Monthly Archives: January 2017

The Cloud Party Declares War

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When the Muslim Brotherhood “won” the 2012 election in Egypt, most of the world just assumed Egypt was going to go down the road to Islamism. Either a slow trot like we have seen with Turkey or perhaps a faster pace into something closer to Iran. That did not happen. Instead, Egypt ground to a halt as the civil service and military, which are intertwined, refused to cooperate with the new government. The result was a sort of coordinated work slowdown and the Brotherhood got the blame for it.

That was not the only reason the Brotherhood failed. They had no idea how to run a country and they never had the depth of support they assumed. Still, the bureaucracy set itself to stymieing Morsi, so they simply stop functioning. People still showed up for work and manned their posts, but they got nothing done. It was a good lesson in how a modern country works, even one on the fringe of modernity. Real power is not in the office, but in control of the system. He who controls the bureaucracy controls the nation.

That comes to mind after Trump has been in office for little more than a week. His initial flurry of executive orders has dominated the news cycles, simply because of the infantile theatrics of the Left. Adult toddlers throwing tantrums at the local airport makes for good TV, especially when the people covering it are toddlers themselves. What has gone unnoticed is the fact that the Republicans appear to have settled on a  strategy similar to the Egyptian bureaucracy. They will slow walk everything Trump wants out of Congress.

So far, the Senate has approved the national security appointments because to do otherwise would make them look bad. The education secretary is still bottled up for some reason. Allegedly, everyone in the GOP would just as soon scrap DoE, but they are making a big issue of this nominee. The AG nomination has similarly been slow walked by the Senate. Of course, the traitor John McCain is stirring up trouble over the DHS appointments. The result is there will not be a full cabinet for months.

The bigger issue is the fact that the GOP Congress has no plan to repeal ObamaCare or pass tax reform. It’s pretty clear that the people we thought were secretly supporting Clinton, people like Paul Ryan, really thought she was going to win, so they never bothered to prepare for this. The result is all their big talk after he election about major reforms and repealing ObamaCare was just talk. They were planning for surrender and suddenly found themselves with a President ready to sign off on major reform.

That’s probably only part of it. The fact is, the leadership of the GOP has more in common with the Democrat Party than the emerging Trump Party. Despite the election results, they cannot let go of their belief that the winning hand is to turn the country into a flop house for the refuse of the rest of the world. Globalism is their creed and they will not let go of it just because the people hate it. They are sure Trump will fail so they are going to work hard to make it happen, After all, a prophesy that does not come true is not much use.

Then there is the bureaucracy, which appears to be organizing itself in opposition to Trump in the early going. Senior people in the State Department made a big show of quitting the other day. The acting Attorney General is instructing her department to sit on their hands over challenges to Trump’s immigration orders. It’s all small time and petty, but with the aid of the media it’s becoming cool for the governing class to throw sand in the gears of the Trump administration. At least that’s the hope in DC.

All of this points out the underlying reality in Washington. There is the Cloud People Party and an insurgent Dirt People Party. The Cloud Party and its donor class hate Trump and the people he represents. If you look at the funding sources from both parties, it comes from areas Hillary Clinton carried 2-to-1. According to this Brookings study, the 472 counties that Clinton won last year accounted for 64 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the 2584 counties that Trump won accounted for the remaining 36 percent.

There are plenty of Republicans who support Trump and a surprising number of people in the bureaucracy who know reform is long overdue. Some of the harshest critiques of the state you will hear come from people in the system. There’s also the fact that Trump is proving to be an exceptional political athlete. He has a knack for baiting the media in order to gain public support for his positions. No person has moved the Overton Window further to the right than Trump has done in my lifetime. It truly is amazing.

Even so, the next year will be about the Cloud Party conspiring to undermine the Trump administration, while Trump figures out how to work around the system to undermine the system. His immigration order is a foreshadow of what is to come. Instead of looking for compromise, Team Trump will go big in order to trigger the political class and their media to overreact. This tends to turn off the public and thus turn the Cloud Party assets into liabilities, as we are seeing with these ridiculous protests.

At some point, the Cloud People will shift gears, but for now, the game will be Trump picking fights and the establishment going bonkers.This gives Trump cover to do some important stuff, like we see with the H1B executive order. While the Cloud People are wailing about the so-called Muslim ban, they did not have time to notice the order to shake up the visa program Silicon Valley uses to screw its employees. This sort of cat and mouse game is how an insurgent party must use its speed and agility to overcome the establishment’s size.

The Great Disconfirmation

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In one of his recent communications with the resistance, John Derbyshire mentioned this Joel Pollak column about the demise of the Obama cult. Pollak does not come right out and say it, but Obama was essentially a totem for the Left. His election was not about him or his polices, but instead it was about returning the Ark to the Temple, so to speak. The long war with the bad whites over racial justice was finally won and the blessings of the void where God used to exist would now descend upon the righteous.

As Derbyshire points out, Pollak is not the first guy to notice this as readers of this site certainly know. The only way to properly understand the American Left is to look at it as a civic religion. Because the American Left adopted European anti-Christianity in the 20th century, it is easy to think they are anti-religious. That’s a mistake the Right has made for half a century. The New Religion, what Progressivism is today, evolved out of the Social Gospel Movement, so it carries with it many of the same habits.

The most obvious of those habits is the obsession with public morality. Public Protestantism starts from the assumption that society is judged as a whole. The righteous, like the virtuous in revolutionary France, have a moral duty to raise up the fallen into the righteous life. This is what gives them license to nose around in your business and order you around.  It’s not about fitting the economic pieces together as with European socialists. The American Left is consumed with building the City upon a hill.

