Monthly Archives: October 2018

Kept Men

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In a series of tweets yesterday, someone calling herself Emerald Robinson announced she had evidence that at least one “conservative” magazine was taking payola from a tech giant. The implication was that the magazine was taking money in exchange for countering the stories about the tech oligarchs censoring dissidents.The woman works for an outfit called One America News, which is a small operation that has made a name for itself during the Trump phenomenon. Here are the tweets in case they vanish.

The most likely candidate, before examining the hints in the tweet, is National Review, which lost its moral compass when Rich Lowry took over the operation. It’s also the one conservative publication with any influence, at least before it hurled itself onto the NeverTrump bonfire three years ago. If you are going to bribe a conservative publication, you may as well bribe the biggest one. It’s not like any of these operations are making so much money that they would say not to a bribe. It’s their reason to exist.

Of course, the clue about the subscriber base evaporating adds to the speculation that the culprit is National Review. When you look at the tax filings for the 501(c)(3) they use to launder contributions, it appears their donations shriveled up during the campaign. Their ugly smear campaign against Trump and his voters turns out to have been a costly blunder. That is if the tax filings tell the whole story. It is possible that the tech giant or some other wealthy patron is paying writers directly or using another vehicle.

I speculated during the campaign that Dan and Farris Wilks were buying support for Ted Cruz and funding the NeverTrump lunacy among so-called conservatives. The two are members in good standing of the donor class and the guys bankrolling people like Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager and Glenn Beck. My suspicion was they were spreading cash around on the side to the various pens for hire at operations like National Review and the Federalist. It would explain some rather obvious patterns we saw in the campaign.

Now, in fairness to National Review, we don’t know if the person tweeting this stuff is legitimate or correct. Her name suggests she should be swinging from a pole, rather than covering the White House, but these days, the differences between the two professions are microscopic. In fact, it would be a relief to learn that the mass media is simply singing for their supper, delivering what a handful of billionaires demand. Otherwise, it suggests a systemic failure that can only be addressed by madame guillotine.

Still, even if the rumor is just that, it raises an important point. The media in America has never been objective or bound by a code of conduct. Into the twentieth century, everyone understood that the newspapers were owned by rich guys with an agenda. There were newspapers for the parties and for the factions within each party. What happened in the Cold War is the bias was concealed in an effort to fool the public into supporting the struggle against the Soviets. Suddenly, reporters became journalists and priests.

When you dig through the tax forms of the various not-for profit operations used by Conservative Inc., you find that their stars are living lifestyles that would make the people who read them faint. Jonah Goldberg is a great example. He’s gets 200 large from the National Review Institute. He gets a similar figure from American Enterprise. Then he has a cable deal from Fox. He writes books that no one reads, but the not-for-profit system buys these books in bulk. Add it all up and he lives like royalty for doing very little.

Of course, this explains why the so-called conservative opposition is unwilling to oppose or conserve anything. They are afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. To wander off the reservation and possibly anger their pay masters, means leaving a life of extreme luxury for, at best, a middle-class life. It’s not as if a Jonah Goldberg could replicate his earnings in the dreaded private sector. The life of a kept man is one of trepidation. They live in fear that the fads will change, they will be deemed heretical and ejected from the hive.

At the human level it is somewhat understandable, but when you look at the whole, it means the whole system is a massive scam design to fool the public. Just as campaign finance laws are designed to obscure who is bribing your politicians, the labyrinth of 501(3)(c) operations that finance the commentariat are designed to conceal who is controlling public opinion. Even if we never get the full story about which publication was taking the bribes, the truth of it is slowly bleeding into public consciousness.

In the meantime, the kept men glance furtively at social media, wondering if it will be their publication that gets outed or if maybe their name will turn up in the story. Maybe some are reaching out to their friends at other media operations, just in case they need to find a new landing spot. It’s the whore’s life they chose, so no one should feel pity for them. In fact, these people deserve nothing but scorn. They choose to play an active role in the decay of our society, by undermining social trust. They deserve what’s coming to them.

Playing With Fire

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On more than a few occasions, I have made the point that the greatest threat to Jews in America is other Jews. While there no doubt exist plenty of anti-Semites, counter-Semites and bigots, they are powerless to act on their opinions. Sure, one can go bonkers and shoot up a synagogue, but that guy could just as easily have thought his dog told him to shoot the Pope. In a big open country, you will have a nut of every variety and on occasion, one will slip the leash and cause mayhem. There’s no remedy for it.

As far as a serious threat to Jews, there never has been one in America, because the culture of the country has never been hospital to confrontational tribalism among white people. Instead, it is a frontier culture, where tribes just avoid one another if they cannot get along. Talk to a European about moving around and they will marvel at the casual way in which Americans just pick up and leave if they think the next town is better. The result of this is our anti-Semites tend to be separatists, not confrontational.

That’s a good thing, but it is not an immutable thing. As the country becomes majority-minority, whites are slowly starting to think of their racial identity as their primary identity and their primary interest. In one of life’s ironies, the Progressive demands for tribalism are creating a white tribe, organized to defend white people from the predation of the Left. It may simply be an inevitable result of demographics, but white Americans are slowly coming to terms with the reality facing them. As a result, that frontier mentality is waning.

