Asked And Answered

Since I am about to slide into an extra long weekend and this is the unofficial end of summer, I thought a little housekeeping was in order. I get questions and suggestions on a regular basis via the various ways to reach me. Time is the one thing I do not have in abundance, so responding to queries is something I do when time permits. I’ll go through e-mail once a week or so, for example. I also accumulate questions and suggestions that I get frequently. Individually they may not be worth a post, but cumulatively they will.

Question: How come you don’t take donations?

Answer: I get some version of this regularly. It has become normal for bloggers, podcasters and social media characters to solicit donations, so it is weird when someone does not solicit donations. There’s also the fact that people in our thing understand there is no billionaire support for our people. A guy like Steve Sailer needs the generosity of readers to keep doing what he is doing. It’s fairly obvious that if /ourguys/ had the same access to media as the Left, a lot of our guys would be wealthy media stars.

In my case, it is mostly sloth. All of this is the result of accident, so I never thought about making a business of it or doing it full-time. I have been approached by some people about doing exactly that, but it has not gone beyond the discussion stage. I am starting to think about making this my job, so figuring out how to make money at it is something I’ll need to do. There are examples to follow. Some people sell stuff, like mugs and t-shirts. Others do the crowdfunding route. Sailer, of course, does the quarterly fundraisers.

I’m not sure what would be best for me. I’m not even sure if it is possible to make a living as a gadfly. It is one of those things that I simply have not thought about much, so I don’t know much about it. People manage to do it, but that does not mean I can do it, so there’s that aspect. I’ve been a micro-business man for long enough to know how hard it is to keep the lights on in any business. That means it is hard being a professional internet solo act and there are a lot of tricks to the trade. I need to learn some of those first.

Question: Why do you live in Baltimore?

Answer: Serendipity, for the most part. A dozen years ago it was convenient for work, because I could get to Philly and DC via highway and I was close to one of the better airports. I never expected to be here more than a few years, but one thing led to another and moving was just not in the cards. That and moving is a huge hassle. When you’re young, it is not that big of a deal, because you don’t have much stuff and moving is just a thing young people do. That and helping friends move. When you’re old, moving sucks.

That said, I’m growing increasingly disillusioned by diversity. It turns out that vibrancy is not as vibrant as the Cloud People in the all-white areas say. The other day, I saw a local had been evicted. One of the males was guarding the furniture on the sidewalk. That night, a brawl broke out as other natives tried to haul off the furniture. I decided that I’ve had enough vibrancy, so my time here will be coming to an end. I’m too busy this fall to make moving plans, but spring is a good time, so I’ll start looking for a new house soon.

Question: What will you be doing in Copenhagen?

Answer: I made mention of my trip to the land of the midnight sun in the last podcast and to my surprise, I got a bunch of e-mails from Scandinavian listeners and readers. I’m always surprised by having an international audience. I guess that makes me a cosmopolitan globalist. Most of my audience is in the US, with the UK number two. Interestingly, I get more readers from northern Europe than from Canada. It turns out that Justin from Canada is the typical Canadian male. All Canadian men are like Justin from Canada.

Anyway, it turns out I have an audience in the Nordic lands. I will be in Denmark for a secret handshake society meeting. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about it at this time, but I will report on it after the fact. That will take up most of my time, but I will, I hope, have a chance to get out and enjoy the city a bit. I’ll visit their ghetto and maybe head over to Malmö to see their version of a no-go zone. I don’t want to sound boastful, but I’m guessing it cannot hold a candle to what Lagos on the Chesapeake offers.

Question: What is your opinion of Jordan Peterson?

Answer: I get this one a lot. I did a post about him six months ago, but I don’t find Peterson all that interesting. Frankly, his Kermit the Frog voice is unbearable. Otherwise, he strikes me as just another edgytarian. Strip away all the hand waving and prestidigitation and he is just another guy who accepts the Progressive moral framework. He’s a good example of a certain type we see, in that when he gets to the water’s edge, his instinct is to find a reason to retreat, rather than keep going. You see that in this clip a reader sent me.

Question: What is your view on White Nationalism?

Answer: This is another popular question. The other day, a reader sent me this video, which argues against white nationalism. Firstly, I don’t care for the term, as it conjures an image of toothless hillbillies bitching about the darkies. I’m just not a fan of rehabilitating words and terms that the Left has successfully demonized. As I’m fond of pointing out, even if you manage to rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis, all you end up with is an airport named after him. You will still be living as a minority in your own country.

On the other hand, I had the opportunity to read a draft of Greg Johnson’s new book, which will release next month. It is titled, The White Nationalist Manifesto. I will post a full review of it once it is released, probably around the time of my trip to Denmark. Greg does an excellent job explaining what he means by white nationalism. It’s one of those things where my own bias toward the term may be misplaced and it is a useful shorthand to cover a lot of what gets discussed on our side of the great divide.

Now, as far as the concept of a white ethno-state that Richard Spencer promotes, well, I’m skeptical. There is a reason Europeans fought thousands of wars. Historically, race is not a great unifier. It is useful as a short hand when starting to sort human populations geographically. It’s not the primary identity people have, even in America which has a small former slave population that is entirely of African origin. Caribbean and African immigrants refuse to see themselves as in the same tribe as the former slave population.

Ethnicity is a much stronger bond, especially when it is combined with geography. It’s why, despite the efforts of successive conquerors, Europe is a land of many people with many identities. Even America, a land of white mutts, breaks down regionally. Southern whites see themselves as distinct from the Northern whites. That said, the rest of the world sees American whites as a unique ethnicity. It’s also becoming clear to whites all over America that we are a new identity group within America.

