In modern America, the mass media is controlled by adherents of the technocratic, neo-puritan religion we call modern liberalism. The simplest way to think of modern liberalism is as an identity cult where a relatively small group of whites look out at the rest of the country with contempt. As a result, public debate and public opinion exist within the context of liberalism. The terms, assumption, premises and boundaries of public discussion are determined by liberals in the media.

The point of bringing this up is to underline how easy it is to come away with a very warped view of what is happening in the world. In the recent Austrian election, for example, the Freedom Party was described as crypto-Nazi, despite being the opposite of National Socialists. If you read their party platform, they are more like the guys at Reason Magazine than anyone from Der Stürmer. From the perspective of the people writing the news stories, however, these rather bland libertarians of the Freedom Party feel like extremists.

The result of ceding control of public discourse to the cult of modern liberalism is that there is not a lot of discussion about what is happening to the Left. The coverage of the Austrian election is a great example. The press carried on like civilization just escaped an attack from Godzilla but breezed past the fact that Alexander Van der Bellen is a complete loon. The Austrian Green Party is nuts even by the standards of Austrian politics, which is no small thing.

Granted, the election was symbolic in many ways and that tends to result in weirdos doing well. Small town mayors are often eccentric because they have so little power. Voters are free to indulge in the entertainment side of politics when there is little at risk. Still, a complete crackpot won a nationwide election in a modern Western country. The reason for it is the political Left in the West has snapped free of its connections to normal society and is now rocketing out to the fringe.

Another useful example of this is the British Labour Party. It was not so long ago that the party was led by dreary technocrats like Tony Blair. Despite all the rhetoric, Labour was not a bunch of communists. They were always a left of center party that was just as happy to curry favor with the rich and powerful as the Tories. Today they are led by a madman who thinks Stalin was a trimmer. Jeremy Corbyn is a lunatic who has spent his life in fringe politics. Today he is one election away from being Prime Minister.

In America, the Democrats have been drifting into lunacy for a while under Obama as they desperately try to hold their coalition of weirdos together. Bernie Sanders is an old communist in a competitive race with Hillary Clinton. Sanders is not just an academic commie. He deeply admired the Soviets and thought Albania was a good model for the world. Just a decade ago a guy like Sanders running as anything other than a no-hope third candidate was laughable.

The dynamic in America has always been that the Progressives yank the window toward some fringe issue. The normals would grudgingly go along, kicking and screaming, so that the Overton Window gradually shifted in the direction of the loonies. All of a sudden, the normals appear to have simply let go of it. Set loose of that tether, the American Left is rocketing off into madness. There’s really no other way to describe the trannies in the bathroom business. It is madness.

Comparing American politics to European politics is not always sound because Europe has lived in a consequence free bubble since World War II. The economic and territorial safety of Europe has been America’s problem for 70 years, leaving the Euros to indulge is a more provincial brand of politics. Still, the events in Greece last year and what we are starting to see in more stable countries like Austria, suggests a global trend. At least a trend in the Western world.

The old order is breaking down and our politics are pulling apart. The old Center-Left coalition that has dominated Western politics is collapsing. On one side we have crackpots and lunatics trying to fill the void. On the other side we have traditionalists and nationalists, long marginalized, trying to organize in order to get into the fight. The Austrian Freedom Party had that “happy to be invited” vibe to it because none of them expected to be competitive.

Austria is a good lesson. We live in uncertain times and it is not always clear to voters who is wearing the black hat and who is wearing the white hat. People tend to go for the safe choice, and the safe choice is more often than not the familiar choice. Hillary Clinton is the worst candidate since Mike Dukakis, but she is familiar, like that hairy wart on Aunt Zelda’s chin. It is gross and disgusting, but you are used to it. That is what keeps her in the race, despite her many defects.

In the larger context, citizens in the West have been familiarized with Lefty for generations. Even the crazy ones like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn are stock figures on the political stage. The traditionalists and nationalists still feel alien and weird to many people and therefore face a bigger challenge. The result will be a period of derangement in politics where the fate of countries is placed in the hands of feckless nitwits like Justin Trudeau.