Derbyshire makes the point that when a prophecy fails, it is does not mean the end of the religion.

In fact all the hysteria on the left this past few weeks yields to a religious, or pseudo-religious explanation. Clearly some of the same kinds of passions are involved that you find in committed religious believers.

Consider, however, the fact that religions very rarely fail. They just adapt.

Recall the Millerite sect that flourished in the 1840s. William Miller, who founded the sect, predicted the Second Coming of Christ at a certain date. Thousands of followers sold all their belongings and waited joyfully for the day. When nothing happened, Miller just reworked his calculations and set another day … then another.

You’d think a disappointment like that — it was actually called the Great Disappointment — you’d think it would kill a religion stone dead. Not at all. Here’s a historian writing about the Millerites, quote:

Following such a catastrophic failure, one might expect that the Millerite movement would fade away entirely. But that is not what happened. Although the fragmented Millerites languished for some time, and though many did abandon the movement, several of the competing splinter groups would ultimately gain new life. Hiram Edson’s [Millerite] sect … developed into a denomination that still exists — the Seventh-Day Adventists, who today number as many as 15 million members worldwide.

End quote. For truly committed believers, a religious or pseudo-religious passion like that can’t be put aside. It doesn’t fail, it only needs adjusting.

Again, readers of this site know where this is going. The thing that holds together these sorts of movements is an internal psychology that allows them to internalize disconfirmation. There is a famous study in psychology by three guys named Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter. They studied a UFO cult based in Chicago that claimed space aliens were due to arrive on a certain date. When that failed to happen, the cult did not dissolve. It transformed into something else.

That’s an important lesson to keep in mind when watching the antics of the Left of late. Their lunacy is not directed at the rest of us. They don’t care what you or anyone else thinks about what’s happening. Their public acts are about signalling to the rest of the believers. By holding protests and making fools of themselves in a public way, they are providing support for one another as they work through the disconfirmation. Like herd animals, they are huddling together in the face if danger. It is pure instinct.

If they were left to sit alone at home, they would have no one around to help them through their doubts. These are people whose entire sense of self is dependent on the identity of the group, so getting out and “making their voices heard” lets them focus on something other than the disconfirmation. Trump as Hitler provides a short term bridge between the failed prophesy and whatever comes next for the New Religion. They can tell themselves that their faith was not wrong, it was just subverted by mysterious forces, or Hitler.

In the past, Progressive Awakenings were followed by period of hibernation as new missions and causes were conjured by the next generation of believers. The trouble for them this time is there is no obvious replacement for identity politics and social justice. When you’re reduced to championing the rights of mentally ill men in sundresses, you have run out of victims. The nation’s changing demographics also means that identity politics will play against this sort of utopianism.

In the mean time, the rage of the true believers will result in more public displays of incoherent misery. The reason they have no point is they cannot face the cause of their pain. It has nothing to with Trump or his policies. It is an unspeakable rage at having failed to reach the promised land. The rage is a distraction and a source of comfort to the believers as the Cult of Modern Liberalism comes to terms with the great disconfirmation of the last decade. Let’s hope they to make their way through it.

The Unanswered Question

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Milo Yiannopoulos is out on the speaking tour, drawing as much attention to himself as possible, but also trying hard to differentiate himself from the people the Left currently hate almost as much as they hate white men. The new Goldstein of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is Richard Spencer and anyone they can associate with him. Spencer is variously described as a “white nationalist”, a “white supremacist” and, of course, a “Nazi.” As a result, Milo is trying very hard to prove he has nothing to do with any of it.

From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. The people running the media in America are as committed to the New Religion as anyone so they will never allow a bad thinker into their thing. Milo dreams of being the gay Bill Buckley or the thinking man’s Rip Taylor. It’s hard to know what he is doing as he does seem to flit from one thing to the next, always in the pursuit of attention. Someone pointed me to this podcast by Sam Harris on Milo.

I don’t count myself a fan of Harris or Yiannopoulos so whatever issues they have are unknown to me. I don’t have anything against them either. I just don’t pay much attention to them. Just taking it on face value then, I’d say Harris is mostly correct. Milo is just an attention whore and he has found a way to be good at it in a way that causes people to give him money. It is social commentary as performance art, something comics have been doing since the Greeks.

Milo is a flamboyantly ridiculous person saying taboo things that are obviously true and everyone knows they are true. There is a long tradition in the West of lampooning the people in charge, especially the people in charge of public morality, which in the West, are often in charge of politics. Further, using a “fool” to ridicule the rulers is common. When Milo goes on campus and mocks feminists, as a ludicrously gay man, it insulates him, so he can say things about the womyn that are both true and forbidden.

That’s all good stuff and well within the Western tradition. In Germany, Till Eulenspiegel is a folkloric hero, who mocks politicians and public figures with political satire. He holds a mirror to make us aware of our times. The English had their court jesters, with some becoming quite wealthy. A fellow known only as a Stańczyk was a famous Polish jester and is a national hero to the Polish people. The point being is that fools like Milo are both useful and necessary, because they tell us something about our age.

That’s where guys like Sam Harris miss the point and get it wildly wrong. There’s a good case to be made that even Milo is not grasping the implications of his shtick.

