Monthly Archives: April 2018

An Ethnocentric Death Cult

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Is neoconservatism just ethnocentric millenarianism? The neocons tend toward the apocalyptic in their language and they always wear the mask of the righteous when discussing the issues they view as central to their narrative. You never hear a neocon say that “well, good people can disagree.” Instead, they describe those with whom they disagree as the epitome of evil, usually the new Hitler. Their lust for war suggests a strong desire to immanentize the eschaton.

We tend to think of suicide cults as groups of lonely losers, preyed on by a charismatic sociopath, who convinces them of the coming end times. They either come to the movement convinced that only a cataclysm can set things right or they become convinced by the teachings of the cult that the great reckoning is at hand. It’s fairly typical, according to the experts, for the people in these movements to see themselves as a minority, operating as a sanctuary for the righteous.

Millenarianism tends to operate on the fringes of society, but not always. The prophets of the Jewish Bible are basically outsiders interpreting events in the context of an apocalyptic timetable. Judaism itself is defined by such a timetable. Judaism is the belief in a Messiah, who will deliver Jews from their enemies and rule over a Jewish kingdom.¹ Christianity is founded on the idea of a second coming, when Christ will return to reign as king with the just, both living and dead.²

The point here is that a belief in the end times or a foreboding sense of a coming cataclysm is not necessarily fringe or crazy. In fact, it is common in human societies, suggesting it is a common tendency in people. Therefore it is not outside the realm of possibility that neoconservatism is a form of millenarianism. It certainly has a strong Levantine edge to it and the adherents clearly view themselves as an oppressed minority in the Biblical sense, despite their status.

In fact, it is a curious feature of neoconservatism. When anyone notices that it was explicitly Jewish at its founding and is almost exclusively Jewish today, the neocon cries out, demanding the person noticing be punished. It’s as if noticing what is a defining feature, something the founders of the cult advertised, causes the adherents physical pain. What is often interpreted as subversive obfuscation, could very well be typical cult behavior. People in cults seek to disappear, which is why they joined the cult.

Just watch the body language in this interview of Noah Rothman done by Tucker Carlson the other night. What looks like a sociopath’s gambit, the lying by omission and half truths, can also be interpreted as a fear response. Rothman is promoting World War III, calling anyone not down with nuclear winter an agent of Putin. When Carlson focuses on what Rothman has written, putting the focus on him as an individual, Rothman physically recoils, like he is being assaulted.

Whether or not neoconservatism is a cult is debatable, but what is not debatable is the lust for the final great confrontation. For obvious reasons, neocons oscillate with rapturous enthusiasm whenever war in the Levant is mentioned, but they are obsessed with the great final conflict between good an evil. Their ancestral hatred for Russia is one element, but neocons were weened on the belief that a nuclear war with Russian was inevitable. It is entirely possible that the belief has come to define them.

They also seem to think Trump is a sign of the coming end times, when the great battle between the righteous and the wicked will reach its denouement. So much so that guys like Noah Rothman argue it is time usher in that final battle. This from a guy who would soil himself in a physical confrontation. As Tucker Carlson has recently started to mention, hatred of Donald Trump is now bringing the neocons back to the Left, by turning the Left into vocal advocates for violence against Trump.

It is tempting to write-off the neocons as lounge chair imperialists with divided loyalties, but the central theme to their warmongering is always Russia. Their general lack of interest in confronting China, which a real threat to the US, or Mexico, which is a collapsing narco-state on our border, suggests violence is not the core issue. We launch drone attacks all over the Middle East, we could certainly drone Mexican drug cartels. If the neocon just wanted blood, that would be a much more promising target.

Their singular focus is Russia. Even their opposition to Trump is based on his unwillingness to talk about Putin as Hitler. If you list all of the neocon wars and desired wars, Russia is the common theme. The defining characteristic of the neocon is a hatred for Russia, viewing it as the Mordor in the great battle between the righteous and the wicked. Their reason to exist is to bring about the final confrontation. Whatever it was, neoconservatism now functions as a death cult.

¹I know.

²I know.

The Gathering Darkness

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In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell wrote, “One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.” It is a wonderful observation that applies to much more than just affirmative action. It seems to apply to all aspect of the Left. Today’s minority view is tomorrows absolute, inviolable dogma.

That has been the way with the Left and science. It used to be common to see a Subaru or Volvo decorated with a Darwin fish. The point was to let the world know that the driver was a good liberal, who embraced reason, rather than superstition. Of course, the other point was to stick it to Christians, who the Left had declared their enemy in the middle of the last century. Even so, science was a big part of how Progressives defined themselves, but then suddenly, imperceptibly, the opposite was true.