In short, things are probably going to get much worse before they get better.

I have long thought that Team Obama was going to work to destroy the campaign of Hillary Clinton, not by having her indicted or backing an alternative in the primary. That would be too obvious and it would risk splitting the cult of personality Obama created within the Democratic Party. Part of the plan to make Obama a billionaire after he leaves office is to cash in all the favors he has in the bank, so that means not spending them now in a political fight.

Instead, the better play is to let her twist in the wind on the scandals and let surrogates on the Left take turns whacking Clinton around in public. Unlike Bill, Hillary lacks the nimble political instincts to dodge and weave in public. Bill could easily swat away whatever was hurled at him and he always looked like he was not worried in the slightest. That was the creepy thing about him in the Lewinsky scandal. He seemed to enjoy the scandal more than he enjoyed the cause of the scandal.

In contrast, Hillary always looks like she is lying. The woman could be ordering lunch and she gives off the vibe that she is plotting to kill the waiter. The reason for it is she is always lying and she is not exceptionally good at lying. Bill is a sociopath. For him, lying is his nature. He enjoys the game. Hillary is just a crook and she is always worried about being caught, which is why she looks so calculating in public. This is a woman who knows she is a crook.

Anyway, that is what this latest revelation tells me. Team Obama is just letting this stuff drip out a little here and little there so the pressure is always on Team Hillary to deal with scandal. The more times she and her people are asked about it, the more chance there are to lie and get caught lying. For a generation, the NYTimes has been carrying water for the Clintons, but even they have to admit the truth when the State Department concludes Clinton has repeatedly lied about her e-mail.

Team Obama could have shut this down or had State exonerate Clinton a long time ago, but they did not. That is how you bury someone without making it obvious. You let others do it in a plodding, bureaucratic fashion so it just looks like procedure. That is what this Terry McAuliffe scandal looks like right now. The FBI was probably sitting on this for years, but then they decided to fold it into the Clinton investigation, because it opens up another front in the trap they are slowly building for Hillary.

It also points to the next phase of this slow torture of Clinton. The McAuliffe issue is a money scandal. He took donations from the Chinese, which is a favorite gag of Team Clinton going back 25 years. He also appears to have gotten his personal funds confused with campaign funds. Coincidentally, those campaign funds have links back to the Clinton Foundation. This lets the FBI open a case against the Foundation and that means examining the finances of what everyone knows is a money laundering operation.

Politicians understand scandal better than the press and the public. The one thing they know is that sex and money are the two scandals that get you tossed out of office. The reason is people can easily relate to those types of failings. Using campaign funds to buy gifts for your girlfriend is the sort of thing that makes great copy and it requires no explanation. The public gets it because we all understand the temptations involved. Everyone likes money and getting laid.

That is why I suspect this McAullife stuff has surfaced. The FBI is probably not going to get the DOJ to indict Clinton before the election, at least not on the e-mail stuff. That would actually play in Clinton’s favor as she could then play the victim card. She would come out and claim it is a right-wing conspiracy to keep a woman out of the White House. The liberal media would turn the FBI head into Ken Starr because that is the easy sell. It fits the narrative of the good liberal fighting the evil man.

That sort of narrative reporting does not work when the dramatis personae are Chinese bagmen, the oleaginous Terry McAuliffe and the parade of unsavory characters around the Clinton Foundation.  Every reporter in Washington will now be on the prowl for a piece of the puzzle connecting all the players in a web of financial shenanigans. Proper e-mail procedures are boring. Financial scandals are juicy and they are really juicy when they involve exotic weirdos carrying satchels full of cash.

Ironically, it is now following the same path as Watergate. The old line about that scandal was that it was not the crime it was the cover-up. That was half true. The real story was the deep, long standing hatred of Nixon by the liberal ruling elite. They hated him for his red hunting and they hated him for his decidedly plebeian style. Watergate and the related scandals were standard issue politics in those days, but they became weapons for the beautiful people to use against the usurper.

