Veepstakes

Posted on June 26, 2024 by thezman

Note: I am doing a Q&A type of show this week, so if you have any small topics of interest, pass them along in the comments.

Between now and the start of Donald Trump’s debate with the CNN hosts on Thursday night we will learn the name of his running mate. Trump said that his pick will be at the debate, so it has been assumed that person will be revealed at that point, but Trump is being cagey about it. He has invited various people to stand around the backstage area during the debate, so maybe the suspense will continue. There is no audience for this debate, as Joe Biden is now easily startled by loud noises.

It used to be that the running mate selection was one of the first big tests of a party’s candidate because it spoke to the strength of the candidate. In 1976 Jimmy Carter picked Walter Mondale to balance the ticket geographically and to assure Washington insiders that he would not cause any trouble. Reagan did a similar thing in 1980 when he picked former CIA head George Bush. In both cases, the running mate pick suggested the candidate had enough insider support.

For establishment candidates, the running mate was about geographic balance or shoring up a party constituency. In 1988 George Bush had all the Washington support he needed, but the party base found him to be a bit weird so he went with Dan Quayle from Indiana on the theory he would win over heartland voters. In 2004 John Kerry picked John Edwards to add geographic balance and add some personality to a ticket featuring a man who appeared to be made of wood.

The running mate pick has lost its luster of late. No one remembers who Hillary picked for her running mate. He may be dead now for all anyone remembers. Trump picked Mike Pence, mostly because Pence is so boring. He was not expected to add anything to the ticket but serve as Trump’s emissary to the uniparty. George Bush II picked Dick Cheney because the people who picked George Bush II told him to pick Dick Cheney so he could run things from inside the administration.

The funny thing about the running mate job is it has always been the death sentence for a political career. Vice Presidents rarely go on to win the top job. Fifteen vice presidents went on to become president, but eight of those got the job when the president died or was assassinated. Only four of those won an election in their own right. It is one of the other rarities of the 2020 election. Not only did a man with dementia become the most popular man in the country, but he was also a former VP.

This may be about to change with Trump. Since he is limited to one term, his running mate will be viewed as the guy who inherits the MAGA movement and gets the Trump endorsement for running in 2028. We are about to have a great die off in both parties, so it will be a scramble over the next decade among the toadies and flunkies to see who gets to pretend to be in charge of things. Being a second or third banana is going to become a coveted position.

You can see this with Biden. His people picked a cackling simpleton as his running mate because it was seen as life insurance. Installing a moron like Harris as president is too much even for the psychopaths running Washington, so picking her as the VP meant no one was going to put a pillow over Biden’s face. That was a fine plan for the Biden family, but now the party is stuck with a guy who soils himself in public while staring blindly out into space during public events.

This is what will make Trump’s pick interesting. Has he managed to learn anything about his moment in the timeline? If he picks another stooge or someone dictated by the party, then it is another reminder that Trump is not a historical figure as in a man who is shaping history, but rather he is a feckless ignoramus who just happened to be swept up by the tides of history. If he picks someone expected to continue the fight, then maybe Trump has learned something.

Ten years of Trump says the way to bet is that he picks the worst possible option as his running mate, which would be someone like Glenn Youngkin. He is a less masculine version of Liz Cheney. He has Washington support, is loved by the neocons, and has deep ties to the economic elites. If Trump picks him, it means the regime has decided to let him win and then wear his administration as a skin suit. In effect, the populist rebellion will have officially died.

Of course, the main problem for Trump picking an heir is that his MAGA movement has zero institutional support. It is why every candidate in the primary was a zombie from the plant where they produce Republican politicians. The only guy who sounded like Trump was Vivek Ramaswamy and he was probably faking it. Then you have the fact that you cannot let South Asians anywhere near power in a white country. Just look at what is happening in Canada and Britain.

In this regard, Trump’s final big decision as a player on the political stage reflects the reality of the system. It is beyond reform, so that means there is no solution through the normal functioning of the system. You cannot vote your way out of the problems of democracy because the point of democracy is to prevent it. “Our democracy’ is a rigged game in which the house must always win. In the end, that will be the lesson of Trump and the populist rebellion that produced him.

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The Dangerous Game

Posted on June 25, 2024 by thezman

During the Cold War, planners concluded that nuclear war would most likely result from two closely related factors. One was the breakdown of communications between Washington and Moscow at all levels. It was not just the red phone between the Kremlin and the White House, but communications across both systems. The other factor that would lead to war was uncertainty about the other side’s intentions. This fear could result in runaway escalation ending in nuclear disaster.

The remedy for this was to maintain communications at all levels of government with the other side so that both sides knew the nuclear posture of the other. The American military had a range of contacts with the Russian military. The spy agencies had contacts with one another across a range of issues and regions. Members of Western media and the academy developed contacts with their analogs on an unofficial basis on behalf of the intel agencies.

The main reason the Cold War did not end in nuclear annihilation is that the two great managerial systems institutionalized communications in such a way that it became a specialty with career opportunities. In Russia, being an expert in some aspect of America meant a good life as a member of the new class. In America, having some expertise on Russia meant a comfortable life in the clouds. The Cold War standoff became a jobs program for both sides.

