Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of left-wing protests. The first I recall was on the Mall in Washington in the 80’s. I no longer recall what they were protesting, but I recall a stubby old women with a bullhorn hanging off her hip. She was screaming something rhythmic, but the audio was unintelligible. The whole scene was just a freak show for no other purpose than for the freaks to be seen. Tourists took pictures and everyone else just ignored it. It was just a part of the rich pageantry of American democracy.

With some exceptions, that’s the model for all lefty protests. At American Renaissance last year, Antifa and a local women’s group put on an all day freak show for the conference attendees. Some were there to “protests the Nazis”, but most were there for reasons that ran from the obscure to the mysterious. Some appeared to be having some sort of hallucinatory break with reality, rhythmically screaming and twirling around or just making crazy faces at people. Again, the point was to put on a show for onlookers.

This year, the authorities penned them up so passersby could not see them. The only way to get a clean look at the protesters was from the top floor of the conference center and you needed binoculars. I counted maybe 40 people in the protest pen at the peak and at least ten were “media.”  The rules against masks and weapons scared off many of the Antifa, but the rest stayed away knowing they would not be able to put on a show. If a protests happens in the woods and no one sees it, did it really happen?

The general consensus on these groups is that outside of the ones financed by Soros and the Democrats, they are just fringe loonies looking for a reason to protest. The guy with the boot on his head shows up at all sorts of events. There’s an enormously obese black guy, who gets wheeled into protests around the country. He usually just sits in a beach chair so people can take pics of him. Then there are the anarchist that just want to smash things and rumble in the streets. Again, it is just a performance that means nothing.

For the last month or so I have been monitoring a bunch of social media accounts of prominent protesters. Mostly it was in preparation for AmRen, but when you scan a lot of them you can’t help but notice the patterns. These people define themselves within their movement by their association with specific events. There’s no normal human back and forth, just trading links and pics from the events they attended. The other type of post is sympathy for some fringe action, as if they get credit by proxy, for the action.

An example of what I mean is this HuffPo piece. Christopher Mathias is actually just an Antifa member they pay to submit field reports for them. Like everyone in these protest movements, he struggles with his sanity. His “report” is actually just a testament to the fact he was there. The protest was a flop as hardly anyone showed up and they were sequestered in a holding pen away from everyone. That left little social credit to be gained from the action, other than tweets and selfies from those who bothered to attend.

I recently had some interaction with a local group affiliated with Antifa, at least that’s what they said. They may have been boasting, but they were definitely into the protest life. That was the thing. All they talked about was where they had been and the “actions” they had done. It was what got me thinking about these protest groups functioning like a cult, where the events are social credits within the subculture. If all you talk about and all you focus on in your life is the events you attended, the attendance has a lot of value to you.

What it brought to mind is people who get into narrow hobbies like model trains or some sort of collecting. They get together not to trade information about their hobby, but to display what they have or what they know. Their events are peacocking festivals so they can display their social capital. Oddly, prisons work on a similar dynamic. Prison ink is about advertising your history in the system and your violence capital. That suggests the protest culture is entirely inward looking and not really about getting our attention.

This would explain why they have started to fight with one another. The alt-right has retreated from the real world and has stopped fighting with Antifa on-line. The affiliated actors like TWP have evaporated. If your thing is to protest other fringe groups and those fringe groups have left the field, you end up protesting yourself. Or in the case of some, like Lacy MacAuley, they start jump from one momentary issue to the next. It’s the old gag. Question: What are you rebelling against? Answer: What have you got?

None of this may seem all that interesting, but it raises questions about modernity. This phenomenon did not exist in the 19th century or the 15th century. These subcultures rooted in vague and shifting causes did not exist in our grandparents age. A major reason is the splintering of society on the rocks of diversity. There’s also the collapse of mainstream Christianity and the related collapse of traditional social arrangements. These sorts of subcultures were denied oxygen in a thriving and dominant mainstream culture.