“The reality is, if you force everyone to play identity politics, if you insist in pitting whites against blacks, women against men, straights against gays, the reality is you guys are gonna win and the left isn’t going to like it very much,” declared MILO. “But there’s a better way. Don’t fight identity politics with identity politics.”

That sounds great. What is it?

“White pride, white nationalism, white supremacy isn’t the way to go,” he continued. “The way to go is reminding them and yourselves that you should be aspiring to values and to ideas.”

Wonderful. And what are those values and ideals?

“You should be focusing on what unites people and not what drives them apart,” MILO concluded. “You shouldn’t give a shit about skin color, a shit about sexuality… You shouldn’t give a shit about gender, and you should be deeply suspicious of the people who do.”

So, nothing.

This is reminiscent of recent forays into doubt by big shot intellectuals like Charles Murray, Steven Pinker and Robert Putnam. In all three cases, they work through the case against the prevailing orthodoxy of the blank slate, egalitarianism and multiculturalism, only to be horrified by where it leads. In the case of Murray, he has been trying to atone for the Bell Curve ever since. Pinker now sounds like a raving loon and Putnam chants Progressive pieties to avoid finishing his thought.

In the case of Sam Harris, he is smart enough to know that the foundations of the Progressive orthodoxy are oogily-boogily of the first order, far more detached from reality than conventional religion. He’s either afraid to take his critique through to its logical conclusion or he lacks the imagination to see what comes next, so he rolls into a ball and starts gassing on about “unifying people with values and ideas.” Any variation of the word “unify” is a signal that what comes next is gibberish.

This is, in the realm of practical politics, why the Buckley crowd is circling the drain as a political force. Way back in the 60’s, they could not bring themselves to challenge the implausible claims by the Left with regards to civil rights. Instead, they picked the losing hand of state’s rights, hoping to avoid facing the Left over the “negro question.” As a result, they ceded the moral high ground to the Left with regards to race and identity. No amount of legal precedent could stand in the way of social justice!

Ever since, the Buckley-ites have had to fight the Left while acknowledging that the Left is their moral superior and the arbiter of civil morality. That’s a battle that can never be won as the other side will simply declare your latest position to be heresy and out of bounds. No matter how logical and right your position, it can never withstand the moral authorities saying it is wrong. That’s why the Left has won every battle in the culture war. They can thunder, “you may have facts, but we have righteousness!”

There’s another problem with what Milo and Sam Harris are saying. Let’s stipulate that identity politics are a bad thing. Is playing that card better or worse than losing to the Left as they relentlessly play the identity politics game? Unless you have a serious mental illness, you have to see that the Left is nothing but identity politics now and they are winning. Just turn on the TV. Just look at the best seller list. The people of the New Religion hate white people, particularly white men and they will not be talked out of it.

The question that faces every man is not “what sort of society do I want for myself and my children?” That’s a lie and it has always been a lie. The question is “What are my choices and how do I achieve my preferred option?” The choice pushed by our betters is a world run by Black Lives Matters and women dressed as vaginas. If the other option is white pride, white nationalism and white supremacy, it is not hard to see how this is going to go.

All of the howling and complaining from the Official Right about the rise of the so-called alt-right is due to the unanswered question from the Milo piece. If the identity politics of the alt-right are bad, what’s the other option? If the answer is submission, which has been the case for the last three decades, at least, then the response is not just going to be “no” it is going to be “hell no!” No amount of moral preening is going to work because that is the thing people are rebelling against. What’s left is what is always what’s left and that’s force.

Essential Knowledge: Part III

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Probably the first paradox presented to a young person is the age old question. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? For most people, this is a fun puzzle, which is why it has remained a popular gag for so long. Aristotle concluded that both must have come into being at the same time, as to have either come first violated the logic of causality. Marxists used this example to “prove” that linear thinking was false. Instead, we have to admit that the egg creates the chicken just as much as the chicken creates the egg.

Evolution answers this by pointing out that eggs existed before birds existed in the fossil record, so the egg preceded the chicken. If you reject evolution, this apparent conflict can only be solved one other way. Some agent, outside of observable nature, was the first cause. It created either the chicken or the egg first. It created all of life, setting off the great chain of causality that controls the natural world. Plato believed that all things in the natural world existed in spirit, as an idea, before coming into being. Jews and Christians believe that God created the natural world just like a clock maker builds a watch.

This is not a post about abiogenesis, but rather a starting point for understanding the great debate of the modern age. What is the nature of man? What is his true and natural state, outside the artificial constraints of society? Did society naturally arise, or was it imposed? This is the question that haunted the minds of the Enlightenment thinkers and it is the question that has animated the great political movements since the French Revolution. If we can know the nature of man, then we can built a just society where virtuous men can be free.

One solution to this question, one that is at the core of every Leftist movement in history, is that man is born as a blank slate. Humans come into the world as a formless blob that is shaped into a person by their parents and community. Eventually they are shaped into a citizen by their society. The reason a person born in France becomes a Frenchman is he was shaped and formed by French society to become a Frenchman. A person born in Niger is what he is because he was raised by Hausa. It takes a village to make a man.

There are a number of implications to this that are critical to understanding the last three hundred years of Western history. The first is that all people are the product of their environment. Therefore, if a person turns out to be a criminal or a bad thinker, it is the fault of society. The good citizen was raised correctly and given the proper education, while the criminal was failed by his parents and society. Of course, it is never too late. The criminal can be rehabilitated and people can change. Our nature is infinity malleable.

