Monthly Archives: August 2017

Private War

Posted on by

When I began my work life, the outsourcing trend was picking up steam in the United States. I no longer recall who it was, but some guy allegedly produced the idea of using the phone book to break up his company. If he could find a company that did a task currently done in-house, he outsourced that task to a vendor. That was probably apocryphal, but it was a useful story. Why do something in-house when there was a local specialist, who could do it better and probably cheaper than you?

To a point, it made a lot of sense. Why would a baker own a fleet of trucks when he can lease them from a company that is expert at maintaining delivery trucks? The baker can focus on his specialty and the truck repair people can more efficiently maintain the bread trucks. Even in cases where there is no direct savings, outsourcing allows for a greater focus on core competencies. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but it is something you heard a lot in the 90’s as companies unbundled themselves.

This was also the driving force behind Al Gore’s project to “reinvent government” by moving tasks from the Federal workforce to private contractors. There was a book published in 1993 that was the text book for government reformers. All over the country, private firms now exist to serve one customer – the government. There are firms around the Imperial Capital that exist solely for the purpose of fulfilling a specific contract. Once the contract expires, the firm will be dissolved or “reinvented” for a new contract.

Of course, there is another aspect to government outsourcing that is different from private outsourcing. In the private sector, the baker can be good at maintaining his bread trucks, if he chooses to put the energy into it. Government is rarely good at anything, so off-loading work to the private sector promises to get around the bureaucracy, especially when it comes to things like work rules. In theory, the government contractor is free to do what is necessary to get the job done, while government is tied down with endless red tape.

This sounds good, but it has curdled into something sinister during the communications revolution. Big tech companies now police speech on-line, doing what government cannot legally do itself. Human resource departments evolved to enforce workplace conduct rules that the state cannot easily enforce. The government cannot tell the males to be nice to the girls at the office, but they can threaten to sue the company for maintaining a hostile workplace, so the company does the state’s bidding.

Now we are about to see this concept taken to the next logical step, as the Trump administration prepares to outsource the war in Afghanistan. The plan is to have contractors like Blackwater, take over the logistics of fighting the Taliban. They would provide an air force and thousands of “contractors”, who would develop and lead militias made up local tribesman. The “contractors” are former soldiers. We used to call these guys mercenaries, but that term has fallen out of fashion for obvious reasons.

The article frames this as a cost saving move, but the most likely reason to consider doing this is the contractors can do things we no longer allow our military to do. Blackwater can also recruit a militia from whatever local forces they like, which probably means the most ruthless killers available. Put another way, there is a realization that the US military has become an inefficient and clumsy giant of a bureaucracy, just like the rest of the federal government. Blackwater will be more efficient at executing this never ending war.

This is not without precedent. Governments have relied on private armies and private security forces since the dawn of time. The American West was often policed by hired guns, simply because they were available and willing to take the work. The Pinkertons were a security force used by the government and rich men. Lincoln used them for his personal security. The railroad used them to infiltrate the Molly Maguires and they were used in the famous Homestead Strike. Guns for hire are not new to America.

Still, this is a bit different and looks like another facet of the modern Servile State. Just as the state has outsourced its coercive functions to private companies, it is now outsourcing its violence to a private company. If Trump goes in for this, you can be sure that a hundred other firms will spring up with plans to do paramilitary work around the world on behalf of the US government. That is the thing with outsourcing. Supply has a funny way of creating demand where none existed. Private war will now get its own SIC code.

Eisenhower famously warned about the military-industrial complex and he has been proven right. The Cold War was used to justify endless spending on the war machine. Then it was terrorism. Now we have an empire to police, in addition to the millions of hostile foreigners our government imports into our lands. There is always some reason to keep shoveling trillions into the war machine. Now the war machine will have libertardian economists singing its praises as an efficient new innovation.

This is not a new problem. The Romans had this problem with their own armies, as well as the Praetorian Guards. America is not in danger of the military seizing control of the state or making demands on the civilian rulers. That is because the global corporations got there first. Those same corporations are now taking over the policing and war making roles of the state. In the custodial state, the throne and alter will be divided once again, with the state serving as the altar and global oligopolies as the throne.

Extra Crispr

Posted on by

Every few months we get a blazing headline about a breakthrough in genetics that will allegedly lead to super babies. This one from a few months ago is a good example of the genre. It makes for a catchy headline. Of course, the story is never as claimed, as we are not close to creating a race of mutant super babies. Instead, science is creeping up on the ability to do some very narrow gene editing to eliminate well known genetic defects. In fact, a lab has just successfully edited a viable embryo for the first time.