That’s what we are seeing with the response to David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here and the subsequent articles he has written about his research. The great Greg Cochran has been reviewing the book, pointing out the bizarre contortions Reich goes through in order to avoid having his lab burned down. It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Reich fears an angry torch wielding mob, but it is only a small exaggeration. Many careers have been ruined by getting on the wrong side of the mob.

Understandably, Cochran takes exception to much of this, because he is a true man of science. He values truth above all else. He has no patience for the political, and now theological, nonsense that saturates the modern academy. There’s also a personal aspect to it, as Reich takes some cheap shots at the late Henry Harpending, who was Cochran’s colleague for many years. They collaborated on The 10,000 Year Explosion and on this groundbreaking paper. Cochran can be forgiven for taking this a bit personal.

On the other hand, though, David Reich is young. He is in his prime years as a scientist and as such he has to be careful to not upset the mullahs in the orthodoxy. That’s why he is going through these ham-handed efforts to inoculate himself against the charge of heresy. The morality police may not burn down his lab, but they are more than happy to burn down his career. If they will hurl a giant like James Watson into the void, they will not flinch at David Reich.

If you are old enough to remember the 1980’s, you remember a time when it was Progressives chanting about free speech, the need for independent media and the glories of scientific inquiry. Today, it feels like a million years ago, only because none of it is true now and not just in small ways. Progressives have swung so far in the opposite direction, becoming what they always claimed they were fighting, it is impossible to imagine them being otherwise.

The funny thing is that our Progressive mullahs are probably worse than the people who suppressed Galileo. Relatively speaking, they are worse than Torquemada. The old inquisitor was quite lenient, relevant to the age, when stealing a cow could get you hanged. Galileo’s trouble with the Church had as much to do with politics and his personal squabbles as science. Today, the people in charge take a perverse pleasure in destroying the life of a heretic. Billionaires now hunt Dirt People on-line for sport.

If you are in the human sciences, none of this is lost on you. If you read academic papers, they have become so thick with jargon and statistics, they are impenetrable to all but the people in the field. Some of it is the normal pattern of group behavior, but some of it is a defense against the charge of heresy. Instead of writing coded notes in the margins of approved texts, people in the human sciences rely on impenetrable gibberish and eye-glazing statistics.

One thing that is clear, in hindsight, is that Church efforts to contain the growth of scientific inquiry were a rearguard action. The institutional place of the Church was not toppled by science and reason. The role of religious institutions was already diminishing with the rise of the secular institutions and the spread of commerce. The clergy was no longer the richest faction in European society. Their efforts to re-impose order on society was reactionary and doomed. The world was changing.

Perhaps something similar is happening with Progressives and human sciences. Their embrace of reason was always like their embrace of liberal democracy, socialism and social reform. It is as a means to an end. Free speech was a bus they rode from their position outside the academy, to a position atop the academy. Once they got to their destination, they got off the free speech bus. That is certainly true of their embrace of science and reason. Once they gained power, they peeled the Darwin fish off the car.

On the other hand, there is no reason to think that humanity is a linear progression from tribal darkness to some glorious post-human future. We have the phrase “dark ages” because there have been dark ages, when society collapsed and sat dormant for centuries. Back when the turn began, Allan Bloom wrote that relativism and multiculturalism were ushering in a closing of the American mind. Perhaps now we are seeing the fruit, the coming of a new dark age ruled by fanatics and dullards.

The War On Us

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Whether you know it or not, you are at war. It’s not a shooting in the street war, at least not yet, but it is a war. Specifically, the people in charge have decided to wage war on segments of the American society. To paraphrase the late historian Christopher Lasch, the managerial elite has turned their back on average Americans and opted instead for a ruthlessly cosmopolitan view of life, one that values rootlessness, internationalism and transience. Increasingly, their ends are in direct conflict with liberal democracy.

Another way of looking at this is that the managerial elite has reached class consciousness in the Marxist sense. Who they are is defined by who they are not and who they are not is you. Their class interests may or may not overlap with the interests of society, but their identity, their sense of who they are as a class, only exists in opposition to the white middle class. That also puts them at odds with the institutions of liberal democracy. That’s the point of this article this article on the new Civil War.

Peter Leyden is a high end grifter who makes his money telling the managerial elite what they want to hear. He pitches himself as a technologist, despite having no math or science. He’s a blend of Alvin Toeffler and Tony Robbins. Ruy Teixeira is an old Progressive hand, who has spent his life pushing various political strategies to help the Democrat Party win elections, mostly by undermining the white middle class through open borders and multiculturalism. These are men who know the mind of the managerial class.

