Monthly Archives: November 2016

Ivy Day In The Blogosphere

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The first election in which I had an emotional investment was the 1976 presidential election. I was only ten years old, but we were Democrats so I got to vote anyway. In fact, I voted several times that day, along with all of my dead relatives and their dead friends. I’m kidding, of course, but it was the first time I cared about an election. I grew up in a Democrat family, but some family members were breaking ranks with the party and that made for some ugly conversations at Sunday dinner.

Despite my Southern sensibilities, I was not a Carter fan. Even at that age, I was a bit of a contrarian. There was just something about Carter that bothered me. There was that and the fact that the hard core Nixon haters in my family were nuts. There was an aunt that always went on and on about her trip to San Francisco in the 60’s. She was well on her way to becoming a cat lady. The big Nixon hater was an uncle, who was big into Kennedy conspiracy stuff. It just seemed to me that Carter people were not all there.

It was also my first lesson in the reality of politics. People don’t vote their interests. They vote for their tribe, their religion, their race, whatever. Carter won in 1976 by carrying the South. He was an Evangelical and a Georgian, so he won on a combination of rust belt states, the South and Appalachia. Even 40 years ago, it was crazy for Southerners to vote for a Democrat, but people convinced themselves he was not a crazy liberal. After all, he was a devout Christian and a Southerner. He could’t be that liberal.

The first election that shocked me was me was the 1988 Democrat primary. I was living in Massachusetts and I knew Dukakis was a joke. How that guy managed to win the nomination still baffles me. There was no chance for the party that year, as Reagan was so popular, even Bush was a shoe in. Still, nominating a guy, who makes the clerks at the DMV sound bright and interesting never made any sense. It just goes to show that determination and luck are what counts in politics.

The thing about that election that will always stick with me is when Bush did his “Read my lips. No new taxes” line. At that moment, I knew he was going to be a fink. The reason he said it was because he knew everyone knew he was going to raise taxes, so he lied. Of course, it did not take Bush long to prove he was liar all along. Little did I know that his presidency was the beginning of the end for the country. The downward trajectory of the GOP and the country started in the ’88 election.

While I’m on the subject of Bush, the first time I thought seriously about not voting was the 2000 election. I was pretty sure Bush would win handily so my boycotting the election would not be irresponsible. For whatever reason I could not go through with it so I stopped at my polling place on the way to work. I was shocked to see so many people voting and the type of people voting. I got the very clear impression that lots of liberals were motivated to vote against Bush. I came away thinking it was going to be a long night.

The funny thing about that election is normals assumed we dodged a bullet, but in retrospect we would have been better off if Gore had won. It would have discredited the neocons and put an end to the Bush dynasty. Gore was having a nervous breakdown, but that could have been handled. We still have no come up with a way to fix the disaster that was the Bush presidency. I don’t know if it will ever be fixed. My bet is a lot of people think back and wish that they had voted the other way back in 2000.

My first non-vote was 2012. I hated Romney, but I wanted to punish Obama so I went off to do my duty. I watched a bus full of little brown guys ushered in by an SEIU worker. They were given provisional ballots and someone who spoke their languages guided them through the process. I stood in line watching it as a fat girl with blue hair tapped at her cell phone. She had a face full of fishing tackle and probably the IQ of a goldfish. Disgusted, I went home without voting. That was a good day.

I’ll head off to vote for the last time in my life tomorrow and I will vote for Trump, even though he has no chance to win my state. It will be the last time we have a chance to vote for someone that is not a nut or a grifter. If Clinton wins, she will amnesty 50 million foreign peasants, creating something close to a one party nation as a result. America will rocket along toward becoming Brazil, if we’re lucky. The crazy bitch could very well start a war with Russia or the Chinese and that could finish us all off.

It was fun while it lasted.

Testing The Theories

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The thing about elections is they test various theories about the direction of the country, the strategies of the party elites and the pet theories of the talking heads representing the ideological sides of the ruling class. In predictable elections like 2012, everyone can hedge enough to look like they have a bead on things, but 2016 is not one of those elections. No one really knows how things will turnout on Tuesday. That’s leaving all the so-called experts out on one limb or another, ready to have it sawed off by the voters.