This is a huge step in science, but we are nowhere near close to creating the master race or even making small changes in real humans. The most recent research on human intelligence, for example, identifies 50 genes that correlate to IQ. That is a lot of combination to sort, assuming that is the whole set of genes related to IQ. There is also the possibility that other traits are indirectly related to those genes. Even something as simple as hair color can get wildly complex, so we will not be decanting babies anytime soon.

While we are nowhere near close to making super babies, this is one step down the road toward altering the foundations of human existence. The ability to inexpensively alter DNA, even in quite simple ways, will lead to better food and better medicine. Imagine a treatment that alters a pathogen such that it attacks cancer cells in the human body. It sounds outlandish, but that is essentially what your immune system does with disease. Of course, the ability to “correct” genetic defects will have an enormous impact on human health.

It is easy to fall into the science fiction fantasy stuff when thinking about these topics, but small things can have a huge impact on human behavior. Improvements in sanitation, food production and basic medicine greatly altered the human condition. Just look at the impact of life expectancy. If lifespans were still as they were a century ago, things like pension costs and health care would not be topics in politics. It is because we can live, and live vigorously, into our 70’s that these issues are now major topics.

That is why this gene editing technology is so important. Up until very recent, the consensus in science was that we were generations away from having the ability to edit human DNA. All of a sudden, the future is now and the rush is on to be the first to alter an actual human embryo and bring it to term. It also means that science will suddenly shift from the purely theoretical to the practical. The first guy to figure out how to fix defects in something as frivolous as purebred dogs will become rich and famous.

There is another aspect to this that is probably more important than the potential impact on human biology. What this technology is doing is bringing to center stage a truth about humanity that our betters have been trying to suppress for generations. That is, what we are is what we inherit from our parents. What they are is what they inherited from their parents. Each of us is the result of thousands of generations of breeding. Our physical and cognitive traits are the result of that long ad hoc experiment.

At a basic level, people know this. Anyone who is familiar with human children knows that they look and act like their parents from an early age. People do not think to hard about this stuff and our rulers work to keep us from thinking about how this scales up. If a white man is the result of thousands of generations of white people, that means the African is the result of his ancestors evolving in Africa. It is not a long walk from there to accepting that race is real. That is why this thinking is a mortal sin on our age.

This becomes increasingly difficult when it becomes more common for a doctor to use ideas and techniques from genetics to better serve his patients. The old gag about race is that race is a social construct until you need a bone marrow transplant. Not a lot of people have that talk with their doctor but imagine a world where everyone has a genetic realism talk with their dog breeder. When you know Rover had a known defect in his breed fixed by a vet at the canine gene clinic, talking about biological reality gets a lot easier.

As people come to accept the reality of gene editing, even if it is just to make better dog breeds, it is much more difficult to maintain the mythologies of the blank slate. Once people come to accept that things like IQ and personality traits are determined by our genes, the blank slate is finished. Even if people do not accept genetic determinism, they will accept testing for IQ and personality traits to fill engineering positions. In other words, strides in genetics will restore a more sober understanding of the human condition.

This is the negation of the core belief of our ruling elite, but it is telling that our rulers seem to be going in the opposite direction. As science makes clear the realities of human biology, our rulers scream ever louder to the contrary. Instead of simply ignoring the new information, they are waging pogroms too root out anyone not fully committed to their biological denialism. Every week were treated to some new scandal where a heretic is brought forth and punished for acknowledging reality.

It is common to compare our current age to the scientific revolution. Galileo is a compelling figure. That does work at some level, but what we are really experiencing is something like what happened in the Roman Empire, prior to Constantine. As the people began to embrace the new religion, the rulers tried to crack down on it. This only made the new religion more popular. The great insight of Constantine was to recognize the strategic advantage that was available to the first ruler who embraced the new religion.

That is probably what awaits us. Science is moving along faster than the current throne and altar cabal can follow. Some clever politician is going to embrace biological realism and ride it to victory over the prevailing orthodoxy. The first politician to say, “Of course men and women are different” and not get run out of town will be the snowflake that sets off the avalanche. Regardless, breakthroughs like CRISPR are about to shake the foundation of our culture. The blank slate’s days are numbered.

