems from the fact that all humans possess the tools to conceive of what with think is reality and therefore we are entitled to reality.

It is why most people struggle to accept that there are people who are not honest, so they do not struggle with the lie. In fact, they take pleasure in tricking people, even when the truth would serve their interest. Unlike the honest person, the Democratic Man sees truth telling as a weakness. He speaks the truth only when forced into it and seems to see it as a weakness. For him, the truth is bait to lure in the honest to trick them into something they would otherwise resist.

An example of this is in The Atlantic, a publication that has become the symbol of democratic mendacity. In less democratic times, it was a journal for the intellectual class of the WASP ruling elite. Now it is a vulgar tabloid used to insert falsehoods into the media ecosystem. This post from David Frum is a perfect example. Everything about it is a lie from the very first sentence. From there is a clever monument to the art of lying to trick the intended audience.

“For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics” is what someone once described as a lie so colossal that people assume there must be some truth to it because they cannot believe that anyone would lie so infamously. Bill Clinton fired the FBI Director, Bill Sessions, as soon as he came to power. He replaced the capable Sessions with the thoroughly incompetent Janet Reno.

The fact is every position in Washington is political. You cannot be in politics without being political, which means taking a side. David Frum surely knows this, but he likes lying and he has an agenda. One of the funny things about this type is they often start with a kernel of truth around which they wrap their lies. In this case, the kernel of truth is that the FBI helped the media drive off Nixon. The schemers are hoping a similar thing happens (again) once Trump takes office.

This is just one recent example. You can scan the regime media sites and find hundreds of examples on a daily basis. We live in a time when the only reasons to consume mass media are entertainment and to learn what is not true. People like David Frum make being funny on social media much easier. If you see an assertion of fact in the Wall Street Journal, then you know what is not true about that particular subject and can eliminate it from the set of possible truths.

The question, from a sociological and analytical perspective, is whether the system produces the mendacious or whether it simply elevates them. Since Grog sold Trog a bad wheel, lying has been a part of human society. Along with it we have evolved various ways to guard against it, both individually and collectively. Among European people, social rules evolved to sort people between the trusted and the untrustworthy, creating moral societies rather than tribal ones.

Therefore, if liars have always been an issue for human society, it means the proliferation of liars is a product of the current rules. We are becoming a low trust society either because we are conditioning each generation to prize mendacity over the truth or the system rewards the mendacious over the honest, thus flooding the public square with shameless liars. The lack of shame is a critical piece, as moral societies rely on shame to govern behavior.

The counter to this is someone like Tutus Oates. He was an English priest who fabricated a conspiracy to kill Charles II. This was the “Popish Plot” that made him quite famous and wealthy for a time. This was just one of his many lies and schemes that often had no obvious benefit to him. Like Hillary Clinton, he loved lying. Eventually, people caught onto his tricks, but again like Hillary Clinton, he used more tricks to escape the hangman’s noose and continue with his mendacity.

This perfect example of the modern pundit lived in the 17th century when democracy was limited to arguments among nobles after too many drinks. This was the restoration, a time when popular government had a very bad odor. Of course, one could argue that the flickers of democracy under Cromwell fertilized the ground where the seeds of mendacity had lied dormant. Still, in a decidedly undemocratic society a trickster like Oates was able to thrive for a little while.

None of this may seem to matter, but Western people evolved over thousands of generations to exist in high trust societies. Unlike the tribal people of sub-Saharan Africa who organize around the tribe or the people in the Middle East who organize around the clan, Europeans organize around a set of moral codes. The proliferation of liars who have undermined social trust are making Western societies unlivable. The next step is they become ungovernable.

What that means for the reform minded is that for reform to work, Western societies must become hostile to people like David Frum. Either they sink in status to the point where they are nothing more than a warning to others or they find life in a high trust society too terrifying, so they self-deport. In other words, the goal of reform must be elevating candor to the highest quality, as the necessary antidote to the mendacity that has come to dominate the modern West.

The Fever Break

Posted on December 2, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about college football and the war on tradition, a post about the bunker mentality in Washington. Due to holiday sloth there was not Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Over the long holiday weekend, President Joe Biden pardoned his crooked son Hunter, which surprised only the enemies of Donald Trump. Everyone else knew that the old man would not leave office without cleaning up the mess of his son. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but he loves his kids, perhaps too much. At some level, you must respect his family loyalty. There is an old world gangsterism about his willingness to help his family loot the political system.

An interesting part of the pardon is that it is not just a pardon for specific crimes that have been alleged by the Department of Justice. It is a blanket pardon for all things he may have done since 2014. This does not cover state crimes like murder, but outside of something extreme like that, it means he has been given the sort of get out of jail free card reserved for important gangsters. Henry Hill, of Goodfellas fame, was given this type of deal so he would become a rat.

If the 2014 start date seems important, that is because it is when the Biden family started feeding at the Ukraine trough. This was when the State Department engineered the Maidan coup that toppled the Ukrainian government of President Yanukovych, who refused to sign a deal with the EU. Once he was gone, the State Department helped put Petro Poroshenko in charge, who was followed by Volodymyr Zelensky. It is funny how so much has revolved around Ukraine for a decade.