That is the way this is looking to me. The Left never really liked Hillary. She was always seen as the Yoko Ono of the Clinton Team. Her disastrous handling of health care made her a loser and there is nothing worse in liberal circles than losing. The way that Team Clinton opposed Obama in 2008 forever placed Hillary outside the in-crowd. Now, the beautiful people are using all of these small crimes to shred her candidacy. The summer of scandal is upon us.

Way back in the olden thymes, access to pornography was limited. When I was a kid, there were magazines sold from behind the counter, books sold from the backs of those magazines and smoker films that came from sleazy vendors in big cities. Women had bodice rippers, the soft porn of romantic novels, which were sold openly in grocery stores. Otherwise, it was your imagination when it came to titillation.

The result of this was a tiny porn industry. Magazines like Playboy were “big time” in that they had a large subscriber base and were able to work from swank offices, but they were still relatively small. They maybe used three or four girls in each issue and some women would appear repeatedly so the pool of women, who made money in men’s magazines, was tiny. The same was true of smoker films and the money they made was tiny as well.

Public morals played a role, but it was mostly technology that kept the porn business small. They were barred from the mass media of the day, television, and public morals meant porn had to be sold discreetly. I recall a store in our town mistakenly putting skin mags in the regular magazine shelf. My mother and some other women went to the owner and probably threatened to nut him. The mags went back behind the counter.

The big change for porn was the VHS tape. This was the first way to distribute video that anyone could play at home. All of a sudden, the porn maker could reach a much larger audience. When video stores popped up, they inevitably had a back room for adult films. With a bigger audience, the industry blossomed. Suddenly there was big money in porn so the San Fernando Valley became the Hollywood of porn, making films on a scale never imagined.

Those of you on-line in the dial-up days know where I am headed next. Porn was the first to truly exploit the internet. They pioneered the use of images on-line and then the use of video. The technology for putting video clips on-line was an obvious boon to the industry. The same is true of credit card processing. The porn guys were the first to adopt this technology. The first commercially successful websites were for porn. The joke back in the day was that a lot of code was written one-handed because it seemed like the porn sites were driving innovation.

The point of this walk down memory lane is that technology changed the porn industry. Demand was always there, but rarely met. The people on the supply side exerted enormous power because the cost of creating and distributing the material was high. Technology suddenly dropped those costs, thus allowing a wave of new suppliers into the business. It also wiped out the old suppliers like the old smoker films and skin magazines. It was a classic case of creative destruction.

That is not the end of the story. The internet lowered the barrier to entry so much that anyone can be in the business now. Amateurs make films and post them on-line for peanuts. Low-cost operators in Eastern Europe can sell porn to Western consumers for pennies. Porn is now free and ubiquitous. As a result, the porn industry has collapsed. There is simply no money to be made making sex films or selling pics of naked people. It is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.

Something similar has happened to the pundit-ocracy, and specifically the Conservative Industrial Complex. In the 70’s, you had a few “conservatives” like Bill Buckley and Bill Safire showing up on TV and writing for major newspapers. Otherwise, the supply of conservative opinion was tightly controlled by technology and the liberal morality police. As a kid, my local library had one copy of National Review and unlimited copies of the liberal rags.

Then talk radio burst the damn, in the same way the VHS opened the porn industry. All of a sudden local radio was allowing right-wingers to talk about forbidden topics. Cable TV started to open up more channels to non-liberal opinion and the Conservative Industrial Complex began to flourish. Instead of booming in a valley north of Hollywood, it boomed in the Acela corridor, running between Washington and New York City. I guess you could argue that Rush Limbaugh was the Seymore Butts of right-wing punditry.

Like the porn industry, the conservative opinion rackets are now under assault by the internet. Specifically talented amateurs who know how to cheaply reach a broad audience on-line and, most important, say things the professionals are afraid to say. Playboy did not just collapse for business reasons. It is content was overtaken by a wave of providers willing to do anything. National Review is being swamped by a wave of talented bloggers, twitterers and commenters willing to say what NR is afraid to say.