That leads to the second implication of the blank slate ideology. The virtuous have a moral duty to remake society so that it creates virtuous citizens. Collective guilt is an inevitable byproduct of the blank slate ideology, because all of us are, by definition, our brother’s keeper. That also means we are collectively responsible for “fixing” the defects that arise from our social institutions. This is why Mussolini said “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Society is a unified living organism. When one bit fails, it all fails.

The alternative to this line of thinking is that people are born with qualities they inherit from their parents. Long before anyone knew about genetics, people could see that the son resembled his father or mother, sometimes both in various ways. People saw that the daughter would usually marry a man like her father and a son would marry a girl like his mother. It was assumed that each person was the result of their line of ancestors, which is why the children of great families took up places in the elite, when they reached adulthood.

This was the standard view of humanity up until the Enlightenment. People all over the world just assumed that the people in various lands were the product of their lands. They did not understand biology, but they knew that Africans were different from Persians and not just in appearance. They knew that the Welsh were different from the Angels and the North-men who showed up on long ships. It was always assumed that nature did not distribute her gifts equally among people or between peoples.

The result of this is that the customs and methods of rule are a reflection of the people who compose the society. Arabs have their ways, because they have their own unique history that has shaped their culture and people. China is the way it is because it is full of Chinese who have lived the way they have lived for thousands of years. In other words, there is no transcendent order that applies universally. There is only a natural order that is rooted in the local population. What works in China, will not work in Arabia.

Since the French Revolution, the great conflicts in the West have been over these two conflicting views of man’s nature and the nature of his society. The Left has always assumed that man is infinitely malleable and that virtuous societies make virtuous men. The Right has taken the other side, defending the natural order of man, which is hierarchical and diverse. Since the Enlightenment, the men of the blank slate have held the dominant position, winning the political fights and imposing their views on the West.

It is largely impossible to grasp the last 300 years of Western history without understanding this intellectual conflict. More important, it will be impossible to navigate the coming battles without grasping this. The new science of genetics is largely confirming what people used to know through observation. Not only are people not blank slates, their cultures are rooted in the shared biology of the people. The next era in the West is about the fight between Liberalism and science, the blank slate and the double helix.

The Title IX Terror

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Very early in the French Revolution, France found herself at war with the rest of Europe. For reasons we will not go into here, the French declared war on Austria in the spring of 1792 and soon Prussia joined in on the Austrian side. Eventually England was fielding an army on the continent as well. One of the many interesting things about the French Revolution is that the country was radically rearranging itself at the same time it was defending itself on all sides. The war and the revolution soon became intertwined.

By the time the Jacobins and the Committee for Public Safety had taken control of France and the revolution, things looked dire for the French army. Many of their officers had fled the country as they were of noble blood. Others fled for lack of pay and support. Those who rose up to replace them were often incompetent boobs, but loyal to the revolution. The solution the revolutionaries in Paris found to this problem was to begin executing their generals for treason. That’s right. The solution was to murder the generals.

The logic behind this was quite simple. Since the new men of the Republic were now in charge of the army, the army was a republican army stocked with virtuous men of the Republic. France was now the first nation in history mobilized for total war. If the army was now composed of virtuous men of the Republic, with the full support of the Republic, the only thing that could stop them was failure at the top and that failure could only be due to treason. The generals failed because they wanted to fail or planned to fail.

There is an important lesson here that has been with us ever since the French Revolution. The Utopian dreamers of the Left always lock in on two unassailable beliefs. One is their vision of the perfect society and the other is their ideal citizens for that society. Those two things become axiomatic, so when things fail to materialize, those two items are off the table. They can never be questioned. Instead, the hunt is on for enemies, heretics and schemers, who are actively trying to undermine the cause.

That’s what has happened on the college campus with regards to the Title IX jihad against men, particularly white men.The original purpose of Title IX was to get more women into graduate schools. In the 70’s, when this odious law was dreamed up, graduate schools, particularly law schools, were still dominated by men. By the time the law was actually passed and implemented in the Clinton administration, women dominated the college campus. They held most of the majority of staff positions, were the majority of undergrads and dominated most of the post-graduate schools.

The feminist pushing this law, however, always had other ideas. They had the radical dream of the female utopia on the college campus and, of course, the ideal revolutionary co-ed. When reality would not yield to their particular brand of lunacy, they went looking for enemies. After all, the dream is perfect and women of virtue were now in charge. The only reason utopia has not bloomed on campus is there must be enemies in their midst and those enemies have a penis! As a result, the campus has become a feminist toxic waste dump.

This story is emblematic of the insanity. You’ll note that tucked away in the story is the reference to a “Dear Colleague” letter – which urged schools to lower the standard of proof for sexual assault and misconduct. The reason for this is that when the feminist nutters found a witch to burn, they were confronted with the silly problem of actually having to prove their case. Since almost all of these cases involve either drunk people or crazy people, there was rarely a way to actually prove anything.

Instead, the enemies of the people were allowed to hide behind those antiquated rules of justice, which were all written by dick wielding enemies of the feminist revolution! In other words, the innocence of the accused is more proof that they are clever and crafty traitors working to undermine the revolution. It’s why every college campus has a Title IX officer now. These tinpot Torquemadas exist to circumvent justice in order to champion the cause of the just.

This too has echos of the French Revolution. The Jacobins sent what were essentially ideological enforcers out into the provinces. They sent Representatives on Mission to watch the generals in the field. During the Terror, Robespierre turned on his former friends, the Girondins, but making his case against them in open court became difficult. The solution was to find them guilty first and then worry about other stuff later. Nothing could stand in the way of the virtuous, as they furthered the cause of the revolution.