The selection pressure on both sides was for second and third order thinking, as both sides had an investment in the status quo. Foreign policy advisors in America thought about the downstream consequences of their recommendations because it could have a direct impact on their employment prospects. Similarly, on the Russian side, the pressure was always there to think about how the Americans would react as getting that wrong could mean being posted to the Urals.

This is what makes the present so dangerous. Washington’s proxy war with Russia lacks both the incentives to prevent escalation and the sorts of people who see it as their purpose to prevent escalation. Washington has cut off communications with Moscow and works to prevent others from developing their own channels. Europe has little contact now with Russia. The primary goal of Washington is to isolate Moscow, which means isolating the West from the world.

We see how this works in the recent beach attack in Crimea. Washington provides Ukraine with long range guided missiles. Ukraine lacks the ability to use them, so the American military provides the targeting and guidance of them, while the Ukrainians operate the ground-based launchers. Over the weekend, one of the missiles, which was armed with cluster munitions, hit a busy beach, killing half a dozen civilians and wounding hundreds of others.

This was most likely an accident. Either the targeting was wrong, as there is a military base nearby, or the missile malfunctioned. It is possible the air defense system knocked the missile off course instead of destroying it. It is also possible that the Ukrainians, in league with their neocon handlers, did something to target the missiles at civilian infrastructure, which has happened in the past. There is the rumor that the real target was the big Orthodox cathedral nearby.

The point is no one knows and more importantly, no one in Moscow knows what the intent was behind this attack. The Russians have stated that they think it was deliberate and they blame Washington. Moscow summoned the American ambassador, presumably to deliver a warning about future reprisals. Putin made clear that Moscow will retaliate, and it may not be against Ukraine. Everyone is left to guess as to what they mean but the empire has targets all over the world.

What has developed is a game of chicken in which the Biden administration keeps escalating, daring the Russians to respond, while the Russians try to figure out what Washington is actually trying to achieve. There is no benefit to the Russians in escalation, so they seek to avoid it. Logically, there is no benefit to the West in escalation, but they keep escalating, so Russia is left to guess as to what is the real motivation behind these escalations.

Where this leaves us is a place that is the reverse of the Cold War. There is no communication between the two sides and neither side knows what the other side is thinking or planning. On the surface, the Russian position is clear, but Western propaganda has anathematized accepting it at face value. The coordinated attacks on Nigel Farage from the entire political class is a good example. Merely pointing out the obvious gets you called a traitor.

It is easy to see how this can end horrifically. If the Russians, for example, declare a no-fly zone over the Black Sea, it is likely that Washington will keep sending drones toward Crimea and the Russians will have to knock them down. Washington will then send manned aircraft or maybe a British ship to threaten the Russian fleet. Such a situation could easily spiral out of control because one side thinks it can do anything it likes, and the other side knows it has to draw the line somewhere.

That gets to the heart of the matter. Over the last thirty years in the absence of that old Cold War system, the neocons have taken control of the foreign policy establishment to the point where there is no dissent in Washington. The system is now controlled by fanatics who lack second order thinking. Like all fanatics, the neocons see only that which satisfies their fanaticism. As a result, they imagine every move is furtherance of their goal of destroying their ancient enemy.

There is also the fact that America is a fading empire that still assumes Francis Fukuyama was right and this is the end of history. Thirty years of selecting for people good at enjoying the fruits of victory has left the managerial class in the West stocked with obsequious, narrow-minded dullards. A Jake Sullivan is in his position because he never asks questions and never has an original thought. These people are easily manipulated by the psychopaths of the Kagan cult.

The ultimate question that is being answered at the moment is whether the Global American Empire will go out with a bang or a whimper. In the fullness of time that will be the real history of this age. The emerging great powers of the world are trying to manage the decline of the West and the transition to a multipolar world, while the people running the West play a game of chicken. The reckless management of the Ukraine war suggests it will not end well.

American Paradox

Posted on June 24, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a short video on the best way to dispose of body, a post about why you should believe conspiracy theories and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the things about the modern age is that the public statements from the centers of cultural production and the institutions are often contradictory. The most obvious are the statements about “defending democracy” which almost always come when an election goes against the beautiful people. Their preferred candidate or party loses and all of a sudden, the democratic result is declared a threat to democracy. It happens so often now that people no longer bother to laugh at it.

There are these sorts of contradictions everywhere. For example, our betters continue to use the language of rights to define society. Even the most fevered social justice fanatic would not say the government should assign you a mate. You get to decide who you date and who you will marry. On the other hand, if a group of white people start a club and say it is for European people, the full force of the managerial state will come down on them for exercising their right to free association.

You see this with the people we call the left. Every once in a while, one of them will write a confession piece about how they have no black friends. In fact, it is rare for a white progressive to have any association with nonwhites. One of the amusing truths of this age is that the whiter or blacker a congressional district, the more likely the representative is to be a kook. Black districts select hilariously insane black politicians, and all white districts get the hardest thumping lefties.

The lived experience of white progressives is closer to the dreamed of life of white nationalists, but the progressive sees no contradiction. You see, they have a right to live where they like and among whom they like. At the same time, they can wag their boney finger at you for your whiteness, even if you live as a minority in a majority diverse part of the country. You see, there is no hypocrisy as they are just exercising their right to live where they choose to live.