In summary, I think what will happen in Europe is the evolution of a national populism that is rooted in local ethnicity. Poles will work with Italians to oppose globalist and Eurocrats, but will see themselves as primarily Poles and Italians. Localism will make a comeback in a big way in Europe. In the US, the Cold Civil War will eventually give way to an acceptance of demographic reality. America will become a majority-minority country and stop being America, at least the version sold to us at patriotic events.

Question: How is the site doing?

Answer: Because I have not done a site update in months, I’ve gotten some form of this question recently, which is the genesis of this post. Traffic took a slight dip in the spring, more like a flattening of growth, but then it has taken off over the summer. July was up over 10% year-to-year and August is looking about the same. Comments have also gone up considerably. As I mentioned at the start, I’m seeing more European traffic now, so I suspect that someone has discovered me and has promoted the site to his readers.

The podcast has seen a steady increase in listenership. That’s much harder to track, because I can only see the Spreaker and YouTube numbers. I have no idea how many people listen on other formats like Spotify and Google. Using what the alleged experts say about popular podcasts as a guide, I’m doing better than most. Lacking a media megaphone means growth is organic. That and my unwillingness to promote the thing means a slow growth curve. Still, the numbers are way ahead of what I expected.

All that said, it seems that all dissident sites are experiencing a rise in traffic. Others have seen his numbers rise and his comment volume spike. Steve Sailer has had record traffic over the summer. Look around at Conservative Inc. sites and you see tumbleweeds in their comment sections. A rising tide lifts all boats and, to borrow a phrase from our enemies, history is on our side. That means the spike in activity here is most likely just the result of being on the side of Team Future, rather than Team Yesterday.

Have a great weekend. I shall return on Tuesday.

You Own You

One of the odd developments in the technological age is that it looks like the Europeans will be taking the lead in taming the tech giants. Americans have been brainwashed into worshiping business, so any resistance to what the tech companies are doing to us is met with howls of protest. Even the American Left is in the tank for global business. Things are different with the Europeans, who maintain that old socialist distrust of capitalists. That’s what you see in stories like this one, where the Euros are trying to reign in the socials.

Leading journalists from more than 20 countries joined a call Tuesday for European MPs to approve a controversial media reform aimed at forcing internet giants to pay for news content.

European Parliament lawmakers return in September to discuss the proposal, a first draft of which was rejected last month after a fierce debate.

The so-called copyright and neighbouring rights law aims to ensure that producers of creative content—whether news, music or movies—are paid fairly in a digital world.

But the plans have been firmly opposed by big US tech firms such as Google and Facebook, as well as advocates of internet freedom.

An open letter signed by more than 100 prominent journalists from major news outlets warned Tuesday that “this fleecing of the media of their rightful revenue” was “morally and democratically unjustifiable”.

“We have become targets and our reporting missions cost more and more,” said the letter written by AFP foreign correspondent Sammy Ketz and published in several European newspapers including France’s Le Monde.

“Yet, even though (the media) pay for the content and send the journalists who will risk their lives to produce a trustworthy, thorough and diverse news service, it is not they who reap the profits but the internet platforms, which help themselves without paying a cent,” the letter said.

“It is as if a stranger came along and shamelessly snatched the fruits of your labour.”

The editorial urged the European Parliament to “vote massively in favour of neighbouring rights for the survival of democracy and one of its most remarkable symbols: journalism”.

Major publishers, including AFP, have pushed for the reform—known as Article 11—seeing it as an urgently needed solution against a backdrop of free online news that has wiped out earnings for traditional media companies.

The thing that no one ever seems to discuss is that companies like Facebook don’t make anything and their service is barely adequate. What they are doing is exploiting a natural monopoly so they can monetize the creative work of their users, including their personal information. Social media companies are skimming operations that operate on the fringe of legality. These companies harvest all sorts of information from users without their explicit permission. They are even trying to harvest your medical and financial records

The fact is, the social media companies, and that includes Google, have figured out how to transfer the value of creators from the owner to the tech giant. After all, Google’s search engine can only work if there is something worth finding. The search engine has value, but so does the content. The same is true of the content on FaceBook or Twitter. The only reason to be on those platforms is the content generated by users. The platform is a tiny portion of the value, but the platform owners consume all of the revenue from the system.

This is why, as an aside, newspapers and magazines are going broke. It’s not the only reason, but it is a big reason. If the New York Times took down its web site today, just shut it down completely, subscriptions would suddenly spike. The reason is, the entire liberal ecosystem relies on the New York Times for content and direction. It is the home church of the Progressive cult. Their regular readers would go back to buying the paper like the old days. If all newspapers followed suit, the internet gets quiet all of a sudden.

Putting that aside, there is a simple reform that addresses the abuses of the tech giants, as well as some of the other problems created by technology. You own you. That means your personal information, your image, your words, they all belong to you and anyone using them must have written permission. If FaceBook wants to sell your demographic data to some marketing company, they must have your written permission and not just through the abuse of leonine contracts. You have to consent to each sale.

This is not a new idea. Your credit record is not something the credit bureau can distribute without your permission. The propaganda on TV shows, where the cops instantly access the suspect’s credit card and personal records, is just part of the conditioning campaign against privacy. In reality, they need a warrant and it is hard to obtain. A lender must get your written permission to obtain your credit records from a credit bureau. It’s not just for privacy reasons. That information is your property and you have right to control it.

The thing is, this is a very easy solution to the abuses that have arisen from the technological revolution. The doxxing phenomenon popular with the bubble heads of Progressive media would go away with better property protections. All of sudden, they would be forbidden from using the images and personal information of people they wish to harass. Unless they could show that the information they obtained is in the public domain, they would be liable for any damages, plus the criminal use of stolen goods.