The Anti-Man

Posted on by

Until someone mentioned him, I had never heard of Leonard Pitts. I just assumed he was a writer for a black website like The Root or the Huffington Post. One of the things about the media age is someone can be wildly famous, yet unknown to most people. PewDiePie is a great example. He has fifty million subscribers to his YouTube channel, yet few adults over forty have heard of him. The number of people, who are unknown to me, but are wildly popular with blacks is probably quite long.

Since this commenter kept posting the man’s name, I decided to look him up and I learned that he lives outside Washington and has been a columnist for the Miami Herald for decades. That is a weird thing, when you think about it. Why would the Miami Herald have a columnist, who lives in DC? The reason, of course, is that the demand for black columnists, to decorate the op-ed pages of big city newspapers, far outstrips supply. If you are a black guy who can play the part, the world is your oyster.

That may seem harsh, but a quick look at the columns written by Pitts finds what you always find with black writers. As Derb would put it, it is all blackety-black. He has done a lot of work on being a black father. He has written columns on being a black man. He has written lots of columns flinging his poo at Republicans over race. Pretty much every Progressive news operation has a slot for the black guy, who writes about his blackness and flings poo at Republicans for their lack of sensitivity to the blackness.

Pitts has authored some books too. His first was Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. The topic is obvious. His first novel is Before I Forget, a “novel of three generations of black men bound by blood — and by histories of mutual love, fear, and frustration.” His next novel, Freeman, is about a former slave. His most recent novel is called Grant Park and it is, wait for it, a story of race and race relations. To paraphrase John Derbyshire, Leonard Pitts is a prisoner of his own skin.

He is also a good example of the negative group identity. Blackness in America is a laundry list of grievances against whites and a list of things that blacks reject about society. It has little to say about what it means to be black, independent of whites. Much like the contours of a black hole, we can only know black identity by knowing the surrounding white identity. Wherever white culture ends, that’s where black identity begins. In America, being black means not being white.

This negative identity has been particularly toxic to black Americans, because a negative identity binds the worst with the best. The greatest exponents of black culture are those who are the most degenerate. Hip-hop culture is a perfect example. It celebrates the worst instincts of black people. Any black who points this out is pilloried for acting white. The result is a never ending race to the cultural bottom, dragging the rest of the black population down with it. Even Obama was forced to respect the gutter culture of hip-hop.

This anti-identity is why blacks demand to live near whites. Whites will often note that despite all the complaints about how whites treat blacks, black people will literally cross an ocean to live near whites. In America, this means demands for subsidies so that blacks can move into white suburban neighborhoods and send their kids to white schools. In cities with voucher programs, blacks try everything to get their kids out of black schools and into white schools. On its face, it seems illogical, given the list of black grievances.

There is more to this phenomenon, but one aspect is that black identity depends on proximity to whites. Sure, blacks want safer neighborhoods and better schools, but they also need to be near whites as being black in America is wholly defined by how whites treat blacks. The reason blacks are prisoners of their skin is because to do otherwise means losing what it means to be black. If all black people left America, whites would not change. If the roles were reversed, blacks would have to invent a new identity.

The negative identity is not just debilitating to groups. Thumbing through the writings of Leonard Pitts, the image of him is of a man in a perpetual state of outrage. He is a bundle of resentments. All of his interactions with the white world, even those of his imagination, are placed on his own scale of slights. His life is not the accumulation of experiences adding to his identity as a man, but a running list of complaints about the world around him. He is an anti-man, because if he did not exist, no one would feel the need to invent him.

 

Stupid People ► Fake News

Posted on by

The plague of fake news is largely assumed to be due to the ruling class trying to convince people to stop noticing things. There is a lot of that, for sure. When the New York Times instructs its writers to use “guest worker” to describe illegal aliens employed in the cash economy, it is a deliberate attempt to deceive. The mythical Backlash™ that is always lurking after a Muslim goes boom is deliberate agit-prop. At the same time, most of the people in the media are true believers so their bias goes unnoticed.

Another aspect of the Fake News phenomenon is the general stupidity of the people in the media. Theirs is the worst sort of stupidity in that it is tightly wrapped with an overweening sense of righteousness and superiority. The typical newsroom is a collection of credentialed mediocrities that are convinced they are the smartest people in the room. It is a reckless stupidity that makes them easy to fool, thus all the hoaxes, but also prevents them from asking sensible questions. This article is a good example.