It is this toxic atmosphere that encourages the rape hoaxes that have become a feature of campus life. The gyno-revolution is not only short of enemies to persecute, it is short of victims too. That’s why a patently ridiculous story like the Rolling Stone hoax goes unchallenged for so long. It’s not just that these fanatics want to believe it. They have to believe it as to do otherwise means questioning the premise of the revolution and that is a good way to have your life ruined.

It is foolish to think that the Feds will ever find the balls to repeal Title IX or even scale back its scope. One reason feminist nutters are going berserk in the streets is in order to inoculate themselves to the Trumpian reform efforts. The answer will come in the Federal courts as more victims of the Title IX Terror press their case and win judgments. A few fines and the revolution is over. It’s a terrible way to solve the problem, but it is what happens when you put women in charge of anything.

Pink State

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O’Sullivan’s First Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. The law is named after British journalist and former National Review editor John O’Sullivan. This is especially ironic as O’Sullivan was forced to abandon most of his right wing positions in order to avoid being purged from National Review. Diseases are often named after a famous victim, but this is the first time the victim named his disease before he contracted it.

Red State is a website that was originally started as sort of a “conservative” alternative to the left-wing blogosphere. I put quotes there because Red State’s brand of conservatism has always been the housebroken type of stuff popular on the Bush wing of the GOP. Like a lot of so-called conservatives in the Bush years, Red State was basically just a cheering section for the Republicans. Whatever Team Bush proposed, Red State branded as “Reaganesque” and “principled conservatism”, especially if it meant killing Muslims.

That probably sounds harsh, but I’m just getting started. Serial plagiarist Ben Domenech, pen for hire Joshua Trevino and the portly proselytizer Erick Erickson saw an opportunity to promote themselves, and maybe lever their popularity with conservative voters, into the careers they thought they deserved. The whole point of Red State was to ball-gargle the establishment, hoping to turn their obsequious rumpswabbery into a Jonah Goldberg lifestyle. The three of them are emblematic of what went wrong with conservatism.

Anyway, this all came to mind because of this post on Red State that looks like it should be on the Daily Lunatic.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is supposed to be the sane, responsible anti-immigration group of the John Tanton-sphere. Tanton is a former Zero Population Growth activist who bankrolled anti-immigration groups like CIS and FAIR after native American birthrates dropped below replacement.

But now CIS is falling down the same Alt Right pit that Tanton for years has denied courting!

One of the leaders of the “Alt Right,” which is the successor to the White Nationalist movement, which was the successor to the American Nazi movement, is National Policy Institute chairman Richard Spencer, based in Arlington, just like American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

Spencer (who totally isn’t a skinhead, as he only shaves the sidesof his head), is hosting some speakers to promote his ideology, including VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, and VDARE contributor Kevin MacDonald. This is the pseudo-intellectual forefront of the alt-right, white-nationalist movement in America.

CIS being reasonable and mainstream has every reason to distance itself from the likes of these. But no: they’re promoting the works of Brimelow and MacDonald, promoting VDARE links and MacDonald’s own writing. CIS wants you to read more of the alt right. CIS is allying with the alt right as part of its extremist anti-immigration ideology.

I’ve gotten criticism in the past for calling out groups like CIS and FAIR. Defenders have held onto CIS though, hoping that Mark Krikorian would keep the group from falling into crazytown. But he has failed. CIS would rather work with the alt right, than bend on their extremist policy of banning all immigration.

And therefore conservatives must stop pretending CIS and FAIR are groups we can work with, since the last thing we need is to poison our movement with the alt right.

The fat dope who posted that nonsense is a good example of the sort of people who infiltrate the organizations that are not “expressly right wing” and turn them into left wing organizations. His primary motivation is signalling his fidelity to the One True Faith by pointing at the nearest heretic and yelling “witch.”  Fatty was probably dressed as a vagina down at the Women’s Waddle in Washington. That’s because “principled conservatism” means locking arms with liberals to oppose Trump.

Anyway, you see all the cons used by social justice warriors in that post. There’s guilt by association, the use of the transitive property to link the targeted enemy to some imagined evil and, of course, the demand that the target abandon their position or face being branded a heretic. In this case, it means the very sensible and respectable Mark Krikorian must denounce people he does not know or he and his issues are ruled out of bounds for decent people. Fatty does not have an argument to make. He just wants to curry favor with his fellow lunatics by accusing someone of heresy.

Like all of the sites in the cuck-o-sphere, Red State has seen its traffic collapse over the last year. That’s because they were never expressly conservative. They were always just to the right of the Official Left. As progressives rocketed off into identity politics, all of these guys tagged along behind them, convinced that being a little less enthusiastic for the latest liberal fads was enough to make them “conservative” and keep the good times rolling. As a result, they claim anyone not falling for their act is a Nazi.

Red State becoming Pink State is no surprise as it was never expressly right wing, rather it was just a marketing vehicle for the people who started it. All of them have moved on as the enterprise served its purpose. Now it is being overrun by rotund rodents like Neil Stevens, launching purity campaigns against everyone to their right. It’s a good lesson for those inclined to support the emerging voices out of the Dissident Right. Not all of them are in it for the right reasons so taking any of them at face value is not a good idea.

Are Performers Stupid?

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Are actors and actresses stupid?

Are performers dumber than normal people?