This will be a different world for Jews, who have enjoyed a casual indifference from the white majority, since Jews migrated here in bulk at the start of the last century. Instead of a disjointed and raucous host population that sees Jews as just another ethnic group within the white majority, Jews will have to live in a world of identity politics. That’s going to mean a return of the old habit of policing the ranks. Jews will have to hunt down and silence members of their own tribe who are bad for Jews. People like Michelle Goldberg.

I have gone around and around with anti-Semites on the issue, but I am not an anti-Semite, or even a counter-Semite. I don’t do the point and sputter, as I think antisemitism, in its primary form, is just an opinion. The same is true for counter-Semites, who strike me as quite reasonable, even if we don’t always agree. As a result, I get along with everyone on the Semitic spectrum. I have readers who are Semites, philo-Semites, anti-Semites and counter-Semites and everyone in between. Indifference has his benefits.

That said, the endless taunting that comes from liberal Jews in the media is going to make even the indifferent observer sympathize with the anti-Semites. How could it not? I look at that post and see a smugly stupid woman celebrating the demographic replacement of white people. My first thought is, “who does this woman think is going to defend her when they come for her?” My second thought is, “even if I’m still around, I won’t be lifting a finger for her.” Michelle Goldberg is bad for Jews and Jews would be wise to muzzle her.

To quote Burke, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” That’s the situation facing Jews in America. In their ranks are bad people, combining to set the world on fire. No question they are aided by plenty of liberal whites in their efforts. The trouble is, whites are permitted to call out liberal whites for this stuff. Only Jews can police their ranks and thus far, we are greeted with a deafening silence. Good Jews stand by and do nothing.

Now, I’ve been around long enough to know that it is not easy for Jews to publicly call out fellow members of the tribe, particularly on tribal grounds. That silent consent has been a valuable survival skill, but now that virtue is being fashioned into a vice. Odious carbuncles like Noah Rothman, rely on the unwillingness of Jews to speak out, so they can spread their toxic filth in the political culture. Michelle Goldberg just assumes no one will dare confront her over her anti-white hatred. That can’t go on. It won’t go on.

Sensible Jews have to accept the wisdom of Burke and condemn these bad Jews, not for being mistaken, but for being bad for Jews. More important, sensible Jews need to accept the support from sensible whites in this matter. No one is expecting Jews and Gentiles to lock arms and sing Amazing Grace. What we can expect is to keep the crazies on the chain and for sensible people to take pleasure in putting the crazies back on the chain, even with the support of those outside their tribe. Good neighbors do that for one another.

The stuff appearing in the media every day from liberal Jews is the great threat to Jews in America. Allowing unstable lunatics to call for white replacement, with the imprimatur of the elite media, is playing for fire. Sensible people, when they see a child, a simpleton or a lunatic playing with fire, they do what they must to stop it. That’s the situation facing sensible Jews in America, with people like Michelle Goldberg. Her bigoted rhetoric is going to get a lot of people killed, unless her people throw a net over her.

Slavery As A Service

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Unsurprisingly, the first step in the Progressive pogrom against normal people after the Pittsburgh shooting was an effort to de-platform Gab. The ruling class has a deep hatred of the site for a number of reasons. One being it puts the lie to the claim that the tech industry is an open market. The other is it puts the lie to the fact that Americans have constitutional rights. Anything that is seen as a challenge to Progressive rule is marked for death and the people in charge are not about to allow a tragedy go to waste.

The bodies were not even cold and the usual suspects were organized and sent out on social media, and then Progressive media, to denounce Gab as some sort of organized assault “on our democracy.” The only thing missing from the hysteria was the claim that Gab is a Russian agent. Everyone was supposed to drop what they were doing for a five minutes of hate against Gab, a tiny web site with about half a million users. FaceBook has billions of users, Google controls the internet. Yet, Gab is a threat to civilization.

Not soon after the signal from Prog was given, the heads of the tech oligopoly got together to throw Gab off the internet. First their hosting service, a company called Joyent, gave them 48 hours to find a new hosting service. The company is owned by Samsung and it is run by a loathsome bigot named Scott Hammond. The hope was that Gab would not be able to find a replacement over the weekend and the site would go dark. Word was sent out to the media to prepare a celebration of the event so Hammond could be honored.

Gab, ever resourceful, found another hosting company and was able to start making the transition, despite Joyent deliberately trying to sabotage their efforts. That’s when the next step in the operation was launched. GoDaddy, the registrar Gab used to buy the domain name, threatened to steal the domain name from them. This is the trick GoDaddy has used in the past, stealing domain names from owners, who hold opinions contrary to the official orthodoxy. Gab was able to avoid this and is in the process of moving to new digs.

Now, when you start looking at these companies, the thing that should ring out is they are pretty much the standard villain in Hollywood movies. They are large, soulless corporations run by bland automatons like Scott Hammond. They are men hired because they will just follow orders. When you look at a guy like Scott Hammond, you see the face of someone who never asks too many questions. He’s the guy who begs for his life at the end of the Hollywood action movie, but the good guy shoots him anyway.