Again, this is not terribly difficult to navigate. If it is not yours, then you need permission to possess it. This is the rule with personal property. If you are found in possession of stolen goods, you are charged with a crime. It does not matter if you did not know they were stolen, because you knew the property was not yours. In other words, unless you are the lawful owner of the property, the burden of proof is on you to show you had a right to possess it. The principle is used in security clearances, so it is not an untested concept.

The result of tighter property laws, with regards to personal information, would be the end of social media as a profitable business. No one should weep for them as they are not technology companies in the conventional sense. They are parasites that exploit bottlenecks and gaps in the law to skim from the public. The internet was much more free wheeling and open without companies like Google and FaceBook. The reason for that is there were no stickup men creating bottlenecks in order to rob the users.

Think Local

For most of human history, we understood that people are not the same. Different people had different customs, different gods, different material habits and of course, they looked different. When describing the people of a foreign land, writers and storytellers would spend a lot of time describing these differences. Julius Caesar, in his commentaries on the the conquest of Gaul, was at his best describing the looks and dress of the Gauls. It not only made his tale interesting, it made a point. The Gauls were not Romans.

In one of life’s ironies, as the Left is about to impose its belief in the blank slate and extreme egalitarianism on society, science is unearthing contrary evidence on a near daily basis. It’s fair to say we now have a mountain of science supporting the claims made by our side of the great divide, with regards to human diversity. That mountain grows larger with every new bit of evidence from the human sciences. This report about Neanderthals and Denisovans is another big piece of data explaining the diversity of man.

Denny was an inter-species love child.

Her mother was a Neanderthal, but her father was Denisovan, a distinct species of primitive human that also roamed the Eurasian continent 50,000 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Nicknamed by Oxford University scientists, Denisova 11 — her official name — was at least 13 when she died, for reasons unknown.

“There was earlier evidence of interbreeding between different hominin, or early human, groups,” said lead author Vivian Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“But this is the first time that we have found a direct, first-generation offspring,” she told AFP.

Denny’s surprising pedigree was unlocked from a bone fragment unearthed in 2012 by Russian archeologists at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.

Analysis of the bone’s DNA left no doubt: the chromosomes were a 50-50 mix of Neanderthal and Denisovan, two distinct species of early humans that split apart between 400,000 to 500,000 years ago.

Advances in the ability to extract DNA from fossils is one of those revolutions in science that does not get enough attention. Agenda driven hucksters like Stephen Jay Gould were able to get away with their schemes mostly because there was a lack of hard evidence to support or contradict theories about early humans. That’s changing as material science and genetic testing gets better and the data accumulates. The political narrative about the origins of man is falling apart, giving way to observable reality about the diversity of man.

“The very fact that we found this individual of mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan origins suggests that they interbred much more often than we thought,” said Slon.

Paabo agreed: “They must have quite commonly had kids together, otherwise we wouldn’t have been this lucky.”

A 40,000 year-old Homo sapiens with a Neanderthal ancestor a few generations back, recently found in Romania, also bolsters this notion.

But the most compelling evidence that inter-species hanky-panky in Late Pleistocene Eurasia may not have been that rare lies in the genes of contemporary humans.

About two percent of DNA in non-Africans across the globe today originate with Neanderthals, earlier studies have shown.

Denisovan remnants are also widespread, though less evenly.

“We find traces of Denisovan DNA — less than one percent — everwhere in Asia and among native Americans,” said Paabo.

“Aboriginal Australians and people in Papua New Guinea have about five percent.”

Taken together, these facts support a novel answer to the hotly debated question of why Neanderthals — which had successfully spread across parts of western and central Europe — disappeared some 40,000 years ago.

Up to now, their mysterious demise has been blamed on disease, climate change, genocide at the hands of Homo sapiens, or some combination of the above.

But what if our species — arriving in waves from Africa — overwhelmed Neanderthals, and perhaps Denisovans, with affection rather than aggression?

A point that Greg Cochran has made is that Neanderthals and Denisovans had evolved some highly useful traits that allowed them to survive in areas inhospitable to African populations. As modern humans spread through Eurasia, they mixed with these earlier populations and picked up some of these genetic advantages.They could also have simply observed things the Neanderthals had learned. The smarter and more clever humans then adapted these acquired skills to then dominate their new environments.

Recent research showing that Neanderthals were not, in fact, knuckle-dragging brutes makes this scenario all the more plausible.

Our genetic cousins executed sophisticated hunting strategies in groups; made fires, tools, clothing and jewellery; and buried their dead with symbolic ornaments.

They painted animal frescos on cave walls at least 64,000 years ago, well before most Homo sapiens arrived in Europe.

Far less is known about Denisovans, but they may have suffered a similar fate.

Paabo established their existence with an incomplete finger bone and two molars dated to some 80,000 years ago.

Among their genetic legacy to some modern humans is a variant of the gene EPAS1 that makes it easier for the body to access oxygen by regulating the production of haemoglobin, according to a 2014 study.

Nearly 90 percent of Tibetans have this precious variant, compared with only nine percent of Han Chinese, the dominant — and predominantly lowland — ethnic group in China.

Some things cannot be acquired through imitation, like the ability to breathe at extremely high altitudes. This may not seem all that important in the grand scheme of things, but if all human attributes are genetic, then it probably means the social diversity we see in humans has a genetic basis as well. If local populations can have local traits, then it goes a long way toward explaining the great diversity in human social organization. Even today, the way Africans prefer to live is different from how Eurasians prefer to live.

Of course, what this new data tells us is that the differences between populations are not uniform. Those modern humans who encountered and mixed with Denisovans have a lot more in common with one another than they do with their ancestors in Africa. The same is true of those populations that mixed with Neanderthals. The mixing of Denisovans and Neanderthals would explain why Asians and Europeans have more in common with one another than either group seems to have with their ancestors in Africa.