The first camp that will probably plunge to the ground are those who have been saying Trump is outlandishly unacceptable. These are the the NeverTrump loons mostly, but there are some Progressive nutters in this group. These are the people that have been predicting a blowout for Clinton, even suggesting she will usher in a permanent realignment. After all, Trump’s pro-evil message and buffoonish style will be resoundingly rejected by the voters and that’s going to damage the Republican brand for a generation.

There’s not way to interpret the polling that says this will happen. The most likely scenario, as of this writing, is the slimmest of slim victories for Clinton. Even Nate Silver says she is one close state flipping away from defeat. If she is going to win, it is going to be the narrowest win possible and closer that what Obama did four years ago. At the minimum, it says the message was fine, but the campaign strategy was poorly executed and a slightly less eccentric messenger would have won.

The next group plunging to earth tomorrow will be those claiming that Trump’s message appeals only to white nationalists. This group should already be on the turf as it is clear that Trump is doing just as well as any Republican with blacks and Hispanics. There’s a lot of polling that suggests he is doing better than previous Republicans with both groups. The only thing that will keep this group of experts around after the election is they are shameless and facts simply don’t matter.

One branch over in the canopy are the TrueCons and Movement Conservatives that have been arguing that Trump is not conservative and only a real conservative can win against a Liberal Democrat. These are the folks debating the proper use of semicolons in the tax code. They need a Clinton landslide to avoid having their limb sawed off tomorrow. The weight of their own perfidy has caused many to plunge to the earth in the primary, but there are still some hanging on, going on about principled conservatism.

Then we have the amnesty crowd. This is going to be interesting to watch as they are almost as fanatical as the NeverTrump loons. A Trump loss will temp them to say amnesty is the only way to prevent this from happening again, but that’s going to be a tough sell. A Trump win takes the issue off the table. The only way these people can claim victory on Tuesday is if Trump losses and it is the result of losing states with heavy Hispanic populations. This is looking unlikely, but that’s their one hope.

Similarly, there have been those who have argued that immigration and amnesty are simply toxic issues. They are third rail issues. The solution is to ignore them or suck it up and pass amnesty so the issue is off the table for another generation. This is a popular cop-out with Republicans as it makes them look like they are reluctant to cave to Democratic pressure, but it keeps the Progressives from calling them racist. The results thus far make clear that this is ridiculous, but a Trump win should kill this one off for a generation.

My favorite election theory this cycle has been the howling from the political class about the need for a ground game. That means the need to hire thousands of their friends into do-nothing jobs for the campaigns. Trump has run a lean and mean campaign in the primary and the general. The political professionals hate him for it. If he wins, then we probably see a new style of electioneering modeled on what he did in 2016. A loss and we get a barrage of opinion from these people claiming they were right all along.

Then there is the Depressive Right’s argument that the country is lost due to demographics. These are the people who drink vinegar for breakfast. Because of immigration, there’s simply no way to win on anything other than a statist agenda. The electoral map has been rigged and the only way a Republican can compete is to out globalist the Democrats. The result will be a slow march toward the abyss as the country cracks up under the inevitable strains of multiculturalism, tribalism and globalist economics.

This is the one group with the best chance to be proved right tomorrow. Trump has his flaws, but his message is fundamentally pro-American, while Clinton is running an anti-American campaign. If that is not enough, Clinton is clearly the least moral and least honest politician any of us has seen in our lifetime. If the voters still reject Trump, then there is no reason to think there is a way to win an election on a pro-American, patriotic message. The people have quit on themselves and the country.

Then there is the Sailer theory of recent elections, which is that the GOP has been shedding white voters and therefore their prospects have dimmed. Those white voters are not voting for the other party in great numbers. Instead, they stay home, dropping out of the system. If the data from the primary is correct and Trump is pulling those forgotten voters back in, then this validates Sailer’s thesis. This may not be obvious for a while after the election, but this election will be a good test case.

This brings up another theory, one that is quietly being discussed in Progressive circles. You can make an argument that someone lacking Clinton’s ugly corruption and even uglier personality would be headed for a landslide right now. After all, the least appealing candidate in human history is one state from winning the election. Imagine if she did not have the sex appeal of a pit viper. The point being, even a narrow loss will seem to prove that post-Americanism is a winner or at least a potential winner, with the right candidate.

Time will tell.

