The Death Of Hollywood

Posted on March 6, 2025 by thezman

243

Show Announcement: Last night was the third episode of the award winning livestream that you can watch on Rumble and YouTube.

The Academy Awards show was this week and outside of the bugmen on YouTube, there was not much interest in the program. They claim it drew 19.69 million viewers, but they also claim that it is a five-year high, even though the number they claimed last year was slightly higher. Like everything else about the entertainment business, television ratings are mostly fake. There was a time when this award show was a big deal, but now it is mostly fodder for critics and comedians.

There are a lot of reasons why people have stopped caring about the awards shows, but one big reason is the product is dreadful. The nominees for best picture were a who’s who of films no one watched. The winner for best picture was a film called Anora, which appears to be a low-budget Slavic version of Pretty Woman. One of the runners up was a film called The Brutalist, which is about hideous architecture. It was also a low-budget, low-interest film that went straight to home video.

According to the bugmen who follow this stuff, the winner was supposed to be a film called Emilia Pérez, but the people who decide these things changed their minds at the last minute because the transvestite star had once held unapproved opinions about blacks and Muslims or whatever. Apparently, there is a hierarchy of degeneracy that the carnies are required to respect. It is Hollywood, so who knows if any of it is true, but it gets to why these awards show are floundering.

The Oscars used to be a popular topic because people were curious about how their opinions of the films stacked up with the insiders. Women liked watching the stars parade on stage and do their act in a social atmosphere. That only works when people watch the films and recognize the so-called stars. A Spanish man dressed as a woman, who is totally unfamiliar to Americans, lumbering on stage to get an award is not going to be a big draw for an American audience.

The fact is, Hollywood no longer serves the American audience. You see it in the box office for this year. The top grossing film is comic book movie that is popular with non-English speakers because it is mostly special effects and stupid dialogue. Half its gross is from overseas and you can be sure that a big chunk of the domestic box office is from people who are on the lookout for Tom Homan. Remove the nonwhite box office and Hollywood does out of business.

Of course, the dependence on foreign sales and non-English-speaking domestic customers is driven by the general decline in quality. Who is the biggest male lead in Hollywood these days? If you do not know, you are not alone, but it is probably a homosexual or a nonwhite. The same is true for female stars. The days of Hollywood stars being glamourous and recognizable are gone. Instead, it is a freakshow of random carnies picked from the diversity lottery.

Starting about ten years ago, Hollywood began to see a steady decline in revenues in North America, for both movies and television. Every year the gross declines, with some years seeing double digit declines. The remedy is to make an increasingly offensive product, which drives down the numbers further. Even easy things like remakes of classics turn into fiascos. The live-action Snow White has been repeatedly delayed because the diversity loons turned it into a punchline.

The funny thing about the collapse of Hollywood is that it is a good proxy for what we have seen in society as a whole. Unlike the government, colleges or the media, Hollywood needs to move product and that means they have to provide a product that the audience wants to buy. It is the ultimate test of the social fads pushed by the radicals over the last ten years. The fact that it was a disaster in the market should have been a clue to what was coming.

Things are about to get worse for the entrainment rackets. AI will soon make writers obsolete as software will generate scripts. Given that we know there are a finite number of plots and character types, and there is data on how these combinations appeal to audiences, it is easy to see what happens. Software will generate scripts that have the highest probability of success that year. That means all the experts on what is trending will be working at Home Depot.

Of course, the content itself will soon be generated by robots. You can now generate believable audio conversations using hints and suggestions. Businesses are already doing this for training and development. Video is coming online next. This not only will replace the actors, but it will lower the barrier to entry of filmmaking. Soon, teenagers will be making feature films that they find interesting. Just as digital audio killed music sales, AI will kill the Hollywood production studio.

To fill this out a bit, imagine you want to watch a film and you want something like the old spy thrillers of the past. You talk to your television about what you have in mind and it creates a feature film using your suggestions. Maybe it first suggests content made by others who had the same idea. Or maybe it recreates a James Bond film using period correct actors, but with changes based on your inputs. This is something that will soon be possible with AI.