A regular topic of debate on the Dissident Right is whether or not conservatives know they are just props for the Left. Some argue that they know and have always known, but they like the lifestyle that comes with it. There’s no getting around the fact that guys like Jonah Goldberg live fabulous lives while being nothing more than stooges. The sheer volume of losing by gentry conservatives should be enough to wake up even the dumbest and most naïve.

Others are more generous, arguing that conservatives are simply naïve or mistaken about the nature of the Left. They come out of orderly upper middle-class suburbs where the rules makes sense and everyone abides by those rules as a matter of courtesy. That makes gentry conservatism and Reason magazine libertarianism attractive to them. After all, their Progressive friends are great people, the best people, so they can surely be persuaded. It just takes the right argument.

Reading Kevin Williamson’s latest retelling of his firing from the Atlantic, those arguing in favor of gross stupidity get a boost. At the start of his piece, he claims to have predicted what would happen to him if he took the Atlantic job.

In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hired me away from National Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor for 10 years.

“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t high church for liberals.”

My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.

Assuming this is true, he took the job knowing it would result in a mob of angry liberals calling for his death. His decision to go through with it could be seen as just part of the Progressive passion play, with Williamson gladly playing his part. The trouble is he rather clearly thought the very liberal Jeffrey Goldberg was some sort of honorable guy, rather than a typical fanatic. More important, he thought Goldberg would stand up to his coreligionists when they came to haul away the heretic. That’s remarkably stupid.

Of course, for gentry conservatives, being remarkably stupid about the nature of motivations of the Left has been a badge of honor for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The hallmark of gentry conservatism for generations has been the insistence on playing by a set of rules the other side refuses to respect, a set of rules that guarantees failure by the so-called Right. Even the allegedly hard-boiled realists of Buckley Conservatism, like Williamson, can’t seem to grasp this obvious bit of reality.

Then there is this tidbit later in the column. Williamson writes “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.”  No doubt he was thinking of the internet meme, probably thinking the quote is from Voltaire. The line is actually from an old white nationalist named Kevin Alfred Strom. Dumb people tend to believe what they see on the internet, without making sure of the source and accuracy.

At the end of his column, Williamson writes this.

Where my writing appears is not a very important or interesting question. What matters more is the issue of how the rage-fueled tribalism of social media, especially Twitter, has infected the op-ed pages and, to some extent, the rest of journalism. Twitter is about offering markers of affiliation or markers of disaffiliation. The Left shouts RACIST!, and the Right shouts FAKE NEWS! There isn’t much that can be done about this other than treating social media with the low regard it deserves.

But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and magazines, some of the old rules should still apply. By all means, let’s have advocacy journalism, but let’s make sure about the journalism part of it: Do the work, ask the questions, give readers a reason to assume that what’s published adheres to some basic standards of intellectual honesty. To do otherwise is to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless partisan opportunism.

Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter mob, which is a jealous god. Jealous and kind of stupid.

Conservatism, at its root, is the acceptance of reality. The man of the Right accepts the world as it is and acts accordingly. Williamson looks out at a world overrun by Progressive mobs, egged on by our Progressive rulers, and concludes that the only proper response is to pretend it is otherwise. He’s nobly walking in front of the speeding train, because trains should not speed. That’s not principled conservatism. That’s suicidal stupidity. Williamson is the example for the side arguing that these guys are morons.

In the end, it probably matters little if gentry conservatism is dying from subversion or stupidity, other than as a cautionary tale. The lesson that Williamson is unable to learn is not lost on the others hoping to get on the big Progressive stage. They will be sure to scrub their time lines and avoid saying or writing anything that could offend their Progressive paymasters. The golden rule is immutable. The man with the gold makes the rules, which is why the Dissident Right needs to build its own institutions.