Most of the article is complete nonsense, especially the part about blue state energy versus red state energy. That’s almost as daffy as framing the Republicans as the party of the elites and the Democrats as the party of middle America. That is the thing though. They did not write the article to clarify. It was written to flatter. These are people who make their money telling the people in charge what they want to hear. When Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, is retweeting the post, it means it rocketed around the ruling class.

The other interesting thing about the piece is the naked hatred of white people. If you read “Republican” to mean white middle-class, the snarling is not hard to miss. Much has been written about the motivations of the open borders people. There’s certainly a money angle, with business wanting cheap labor. There’s also a political component, as the Democrats cannot win without foreign voters. The core motivation,  that co-evolved with class consciousness, is a visceral hatred of white America. They really do want to replace us.

This is why they really hate Trump, despite the fact he is more than willing to sign off on big slabs of the Democratic agenda. He’s not a threat on social issues and he will spend like crazy on infrastructure projects, that disproportionately help Democratic Party constituencies. They hate what he represents. Trump is a reminder that white people will not go quietly into the night. Again, the article reads like the authors spend their nights dreaming of genocide. They do not want to win; they want to win permanently.

Of course, the increasingly bold and sophisticated efforts to wall off the public square from dissent is part of this larger project. The social media platforms are now using sophisticated analytics to piece together the network of people they see as the enemy of their class. This lets them coordinate their efforts to purge dissent from their platforms, without having to go to the trouble of finding violations. They are using the tools they developed for the Chinese Communists, against American dissidents.

The brashness of it is suggestive too. They are now censuring harmless black ladies because they amusingly support Trump. After all, all is fair in war. It’s one thing to censure some guy, claiming he is alt-right or a racist. No one is going to believe two middle-aged black ladies are in the alt-right or part of a racist group. This indicates they no longer think they have to conceal their motivations. We’re a couple of clicks away from people having their credit cards cancelled because they live in an area that votes heavy Republican.

That last bit may sound ridiculous, but we have credit card companies working to prevent you from using your Visa card to buy a gun. If that is permissible, it is a short trip from there to shutting off your internet access because you will not die fast enough. More important, the fact that the captains of industry, the tech giants, are sitting around scheming of ways to undermine the very notion of your citizenship, suggests they see no limits to what they can do to solve their problems with the white middle class of America.

Again, this is war and all’s fair in war. You may not think you are at war with them, but they are at war with you. The longer you stay stupid about it, the better. That’s why the morons at places like Reason Magazine and Cato get a free pass. You can be sure they will be celebrating “property rights” when every bank in America coincidentally stops doing business with gun makers and gun retailers. What’ the matter? Are you against free enterprise? Start your own bank and credit card system if you don’t like freedom!

Over the last couple of decades, many reform minded writers have been doing yeoman’s work, trying to convince the public, but also the ruling class, that preserving the heritage of America is essential to maintaining civil order and liberal democracy. Lots of people in the civic nationalist camp agree with this approach. Just one more election, one more reform movement. The trouble is the people in charge are at war and the only things they want to hear are the time and place of your death or the time and place of your surrender.

The Museum Is Closed

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Imagine you are asked to compete against another person. Let’s say it is a manly contest like boxing or martial arts. The person arranging it talks about the fight in a conventional way, allowing you to assume the match will follow the conventional rules for the sport. Let’s say it is agreed that on a given day, you will show up and box the champion from the other team. You show up on that day, learn that the guy is twice your size and he will be allowed to use a sword in the ring.

That’s a ridiculous scenario, but the point is the only way there can be a fair competition is when both sides abide by the same set of rules. Otherwise you find yourself in the ring with a giant, trying to dodge his weapon of choice. This is something most men learn on the playground as kids. The exception seems to be conservatives, who have been allowing themselves to be clubbed by the Left for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. They still cannot grasp this basic concept.

Michael Anton, who penned “The Flight 93 Election” back when he was hiding behind a pen-name, articulated very well in an exchange with me what millions of conservatives believe to be true:

The old American ideal of judging individuals and not groups, content-of-character-not-color-of-skin, is dead, dead, dead. Dead as a matter of politics, policy and culture. The left plays by new rules. The right still plays by the old rules. The left laughs at us for it — but also demands that we keep to that rulebook. They don’t even bother to cheat. They proclaim outright that “these rules don’t apply to our side.”