What this gets to is a central paradox of progressivism. An individual has rights, including the right to be free of discrimination. These are contradictory assertions as the only way to prevent discrimination is to infringe on individual rights. If one is to be free of discrimination then it means forcing everyone else to act in ways they otherwise would not act, as in not associating with someone. Your right to not associate with a potential employee must yield to her right to not be oppressed.

Within the progressive morality is a paradox. An individual has rights that must be respected, as in the dating example. Two individuals or three individuals also have these same rights. At some point, there are a number of individuals that flip from judging them as individuals to judging them as a group. The person renting a room in their home can discriminate as they please, but if that landlord is operating a rental property, they must abide by the codes governing group behavior.

At what point does a collection of individuals become a group? If one white person can exercise his right to free association, how many white people constitutes a group and therefore they lose their right to free association? This is the paradox. There is a number at which a collection of white people loses their rights and fall under the supervision of the moral authorities. The trouble is the number cannot be defined, which is a form of Sorites paradox.

This is the paradox where you start with grains of rice. You start placing grains on a table and they remain some number of grains until at some point you have enough grains to declare it is a pile of rice. Logically, there is a number where you go from a collection of grains to a pile, but it is impossible to define the number. You can arbitrarily decide it is one hundred grains or one million grains, but there is no mathematical proof that locates the exact number.

We see the same thing with the progressive view of rights and responsibilities. At some point, a collection of individuals becomes a group and therefore they transition from the rules judging individuals to the rules judging groups. A solitary white man has a right to associate with whom he chooses but get enough white guys together and at some point, they lose their individual rights in favor of group responsibility. The number must exist, but no one bothers to define it.

This works in reverse, as well. Progressives have long argued that whites as a group owe blacks, as a group, reparations for slavery. California has been debating such a scheme for years. The trouble comes when the white plumber is told he has to send money to the black sports star. Collectively the morality of reparations is somewhat justifiable, but once it is applied individually it becomes an abomination. In theory there lies a middle ground, but no one can define it.

The source of this paradox is the fact that the progressive moral framework starts with the group and works backward. Since the Greeks, people have worked the problem in reverse by starting with the rights and obligations of the individual. This meant carving out a well-defined space where the individual is free to act as he sees fit. In old Norse, for example, there was a word for private habits and a word for public habits because it was understood there was a clear line between the two.

In fact, an individual’s obligations to the group were all within the context of what is best for the group, which was always tied to group survival. There was no collective moral purpose, only a collective practical purpose. Socrates did not flee Athens because it would bring shame to his family or to Athens. He remained and faced his punishment because it was good for Socrates the individual. He upheld Athenian law, even if it meant death, because it was his duty to the survival of the whole.

For a long time, since before Gettysburg, progressives have determined that there is a moral purpose to America as a collective entity. Therefore, everyone as an American has an individual duty to further that collective moral purpose. Since the good of the many must outweigh the good of the individual, the moral purpose of society must inevitably chip away at individual rights. Thus, this paradox we see with regards to rights slowly gives way to collective morality.

In a way, the hyper-moralization of mass culture and the transformation of the state into an explicitly moral structure, is an effort to resolve the contradiction. If the point of America is to impose a new moral order on the world, then it must follow that the point of being an American is to dedicate your life to that cause. Individual rights, which imply choice, must fall away in favor of universal moral duties. In this new paradigm, the Bill of Rights becomes the bill of moral duties.

Theocracies have a poor history primarily because men are not angels. This means the moral authorities must either accept something less than the ideal outcome or exhaust themselves making the people comply. This is why our mass culture sounds like a deranged church choir. The ruling class cares far more about you having only the right thoughts in your head than making sure Boeing builds safe planes. At some point, practical necessity requires the people to overthrow the priests.

The Baby Crisis

Posted on June 21, 2024 by thezman

After putting the show together I thought about many things I could have included but either forgot or did not think about until I got into the topic. The demographic collapse we are seeing in the West gets some attention, but no where near enough given the enormous consequences that lie ahead. No civilization that we know of has gone down the path on which the West has embarked.

A subject that gets even less attention is the fact that fertility rates are dropping all over the world, not just in the West. Mark Steyn wrote a book about this years ago, but conservatives are too dull to think about such things. David Goldman also wrote about this around the same time, but he too was ignored. There is a great deal of leaving alone going on with regards to collapsing fertility rates.

If you are a conspiracy buff, you could add in the Covid panic and how the virus was deliberately created and maybe accidentally on purpose released into the world by the sorts of people who cheer demographic collapse. You will note how the origin story of the Covid virus is also getting a good leaving alone. A cynic might think that maybe there is a link between collapsing fertility and engineered superbugs.