You’re Not Welcome

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One of the bedrock principles of Anglo-Saxon conservatism was the belief that all people have a right to associate with whoever they wish, as long as it is not for criminal purposes. All rights have limitations so forbidding convicted criminals from associating with other criminals is a reasonable exception. In the modern age, people can get a restraining order to have the state prevent someone from associating with them. These are reasonable exceptions that have no impact on the lives of the law abiding citizen.

This presents a problem for fanatics as people have the ability to ignore them by refusing to be around them. The gays that go around harassing Christian bakers, for example, are simply using the power of the state to force themselves into the lives of those who would otherwise ignore them. The goal being to drive these people out of the public space, assuming they take their beliefs with them. This is not possible when people have freedom of association and it is respected by the state.

The trouble with public accommodation laws is they turn Jim Crow on its head. Instead of forcing people to discriminate, the law now forces you to associate with people you don’t like. This is just another way of violating people’s right of free association. The result is a metastasizing list of laws telling business with whom they can and cannot conduct business. One groups morals imposed on everyone.

The trouble is people naturally self-segregate. Blacks like to be around blacks. Rich people prefer to be around rich people. Women at a party will congregate in one room while the men are in another. It is human nature. There’s also the fact that people notice things. If you are hiring people to work in your plant, you will notice that the Spanish guys tend to work harder than the black guys. These observations about the differences in groups reinforce our natural impulse to self-segregate.

This is problem for the New Religion as they insist that all people are the same and that the righteous never ever notice otherwise. A key part of the New Religion is the relentless hunting down of the heretics and non-believers so they are always on the lookout for people noticing. This is what has forced Airbnb to institute a  policy where all of their hosts swear loyalty to the one true faith.

What is the Airbnb Community Commitment?

Earlier this year, we launched a comprehensive effort to fight bias and discrimination in the Airbnb community. As a result of this effort, we’re asking everyone to agree to the following Community Commitment (beginning November 1, 2016) in order to continue using Airbnb:

I agree to treat everyone in the Airbnb community—regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias.

How do I accept the commitment?

On or after November 1, we’ll show you the commitment when you log in to or open the Airbnb website, mobile or tablet app and we’ll automatically ask you to accept.

What if I decline the commitment?

If you decline the commitment, you won’t be able to host or book using Airbnb, and you have the option to cancel your account. Once your account is canceled, future booked trips will be canceled. You will still be able to browse Airbnb but you won’t be able to book any reservations or host any guests.

Notice the language. It’s not a rule that you must obey. No, it is a commitment because you want to be saved, don’t you? Of course you do. Who wouldn’t? You’ll also notice the appeal to community. It’s hard to know if the fascist borrowed this from our Puritans or it was the other way around, but totalitarians love the insider/outsider image. The good people are inside. The bad people are outside. You don’t want to be outside so that means adhering to the rules of the community, or else.

This commitment to community means you renounce your rights as a human being, because you cease to be an individual in the community. Your identity is the community and that means you have to open your home to a group of star seeds or satanists and pretend to like it. Your property rights no longer exist. Your freedom of association no longer exists. If you wake up and your boarder is standing over you with a meat clever, so be it. The community will carry on.

Airbnb is doomed if they try to enforce this, of course. Instead, they will pretend to care and leave it alone. This is just so they don’t get sued. That does not mean hosts will not get sued. You can be sure that buggerers are scanning the site looking for Christians to harass and then sue. The result, like the Christian bakers, is the religious will retreat further from the public space. That’s the whole point of this.

Why They Hate Us

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The other day I turned on Fox News and was presented with Britt Hume opining on the state of conservatism and where it goes after the election. I’m going from memory, but he said something like, “The Conservative Movement was about low taxes, small government, muscular foreign policy and opposition to abortion, among other things.” He then went on to point out that Trump is none of those things and that those issues are not featured in his campaign.

What struck me about what he said is there was no trace of self-awareness. No mention of the fact that the Conservative Movement lost on all but the foreign policy stuff, and that has been a disaster. The tax bite has not changed very much since the 50’s, despite endless rounds of tax cuts and tax reform. Government has grown like a weed and social issues have all moved in one direction, with amazing speed at times.