Clearly, this “study” was shopped to the media via press release. They provide copy that can be cut and pasted into a news item and they provide a graphic, which is like catnip to the modern media. Mx. Chang was given the task of writing up a story about it and someone got the job and slapping on a click bait title. If Mx. Chang bothered to read the underlying study; she clearly did not understand what she was reading. Of course, the people at the Missouri School of Journalism have no idea how to do a study.

The most obvious flaw is that they used a questionnaire, which they distributed to news sites and had them get readers to fill them out. Unsurprisingly, the readers of NPR like and trust NPR. Even less shocking, no one who reads Drudge bothered to fill out the survey as Drudge did not participate. The billion people who go to his site, therefore, were left out of the survey. Even though the methodology used to arrive at their analysis is probably good enough, the data collection is crap on stilts. Therefore, the whole thing is crap.

People who work with data understand that data collection is critical to any analysis, so that is often where you see the most effort. If you want to know how people intend to vote, for example, you better have a sample size that is large enough so that you can model the electorate. A survey of the most loyal readers of news sites can tell you something about those readers, but it tells you nothing about public attitudes regarding the news or the fake news phenomenon. It is a fake study for the purpose of fake news.

That is why the public is increasingly cynical about the mass media. When they see a story about how The Economist, of all things, is the most trusted news site in America, they know they are being fed fake news. Mx. Chang, on the other hand, has not the slightest idea what any of this means. She is just paid $25 to do a cut and paste job and get it up on the site. She is probably a very nice person, but nothing in her resume qualifies her to write about any of the topics assigned to her by Market Watch.

This is something you see all over the news media. The people assigned to cover the news, rarely have any experience in the field. In fact, they rarely have any experience or education outside of media. Their alleged expertise consists of years reporting on topics they do not understand. It is impossible for someone like Mx. Chang to ask sensible questions when she does not know the first thing about the topic. The result is she has to take everything at face value, repeating whatever is said to her.

This shortage of intellectual capital is probably the main driver of the fake news problem and the decline in trust in the news. It is not just the stupid people saying stupid things. It is the lack of smart people at the top. That Missouri study is a good example. They lack the wattage to figure out what is going on in their own ranks. Throw in the fact that most news organizations are overrun with Progressive nutters and you end up with a mentally disturbed lesbian anchoring your prime-time news channel.

Tucker Carlson has characterized the Washington media as a collection of stupid rich kids. That is a good way to think of it. The upper middle class family has one kid, who is not so bright, so they send her off to journalism school and a career in the media. That has been the case for a couple of generations, but there is a limit to that formula and we may be reaching it. One byproduct of the fake news era is the collapse of social status of the media. To be a TV talking head is to be on the same level as a carny barker.

Regardless, anything dominated by stupid people is going to fail eventually. The mass media is experiencing the corollary to the Smart Fraction. It is not that the mean IQ is falling to a certain point where the enterprise fails. It is that stupid people tend to chase away smart people. You see this in a social setting where the smart and sophisticated move away from the boorish and loud. How many smart people want to be on the same set with a talking airhead like Don Lemon or Jake Tapper? The news is becoming this.

Waves of Destruction

Posted on by

When I was a young man, I was taught to think about growth businesses or growth industries in terms of the military. The guys who start the business, or pioneer a new industry, are analogous to the elite units sent in to establish a beachhead or breech the perimeter. These guys are goal oriented and never bogged down with a lot of rules. In fact, they tend to hate the rules as they see rules as artificial obstacles to their task. In business, the pioneers often start out trying to subvert the rules.

A new industry, like a new conquest, may start out as a series of attacks along the frontier, but eventually it must establish itself as a self-sustaining camp with the perimeter of the established order. The computer business went from experimental ideas in the lab to simple products that could be used in fields like finance or banking. Read this book and you will see how the first nerds established their beachhead on Wall Street. The risk takers sought out the rick takers for their risky new ideas.

Beachhead is the right way to think of it. The special forces find a place for a landing and the shock troops are called in to attack that point and establish a foothold. The D-Day landings in Normandy were not about sacking the beach. It was to secure an entry point for the American and British forces that would follow. Whether it is an industry or a business, that first wave into the new thing are risk takers. They are not the sort of guys who fret over the rules too much, and they are always guys. Guys like risk.