The question that normal people ask is how this is possible. After all, these companies sign contracts and in theory, we still have courts where contracts can be enforced by impartial judges. While that is a laughable fiction now, the reality is these companies are not bound by standard business agreements. They have been allowed to carve out new law for themselves, forcing their vendors and customers to sign off on what is called an adhesion contract. This gives the tech giants absolute power over everyone else.

An adhesion contract or “standard form contract”  is a contract drafted by one party and signed by another party. The second party typically does not have the power to negotiate or modify the terms of the contract. Adhesion contracts are commonly used for things like insurance or rental contracts. When you rent a car or purchase car insurance, you just sign the contract, because you have to in order to rent the car or get insured. Every technology service provider is now basing their relationships on these types of contracts.

It used to be that the courts carefully scrutinized these types of arrangements, so the contract had to adhere to some basic principles. The courts would often use the “doctrine of reasonable expectations” to void all or part of these contracts, when there was lack of notice, unequal bargaining power, or blatant and substantive unfairness. The reason for this should be obvious. When a powerful company has the right to dictate the terms of the contract to their customers, they have all the power in the contractual relationship.

In western jurisprudence, a valid contract is one in which both parties freely engage and have equal opportunities to negotiate. When one party imposes the conditions on the other, that’s not a contract. That’s slavery. In a world where a handful of people control the public space, these types of contract give them arbitrary power over public discourse. If they become vexed with what you say, they can claim you have violated their terms of service and remove you from the internet. Again, the terms are dictated, not negotiated.

A recent, less emotional, example is what happened with Stefan Molyneux, the alt-lite YouTube personality. He has built up a large following on YouTube for his quirky brand of edgy commentary. He said the wrong thing and was informed by YouTube that his business would be shuttered unless he conformed to their terms of service. His only recourse, like a slave being whipped by the master, was to beg for mercy. After getting a reprieve, he will have to live knowing who holds the whip and who is the slave.

This is not something limited to social media. Microsoft has imposed similar terms of service on users of Office and Skype. In theory, it means they can stop your company from using these products if they find out the owner gave money to the wrong political candidate or has the wrong opinions. All of the content providers like Hulu, Amazon and NetFlix have implemented the same one-way contracts. While they have not banned people from using their services yet, it is something they now have the power to do.

This is why the “cloud” is so popular with the Cloud People. Turn on the television and you are treated to ads telling you how the cloud will solve all the problems of your life. What it is, of course, is an inducement to walk into the cage. Once inside, the door slams shut and you are now just another bit of property on the plantation. In the near future, Brendan Eich will not just lose his job. He will be found to have violated the terms of service for his refrigerator, car and checking account. Internal banishment becomes real.

Slavery tends to end one of two ways. The slave-based society is conquered or the slaves rise up and slaughter their slave masters. It’s too much to hope for the political class to ban these leonine contracts used by global tech to enslave the rest of us, but that would be the peaceful resolution. The courts could also return to the habit of carefully scrutinizing these agreements. Given the behavior of the political class, this seems unlikely. Judging by the physiognomy of Scott Hammond, the alternative seems certain.

Be Not Afraid

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Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.

I was in the market this morning, doing the weekly ritual and I came around the corner with my carriage to see two people in the middle of the aisle chatting. Their carriages were next to them, so that you could maybe squeeze by on one side. Some people were trying to do exactly that when I came upon the scene. There were a couple people in front of me trying to figure out how to get around the two selfish idiots. I walked up to them and loudly said, “Have your chat somewhere else. The rest of us have to shop here too.”

Both people were immediately embarrassed, and hustled to get out of the way. They were just being inconsiderate, but they were oblivious to it, because others were too polite to confront them with this reality. It’s a good example of how being polite is easily turned into a weapon against you, even unintentionally, as was the case here. It’s is also a good example of people often having to be slapped in the face before they notice the elephant in the room. The events of this weekend are another great example of this.

On Saturday, a lunatic went on a shooting spree at a synagogue. I posted on Gab that the result will be a hellish backlash by our rulers against dissidents and dissident web sites like Gab. Most likely, Gab would be de-platformed and some heretics would be hurled into the void. Part of it is just rage, as much of what keeps our rulers in place is the rage they stoke among the anti-whites. The more important role of pogroms like we are about to endure is they send a message. The idea is to scare those sympathetic to the dissidents.

These events serve another purpose though. Like those folks in the market who were oblivious to what they were doing, what’s happening now is opening eyes. I’ve had a dozen exchanges in the last 24 hours with normies wondering how it is possible that the people in charge can so easily pull the plug on a site like Gab. There’s no question that lots of normies respond to these attacks with calls for greater conformity, but lots of people who “trust the system” start to question those beliefs when they see this stuff.

That’s always been the challenge for our side. It’s never been about race realism, the JQ or the nature of Progressivism. Those are useful tools, but the real goal is to convince people that the system they are supporting is really just a fiction. More specifically, the political dynamic of Left versus Right, Red versus Blue and Democrat versus Republican, is just theater. After all, if conservatives are unable to and unwilling to conserve and defend basic rights like speech and association, what’s their real role in this?

The fact that the people in charge are free to read your e-mail, track your behavior and spy on you in your own home is not that obvious to people. The reason is white people are trusting. They just assume the people running these tech giants share their civic sensibilities. When they see tech giants and massive banks squashing dissidents like bugs, by throwing them off the internet and out of the banking system, some of those normal white people begin to suspect we have been right all along about our rulers.