I disagree with Anton’s prescription — to surrender to identity politics and cheat the way our “enemies” do — but I cannot argue much with this description of a widespread mindset. Many on the right are surrendering to the logic of the mob because they are sick of double standards. Again, I disagree with the decision to surrender, but I certainly empathize with the temptation. The Left and the mainstream media can’t even see how they don’t want to simply win, they want to force people to celebrate their victories (“You will be made to care!”). It isn’t forced conversion at the tip of a sword, but at the blunt edge of a virtual mob.

Goldberg is not alone in this. Buckley conservatives, neocons and libertarians spend every waking moment prattling on about their principles. This is understandable for libertarians and neocons. The former are outlandishly stupid and the latter are subversively dishonest. Conservatives, on the other hand, are supposed to accept the world for what it is. The starting place for conservatism has always been an acceptance of the human condition. Conservatism is the absence of ideology, in the words of Kirk.

It’s tempting to write-off the Buckleyites as sellouts and grifters. There’s certainly some of that. Being a good punching bag has put Jonah Goldberg into a million dollar home in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods on earth. Being wrong a lot pays really well, if you’re willing to be the Left’s footstool. There’s also the dunce factor. Being a pundit does not require a high IQ. That’s why you don’t find too many math majors in the chattering classes. It is entirely possible that many conservatives think they are right.

To continue to play by a set of rules that guarantees failure and failure guarantees a non-conservative outcome is pretty much the antithesis of conservatism. Fundamental to conservatism is the belief in a transcendent moral order. No matter what political mechanisms it may utilize or the rules it relies upon to operate its political machinery, a society of people morally adrift, living at odds with the natural order, is an immoral and unjust society. Ordered depravity is still depravity. Principles are a means to an end.

That’s why the argument from guys like Goldberg, that conservatism is about means, not ends, is fundamentally un-conservative. Conservatives since the dawn of time have understood that it is the ends that matter. The form of government is only useful in achieving good ends. Custom, convention, and continuity are the proven means for attaining a society in-tune with the natural order, but conservatism does not require a mindless fidelity to the past. If the ends require it, novelty is perfectly acceptable.

Of course, you can make a fetish of rules and your own adherence to principle when you don’t have skin in the game. Much of what plagues conservatism, and has for at least two generations, is the modern conservative is a man who prefers to live in imagination land, rather that the real world. Jonah Goldberg can be on the losing side of every debate, because it has no impact on his life. When he loses to the big guy with the spiky club, it is someone else who takes the beating. Most of us cannot afford to be so principled.

The fact remains, the people now claiming ownership of the label conservative are not actually conservative. Even calling them “northern conservatives” is a crime against the language. They are simply guys who say their lines in their role as foil for the prevailing orthodoxy. They have been nothing more than a collection of cartoon villains for the morality play concocted by Progressives. At the dawn of the demographic age, they no longer even work as props in the morality play. They are museum pieces.

 

Nothing Is Ever On The Level

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After the crooked FBI agent, Andrew McCabe, was finally fired by Mister Magoo, there were posts in official media about the wrongness of it. After all, he would lose his pension, we were told, because of politics. Of course, that was never true. He would lose some extra benefits, but it would be a drop in the bucket. A former FBI man of his status will land in a high six-figure job. Given his status he could even end up at a financial house, making seven figures.

Soon after that round of stories, a new set of stories popped up about his crowd-sourced fundraising effort. He was up on GoFundMe. The point of the stories was to show that the public was rallying to the side of this poor man, a victim of the evil Donald Trump and his Nazi minions. Regardless of the agit-prop, there was no doubt that he was raising a lot of money. Then, it turned out to be a complete fraud. The whole thing was an elaborate PR effort from a lobbying firm.

Andrew McCabe recently raised over half a million dollars from small donors by way of crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. McCabe’s cash-collecting prowess was buoyed by several #Resistance-linkedpersonalities and MSNBC’s own Rachel Maddow, who suggested McCabe should run for office because he’s so good at raising money.

Was this apparent “grassroots effort” actually a PR campaign put together by high-priced, well-connected, and experienced PR professionals in order to take advantage of the #Resistance’s seething anger at the Trump administration? A Monday report in Slate suggested as much. Law&Crime can now confirm that some of those allegations are true, while some of them appear to oversell the issues at hand.

Most likely, the firm behind this scheme provided the logistics, but also the seed money to get the fund going. The theory behind this stuff is that people will donate if they see other people donating. If other people are giving to this guy’s fund, then you may feel more comfortable giving money, because you assume it is the right thing to do, based on the fact others are doing it. This is marketing 101. Companies often use various forms of indirect peer pressure to sell product.

Of course, there is another angle to this.

