American Cicero

In an apocryphal exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald said, “The rich are different from you and me.” Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” This gets repeated a lot, because it tickles the egalitarian sensibilities of most Americans. A big part of what has kept America together since the Civil War is the myth that ours is a classless society. Some people have more money and power than others, but that is entirely due to merit, not class and connections.

Like the exchange itself, this belief is false. Every society has an elite and that elite uses its influence and connections to perpetuate itself. The daughters of rich guys marry the sons of influential guys. Their children are groomed to take up positions in the elite, mostly due to their family connections in the elite. Just as important, a floor is placed under members of the elite, protecting them from reversion to the mean. It is how the Kennedy family has been in politics for four generations, despite their deficiencies.

What used to be unique about the American elite is they had a strong connection to the rest of America. This is a big, continent sized country, composed of man nations. That regional diversity, which is driven by biological diversity, made for a national elite that was just a collection of local elites. This greatly reduced the distance between the elites and those over whom they ruled. Therefore, the American elite tended to be less elite, relative the Europe, and much more connected to the people.

In this interview on C-Span, Tucker Carlson explains some of the themes in his book and how he had this epiphany about what is happening in America. It is an amazingly frank interview about how he and his fellow elites know pretty much nothing about the country over which they rule. At around the seven minute mark, he makes the point that he and his neighbors do not know things like how much gasoline costs. The reason is they have lots of money and the price of staples is simply unimportant.

Carlson is in many respects, a throwback. He is what the WASP elite used to be like in previous generations. That is, he grew up in privilege but had plenty of exposure to the common people and developed some common habits. In that same interview, he mentions that Claiborne Pell drove a beat-up old car, despite being from old money. It was partially an affectation, but it was also a sensibility. American elites not only did not want to look like elites, but they also wanted to make sure they were a responsible elite.

That is the interesting thing about Carlson’s book. It is being bought and read by the hoi polloi, but it is aimed at his neighbors in Georgetown. It is a warning to them that they better start paying attention to what’s happening on the other side of the great cultural wall that separates us and them. What is even more interesting is the people who should be reading it, are not reading his book. Instead they are attacking Carlson for it. They want his severed hands to be put on display in the Capitol rotunda.

The fact is the Trump phenomenon is showing that the time for reform has passed and whatever comes next is unavoidable. That is a truth about all reform efforts. Once a reform effort gets going, it is almost always too late for reform to work. The entrenched interests are too strong to overcome. Democracy moves quickly from a point where corruption is too minor to be of any concern to a place where corruption is too rampant for the system to confront it. Systemic failure is the core code of democracy.

You see this in late empire America. The ruling elite is composed of many parts, none of which has a reason to care about public welfare. The so-called deep-state is thoroughly beholden to global interests, many of whom are foreign. The semi-permanent administrative state is composed of people who hold the rest of us in contempt and people happy to not be subjected to the vagaries of the dreaded private sector. The mass media is a collection of propagandists and court jesters, mostly stupid rich kids.

The political class is always the focus of reform, which is why many Americans are flirting with the sort of radicalism circulating in dissident politics. These well-trained actors run for office on well-designed appeals to bourgeois sensibilities, then immediately begin speaking in tongues when they get to Washington. To follow modern politics, as a normal person, is to see the movie They Live over and over, thinking there can be a different ending, that the aliens will come around to our side.

The reason for this is the political class is just a collection of hired men. The plutocrats, who control both parties and the administrative state, have found that it is a lot easier to hire actors to stand in for them in office. That means every election, the choice is between two actors hired by the same people, playing different carefully scripted roles. When they get to Washington, they are given a different script. It is why so many of them are quite dumb. Stupid people do not ask too many tough questions.

The defining feature of our modern elites is that a big part of who they are, their sense of identity, comes from not being us. The cultivated contempt from FBI functionaries like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page is part of the dress code of these people. In the same way a rich guy will sport an understated, but expensive watch or article of clothing, the people who rule over us wear a contempt for Americans, especially white Americans. The dying white middle-class is especially despised by the administrative state.