What all this points to is that the woke lunacy that has raged for the last decade may have been the last effort at ideological control of the culture. The slow and steady erosion of the control mechanisms coincided with the woke rage. Perhaps the blue haired rage head was a reaction to the steady disaggregation of the culture that has been brought on by the technological revolution. She was not the vanguard, but a desperate rearguard action that has failed.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Blanche DuBois Problem

Posted on March 5, 2025 by thezman

170

Show Announcement: Tonight at 8:00 PM eastern, Paul Ramsey and I will be discussing communists and the best way to execute them. You can tune in live on YouTube and on Rumble.

Over the last thirty years, many people have noticed that all moral claims within the public policy sphere can be reduced to a few time periods. In the realm of foreign policy, it is always about 1938 and the events around that time. If it is a domestic issue in the United States, then it is always 1968. Perhaps the slow Progressives will try to make it about the 1980’s when their hero was president. For Americans, public policy is trapped in one of three historical frameworks.

On the foreign policy side, it is easy to see how this works. There have been so many new Hitlers on the stage, no one can keep count. Every foolish and destructive misadventure by Washington involves a Hitler figure. They are not just a generic bad guy in the propaganda sense of it, but they represent the re-emergence of the timeless enemy and the timeless struggle. Everything about American foreign policy since the Cold War is about preventing an imaginary past.

This cognitive defect has made its way across the ocean to Europe. Whenever there is a meeting of the local satraps of the American empire, they take turns looking worried in front of the cameras, talking about the possible reemergence of you know who and the danger of resembling Neville Chamberlain. This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region.

In the United States, the other great moral framework is the Civil Rights movement, into which every local issue is jammed. Every black politician imagines herself as the you-go-girl version of Martin Luther King, which means even mundane issues like maintaining the roads is a civil rights issue. Every man in a dress not being called “ma’am” by the clerk is Rosa Parks. This framing has gone so far that nonwhites are routinely called white supremacists.

One of the features of those who have crossed the great divide is that they see the past as the past, not as an emotional support framework. Whatever lessons can be learned from the past in order to navigate the future are studied, but otherwise, the modern dissident accepts that tomorrow does not lie in yesterday. For those trapped in the 20th century, it is an endless singing of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” and morality tales where they are the hero.

This irrational attachment to the past is ironic, in that the whole point of the Progressive ideology was to advance human society forward, with forward defined as an advanced state of moral existence. While Progressives of the past often focused on material improvement, the spring has always been eschatological. Better stuff was proof of better living and better living was always a normative issue. It is why they continue to see themselves as the Elect.

The thing about ideology is that it tries to replace something that the Christian West eventually took for granted. Within Christianity there is an assumed point to living within the bounds of Christian ethics. Live a Christian life and your reward is eternal life at the feet of God. Ideology cannot offer this because ideology rejects God as the moral authority, so there must be some other reason to follow the moral demands of the ideology, which becomes the project of the ideology.

Marx probably understood this when he described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” He was criticizing specialization and its dehumanizing qualities, but he was also describing a world where men were liberated from the human condition, free to be what they chose. Communism always imagined an end point that recreated heaven on earth.

At some point, every ideology must at least imply a vision of the future as a reason to continue to live within and fight for the moral claims of the ideology. If the point of the ideology is more of the same, then why bother? Therefore, central to every ideology is a point to the struggle, a destination that promises to liberate people from whatever vexes the ideology. Therein lies the reason why the modern Progressive remain trapped in and obsessed with past struggles.

Progressivism was always a weird hybrid of Protestantism and liberalism, so it could leave unsaid the promise of Christianity, while refashioning the ethics of Christianity around claims to universalism, egalitarianism and eventually the blank slate. At its peak, it was a restatement of Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” but stripped of all Scriptural references. It resonated with an audience that continued to be informed by the vestigial Christianity they inherited.