A theme here over the years has been the fact that the Conservative Movement has managed to conserve nothing. The reason they are in a crisis is the same reason a losing ball coach finds himself in jeopardy. People will tolerate only so much losing. A salesman, who cannot close deals, gets fired, even if he is the nicest guy in the world. What’s happening today is Official Conservatism™ is being fired.

There’s something else, I think. A useful tool for understanding the world is this. You can learn a great deal about someone by looking at who he hates. The same is true of groups of people. Yankee fans, for example, are indifferent to Mets fans, but they detest Red Sox fans. The reason for that is the Mets are always terrible and pose no threat to the wellbeing of Yankee fans. The Red Sox, on the other hand, are almost always a problem.

Official Conservatism™ hates Donald Trump and they hate the people voting for him. That’s been a bit of an eye-opener for people. When Hume detailed Trump’s deviationism, he was dismissive and condescending. He then had that gold plated phony George Will come in and dismiss Trump and the people supporting him as knaves and fools. The segment was ostensibly about Official Conservatism™, but it was really just an excuse for the two of them to bash Trump.

Take a look at this column from Mona Charen the other day.

If she wins (a bigger “if” today than a week ago), it will be due only to the Republican Party’s suicidal decision to nominate and support a pathological narcissist/con man — a figure utterly outside the parameters of acceptability for public office. Any public office. So as culpable as Democrats are for nominating a person who ought to have been disqualified, Republicans are even more irresponsible for risking the terrible powers of commander in chief to someone most elementary school kids would regard as emotionally unstable.

Just look at the language used here. If she were describing Hitler, would she use a different tone? More important, is it anything like the tone and language used to describe Clinton? Clearly not and that’s the tell. These are people driven purely by hatred of Trump and by extension those who support him. Hillary Clinton could probably promise to revive the Holocaust and Charen would support her, simply because she hates Trump.

The question is why do they hate Trump and his voters so intensely?

I don’t think there is a single answer, but a big part of it is purely personal. No one likes to see their mistakes and failures made public. The people at the core of NeverTrump are the same people who sold us neo-conservatism in the Bush years. What is happening now is a delayed reaction to the massive failures under George W. Bush. Trump made his mark in the primary by humiliating Jeb Bush and that was not an accident. Trump is the repudiation of Bush and the neo-cons.

There’s another bit here too. The Official Right™ has defined itself to the Left by who it hates. Purging people from their ranks has been an integral part of how modern conservatives define their thing. Naturally, when challenged, they fall back on the old ways. The trouble is all their name calling and threats have been met with jeers and laughter. They lost all of their moral authority so they can no longer simply scold the dissenters into silence.

Finally, there’s the creeping realization that their brand of conservatism is all hat and no cattle. Their moral preening and appeals to as yet undefined principles are just postures. In the end, their thing was just a jobs program for people unable to do productive work. As one of the moonbats at the post points out, it is a movement with no base. No matter what happens Tuesday, the pro-Trump people will never forget these traitors or welcome them back.

After liberation, French women guilty of “collaboration horizontale” were dragged into the street to have their heads shaved. It was punishment for betrayal of their people. The Dutch did the same, but they also sent their collaborators to work camps in New Guinea. Many were simply shot, of course. Immediately after the liberation, almost 200.000 Dutch citizens were interned in camps and prisons and put on trial. Sadly, this is not what awaits the traitors of NeverTrump, but at some level they know they will never be “us” again.

 

Call Me Swamp Thing

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Way back in the Clinton Administration, I had the opportunity to socialize with Chris Mathews at a small dinner function. It was one of those charity deals where they have some important person give a little speech and chit-chat with the attendees. This was before Mathews had his mental breakdown so he was good fun, despite being a Lefty. People forget that he was not great fan of the Clintons, even though he was always a loyal party man.

This was the mid-90’s and the Drudge Report had just gone up as a website. Americans were flocking to computer stores to buy modems so they could use that AOL disk they got in the mail. I forget what we were discussing, but at some point I got the impression that Mathews simply had no idea the internet existed. I made mention of something about on-line news and Mathews had this puzzled look, then said, “Oh, you mean that internet thing.” He was unaware of the biggest technological event since the steam engine.