That is what keeps many people in Washington up at night. Trump returning with a vengeance could mean him directing his people to investigate this long running scam called Project Ukraine. After all, it was his decision to question Ukraine that got him impeached, so Ukraine should be at the top of his vengeance list. That and the Ukrainians are desperate to cut a deal with Trump. There may be more Ukraine related pardons coming before January 20th.

That is what makes the timing of this interesting. Normally, the president leaving office signs the pardons on the way out the door or maybe over the Christmas holiday, in order to minimize attention. Bill Clinton pardoned the Jewish gangster Marc Rich on his last day in office. At the time, Rich was on the lamb hiding in Switzerland, but his wife was loading the Clinton family down with cash and prizes. Rich got rich as part of the looting of post-Soviet Russia, in case you are wondering.

As an aside, once word got out that Clinton had pardoned Marc Rich there was a hue and cry in Washington demanding that the incoming Republican administration investigate the matter. It was not just Republicans pretending to be outraged. All the beautiful people were playing along as well. Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to look into it, but she took the job seriously, so she was replaced with James Comey, who could find nothing wrong with it.

That aside, it would have made much more sense for Biden to have done this on the way out the door, so it suggests this is part of a process. Everyone involved in the very dirty dealings in Ukraine must remain silent or face the prospect of Hunter Biden talking without fear of prosecution. Given how the Biden family has operated over the years, it probably means the next six weeks will be a pardon auction for those who ever did business with the Biden family.

The hilarious part of this is how the people we call the left are having a collective meltdown over this news. Twitter/X is now full of angry denunciations from Trump haters about how this makes them look stupid. The people who serious thought Kamala Harris was a good choice are also very vexed. They see this as proof that their girl boss was undermined by a conspiracy of pale penis people. They are now determined to make sure this never happens again. That should be fun.

Official Washington sees the problem with this pardon. They have been running with the narrative that Trump is a say anything to win dictator who will then grow a small mustache as soon as he returns to Washington. That sort of self-righteous indignation does not work when your side is issuing blanket pardons to family members and potentially anyone with a fat wallet. It is hard to claim Trump is corrupt when Joe Biden is putting pardons up on eBay.

In a way, it is a fitting end point for this long moral panic that kicked off during the Obama administration and came crashing down in this election. The subtext to all of it was that the good guys, the people launching the pogroms and panics, were surrounded by an invisible army loyal to Old Scratch. This required any means necessary to reveal and then defeat this threat to our democracy. It turns out that the threat was in the mirror all along.

Not only has the “crying Trump” run its course, but the moral panic that has been the basis of it has also run its course. The public no longer believes any of it now and the people doing the point and shriek are running out of energy. It also means there is no more money to be had from monetizing these panics. The relatively muted response to the election is the result of exhaustion. The Hunter Biden pardon is the start of a great sweep up from a party that went on far too long.

A Ship Without A Crew

Posted on November 26, 2024 by thezman

It appears the plan is to fill the time between now and when Donald Trump regains the White House with stories about starting a nuclear war with Russia. First, we got the NATO missiles strikes on Russia, then it was the Russian use of a mystery weapon that should terrify everyone. Instead, the response from NATO is a series of stories about doing even dumber things than the missile strikes. It is as if Western leaders are in a contest to see who can think of the dumbest idea possible.

So far this week we have stories leaking out from Europe that the Brits and French are talking about sending an “expeditionary force” to Ukraine. That was followed by comments from the head of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, suggesting NATO launch preemptive strikes on Russia. All of this is taking place in the looming shadow of a second Trump administration. The Europeans are carrying on as if Godzilla is approaching the continent.

Of course, all these ideas are being floated by people who would urinate themselves if faced with a physical confrontation. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are ridiculous people who have landed in these positions due to the collapse of their respective political classes. The rest of the European political class is equally silly, but most lack the vanity of these two. Most are like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who seems to cherish being a middling mediocrity.

The question that is never asked is how did it come to this? Surely Britain has better men than Keir Starmer. The UK has a lot of problems, but it still has some of the best human capital on the planet. The same is true of France. This is a country that defined diplomacy in the West. There must be a deep well of talent in the country, despite generations of bad policy making. How in the world did these two feckless nitwits end up ruling these two once great nations?

Obviously, these two men did not arrive on the scene by chance. They were selected and groomed by the political system that rules their countries. They made the right friends, followed the right advice and most importantly, never asked the wrong questions about the current narrative. In many respects, these two men were selected purely on narrative grounds. They filled a role in the story better than the alternatives, so they got the job and here we are on the verge of war.

It is the machine that generates the narratives that makes it possible for so many mediocrities to bubble up to the surface of the system. For example, the crackpot idea of an expeditionary force was not dreamed up by Starmer or Macron. This has been floated by the best thinks tanks in the West. Here is a post from the Center for Strategic and International Studies talking up the expeditionary force. It was written by what the system calls an expert on the topic.

This idea is part of a larger narrative that assumes, like all managerial class narratives, that the world can be set right if the managerial elite simply has the will. That is the themes of this post in The Guardian by one of the UK’s top experts on the war in Ukraine and Russia in general. It is a completely insane post that has no bearing on objective reality, but that is not important. What is important is it tells guys like Starmer that the good guys have the will to make the narrative real.