The implied destination of Progressivism no longer works on an audience lacking even a basic Christian frame of reference. This void has been filled with a circular version of history in which events of today are recast as versions of the old glorious struggles of the past, where the good guys won, and the bad guys were sent fleeing. The Elect in this arrangement are those who can imagine themselves wearing the white rose of resistance or riding a bus in the Jim Crow South.

In this regard, Progressivism has become a hive without a queen. The queen is the promised land, and the hive is the habits of mind that form the ideology. They are the Christian zealots with no conception of God and only a vague understanding of what lies after this moment in time. This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.

This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality. Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past. The rest of us are now struggling to figure out what to do with them. They are an unwanted and useless presence to the people of the present, trying to move into the future.

The Ghost Of The People’s Party

Posted on March 4, 2025 by thezman

114

Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

Most of the ideas that shaped 20th century America boiled up during the 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War. Some arrived from the Old World before and during the war, things like nationalism and socialism, but most were homegrown ideas that arose out of American Protestantism and the struggle with secularization. Interestingly, the Progressive ideology that emerged was sparked by the populist forces at the time and is now threatened by the same populist forces.

The 19th century was a wild time in America. Prior to the Civil War, it became increasingly clear to the industrializing North that the Constitutional framework was not working for them. The Hartford Conventions, largely erased from the history books now, were a series of conferences in the North to debate leaving the Union. This process was short-circuited by the War of 1812, but the sentiment merely found a new home in abolitionism and finally flowered in the Civil War.

The post-Civil War period was no less tumultuous. Reconstruction was a failure, but a foreshadowing of what would be a feature of the progressive ideology. That is the belief that societies can be reordered in such a way that the people in those societies change how they think about themselves, their neighbors, and the state. The abolitionist fanatics did not abandon these beliefs after the failure of reconstruction. They continued to refine this belief as progressivism flowered in the 20th century.

Of course, progressivism itself is a 19th century phenomenon. It emerged out of American Protestantism as a belief that human society can only advance through relentless social reform. The same people who were sure they could reinvent society to accommodate the freed slaves as equals were now sure they could use the lessons from industrialization to reorder America and the world. Religious social reform became a secular political movement.

The engine that made progressivism possible was populism, which was not unique to America or even unique to the 19th century, but if you look at the populist movements of the 19th century, you see many of the features of what would later be the progressive movement and then progressivism. The populists were not angry mobs assembled outside of the homes of the rich, demanding redress of their grievances. They had an agenda that was mostly crafted by elites in waiting.

For example, the Ocala Demands were a platform of economic and political reforms that became the basis of the People’s Party. It was “produced” by the various farmer’s alliances that had sprung up as mutual aid societies following the Civil War. These groups were brought together in the Marion Opera House in Ocala, Florida, where they approved this list of demands. This was formally called the Ocala Demands and was adopted by the People’s Party.

When you read the demands, the first thing that is clear is that they were not written by a collection of dirt farmers in the South. It was not the work of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union either. That was a real group that participated in the Ocala convention, along with the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. These were not people debating the abolishment of the futures markets, the regulation of the money supply or the imposition of a graduated income tax.

The platform was the work of intellectuals and reformers who saw an opportunity to ride the wave of populism to power and influence. They saw a grassroots movement of disaffected farmers as a vehicle for building a coalition in support of their reform ideas, so they attached themselves to it. It is not an accident that the populist agenda looked a lot like the progressive agenda that would emerge in the 20th century. Progressivism would not have been possible without populism.

It is why it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.

The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.

Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.

The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.

In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.

The Zelensky Problem

Posted on March 3, 2025 by thezman

251

Note #1: Last Wednesday was the second edition of a show I am doing with Paul Ramsey every Wednesday at 8:00 which you can watch live on Rumble and YouTube and, of course, watch at your leisure after the fact.

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about the events of last Friday, a post about the importance of knowing who is in charge, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. I was also on with the boys from the Old Glory Club where we discussed the events of the day. The replay is here.

Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that “the closest thing to immortality is a government program.” He was not the first person to say it. There are examples of American politicians saying a version of this going back to the 1930’s. There are probably versions of this concept going back to the Kingdom of Ur, because it is the nature of government to create constituencies in favor of its actions and those constituencies always lobby for more of what created them.

You see this with Project Ukraine, which was largely created by a small number of zealots called the neocons in the Obama administration. They overthrew the government of Ukraine, installed an anti-Russian government and just like that there was money and opportunity in Ukraine. By the time Trump came along in 2016, the Ukraine project had a sizable constituency in the Western ruling class, which is why Trump was impeached. He threatened the project.

Since the war broke out in 2022, the power of the Project Ukraine constituency has grown much stronger for monetary and political reasons. Important interests in Western countries are making money from the war, so they support politicians who seek to keep the war going. The politicians are happy to oblige, as the war is a nice distraction from the boring tasks the voters expect from government, tasks that the political class has thoroughly and completely ignored.

There is also the fact that the European political class operates like a preschool, where they are the children, and the United States is the teacher. Ending Project Ukraine is like forcing them into regular school or maybe sending them home to parents who do not fawn over them like their teachers. The reality of Europe is bleak, largely due to the perfidy of the Europeans political class. They prefer not to face that and instead fixate on this glorious adventure in which they are the heroes.

Of course, like all government programs, there is the program itself, which always adheres to the iron law of bureaucracy. In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people. There will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group will gain and keep control of the organization. We see this with how the Blob is fighting DOGE like Grendel facing off against Beowulf.

This is what we see with Zelensky. He is the anthropomorphized government program, consumed with defending its prerogatives. It is why he was so nasty in his trip to the Trump White House. He could not believe that these people would have the audacity to make demands upon him. He is the indispensable man, on whose shoulders rests the fate of the free world and through him is expressed the hopes and dreams of the managerial class that created him.

This is the problem the Trump administration faces as they seek to wind down what they consider to be a pointless and costly enterprise. They wisely drove a stake through the heart of that part of the Blob that has controlled American foreign policy, which is why official Washington is struggling to defend Project Ukraine. Legacy media is simultaneously calling Trump Chamberlain and Hitler – he is somehow appeasing himself – but otherwise they have no answers.

The Europeans are another matter. They see themselves like the tax eaters in Washington getting memos from Elon Musk. For them, Project Ukraine is their reason to exist now, so Trump’s plans to end it are an existential threat. It is why they cooked up the scheme to trick Trump into going along with their peacekeeper idea last week and why they are now busy cooking up a new scheme. Ukraine is their teddy bear, and they cannot think of being without it.

Zelensky is the key here, as his very life probably depends on this war never ending, at least not until he has an exit strategy. He cannot make a deal with the Russians because the ultra-nationalist will not tolerate it. The only deal he could make is one that requires Russia to surrender, which is not a possibility. His other choice is fleeing the country, but he would no doubt be tracked down by enemies. That leaves him with no other choice but to keep the war going.

One of the truths of a government program is that when it is finally killed off, the world never ends and the people dependent upon it find something else. After the initial sobbing and moaning, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. That will be the case with Project Ukraine. What must happen first is Zelensky must exit the stage, and either be replaced by chaos or by someone willing to do a deal to end the war. At that point, the Europeans will adjust to the new reality.

This is where things stand now. At some level the Europeans seem to know it, which is why they put on a show over the weekend featuring their favorite comedian. It was a funeral where they could all hug and reminisce, except the corpse was still walking and talking, demanding more money and weapons. The reason Zelensky keeps talking about resigning is he knows that for this program to finally end, he must exit the stage, so he is hoping to create conditions which drag that out a bit longer.

While it may feel like government programs are immortal, immune to all efforts to slay them, nothing lasts forever. That is what we are now seeing. Along with the death of the 20th century mindset in American foreign policy is the death of its last great program, Project Ukraine and its anthropomorphized representation of it. Once Zelensky is gone, the war ends, and the process of developing new, normalized relations in Europe begins as we exit the post-Cold War world.