It’s easy to get down about these things. Inevitably, sites you read will be shuttered during this pogrom. There will be a rash of heretics doxxed out of their jobs. Gab is already de-platformed, but it will not be the last. My guess is sites like Unz are next, as they are already getting the Alex Jones treatment from the usual suspects. Look for Republicans to “join their colleagues on the Left” to support wide-scale de-platforming of sites that question the official orthodoxy. Maybe even pass a law to make it official.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and the people who rule over us are at war with reality. That’s always been their Achilles’ heel and the reason they take extreme measures against even the smallest dissidents. Gab had about a million users. It’s a tiny speck in the social media universe. When you live in constant fear of people waking up from the dream and challenging your rule, even the smallest hint of eyes opening up is a mortal threat. The giant lashes out in fear, not in confidence.

It’s a long war though and when you’re the insurgency, it means lots of set backs, missteps and failures, but it also means slow incremental gains. Ten years ago a blog like this would not have many readers. When Barak Obama assumed power, no one bothered talking about freedom of speech. Now, even the most genteel normie suspects his rights are under assault. Every day, our numbers grow, despite the relentless pressure, and their paranoia grows, despite their efforts to stamp us out.

So, they took out one of our sites, but already clubs are reforming in quiet places on the internet. Normies who were on Gab for free speech reasons are now thinking it is a good idea to join a book club or pool party. As much as it sucks to lose a platform, it goes a long way toward swelling our ranks. It’s also a reminder that the great revolutions in Western history were organized by dissidents passing notes and having private conversations over drinks. Our rulers are probably doing as a favor by forcing us into the shadows.

From there we came outside and saw the stars

Zero-D Chess

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The old paleocons were right about most things, particularly about the growth of the managerial state, but they were not right about everything. There were things they simply could not imagine, much in the same way sci-fi writers cannot imagine the cultural implications of technology. No matter how smart you are, you can only think so many moves ahead. One thing the paleocons got wrong about the managerial state is just how corrosive it was to the people inside the managerial class. It makes them weak and stupid.

This post about the scheming of Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller is a good example of how weakness is viewed as strength by people inside the system.

In court filings last week the Department of Justice deployed what could be the nuclear option in its latest effort to prevent President Trump from declassifying information regarding FISA warrants used to spy on his campaign aide Carter Page: It is claiming that such a move would interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

This is the first time the DOJ has explicitly made this argument implying personal peril for the president, since interference could open Trump to charges of obstruction of justice. Until now, the department has argued that declassifying the documents threatened national security.

In the 178-page court document, DOJ officials said they had “determined that disclosure of redacted information in the Carter Page FISA documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with the pending investigation into Russian election interference.”

That rationale has heightened suspicions among congressional investigators that the special counsel is being used to prevent the disclosure of possible FBI abuses and crimes committed during the Russia probe. Opened by the FBI in July 2016, the Russia investigation was taken over by Mueller when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him special counsel in 2017.

By the DOJ’s logic, according to one source, the fact that the investigation is ongoing protects it from scrutiny, including the president’s.

The post goes on to explain that the reptilian Rod Rosenstein has constructed an elaborate trap for Trump. He can allow Mueller to investigate his administration to death, while covering up the subversion and possible treason committed by members of the FBI and DOJ. Or, he can go public with these facts and be charged with obstruction and impeached by Congress. The writers of the post no doubt think this is brilliantly clever and they are probably correct about what the subversive Rod Rosenstein is plotting.

It suffers from one glaring defect. That is, it is a great example of “creating elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” There’s no doubt that the subversive Rod Rosenstein is covering up his own crimes here. He signed off on a lot of this stuff and he fears being turned into the fall guy in this caper. His natural inclination is to assume he is the outsider and that the rest involved, who do not share his loyalties, will somehow pin the blame on him.

This is a great example of the core flaw of managerialism. It turns everything into a cheeky parlor game, in which the winner is the one to come up with the most verbally clever solution. The people inside the system come to believe that is actually how the world works. Because their world is a one governed by words and gestures, they start to assume the outer world functions the same way. It creates a false sense of superiority in a class of soft men, wholly unprepared for the harsh reality of the outer world.

There’s no doubt that the bureaucrats inside the system think they really outfoxed Trump this time, but they are mistaken, because this is not how the real world works. Trump is the President. He has real power. For example, he can declassify those documents and release them to the public. No one else can do that with the stroke of a pen. Rosenstein can conjure all the cheeky word puzzles he likes, but Trump retains that power. In fact, they may be playing into his hands with this effort. Now, they look guilty.

That’s the real fight here. Rod Rosenstein can threaten obstruction of justice all he likes, but he has not power. Trump has real power. He can address the nation one night, reveal the secrets Rosenstein is trying to hide and then fire all of the people involved in this subversive plot and its cover up. Congress, even one run by Democrats, is not going to impeach Trump for exposing corruption. They will make the ritual noises and rush to their media outlets to complain about how Trump is a tyrant, but nothing will come of it.