That post is not written by the typical kook that fills the pages of The Guardian, but by a fellow calling himself James Nixey. He leads the Russia-Eurasia program at Chatham House, which is a prestigious think tank in the UK. In other words, he is a guy people like Starmer will call for advice on Russia. Note that Mr. Nixey is barely qualified to offer tour advice on Russia. His entire life has been about sitting in a room somewhere imagining what life is like outside that room.

This is a recurring theme in Western politics. From top to bottom it is people who are very good at playing along inside imagination land and even better at avoiding anything that resembles real life experience. Generations ago, the Prime Minister would have served in the military and maybe even seen war. Even the more effete politicians could rely on a class of men who understood how the world actually worked. Today such men are treated as skunks at a picnic.

In the fullness of time, the defining characteristic of managerialism will be its boiling off of the capable, independent men in favor or complaint mediocrities. Lacking genuine men of action, the compliant mediocrities search for consensus, which becomes their authority figure and their moral authority. It is why everything that comes from the think tanks and media reinforces the agreed upon positions. The most terrifying thing for a mediocre man is to stand alone against the consensus.

The narratives we keep seeing serve to make manifest the consensus and cast those within the consensus as the white hat in the drama. Much of what seems to drive these mediocre men of late-stage managerialism is moral affirmation. It is why they have all herded themselves off the Ukraine cliff. They care only for being seen at the sincerest believer in the prevailing narrative. For the political class, it means public policy is always a public act of piety.

If the crew of a ship all die at once, the ship does not immediately capsize. It will float around until it runs aground or succumbs to a big wave. On rare occasions it makes its way to land in one piece. That is the West right now. It is a ship bobbing around, crewed by mediocre men who are terrified at the thought of being in charge. Instead, they huddle together inside a consensus and ruthlessly enforce it. To continue the metaphor, they are below decks debating the need for a captain.

Two Minutes To Midnight

Posted on November 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about my various handyman-DIY projects, a post about magnificent short film about Star Trek called Unification and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, NATO began firing long range missiles into Russia and in response the Russians fired something entirely new at Ukraine. There is not much data on what it was and what it did, but the Russians claim it was their Oreshnik system, which is a type of intermediate-range missile. The Ukrainians, of course, claim it never happened and Western media is saying it was a ballistic missile. Whatever it was is serious enough to warrant an emergency NATO meeting this week.

From independent sources, the most likely answer is that the Russians demonstrated the first combat use of a hypersonic glide vehicle in this attack. The word “hypersonic” gets tossed around quite about by online “geopolitical analysts” because it is a cool sounding word that is often used in video games. There is nothing all that new about hypersonic missiles, as many long-range ballistic missiles reach or exceed Mach 5 as they descend toward their target.

In fact, there is nothing new about hypersonic glide vehicles. The Russians started working on this technology in the 1960’s. America also had a program testing this technology for weapons. Both sides of the Cold War figured out that traditional ballistic missiles were good enough for the job of terrifying the other side with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, so the technology never went into use. The cost of hypersonic vehicles was simply too high for the task.

There was another problem with hypersonic glide vehicles. Traveling through the atmosphere at those speeds made them impossible to hide. Satellites would be able to track them as soon as they were launched and ground radar would then also be able to track them, even if they have some maneuverability. A pretty good rule of air defense is that if it can be tracked it can be killed. At the minimum, the other side sees it coming and has time to get its own missiles in the air.

That is a bit of the arms race that has been forgotten. It was not just the race to have the most devastating warheads, but also a race to have the best detection systems and the best cloaking system. If the other side could not anticipate your launch or see it coming right away, you had an obvious advantage. This is why both sides eventually banned intermediate range missiles in Europe in 1987. The United States unilaterally withdrew from the treaty in 2019.

The intermediate range missile presents a big problem if your goal is to avoid wiping out mankind in a nuclear war. Because it can hit its target in less than thirty minutes, there is no way to respond, short of mag-dumping your ICBM’s. By the time the launch is detected, the missiles are closing in on the target. Missile defense in the nuclear scenario depends on hitting them in their boost phase or as they leave the atmosphere to prevent them from exploding over your territory.

It is unclear when the Russians resumed their intermediate missile program, but it was probably not long after the U.S. withdrew from the treaty. It is not all that clear when the Russians resumed working on hypersonic glide vehicles either. There is growing evidence that they have been collaborating with the Chinese on this project, because last year the Chinese demonstrated a hypersonic weapon. It combined a hypersonic glide vehicle and a fractional orbital bombardment system.

That last bit is another clue that the Chinese have been working with the Russians on this project, as the fractional orbital bombardment system is technology that dates to the Soviet Union. The Russians first developed this technology in the 1960s for its nuclear program. Unlike a ballistic missile, the FOBS only reaches low-earth orbit and can then deorbit over the target. This makes it very hard to track, because the warhead does not follow a predictable path.