Like most people, I just assume this is so, because actors tend to say stupid things when not following a script. The actress Meryl Streep took to the stage at some awards show to say Donald Trump gave her the sads. I’ve watched it a few times trying to figure out what it is she was trying to communicate. Streep is a great actress so it was well choreographed, but it contained nothing more than some hyperventilating about imagined bogeymen. My take away from watching it is that Mx. Streep is not spending her free time working math puzzles.

Even more obvious examples were on display at the Waddle in Washington this past weekend. Ashley Judd went on a deranged rant that suggested she needs to be in a nervous hospital again. Madonna of all people was carrying on about respecting women and committing acts of treason. Madonna, like all other performers, degrades herself for a living. Other than being a cautionary tale, she should stay out of any discussion about respecting women. Yet, this was lost on her and her fellow performers.

That brings us back to the original question. Is Madonna stupid? Judd apparently has had a lot of mental problems, but Madonna and Streep have no history of mental illness. Short of handing out IQ tests, there’s no way to know if performers are unusually stupid, but perhaps there are other cognitive traits that performers have in abundance that present as a low IQ when displayed outside the narrow realm of the stage. Quants are super smart, but lack social skills, so they are often assumed to be retarded.

The first thing that springs to mind is that you need a near total absence of self-respect to be a performer. It is, at best, a degrading way to make a living. Anyone who has stood in front of a crowd to give a speech knows it is not as easy as it looks. Imagine standing in front of cameras, pretending to be someone else, while a crowd of people watch you play make believe. Often times, the job requires the performer to make a fool of themselves or do degrading things for the amusement of the crowd. Most people will not do it.

Even if you put limits on how much you will degrade yourself in public in order to be a performer, it is a humiliating road to success. Even the greatest thespians started out as complete hacks, often being laughed at and yelled at for being dreadful on stage. Movie and TV people get their start in terrible shows or making commercials for things like hemorrhoid cream. Then there is the casting couch, which is a feature of the business for both sexes. Male actors spend their youth biting a pillow or something else.

There’s something else that is universal to being a performer and that is a near total inability to judge risk. About one tenth of one percent of people who go into show business end up with a productive career as a performer. Most struggle for years and drop out or go into some other part of the business. New York and Los Angeles restaurants are famously staffed with the next big stars of stage and screen. Going into show business is about as logical as spending your life savings on lottery tickets.

This is probably why performers have money woes and tax problems. Just google actors and tax problems and you get half a million hits. People who are terrible with risk assessment are probably never going to be very good with their money, no matter how much they make. Nicholas Cage has probably earned half a billion dollars in his career and he is broke. People with any sense of risk assessment will not waste their life chasing a dream that is unlikely to materialize, but that’s what it takes to be a star.

Of course, the big key for any performer is their ability to draw attention to themselves over the others, who are also good at getting attention. The world is full of pretty blondes, who know their way around a penis. In order to gain the attention the star makers, you better be really good at standing out in a crowd of beautiful people with the same dream as you. This is why famous performers often have some weird tick or skill. Samuel L. Jackson got famous because he is a living satire of the militant black man.

There’s something else. Performers are much more likely to make it when young than old and young is defined as teens and 20’s. It’s why so many of the top starts are people who literally grew up in the business. Their parents were in the business in some capacity. This means that the typical star is someone who has had little exposure to the world outside acting. Even those who left home and went to Hollywood to become stars as young adults have had little experience with the normal world.

Most Americans have never been to Africa so they only know about the place from books and television. As a result, Americans talking about Africa sound like morons to people who have lived in Africa. This is the problem for performers. They talk about America as if it is a foreign country to them. That’s because it often is a foreign country. How much does Meryl Streep know about America at this stage of her life? She has been cooped up in a museum for decades. Death row inmates have a better feel for America than actors.

That brings us back to where we started. Are performers stupid? The safest answer is yes, they are very stupid. Being stupid makes it easy to not notice the long odds of being a performer. Being stupid lets these people avoid thinking about the moral dilemmas that are inevitable in the business. Those who are not stupid are so divorced from reality that they can no longer apply their intelligence to the normal world as it has become a foreign place for them. This means that most of the stars are both stupid and ignorant, which is why they so often sound like drooling idiots when speaking off-the-cuff.

The Long Civil War

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John Derbyshire was the first person I heard use the phrase “cold civil war” to describe the culture war in American society and politics. His argument, if I recall correctly, is that the Civil War may have ended, but a cold version of it has festered ever since, largely over the issue of race, but other issues are part of it. The result has been the Blue side of the conflict, the good whites, imposing their will on the Gray side, the bad whites, using the “transcendent morality” of racism as the main weapon.

It is a good way of looking at things. The recent hysteria about the bogeyman of racism, for example, is almost all coming from suburban white women, who live in all white neighborhoods. They don’t really care about blacks in a practical sense. Their real concern is the specter of bad whites holding opinions the good whites find unacceptable. It’s what caused them to go bonkers over Bush and then force the ridiculous Barak Obama on us. The bad whites needed to be taught a lesson and put in their place, which is at the bottom of the social order.

The whole red state/blue state business that got going with the 2000 election was another manifestation of this. The bad whites voted for Bush and tended to live in awful places like the South and Midwest. The people who voted against Bush lived in cool paces like New York and LA. This was made more obvious in 2008 when the states not going for Obama were conspicuously Southern. More than a few lefties noted that the Old Confederacy did not vote for Obama and everyone knew what that meant.

