I was reading a story the other day about the geezers who pulled the great Hatton Garden heist. It is a fun read, but what jumped out to me was how the cops caught these guys. London is so thick with surveillance cameras; you simply cannot escape having your every move documented. In this case, they traced the movement of the car involved via CCTV and figured out who was involved. Then they listened in on their conversations via electronic surveillance.

The thieves had some understanding of this, but as the one detective said, “They were analog criminals operating in a digital world, and no match for digital detectives.” In this case, they managed to knock out many of the cameras, but missed one and that was their downfall. The data from that one camera along with the data tracking the movement of all subjects in Britain now, was enough to solve the crime.

We are just on the cusp of the surveillance state. The looming end of cash will mean all of your financial transactions can be quickly harvested by the state. We have been conditioned for this via the television for years now. Every cop show has the earnest detectives rummaging around in the suspect’s financial affairs without a warrant. Most people think it happens now so when it comes on-line no one will squawk. After all, public safety requires it and who could possibly be against it?

The end of cash has another implication. Without cash, all transactions will be above ground. Implementing block-chain technology means that the history of every bit of currency will be carried with that bit of currency. The black market will have to be a barter economy. The above ground economy will be a permission based system. Fat people will not be allowed to solicit ice cream shops, for example, unless some thin person pays their way. In effect, everyone will be on allowance.

I was watching a show on the Norse the other day. The show was about how researchers are using new technology to figure out where to dig for Norse settlements. Specifically, they use satellite imagining that can “see” in near–ultraviolet. The satellites can also pickup variations in the electromagnetic radiation along the surface of the earth. This lets the researchers identify what is under the grass, noticing old stone and even mud walls. The accuracy of modern satellites is feet so they can just about pinpoint exactly where to dig.

The next generation of satellites will be even better and cheaper. The new Google satellites will be able to see faces at street level. Looking inside structures with the use of the full light spectrum is just around the corner. In the not too distant future, the state will have 24×7 eyes in the sky that can see and hear anything that is happening above ground. Coupled with expanding use of technology like the “Stingray Tracking Devices”, everything you say and do will be in a database at a government agency.

That is the other bit people do not think about right now. You walk around with your mobile phone and it is now reporting your whereabouts to the phone company and the app developers for those things you downloaded. Google has been keeping tabs on you for a long time. In a cash free society where you have to carry a device in order to conduct basic commerce, mandating this sort of tracking is too easy.

Soon enough, everyone will be able to track everyone, thus making all of us agents of the state. That is the genius behind all of this. Organized social pressure is the way populations will be controlled, much in the way cattlemen manage their herds. Once you realize everyone knows what you are doing and saying, even in private moments, you will act in a way that is “appropriate” even when no one is looking.

The brave new world will be safe, at least, unless you say the wrong things on social media. Then you can expect men with guns to bust down your door and haul you off to jail. Even if they only haul away the hard core haters, you can probably expect to have social media audits where you will have to explain your tweets, posts and so forth. You may not have to sit through a tax audit, but you will be sitting through struggle sessions over your internet activity.

That is the thing Huxley could not see clearly, but he had some inkling of this. For those who read the book, you will recall that people, in the future he imagined, were always under scrutiny. Bernard Marx was exiled to the island of non-conformists for what we would today call trolling. Bernard Marx was a contrarian and a jerk, which is pretty much everyone on-line these days. It is also why our betters are berserk over policing the internet. It is easy to see how this will end.

At least in the World State, everyone was high on soma most of the time. Soma is a hallucinogenic similar to peyote. I write most of these posts micro-dosing mescalin so I can tell you the future will not be too bad, except for the giant spiders.  Then again, the future promises to include an inoculation against drug use. The day when science can “cure” drug abuse and alcoholism is a lot closer than people realize. Imagine a time when you can drink all the beer you like and never get drunk.

That may sound far-fetched but look at the way our keepers treat vice today. They are endlessly hounding us about our diets, our drinking and our exercise. My fondest memories of my father are of him with a Marlboro in his hand. Today, a gaggle of angry lesbians will assault you if you light up in public. All the things that come natural to men will be banned. That is what awaits the toddlers crawling around on the floors of Western homes right now. No wonder white men are offing themselves at record numbers. The future will suck.

One of the things few notice is the level of coordination in the media. The writers and talkers are often conspiring with one another to push some agenda, usually on behalf of moneyed interests or one of the political parties. The most recent example is the Michelle Fields hoax, facilitated by Ben Shapiro, who is a kept man of the guy financing the Ted Cruz campaign. The whole thing was a setup by “reporters” with an agenda, one purchased by the Ted Cruz campaign.

The Fields hoax is an exception, but there is a lot of media coordination. The JournoList scandal a few years ago revealed that many left-wing writers and reporters were coordinating their efforts via a secret e-mail list. They would promote each other’s work and coordinate how they would cover certain people and events. They imagined themselves as the guys meeting at Rue Saint-Jacques, except they were working on behalf of the king, despite imagining otherwise.