Radio Derb February 28 2025

Posted on March 1, 2025 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

02m27s CPAC report
06m56s Dems in the doldrums
13m57s Immigration innovation: the Registry
20m40s Immigration innovation: the Gold Card
28m15s Trump 47’s first cabinet meeting
29m57s Hegseth’s Friday night purge
33m13s Ramaswamy for Ohio
34m23s James Bond Bezos?
37m30s Germany’s unsurprising election
39m45s Signoff: The Hippopotamus Song

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, this last day of February, greetings from your normatively genial Radio Derb host John Derbyshire.

The first thing you want to know is of course whether I can list five things I got done last week to justify my employment. Of course I can! Five? How about eight? That’s the number of segments in last week’s podcast, not counting Intro and Signoff. There was a carefully-crafted segment on each of the following:

Vice President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference.
President Trump giving the elbow to Ukraine.
The condition of South Africa.
A possible asteroid strike.
Scattering federal departments out of D.C.
Securing Fort Knox.
Getting our astronauts home from the International Space Station.
World Hippo Day.

Talk about spanning the globe! Note that list includes three segments on foreign affairs, after my confessing openly that I don’t much care about them. My scope even includes interplanetary space.

So yes, Elon, I have no difficulty responding to your Saturday email demand; although since I am not a federal employee my response is entirely voluntary.

Perhaps I should be a federal employee. What’s the healthcare plan like? Continue reading →

Populism

Posted on February 28, 2025 by thezman

On the show Wednesday with Paul Ramsey, we talked about how Trump is a bookend for Nixon containing the period of peak managerialism. The managers ran Nixon out of town for the crime of being a strong executive and now Trump, the strong executive, is running the managers out of town. It remains to be seen if that is how it plays out, but it is a good way to containerize this period of history.

Doing the show, it occurred to me that we can do something similar with populism in that it was populism that gave birth to managerialism. When you look at the birth of progressivism, it started with the populist movements. It peaked with the FDR administration, which is the rise of the managers. Now we see a populist movement rising to smash what was set off by original populism.

Here is where you see the two faces of populism, democratic and authoritarian or anarchic versus orderly. Of course, it is a fact of history that democracy leads to authoritarianism, so this long cycle dating to the 19th century follows a predictable course, just more slowly and mildly. The synthesis that will result from it may be a modern version of what the Framers imagined.

Anyway, that is for some posts this week. The show this week is a review of and comment upon populism in its many forms, as well as the criticism of it in light of the events unfolding in Washington. It is one of those shows that meanders around a bit, so it has no main point, just a main theme. Perhaps if the topic is of interest, I can do a more formal deep dive into the topic.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Populism
- Britanica (Link)
- European Center for Populism Studies (Link)
The Negative View
The Positive View
Populism in America

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Long Way Home

Posted on February 27, 2025 by thezman

One of the many failings of conservatism was the insistence that with just the right argument using just the right data points, the people they called the left would throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. At the core of what later became known as civic nationalism was the assertion that all political actors are looking for objective truth and therefore would respond to it. The reason for political disputes was the failure to flesh out the facts.

Politic is about morality, not facts. It is also about power, specifically the power to impose your moral vision on the rest. Facts have little to do with politics and are often seen by ideologues as a threat. The diversity cult looks at the FBI crime stats as a direct threat to their project, so they worked to suppress them. The flat earth people insist that intelligence testing is a conspiracy of some sort. They label it “race-science” because adding the words “race” to anything anathematizes it.

Another thing that the conservative view of politics got wrong is that it left people with only two choices when evaluating left-wing rhetoric. Either the people chanting about white power structures were lying or they were deeply confused. In both cases, it was assumed that they had to know the truth and that the truth would either set them straight or force them to stop lying. Untold man hours were wasted trying to explain the truth to crazy relatives because of this.