In war fighting, that toehold allows the waves of regulars to flow in and begin to take ground. The English speaking nations landed 150,000 men on the beaches of Normandy, but millions soon followed them through the breach into Europe. That is the way it works for a growth industry. The first firms establish themselves and then a wave of imitators and opportunists follow them to expand the industry. In a business, the viability of the firm and its growth means hiring anyone, who shows up and can do a job.

Eventually, the land is conquered and the industry or business is established. That is when the middle-managers, administrators and police arrive to make rules and enforce them. A good rule in war is you know the advance has stalled when the general staff arrives. In business, the filling out of the HR department means the growth phase has come to an end. Now it is all about securing what has been won and securing against future attacks from competitors or the conquered enemy. It is why Microsoft is no longer hip.

In this maturity period, the rough guys and shock troops that established the beachhead and poured into thing during the growth phase, are pushed out. They no longer fit as the goal in this phase is the formalization of rules. That means creative thinking and risk taking are not only out of place, but they are also considered dangerous. It is why the founders tend to get bought out or move onto emeritus type positions. The guys who came in as young risk takers either move onto new ventures or mature into risk adverse managers.

In the modern age of predatory global economics, this final phase is also a death rattle of a company. Building and maintaining something no longer has value. In fact, it is viewed as foolish. Instead, the goal is to not only eat the fruit of the tree but chop it up and burn it at the final party. Therefore, the mature phase of a company or industry is a spasmodic, social justice warrior phase, in which a firm sets about committing suicide. The smart money is gone. The risk takers are gone. What’s left is to set the whole thing ablaze.

You see that with Fox News, which now has another sex scandal. This time it is claimed that some old guy is sending dick pics to the women on staff. Given that one of the “victims” is the well known SJW and sociopath, Michelle Fields, it is most likely a hoax. Even so, only a firm committed to its own death would hire a nutjob like Fields. She is a cancer, a carbuncle on the face of humanity. A company with a future would instinctively avoid her, as an unnecessary distraction.

Fox News had a good thing going and if they wanted to keep building, they would have quietly bought off some of these broads and cracked down on the fraternization. They also would have culled the problem women from the ranks. Instead, they have donned the sack cloth poured ashes on their head. In the context of Fox, this has meant running off their riskier talent and replacing it with safe, boring and morally correct nothings. When they find a reason to run off Tucker Carlson, the network will spiral into the abyss.

Something similar is going on at Google now, with the revelation of this hilariously tame memo about diversity. It is somewhat charming how the writer thinks he still works at the dynamic company of yesteryear. It is hilarious how he thinks the vinegar drinking lunatics in charge of chasing off the whites will listen to reason. As Vox Day would put it, and is now documenting, Google is fully converged. Their staff meetings are a scene from the day room in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They even have a big Indian!

All of this is entertaining, unless you are the one being attacked by the blue haired, tackle -faced rage loonies. You can be sure that the author of that Google memo will be broken on the wheel by the company Torquemada. Just as the DNC named that bike rack after the intern they had assassinated, the Google heretic will have his head on a pike outside the main entrance to Google. Everyday at lunch, employees will be forced to shriek his name in an orgy of hatred. Maybe they will name Room 101 after him.

While it is entertaining, these orgies of destruction are killing Western civilization. The culture of the West is not a single thing, but a series of waves from Greece to the present. As each wave crashed, the next wave built upon what was accomplished by the previous wave. The current waves breaking on the rocks of reality are leaving nothing but rubble, as Progressive culture furiously erases our past. To call it a suicide cult is to give it too much credit. It is cultural nihilism that will usher in a new dark age.

The Z-Blog Power Hour: The Bad Podcast

Posted on by

This week, the podcast stinks. For some reason it was just not coming to me and I struggled getting it done. Hence the title. That’s the thing you have to learn in all endeavors is that sometimes, good enough is good enough. On the other hand, you will always be your harshest critic, which means you can easily make things hard on yourself by trying to hard. Figuring out when to put down the tools and call it a day is part of the process.

This week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the full show and some new graphics to distinguish the bits from the full show. I am now on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can now listen to me on their Hitler phones.You’ll also a note I have renamed this thing, which is explained in the podcast.

I will be streaming this to GabTV at some point, but I have some wrenches to turn before I can get that working. I’ll update the site when that is working, if I’m able to do it.