Based on what we know, it seems unlikely that the people running the world are trying to snuff out humanity, but the point of mentioning it is that there are a lot of angles to the global fertility crisis. The fact that the great and the good are putting so much effort into making sure no one thinks about it is a story in itself. There is a reason they do not want the masses thinking about this topic.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
Fertility Rates (Link)
How To Think About It
Possible Causes (Link) (Link)
Think Simply
Conclusion

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Ending Strength

Posted on June 20, 2024 by thezman

One of the consequences of youth culture is that there is not a lot of thought put into the fitness of old people. What little there is on the subject is either aimed at peddling drugs or peddling the crackpot idea that you are as young as you feel. The former looks at the swelling population of geezers the same way they looked at Covid. They are just looking for a way to steal more money. The latter tends to promote activities that have dubious fitness benefits and mostly sell good vibes.

The main reason for this is Americans are terrible at being old. The obsession with youth is a core part of the culture. Every political cycle, billions of words are wasted on what the youth have to say about things, as if being young makes you wise and smart, when in reality you are at your dumbest when young. Of course, young people are encouraged to set new trends and then old people are encouraged to adopt those trends so they can pretend to be young.

This was not always the way. For most of human history, youth was a thing humans were quickly ushered through so that they could become productive members of the family and community. Once children could do useful things, they were put on a course to learn to be an adult. In the modern age, it is the reverse. Once someone hits the age of majority, they are put on a course to maintain the illusion of perpetual youth in order to avoid thinking much about what comes after youth.

The thing is though, you will spend most of your life living outside of your physical prime, so preparing for it and maximizing that time should be important. The old Mickey Mantle joke about how if he knew he would live as long as he did, he would have taken better care of himself was funny because it is true. Good fitness habits in the twenties and thirties are what make for good health in the middle years possible. Good habits in the middle years are what set up productive later years.

Instead of a fitness culture aimed at maximizing fitness over the long arc of your life, the focus is on unrealistically preserving youth. Gyms profit from people hoping to attain a physique that they never had in their youth and probably never would have attained in their youth if they tried their best. In their post-youth they are struggling and failing to attain a goal that makes no sense. Worst of all are the weight trainers who strive to look like Greek statues, so they can post shirtless pics on Twitter.

Years ago, a smart guy named Mark Rippetoe wrote a book titled Starting Strength, in which he laid out his scheme for basic weight training. It remains a classic in the weight training world as it explains all of the important exercises and how they strengthen specific muscle groups. It made a lot of money for him, but it would have been better if it were called Ending Strength. The reason is the point of exercise in general is to extend the useful years of your body to the furthers possible limit.

The proposition with regards to fitness is quite simple. If you are thirty years old, would you trade a few years of looking buff right now for not being able to climb stairs in the final ten years of your life. Sadly, most thirty-year-olds would go with looking buff, but no fifty-year-old worried about such an outcome would take that deal. Yet, that is the way fitness culture is structured and the thumb is on the scale to encourage people to take the buff option, long after buff is plausible.

You can probably blame this on the boomers as the obsession with perpetual youth started with that generation. Prior to the post-war years, youth culture was limited to jazz clubs and the degenerates who frequented them. In fairness, boomers did not invent youth culture, but they embraced it, and they still embrace it. Every potion, product and promotion are sold to them as the fountain of youth. It will not be long before lifestyle companies are claiming eighty is the new thirty.

The thing is though, eighty can be a better eighty, if all along the arc of life the person is encouraged to do the things that pay those dividends in old age. Regular weight training in the middle years with the goal of maintaining muscle mass will mean climbing the stairs when you are eighty rather than buying a stair lift. Functional exercise aimed at maintaining cardiovascular capacity in your thirties will mean being able to walk the museum with your grandchildren.

Of course, the reason no one tries to sell a program like this to middle aged people is the target audience fears old age more than death, so anything that reminds them that they will one day be old is a no sale. Still, it seems like there could be some audience for a program that focuses on extended quality years. The typical white person in American is in his fifties. This is a guy thinking about how many quality years he has left and what he can do with them.

That is the warping power of youth culture and a good example of what happens when the wrong people gain cultural power. Peddling potions and programs that promise to make you look young and buff is good for the sort of people who work at card tables in temporary offices where all the cars in the parking lot are left running in case they have to make a quick escape. They do not care about the long-term health of the population, just the short-term profit to be gained from them.

In a way, fitness is a microcosm for the current crisis in that it focuses all of the attention on the here and now, usually on unattainable or pointless goals, without thinking about what comes around the next bend. Most of what ails present day America is the result of not thinking at all about the second order effects of present actions. Youth culture has created a population with no sense of time. Instead of building something to last, it aims for living fast and leaving behind a good-looking corpse.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what ails us in this age is the rejection of youth culture and the short-term thinking that comes with it. Instead of maximizing the moment, the focus must be on ending strength. The long arc of life, politics and the culture is to be the best at the end rather than the beginning. People who live with the end in mind have full lives and a culture full of such people is one that avoids the present troubles and endeavors to sustain itself for the long haul.

Gradually And Then Suddenly

Posted on June 19, 2024 by thezman

The Brits are set to have an election on July 4th, ironically enough, and everyone expects it to be a terrible result for the ruling party. The Tories have been in power for a long time and have managed to break every promise they made when they gained power and make everything worse that they promised to improve. On top of that they have gone through a series of ridiculous people as Prime Minister. The current person in the job is an Indian little person who has never run for office.