When the Chinese demonstrated the combined use of FOBS and hypersonic glide vehicles, American military planners had a panic attack. General Milley famously compared it to Sputnik, by which he meant a moment when the West suddenly realized it had fallen behind the Soviets in space technology. Everyone dismissed his comments, because he is a notorious liar, but he may have been right. The possible use of this type of weapon by the Russians likely proves it.

The Russians have not said much about this system, other than stating that the West has no defense against it. The usual suspects are claiming that it is just an old intermediate missile system, and the Ukrainians say it was an ICBM. What we know is that minutes after it was launched, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles slammed into targets in Ukraine at speeds above Mach 5. Some claim Mach 10, but that is probably an exaggeration, but Mach 5 is still very fast.

What this means is that the Russians, if sufficiently provoked, could remove any European city from the game board in a matter of minutes. There is no defense and not much of a warning to the target country. If France, for example, starts firing SCALP missiles into Russia, Paris could cease to exist within a few minutes of someone telling Macron that he better say his prayers. It is easy to see why the deployment of such a weapon is so terrifying to fans of human civilization.

Of course, it is why the treaty banning the development of such weapons was viewed as an important step in deescalating the Cold War. This technology puts the world on a hair trigger with no time to pause for communication with the other side. It is also why the neocons desperately wanted the U.S. to withdraw from the deal. John Bolton was instrumental is convincing American officials to pull out of the treaty. In 2018, politicians still thought listening to psychopaths was a good idea.

The path to this point is a familiar one. The neocons first invent a threat, in this case the threat was that China and Iran were developing intermediate range weapons. There was little evidence of this, but that never matters. This is then turned into a justification for the United States to do something stupid. Famously, the invasion of Iraq was based on the entirely false assertion that Iraq was building doomsday weapons. It turned out that they only had WW1 vintage chemical weapons.

For the next two months, the psychopaths are still in charge of Ukraine policy, so they will no doubt keep poking the bear. It is pretty clear they want the Russians to use nukes in Ukraine. They have been yapping about it since 2022. That means the NATO meeting this week will be about getting the Germans to start launching their Taurus missiles at Russia. The excuse will be that they need to call the Russian bluff, but the real reason is they want a reason to fire the nukes themselves.

It remains to be seen if Trump is up for the difficult task of deescalating the arms race with China and Russia. He fell for every trick Washington could muster the first time, even some tricks they invented just for him. He seems to be set on keeping the neocons out of his administration this time. Even so, he will inherent a world that is now infinitely more dangerous thanks to the reckless behavior of the Biden admin. Simply surviving the next term might be the best he can do.

Trumponomics 2.0

Posted on November 12, 2024 by thezman

The next few weeks will bring a flurry of news regarding various names for jobs in the next Trump White House. Some of it will be gaslighting from people who just make things up for regime media. Some of it will disappoint Trump supporters hoping to get something from their efforts this time. One area that has gotten no coverage, but will be one of the most important, is the economy. Trump appears determined to fundamentally change how Washington controls the economy.

That is the first thing to understand. The United States is not a free-market economy or even close to one. There are millions of lines of regulatory code covering every aspect of economic activity. It is not exactly a command economy and in no way a centrally planned one, but it is a tightly controlled economy. Washington has its tentacles in every nook and cranny, even the black markets. Therefore, a president’s view on how to control the economy matters a great deal.

When it comes to economic policy, the placed to start is former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Trump was a fan of Abenomics, in addition to be on very good personal terms with him. Trump has often spoke highly of what has come to be known as Abenomics. Reportedly, Trump has talked to Scott Bessent about a position in the administration, maybe even Treasury Secretary. Bessent is also a proponent of the “three arrows” approach to the economy.

The “three arrows” term is how Shinzo Abe described his approach. One arrow or prong was loose money. Get as much money into the economy as quickly as possible, even if it creates inflation. The second arrow is to direct that new money into areas of the economy that either need revitalization or startup capital. If this means growing the budget, then so be it. The third arrow is to encourage (compel) private investment in the domestic economy over yield chasing.

Applied to the American economy, it probably means a blend of loose money, the slashing of regulation and tariffs to direct investment into the domestical economy, especially the supply chain and industrial base. One obvious lesson of the Covid panic, one entirely ignored by Washington, is complex supply chains, especially those flowing through Asia, are highly fragile. The growing rift with China makes untangling those supply chains even more important going forward.

Trump has made it clear that he wants to use tariffs to redirect investment into the domestic economy. Another name turning up as a possible addition to the Trump team is Robert Lighthizer, who is both a China hawk and the architect of Trump’s trade policy in his first term. It is important to note that the changes Trump ushered in were not rolled back under Biden. Taken together, it is a clear sign that Trump 2.0 will be much more hawkish on the trade front.

Those familiar with the regulatory world remember the wild ride it was in Trump’s first term as they went on a deregulation spree. Expect Trump 2.0 to be even more aggressive, especially on the environmental front. His nominee for the EPA is Lee Zeldin, who the Gaia worshipers detest. Trump made it clear with the announcement that his job will be to clear the dense thicket of environmental regulations that make it hard to put a shovel in the ground for any reason.