This Week’s Show

  • 00:00: Perfunctory Opening Comments
  • 03:30: AmRen
  • 13:00: Detroit (Link)
  • 23:30: Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Link)
  • 33:15: Cat Lady Science (Link) (Link)
  • 38:30: The Blank Slate (Link)
  • 44:00: Cucks (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 49:00: Dinesh D’Souza (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 54:00: Colin Kapernich (Link)
  • 59:00: Closing

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

After The GOP

Posted on by

After the 2010 election, I mentioned to someone that I was probably done with voting, at least in national elections. The reason was that voting had ceased to mean much to me, other than as a ritual. I know men who continue to go to mass for the same reason, even though they are no longer believers. In 2012 I got in line to vote, but standing there for a while, I realized I was wasting my time, so I skipped and went home. On the issues that mattered to me, Romney and Obama were the same guy.

It was an oddly liberating thing. I had voted in every election in which I was eligible up until that point. I considered it my patriotic duty, even though the options were rarely worth the effort. In most cases, I did the old Buckley thing and voted for the most rightward viable candidate on the ballot. As a result, I found myself rooting for the GOP, simply because they were not as awful as the Democrats. I never appreciated how much that sucked until I skipped voting in 2012. That was a good day.

The thing is, we are all men of our age, which means our opinions and inclinations are, to a great degree, formed by the prevailing opinions of our age. Just as progressives control our moral framework, the two parties control our political framework. All of us are forced to pick sides and root for them. Consequently, conservatives have invested in the GOP, despite the fact the Republicans never do what they say they will do, even when they have large working majorities, like in the Bush years.

This inability or unwillingness of voters to walk away from this paradigm is how we ended up with Trump. It is, to a lesser extent, what kept a laughable squirrel like Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primary. Within the very narrow construct of the post-Cold War political framework, Sanders and Trump were the only way to send the message. That is promising, but it also means that people, particularly people on our side, are unwilling to walk away from the game, at least just yet. They still have hope.

Strangely, this may be setting up the Republicans for collapse. They are looking at the special elections and thinking that Trump’s antics are not hurting them. Then there is the health care debacle, which they think they can blame on Trump. The GOP is acting like they have the voters boxed in so they can disrupt and oppose Trump on everything theit handlers oppose. So much so that Senator Caitlyn Graham is out promising to sink the Trump immigration proposal.

This is incredible, given where the voters are on immigration. Graham is not just opposing this bill. He wants to flood the country with foreigners. There is no constituency for open borders. In fact, 60% of voters would shut down all immigration, not just the illegal immigration. That remaining 40% is probably distributed between those who favor greater enforcement and those who support limits. You just do not see numbers like that on any issue.

In fairness to the GOP, their model has worked for a long time. Going back to 1994, they have controlled Congress for all but four years. They blame that short interlude on the Iraq war and Bush. Otherwise, their game of lying to the voters on the campaign trail and then voting like Democrats in Washington has worked, but this may be different. Trump is the warning shot to the party and Washington. Those millions of GOP voters who have stuck it out, may just throw in the towel.

Of course, what has worked in the past will be used again. “Who are you going to vote for if not the Republicans?” We are all men of our age and that means we have been trained to respond to that question one way. Old habits are hard to break, but they eventually do get broken. How likely is it that a soured electorate stays home in 2018 and lets the Republicans take a beating? It is hard to know and there is the fact that Democrat voters are not exactly thrilled with their options either.

The point of all this is that what is happening now is not an isolated event. Trump is part of a larger trend and a sign of a weakening in the political arrangements. The old gag about bankruptcy comes to mind. Slowly then all of a sudden. The Democrats are well on their way to being the anti-white party. They will be the home of homosexuals, blacks, foreigners and the mentally disturbed. There will be a party for the rest, a white party, but maybe not the GOP.

It is too early to think about new parties or even co-opting existing parties, but it is not too soon to think about what comes next. If you are alt-right, does it matter if the Democrats win Congress next year? Probably not. In fact, it may help. If the GOP is no longer viewed as a plausible middle-ground between the alt-right and the Left, then people are forced to choose. If principled surrender is no longer a credible option for white voters, then maybe they begin to look at aggressive and assertive alternatives.

A Post About Fake News

Posted on by

Like a lot of people, I developed the habit of going to the Drudge Report as a one stop shopping experience for political news. His penchant for sprinkling in some news of the weird helped keep it interesting. He also is obsessed with extreme weather which I find amusing for some reason. The result is that it has been my first stop for general news going back to the Clinton years. Most mornings, it is my first stop just to see if anything important blew up while I was off-line.