Melissa Schwartz is a crisis and communications consultant who currently works for The Bromwich Group. After previously working for then-Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Department of Justice, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (where she served under her once-and-future boss), Schwartz joined The Bromwich Group as their chief operating officer in 2012. She’s also McCabe’s present spokesperson.

The Bromwich Group is a K Street consulting and PR firm headed by Michael R. Bromwich. Immediately prior to founding the firm, Bromwich served as the first director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management under President Barack Obama. As a former mineral extraction regulator, Bromwich promised that his firm would never lobby for energy industry clients. Prior to this role, Bromwich served as the Inspector General for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton.

Given the people involved, would it surprise anyone if McCabe is eventually found stretched out in Fort Marcy Park? That’s most likely been carefully explained to the McCabe family in detail. Even the most generous reading of events suggests McCabe is a man who knows too much. For now, the syndicate is looking out for him, but eventually he’ll have to be dealt with in a more permanent manner. You don’t want to be the guy selling him life insurance right now.

That aside, it is a good reminder that nothing is on the level. Politics has always been crooked, but the degree of dishonesty is different. Rachel Maddow is a dunce, but the people running MSNBC are not stupid. They knew what this firm was doing. They probably offered to help promote it. Today, it is prudent to assume everything in mass media is a carefully considered PR campaign. The point of the media is to bamboozle the public in some way. Nothing is on the level and no grift is too small.

Baltimore

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The week started out as a million frustrations, but then ended like the first warm day after a rotten winter. First the pistol packing Persian reminded us of the importance of keeping our skills up by going to the range once a month. Then the fates handed Sloppy Williamson a little bit of payback for being a colossal douche. It is a good reminder that there  is always some good news around the corner.

The funny thing is the best bit of news this week was getting hurled into the void by the social media police. Not looking at this stuff for a couple of days has been a real boost to morale. I remember reading somewhere that Facebook users report being less happy than non-Facebook users. Maybe there is something to it. Staring at the reality of your fellow man for too long may be like looking into the Ark of the Covenant.

This week I have the usual variety of items. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening (Music)
  • 02:00: The Baltimore Riots (Link) (Link) (Music)
  • 12:00: Move To Iowa (Link) (Music)
  • 22:00: The Morality Business (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Suburban White Boy Astrology (Link)
  • 37:00: Democracy On Mars (Link)
  • 42:00: Decolonizing Perverts (Link)
  • 47:00: College Debt (Link)
  • 52:00: Greek Bondage (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

In Defense Of Kevin Williamson

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I’ve made no bones about the fact I don’t like Kevin Williamson. I’ve called him “Sloppy Williamson” and a “gold-plated phony” for years. I think his quill pen act is just that, an act intended to make his otherwise mediocre views appear sophisticated. I know that is probably unfair of me, but some people just bug the crap out of me and Williamson is one of them. I fully accept that I could be wrong in my opinion.

The point is, I take a back seat to no man in my disdain for Williamson and all of the Buckleyite-Conservatarian-Libertarian cabal. To borrow a Derb phrase, I’m a low number hater on this score. That said, what the Atlantic Magazine has done to Kevin Williamson is despicable. In fact, it looks like they plotted it, hiring the guy knowing they would soon fire him, because the lunatics would start howling. Even if the execrable Jeffrey Goldberg simply folded to pressure, firing Williamson is immoral.

Kevin Williamson is a guy with bills and responsibilities. He needs an income like most everyone else in this world. Firing someone is never something to be taken lightly, because it is a life altering experience. To hire a guy away from one company, only to fire him a week later, is to recklessly cause harm to another, for no other reasons than a failure to do your job. If Jeffrey Goldberg was really upset by his hiring of Williamson, he should have quit as editor-in-chief, but that would require personal integrity.

There’s a larger point here. The Atlantic is basically succumbing to the mob, one that is most likely entirely artificial. It is the ultimate heckler’s veto. A relatively tiny cabal of lunatics get to determine who is and who is not allowed on the public stage. It’s exactly what can never be allowed to happen if you want a civil society. The reason is, torch wielding mobs encourage the formation of counter mobs, who see that their only rational option is to meet force with force.

Just as important, from our perspective, is what our Progressive oppressors are trying to establish with this move. All of a sudden, a guy who is slightly to the right of center – maybe – is now beyond the pale. Williamson’s views on social issues like abortion and gender delusions are held by the majority of Americans. What this is about is a new push by our oppressors to make any criticism of their increasingly deranged opinions a disqualifying act. If Williamson can’t get work, imagine what happens to us.

One of the great mistakes of the Buckleyites has been to think they can cut a deal with the Left, by purging people to their right. The various groups in polite conservative circles have been silent as people on our side have been systematically attacked by the orthodoxy and shut out of public debate. Now they find themselves facing the same challenge. Kevin Williamson has just learned that no matter how much he disavowed our side, Progressives would never accept him.