Now that this Progressive Awakening is sputtering to a comical end, the Left is increasingly convinced that the nation is headed for a civil war. This post on The Daily Lunatic from last year is humorous, but representative. Here’s another from the Huffington Post. This piece in The National Interest is a recent example. TNI is not explicitly Left, but it is certainly not explicitly Right either. It’s always been a neocon hangout, which puts it on the Left, mostly as a home for heretics who broke with the Left on foreign policy.

The reason the Official Right was willing to join arms with the Left in opposition to Trump last year was their belief that Trump was leading some sort of rebellion of the bad whites against the benevolent rule of the good whites. Now that Trump has been installed as ruler, the same people are imagining a counter rebellion by the good whites, like the cat ladies, who waddled into DC on Saturday. The only thing they were missing was having the geriatric Madonna lead the crowd in singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

It is easy to dismiss it, as the Left is prone to these sorts of histrionics whenever they don’t get their way. Even so, what we may be seeing is not a new civil war or even a continuation of the Civil War. Maybe what we are seeing is the final, long delayed end of the Civil War. The political realignment we are witnessing is not the start of anything, but the end of a long cycle of American history that started in the 19th century with the Hartford Convention. After several delays, we are reaching the final denouement.

If you think of America in terms of The American Nations model or maybe the Nine Nations model, the last 200 years can be looked at as a long hegemony of Yankeedom over the rest of the country. Following the Civil War, the South was excluded from having a say in how the nation was governed. The Midwest and Mid-Atlantic were subordinate to the Yankee ruling class, while the West was simply not a factor. This remained the case into the 20th century, as America went from provincial backwater to an industrial power.

The 20th century should have been when this post Civil War arrangement began to fall apart as the South rebuilt and the West joined the Union. Instead, the Great Depression, two world wars and the Cold War locked everything more or less in place. Nixon’s “southern strategy” to win the presidency was an early sign that the old order was unstable. The necessities of the Cold War kept things in place, but the dominance of the old Yankee elite was showing it’s age as far back as the 70’s.

Look at something else. The Conservative Movement got going strong in the 1960’s and came into its own in the 70’s. The election of Reagan made conservatism the alternative to liberalism, but it did not change the regional alliances in the country. Up until very recent, conservatism was strongest in the South, but it had no Southern leaders. The GOP, the alleged home of the Right, remains a party of Southern voters, but Yankee leaders.The Trumpening has mostly been about the long overdue eviction of the Bushies from party leadership.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the start of a process where America returns to being a collection of regions more or less cooperating only on the big issues like national defense and trade. On those items, perhaps the national ethos returns to something like the John Quincy Adams model, rather than the Theodore Roosevelt model. A lot of what Trump says about foreign policy and trade may be a reaction to the neocon debacles of the last three decades, but they are also an echo of the pre-Civil War consensus.

One final thing. The Left is suddenly talking about the need to restore powers to the state as they face a federal government controlled by their sworn enemies. There are many on the Right who would like to see an Article V Convention. One side fears what the Federal government might do and the other side has had enough of what the Federal government has done. The one thing all sides of the political class may accept in the end is a restoration of the natural regionalism that has always existed in America.

Playing With Fire

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The Trump inauguration featured the usual array of public nuisances and troublemakers that are now a feature of public events. If world leaders meet in a city, that city has a riot by anarchist loonies bused in by guys like George Soros. If a country celebrates one of their traditions, lunatics show up to ruin it for everyone. In this case, paid employees inspired supporters of Democrat pressure groups showed up in the Imperial Capital to harass citizens as they attempted to enjoy the spectacle of crowning our new emperor.

I’ve long argued that public protests are anti-democratic, anti-liberal and an assault on civilized order. They are unnecessary in a social democracy. We have elections where the issues of the day can be debated. There’s simply no need to be out in the streets causing trouble. These people yesterday were not there to raise awareness. They were there to intimidate and frighten people. While we cannot ban such things, the punishments handed out for causing trouble should be draconian. Put the rioters in a city jail for a couple of years and this comes to an end.

Normal people will tolerate a fair bit of this, just as long as they can avoid it when going about their business. There’s also an entertainment factor that gives these rioters some room to maneuver. The press loves covering these idiots and people will watch it on TV. Of course, most of the nation’s press corp wishes they could be rioting and looting so they pretend that the rioters are a serious, organic response to oppression. The struggle myth remains a powerful force in Progressive politics.

Property destruction used to be the preferred action of these rioters as it avoided the moral hazard of physical confrontation. If they rumbled with the cops, they could get a beating or worse. If they assaulted people on the streets, something similar could happen. Plus, judges are tough on perps who attack innocent bystanders and cops, while they are lenient on property crimes. Insurance pays for the damage and the miscreants don’t have any money, so it is easier to just let the rioters go.

That’s changing as we keep seeing with Trump events. These lunatics show up and throw eggs, batteries, urine bombs and worse. There were reports that rioters were crapping in their own hands so they could fling it at people. Milo Yabadabadoopolis keeps having his events cancelled because the authorities worry about potential violence. Given that a guy was shot at his last event, it is not an unreasonable fear. It’s the extreme version of the heckler’s veto. Instead of shouting down the person on stage, the heckler opens fire on the audience.

The question that comes to mind is when do we see the other side of this. So far, it has been all leftist crazies assaulting normies, who quietly take it. To their credit, the normies know the media is looking for a reason to blame all of it on them so they have adopted a passive approach to it. Videos are posted on-line and appeals are made to the authorities to do something about the violence. The assumption is the public will side with the victims over the lunatics, even if the press does the opposite and blames the victims.