Trump 2.0 will be helped by the courts in this regard. This year the Supreme Court ended what had been termed the Chevron deference. This was the rule that said the courts should defer to the regulatory agencies whenever there was ambiguity in the laws passed by Congress. Of course, this meant that everything passed by Congress was as vague as possible, to give total control to the agencies. This has been turned on its head by the courts.

What we are likely to see is a three-pronged assault on the administrative state in Trump’s second term. One prong will be the aggressive slashing of regulations that we saw in Trump’s first term. The second prong will be a flood of litigation aimed at the vagaries of the enabling legislation. There are many cases in the system. The final prong is an effort by Congress to clean up the language to both limit the agencies, but also reassert oversight.

Where things get interesting is fiscal policy. Inflation remains an issue, despite claims to the contrary, but the Fed is signaling cuts in interest rates. Will Trump demand big new spending on infrastructure? This would be one way to soak up some of the extra money being generated by lower interest rates. Anyone who goes outside knows there is a desperate need to rebuild the infrastructure. Go to an airport and you are suddenly embarrassed to be an American.

All this stuff is boring and does not get the same attention you see with some of the other stuff allegedly on Trump’s agenda. Catapulting left-wing crazies into the sea provides a much bigger dopamine rush than deregulation. On the other hand, Trumponomics is the most radical part of his agenda. Those old enough to remember Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan see the point. Trump is repudiating half a century of conservative economic dogma.

The Trump economic agenda is not without its problems. In Washington, every mortgage payment, college tuition bill, access to elite schools and universities depends on nothing changing in Washington. Trump 1.0 was largely undone by his own party, who is as invested in the status quo as the Democrats. The lawfare industrial complex is also gearing up for round two against Trump. Maybe his team is ready this time, but even if they are prepared, it will be a long slog.

The bigger question is if it will work. What Trump is proposing sounds a lot like old fashioned liberal economics from the last century. Instead of tax and spend it will be print and spend. The difference is the deregulation and tariffs. The point of this approach is to redirect investment back into the American economy and direct it to tangible things like supply chains and manufacturing. It is the approach we saw with growth economies last century.

Another thing he has on his side is the economic elites have come around to this approach to the economy. Investors love cheap money and deregulation, but Wall Street also sees it needs a replacement for Asia. The days of getting rich from the China trade are gone. If the United States replaces China as an investment option, they will get onboard with it. As we saw with the election, it is always good when the rich people are backing your play.

The Restoration

Posted on November 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the weird noises coming from the regime after the election, a post about the odd quiet that we are seeing after Trump swept the field and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Legend has it that at the start of the trial of English King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell saw the king approaching Westminster Hall and realized he had a problem. He quickly warned his fellow parliamentarians that the king would ask a very straightforward question at the opening of the trial. He would demand to know upon what authority was he being brought to a trial. This is, in fact, what happened. Charles refused to enter a plea on the grounds the court had no authority over him.

The drama about Cromwell seeing the king’s approach and then suddenly seeing his problem is apocryphal, as the parliamentarians had been debating this issue since the end of the Second English Civil War. According to English law, the king could not be tried for breaking the law. Logically, the king was the law. The king was the sovereign and therefore the embodiment of the nation and its laws. Putting the king on trial was putting the system itself on trial.

Cromwell and his pals got around this problem by simply wielding the power they had, which was the force of arms, to override objections from members of parliament, the House of Lords and the king himself. When Charles asked “I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful authority”, the parliamentarians decided that “the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern.”

In other words, the long-held principles both sides claimed to support, over which they fought two bloody wars to that point, gave way to political expediency. Cromwell and the New Model Army had power, and they were determined to keep it, which meant killing the king and what he represented. If it meant trampling a thousand years of tradition and the law itself, they were prepared to do it. The trial proceeded as if the Charles confessed his guilt, and he was soon executed.

The French Revolution gets all the attention when it comes the crisis of liberalism, but it is the English Civil War that presents the problem plainly. By what authority can a parliament rule over a people? The answer always given is the people, but by what authority do the people have to pick their rulers? Where is it written that the people are the moral arbiter of society? Modern people think the answer is obvious, but for most of human history people thought the opposite.

The reason we have that story about Cromwell looking out of the window of Westminster Hall and suddenly realizing his dilemma is because people at the time understood the power of authority. The king was just a man, but what he represented was earthly dominion over man. No one looked at the king as just a man because he was the final authority, the one man who was an exception to the law, while being the embodiment of the law. He was the sovereign.

It is why after Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored. Despite it all, Cromwell was never able to answer the question posed by Charles at his trial. The authority of Parliament is in the law, but the authority of the law is in the king. Without a king, those in control of Parliament were left with force as their authority. It is easy to see why Mao famously said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The question of authority has haunted the world since that famous trial.

We are getting a glimpse of this with the election of Trump. Fifty years ago, the managerial class staged a coup against Nixon. Like the Rump Parliament that deposed Charles I, they acted extrajudicially but claimed to be doing so in defense of the law, which is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. They rid themselves of the imperial presidency, reducing the office and the rest of the political structures to committees controlled by the managerial class.