Welcome to the party pal.

Edit: I dashed this off in five minutes, so I was not clear on a couple of things. One is the dumb cuck had it coming. If you get in bed with Lefty, expect to wake up with a lot of problems. The other thing is these guys give legitimacy to Progressive media by going on their platforms, so I have no sympathy for them when they get thrown off of them. I just wanted to make the point that we either have a public square or we have mob rule. I’m good with either, but I don’t think the people in charge want the latter.

A Million Petty Tyrants

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When news broke that someone was shooting up YouTube, the usual suspects geared up to profit from it. You can be sure that the ridiculous little twerp David Hogg was looking for cheap airfare to California, so he could mug for the cameras. Then it turned out to be a Persian woman, who was pissed about being censured. She was a nut, but what sent her over the edge was the way she was treated by the petty tyrants of YouTube. She was the multicultural version of Falling Down.

The funny thing is, none of the respectable people have bothered to notice what has been happening with social media until now. This story on PJ Media takes the girl angle and this post on National Review takes the CivNat approach. If the shooter had been Baked Alaska or Sam Hyde, they would be saying the usual things about extreme right wing extremist hate speakers. Instead it was a neurotic foreign vegan, tormented into a homicidal rage by the semi-official thought police now running the public square.

Of course, when bullets start flying, people tend to get serious. Up until now, the people running the social media companies have paid no price for their behavior. In fact, they have been publicly praised by the left side of the ruling class, and quietly praised by the right side. All of a sudden, the folks in charge have to consider the possibility of a lunatic with a gun showing up in their offices, when one of their moderators willy-nilly decides to nuke a user account. That changes the math of being the morality police.

Even through this has been ignored by the media, there are now two types of meetings going on in companies like YouTube. The people in charge are huddling in their executive suites, talking about security and how best to make sure the next lunatic does not get beyond the first floor. The soulless shrew running YouTube will no doubt make sure security around her is beefed up in response to this incident. She will probably issue a memo demanding greater vigilance by the YouTube morality police.

There is a second form of meeting going on today. That’s the one in the lunchrooms and chat rooms for employees of these social media companies. These are the people who take the bullet when the next pistol packing Persian shows up with a beef about the arbitrarily enforced terms of service. At least for a little while, some of them will think twice before pushing the button to delete a video or take down an account. After all, that vegan yoga instructor with quirky politics, could be a really good marksman.

A smart man once said that the post-modern age is a period where the best people painfully relearn all the things everyone used to know. For example, the whole point of liberal democracy was not to give the people a say in how things are run, but to give them a non-violent veto. Instead of the angry rabble stringing up their local rulers and burning down their mansion, the angry rabble gets to vote out some candidates or perhaps pass a referendum that will be ignored. Political liberty is the pressure release.

The guy on street corner, waving around a manifesto, proselytizing to his fellow citizens, is only a threat to the public order, if the people in charge don’t have better answers or a way to steal his ideas. Otherwise, he is just a crank who can be ignored. Today, the street corner is a user account on social media and the manifesto is a series of videos detailing some political or social cause. All of which is entirely harmless, just as long as the people in charge have better answers. Within this lifetime, people used to know this.

Something else people used to know is that the guy with a tiny bit of power, is often the most dictatorial. Meter maids, building inspectors, zoning office clerks, these are people with very narrow authority, but hey wield it with the zeal of a bloodthirsty tyrant. That is because the sort of people attracted to the work, are the sort of people looking for any chance to have authority over another person. The way American cities solved their sadist problem is they installed parking meters and made the sadists into meter maids.

Today, it is the social media companies hiring the petty tyrants, sadists and mentally disturbed spinsters, giving them a job of reading your tweets. These are the people who scan the internet, looking for “hate speech” they can put on a list, so that other petty tyrants can use it to torment the hate speaker or anyone interested in him. These are people who relish the task, because it is the only time anyone notices them. Our public space is turning into a daycare center run by sadistic schoolmarms.

The people in charge of social media firms spend so much time smelling their own farts, they truly think they can regulate what the world has to say about things. Again, people used to know better. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and reality is, there is no controlling public opinion. There is no way to stifle dissent. The only thing that comes from efforts to do so is a violent response. But, the petty tyrants will only learn that lesson when the next Persian vegan shows up at their door.