The reason the Conservatives called what the Brits call “snap elections”, is the people who actually run Britain are worried about new right-wing parties. Snap elections are those called on short notice in some parliamentary systems. The logic behind it is that the ruling party can more easily rig an election when they are out of favor by limiting the time for the opposition to mount a campaign. Democracy depends on institutional skullduggery to maintain its legitimacy.

According to current polling, which is as fraudulent as everything else in the West these days, the Conservatives are at 21%, which is their lowest rating ever. This is why there is a campaign called Zero Seats. The argument is that the only way to break the corrupt system is to eliminate one of the two main parties. Since the Tories are as popular as rectal cancer, they are the best target. While unlikely, it is possible to see a scenario in which they become a fringe party.

It is not all bad news for the Conservatives. Their historic dance partner, Labour, is polling at just 41%, which is terrible given the status of the Tories. Like America, the game of see-saw the parties play says that when one face of the ruling class is unpopular, the other face is popular. Right now, in the UK, both faces of the ruling class are unpopular, which is why they forced snap elections. No respectable person wants to see a new party rise up and challenge the system.

Just in case, the regime has brought Nigel Farage back from America where he was committed to stumping for Donald Trump. Farage is now the leader of the Reform Party, which is the heir to the Brexit Party. He created that after he successfully led the winning side in the Brexit referendum. The party was created to force the regime to follow through on the referendum, which they did not do. It is one of the reasons UK politics are such a mess now.

The only reason any of this matters is it is a good way to see how the system adjusts to defend itself from public discontent. The British regime is just the mini-me of the American regime, so it is a microcosm of what happens in America. The scale is smaller, and the system is slightly different, but we see all the same tricks used by the regime to make sure it is always heads they win and tails you lose. One of those tricks is to co-opt discontent into an acceptably pointless channel.

You can see how it works in the program the Reform Party posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, the other day. They put immigration at the top because this is one of the top issues that is rustling the voters. To the untrained eye it all looks good, but to the trained eye the fraud is quite clear. The point of their program is to not question the moral claims behind immigration, but to put a fence around that morality so the question is how to best manage mass immigration.

Look at the first point. “Freeze non-essential Immigration.” The only reason to have the term “non-essential Immigration” is if you have “essential Immigration”, which is a moral claim held by the people Farage claims to oppose. Who decided that any immigration is essential and essential to whom? Was it the bankers who actually run the country or was it the managerial elite who adopted it as a luxury belief? Who decides what is and what is not essential about immigration?

Here is another example. “All asylum seekers that arrive illegally from safe countries will be processed rapidly, offshore if necessary.” Logically, the UK should never receive any asylum seekers as by law and logic, asylum seekers go to the nearest safe country for temporary refuge while the home country is in turmoil. The UK is a set of islands bordered by countries that are stable “democracies” so there can never be a case where anyone seeks asylum in the UK.

The point of this weaselly language is two-fold. One is it is the natural obsequiousness that infests all Western right-wing parties. They have the slave mentality, which means they are always bowing and scraping before the people they pretend to oppose with regards to the moral claims of the ruling elite. The other reason is it tend to work as people just see the headlines and never think about the qualifiers. Owning the libs is a universal concept in Western democracies.

Of course, putting an entertaining clown like Farage up as the front man is a great way to distract from this reality. People are mad and lack the sophistication to understand the issues in detail, so Farage provides a vent for their frustration by pretending to be on their side, when in reality he fully supports the moral framework that is the root cause of their frustration. Farage and his Reform Party are what James Carville once called “boob bit for the bubbas.”

The genius of the trick is it will work. Reform is now polling within a few points of the Tories at 16% in the government polls. In other polls they are in a statistical dead heat with the Tories. If they overtake them, then the people angry at the system will claim victory for having knocked out the Tories. Meanwhile, gangs of Muslims are chasing their daughters through the streets. If Reform flops, then they can focus their energy on being angry at Labour for a few years.

For Americans, this should sound familiar. The usual suspects co-opted the Tea Party to become a subsidiary of the Republican Party. What could have been a threat to the system was quickly neutralized. The current populist groundswell has been slowly co-opted by oleaginous grifters who run around wearing red caps and talking about Trump like he is Orange Jesus. Meanwhile, Trump’s platform is now no different from what Jeb Bush was offering in 2016.

This may sound black-pilling and depressing, but the white pill in what is happening with populist parties all around the West is they are gnawing away at the legitimacy of the system by forcing these reactions. The dullards in the UK fall for Farage, but there are lots of people who have gotten wise to this stuff by watching him work. In the U.S., the Trump phenomenon has opened the eyes of many to the reality of the system, simply by seeing the system react to Trump.

In other words, the process by which a system loses its legitimacy is through its various mutations to defend itself from challenges. The number of people wondering if the system should be saved is a measurable number now, thanks to the struggle the system has undergone to defend against even mild reform. The same is true all over as people increasingly notice the unwillingness of the system to give an inch on critical issues like immigration and culture.

The old line from Hemingway about bankruptcy being gradually then suddenly applies to all complex systems. Failed populist uprisings and Potemkin opposition movements are the gradually portion of the show. With every failure to get even a tiny concession from the system, the system loses legitimacy. At some point, and no one ever knows when it will happen, the suddenly part of the show begins. In order to get there, you have to work through the gradually part first.