One difference is that being an insider has value. The price for access has always been the keeping of confidences. The big shot reporter who had a lot of friends in government could lever that into high paying TV gigs. He just had to be trustworthy with the secrets shared with him. Bob Woodward got rich and famous leveraging his confidences. That is not something that is easily replaced with technology. But it does limit the insiders and connected because there are things they cannot say that the bloggers and twitter guys can say.

The other obvious difference is the government was never shoveling billions into the porn industry via tax schemes and subsidies. Plutocrats were never bankrolling porn shops like we see with the pundit rackets. There is a great disconnect between compensation and audience share in the chattering classes. S.E Cupp has a six figure salary despite the fact you can count one hand the number of people who pay any attention to her. That is because billions flow into the TV chat shows via government regulation.

Even so, the Trump phenomenon is a good example of how technology is collapsing the political industry in the same way it collapsed the porn business. It is simply not that hard to be a chattering skull on TV or a political writer on-line. There are millions of people out there good at selling candidates and positions. Trump’s volunteer meme army is crushing the pros in both parties because it is just not that hard to be clever with this stuff. When lots of people can do something and the barriers to entry fall, the market collapses.

Like most people, I became aware of Jonah Goldberg in the Clinton years. I’m going to guess and say it was during the Lewinsky stuff, but I could be mistaken. He was the guy who started the Corner on National Review and that’s where I started reading him with any regularity. His act in those days was as the slacker conservative, a sort of proto-hipster who wrote about TV shows, comic books and right-wing politics.

It worked for him because most conservative writers to that point wanted to be Bill Buckley so their style was dull, humorless and unnecessarily complex. I grew up on Buckley too, but by the 90’s his writing was incomprehensible at times. Goldberg went a different way. He was like Seth Rogan if Seth Rogan could read and write and had the slightest idea what was happening outside.

Jonah’s goofy and accessible style made him the Bart Simpson of the commentariat. In fact, he used a lot of references to the Simpsons when writing about politics, which was part of his hipster-doofus act. In the 90’s, the cool kids made Simpsons references. It’s hard to remember back that far, but in the 90’s the Simpsons were the leading edge of cool kid comedy. If you quoted lines from the Simpsons, you were cool.

That was then. Two decades on he is no longer the snarky Bart Simpson. He’s more like the bloated has-been, Krusty the Klown. He’s long past being funny, but he has been around long enough where he feels like a fixture. Instead of the cheeky prankster, he is the jaded hack. It’s not hard to imagine that the guy who wrote this did so after yelling at the neighbor kids about making too much noise.

The Alt-righters. The less said about these creatures, the better. Mostly composed of Twitter and comment-section trolls, this coprophagic phylum is convinced Trump is the tip of the spear of some new white-nationalist takeover of the party and the country. They think it’s hilarious to bait Trump’s critics with Klan-vintage racism and Nazi-style anti-Semitism. Probably my biggest complaint about the benighted is the degree to which they make apologies for the bigots or don’t care that the bigots speak in their name.

Goldberg was an original anti-Trump for petty personal reasons. Trump used to make fun of him on twitter and guys like Goldberg don’t take criticism well. The carefully cultivated funny guy act he does on TV hides a thin-skinned narcissist. Goldberg earlier went full-on David Brock and participated in a smear campaign run by National Review, claiming Trump was in the KKK. Goldberg has made the trip from goofy conservative to sneering social justice warrior.

The panic over Trump is not just petty and personal. Trump by himself can be dismissed, which is what they were all prepared to do a year ago. The issue is his success, because it reveals things about the Right they would just as soon not face. The truth is, guys like Goldberg are not all that interested in small government, traditional solutions and cultural stability. Those are just lines in his script for his role as the Seth Rogan of TV conservatism.

Goldberg popped out of college and landed in a job at American Enterprise Institute assisting Ben Wattenberg making PBS specials. He then went over to National Review, which, as I a pointed out the other day, is like every political magazine in that it lives off tax deductible grants from rich people. That got him into cable news, which exists solely off its right to tax every home in America a buck a month, whether they watch or not and 95% don’t watch.