Prince Rupert’s Revenge

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There was a time when it was possible to have cordial and even friendly relations with people on the Left. I spent many hours debating my lefty friends over drinks, about the defects of various central planning schemes. Anyone my age or older remembers the way these debates would go. One side talked about economic justice for the working class, while the other side talked about the glory of free markets. Usually, the “right-winger” would bring up the Soviets.

Often, one side or the other would get mad, but it was rarely personal. People get hot in political debates, mostly because we are social animals. Conflict with people inside our group vexes us. It makes us uncomfortable. That was the thing. Liberals and non-liberals could operate in the same peer group. The reason is the Left and Right back then, agreed on the goals. Both sides wanted prosperity. The Left believed socialism produced plenty, while the Right believed a rising tide lifted all boats.

Thinking back, a strange thing happened in the 1990’s, with regards to my own debates with lefty friends and acquaintances. The debates in the 90’s were almost all about the peculiar personal lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Right was always scandal mongering and the Left was conjuring novel defenses for the degeneracy of Bill Clinton and the personal corruption of Hillary. These revolved around Red Team/Blue Team scat fights, that had little to do with policy or ideology. It was just ritualized tribal warfare.

That changed instantly with the 2000 election. All of my lefty friends and acquaintances went insane overnight.  They hated Bush with the intensity of a fanatic. The wars made it impossible to have a discussion with the Left. Granted, many of us were naïve about the lunacy of the neocons, but the Left’s opposition was never more than shrieking madness. How does one debate someone who thinks Halliburton controls the weather and attacked New Orleans?

I remember thinking my lefty friends would return to sanity after Bush left office, but that never happened. A few stopped foaming at the mouth, but for the most part, they crossed into a realm from which there is no return. In the Obama years, they went from one peculiar fad to the next. One week it was homosexual marriage, while the next week it was claims about sex being a social construct. There’s simply no discussion, much less debating, these issues with them.

Looking back, it’s useful to think about the fight between the Left and the Right as a set-piece battle on an agreed upon battlefield. At the center of both sides was economics. The Right had religious archers and the constitutional conservatives on the flanks, but the center of the army was formed around economic issues. Similarly, the Left had race hustlers, second and third wave feminists on the flanks, but their main line troops, the center of the line, were economic Utopians.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had an enormous impact on the ruling classes of the West. In America, it meant the center of the Progressive army broke and fled in all directions. The flanks, however, the racial justice warriors, the gender dragoons and exotic identity battalions rushed into the center, forming a new main line of the Left. The Right, despite carrying the day, was too busy setting up battlefield trophies to notice that the Left had reformed around sexual and racial fanatics, so they promptly surrendered.

A curious thing is happening to this new center of the Progressive battle line. Their moral certainty about the innate equality of man and his infinite malleability, is crumbling in the face of scientific reality. The release of David Reich’s book is the latest direct hit on Boasian anthropology. The response from the soft sciences, which has been a key intellectual authority for the blank slate Progressives, looks like a panicked flight from the battle field. They simply have no answer to science.

The tent pole holding up modern Progressivism is the assertion that all humans are essentially the same and that the observable differences are trivial. All of the Left’s arguments spring from that belief. It’s why they insist the magic of white privilege is the reason black crime is so high or rape culture is why girls don’t go into STEM fields at the same rate as boys. In other words, magic is a plausible answer, as long as reality is ruled out as an option. Biological realism explodes the center of Progressive theology.

That’s what we see happening all over the human sciences. Twenty years ago, some guy in a cardigan could claim that racism was learned behavior and their was no biological basis for race. He could be held up as an intellectual authority and therefore, a moral authority. Genetics is undermining the intellectual authority of those preaching cultural anthropology, multiculturalism and the blank slate. The main line of the Progressive army is suddenly looking like a bunch of primitives chanting oogily-boogily.

It’s tempting to say I’m getting ahead of myself, but we have millions of people relying on DNA services to map their ancestry. Genetics is promising new cures for disease and soon, people will be able to get their intellectual destiny for $50. It will not be long before some clever fertility lab begins offering bespoke artificial insemination, using donors with desirable traits, based on their genetics. People are becoming habituated to the idea that humans are different, because of biology, not culture.

The question, of course, is where does the Left go now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, what we call Progressivism was mostly a Protestant crusade. In the 20th century, they shifted to embracing  the economic utopianism of socialism, with racial and sexual politics as side acts. For the last three decades, the dream of sexual and racial utopias has been the dominant theme of the Left. Once the blank slate is broken on the wheel of biological reality, what comes next?

The answer could be nothing. There are many currents to American history, but the dominant one is what John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War. It is our inheritance from the mother country. The story of America has been the good whites and bad whites, the Roundheads and Cavaliers, fighting for control of the country. It’s also a conflict of visions, where the Roundheads always embraced extreme egalitarianism, while the Right has embraced the natural hierarchy of man.