Even now, with all that is happening, it is hard for people to accept that the crazies are in fact crazy enough to believe the nutty things they are saying. This post in the New York Times feels like parody, but it is written to soothe the nerves of the believers while they huddle together plotting how to respond. The writer genuinely believes Washington is being taken over by a Stalin-like figure and he and his coreligionists are the beginnings of a great resistance to it.

This is the precursor to the forming of a narrative. The cult we call the left operates like all cults in that it has a story to explain itself and its destination. Within the story are stories to address the bumps along the way as well as the victories. Soon, others will take this framework in which the good guys are being oppressed by the bad guys and create a narrative that fills in the details, especially the part where they finally vanquish the monster and everyone cheers.

It is hard for normal people to accept that the writer is as crazy as it seems. After all, he had to have sat in meetings at the New York Times where people boasted of ruining critics of the Biden regime. He must be aware of the doxing campaigns and the hooded terrorist gangs sent to harass dissidents. It is inconceivable to a normal person that this guy does not see the irony in what he is writing. The truth is he is that crazy and the audience is right there with him.

Part of how cults respond to disconfirmation and setbacks is they create new pleasing narratives for why things have not gone as predicted. A month into the Trump presidency and the crazies have settled on an economic collapse as the most probable end to the Trump tyranny. According to the Times, the economy is already reeling from policies that have yet to be implemented. The Telegraph reports that the really smart people foresee disaster for the Trump economy.

This gets to another thing that people struggle to accept. These people lie. They will make up whatever whoppers they think they need for their narrative. Extreme partisanship rewards sociopathy, so over time the movement will be overrun by people who see no moral distinction between the truth and a lie. All that matters is whether it serves the cause, by which they mean does it strengthen their side or does it cause harm to their opponents?

Despite all that has been revealed so far, as well as the massive media gaslighting campaign last year, people still think there is truth in the media. There is little doubt that the Harris campaign turned many people from civic nationalist into something else, but for many, the whole thing was forgotten after the election. It is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which is when you see something in the media that is an obvious lie but then forget that story and trust the next story in the same media site.

What all this tells us is that even though normal defeated crazy in November and the Trump admin has a plan to defeat the Blob in order to restore sobriety back to politics, the road back to normal will be long and full of trouble. Scan the fever swamps and it is clear that events have had no impact on the crazies. If anything, they have become crazier now that they have shuffled off mainstream platforms into places like Bluesky and Reddit where they are free to fly their freak flags.

Similarly, the media has learned nothing from the last decade. They put everything they had into dragging Harris over the finish line but failed because not enough people trust them anymore. Despite the massive rejection that was the November election, they are now leaning into the same tactics that brought them to this point. The employees of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post still think they get to tell the owner of the company to buzz off and leave the running of it to them.

While it does appear that we have reached the end of a cycle of madness, perhaps several historical cycles that culminated in the last decade, it is going to be a long road back to normal. The crazies will not simply go away. They must be defeated, caged, and only released when the conditions that created them are eradicated. The normals will have to be trained in the new way of engaging in politics. Much like Russia after communism, America is on the road to recovery, but it is a long road.

The Escapists

Posted on February 26, 2025 by thezman

An iron law of the universe is the opposite law of liberalism, which states that whatever the left is saying, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. It is not a perfect rule in that the opposite is obvious or correct. It is just a good place to start when trying to figure out what they are doing. Projection plays a central role in the interior life of the progressive hive mind, so they inevitably accuse the enemies of the hive of doing what the hive is doing or has done.

An old example comes from the heady days of the Tea Party, which was a genuine populist and grassroots response to the cultural revolution. Normal, middle-class people started to organize against the Obama administration, but also the sissies of conservatism who were hiding under their beds at the time. Suddenly, people were turning up to protest and fight back against the gathering madness. It was a foreshadowing of what would come in 2016.

The response by the left was to accuse these people of being part of a conspiracy organized by the enemies of history. Nancy Pelosi famously said it was not a grassroots movement, but an AstroTurf movement. For those who do not know, AstroTurf is a genericized brand name or proprietary eponym for fake grass. Of course, what was true at the time and true to this day is the “grassroots” support of the left was bought and paid for by tax dollars laundered through the Blob.