That’s probably why Trump has been sitting on this stuff until after the election. He has no fear of twerps like Rosenstein. He just needs to get through the election and then figure out the new game board. If the GOP keeps the House, then maybe he lets Congress work this case. If it is the Democrats, then maybe he calls their bluff and releases these documents to the public during the lame duck session. The one thing he will not be doing is worrying about what silly men like Rod Rosenstein have to say about it.

Our Conservative Enemies

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Hunting around for material this week, I stumbled on some stuff from Conservative Inc. that reminded me of why so many of us threw in the towel on them and made the journey to this side of the great divide. It also reminded me that there are lots of people just starting the journey from Buckley conservatism or libertarianism. A lot of things readers and listeners here take for granted, they are just experiencing. It’s why it is necessary to go back and play the standards once in a while. So, I have a show about cuck-bashing.

A funny thing I discovered while doing research is that The Weekly Standard website is now for subscribers only. They used to post their stuff to the public, but now you need a sub to read their articles. What that means is my posts now have more readers than anything at the Weekly Standard. They claim 65K subscribers as of 2012, which is probably down to 50K now, maybe less. This site gets about 100K unique readers every month. My heart is an alligator. Let’s hope their numbers continue to fall.

It’s not all good news. I saw that one of the dingbats NRO hires to churn out pap for them was on twitter demanding someone be purged. The fact that any young people still think that crap is edgy or relevant means there is still plenty of work to be done. Like it or not, the cuck-o-sphere still has a vast audience for their surrender ideology. That’s why it is important to keep going over these arguments about the futility of Buckley conservatism and the danger of subversive neocons like Ben Shapiro.

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/lfFxlAwZ6qU

Thoughts On Sportsball

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The Federal government won convictions on three of its cases against the sneaker pimps working behalf of the apparel company Adidas. The case is a strange one in that the FBI invested a lot of time into surveying and wiretapping some famous basketball coaches, as well as some senior company executives. Yet, they have narrowed their focus to some small fish and two executives. It’s one of those cases that probably reveals things about our age for what is not happening, than for what is actually happening in the courtroom.

For those unfamiliar with American college basketball, here’s some background.

Men’s college basketball is probably the most corrupt sport in America. It used to be that boxing was the dirtiest sport, but interest in it has collapsed to the point where it is probably no longer worth the trouble for the criminally inclined. Basketball, on the other hand, is a big money sport with lots of public interest. Like boxing, the talent tends to be unsophisticated and dull-witted, so they are easy to corrupt. There’s also a culture in the sport that tolerates hustlers and conmen. In fact, they are often celebrated.

Strangely, the corruption is not driven by the money coming in the front door, from ticket sales and player contracts. The corruption is driven by the money that comes through the back door, in the form of sneaker agents, apparel companies and the youth development leagues. The business model for sneaker companies is simple. They want black kids buying their sneakers. Since Americans worship black people and youth culture, whatever black kids like, gets bought by Americans and then the people of the provinces.

To that end, the sneaker companies are always looking to sign young basketball stars to represent their brand. They also want college programs, where many of the stars start to become famous, wearing their shoes. The result is the sneaker companies operate complex webs of street agents who bribe kids and their families to sign off-the-books contracts, so they can be guided to the college programs on the payroll of the sneaker company paying the street agent. It’s institutional bribery that has been normalized.

With that as background, it is a mystery as to why the Feds decided to go after these guys, when they have been turning a blind eye to it for decades. The corruption in college basketball is so well known that some of the notorious street agents, who bribe players on behalf of sneaker companies have become institutions. The agent for LeBron James has become very rich just because he got lucky and signed the biggest star in the sport when he was in high school. There are lots of guys hoping to win that lottery.

In other words, the Feds could have been arresting people for decades, but they didn’t and then all of a sudden they went after Adidas. Now, maybe that is just bureaucratic inertia, but what makes this strange is the limited scope thus far. The company executives involved were handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. Given the nature of the sport, that means they probably had a budget of millions to use to bribe players and coaches. That money did not fall from the sky. It came from the company.

Everyone familiar with corporate accounting knows there is no account for bribery in the G&A expenses. Adidas is a publicly traded company, which means they have to follow strict accounting standards. That means there are people in their finance department who have been involved in fraud for a long time. It certainly means C-level managers were aware of the activities and approved it. The FBI could easily take down the whole company if they started to dig around in the books. They certainly have probable cause.

Then there is the strange fact that there have been no plea discussions. The people have not been offered a plea deal and no one has offered to talk. Again, the Adidas executives were not operating alone. They have bigger fish to trade for their freedom. The assistant coaches that have been charged can easily hand over their bosses, who are all famous people. The Feds love putting famous people in jail, because it gets them on TV, but in this case the Feds are strangely uninterested in leveraging what they have to get big fish.

Now, like most people reading this, I have limited interest in basketball. What’s intrigued me about this case is all of the dogs not barking. I can accept that the Feds just ignored the issue for years, because their political bosses put things like terrorism and the drug war as top priorities. Still, the Feds have time to hassle citizens for all sorts of stupid and petty things. It’s not like they are actually doing anything about drug crime and terrorism, other than putting on a show for the public. They could have been on this years ago.

Putting that aside, the real mystery is why they have not bothered to expand this case to the most obvious places. If we’re going to assume that the Feds are lazy so they go after low hanging fruit, then why are they not picking these big juicy plumbs that are right in front of them? Similarly, if sloth is the reason behind their lack of action for decades, why did they bother going to trial, when they could have offered these guys a deal? It’s one of those times where the answer to one question contradicts the answer to something else.