November Rain

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The conventional wisdom says the Republicans are headed for a bloodbath in the November midterm elections. Sadly, it will not be a literal bloodbath, but it could be a big swing in the House. The Senate is a different issue, as most of the seats up this time are currently held by Democrats. Many of them are in states that tilt Republican and many are held by blockheads like Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. The House is where the Democrats have a chance to claw back larger capitol offices.

Now, there are some things to keep in mind when thinking about this stuff. One is the mass media is just the propaganda wing of the Democrat party, so they will be endlessly gas lighting us from now until November. Then there is the fact that the gerrymandering of House districts has made most of them bulletproof. About 15% of seats are truly competitive now. There’s also the fact that the Democrat freak show tends not to show up in midterms. T

To get some sense of what could happen this November, I took a look at the district by district results in presidential races over the last three cycles. If a Republican held a seat during the Obama years, it is a safe bet that the seat is solid GOP. If a Democrat held the seat, despite blowouts in 2010 and 2014, the safe bet is the seat is solid Democrat. The result is 183 seats that the GOP will always win and 194 that Democrat will always win.

That means there are 58 house seats that are in play this election. Redistricting and local issues will always play some role. Then there is the fact that solid districts can swing to the other party because the default candidate is weird or corrupt. Still, the fact that incumbents win 85% of the time and we have 13% of the seats in the contested column, means the real election will be over roughly sixty seats this fall. The “Great Shellacking” in 2010 resulted in 63 seats swinging to the GOP.

Another aspect to this midterm is the fact that Hillary Clinton did not win any of the solid GOP districts and she only won in eight weak Republican districts. Even more interesting, she won in just five toss-up districts. The Democrats perform like a regional party, with a small number of high intensity zones. This has been true since 2006, when the Democrats last had a good midterm. In order to win a toss-up district, they have to put up a candidate that does not remind the voters of his party’s leadership.

There’s also the local flavor. A district like Arizona’s 2nd is a good example. The district went Clinton in 2016, but had been solid GOP for the previous four presidential elections. In 2012, the Democrats won the seat, but lost it in 2014. The Republican incumbent then trounced the Democrat in the 2016 election, despite the district tipping to Clinton. Voters don’t always punish their representative, just because his or her party is run by idiots. The idiot you know is better than the idiot you don’t know.

The challenge for the Democrats is to find 26 seats held by Republicans that they can flip this November. Assuming the solid districts on both sides, there are 58 “in play” districts this election, give or take. Of those, 33 have been pretty reliable for the GOP. That’s defined as going Republican in presidential elections, even when the Democrats won the White House. That leaves 25 truly vulnerable Republicans in the November midterm, plus or minus the results of redistricting, bad candidates and so forth.

Now, the party holding the White House often does poorly in the midterm elections, as the loyalists of the party out of power are full of anger. They’re still mad about losing the last time. Here’s the breakdown of midterms going back to Reagan.

Year President Approval House Senate
1982 Reagan 42 -26 +1
1986 Reagan 64 -5 -8
1990 Bush I 57 -8 -1
1994 Clinton 48 -52 -8
1998 Clinton 65 +5 0
2002 Bush II 67 +8 +2
2006 Bush II 37 -30 -6
2010 Obama 45 -63 -6
2014 Obama 41 -13 -9

Democrats do vastly worse in midterms than Republicans when they hold the White House. This is a familiarity breeds contempt issue. The average net loss for the Republicans is about 12 seats, with a high side of 30 under Bush in 2006. That 2006 election is probably the absolute bottom for the GOP. The Democrats rely on outlandish lies to get their way into majorities, so they suffer greatly in midterms. Their average loss is 31, which reflects a swing back to normal after a presidential election.

The GOP can look at history and figure they probably hold the House just on inertia. Even when the voters are really mad at them, like 2006, the losses are not catastrophic, despite the claims by the media. After the 2008 election, the media was carrying on about the dawn of the Progressive utopia. In reality, the country remained mostly Republican in inclination and that was proven out in the following midterm. The fact is, the GOP is the majority party in America, because it is the party of the white middle-class.

Now, the one sure way to keep the House in the hands of the GOP is to make sure the Republican president in popular. Reagan was suffering in the polls and his party suffered as a result. Bush was popular in 2002 and his party did well. Clinton was very popular in his second midterm and his party did well in that election. If the GOP wants to avoid a disaster this November, they would be wise to help Trump get over 50% in the polls. The obvious way to do that is help deliver on his campaign promises.