It was one of those moments that revealed something about the sorts of people who end up in left-wing social movements. They always assume that the enemies of the hive operate as they do and will act like they would if given the chance. It is why they were sure Trump would trample your civil rights after he won in 2016. They knew that if they were in his position, that is what they would do. After the color revolution that toppled Trump and installed Biden, it is exactly what they did.

Now that Trump is back, we see the opposite rule kicking in as part of their coping strategy and effort to organize a response. The crazies are now free speech warriors, claiming Trump is going to start censoring people online. The very same people who chanted “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” as anyone with a sober thought in their head was evicted from Twitter are now carrying on as if they are Ann Frank, hiding in the attic from the MAGA police.

This story about how a handful of zombies turned up to yell at a Congressman is framed as a populist rebellion. These are people made angry by their television, so they show up on command at this event to be angry. A defining feature of these old, white progressives is they have no idea why they are angry. The person on their television is angry, so they are angry. They are the sort that started saying “keev” the weekend the war in Ukraine started, as if they always said it that way.

Of course, nothing about this is on the level. That is the great lesson of the populist rebellion that started with the Tea Party. Our politics have been entirely fake for decades, manufactured and controlled using government money. These efforts to repeat what worked in the past affirm it. Our politics for the last several decades have been pretty close to the opposite of what was beamed to us. “Our democracy” was absolute party control.

All ideologies rely on lies to fill the gap between their vision of the moral society and the reality of the human condition. This habit explains the violence that comes when the ideologues gain control. The lies are replaced by a program to fill the gap between ideology and reality. That gap is always filled with corpses, but it is never completely filled, so the lies return as the cost-effective option. In time, they become so comfortable with the lies that lying is the solution to everything.

We are seeing this in the “resistance” being rolled out in the media. It is not connected with reality but dreamed up by the same people who claimed they were defending democracy when they were harassing people for Facebook posts. The same narrative makers who swore all their failed schemes were working right up until it was obvious that they were not working are now busy imagining a scenario in which they are carried back to power on the shoulders of the people.

Things like the opposite rule are part of the essential appeal of ideology, which is an escape from reality. This is what ideology inherits from Christianity. The losers drawn to the new religion spreading around the Roman Empire were attracted to the promise of escape from this life. If they followed this new religion, they would one day stand shoulder to shoulder with the great men of this age in the sight of God. Ideology says the same thing but stops at the bit about God.

Libertarians imagine that one day they will be yeoman farmers, totally self-sufficient and liberated like the rich guys they admire. The antifascist imagines herself as a stunning and brave member of the committee, as respected as the men who never pay much attention to her. The conservative believes he will one day be rich like Donald Trump, but classy like Bill Buckley. The fascist imagines himself in a snappy uniform in charge of men, instead of a loser playing video games all day.

This is what brings us back to the opposite rule of liberalism. The last ideology, like all ideology, requires the suspension of disbelief. Accusing the bad guys of doing what you have done or are currently doing is a way to escape the reality of politics. It is not a fight for power, but a great crusade between white hats and black hats. To think otherwise is to be back in the reality from which you are trying to escape. The “resistance” to Trump are not losers, but the heroes of a story they are now writing.

The End Of Ideology

Posted on February 25, 2025 by thezman

One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

The Game of Chicken

Posted on February 24, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the blob, a post about big stupid trucks, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Last Wednesday was the kickoff of a show with Paul Ramsey, which you can watch on Paul’s channel. I also did an appearance on the Mike Farris show, which can be seen here.

The Trump administration’s opening of direct talks with the Russians setoff panic in Kiev and the capitals of Europe. The reason for that is Project Ukraine was centered on the acceptance that there could be no direct talks with Moscow, until the Russians surrendered their country to the control of the usual suspects. Trump’s call with Putin and then the meeting in Saudi Arabia violated this central assumption. First there was panic and now there is a game of chicken.