About a dozen years ago, I heard a Brit remark that you can get charged with rape in Sweden if you brush against a woman in an elevator. It did not quite register with me at the time. I just thought it was an exaggeration about Swedish prudishness. Then a few years later Assange was charged with rape and it made sense. He was accused of having sex with two women and then not calling them the next day. In Sweden, hurt feelings and regret are enough to support a rape charge.

What no one knew at the time is that the estrogen fueled lunacy that was raging in Sweden was headed our way. The #metoo stuff is pretty much what happened in Sweden, except it is playing out on social media. Of course, it was the gals in Sweden who demanded the nation import millions of swarthy males from over the horizon, so the Swedes could have a real rape problem, rather than an imaginary one. That most likely means the girls of the #metoo movement will be demanding the same for us.

A popular topic in our thing is the fact that our women have gone insane. Some say the mistake was giving them the vote a century ago. Others say it was multiculturalism and the resulting break down in society. Both are probably true to some degree, but that does not explain what happened in Sweden. It does not explain why mentally unstable coeds are making up bizarre rape fantasies, like the one at UVA. It does not explain why European women are trying create a land of Amazons in the Baltic Sea.

We’ve all had those moments, whether you’re drowning in work in a cramped cubicle or just tired of the daily grind. In those moments, a thought might cross your mind, like “I wish I could escape to a private island.”

Well, entrepreneur Kristina Roth actually made that happen. She’s not just escaping to an island, she owns it. And she’s opening it up to women worldwide. But men? They’re not allowed.

SuperShe Island is tucked away in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland. The 8.4-acre (literal) no man’s land features four newly renovated cabins and can accommodate 10 people. Its amenities give five-star resorts a run for their money, with Finnish saunas, spa-like facilities and beautifully decorated rooms. Daily wellness activities on the island include yoga, meditation, farm-to-table dining, cooking classes, fitness classes, nature activities and more.

Now, women have always liked being with other women, which is why beauty shops and day spas exist. The thing is though, these activities are not about hating men or hating themselves. Women head off to the day spa so they can get the some of the dents knocked out and look good for their man. Hanging out with their female friends plays a role, but the point of the activity fits in with the traditional male-female relationship. This man-haters island is about man-hating and self-abnegation.

Of course, this is just one wacky example, but all over the West, women have gone bonkers, making crazy demands and fighting against their nature. The star of the linked story is a German women who came to New York to make a nuisance of herself, then went to Finland to create Sappho-by-the-sea. It’s tempting to think this stuff is local, but the fact is the West has had a girl problem for a long time. It started in the early 20th century and then took off in the post-WW2 years. The girls have gone mad.

The question thought, is why has this suddenly happened. In the US, women were mostly normal until the early 20th century. The war years seem to have either accelerated their descent into lunacy or magnified some trends causing it. Modernity is a good scapegoat here, but how much of modernity is caused by the derangement of women? If the girls had held up their end of the sexual relationship, how different would the social mores of modernity be now?

It sounds like I’m blaming the women, but the last century in America is often called the Jewish Century, but it could just as easily be called the Female Century. We went from a world where Western societies were run by men to one where many of them are run by women. Others have ceded much of the high ground to the girls, suggesting it is a matter of time before the girls run the West. A world run by the blue-haired rage heads of gamergate is probably not a world that anyone wants to live in for long.

Back in the financial crisis, I read some stories about how tiny Iceland had turned itself into a massively leveraged hedge fund with a small fishing society attached to it. One explanation was that the male culture of Iceland had always been about pointless risk taking this led to the financial mess. The result was a shift in the culture where women were taking a prominent role and Icelandic women had always been known for their prudence and caution. Iceland is now a tourist island as a result.

Perhaps that’s a clue. The wars of the 19th and 20 century, particular the industrial wars in Europe, discredited Western man generally and particularly. As Spengler would put it, the culture died with the men who died on the battlefields. The society was left, but the animating spirit of it, the passion that built it, was gone. What has filled the void is the raging anguish of Western women. Put another way, the rise of feminism is the spread of women in mourning raging against their loss. Maybe feminism is the long black veil.