The thing that always worked for Drudge is that he simply linked to the news stories in the mainstream press. He operated as a senior editor and headline writer. The New York Times may have decided to put something on page three below the fold, but Drudge would make it front page and give it a spicy headline. As these organizations became more dependent on web traffic, they became more Drudge friendly. That was true of writers as well.

Drudge was also the first to notice that the foreign press was often better at reporting on America than our local press. Many Americans now regularly read the British tabs because they were introduced to them through Drudge. While probably not intentional, it has opened the eyes of many Americans about the realty of the mainstream media in the United States. When the Guardian is doing a better job covering your hometown than your hometown news site, you notice it and you begin to wonder why.

That is the reason the Left has always claimed Drudge is a right-wing, even though his site is just links to left-wing publications. It is the editorial discretion. The people running the New York Times know they are shaping the news. They have always lied about it, but at some level they knew they were advocates for the Left. That was reflected in their choice of stories to cover and how hard they promoted those stories on their front pages. Drudge used that against them by re-prioritizing their stories.

The important thing though, is Drudge has always existed like an oxpecker. His site sits atop the mainstream media, plucking from it the stories that should be publicized. In return for this service, the mainstream media gets lots of traffic from Drudge. They could live without him, but it would be less pleasant. On the other hand, he cannot live without them. His existence depends on their existence. Drudge can thrive as long as most people think the news is largely true, but mostly biased to the Left.

What happens when the news is not true, but instead is mostly false and often just propaganda? How can Drudge work in the age of fake news? That keeps coming to mind every time I visit the Drudge Report lately. Yesterday he had a headline that read, “Dem Dream: Take Back House” and another, “Support Surges.” Both linked to stories that are entirely made up. The claim that there is a wave of support for Democrats right now is so ridiculous it should be in the Onion. That is obviously fake news

That is the reality of the Drudge Report now. He is working hard to add a tabloid gloss to the news, but the news is already well past being a tabloid. We are in the era of fake news, where political sites just make stuff up, claiming “anonymous sources.” Mike Cernovich has figured this out and he now has an army of anonymous sources of his own. On occasion, some of them have been right, which puts him ahead of the so-called journalists, who work in Washington politics. Drudge is now a fake news portal.

That is not the fault of Drudge. My recollection is that he hires people to help maintain the site, but he may be completely hands off now. It is that his business model is built upon the assumption that the news, to a great degree, is true. He then takes their news stories and adjusts out their bias by filtering and ranking them to highlight that which is often hidden by the mainstream press. If the news is fake, then he is doing what he set out to avoid, which is peddle bias.

This post is too long already, but there are two points that arise from this that are worth considering. One is that the fake news and its impact on sites like Drudge will have further collateral damage. Just as Drudge relies on the news being true, but biased, so do the conservatives. The hysterical pearl clutching at National Review looks even more ridiculous when it is clear they are reacting to fake news stories. In other words, fake news further reveals their complicity.

Another issue is that the prevailing orthodoxy is built around a superstructure composed of things like the mass media. Our progressive masters get to sway the public by filling the air with approved messages. The advertising model assumes people think the ads are there to sell product. If the public begins to see them as agit-prop, then all of those ads on TV peddling miscegenation take on a different color. Having a mixed race couple peddling camping gear then looks like an ad for race mixing, not camping gear.

In other words, a lot of other efforts depend upon the public accepting that the mass media is on the level, at least in terms of intentions. If people start assuming the news is fake, they are not going to be fooled by the ad men peddling the one true faith, dressed as product promotions. It is a short trip from there to questioning all of the other arrangements. Like the kids game Jenga, removing one key peg can cause a whole bunch of other things to come tumbling down as well.

Again, this is way to long, but the point is this. You do not have to red pill your honky friends on everything, just whatever they are ready for at the moment. The mass red pilling on the media is leading a lot of people to question all sorts of things that are only tangentially related. As the number of people aware of fake news grows, the number of people doubting the ad men and the intentions of corporate America grow as well. It means more people turning against the controlled opposition and their wealthy patrons.

Doubt is on our side.

Positive and Negative

Posted on by

Buckley Conservatives have tried hard to make the term “identity politics” into an epithet, but like all their other efforts, it has been a failure. The only thing David French managed to do in that piece is reveal that he has no respect for his ancestors and he remains petrified of the Left. He and the other wimps of the Right can beg and plead all they like, but identity politics is going to be a feature of the next generation of culture wars, probably the focus.