Then as now, the central question in the crisis is who says? Much of what constitutes the crisis of the American empire is people shouting from screens, demanding you must do this or must stop doing that. Everywhere you turn is a digital preacher, waging her bony finger at you and lecturing about your sins. The Roundhead ascendency that began with Watergate climaxed with men in dresses calling normal people sinners, but always the question remained. Who says?

The restoration of Donald Trump is an answer of sorts. Whatever his faults, Trump is a man who commands attention and respect. When he enters a room, the room changes because he is larger than life. He persevered over the last four years of official persecution through force of will. He returns to Washington as the leader of the victorious side in the cold civil war that has gripped the country. He also returns with an agenda and a mandate to execute it.

None of this is to say that Trump is the monarch or our moral authority. The point of the comparison is that the executive exists to replicate that role in a democratic system that lacks a moral authority. Without energy in the executive, the president cannot play the role the system requires to function. The last fifty years has seen the rise of rule by committee, and no one builds monuments to committees. Just as Parliament needed the king, Washington needs Trump.

It still leaves open that question. Monarchy solved the problem by making the king the sovereign and the answer to who says? In America, Christianity was assumed to be the answer most of the time. The exceptions required a strong executive to make the hard decisions and force the legislature to act. First the melting away of Christianity then the toppling of the strong executive left us with rule by committee and the fanciful chants about democracy to answer the question of authority.

Trump will not reign forever, so the question will return. Perhaps the managerial elite sees the problem and supports the return of the imperial presidency as a solution to the internal contradictions of managerialism. Maybe the economic elite supports the strong executive as a proxy for their supremacy over the managerial class, much in the way the king was the leader of the aristocracy. Maybe Washington falls into chaos again, as managerialism reaches its end.

In the end, political systems rise and fall on the question of authority. The moral questions in every society are either answered by the gods or by the people though their traditions and customs. Centuries of experience in self-government says we simply cannot accept “because we say so” as an answer. You either have a strong executive with the power to impress or you have a shared religion that answers all the important moral questions. Managerialism has neither.

The Signs Of The Next Times

Posted on November 7, 2024 by thezman

One of the weird things about how the American empire operates is that there is a long waiting period between the presidential election and the installation of the winner, if the winner is not the incumbent. In most countries with elections, the transition happens within a week or two of the election. In America, the new president has months to wait for his turn at the wheel and the outgoing administration has months to do their worst, often with the goal of hobbling the next president.

The latter was on full display after the 2016 election. The last months of the Obama administration were used to set up the Russian collusion hoax, along with other schemes to prevent a smooth transition. The Trump administration was crippled right out of the gate, forced to go through the absurd theater of a special counsel to investigate what everyone knew was a political dirty trick. Between November and January, the fate of the Trump administration was sealed.

That is something to keep in mind this time. Like 2016, the political class was sure they had fended off the invisible army of orange Hitlers, only to find that their blue wall had crumbled once again. Unlike 2016 there was no way for them to claim it was fraudulent or illegitimate, since the results were conclusive. This may explain the relative quiet this time compared to 2016. By the standards of presidential elections, this was a trouncing in both the electoral college and popular vote.

It is possible that the energy has run out of crazy land. People want to think the madness set in during the 2016 election, but it started way back in 2000 when the people we call the left went nuts over the Florida recount. It has been a steady decline into madness for over two decades. That is a long time to sit in the pumpkin patch waiting for the conspiracy theories to be proven true. Perhaps they got tired of waiting and are making their way back to the fringes of sanity.

It is impossible to know, primarily because it is impossible for the non-ideological to understand the mind of an ideologue. The former group tends to the practical, while the latter tends to the fanciful. Most people think half a loaf is better than no loaf, while the ideologues look at such a compromise as a conspiracy against the tides of history and a justification for violence. It is why normal people are always surprised by how the ideologues react to events.

The best we can do is look for clues around the issues of the day. Project Ukraine, for example, has been central to the usual suspects for a decade. Trump is no fan of this project, and he is no fan of Ukraine. People tend to forget that Ukraine was central to his first impeachment. The people responsible for Project Ukraine are the main players in the anti-Trump stuff going back to 2016. They are also something like a drug-resistant virus that never stops trying to kill the host.

At the moment, what we are getting is the usual stuff from the usual suspects laundered in regime media as news and analysis. This Wall Street Journal story tries to frame the Trump plan as a choice between Russia surrendering or Russia giving Ukraine time to regroup and restart the war after Trump. This is the same narrative they have been shopping in one form or another for a year. In other words, the usual suspects may not have a scheme ready for Trump 2.0.

Another place to look for clues is in the antiwhite subculture. They have been weirdly muted for the past year. One reason is the backlash to DEI that took down a few prominent people. These were financed by members of the economic elite, which might mean money is drying up for the antiwhite bigots. This tweet from New York Times rage head Ida Bae Wells reads like a resignation letter. In 2016 these bigots were enraged by Trump winning, but this time they are despondent.

The antiwhite race rackets are worth billions, so there is no reason to think their relative quiet this time is a sign that they are about to fold up their tents and get jobs down at the local Home Depot. It is worth noting that crying “white nationalism” has lost all its punch over the last few years. In other words, their muted response could be part of a longer downward trend or simply part of a regrouping. Like the neocons, how these people respond over the next months will provide some clues.