It is a story I like to tell as way to illustrate that people in the national media don’t live in America like the rest of us. The old joke in DC was that the big media outfits sent their foreign correspondents to cover stories in Ohio. That’s an exaggeration, but our national media does live in bubble. They can, when they feel like it, do a good job telling the rest of us about the doings in politics, but otherwise they are baffled about what happens out among the Dirt People. You see that in this Megan McArdle column.

How can the Republican Party keep another Trump candidacy from derailing its future electoral chances? Forget messing around with the primary system. If Republicans want a party that can win, says Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post, the first thing they need to do is to “drain the right-wing media swamp.”

“It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and Internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess,” she writes, “that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters. And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it.”

I could point out that Rampell is remarkably ungenerous in ignoring the many serious conservative journalists who spoke out early and often against Donald Trump, including an entire “Against Trump” issue of the National Review, the elder statesman of right-wing journalism. (The National Review also printed an editorial unequivocally stating that then-President-Elect Barack Obama was a natural-born U.S. citizen.) None of this had much effect on folks like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, nor does it seem to have appreciably damaged Trump. It’s unclear how the Republican establishment critiquing Fox News and talk radio would be any more effective.

Note the pleading in there about how “serious conservative journalists” are anti-Trump. McArdle plays a libertarian on approved media sites. Libertarian in this context is the house broken type that Progressives will tolerate. These are the low-tax liberals, who are the first to answer the call when it comes time to make war on the crime-thinkers. In the current crisis, this manifests as obsequious rumpswabbery where the “libertarian” comes close to begging the loopy liberal woman for mercy.

Let me suggest a better strategy. Liberal journalists who want to drain the “fever swamps” should not be pointing the finger at Republican politicians. If they want to get people out of the swamp, they’ll have to make room in the castle.

The media is overwhelmingly liberal. It tends to mirror the left-to-center-left spectrum of the social class from which most journalists are drawn. That affects coverage, which right-wing readers pick up on.

Yes, liberal journalists, I’m saying that the media is biased, and I know you don’t see any evidence of that, because that’s how bias works: You don’t notice it when you share the bias. No, my loonier Republican readers, I am not confirming your belief that journalists deliberately slant their coverage to achieve political ends or even just to provoke you.

The not-so-subtle condescension here is what always gets me about these people. Instead of “right-wing readers” I suspect she wanted to write “slack-jawed yokels.” In case that’s not clear, she makes sure her Progressive friends all know that she thinks people like you are loony. Most of what passes for conservative or libertarian opinion in the media is really just moral signalling. In this case, McArdle wants her Progressive friends to remember she is not one of those disgusting Trump people.

Conservative media, in other words, became an ideological ghetto. And ghettos often develop pathologies. What’s remarkable is not that so much of the right-wing media is so vitriolic and prone to conspiracy-mongering; what’s remarkable is that so many of those outlets remain committed to careful reporting and debunking things like the Obama birth certificate nonsense, rather than simply pandering to their readers.

The defining feature of Official Conservatism™ and its retarded little brother, Reason Libertarianism, is a fear of being “ghettoized” which is the scare word for being left out of the Progressive party circuit. They fear that more than death. If the price of admission means mocking and ridiculing the people whose interests they claim to champion, that’s a price they are more than happy to pay.

I’m not blaming liberals for the rise of the conservative-media ghetto. “Blame” implies that someone made a decision to make this happen. The thing is, no one made any such decision. There was no secret plan.

There was certainly no liberal media conspiracy, just an iterative process controlled by no one: Being human, liberals naturally prefer the work of folks who agree with them, so those are the folks they tend to hire and promote.  As they became increasingly dominant in the media, the trend became self-reinforcing. Fewer conservatives wanted to enter the castle in the first place, and few were allowed to. Now the castle residents are peering into the swamp and wondering what the heck is going on out there.

I suspect she had to fight back tears writing those two graphs.

But whoever is to blame for the problem, yelling at the residents of the swamp to behave themselves is probably not going to fix it. What would fix the problem is if the folks in the castle made a concerted effort to open the doors and persuade some of the swamp-dwellers to move inside. Not just to move inside, but to help run the place, pushing back on liberal pieties and dubious claims with the same fervor that liberals push back on conservative ones.

Call me Swamp Thing.