The reason this intrigues me is I think it reveals something about the entire system that most people just suspect. That is, the level of incompetence is much worse that even the harshest critics assert. We’ve seen glimpses of this in the FBI scandal. These people are supposed to be the elite, yet they bungled the simplest of tasks. That means down the line, the quality of personnel is even lower. The reason this sneaker case does not make a lot of sense is because the people running it just time-serving hacks.

Another angle to this is that this case reveals the cultural rot of the American empire. The appeal of professional sport is to see men compete in mock battles on a level playing field, abiding by transparent rules. The governing bodies are supposed to make sure the field remains level and the rules transparent. That’s sportsmanship. The state is supposed to step in clean up the business if the governing body is corrupt or simply needs help policing their sport. It’s why casinos have a strong relationship with law enforcement.

Yet, we have a sport that is flagrantly and openly corrupt and no one says anything about it or tries to do anything about it. As we see with this Adidas case, it would be very easy to pop dozens of coaches and even more sneaker company executives. A handful of high profile people going to prison is the sort of thing that reminds everyone else of the need to maintain high standards. As the Chinese say, sometimes you kill some chickens to scare the monkeys. Imprison a few sneaker executive to keep the rest of them motivated.

One final thought, as I have gone on too long about this. The political class is now moaning about the fact that the public has lost faith in institutions. They never think that maybe their unwillingness to enforce the people’s laws could be the reason. They never mention the flagrant disregard for the spirit of the law throughout the elite. Most Americans are sports fans and every day they are reminded that the Cloud People have no respect for the rules. Eventually, the message does sink in and the Dirt People follow suit.

The End Game

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A popular topic on the Right for a long time has been the looming economic trouble that everyone agrees is inevitable, due to the spiraling debt. The political parties lost interest in the debt during the Obama years, but the problem remains. The Federal government adds another trillion or so every year and we’re just at the start of the great Baby Boomer retirement, which promises to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare. All of the things Reagan warned about, and did nothing about, are still there and getting worse every day.

Now, as I mentioned in the podcast last week, one reason no one cares about this stuff anymore is nothing every happens. The politicians never do anything to address the problem and the warnings about the disaster never come true. The 2008 mortgage meltdown can probably be blamed for the public’s indifference to these issues now, and maybe the politicians too, because the disaster was averted. That problem was worse than the predictions, but the consequences were nothing like predicated.

For the Right and increasingly for the Left, the hand-wringing over the looming financial troubles has always been a proxy for the general angst about democracy. After all, the primary driver for the debt trouble is the public’s insatiable desire for free stuff and the politicians need to give it to them. The creative ways in which the U.S. government finances its spending is driven by the need to feed the beast that is democracy. They say necessity is the mother of invention and we see that in our fiscal situation.

The thing is though, a financial crash, even a debilitating one, is never enough to bring down a nation. For example, the Long Depression lasted in the United States from 1873 to 1896, with the most severe portion being the first decade. The Great Depression lasted for over a decade and was followed by world war. There was never a fear of revolution in these economic disasters because the public trusted itself and the institutions of the nation to work through the problems. People just kept working the problem until it got better.

Revolts come when people no longer trust their rulers. The king bungles a series of issues and the people decide they need a new king. The ruling class gets reckless and lazy and they find themselves on the run. Revolutions come when the system itself is no longer trusted. The economic crisis that triggers it is just an excuse for doing what people have been thinking about doing for a long time. The radicals were able to overthrow the French monarchy because no one could think of a reason to not overthrow the system.

That’s the dangerous waters we seem to be in today. Now, elites love to confuse the institutions with the people occupying them. Despite being replaceable and often replaced, they see themselves as indispensable. That’s just their arrogance, not a sign the public has lost faith in the system. After all, no one trusts Congress, but the voters can replace all of the congressmen with more trustworthy people in a series of elections. Is that a loss of faith in the institution or just the normal process of democracy?

Still, there is a growing distrust of the system and it is something you see in the Progressive coalition, Trump voters and the Dissident Right. The reasons are different, but all around, people are losing faith in the system itself. Team Brown wants to begin the great replacement today and they see the system as a hindrance to their efforts. The MAGA-pedes see the system as an impediment to Trump’s reform efforts. The Dissident Right sees the system as part of the cancer that is destroying white society.

Cultural discontent is not a new thing, so it is temping to think that we are reliving the period from the 1970’s into the 1980’s. Smart people in the Nixon years thought the country was headed for civil war. By the middle of the 1980’s everyone was happy again due to the robust economy. Trump’s approval rating is his highest as the economy is finally showing that old dynamism again, but people are even more angry now than before the election. Maybe this time is different and a good economy is not enough.

Of course, the troubles half a century ago were different than today, despite the similarities. The culture war of the 60’s and 70’s was between white people in a country that was 90% white. The fight today is between whites and non-whites in a country rapidly moving to majority-minority. Then we have the brown waves of migrants washing up on the southern border, that serve as a daily reminder of what the future holds for white people. This is a very different crisis than we saw in the 60’s.