None of this argues in favor of any political agenda, but it does argue against the assumptions underlying the neoliberal order. Humans are not interchangeable and the differences we see are genetic and the result of local evolution. It turns out that the Left was sort of right when they said, “Think globally, but act locally.” People are the product of their local environment. The best thing to do, for the sake of global harmony, is to leave people in their local environment, so they can live locally, among their people.

The Original Sin

The original sin of modern conservatism is that it never came to terms with the reality of the Left’s race delusions. Last century, Progressives came to the conclusion that the obvious racial disparities in the world were solely due to racism, specifically the racism of whites toward the world’s non-whites. Everything that defines the American Left now is based on this assumption. This a lie, not a sin. The sin was that the American Right, or at least those who came to define the Right, never honestly challenged this claim.

Instead, Buckley-style conservatives accepted this two part assumption about the world and tried to fit their ideas within it. This was mostly expedience. By going along with the Left’s egalitarianism, they could have a place at the table. With the Civil Rights Movement, the Left claimed the moral high ground on the matter of race. Confronting them on the reality of race would have required courage the conservatives did not posses, so they chose to make an accommodation with the Left. Cowardice became a feature of the Right.

This mistake has haunted Buckleyites for fifty years, because there is no way to fit conservative ideas about society and culture with what amounts to race delusion. The fact that race is real, ethnicity is real and human diversity is immutable, means differences between the races are eternal. Worse yet, by casting the issue in moral terms, opposition to the Progressive race program was by definition immoral. After all, if racial differences can only be due to white racism, any white resistance to reform must be racism.

There was always another problem with Progressive race delusion. Eventually, the Left would run out of ways to address the immutable racial differences. That means they would run out of possible explanations, leaving them with just one conclusion. That is, racism is what defines white people, so the only way to achieve social equality is to get rid of white people entirely. This is why the media is full of over-the-top anti-white rhetoric. The Left  is now entirely defined by a visceral hatred of white people.

This leaves conventional conservatism with nowhere to run. When the Left howls about white privilege, the white guys of Conservative Inc. have no response, since they can’t get away from the fact that most of them are white. Then they have the neocons, the shape-shifters of American politics, who will be white and non-white depending upon how they want to play an issue. The result is that any resistance of the Left is automatically a white guy thing and therefore immoral. The prevailing morality is now explicitly anti-white.

As their ranks dwindle, the Buckleyites seem to have some sense they are now in a blind alley, but they are baffled as to why. Super-cuck David French thinks conservatives should try to out-hustle the race hustlers. Roger Clegg would like to hide under his bed until the issue goes away. That’s the default position of conservatives on most things now. The swarthy cohort  of the Buckleyites thinks the way forward is to bore everyone to death on the issue and this guy has decided to hold his breath or something.

The conservative position on the Left’s anti-white turn is a combination of pleading, groveling and wishful thinking. The reason is they can’t do anything else as long as they accept the Left’s egalitarianism and blank slate assumptions. If all the problems of the world are due to white racism, and all other efforts failed, it is only logical and moral to get rid of white people, or at least make them sub-citizens. If the problems persist, then killing off the whites is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing that can be done.

Buckley conservatives have written often about the original sin of race, but the real original sin was their unwillingness to confront Progressives on their racial delusions. Whatever American Progressivism was in another age, in this age, for more than half a century, it has been a cult based on the belief that whites are the root of all evil. It is a toxic religion that makes Bolshevism look optimistic by comparison. There was never any reason to accommodate it, other than expediency and greed. Now it is the ruling ethos of our age.

The opposite of race delusion is not a different form of race delusion. That’s the problem with colorblind society argument. There can be no such thing as a colorblind society as long as society is populated by humans. Man is tribal and hierarchical. These are defining features of our species. To think otherwise is at odds with biological reality. The dream of the colorblind society we hear from civic nationalists is just as nutty as the Left’s delusions about racial justice. Egalitarianism is not just wrong, it is toxic and perverse.

The foundation stone of western conservatism is the unblinking acceptance of the human condition, without reservation. The point of society was to mitigate those aspects of the human condition that interfere with a peaceful and prosperous existence. The original sin of the Buckleyites is they agreed to abandon that core understanding. The result is a movement composed of hollow men, inexorably shuffling toward their demise, as they plead for a second chance. Sin pays its wages in death, but reality is eternal.

The Encirclement

If something gets lodged under your skin, the body will react by trying to push it out, which involves swelling and inflammation, due to the presence of microorganisms on the foreign material. Along with the normal renewal of skin cells, the object will move closer to the surface and eventually, with your help, be expelled. If that does not work, the body summons cells call macrophages that surround the object to isolate it from the body and eventually dissolve it. Sometimes you just end up with a calcified object there forever.

Human organizations work a similar way when they are infiltrated by something seen as hostile or even just foreign. The foreignness is automatically assumed to be hostile and treated as such, until it can be assimilated or expelled. Instead of macrophages, the organization finds  a way to isolate the interloper, so that everyone knows it is unclean and he knows he is not welcome. That’s what we are seeing with Donald Trump and the American political class. They have surrounded him and are trying to isolate him.

The effort to isolate Trump started early, when anyone who took a job with his campaign was treated like a leper. That turned out to be a stroke of luck for Trump, as it forced him to hire outsiders, who were not locked into old thinking. The only establishment man to support Trump was Jeff Sessions and he is looking more and more like a mole for the political establishment. Even into the general election campaign, Trump was forced to use outsiders and washed up insiders like Kellyanne Conway, hoping for a second chance.