The point here is that Goldberg has spent his life living off government. The million dollar home in the swank DC suburb is paid for by government in that his livelihood is entirely dependent on government. His wife, Jessica Gavora, worked in the Bush administration and you can be sure the two of them were rubbing their hands together thinking about her next gig in the third Bush administration.

Big sprawling government has given Jonah a 1% lifestyle. How serious is he about shrinking government? Put that reality next to the results of the Bush years and the conservative response to Obama and people can be forgiven for thinking guys like Jonah are just big fat phonies. These are cocktail party conservatives who were toted to the party by their traveling buddies, the limousine liberals.

Washington DC is Hollywood for homely people. It is a company town and everyone works for the company in some capacity. They may bitch about the company, in the same way actors and writers bitch about the big studios, but they will defend it to the death in the same way Hollywood tries to choke off independent film. The #nevertrump loons are the circus performers of DC baring their fangs, warning the rest of us to stay away from their turf.

Whatever the merits of Buckley Conservatism, it is utterly worthless as a political one. Since the whole point of ideology is to shape politics, an ideology that utterly fails in politics is worthless. Pretty much the only thing they can do well is explain why they lost and even there they manage to screw up. Somehow, the great conservative minds managed to convince themselves that the reason Romney lost was that he was not mushy enough. People can be forgiven for thinking it is deliberate.

News brings word that the House Republicans were stymied by the tiny minority of Democrats over the Zika response. The bill is to fund a response to the Zika virus that is spreading north from South America via mosquitoes and immigrants. The liberals demanded abortion provisions in the bill, which has nothing to do with abortion, but the Left never takes its eye off the ball. They attach abortion provisions to everything knowing the Right is too stupid to stop them.

The Left knows how to play the game. They know that the Right will want to look like good citizens and eventually cave on the abortion provisions just to get the Zika bill passed. Even if they don’t, there are a thousand other bills they will do the same thing with so eventually they will get what they want. The Left never takes a break, They are always pressing forward. There’s no deal you can strike with them that will end their attacks. They are like Muslims in this regard.

Another example is this stupid flag bill the House just passed. What on God’s green earth are this idiots thinking? This bill does nothing for Republicans and helps Democrats. On pure politics alone, the bill should have died in some no name committee. If the Democrats really wanted this bill, then the smart play is to attach a dozen poison pill amendments that lets the GOP vote for it, but makes Democrats vote against it. That’s how a majority handles the minority in a parliament.

But that’s not how the Wuss Right thinks. They are always seeking to curry favor with the Left. Paul Ryan would drop to his knees and beg Obama for forgiveness if he thought there was some chance he would give it. He spends more time plotting to derail those to his Right than he does trying to stop the Left. These are small issues that garner no attention in the media yet Ryan and his fellow “principled” conservatives can’t summon the courage to tell the Left to pound sand.

What’s maddening about this and why voters have thrown in the towel on these guys, is that they don’t seem to know the basics of politics. These men and women somehow managed to get elected without understanding how parliaments work. It’s tempting to think, as many in the Dissident Right claim, that it is deliberate. That’s the Moldbugian thesis. Republicans are the outer party and Democrats are the inner party. The conservative commentariat are just the fluffers for the stars of the political theater.

The argument against that is if they were truly so clever as to perpetuate this elaborate ruse on the public, they would do it so no one noticed. In reality, the Republican Party is just the land of misfit toys. The “conservatives” are just guys who tick the boxes they are told to tick, but don’t think much about it. There are exceptions, but most could just as easily be Anarcho-Syndicalists or Whigs. They just like the lifestyle and they are not very good at anything other than toadyism.

Paul Ryan has been in politics his whole life, He has done nothing else. We live in the age of mass media where everyone knows about everything instantly. He has to know he is about as popular with Republican voters as testicular cancer. He has to know his party is under the microscope. Yet, he can’t figure out how to score some small victories to maybe claw a little credibility back in time for the elections. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s stupidity. That’s the Stupid Party way.