So far, it has been remarkable that nothing serious has happened. These protesting lunatics are not terribly clever. All it would take is a bit of forethought to lure them into an ambush. How long before some armed normies turn up at an event and wait for the lunatics to give them a reason? The fact that it has not happened is encouraging, but maybe we have just been lucky. There are a lot of young men at Trump events. The alt-right is mostly young men. Young men tend to push back.

The other side of this is something that came to mind watching Richard Spencer get attacked on the street while doing an interview. At the risk of breaking the code, Spencer is an attention hound, who I suspect set this up hoping something like this would happen. Doing an interview on the street in front of the lunatics is just asking for trouble. The video was posted by his followers and he has been talking about it nonstop ever since. It’s good public relations for him and his cause. It makes him sympathetic, but also gives him street cred.

Of course, young men looking for street cred of their own will see this as a chance to be part of the action. They can stand guard while guys like Spencer conduct interviews and give speeches. This has been the attraction for black militants since the 60’s. Given the choice between wearing cool outfits and carrying a gun or submissively taking a beating from the cops, young black men naturally are drawn to groups like the Panthers, the Nation of Islam and recently, Black Lives Matter.

It is another example of the dangerous game being played by our Progressives rulers. While the public becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the current order, the ruling class becomes increasingly hostile to the people. By encouraging this sort of mayhem we see outside public events, they are encouraging a response to it. I don’t have much interest in Spencer and the preppy Nazi stuff, but if I’m forced to choose between him and the anarchist rioter, it is not a hard choice.

I’ve been making the point for a while now that Trump and his election are a warning shot across the bow of the ruling class. The public is increasingly frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the ruling class. Reform is long overdue. The support for and election of Trump is that message. If the ruling class ignores it or actively subverts it, what comes next will be much worse. The status quo is untenable, but we are not at a crisis. More videos of citizens being assaulted by leftist mobs and people start thinking the time for half measures has passed.

Essential Knowledge: Part II

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A thorough understanding of human history has been the hallmark of an educated man in the West since the Middle Ages. Herodotus is considered the first historian, but there is debate about whether the ancients had an appreciation for human history. Oswald Spengler argued that the ancients were ahistorical, as they lacked a historical consciousness. Perhaps that is true, but for our purposes, the point is that a classical education in the West has always included a thorough understanding of history.

Now, we live in a post-Christian age, but there remains a high degree of hostility to religion in general and Christianity in particular. As a result, religion is either left out of the history books or cast as some sort of malevolent influence. That’s a big problem as it is impossible to understand human history without understanding religion and its role in human affairs. This is especially true in the West where Christianity is arguably the most important feature of Western culture since the fall of Rome.

Obviously, knowing European history means knowing Christianity and that means knowing something about the Jews and Judaism. I’d recommend starting with Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews as it is very readable and covers the important bits without getting bogged down in academic posing. Given the outsized influence of the Jewish people on world history, as well as current events, you cannot be an educated man without fully appreciating the role of Judaism in world history.

Of course, a solid understanding of Christianity is important. You cannot understand the last 2,000 years of Western history without knowing Christianity and the history of the Church. There are so many books on the subject that you are spoiled for choice, but Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity is the one I’d recommend to every atheist that can read. The point is not to become a theologian. The point is to have an appreciation of and knowledge of the role Christianity has played in Western history.

Eventually, learning Christian history leads to how it evolved from its antecedents. Greek and Roman mythology is not just the starting ground for the fantasy role playing crowd. It laid the groundwork for the monotheism of the Jews to jump into the rest of human society. Once you fully appreciate what came to replace Greek and Roman theology, you can fully appreciate a classics like Edith Hamilton’s Timeless Tales of God’s and Heroes and Hilda Davidson’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe.

Islam is a thornier topic as there has been a flood of books and articles on the Religion of Peace that are more about modern political topics than the history of Islam. A book worth reading to get a positive introduction to the history of Islam is Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History. Like every book about a specific religion, it has its short-comings and critics, but it does the job. Another good option and maybe a companion to the other book is Reza Aslan’s No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.

The hard part about Islam for Western readers is we tend to look at religion through the lens of European Christianity. There was the world before Christianity and then the Christian era. Islam did not spring from nothing. It is the result of a long evolution of religion in the region. A good book to get a fuller understanding of that is Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East. It provides a nice history of religion before Islam and a fuller picture of the complexity in the modern Middle East. It’s not all raging Imams and Jihadists.

As far as Eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, this is where it can get difficult for the Westerner. Thousands of books have been written on Eastern religions by hippy crackpots  All of them are terrible and useless in terms of learning anything about these religions and their role in the development of those societies. The right answer is an old book by a long gone professor named Huston Smith. The book is The World’s Religions and it has good sections on these topics.

Belonging to a church or religious sect is not the same as joining the stamp club or volunteering down at the school. It is the defining feature of a person’s life and the defining feature of his group. For those who lack faith, this is not always easy to grasp. A good book on this subject is Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich. It’s easy to see why a great cathedral could be inspiring, but it is not easy to see what inspired men to build the cathedral. Understanding faith at the personal level is critical to understanding religion.

The point of learning about religion, as an intellectual exercise, is not to become a theologian. The point is to have a grounding in the basics in order to better understand human history. Belief is one of the oldest modern human traits. It is thought to have co-evolved with language. It is the main driver of human history and it remains a principle force in human affairs. There’s simply no way one can have an understanding of history, especially Western history, without understanding religion.