Once he won the election, the political establishment adjusted its tactics. Paul Ryan rallied the dweeb army inside the GOP to basically ignore Trump’s agenda. That’s why nothing happened on the border wall, immigration or infrastructure. The point is being made that working with Trump would be death for any Republican. In fact, the leadership went out of its way to make sure nothing Trump wanted was in the last budget. The message was being sent that the people in charge saw Trump as a hostile outsider to be resisted

Even as the evidence of a sedition plot to alter the 2016 campaign mounts, you’ll notice that the grandees of the House GOP are stone silent on the matter. If this sort of thing had happened to Obama by Bush people, sniveling wimps like Paul Ryan would have been sent out on every talk show to condemn Bush and apologize to Obama. Instead, the only guys pushing the story are back bench types like David Nunez, who has come to terms with the fact he has no future in the party. He has nothing to lose so he can talk about it.

This is part of the planned isolation. It’s not about policy or ideology. That’s the mistake many make when wondering why Trump’s own party hates him. Certainly the greedy bloodsuckers who bankroll the GOP hate his immigration stance, but they love his trade and regulatory positions. Trump has done more for the wallets of Silicon Valley and Wall Street than any president in history. No, the reason official Washington hates him is he is not them. He is an outsider, the nullification of why they claim we need them.

Then you have the phony-baloney Mueller operation. The original point of the thing was to cover-up the malfeasance of guys like Rosenstein, Comey, Strzok and the rest of the conspirators in the effort to subvert the last election. It has quickly become a weapon to attack anyone associated with Trump. The whole point of going after Michael Cohen, for example, is to send a message to everyone in the private sector with ties to Trump. The Manafort case is the modern equivalent of the show trials during Stalin’s purges.

It is a bit ironic that the the Left is now trying to paint Trump as Nixon. It’s almost as if it is a coordinated narrative. This and this are surely coincidental. After all, the Left ran Nixon out of town for just mentioning stuff that we now know President Obama was doing in the final years of his presidency. But, consistency and accuracy are not the issue. Like Nixon, the Left hates Trump because he dares speak for the dispossessed. He may be a billionaire, but he talks like a commoner and speaks for the forgotten white American.

The result thus far is a stalemate. Unlike Nixon, Trump is not careless in his dealings and he seems to know what he is facing. Team Trump are like defenders of a city, surrounded on all sides, but strong enough to repel an assault. Official Washington is the besieger, camped outside the walls not entirely sure how to proceed. They think they can wait it out, but supplies are not infinite. They also have to spend time and resources policing their berserkers, who keep rushing to the walls. Both sides make noise, but nothing happens.

What should worry the establishment is they have thrown everything they can at the walls, but Trump remains popular. In fact, he is more popular now than when he took office and more popular than Obama and Bush at similar points. It’s why the Democrats are trying to tamp down impeachment talk. They know this is exactly the sort of thing that will motivate Trump voters in November. It’s why the Prog media is full of blue wave stories. They are hoping they can gaslight the typical GOP voter into staying home in November.

For those still clinging to the idea of old America, with the orderly resolution of disputes through orderly elections, the only good result is one where Trump folds and decides to sign off on the neoliberal agenda. If Trump gave up on the wall and his immigration push, his base would abandon him and the great replacement could accelerate. There is no scenario where the people in charge peacefully go along with doing what is best for heritage Americans. There is no reasoning with fanatics and hired killers.

The fact is, the ruling class of America despises Trump and see him as a traitor to their class. His willingness to speak for heritage Americans, people the rulers now see as hostile and foreign, is unforgivable. He is the foreign object in the political body. That’s why they see him a cancer on modern politics. There’s no living with cancer, at least not for long. It is either killed, removed or it kills you. That’s how our rulers see us and it is how they see Trump. The siege continues until it is broken or the walls are breached.

The Wrong Stuff

A regular feature of the news, going back decades, is how the military is struggling to meet its enlistment goals. One reason for this is the Left’s antiwar past, which is a big part of their origin myth. The geezers in the cult still carry on about how they protested the war in college. There’s also the fact that the Left needs to believe the tide is turning their way and the people are rushing to their banner. That means the sort of white men who join the service are in decline. The result is regular stories about the lack of recruits.

The thing is though, volunteer armies don’t have a great history. In the French Revolution, there were lots of people ready to fight for the revolution, but nowhere near enough to man the massive armies required to fight the rest of Europe. Wide-scale conscription was necessary to meet demand. The same was true during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 20th century, both world wars were fought with conscripts. For example, 70% of the US soldiers were drafted, despite massive public relations efforts to get men to enlist.

America has been running the world with a volunteer army for about fifty years now, but the cost has been enormous. Official spending numbers put the defense budget at about $600 billion per year, but lots of stuff is off-budget. The microprocessor has also been the great force multiplier. The United States has the most technologically advanced war machine in history and a fighting ethos to go with it. That just raises the cost of operations, relative to the overall fighting strength, in terms of manpower and material.

As a result, there is a general consensus that the current US military configuration is inadequate to continue ruling the world. This is a big part of Trump’s push to delegate some of the task to Europe and Asia. There really is no reason why the EU countries need any support from the US to police the Continent. The Russians have nukes, but the bear is poor and the people are in no condition to fight a war. In Asia, the Japanese and South Koreans could do much more to help deal with Chinese aggression.

There is another problem though, one that the Europeans have, but are not willing to acknowledge. That is the lack of men willing and able to fight. This is a problem American warmongers are beginning to notice in America. Right-wing Progressives are noticing that the struggle to meet enlistment goals are not just rhetorical. The military is struggling to find young men willing and able to do the work of a modern soldier. Those with the talent are wising up to the reality of this age and the rest simply have the wrong stuff.