The White Fortress

Posted on June 18, 2024 by thezman

It is fair to say that Detroit was one of the first victims of the civil rights revolution, given what happened to it relative to where it was pre-revolution. After the war, Detroit was the most prosperous city in the country. In 1950 the city had 1.8 million people and the highest per capita income in the country. Then the civil rights revolution unleashed hell on the city, leading to a collapse of its economy and population. Motown is now roughly a third of its peak size and gripped by urban poverty.

Despite remaining the symbol of the urban decline unleashed by the civil rights revolution, Detroit is not the worst city in America. St. Louis continues to sport the highest murder rate in the country at 66 per 100,000. Baltimore is always the bridesmaid in the murder Olympics at a respectable 56 per 100,000. Detroit is third, but the murder rate is 40 per 100,000. That is still ten times worse than the most dangerous European cities, but well off the pace in America.

Detroit has also stabilized to some degree. A few super wealthy men have tried to rescue parts of the city from the locals. The billionaire Dan Gilbert spearheaded the revitalization efforts in the city that have carved out some green zones that host business and the sports and entertainment areas. The Ford family continues to play an outsized role in the city. The result of these billionaire efforts has been to arrest the collapse of the city and slowly claw back some civilization.

It was not just the generosity of some oligarchs that saved Detroit from total collapse but also the recognition that the locals cannot be trusted. The state of Michigan stepped in and suspended the lunacy of democracy in the city. The city was ushered through Chapter 9 bankruptcy and an administrator was appointed. Many local politicians were arrested so they could not interfere in the repair efforts. Ten percent white Detroit continues to have a white mayor.

When you walk around Detroit now, you can get a glimpse of what lies ahead for majority-minority America. Like Brazil, Detroit is three cities. There is the war zone that has been cordoned off as best they can. Then there is the area where the more stable black population lives and then you have the economic zone. A weird balance has been struck where the more stable black population works in the economic zone and does not get rustled by the measures required to maintain it.

Walk around Greek Town on a Friday night and the thing you cannot help but notice is the lack of local color. This is the tourist part of the city located near the big sports arenas and the large office towers. It is called Greek Town because it was populated by Greeks before the savages were unleashed by the civil rights revolution. Like everything created in America over the last half century, Greek Town is named after what was destroyed in order to make the new thing.

The reason for the lack of local color is the police presence. It is not just cops milling about like you see in less violent cities. This is the sort of policing that is intended to be an unwelcome mat for a specific group. At all of the entrances to the area are cops who man metal detectors. They select who must go through the detector and then get the pat down once it inevitably sounds the alarm. One can guess as to who they select for this special form of inspection.

In fairness, Detroit is not the first city to take this approach. Baltimore was a trail blazer in this regard, having condemned the area around the harbor and then handing it to developers and urban pioneers in the 1980’s. The deal was that pioneers and developers would build a white fortress to serve as an entertainment and tourist zone, while the city would provide security. This meant aggressively policing the border between the green zone and the black zone.

Detroit appears to have used Baltimore as a template, but also learned from Baltimore how not to screw it up. Got to Baltimore today and it is a mess. The Inner Harbor is vacant and the former tourist areas are overrun by locals. Nature is reclaiming that which was carved out of the urban jungle decades ago. Detroit, in contrast, is holding the line and that is mostly due to elite support. The oligarchs are not going to let their investment be swallowed up by the jungle.

It is too soon to know if Detroit can survive with this model. The upper middle-class white population escaped the city and refuse to return, unless it is for a ball game, concert or for work. On a Friday night when there is no major event, Greek Town is a well-guarded ghost town. You can walk into the best restaurants and get a seat at what is usually their prime hours. The pricing reflects the fact that the entertainment industry is built around the major events.

That is the trade-off to politely working around the problem instead of rudely going after the roots of the problem. There is a lack of authenticity to Greek Town. It feels like the Potemkin “town centers” that are now part of the suburban white fortress that is getting attention from the kooks. They do all the things that you expect from the organic urban centers of old, but they lack that hard to describe sense that can only come from the produce of an authentic community.

It is tempting to think that maybe that is the compromise that will define the future, but these transactional communities have a poor record. The reason is the cost of maintaining them is much higher due to the lack of social capital. People in a new development have only the investment in their home. They have no investment in their neighbors, who come and go. Eventually, everyone finds a newer, cleaner white fortress because the old white fortress is beginning to crumble.

That is what makes Detroit worth watching. It was the first victim of the civil rights revolution, and it may be the last chance to figure out how to maintain an urban area within the moral construct of civil rights. If like Baltimore it collapses under the pressure of diversity, then there are no arguments left for maintaining the moral framework of civil rights, but if it survives as a post-modern apartheid city, then it can be the model for how to maintain civilization in a majority-minority America.

Modern Youth Politics Inc.

Posted on June 17, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about my experiments with time travel and a series of daily travelogues about my time in Motown for AFPAC, which was much more interesting than I expected. Subscribe here or here.

Symbolism is one of the aspects of all politics, regardless of political system, which tends to get missed by political people. This is especially true of those we call the right, who are often deep in the weeds of ideology or theory. They are like experts on paint who are more concerned with the type of paint used by the great artist than the actual painting he created and its larger meaning. You see this with the reaction to the Nick Fuentes movement that just had its big party this past weekend.