History buffs like to look at the French Revolution for clues as to how the American experiment ends. The alt-right thinks the interwar period in Germany is a good model for what comes next. Of course, the Roman Empire is always a handy example. All of that is probably wrong. In fact, the alt-right is laughably wrong about what comes next. The better example may be the Holy Roman Empire. The slow disintegration of that political construction is a less glamorous story, but it may be a more relevant one for us

After all, America has always been a multi-cultural empire. It was just confined to this continent and composed of white people. Even today, the cultural difference between the people of New England and those of the Midwest are obvious. The whites of the west coast are wildly different in temperament than the whites of New York. When someone from the Northeast visits Texas for the first time, they almost always say that they feel like they are in a different country. That’s because Texas is a different country.

Since Gettysburg, American has been a collection of cultural regions held together by the Yankee hegemony. The rest of America has functioned like Puerto Rico to the winners of the Civil War. That is, they retained some local autonomy, but were never allowed to have a say in the big issues. A fun way to see this is to to examine the list of President before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Heck, the GOP is a party based in the South and Southwest, yet the President is the quintessential New Yorker.

Maybe instead of a dramatic collapse or a great revolution, maybe the future for this empire is to just stagger along from one crisis to the next, losing a little bit of influence here, a little bit of land over there. A long, episodic process where the American Empire slowly disintegrates, returning to its natural parts. A generation from now, America will be out of Asia. Another generation and Europe is free. All the while the role of the central government recedes domestically as the local cultural regions re-assert their authority.

A Report From The Field

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One of the stranger things about this age is that even the fiercest critics of the ruling class are finding it hard to keep pace with the ruling class confirming their claims. Make some exaggerated statement about the Cloud People and before you have had a chance to defend it from critics, Cloud People have taken to social media to prove your point. It’s a cliché to say that satire is dead, but it really does feel that way. How can you satirize people who are everything you mock them for being, plus some extra to make the point?

A popular theme here is that the people who rule over us act like a foreign colonial elite, divorced from the reality of our daily life. They are not just physically removed, but spiritually and intellectually removed. As a result, they are entirely clueless about what animates our lives and decisions. This critique is meant to be an exaggeration to make a point about our elites. This editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Yale professor David Gelernter, however, is an example how it is hard to exaggerate these things.

The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of. They skip Davos every year and watch Fox News. Not even the very best has the dazzling brilliance of a Chuck Schumer, not to mention a Michelle Obama. In truth they are dumb as sheep.

Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is. Not the average male American, or the average white American. We know for sure that, come 2020, intellectuals will be dumbfounded at the number of women and blacks who will vote for Mr. Trump. He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones.

Now, Gelernter is one of the few good neocons in that he is much more in line with the original generation than with the successors. I had a short correspondence with him a long time ago and he was very nice. No, I am not the Unabomber. He had written an article about alternative file structures that I found interesting so I sent him an e-mail about it and we went back and forth on the topic. Unlike his neocon brethren, he does not sneer at the rest of us or endlessly advocate for our destruction.

The amusing part about this column is that it needed to be written. Gelernter is a Yale professor, which means he spends his days around Cloud People and future Cloud People. As a Trump supporter, he operates a lot like Dian Fossey, spending every day in an alien environment observing strange creatures. He no doubt has come to care for them and appreciate them, but their weirdness remains the main fascination. Yet, this is a place that is a training ground for the people who will one day call themselves our leaders.

Now, spend enough time in a foreign place and you will start to take on the attributes of the natives. You see that in the description of the “typical American” as something closer to a character from Dickens than modern reality. Whenever ruling class people talk about the rest of us they never mention business owners, the self-employed or senior managers in mid-sized companies. I deal with the latter on a regular basis and I rarely encounter a hard core lefty. They range from right-of-center to way over on our side of the divide.

That’s the strangeness of the current age. It’s not that the ruling class is physically removed from the rest of us, as in the feudal age or even at the peak of the industrial age. In those times, the people in the castles and mansions generally believed the same things as the regular people, at least spiritually. They also felt a duty to maintain order, not just in their own interests but in the interests of the populace. They may not have liked the peasants, but they did not hate them. They certainly felt a duty to look out for them.

In this age, the ruling class believes things that no normal person accepts. The tranny stuff is the obvious example. That will never be accepted by normal people as anything other than an insult to their decency. The Cloud People can bellow about this until they are swinging from a rope and the people will never accept it. Yet, among the Cloud People, gender fluidity is as sensible as worshiping Gaia. Our ruling class now has an entirely alien religion upon which is built their moral framework and world view. They ain’t us.

That’s another thing about this age. The Cloud People lack self-awareness. It’s why comedy is no longer funny. A sense of humor relies on a sense of self and a willingness to make sport of your side. That can only work on people when they are aware of their own foibles and quirks. For our rulers, their greatest blind spot is in the mirror. They imagine themselves as plucky underdogs fighting the man. They think they are nobly sacrificing for the greater good. In reality, they are selfish self-absorbed children throwing tantrums.

That’s why it is hard to be optimistic about a good end to a course correction. How do you reform a ruling class whose identity is based on its hatred of the people over whom it rules? How do you fix a people who are oblivious to the lives of the people they rule and oblivious to the reality of their own lives? It is easy to understand why the Maoists sent so many intellectuals to the rice paddies or gave them factory jobs pushing a broom. It’s hard to comprehend how anyone can be so clueless and self-absorbed, but here we are.