One of the amusing aspects of these columns is that people like McArdle are just as clueless about life outside the bubble as her moonbat friends. She positions herself as soul sister number one, down with those loony Dirty People in the swamp, but she would break out in hives reading the sorts of things that are coming from the Dissident Right. The fundamentals of what is driving the rebellion against the elites is well outside the field of vision for people like McArdle. She does not know what she does not know.

The Great Fear

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Imagine if tomorrow, a space ship descends to earth, hovering over some part of the United States. At some point, when the eyes of the world are fixed on the event, the ship lands and out pops a bunch of aliens. These aliens are able to speak to the people of earth in a way that everyone can understand them. They explain where they are from and that earth is just one of many planets with sentient life. Further, most of the people in charge of earth are aliens sent to run things while the talking monkeys get up to speed.

For a fuller presentation of this concept, you can watch the John Carpenter movie, They Live. One thing I liked about that movie, is that when people realized the truth, they were stunned and confused. Paranoia immediately set in as they tried to reorient themselves to the new reality. That’s what would happen in the above scenario. Suddenly confronted by the truth, everyone would know most of what they have been told was a lie. That would lead to questioning of everything else, then mass paranoia and fear.

Something like this happened in revolutionary France. Instead of space aliens, they got a collapse of the old order. Feudalism had been under great strain due to the new economics of the age. Trade and the beginning of the industrial age challenged the old economic system. There was also the rampant corruption in the French economic system that was slowing bankrupting the government. The King was not just broke. Massive borrowing to keep the system running had made the system insolvent.

The French Revolution was not just a money issue. Within one year, the King went from being god-like to merely a citizen. That was not a small thing. Symbolism is an important part of the normal rhythms of human society. The social order of France was built upon the King having a divine right to rule. Once the king became just another guy, the whole system stopped making sense. It was a short trip from there to conspiracies about the aristocrats plotting against the people. The result was the Great Fear.

That has been coming to mind often of late. My twitter feed is full of posts that can be charitably described as batshit crazy. Scan through the news and you see “reports” that range from the ridiculous to the deranged. I don’t have a Faceberg account, but I’m told that all sorts of crackpot stories are popping up there too. I’ve had to reconfigure my news reading in order to filter out the crazy rumors and made up nonsense. It feels like the wheels have come off the cart and we live in a world of nonsense.

The reason, I suspect, is the growing awareness that much of what we have taken for granted is, at the minimum, not what it appears to be. The open hostility of so-called conservatives toward the people they claim to represent, for example, has been quite an eye-opener for a lot of people. You don’t have to be a red-pilled conspiracy monger to think the whole conservative movement was just a money scam all along.

That also means the Republican Party was something other than a good faith attempt to counter the other party. When prominent leaders in the party appear to be backing the other party’s candidate, the system does look rigged. It’s not hard to imagine what these people are saying when the cameras and microphones are off. Throw in some leaked e-mails that seem to conform people’s worst fears and it is not surprising that the peasants are getting a bit paranoid about the ruling class.

The shenanigans in the news media has breached that wall in our minds that separates bias from conspiracy. When allegedly solid opinion polls swing by a dozen points in a few days, it is not unreasonable to wonder if they were fraudulent all along. The revelations in WikiLeaks has made clear that it is not just bias. It is an organized effort by our “news media” to fool people on behalf of the government party. Rigging the debates by feeding Clinton the questions is a pretty big deal.

Just this week we have learned that the FBI and the DOJ may very well be colluding in order to conceal very serious crimes by the Clinton Family from the public. Seeing that the current FBI director let the Clintons off the hook 15 years ago, when he was tasked with investigating them, naturally makes people think the whole system is rotten and corrupt. When people see e-mails from the Clinton campaign chair revealing that he is best buddies with the Feds, it tends to confirm and amplify their suspicions.

Probably the biggest blow to public trust has been the revelation regarding the Clinton Foundation and the shenanigans involved in covering up what looks like very serious crimes. Everyday we get new stories that make a Hollywood thriller sound pedestrian. All of a sudden, the conspiracy guys don’t sound so nutty as their theories are playing out in the news. If the Feds can accidentally find a laptop that brings down the Clinton Crime Family, name a cloak and dagger scenario that is still implausible?

We are in a period where no one takes anything in the news at face value, but lots of people are willing to accept all sorts of outlandish rumors. After all, the crackpots and conspiracy nuts have been right a lot lately. When every scandal starts with WikiLeaks or some anonymous tweet, it is not unreasonable to pay more attention to that stuff than the main stream media, which is often working to conceal these stories. You cannot blame people for being a bit paranoid, given what we see happening.