For starters, the sorts of men excited about taking orders from a girl are not the sorts of men you want fighting your wars. That only works in Hollywood propaganda. That propaganda, however, has had an impact on the culture. As a result, a decreasing number of men are physically able to meet the minimum requirements. A boy who spent his formative years playing video games and being asked if he would prefer to wear a dress, is unlikely to have the ability to make it through basic, much less be a good soldier.

Then you have the fact that white guys are starting to figure out that the government is their enemy, so signing up to fight for the government is not in their interests. Part of it is the fact that the public has figured out that the neocon response to 9/11 was a scam. They did not care about keeping the country safe from Islam. They only cared about keeping Israel safe from Islam. Importing millions of Muslims after 9/11 did not go unnoticed. A volunteer army relies on patriotism to fill the ranks. Fighting for strangers does not cut it.

There’s also the fact that whites are getting wise to what’s happening and public trust is plummeting. A volunteer army not only relies on patriotism, but it relies on civic duty. It is why we still call military service a duty. Some still call politics “public service” even though no one is so naive these days. The point is, like patriotism, civic nationalism is a social contract. Both parties have to uphold their end of the deal in order for it to work. It’s why blacks lack patriotism and they have never been willing to join the military.

The black issue is one to understand. We are constantly bombarded with propaganda about the heroic blacks in the military, but blacks have always been under represented in the services. Blacks, of course, are leading the charge against the  national anthem. It’s not just a stunt by coddled athletes. Blacks in America have never felt a sense of duty to the country, which makes perfect sense, given the nature of black identity. If you see society as dominated by the people you hate, why would you feel loyalty to society?

Then you have the much celebrated browning of America. As of the last census, the majority of people under-18 are non-white. By the next census, it will be distinctly non-white. War fighting is a young man’s game. A military built to run on smart white guys with a sense of duty is not going to function when it has to rely on non-whites, who despise their host population. Inevitably, the military is going to start looking like a Chicano version of Stripes. No one says it, but everyone in charge sees the problem.

The response will be a greater reliance on high technology, but the cost of the robot warrior goes up faster than his effectiveness. No one bothers to notice that the space age war machine of the Unites States has been fought to a standstill by cave dwelling archaics in Afghanistan. Trillions have been spent trying to outsmart the locals and the graveyard of empires is going to win anyway. In the end, there is no replacement for human capital and there is no way to replace the premier human capital with cheap knockoffs from overseas.

A World Without Consequences

When I was a kid, serendipity landed me in a very nice prep school for boys. The student body was mostly drawn from the upper middle class. There were a few genuinely middle class kids and a few kids from very wealthy homes. The handful of poor kids, who got there on their wits and dumb luck, naturally stood out from the crowd. At that age, kids are keenly aware of differences in class. That’s because the awareness of group status is strongest at that age. As a result it was rough going for the poor kids initially.

My first taste of it was in the locker-room for gym class. A snotty little rich kid started giving me the business. He was smaller and weaker than me and it was obvious, at least to me, that he would not fare well in a fight with me or with anyone probably. He was not tough. He persisted and when he put his finger in my chest, I put his face into a locker a few times. The one thing poor guys know is that soft men do not react well to the sight of their own blood. My nemesis started to cry and then ran for a teacher.

His friends volunteered to tell the head master that I was the villain, so I was hauled away for interrogation. That was when I discovered that there was such a thing as bourgeois values. Poor kids never rat and they never run to the authorities. In the upper middle class, it is exactly the opposite. The winner is the guy who runs to the authorities with the most convincing tale of woe. It’s just assumed that some authority with the power to pass judgement will adjudicate matters, based on a set of unwritten rules I’d never unriddle.

Lucky for me, the school was not unfamiliar with this phenomenon. My adviser was a man who had come up from the lower classes, so he understood what it was like for us. This was why, most likely, he was assigned the poor kids. This was not obvious to me at the time. He just seemed to know what was in our heads, like he was magic. That made him extremely effective at convincing all of us that we had to adapt and learn how to outwit our enemies. By resorting to violence, I had given the others a reason to dismiss me.

The lesson we were supposed to learn is that in a civilized society, verbal and cognitive skill counts for more than physical skill. The lesson I learned is that the people populating the ruling classes of American society had decided violence was no longer a concern for them. They were never going to face a physical challenge. Instead, theirs would be a life of verbal jousting, while someone else guarded the walls. Later, I came to understand that they did not even think much about the walls or the people guarding them.

This is what I suspect is at the core of the problems vexing America. The Progressive ruling class lives in a world in which real risk, physical risk, is so alien that it may as well not exist. In fact, for them, it does not exist. The worst thing they can face is ostracism, which is why they obsess about the prevailing morality. That’s not a real concern, as long as they are aware of the boundaries. For most of the people in the elite, they have plenty of money, so losing a job is not a threat in the same way it is for the Dirt People.

Nicholas Taleb would say they lack skin in the game, but I don’t think that’s right. These people are not playing a meaningless game. It is very serious to them and they are ruthless in their execution.Those status points they hope to cash in at Davos or Jackson Hole mean everything to them. When Tim Cook walks into the bathhouse in Davos, he wants everyone to know that he is the guy leading the charge to purge dissidents from the internet. It’s important to him that he be seen as the most pious of the pious.

In a world where physical violence is a real possibility, the hierarchy of concern starts at the most personal and works outward to things like financial and reputation risk. In a prior age, the King had to worry about being killed or having his heirs killed. That was a sobering thought that led to a natural conservatism. In the current age, the rulers have no fear of physical violence and little fear of losing their stuff. That leaves them playing a game of school yard politics, in which status is set by words and signalling.