It looks like Buckley Conservatives have learned from their betters on the Left. This article appeared on the collaborationist website The Federalist, yesterday. Today, National Review has a different version of essentially the same article. Ian Tuttle feels no shame in plagiarizing the Federalist piece, suggesting this is a coordinated effort. Then again, there are only so many ways to hoot the word “racist” in a column so plagiarism is probably not the right word here.

Tuttle can be forgiven for not understanding the material, but still trying to please his bosses. He is a child trying to start a career as a chattering skull. Children do what they are told. The old fat guy from the Federalist is just a nobody so this is a way to make some money. We can expect more from the Buckley Right, as it finds itself decreasingly relevant and increasingly under assault.

Ideological movements enter into decline at the same point they turn inward and focus on a narrowing set of doctrines that define the cause. That’s the point they lose faith in the future, their future. They turn their tools to the task of maintaining the status quo, often at the expense of the movement and the benefit of the leaders. Today, Buckley Conservatism is mostly a Reagan Mystery Cult with a gift shop for their books, magazines and television programs.

There is some continuation here with the tradition of Buckley, as far as the war on the people to their Right. That has always been an essential element of Buckley Conservatism. Like Progressives, they hate the people to their Right and curry favor with those on their Left. By casting the people on their Right as unacceptable, so the theory goes, they position themselves as the sensible alternative to the Far Right and the Far Left. Buckley cut his teeth purging Burchers and Randians.

The whole point of Buckley Conservatism was to fight the Soviets so this strategy of self-legitimization made some sense. The Left was hoping to emulate the Bolsheviks, not counter them. In order to prevent that from happening, the Right had to be a legitimate counter argument. So, Bill Buckley was willing to throw anyone over the rail if it made him and his cause look good. A lot of people went over the rail as a result.

The Cold War is over. What’s left of Buckley Conservatism is the weird half of Frank Meyer Fusionism and the purging. Over the last 25 years the list of people purged reads like a who’s who of important writers of the American Right. What’s left of Buckley Conservatism, as an intellectual movement, is the sophomoric libertarian nonsense and angry tantrums about the traditionalists of the Old Right, who refuse to play along anymore.

The Buckleyites still run the Reagan Mystery Cult and the adjoining gift shoppe, the latter being the critical piece. Jonah Goldberg lives in a million dollar home in the Washington suburbs. To maintain that lifestyle means keeping the gift shoppe open. Even if he wanted to entertain alternative opinions, he has a mortgage to pay and a college fund to finance. He lacks the talent of a Mark Steyn and the courage of Ann Coulter so he cannot go it alone. He has to remain a clerk in the gift shoppe, writing copy about the wonderfulness of Buckley Conservatism.

The problem for Buckley Conservatives is they have nothing to offer. People see 25 years of failure and naturally begin to look elsewhere for answers. The alt-right has loads of problems and parts of it are a bit like heroin, offering momentary relief at the expense of long term happiness. To the person suffering in the present, however, the momentary high from joining a white identity group, for example, feels like salvation.

The alt-right, in all of its manifestations, is not growing in number and confidence because they made a pact with the devil. There is nothing supernatural at work here. It’s not a coherent intellectual movement, but simply a refuge from the endless assault on ordinary people, who see their traditions, their customs, their ancestors and their progeny being ground up in the meat grinder of technocratic managerialism. The alt-right is not offering anything but shelter from the storm – for now.

Mass movements are always attractive to the disaffected, which is why responsible people must always work to limit the number of disaffected. It’s this failure of Buckley Conservatism, and the failure of the managerial class as a whole, that has grown the number of disaffected. The whole reason to be loyal to the Left or the Right was always patriotic interest. Neither side bothers to make patriotic arguments, thus leaving patriots with nothing.

When people who have been loyal to conservative causes and conservative politicians their whole life find themselves being called racists and bigots by those people they supported, they start to feel like they have been conned. When ruling class organs publicly argue that vast parts of the culture must be destroyed, that traditional America must be wiped out, people hear a declaration of war. The response is not going to be “yes sir, may I have another.” The response, to quote the late Andrew Breitbart, is going to be “Fuck you. War!”

A while back someone noticed that white people in American are dying off at record rates. Digging into the numbers reveals that middle-aged whites have seen a spike in suicide rates as well as a spike in death from substance abuse. It got a lot of attention because white liberals are pretty much organized around exterminating white people. It is a suicide cult based on race. The so-called conservatives hid under their beds, but hate thinkers out on the fringe jumped in with their explanations and data analysis.

My best posts seem to be those where I don’t make an argument, but instead describe a phenomenon or analyze something happening in the world. I know I enjoy writing those posts more than the standard arguments in favor of a particular point of view. With that in mind, I thought a useful post would be a roundup of the various theories about The White Death, including a little of my own opinion on the topic. It’s a big topic that will surely make a few books, but here’s a first blush of some of the theories.