One of the stranger aspects of the current ructions is the willingness of members of the professional Right to gleefully and publicly stab their colleagues in the back. Politics is an ugly business, where men squabble over trivial slights, but the custom is to avoid making it nakedly personal and to avoid being overtly craven. This last bit is especially true with the Buckleyites, as they love carrying on like Victorians. For as long as I’ve been alive, conservatives have railed against putting “politics above principle.”

Like most of what the Buckleyites preached, that was all bullshit, but they did try hard to keep up appearances. That’s not been the case during the Trumpening. National Review turned itself into MoveOn.org last fall, posting daily rants about how anyone supporting Trump is Hitler. Then we got the #nevertrump stuff, which was pretty much just people taking cash from donors to pretend to be a grassroots resistance to Trump.

A couple of weeks ago it was revealed that the lone Trumpette on Fox News, Andrea Tantaros, was dropped from the network. The official reason was a contract dispute, but the grapevine says the midget tag-team act of Greg Gutfeld and Dana Perino got her fired over Trump. The internet says both are unpleasant people in private, despite their TV act, but I have no way of knowing if that is true. I do know it looks terrible to dump the only conservative on the network.

Today brings word that the traitorous Mark Zuckerberg is recruiting some of the more deranged Trump haters to help him do a better job suppressing dissent on Faceberg.

On Wednesday, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg will hold a meeting with “leading conservatives,” embattled The Blaze head Glenn Beck, and former George W. Bush Administration official and co-host of Fox News Channel’s The Five Dana Perino, at the website’s Menlo Park headquarters to discuss Facebook’s conservative media suppression and censorship scandal.
Last week it was reported that “anonymous sources at Facebook’s news team have confirmed to Gizmodo that, in addition to suppressing conservative news sources, the company suppresses stories about itself while artificially promoting stories about the Black Lives Matter movement.”

In spite of this, Zuckerberg denies any wrongdoing, stating “we have found no evidence that this report is true.” He is instead planning to hold a session Wednesday where he will essentially “pat conservatives on the head” with a photo-op that is a direct testament to the fact that nothing has changed. It is also quite telling that he has reached out to Beck, who is struggling to remain relevant in the conservative media sphere.

Beck announced the meeting in a Facebook post on his page early Sunday morning. Beck and Perino will be joined by Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, CNN’s S.E. Cupp, and Mitt Romney’s former digital director, Zac Moffatt.

Glenn Beck is a nut and desperate for cash now so it is no shock that he would come running when Zuckerberg calls. One of the true benefits of the Trumpening has been the near destruction of Beck and his lunatic cult. The others have always struck me as being sensible enough to avoid stunts like this. S.E. Cupp is a C-list talking head, who should avoiding making enemies. Her drunken bar slut routine would make her a favorite of red pill types if she went that way.

The weird thing about this is the public nastiness of it all. Trump is not a Buckleyite, but they could easily do business with him if they were willing to play ball. There are worse things than having Trump selling your pet project. Unlike most Republicans, he could possible get some things done in Washington. Even if you hate the guy, smile and pretend and make the best of it. Smart politics says it is better to have a guy like Trump inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in.

It’s not just about Trump with these people. There’s a sneering contempt for the public in their Trump hatred. The Trumpening has been revelatory in that regard. Most of these people in the Conservative Industrial Complex are just in it for the cash. They could just as easily be peddling Marxism if it paid better. They don’t like you or your country and they don’t believe in anything but making a buck. Zuck is passing around cash so they will sell his brand of nation wrecking lunacy and say bad things about Trump.

Time will tell if this is part of some larger strategy that has yet to reveal itself. Six months from now, being #nevertrump is going to be the mark of Cain, regardless of the election outcome. If Trump loses conservatives will blame these traitors for the defeat. If Trump wins, the #nevertrump loons will be packed off to the labor camps. Well, we can dream. Still, life is not going to be fun for these people if Trump is in the White House. There’s just no obvious upside to this #nevertrump nuttiness, other than the craven cash grab.