This seems to be the issue with the rising tide of censorship. They keep following a pattern. One platform bans a heretic and then it is a race for all of the others to do the same. Despite the overwhelming support for gun ownership, for example, the ruling class is racing to de-platform anything gun related. It’s monkey see, monkey do, as the Judeo-Puritan ruling class signals to one another their piety and then reacts to those signals with their own acts of piety. They are like lightning bugs on a summer evening.

What never crosses their mind is what could happen if they terrorize the wrong person and he decides to take action. They never think about what could happen if the public begins to turn on them in large numbers. No one in the ruling class thinks about the mob showing up with torches and rope. They don’t even think the mob will show up at the voting booth and cast a protest vote. Instead, they assume bad election results are the doings of gremlins and magic fairies with sinister names like Boris and Natasha.

The world they have created for themselves is one  that is surrounded by high walls and armed men that are invisible to the people inside. It is just assumed that the walls will hold and the guards will never turn their guns on the people inside. It’s never considered because they never think about it. It’s why the silly airheads on Progressive media sites can viciously attack people they claim are Nazis. They never think about the possibility of the person they ruined showing up outside their door looking settle things old school.

This is why they will keep pushing with the censorship. In fact, it is accelerating, as they furiously try to out signal one another in what has become a piety festival among our ruling classes. Some of the girls at Progressive sites, with heads full of rape fantasies, dream of provoking a response, but most simply don’t think a response is possible. They no longer see any humanity in the Dirt People. We’re just here as props in their endless morality plays they stage for one another in the land of the Cloud People.

Summer World Tour

As we head into the last week of summer, at least for most Americans, I thought a survey of the world scene was a good idea this week. Here in Lagos, it is the final week before the kids go back to school, so most everyone is getting in some outdoor fun before it is too late. I’m taking next week off so a show on lighter topics seems appropriate. Plus, the political scene in America is so ugly right now, I need a break from it. I think I will take a week off from consuming any news, with regards to politics or current affairs.

I think the plan going forward will be to mix up the format each week. One or two weeks will be the single topic type shows and the other weeks will be the variety shows. The feedback on the format has been about evenly split. Some prefer one style, while others prefer the other format. You can’t please everyone, but mixing things up works for me, as content is always a struggle. Sometimes the world is just not that interesting, while other times it demands out attention. This way I keep it interesting for me and for you.

I am looking forward to a bit of break. I don’t know about anyone else, but the censorship, the deplatforming, the barking at the moon insanity of the Left, all of it has really started to wear on me. I hate these people. I hate them mostly because they force the rest of us to share in their hatred. They could stew in their own juices, but instead they demand the rest of us pay attention to them. While thoughts of the day of the rope bring some pleasure, I really wish it did not have to come to that, but that’s the future and we all know it.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. 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. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Spotify

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/IkLPLFKSVt8

The Warning Signs

An axiom of this age is that the Left always projects onto others the things that it is either doing or planning to do. A good rule is to listen to what they are saying, assume the opposite and then try to piece together what they are doing. It is the Opposite Rule of Liberalism and it is an iron law of modern life. An obvious example is their howling about election interference. As soon as they started howling about Trump colluding with the Russians, you knew that it was the Left colluding with someone to rig the election.

This is due to something Eric Hoffer noticed about people who join causes. The fanatic is driven by self-loathing. They are attracted to causes, because it allows them to swap their hated identity with that of the group. It’s also why they tend to jump from cause to cause, often contradicting previous opinions. Progressivism is a secular religion that is really just a dog’s breakfast of causes. Today it is all about trannies, non-whites and the never ending vagina monologue from white women, held together by a hatred of white men.

The point is that you can often get a sense of what the Left is up to by watching where they are casting the accusatory eye. That’s why this story is interesting. Fake twitter followers is a well know phenomenon. It’s fairly obvious that many B and C level media personalities buy twitter followers. It would not be shocking to learn that lefty sites like the Daily Beast and Estrogen Post buy followers for their contributors. Are there really close to one hundred thousand people following this person? Seems unlikely.

Anyway, the fact that the NYTimes is focusing on fake YouTube views when their cult is waging an all out assault on dissidents on-line, probably means that the view counts for lefty YouTube stars are fake. Just how fake is hard to know, but given the “by any means necessary” attitude of the Left, there’s no reason to think they would be restrained. Keep in mind that the NYTimes was buying traffic from Chinese click farms around the same time they started reporting on the phenomenon of fake followers in twitter.

Perhaps more ominously, this post from the Carlos Slim Journal, demanding Trump be dragged from office and hanged in Lafayette Park suggests the Left’s war on civilization is just getting started. Most people will focus on the rank hypocrisy and dishonesty, but the real focus should be the warning. The Left organized a wide scale conspiracy to rig the last election. The FBI and DOJ are currently running a wide scale conspiracy to hide their ongoing efforts to remove Trump from office and stonewall Congress.

As much as our side jokes around about Pinochet, it is the Left that may be plotting a coup in order to install an authoritarian government. Just look at the organized effort to ban people from the financial system. David Horowitz has just been un-personed by MasterCard and Visa. In the modern age, if you want to wage a civil war, gaining control of the banking system is the first step. Then you take over the internet. Without money or a means to reach a mass audience, fighting back in a civilized way is impossible.

That last bit is important. Most people are willing to fight the good fight until it means coloring outside the lines. That’s the water’s edge for most of the people the Left sees as their enemy. It’s why the Left is always trying to provoke or invent a backlash. It provides them with cover to scare the normies and use any means necessary to “defend our democracy!” As is always the case, the Left seeks to turn civilization’s virtues into vices they can exploit to undermine society. Your reasonableness is their best weapon.

The thing to understand with the Left is that they are reactionary. Team Obama came up with the scheme to rig the last election and when this became apparent to Team Clinton, they reacted by howling about “Russian hacking.” In other words, they immediately began to project their own hated activities onto others. Remember that it was the Left that started the Fake News idea, only to have people point out that the lefty news organs were nothing but fake news. The same was true of the AstroTurf chants over the Tea Party.

What all of this most likely means is that the Democrats are quietly working on their plans to impeach Trump as soon as they gain control of the House this fall. They have upped Pelosi’s Thorazine dosage so she does not blab about it during interviews, but the Left can’t help but get ahead of themselves, hence the NYTimes post. The plan is to impeach Trump in 2019 and then count on the NeverTrump loons in the GOP to join in and force the Senate to remove him. Given the nature of the GOP, this is a good bet.

This is a bit of a meandering post, but the basic point is that it is a mistake to take the Left’s chanting at face value. It’s not just that they lie. Ideologues always lie. It’s that they are psychologically incapable of concealing their actions. Again, that old self-hatred gets the better of them and they start dropping hints via projection. For two years now, the Left has been trying to convince us that Trump is a dictator, who plots with foreign agents to “harm our democracy.”  That should be read as a warning about what comes next.

That’s what puts the Left’s howling about a civil war in perspective. They have been waging a civil war on the rest of us for a couple of years. They have normalized the idea of using public companies to strip people of their right to participate in public debate. They have normalized the idea of stripping people of employment due to their politics. They are now the proscribing people because they hold the wrong opinions. Banning people from using breathing is next. The only thing missing is a coup and a dictator.

Lost Boys

A thing you get used to on this side of the great divide is seeing people go through the transformation. It’s like seeing a blind man suddenly given the gift of sight. At secret handshake events, a topic of conversation is “how you got here.” By that it means the book, event or person that finally opened your eyes to the reality of the world. For a lot of people, the absurdity of libertarianism was the gateway. Others found an old book by a banished writer, who used to be in the mainstream of conservative thought.

Not everyone makes the trip. Some people are so immersed in the prevailing morality that they will probably never find their way out. It’s not a matter of intelligence. We have plenty of mediocre minds on this side of the divide. It is the inability to step out of the old morality, the prevailing set of rules about what defines the moral person and what describes the immoral person. It’s not fear either, although that is often a big part of it. There are just some people who see Ben Shapiro as the great barrier after which is nothingness.

This article at PJ Media is a good example. The writer is unknown to me and probably unknown to everyone. The first thing to notice about the article is the caption on the picture is a lie. It is a deliberate lie, as well. That was not “white supremacists” surrounding counter protesters.” Nothing of the sort happened. That was a flash mob the night before Charlottesville. The lie, however, says something. It shows that the people at PJ Media are deep in the weeds of the Progressive moral framework. They accept all of it.

The setup of the post strikes me as contrived, but putting that aside, his response about tribalism is the standard CivNat spasm we see in response to biological reality. He writes, “An America where every group is primarily loyal to its own country of origin or race is an America without a bright future.” No quarrel there, which is exactly why all the sub-groups of the Dissident Right exist. They have come to understand that America is being balkanized by mass immigration, the racial awareness of non-whites and identity politics.

Then there is this. “Are most people inherently tribal? Absolutely. Our natural tendency as humans is to split ourselves off in different ways.” This is true, but there are no multi-racial tribes. In fact, we don’t have multi-ethnic tribes. The various tribes in Italy were bound together by blood, just as the Irish clans were bound together by blood. That’s a perfect example of the obtuseness of people unable to shake themselves free of the prevailing moral order. They will use the most ridiculous reasons to avoid facing basic reality.

Towards the end, we see this obtuseness again when he writes, “I think “civilizational ability” is something that should be chalked up to culture, not race. The most successful nations have been those that have adopted the tenets of Western civilization.” This is right out of the CivNat playbook. It is the most absurd form of circular reasoning, but it allows the timid to avoid noticing. It’s also a basic premise of Progressivism. The West is what it is by sheer dumb luck and that’s the root of white supremacy and all the evils tied to it.

No, the reason Europe began to race ahead of the world five centuries ago is the human capital of Europe was simply better than what populated the rest of the world. Sure, geography, history and chance came together to make the humans of Europe, but that’s true everywhere. That’s called evolution. It is a basic bit of reality that human evolution is copious, recent and local. Europeans can no more be blamed for being white than Africans can be blamed for being African. It’s just a fact of the human condition.

Now to be fair, the writer avoided most of the clownish virtue signalling that defines the people calling themselves conservative these days. The emptiness of conservatism, as well as it is ineffectiveness, leaves little for the conservative writer to do other than virtue signal. This guy at least acknowledged that the swelling ranks to his right are not simply evil, but motivated by facts and reason. He disagrees with those facts, but he has no choice, as to do otherwise means packing up and making the trip to our side.

The point of this is that you can’t save everyone. In fact, if someone from our side were to sit down with John Hawkins and explain the facts of life, he would probably nod along, but then go right back to chanting the old slogans again. Those old slogans and beliefs are comforting and require no risk. Thoreau was wrong. The mass of men do not lead lives of quiet desperation. The mass of men live in mortal fear that they will one day find themselves alone, separated from the pack, facing the dangers of the world alone.

That’s frustrating for many on this side, They wonder how it is that otherwise smart people like a John Hawkins can remain trapped on the other side. The fact is, you can’t save everyone and we don’t have to save everyone. The way these things work is you change the minds that can be changed and eventually, you have enough numbers to offer comfort to those who fear separation from the herd. You offer them a new and better herd in which they can find fellowship and comfort. That’s a how a counter-cultural movement works.