The Steve Sailer Theory: Suicide and death from substance abuse often go hand in hand and they tend to work over time. Sailer took a look at the ages involved, did a little math and noticed that the cohort with the spike in suicide and substance abuse were the 70’s generation. These were the folks who missed the summer of love, but made up for it in the disco era. For whites, this was probably the worst decade for drug abuse, social pathology and cultural decay. It was a a tough decade to be a honky.

The argument here is that peak partying for whites took a toll on this generation. Higher alcoholism rates and the aftershocks of excessive drug taking in the younger years resulted in higher death rates in the late middle years. There’s also the fact that this generation was the first to experience economic malaise. If you came of age in the 70’s, you did not enter a world brimming with optimism. For working class whites, the malaise never really ended, thus a lifetime of substance abuse for many of them.

The John Derbyshire Theory: John made the observation back when Merkel’s Millions were first flooding into Europe that the invaders were all young males. Further, the people welcoming them were mostly women. In the US, the middle-age death spike is exclusively white and heavily male. In subsequent podcasts, John put the two trends together. The white male had suddenly fallen to the bottom of the sexual pecking order. White males are now low status males, while the young dusky fellows from over the horizon are the top dogs.

Human biology is immutable so of if there is no future for white males, that could explain the spike in substance abuse rates and suicide rates among white males. After all, we are biologically designed to seek out females. If I understand John’s angle correctly, his theory is that the general war on men, by white women, in white societies is leading to all sorts of bizarre outcomes, one of which is the climbing death rates among white men. Maybe we can call this death by angry snapper.

Manosphere Theory: I’m not entirely sure I fully grasp this explanation, given that I don’t haunt these sites all that often. The basic claim is that masculinity has been degraded to the point where men are just lesbians with a dick. Instead of engaging in masculine jobs, hobbies and social roles, men have been forced into an increasingly feminized role in society. This rewards submissive men, but heavily penalizes normal males. Turn on a television and you clearly see they have a point.

The result is a general sense of despondency and disconnectedness. This leads to high substance abuse rates and higher suicide rates as this is not a role most men are bred to accept. This is the genesis of the “cuckservative” epithet to describe the new submissive male that is held up as the example of modern masculinity. If your main role in life is to bring black guys home to the wife, you’re better off dead. Like I said, I may be missing something here, but those are the general outlines.

The Despair Theory: Here is a broader look at the trend lines to include other types of social dysfunction, like the spike in opiate use. Flat wages, declining mobility, increased inequality, the proliferation of drug therapy, social decay and the decline in religion have led to a widespread sense of despair. This is the Robert Putnam angle. The globalization of economics has left people less secure in their lives, adding anxiety to the despair. Everyone is a bad decision by management away from suffering a severe decline in living standards.

If you look at what has been happening with the white working class, the word “despair” is a good descriptor. The economy has been horrible for these people and the ruling elite has unleashed a cultural assault that has blown apart anything resembling social structure. A factory man in 1965 could live a nice lower middle-class life. Today, that guy is working at a Home Depot and his wife has to work to make ends meet. These trends are now seeping up into the middle class, as evidenced by the Trump candidacy.

My Theory: My hunch is the White Death is a downstream result of a much longer trend. Think of the West as an industry and each ethnic group as a business in that industry. It got going in the 15th century with the age of exploration. The competition between countries, as well as the massive growth of the business, allowed the West to rocket ahead of the world in culture, finance and technology. The West was Silicon Valley while the rest of the world was Pittsburgh.

This long expansion ran its course like every other industry in history. It is a mature industry now, where growth is small. The sort of people who thrive in a booming industry are the people who like risk and like breaking form to try new things. In a mature industry, the rewards are to the conservative and rule bound. There’s no benefit to risk taking so there’s no reason to take risks. Similarly, there’s nothing but risk in breaking from the rules, so the best people avoid coloring outside the lines.

Thinking of Europeans, in the broadest sense, as risk takers and adventurers, trapped in a world where risk is to be avoided and adventure means having ice cream for desert, would explain a few things. Inviting millions of Exploding Mohameds into Europe tickles that desire to take risks and take on new challenges that is baked into the Western psyche. If you think about it, all of the problems that plague the West today are self-inflicted. It’s as if we are keeping ourselves busy by inviting trouble to our door.

At the more granular level, and this is probably truer of Americans than Europeans, is that there’s not a lot of fun stuff for men to do anymore. A century ago, a man with modest skills could do well by being physically courageous. Maybe that meant military service or striking out for the hinterlands to start a new life. Tough guys and bad asses were still getting the girls in movies up until fairly recent. Now the leading men are homosexuals, who share their feelings and cry a lot. Or, they are cartoons.

This is one of those topics that is open to all sorts of crackpot theories. It’s also one that will probably solve itself. In a healthy society, old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. That’s not the West today. Whatever is at the root of the White Death will give way to something more hostile than white guys hanging themselves or overdosing on horse. To use another hoary chestnut, no tree grows to the sky. The White Death will give way to something else. It will probably be worse.