Killing Lincoln

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One of the unmistakable features of modern conservatives is their not-so-veiled hostility toward heritage America. Some attribute this to ethnic hostility, given the infiltration of the Right by neoconservatives. Initially, these people made the journey from communism to anti-communism and were never conservative in temperament. Of course, the royal lifestyles of many conservatives has made them into unpleasant snobs. All of that is true to one degree or another, but it obscures an important point about modern conservatives.

The Official Right has a different interpretation of American history than most normal white people. Blacks, of course, fixate on slavery and segregation, so their view of American history is through hostile eyes. Whites generally accept the conventional narrative. If you ask a normal white American to tell the story of America, he will start with something about how the Puritans came to America to escape religious tyranny. Once the colonist got things going, the King tried to tax the colonists, so there was a revolution.

The Official Right has a different view of American history. They look at the Founding as an imperfect result. First and foremost, they view the tolerance of slavery, and the enshrining of it in the Constitution, as a great sin. Rather than embrace the principle of liberty for all, because all men are created equal, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution created a compromise. While all citizens were free and equal under the law, slavery created a class of people who were not citizens.

In the view of the Straussians, the intellectual movement based on the writing and teaching of Leo Strauss, the Constitution was not just a flawed document, but an immoral one, because it violated that core principle of equality. From this perspective, the Civil War was a purification of the country, removing the origin sin of slavery and forming a new Union, based in equality and universal liberty. For the Official Right, America was reborn in the Civil War and Lincoln was the Moses who ushered in the new republic.

This is why the Official Right has a Lincoln fetish. For example, Rich Lowry, the dull-witted editor of National Review, wrote a Lincoln book. The neocons treat Lincoln as if he is an Old Testament prophet. Jonah Goldberg regularly writes about Lincoln as if he is a god on Mt. Olympus. For the Official Right, Lincoln is the Founding Father. Those guys who wrote the Constitution are not entirely dismissed, but they are secondary figures in the story. For the Official Right, the American story starts with the Gettysburg Address.

A big part of this is due to a guy named Harry Jaffa, who became something of a cult leader for the neoconservatives. His framing of the Civil War as the second founding, allowed the neocons to see themselves as proof of the concept. The original founding excluded them from the narrative, while the second founding not only included them in the story of America, it made them proof of its righteousness. Lincoln’s America was not just for the founding stock. It was for whoever could get control of it.

Of course, the old WASP side of the Official Right was also willing to embrace this notion of the second founding. Since northern conservatism was mostly just a clean up crew that followed Progressivism around, the story of the second founding made their unwillingness to oppose the Left seem noble. Since Reconstruction, the role of what passes for conservatism has been to fill the void after every great spasm of Progressive activism overturned the old order. The Official Right’s job was to make it all work again.

The problem with this telling of history is it assumes a core immorality of the founding stock and the institutions they created. It also locks in the notion that it is the role of Northern reformers to be the guardians of civic morality. The Left need only appeal to the notion of universal equality and liberty and their opponents were disarmed. After all, the party of Lincoln, if it stands for anything, stands for universal equality and liberty. The conservatism of Harry Jaffa is nothing but a complex apologia for Progressivism.

A fun gag is to talk to the grandees of the Official Right about Lincoln’s actual views on race relations. The quickest way to get hurled into the void by angry Buckleyites is to quote Lincoln on the issue. The fact is, Lincoln was a man of his age, when it came to race, despite his zealous opposition to slavery. Like all abolitionists, he did not care about the slaves, he cared about the slave holder. That was the soul he sought to save. The slaves themselves were just props on the stage of the morality play that was abolitionism.

The Official Right can never accept this. One of the criticisms of Harry Jaffa on this score was that he was not a scholar of Lincoln, so much as the chief polemicist for the cult that formed around him. His telling of history left out anything that contradicted his concept of the second founding. This is true not only from an academic perspective, but also from a human one. This telling of history leaves out most of the country. For anyone outside the northern alliance, their ancestors are either villains or non-entities in the narrative.

That’s the source of the low level hostility toward heritage America that has been a feature of the Official Right and that is now its face to the rest of us. Since Gettysburg, the story of America has been the story of northern hegemony. On one side are the reformers and fanatics, always looking for a reason to put the lash to the legacy population. On the other side are the so-called conservatives, who hold most of the same views, but see their role as making the latest fads work, so the overall American project can move forward.

The Lincoln fetish that blossomed among so-called conservatives in the middle of the last century was a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Unable to conjure and sustain a moral opposition to the Left, they embraced Lincoln as their Moses. Their acquiescence to the Left was the result of deeply held principles with roots in the founding, the second founding. They were champions of “a new birth of freedom — that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This is the great challenge in attempting to overturn the Judeo-Puritan orthodoxy that defines the America ruling class. It requires more than just defeating present day arguments over public policy. It means restoring large chunks of history that have been systematically erased by our zealous overlords. Killing off the cult of Lincoln and the political movement it animates, means telling a better story to the people charged with tearing it down. That inevitably means killing Lincoln as the founder of the nation.