Another area to watch to get a sense of what is happening is the media. Crazies like Rachel Maddow were slightly less nutty this time, but other nodes on the media rage machine were strangely sober. Again, the decisive victory this time might be the issue as there is no easy bogeyman for them to blame. On the other hand, the Biden debate performance and the aftermath may have broken whatever spell had kept these people within the narrative.

It feels like a lifetime ago, but the night of the Trump – Biden debate, it was clear that the chattering skulls were stunned to see that desiccated husk of Joe Biden drooling on himself and staring into the nothingness. It is possible that there was some sort of awakening among some parts of the media. These people are sociopaths, so no one should be optimistic, but how they react over the next months will provide some clues as to what is happening behind the scenes.

There are plenty of other places to look, but the reason it feels like there is an eerie calm over the battlefield is everyone expected the orcs to keep fighting, despite the results of the election. Instead, they have retreated over the hill and are murmuring amongst themselves. The thing to accept is they never quit. They will be back, so the question is in what form will they return? What path back to perfidy will they take in the coming months to continue the fight?

An Amazing Time

Posted on November 6, 2024 by thezman

One of the funny things about history is we have the benefit of hindsight and a good idea of how we want to shape it to fit our current needs, so we can choose who we like to be the great men of history. We also get to choose clever labels for certain periods that elevate them over other periods. The Age of Enlightenment sounds better than the Dark Ages and it flatters us to think we are the product of people who struggled from the muck of latter to create the former.

Of course, the people who lived in these times had a different view. The most famous example is the life of Jesus. Few people at the time cared at all about this man or even knew he existed. His followers, if anyone bothered to notice them, were just a number of such troublemakers kicking around at the time. Even after Christianity started catching on, most people saw it as another cult in an age of cults. Men of the first century would be shocked to learn they lived in the first century.

This is why we get our own age wrong. We want to think it is important, so we look for people and events to elevate, often not noticing men and events that will one day be considered the important bits of our age. Those old enough to remember the 1980’s marvel a bit at the changing fortunes of Ronald Reagan. At the time, it certainly seemed like he was a seminal figure. Now, he is looking like part of a transitional period from the Cold War to the ultimate decline of the American empire.

Probably the best example of this form of recency bias is Barak Obama. His fans at the time thought he was black Jesus. He was not just the first black president, but all the three letter heroes rolled into one swarthy savior. He was FDR, JFK, RFK and MLK with a dash of Lincoln thrown in due to having lived in Illinois. Less than a decade since he left office, he is a fading memory. His stumping for Kamala Harris in the election drew little media attention and had zero impact.

The truth is the great men of history are usually the epitome of some inflection point in the affairs of man. The communists are wrong to say that there are no great men, just great times that produce the necessary men. If someone bought one of Adolph’s paintings our past and present is very different. If Alfred the Great did not exist this post is written in runes rather than the English language. On the other hand, momentous times call forth the great man. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

It is hard to know if we are living in a momentous time. It certainly feels like it, but these are relative things. Again, the 1980’s felt like the hinge of history. The Cold War and thus the fate of the world would be decided. It is now looking like the Cold War will not be viewed as all that important in the grand scheme of things. Maybe the convulsions of this age will similarly be viewed as a ripple in the timeline. On the other hand, last night could be a date people recall generations from now.

On the surface, it certainly looks like Trump is an important figure. Only one other president came back after a defeat to regain the White House. Grover Cleveland lost in 1888 and came back to win in 1892. Only a few former presidents have bothered to run again for anything, and their luck was all bad. This means Trump is now a “one of two” which is the second rarest of things in history. He is also the one of one in other things like impeachments and getting shot in the ear.

The Grover Cleveland example is a good reminder that being the first at something or even the only of something does not make for a great man. If Trump’s next term is quiet, then he could just as easily be forgotten. Given the circumstances around his political career, that seems unlikely. That is where the other part of the great man versus great times debate comes into the picture. This is a changing age. The world is changing, and the American civilization is changing with it.

That means future historians will no doubt pick some date or presidency to mark as the beginning of the change and then one as the end. Somewhere in that range will be Donald Trump or possibly, he is both ends of that range. We may look back at the Trump Era as the great transition from the post-Cold War America to whatever we call the period that comes next. Maybe it is called the multipolar age. It could also be the break from old America to the new, majority-minority America.

Again, it is hard to know about these things, but one thing we can be sure about is that we will not see another Donald Trump. Like the civilization that produced him, he has his faults, but those faults do not lie in anything sinister. No one has seen or will ever see a force of nature like this man. He is a Nietzschean figure in that he has fully embraced his destiny and lived it. He probably started his political career for superficial reasons, but in the end, he is the great man of his age.