Since he started to gain a following, critics have struggled to find a good way to attack him, as they often get tangled up in the symbolism. He became a national figure during the 2016 MAGA movement, but shot to the top with the 2020 election, where he toured the country holding rallies in the “stop the steal” days. He would gather up young fans and give speeches via bullhorn outside of state capitols. It was reminiscent of the radical protests of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

That was the point, more than the actual content of the protests. It is a form of guerilla marketing in which the counter to the well-financed and carefully choregraphed messaging from the regime is the apparently organic rejection of that message and the people behind the messaging. In other words, the point was not what they were saying at these events. The whole point of the event was to tell the world they exist, despite the mass propaganda from the regime.

This has always had another function for Fuentes. It tells the disaffected youth that there is a place they can go to be with other likeminded people. They see these things happening on their preferred platforms. They get talked up in the online spaces these young people frequent and most importantly, they get criticized by the sorts of people who make good foils for Fuentes. Like all good political animals, Fuentes tends to attract the sorts of critics he needs to make his points.

It is important to note that it has been a long time since someone has come along with the skill of Fuentes in terms of generating excitement. There is an electricity around his events that you never see at other political events. He understands his audience because in reality, Fuentes is his audience. He is trying to create the sort of excitement he and they learned about in history class. He is building a youth movement that mirrors what he thinks it was like in the Reagan or Kennedy years.

This is why the marketing of Nick Fuentes and American First looks like it is put together by profession marketing people. He and his entourage arrive at their impromptu rallies wearing the American First gear, which you can buy at the AF store and the crowd always has the same look at feel. He is always surrounded by guys holding up their mobile device who are surrounded by young men in blue blazers chanting the familiar chants that have become a defining feature of this thing.

While it looks like great marketing, it is genuinely organic. Much has been said about the fact that this generation is the first to be socialized online, but they are also the first generation to be saturated in and socialized by marketing. To old people, the thoroughly commercialized culture of today feels alien and weird. To the young people raised in it, it feels normal. It is simply a habit of mind. The people you see at a Fuentes rally are just falling into the role that fits them best.

In a way, it is as if life has become a video game. They play the character that they feel comfortable playing. Instead of being the barbarian character in the online game, they are the guy holding the cell phone up next to Nick. The archers fall into the role of standing in the back yelling the familiar slogans at Nick. Of course, there are the Leroy Jenkins characters at these things. That would be the black guy dressed as Playa Maga or the has-been grifters like David Duke.

This is what trips up his “right-wing” critics. They see the assorted kooks and weirdos that turn up at these events and then fashion an argument against Fuentes and his followers that often reduces to petty jealousy. Fuentes is doing what many of them said was impossible, mostly because they lacked the skill and courage to try and do the things that Fuentes is doing in terms of public demonstration. Calling Fuentes a grifter is a way to feel good about losing.

When you talk to the people at a Fuentes event, and in Detroit they were everywhere Saturday evening, they will tell you that people like Sneako are not really part of the movement but something like the court jester. They lack the sophistication to explain it, but they sense that the point of these colorful characters is to decorate the public face of the movement as something like an inside joke. The critics do not get it, which is why they are not in it.

Therein lies the genuine problem for this thing. It is like everything else in the modern mass media age in that it is just a thing you do until the next thing comes along. It is why Fuentes has had to keep shifting the focus and changing the characters in what is more like a long running reality television show than a political movement. Every season you get a new character and some new issues. It is not that it is a grift or he is not serious, but rather this is what this generation thinks is serious.

Another way to think of it is the films from twenty years ago where the walls between virtual reality and reality break down and you have a character from the digital world enter the real world or vice versa. This is what is happening for a generation raised on mass media, mass marketing within the context of virtual reality where the worst thing that can happen to you is your character dies. The politics of this generation are the politics of the internet, not the meat space.

Politics as professional wrestling is fun for the twenty-somethings who are naturally drawn to it, but in time they will have to have real lives. You see this transition in some of the older young people who are now working and on their own. Standing outside a Nick rally yelling those slogans feels foolish to them. That is the most likely way this thing unfolds over the next few years. The youthful excitement and superficiality will give way to more mature and serious politics.

This raises the question of the expiry date for Nick Fuentes. All pop stars who court the youth audience run into the same problem. There comes a point where their act goes from opportunistic to weird. They get too old for their market. Fuentes looks like he is a teenager, so he has time, but at some point, he will have to follow his older audience into a more mature form of politics. The question that remains unasked and unanswered is whether he will lead them or follow them.

The Conservative Industrial Complex

Posted on June 14, 2024 by thezman

One of the many frustrations of people in outsider politics is that the people inside conventional politics, especially in the conservative wing, never respond to what is going on outside of Washington. After every election, regardless of the result, they continue doing what they were doing before the election. We saw this most clearly after 2016 where Conservative Inc rallied against Trump.

The reason for that is conservatism is not just an institution or even a collection of institutions, but rather an ecosystem that provides total care for the people who are allowed to take up a place in it. If you manage to slither inside one of the institutions, you no longer live outside of your political existence. To the contrary, your entire life is now defined by your place in the political ecosystem.