What is driving the growth of the Dissident Right, in part, is the realization among whites that the old political groupings no longer make sense in an age of identity politics. The one common theme among the people and groups now populating the movement is white identity. Some people prefer white nationalism, but that is mostly the older crowd. There are others who simply go with pro-white. The salient feature here is whiteness and that is generally defined as European, but there is some debate about that too.

Since no one is ready to roll out the equivalent of the Brown Paper Bag Test to determine entry into the Honkyverse, debating these fine distinctions is mostly a waste of time. Like porn, most people know white when they see it. What does matter is the nature of white identity. It is easy to generalize about what it means to be white and list off some things that are in the interest of white people, but that is not an identity. At best that is a list of political goals and at worst a list of complaints about the prevailing order.

Identity movements, as cultural or even political phenomenon, come in two flavors. One is positive and the other is negative. A positive identity is one that exists independently and in isolation. It is true in all times and all places. Its logic is entirely internal and only modifiable by those within it. A negative identity, in contrast, exists only in context, usually in relation to or in opposition to something else. It is dependent on some outside thing. Its logic is external and modifiable by whatever exogenous thing upon which it depends.

Consider something like Icelandic identity. To be an Icelander means you or your ancestors were born in Iceland. If the rest of the humans on earth die off, the person born on that rock in the North Atlantic is still an Icelander. If for some reason the people within that identity group decide to change the rules, adding some morphological feature, then that will be the new definition. Even if the French protest that change, the Icelandic identity is whatever the Icelanders decide. That is a positive identity.

Now, think about black identity in America. sub-Saharan Africans come to America and refuse to call themselves black or even African-American. They have a different identity, their own identity. Black Americans are defined by the fact that whites needed farm equipment and brought blacks over to the colonies to work the fields. Everything about the black experience is in relation to this history and its alleged effects on the present. To be black in America is to be defined entirely by your relationship to white America.

This difference in nature is why Icelanders do not spend all their time listing their grievances against some group outside their group. Blacks, in contrast, do nothing but complain about whites. They define themselves in relation to whites, mostly in how they are treated by whites. It is why they insist on being close to whites. Section 8 housing is popular with blacks, because it lets them mix with whites and have a daily validation of who they are as people. If whites suddenly went away, blacks would lose their identity.

These are extreme examples. A less obvious example of negative identity is Ireland. The Irish fell into the negative identity camp, defining themselves in opposition to the English, over the years of British occupation. The Irish certainly had plenty of cultural history of their own, but their subjugation by the British eventually began to shift the Irish identity from a positive and internal one, to an external and relational one. It is why the Irish continue to obsess over British politics, despite having their own government now.

The point of all this is that what is happening now with white identity has to avoid going down the negative road. If the alt-right, for example, is going to be a laundry list of complaints about non-whites, it can never chart its own destiny. It will always be dependent on those outside groups. On the other hand, if this thing follows the course you see with Jared Taylor, then it can chart its own course. Taylor does not waste a lot of time with grievances, beyond those related to the right to have a white identity.

Put another way, if being pro-white is only going to mean anti-black or anti-Jew or anti-Asian, then it is never going to be a useful identity group. It is just going to be the nullification of other identity groups. That is not a movement with a future, because it is definition lies outside its control. It is why feminism is curdling into a home for barren spinsters. It is just a list of grievances. In order to avoid that fate, white identity is going to have to be a positive identity that defines itself, independent of the rest of the world.

The way to do that is as a cultural movement. The reason Progressivism lasted for half a century, despite being at odds with reality, is it was a cultural phenomenon. Being a Progressive was not just politics. It was a lifestyle. Even today, you can tell a Lefty from a distance because they dress a certain way and act a certain way. One Lefty starts wearing fake glasses and all of them do it. Whatever white identity or pro-white comes to mean, it has to define itself internally, if it is going to be anything more than a passing fad.

Proof of this is the old white nationalist and white supremacist movements. Those old guys complaining about blacks and Jews were just that, old guys complaining about blacks and Jews. You got nothing by being a part of their thing other than endless lectures about blacks and Jews. Even racists run out of ways to keep that interesting. Avoiding the fate of those movement means steering a path down the positive road, even if it takes longer and is less clear. It has to be this way because this is probably the last shot at it.