As is always the case there will be plenty of people rending their garments and gnashing their teeth today. The “fascists” have won they will tell us, as they enjoy their luxurious lives of comfort. Others will seek to immiserate you by pulling forward their expected unhappiness so they can be miserable today. The rest will soak in the moment of having seen something no one will see again. It has been a dark and dangerous time but, well, e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Time On The Cross

Posted on November 4, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the proliferation of rage heads who can only communicate in emotions, a post about how we have become a nation of liars and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

The British conservative party, known as the Tories, finally settled on a new leader after they were nearly zeroed out in the last election. The pick to lead the party is a Nigerian woman calling herself Kemi Badenoch. Her official name is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, but that is far too British these days, so she has shortened it to a single word “Kemi” like pop stars do. She is now the face of the party that is supposedly the face of traditional English people.

The absurdity of this is obvious to most people, but not to everyone. The people running the Tory party are over the moon with this. Many of them are snickering into their sleeves about how the Labour party is “pale, stale and male.” Other are sure that it will take a Nigerian princess to restore British honor and finally confront the multicultural forces that have turned Britain into a zoo. This is their version of “Mexicans are natural conservatives”, popular with American conservatives.

The ridiculousness of this does not stop there. Look at the career of Kemi Badenoch through a traditional lens and her resume is a baffling mix of things that have no connection to one another or fit into a clear theme. She bounced from one thing to another, never accomplishing much but then suddenly she became a hot property among the consultancy class. That is where she was discovered by the political class and turned into a Yoruba version of Barak Obama.

The parsimonious explanation for Kemi Badenoch’s shambolic rise to the top of the Tory party is something John Derbyshire observed about Barak Obama when he suddenly burst on the scene. What appears to be a random walk preceding the meteoric rise is the result of the warm thermals created by white guilt over race and the desires and projects to seek forgiveness. The idealized black flits about until finally catching the sharp upward gust into the clouds.

Upper and middle-class whites in the Anglosphere seem to be driven to do these things, in part, by a desire to be ruled by Africans, who just happen to agree with them or “hold their values”, as they prefer to state it. There is also the desire to be punished by Africans, but not so much as to cause them real harm. They prefer the harm to fall on the bad whites. Then there is the strong undertow of salvation. These whites believe that this process will lead to their salvation.

This explains the weird exultation we see from these whites when a chosen one turns up to confirm the prophesies. The mania over Barak Obama was so bizarre people compared it to the cult of personality seen in places like North Korea. The Obama fans could tell you almost nothing about him, but that did not matter as simply being in the mobs worshipping him provided the religious experience they desired. You see the same look among the Tory members regarding Kemi Badenoch.

It is easy to mock this, but this behavior is driven by strong cultural and spiritual forces, and it is having a real impact. This phenomenon is mostly a product of the United States, exported around the West. The desire to build a city on a hill evolved into a sense of shame coupled with a desire to heal the world. The result is something approaching idolatry, with the well-behaved black person being treated like an emissary of God, who must be allowed to perform his miracles.

It is not an accident that the script writers for Barak Obama had him say things like “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Many people dismissed it as emotive nonsense, but the line has African origins. For the intended audience, white, educated and upper-middle-class, the line struck like a thunderclap. They were the elect and the proof of this was their presence in the cult of Obama. Not only was the promised land near, but salvation was also at hand.

Salvation never came and the result was a decade of madness. It is not an accident that the street violence and other engineered destruction of the basics of society started in the middle of Obama’s last term. At that point, it was clear to all that salvation was not coming, so they had no choice but to search for a villain. This sort of cult like behavior never turns to self-reflection in the face of disconfirmation. Instead, the energy in search of salvation channels into the search for the devil.

It remains to be seen if this is the process in Old Blighty. The Tories are in the political wilderness for a few more years. Labour, which won the last election, is as popular as rectal cancer and faces nothing but bad options. Britain is much closer to economic and social collapse than anyone in power appreciates. Throw in the fact that Black Jesus is not supposed to come from what passes for the right and it seems unlikely that Kemi Badenoch will follow the Obama arc.

Instead, what this looks like is what we see all over the West these days and that is a reboot of an old classic but done by ham and eggers. The Tories, like their American counterparts, have reached the logical end of what has passed for conservatism since the middle of the last century. The only remaining constituency for conservatism is the economic elites who seek to keep the old dialectic going. In the end, this gambit will fail to change their political fortunes.

There is more to it though. This unsatisfied desire for forgiveness that lies at the heart of this worship of Africans in the Anglosphere is not going away, because there is no mechanism to achieve it. Christianity, from which this desire was inherited, had mechanisms for forgiveness of sin. It also had a logic to address those things for which forgiveness in this life was not possible. The secular ideologies that rose up to replace Christianity have no such mechanisms.

Each turn of the wheel has led to a more reckless pursuit of salvation, because “more of the same” is the only possible answer to the inevitable failure. It is why we have gone from the reasonable extension of legal protections to former slaves to a world of unlimited non-white immigration and the erasure of white people from the cultural spaces, like movies, television and advertising. The burning desire to cleanse their souls of this sin has led to the desire to burn it all down.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what is killing the West is something that will lead the people to come down from their cross of ebony and embrace a new moral framing which gives them a purpose that elevates their people, rather than sacrificing them in search of forgiveness. That is unlikely to be found in the past. Instead, it will be found in the rubble of decline. At some point, even the fanatic must submit to reality or at least be overcome by it and those who rise from it.

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