Turning Virtues Into Vices

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The other day I had the misfortune of driving into one of the Pink Ribbon events that seem to be everywhere these days. Every month is breast cancer month and every weekend there is a “waddle for the cure” event somewhere. You can’t watch a sportsball game without seeing some bright pink mixed into the uniforms. The one I ran into was a 5K where middle-aged women “unite” to display their “passion” for “fighting” cancer. Like Hitler, women are passionate and enjoy fighting.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation is a racket, just like any large charity. The bulk of the money they raise is spent on raising money, which requires hiring scads of people, who need supervision by well-paid administrators. Some money goes to charity, but how much ever ends up doing any good is debatable. People more cynical than me suggest the whole point of the Komen operation is to facilitate “pink washing” by corporations looking to keeps the gals off their back.

I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that heart disease is the number one killer of women and it is not even a close. The next seven killers on the list account for fewer deaths than heart disease. Breast cancer is very treatable and the treatments are fairly mild compared to most other cancers. There are exceptions, but you would much prefer to have breast cancer than colon cancer or congestive heart failure. You won’t see women sporting brown or red ribbons for those diseases.

Komen and the pink washing rackets are not unique. All of the big charities are rackets run mostly to employ managerial types and keep them in a lifestyle they believe they deserve. I recall once going to the campus of the Red Cross, outside DC, and seeing what looked like a luxury car dealership. It was the executive parking lot. At the time, Bob Dole’s old lady was President of the “charity” and she was pulling down a million per year. It’s called “doing well by doing good.”

This is a feature of the managerial state. The people running big charities, not-for-profits, think tanks, NGO’s and so on, have no real way to make money outside of stealing via taxes. They make nothing anyone wants to buy. They create nothing anyone needs. They have no salable talents that the private sector demands. Instead, they create demand for their labors by turning society’s virtues into vices. In the case of charities, that means exploiting American generosity and civic mindedness.

This is most evident in our elections. We now have armies of people who make their living entirely from elections. Many of them work for both parties. Not so long ago, these were jobs handled by low paid staffers and volunteers. I’m old enough to remember when my Congressman had three staffers and relied entirely on volunteers for his election staff. Today, your local congressman has at least a dozen staffers, many making six figure salaries. Most have law degrees from prestigious universities.

When people in the political class get bored, they hop over into the media for a while. The cable channels are littered with “veteran campaign consultants” and former elected officials. We live in an age where it is no longer possible to draw a line between the rulers, the people working for the rulers and the people reporting on them. American public life is an amorphous noisy blob that serves no obvious purpose other than to exploit people’s desire to be well informed citizens.

The ugly part of this is that the politics industry, in the process of exploiting the citizen’s desire to be informed, generates massive amounts of false information to fill in the gaps in the narrative, in order to promote the interests of the managerial class. As a result, public trust declines, not just in the media, but in the institutions of society as well. We live in a age of seemingly unlimited media, yet people are not only less informed, they don’t believe anything they see in the media.

The counter to these observations is that people have been finding ways to profit from the good intentions of others long before the concept of the managerial state. This is true, but it was always small scale and ad hoc. What we are living in today is large scale and systematic. The tax code, for example, has been warped to provide for the existence of not-for-profit organizations that do nothing but politics. All of the big foot opinion sites are now non-profits. Many of the campaign organizations are now non-profits, calling themselves educational organizations.

The rapaciousness of the managerial state is a feature. It must bend all of a society’s institutions to the perpetuation of the managerial class, because it has no other way to generate income. If the boys and girls of National Review, for example, had to rely on paying customers, they would starve to death. If candidates could go directly to rich people for funding their campaigns, there would be no need for the campaign industrial complex and its money laundering services.

Human societies go through periods where they create and accumulate surpluses of wealth. Similarly, they go through periods where they consume their surpluses until they reach a crisis. This is when there is no more surplus to consume. It very well may be that the emergence of a managerial class is the signal that a modern society is heading into the consumption phase. Given the fiscal health of the West, it is not unreasonable to think that we have consumed the benefits of the technological revolution and we are now hurtling toward crisis.