The Trump administration has concluded, after assessing the situation inside and outside the issue of Ukraine, that normalizing relations with Russia is in the best interest of the United States. One of the obstacles to that is the war in the Ukraine, so logically they are looking to wrap up the war as quickly as possible. The Russians have agreed to talks with Ukraine but insist on elections in Ukraine first. They point out that by the laws of Ukraine, Zelensky does not have the power to sign a deal.

Russophobes argue that this is a stalling tactic, but they are the ones demanding the unconditional surrender of Russia before any talks can start, so this is the usual projection that is a feature of the post-liberal West. The Russians, having been burned by the Minsk agreements charade, want the next deal to have teeth, so they are insisting that it be signed by the internationally and domestically recognized leader of Ukraine, which means new elections.

The Russians would probably drop this demand if the EU were willing to co-sign whatever deal is struck, but such an offer will never come. The reason is the whole project relies on never having direct talks with the Russians. This is the trap setup in 2023 to keep everyone committed to Project Ukraine. Ukraine passed a law forbidding direct talks with Russia in exchange for unlimited support. Europe signed on in exchange for unlimited support from Washington.

The reason the Biden administration expedited the remaining weapons and money allocated to this project was an effort to prevent the incoming Trump administration from rethinking these arrangements. They would not have time to do that, as Ukraine would immediately need more money and weapons. The assumption was that they would have no choice but to go along with more money and weapons, thus entangling Trump in the Ukraine trap.

The underlying assumption was that Trump would not walk away from Project Ukraine and risk the image of Russian tanks rumbling through Kiev. This is the assumption the Europeans and Zelensky are relying on as they deal with Trump. In fact, Zelensky is so confident of this that he is going out of his way to jerk around the Trump administration on the mineral rights deal. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are coming to Washington this week to set Trump straight.

Reportedly, Starmer and Macron will present a plan to Trump that has the UK and France putting troops into Ukraine, while the United States provides air cover from bases in Poland and Romania. In effect, the United States must create a no-fly zone over Ukraine and go to war with Russia if the Russians violate it. The madness of the scheme is so beyond the pale it is hard to accept as real, but the Europeans are operating in an alternative reality from the rest of us.

The Trump people see that the main obstacle to their plans for normalizing relations with Russia is Zelensky. Anyone who has dealt with a deadbeat knows Zelensky and the best way of dealing with this type is to get rid of them. Elections will remove him from the picture. The end of American support will also remove him from the picture, as the only reason for him to exist is as a facilitator of money and arms into Ukraine, mostly the money, which is stolen by Ukrainian officials.

The danger of pulling the plug on Ukraine is that it could be bad public relations, which is where the mineral rights dispute comes into play. The point of this is to make it appear as if Zelensky is unwilling to make a deal for more money and make it look like he is the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump’s team has figured out that Zelensky cannot sign the mineral deal, and he cannot agree to negotiations, so they are pressing on both in order to shift the blame to him.

What is setting up is a game of chicken. On one side we have Zelensky and the Europeans, who are sure Trump will never walk away from Ukraine. It is why they are getting bolder in their demands. They think Trump is bluffing. On the other side we have Team Trump who is sure the Europeans will fall in line, rather than risk a break with Washington, even if it means abandoning Ukraine. Zelensky is sure he has fooled everyone with his latest schemes.

For their part, the Russians are making the prudent bet. It costs them nothing to talk with the Trump administration and there is a good chance it leads to a positive outcome, so they will follow that route to the end. Similarly, the Chinese have made positive noises about the start of talks between Moscow and Washington. Like the Russians, the Chinese welcome the return of normalcy to Washington. China and Russia are open for business and ready to make deals.

It is too soon to know how this ends, but this game of chicken revolves around Zelensky being the ruler of Ukraine, which means the way to avoid a collision is to remove him from the equation. The Russians figured this out two years ago. The Chinese figured it out last year when they had talks with him. Now the Trump administration has arrived at the same conclusion. That leaves the Europeans and the bet in the White House right now is they will choose Washington over Zelensky.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff