Constitutional Conservatives

In response to my latest podcast, a listener asked why I was hostile to the “constitutional conservatives” given that I would prefer to live in a society that abides by something close to the old American constitution. After all, the tricorn hat crowd just wants to return to the old order as defined by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That’s a fair question and it is certainly true that most people in dissident politics came from some form of official conservatism or libertarianism. As such, most everyone here prefers ordered liberty.

The first problem with self-identifying as “conservative” in any way is that the label has been thoroughly corrupted. When someone like Jonah Goldberg is considered the face of conservatism, the label no longer has meaning. Goldberg started out on the far Left working for Ben Wattenberg at PBS. His “journey” to the Right got him only as far neo-conservatism, which has always been a Progressive heresy. The fact these people are allowed to call themselves conservative says conservatism is a meaningless label.

Even if you want to tease out the neocons on the grounds that they are fifth columnists with loyalties that transcend American politics, what’s left is nothing more than 1960’s left-libertarianism and some ostentatious Bible waving. The self-styled “Bible believing Christians” are about as Christian as Hinduism. Their bespoke brand of religion is a product of the therapeutic culture, not Western civilization. Of course, Left-libertarianism has always been little more than the accounting department of Progressivism.

The point is that like the word “fascism” the word conservative carries with it baggage I have no interest in totting around. Any effort to “reclaim conservatism” is either a waste of time or doomed to subversion and corruption. Dissident politics is as much about rejecting the people who man the barricades of the prevailing orthodoxy as it is rejecting the orthodoxy. The problem with Buckley conservatism was never just about ideology. It was the sort of people who saw it as a useful vehicle that was always the problem.

As far as the argument in favor of “returning to our constitutional principles” is concerned, it is important to understand that one reason why we are where we are now is those constitutional principles. The men who wrote the document and assembled the political order at the founding, did so to lock in their positions in the elite. Winners not only write the history books, they write the constitutions. What those men of the 18th century did not contemplate and maybe could not contemplate, is the rise of American Progressivism.

A small child alive at the time of the Constitutional Convention, if he lived a long life, could have seen the birth and death of the American Republic. Within one generation, it was clear that the constitutional order created in 1789 was not going to hold together. The Hartford convention was in 1815. Of course, not long after the issue of slavery and the irreconcilable difference between the American South and Yankee New England made clear that the constitutional order was untenable. That order ended at Gettysburg.

The point here is while those “constitutional principles” sound appealing to our modern ears, the people who actually lived them did not like them very much. Interestingly, the romantics for the 18th century politics have the same problem as fascist romantics, in that they never wonder why their ideal was a complete failure. The fascist ideal can sound pretty good, until you look at the actual results. The same holds for the constitutional republic, as designed by the Founders. Whatever its merits, it collapsed in a lifetime.

Even if you can argue that with some modifications, the old order can be made to work, accounting for Progressive efforts to undermine order, the problem is the same one faced by libertarians. That is, short of a violent revolution followed by a good bit of genocide, there is no going back to the old system. The people in charge will never permit it. That’s why they are tolerant of constitutional conservatives. They merely function as the court jesters of the neoliberal state, keeping the people busy with pointless political activism.

Putting all of that aside, ask a constitutional conservative if he would like to bring back slavery. Ask him if he would like a return of freedom of association, where citizens are free to discriminate. The best you will ever get from these people is a willingness to limit the vote to tax payers or property holders. They can’t even talk honestly about the role of women. Most of what the Founders believed is now considered disqualifying racism, sexism and ethnocentrism and the conservatives would agree with the Left on it.

The simple truth is that conservatism has been utterly worthless in stopping the march of Progressivism through the institutions of America. If the Founders came alive today and gained power, the first people they would hang would be the conservatives on the grounds they collaborated with the enemy. For as long as I’ve been alive, the Left’s greatest weapon in the culture war has been the so-called constitutional conservatives. In every fight, it has been these people who have counseled surrender and accommodation.

Just as mobsters wrap a victim of a hit in a carpet and toss him in the nearest dumpster, the goal for us it to wrap the so-called conservatives in their constitution and dump them into the dustbin of history. If there is to be a society in North America where white parents can raise white children, white people have to stop thinking there is an orderly solution to a lawless society. The people in charge have no respect for the spirit of the laws, much less the letter of the laws. When enough white people figure this out, real change is possible.

The Seekers

The book, When Prophecy Fails, is a classic work of social psychology written in the 1950’s based on a study of a UFO cult called the Seekers. This group was led by a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed that aliens spoke through her to warn of a coming apocalypse. She employed something called “automatic writing” to channel the messages from the people of the planet Clarion. Through her, they were telling humanity that a great flood was coming and the world would end on December 21, 1954.

The study documented the believers and how they coped with the fact the word did not end on December 21, 1954. What they found is that instead of the group realizing they had been duped by a lunatic, they quickly developed an explanation for why the great event had not occurred and came to believe that with the same degree of intensity they had believed the original prophesy. In the case of the Seekers, within hours they were telling themselves and the world that their faith had convinced God to spare the world.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind while observing the actions of the America Left. Whatever it was, today it is a cult. We tend to assume cults have a charismatic figure at the top, but that’s not always the case. Hassidic Jews are not led by a charismatic leader, unless you consider the Rabbi a cult leader. In fact, that may not be a bad comparison, in that Rabbis come and go, temporarily holding the position of sect leader. Progressives swap out their chief lunatic as well. Look at their list of three initial heroes.

In the summer before the 2016 election, the Cult was sure Hillary Clinton would be anointed as their new cult leader. They were so sure of it there were people quitting their jobs so they could prepare to move to Washington and serve the new ruler. Then disaster struck and the prophecy failed. Like the Seekers, they waited all night for a miracle, but there was no miracle. Also like the Seekers, the cult has cooked up an elaborate explanation, rather than accept the result. Russian collusion is a coping mechanism.

It does not stop there with the Progressive cult. They have a new prophecy that they are sure will come true on the first Tuesday of this November. They believe the magical blue wave will cleanse the Imperial Capital of the sinners, who defend the evil Donald Trump, by concealing the Russian hacking scandal. It’s why fiction writer Bob Woodward released his book this week and why the NYTimes ran the fictional op-ed. These are intended to be evidence at the trial of Donald Trump, when he is impeached and removed.

It’s also why Elizabeth Warren was out demanding they invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump now. After all, if it is inevitable, why wait for the election? As far as she and the other hormonal crazies in the cult are concerned, the impeachment and removal of Trump is written in stone. True believers always succumb to the Tinker Bell Effect, because they believe so intensely, they inevitably begin to see everything as confirmation of their deeply held beliefs.  Fanatics see only that which confirms their fanaticism.

You’ll also note that these periods of extreme mania come and go. When Trump fired Comey, the Left was apoplectic for a week. Comey himself was out there casting himself in the role of martyr for the cause. Then it passed and no one talks about him anymore, outside of grand jury rooms. When Trump met with Putin, there was another week of fevered lunacy in the Progressive media. This week’s spasm of fervor from the cult coincided with the Kavanaugh hearings. Next week, all of this will be forgotten.

What’s happening is the cult is responding to disconfirmation in the same way the Seekers handled it. Rather than reevaluate their positions or beliefs in light of obvious reality, they escalate their intensity as a way to pull the faithful together. Firing Comey showed Trump was not about to resign, as the cult believed. When he met with Putin, it annulled their Boris and Natasha fantasy. Now that Kavanaugh is obviously going to be confirmed, it undermines their belief that his own party is about to abandon him.

Another aspect of the Seekers is relevant here. Dorothy Martin came out of the same cult that gave birth to Scientology. She later went on to reinvent herself as Sister Thedra and start a new cult called the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Progressives have similarly morphed into different things over the years. You’ll also note that spiritual cults tend to be led by women or have a lot of high profile females.  The same thing is happening with the Progressives. It is hormonal woman shepherding non-whites.

All of this is amusing, but imagine a country with a powerful army and nuclear weapons being run by nutters like Elizabeth Warren. Imagine a situation room that looks like the editorial board of the Huffington Post. There are no obvious remedies to having the ruling class succumb to mass insanity. The big challenge is accepting it. The public can accept that their rulers are corrupt or evil. It’s really hard to accept that they are insane. The proof of that probably comes too late as the loonies have already pulled the roof down us.

Nacirema

Over the long holiday weekend, I had the misfortune of being in the company of a classic ConservaCon type. The only thing he was missing was the tricorn hat and over-sized copy of the Constitution. No matter what the topic, he somehow circled back to some version of “we need to get back to our constitutional principles.” It is the abracadabra phrase of these people. If we just say it enough times, poof!, we’re in the 18th century again, with better hygiene. It really is annoying, even if it is understandable.

On the way home I started thinking about the rights that actually exist in the Bill of Rights and how much of them we actually have now. I though it might make a good topic for the podcast, so that’s what I’m doing this week. It is one of those topics where after some thinking about it, you end up sounding like a radical civil rights lawyer. Well, like what radical civil rights lawyers used to sound like when we still had something resembling a constitutional republic and stable demographics. Funny how that worked out.

Something I did not discuss this week, but occurred to me while editing, is that our side needs a William Kunstler. He was the old publicity hound, who represented the radicals of the 60’s and 70’s. It was not so much that he was a great attorney, but that he knew how to work the press in favor of unpopular clients. Those old radicals knew how to normalize the defense of villains, thus making them less villainous, but also making it more difficult to railroad the inconvenient. He raised the cost of what passed for virtue signalling.

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

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Our Rights
  • 07:00: Freedom of Religion (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 17:00: Speech & Assembly
  • 27:00: Gun Rights (Link) (Link)
  • 37:00: Privacy (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: Taking the Fifth (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Music)

Direct Download

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Google Play Link

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/sbwaic2PNvg

The Weak Leading The Crazy

The fake news phenomenon is nothing new. It’s been a part of the business since William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer invented it in the United States. They are the two credited with inventing yellow journalism and using it to get the US to declare war on Spain at the end of the 19th century. It probably goes back further, but it was these two who figured out how to make it work in the age of mass media. It’s not an accident that the two men who created fake news have journalism awards named after them.

More recently, the gold standard of fake news is the fake human interest story. This is where the fake reporter would find some fake people to write about, placing them into a canned narrative. Sometimes the people would be real, but their story was fictionalized and their quotes created by the fake reporters. Mike Barnacle had a long career at the Boston Globe writing fake human interest stories. He was eventually found out and fired, but people always knew he was a faker. He’s now a regular on MSNBC as a fake guest.

Another variation on this is the Stephen Glass example. He was a “journalist” for the New Republic, who wrote eye catching first person stories about outlandish things supposedly happening in Washington. Of course, his subjects were almost always conservatives acting in a way that titillated Progressives. For example, he did a piece on CPAC in which he described conservatives carrying on like a Roman orgy. He was eventually found out by someone at Forbes magazine and the New Republic fired him.

Despite that rather famous event, Progressive publications have done little to address the wholesale fraud that goes on in the business. If anything, it is worse now that ever. It’s rare to find a named source in a story,. All sources are now “unnamed sources” by which they mean imaginary. Even sports has succumbed to this habit. It’s so egregious, it has to be assumed that everyone knows it is all fake. When someone reports on something that only two people could know, and neither is named in the story, the report has to be fake.

This week we may be seeing fake news merge with mass hysteria to set off a panic among the Cloud People. First we have fiction writer Bob Woodward out with his latest collection of ghost stories. Woodward is the guy who used former CIA director Bill Casey as a source, while Casey was in a coma. That’s right, he claimed to have spoken to a man while he was in a coma. His Watergate writing was similarly full of fabrications. There is a great book on that topic and all else related to Watergate called Silent Coup.

Anyway, Woodward has a book out on Trump in which he strokes every single fear and hatred of the NeverTrump loons. Totally a coincidence, no doubt. Perhaps sensing it was too obvious or hoping to piggyback on the release, the New York Times has an op-ed up that is supposedly written by a White House insider. Reading the thing, it feels as if it was written by a couple of clever college boys pulling a prank. The only thing missing from it is a picture of Sam Hyde. Judging from the reaction, even liberals suspect it is fake.

Of course, all of this is a coordinated effort by the mass media to damage Trump in the run up to the midterm elections. We know this is a coordinated effort because they did their organizing in public view. Someone needs to explain to the media that conspiracies work best when  done in private. Someone should also tell the media that the point is to scare the public, not scare yourselves. All of these whoppers they are producing read like the stuff pink pussy hat wearing gals tell one another after too many gulps of chardonnay.

All of this is amusing, but it is also revealing. On a daily basis the mass media tells us that there is no reason for the Dirt People to bother voting this fall. The blue wave is coming in November and the House will soon be stuffed with exotic brown people, sporting funny names and a long list of grievances against whitey. Yet, they are in a full panic, carrying on as if they expect the opposite. The grotesque theater that was the McCain funeral is another example that suggests these people feel the heat of the setting sun.

Another amusing aspect to this is the Prog loonies will no doubt have their panties in a twist when the truth is revealed. If it is a real person in the White House, the media will suddenly be outraged by the doxxing of this brave hero. Meanwhile, Darren Beattie will remain unemployed. If it turns out the writer is Jayson Blair, the whole thing will be thrown down the memory hole along with all the other hoaxes. Of course, regardless of the outcome, the Progs will consider the contents to be gospel for the next six years.

Journalism  has always been about shaping public opinion. It has always been fake news, which is why their top awards are named after the inventors of yellow journalism. It worked for a long time because the guys who used to run the media were smart and they hired smart people. They also had a feel for their audience. Today, the typical journalist is a hormonal girl, with a head full of feminist nonsense. Alternatively, it is a foppish male with no useful skills and no useful experience in the world.

Compounding it is the the management class of these news organizations have never done real reporting. Many came out of politics, never having covered a fire or reported on a court case. They don’t know the basics of the news business, so they are easily fooled by their obsequious underlings. The result is the typical news organization is the weak leading the crazy. In an age where facts are easily verified and groups of volunteers can crowd-source a response, fake news needs to be smart. Instead it is stupid and childish.

It’s Complicated

Anyone who has been through a change in software platforms for their company knows that it starts out as a lot of fun, but then turns into drudgery. Initially, thoughts of all the new stuff and better programs makes it feel like Christmas. Then the reality of going through every single business process of the company hits home. You end up re-thinking vast chunks of the company’s business processes, much of which is terribly dull, even though it is essential. It is the only way to get it right and take advantage of the new system.

What you learn from such an ordeal is that the company software system is the repository of the company rules that define how it exists. Over time, the rules changed and evolved and the software was changed to evolve with the company. There were upgrades and modifications. If the software is old enough, there were modifications to modifications and many hands doing the work, many of whom are long gone. More important, many of the processes were created for reasons no one remembers. It’s just the way it is done.

The people who like to argue that complex systems cannot evolve from simple systems have never worked with business software. All complex business software started as simple software. Over decades, it evolved into highly complex systems that even the creators don’t fully understand. Usually, in the case of enterprise systems, there are teams who specialize in one aspect of the system. They have created interfaces that the rest of the system uses to pass data or call functions related to that area of the system.

The reason that systems tend toward increasing complexity is that the world is not a fixed place. Even small changes can require significant changes in how a company does business. In a government regulated industry like food or chemicals, the government is always updating the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). That means regular changes to the forms that are printed or the data that must be captured. That, of course, means regular changes to the company software system. Over time, those changes add up.

Now, the people maintaining and modifying the software are not rewriting large swaths of it every time there is a change. They make small changes, the bare minimum, in order to keep costs down and get the change done quickly. That means they take shortcuts, hybridizing other functions and applying patches to existing code. It does not take long before this gets out of hand and even small changes require lots of thinking and planning.

It is good way to think about all of human organization. The company that started out as two people, but grew to one hundred people, is at least a thousand times more complex than when it started. Obviously, the small town that grew into a city seems infinitely more complex than when it started. Even your social circle can suddenly feel wildly complex if your circle of friends expands to include people outside your initial peer group. Complexity grows at a rate faster than the growth the organization. That’s an iron rule of life.

The people working in artificial intelligence are running into this same problem. Replicating even the most mundane human task requires millions of lines of complex code. What we take for granted as humans is actually quite complex. For the same reason no one person can understand the complexity of their small town, the creators of AI cannot understand the complexity of their creations. Algorithms to handle one small task get unwieldy in hurry once they are interfaced with other algorithms to handle other small tasks.

This is why the robot future is a lot further away than the futurists want to believe. The cost of labor to automate a warehouse is a grain of sand on the beach, compared to the cost and complexity of automating a highway. Just as important, the cost of maintaining it is orders of magnitude higher. As every business owner knows, just because something can be automated, the cost of doing so often outweighs the savings. Put another way, just because something can be done does not mean there is a reason to do it.

Putting aside the cost of complexity, systems often become so complex that they become unpredictable. Even in business systems, which are simple compared to the software for driving a car, the complexity can reach a point where no one truly knows what will happen if some change is implemented. The result is a whole new process for performing quality control, to make sure the changes do not have some unexpected and unwanted downstream result. There are now certifications for software quality control professionals.

This is often why legacy systems are replaced. It’s not the technology, although that is often a handy excuse. It’s that the old system has so many patches and mods that no one knows how it works anymore. New changes result is weird outcomes and costly followup changes. As is true with everything in life, things sometimes get so complicated that the best answer is to start over. It’s why men leave their families and why people change careers. It’s also why the people stand aside and let the revolutionaries topple the rulers.

That’s what a revolution is, when you think about it. It’s a lot like the decision to buy a new software system for the company. It’s not that what comes next will be better. It’s that the status quo is so complicated and unpleasant, anything has to be better. Of course, just a new software never turns out as expected, revolutions always turn out to be a lot more unpleasant than anyone imagined. Instead of firing the initial consultants, the revolution eats its own, by killing off the first group of revolutionary leaders.

Even so, it is something to think about as the West struggles to reform itself. The web of pirates, grifters, reformers and patriots within the ruling classes of the West has reached a point where no one understands what’s happening. That’s why official Washington remains in a state of emergency over Trump. It’s why the European ruling class is worried that they may be too lazy to fight their own people. Everyone knows that the system is not working, but no one has any idea how to fix and everyone is afraid to touch it.

It might be time for a new system.

The Kavanaugh Hearings

The long, end of summer holiday weekend is over and that means the circus has returned to the Imperial Capital. Congress is back in town after a month back home lying to the public. They kick off this week with the much anticipated confirmation hearings on justice Brett Kavanaugh. Given that the Democrats have had all summer to prepare, everyone thinks they will be in peak form. These confirmation hearings are like catnip to the freaks and weirdos that now constitute the Democrat Party. It promises to be a riot.

Of course, in a constitutional republic, which is allegedly our system of government, this sort of spectacle would never happen. After all, the legislature would debate and pass the laws and the court would simply apply them to cases brought before the court. That is supposed to be how things work. The people’s house passes laws and the Senate, representing the interests of the states and the wealthy, is a check. The President, with the power to veto, is the final check.That’s not how things work though.

Instead, America is ruled by nine shaman in black robes, who are allowed to make up whatever laws they like. No one says it this way, but that is the truth. That’s how America ended up with an absolute right to abortion, despite the word never being uttered by any of the Founders. That’s how we ended up with a bizarre system of rights for prisoners and foreigners. Most recently, the high druid council decided the republic could not survive unless Bob and Bill get to play house and pretend they are married.

The reason the Left is sure to go crazy over Kavanaugh is his views on social issues and he will tilt the court further into the direction of normal people. The Democrats understand That you cannot have rule by circus freak if the high druid council is opposed to the freak show. If you want a reason to believe in the hand of Providence, the Trump election should be it. Imagine if that old crook Hillary Clinton was in the White House now. Imagine how she would have stacked the court. Even atheists have to consider this a miracle.

Of course, the one thing to look for is how the Left will conjure a new set of standards this week, giving them reasons to abandon the last set of standards they created. The cucks of the GOP will be ready to abide by every comma and semicolon of the of old set of rules, so you can be sure they will crying foul all week. It’s always a good reminder that the way forward is to first chase off the conservatives. Until our side is the authentic opposition, the Left has no legitimate opposition. But, that’s a topic for another day.

One major item looming over the confirmation is the upcoming midterm elections. The GOP needs something to perk up their voters. You can be sure we will hear lots of references to what this process would be like if the Democrats were in charge. That why Mitch McConnell scheduled the hearings for this month. It means the vote will be within the window of the election. The thing the media does not notice is this nomination means a lot to social conservatives, who now see a way forward to address abortion.

For the Democrats, this is a thorny problem. They have Senate seats to defend in states where heritage Americans still decide things. Those senators will probably have to vote to confirm or risk losing their seat. There’s also the freak show problem. If the Progressive media plays to form, they will give the GOP lots of examples to wave in front of the voters next month. Of course, the characters right out of central casting like Maxine Waters will not pass up on a chance to rant and rave in front of the cameras this week.

Another subtext of this nomination is the fact that Kavanaugh is not Jewish. This will be the second nominee in a row who is not from the Tribe. The thing everyone in DC understands is that Trump represents heritage America. The great fight going forward will be heritage Americans versus the coalition of foreigners, blacks and other non-whites, lead by a Judeo-Puritan elite. The word “populism” now means white people and everyone in Washington gets it. Watch to see how they manage to convey it, without being obvious.

One other aspect to this nomination is that Kavanaugh is considered an extremist on the gun issue. Granted, the Left considers anyone to the right of Pol Pot to be an extremist, but 2A people really like this guy. Given that the courts will be hearing many cases over banks and insurance companies trying damage the gun business, having one of our guys on the court is good news. Kavanaugh is not exactly a right-wing Elena Kagan, but he is as close as we can get right now. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough.

Over all, this week should be a good reminder of why heritage Americans came out to support Trump. The GOP has not earned anyone’s vote, but Trump is reason enough to get out in November. The transformation of the GOP into a party of heritage Americans will be slow, but this week is a reminder of why it is necessary if you hold out any hope of a peaceful transition to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society. The only way it can work is if the old stock bands together to keep the strangers and weirdos divided and weak.

The Death of Sportsball

Twenty years ago, I looked forward to the start of college football season. If I was not going to a game, I’d make sure watch one of the big games featured over the opening weekend. My friends were all into tailgating at NFL games, so I would go to a few of those throughout the fall. One of the things we would do every year is pick a game somewhere in the country and meet there for a reunion. Granted, the game was not central, but the reunions were planned around a sportsball event, either baseball or football.

It has been at least half a dozen years since we did a sportsball road trip. I’m struggling to think back to the last football game I attended. I still go to opening day of the local baseball team here in Lagos, but that’s because I get free tickets and it is a nice excuse to skip work and enjoy the spring weather. The local baseball team means nothing to me. Over the weekend, I tuned in for one of the college football games, Appalachian State versus Penn State, but only because a friend was watching. He went to one of the schools.

Tastes change, of course, and sportsball fandom is more of a young man’s game than an old man’s past time. Becoming an internationally renowned crime thinker has changed my view on things as well. I spend much more time around crime thinkers in real space as well as the virtual world. Even around my old friends though, sportsball has lost ground to other subjects. Again, age plays a role, but some of the guys have made it a point to drop sportsball from their list of interests. Something has changed in the culture.

The NFL has seen its TV ratings decline over the last two years. People want to believe it is all related to the anti-white behavior of the blacks, but the decline began before the monkey shines. Part of the problem is the product. As the ownership has become more transient, the game has become more short term in its design. Players move around, teams are never the same from year to year, coaches come and go and the quality of play resembles an intramural game on the college quad. The quality of play is very low now.

There’s another aspect that reflects the new ownership. They try to squeeze two dimes from every nickel. This is becoming true of all sportsball events. The games are more marketing than game. Everything that can be monetized in some way is exploited to the point where the presentation is grubby and offensive. Watching a game at home is like being stuck in a room full of carnival barkers. There is something unseemly about billionaires trying to squeeze their middle-class customers out of their last dime.

Of course, to watch a game means subjecting yourself to the endless proselytizing in favor of degeneracy. There are the commercials for various sexual diseases. Then you have the fact that every commercial must now celebrate miscegenation. I saw a spot for the NFL featuring a Mexican single mother who cuts short her daughter’s lemonade stand so they can watch a football game. It makes me wonder if the owners of these teams have ever gone to one of their games. There are no low-riders at NFL tailgates guys.

It’s not just the NFL. I stopped following the basketball a long time ago, primarily because the culture of the sport. I don’t just mean the antics of the players. The NBA has always been a human flea circus. You watch bizarrely shaped humans perform like circus animals in the context of a game. That’s even how they sell it. What gave me the creeps is the feeling at the arena. Go to a basketball game and you sense the guy running it has his car running in the parking lot, just in case the the gate that night is too low to pay the bills.

My temptation is to assume it is me and the sportsball leagues are doing the same as always, but the evidence suggests otherwise. It is not just college football games experiencing a steep decline in attendance. All live sports are seeing it. Last year, a Twitter account popped up featuring pics of empty NFL stadiums during the game. Most of the featured teams were perennial losers, but not all of them. Even mighty NASCAR has seen a slide in their live gate and they obviously can’t blame blacks for their problems.

The Atlantic article I linked above wants to blame the changing landscape of television for the ratings decline, in addition to other factors. That’s tempting until you think about how we got to the TV sports world. When I was a kid, sports on TV was rare. Baseball had a “game of the week” on the weekend. The NFL had two television games on Sunday. Only famous college football teams were on TV regularly. At the same time, live attendance was low. Fenway Park was famously empty for the last game of Ted Williams.

If you look at the rise in attendance, it started in the 1980’s just as the cable television model spread around the country. What most likely drove live attendance was the creation of state of the art venues, beginning with Camden Yards in Baltimore. Like the proliferation of giant bookstores, the spread of luxury venues was driven by credit money.  Supply sometimes does create demand and that is what happened in sports. The flow of TV money also helped, as the cable model gave sports teams billions in new revenue.

It all seems to be unraveling now. The sports teams are still making loads of cash, but the reason they are resorting to every underhanded trick in the book to squeeze their customers is their customer base is shrinking. At some point, the math will catch up to them and the bust out comes to an end. Since the business model of every professional sports league is based o a growing revenue stream, even a flattening of growth is very dangerous for them. As a result, they will get even more avaricious in their greed.

None of this is new material, but what gets little attention is why is it we seem to be in a down cycle for big public entertainment. Taken in total, starting roughly in the 1970’s, sports and entertainment started on a long upward swing that seems to have peaked in the last decade. That’s roughly a generation, give or take. That means one answer for it is demographics. The 1980’s through now has been peak Baby Boomer. Everyone with something to sell targeted that cohort for decades and now that cohort is moving on.

Of course, the sports boom also coincides with two other things. One is the collapse of local, community based entertainment. You just don’t see youth leagues and community activities like you did in the 1970’s. There’s also the invasion of tens of millions of foreigners from over the horizon. You local community loses its attraction when so many of the people in the community are strangers with weird habits. Maybe going to sporting events and having watch parties was a temporary reaction to the collapse of the local.

Anyone can have their own theory, but what you can’t argue is the issue is purely economics. That’s the BoomerCon response to these things. “It’s too expensive” does not make a lot of sense when it was not too expensive last week. The great spike in ticket prices, for example, occurred well over a decade ago. Watching games on the TV you already own is no more costly than not watching the games. There’s something else happening and it is most likely tied to the cultural changes driven by demographics.