The reason for that is the enormity of institutional conservatism. What it lacks in popular support it more than makes up for in financial support. That money is used to build a network of institutions that are linked together to provide a lifestyle to the people inside them that they could never achieve in the dreaded private sector. As a result, everyone inside is deeply loyal to the system.

That is the show this week. In order to provide some perspective on the size and scale of the Conservative Industrial Complex, I go through the leading organizations and explain their size and scope. This is just a sample as the system is composed of hundreds of nodes and is well over a billion dollars in revenue, before you start looking at their purely political activities.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
How Politics Works
The Conservative Industrial
What Do These Groups Do?
The Conservative Ecosystem

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Euros And Ukraine

Posted on June 13, 2024 by thezman

During Covid, one of the questions that kicked around was how would the public react when they found out the government was lying? The answer is we do not know as the whole thing has been thrown down the memory hole for the most part. The truth about Covid has slowly seeped into the public consciousness, but no one asks them about it and no media outlet discusses it. The best anyone can tell is that the Covid lies have become a part of the general cynicism.

We will soon get another case to see how the public will respond when the truth is nothing like what they have been told by the media. In the case of Project Ukraine, this test will happen in Europe where the local media talks about the war in Ukraine in terms that have always been fanciful. It was European media that gave us the “Ghost of Kiev” and the babushkas knocking down fighter jets with canned goods. They continue to feed their public outlandish stories about the war.

Those with an interest in the war and access to the internet can find out what is actually happening on the battlefield. The facts are often blurred by the fog of war and the bias of the people doing the reporting, but with some patience you can get a good picture of what is happening in Ukraine. It is even possible to get a sense of what is happening outside the war zone as there are still plenty of Ukrainians posting stuff to popular apps like Telegram and Instagram.

Very little of this reality gets into Europeans media. Instead, they produce content like this from the UK Telegraph, which is supposed to be a serious media platform, not the typical British tabloid. Not only are they “reporting” that Ukrainian “wonder weapons are decimating the Russians”, but they also have a special section with high production quality explanations of those wonder weapons. In other words, this is a highly choregraphed bit of propaganda designed to deceive the public.

The wonder weapon stuff is mild compared to some of the other posts you will find about Ukraine in the Telegraph. This one claims the Ukrainians are about to seize Crimea because their squadrons of unicorns are showering the place with magical fairy dust they shoot from their ass. That is not an exaggeration, as magical farting unicorns would be more plausible than the contents of the actual post. The whole thing is a fantasy with no basis in reality.

It is not just the UK media that is gaslighting the public. The German media is full of similarly nonsensical stories. Here is the Ukraine page for Bild, which you can use Google to translate into English. Die Zeit is probably the most respected news site in Germany, and it just copies and pastes whatever Kiev, or the neocons send them about what is happening in the war. While not as ridiculous as the UK media, the continental media is gaslighting its public just as hard.

The problem is the war is going horribly for Ukraine. The Russian army is slowly and methodically grinding the Ukraine army into bits. Every month the Ukrainians are forced to fall back at some point along the line of contact. The Russians have knocked out the power grid of the country, which means there is no electric for up to twenty hours per day in some areas. The Ukrainian army is literally snatching men off the streets and sending them to the front due to a lack of manpower.

What Ukraine war watchers have known for a long time is that at some point, the Ukraine army will not be able to keep fighting. At some point, the Russians will decide it is time to end the war on its terms. Given that this is a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, the assumption is the fall is when things come to a head, just in time for the presidential election. Maybe it will happen sooner or maybe later, but at some point, reality will burst through those European headlines.

From a distance, it is hard to know if the firehose of nonsense about the war is fooling the European public. The recent elections suggest that at the minimum the public is tired of the ruling parties putting the welfare of Ukraine ahead of the welfare of the European people. It is possible that the Euros have been wise to the media nonsense about Ukraine, but simply care more about other things. Like Covid, it is hard to know as no one bothers to find out what the public thinks.

Unlike Covid, the collapse of Project Ukraine is not going to be easy to sweep under the rug by ignoring it. With Covid, the liars scurried off with their bags of cash and the pols declared victory as they let their foot off the neck of the public. The general public was simply happy to get back to normal. That is probably not going to work with Ukraine as there is no benefit to putting the topic in the past. There will simply be what the media claimed to be true and the truth, which is the opposite.

Compounding the problem in Europe is the fact that the leading politicians have made Ukraine their signature issue. In the U.S., the pols have been giving it a good leaving alone for a year now, other than the big funding push in February. Note that as soon as that bill passed, they changed the subject. In Europe, the political class has made Ukraine a test of their legitimacy. Therefore, when the Ukraine army surrenders, they cannot shrug and move on to other issues.

One of the lessons of the Soviet era was that the accumulation of lies eventually saps even the most repressive regime of legitimacy. The Soviet system fell apart when no one could think of a reason to support it, not even the people at the top of the system who benefitted from it the most. In this way, Ukraine and Covid may be analogous to Afghanistan and Chernobyl. These are events that delegitimize the system by making clear that nothing it says or does is on the level.

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