This is why reform is impossible. We see this with Trump, and we would have seen it if Bernie Sanders had scored the upset. It is not about the old ideological framework. It is about the new cultural framework. The people who rule over us see themselves as different from us, at war with us. They are defined by that sense. While it is amusing to see Carlson play the jocular Cicero role, it is important to remember the fate of Cicero as Rome succumbed to authoritarianism. No one should buy him gloves for Christmas.

The Coming Crisis

In a crisis, people either turn to their institutions or they turn to their leaders to provide a path forward through the emergency. This is especially true when the path forward is waiting out the emergency. People respect action, so they must have faith in their leaders if the right course is patience. Alternatively, if the leaders and institutions are not up to the task, then the people turn on each other. The French Revolution is the perfect example of what happens when leaders and institutions fail in a crisis.

It has been a long time since American faced a real crisis. The closest we came to anything major was the financial crisis a decade ago. For people foolish enough to take on the crazy mortgages, it was a very real emergency, but for most people it was more of an abstraction than a real crisis. Unemployment ticked up and the stock market took a header, but it was not the Great Depression. There was a concern, for sure, that the wheels were about to come off the cart, but it never materialized.

Of course, one could say that the leaders and institutions stepped in and guided the country through the crisis. People tend not to think of the Federal Reserve as an essential institution, but it is probably the most important part of government now. The head of the central bank is every bit as important as the President. In fact, he may be more important, as we saw with Greenspan and George Bush. An overly tight monetary policy led to a slight downturn in the economy at just the right time to sink the Bush election bid.

In 2008, the world was lucky to have a Fed chairman, who had prepared his whole life for such an event, and a very weak political class. Bush was near the end of his reign, and no one thought much of him anyway. Congress has not had much credibility in decades, so they could not cause too much trouble. Bernake was given the room to do what had to be done to stabilize the financial system. People can argue about the solution and various alternatives, but the Fed did provide a peaceful path forward.

The world was lucky in another way. The public was still confident in the system, even though they may not have liked many of the people in it. George Bush was down in the polls, because of the Iraq war, but people still trusted he was a good guy. The restoration of public trust during the Reagan years still cast a shadow over the Bush years. Even though Clinton had been a degenerate and Bush was an incompetent, people still thought the system was fine. They could trust the system.

That brings us to the present. Half the country voted for Trump and increasingly blames the system for blocking his efforts. The other half voted against him and increasingly suspects he is punishment for a broken system. The political class is at war with itself, as it grapples with the fact it no longer commands respect. Then there is the hidden war between the semi-permanent administrative state and the reformers in the White House and Congress. Right now, the people and institutions are not very stable.

That is what makes the rumblings from the financial system ominous. Wall Street is not Main Street, so a yearlong bear market should not be overstated. The old line about the markets being predictive is nonsense. If people could see the future, there would be no stock market. The US markets went on a crazy upward run and may simply be going through a correction. Still, the housing market is heading into a recession and the economy is showing signs of a slowdown, if not a recession.

None of this is cause for alarm, but what if the long-prophesied collapse of the credit system is a lot closer than we know? A lot of smart people said that 2008 was one of those tremors that precedes a major earthquake. Maybe what we have been experiencing is something like the Long Depression, which ran in fits and starts for two decades. The last few years have simply been a respite, and we are about to have another serious downturn or even a panic. Will the leaders and institutions hold up?

In other words, the economic pendulum swings back and forth. That is the lesson of economic history. The salient question is whether the political institutions and the leaders can hold up as the pendulum swings. In the 19th century, Europe was convulsed with civil unrest and war as the Industrial revolution blasted through traditional institutions. In the US, the post-Civil War period was relatively calm, even though the same forces were at work. The institutions and leaders held up.

Again, we really do not know if the current system and the people in it could hold up under a real crisis. Maybe the 2008 crisis can be read as proof that the system is better than the people in it. Maybe the lessons learned from it have made the system even stronger. On the other hand, maybe the system held up because of residual stability that has now dissipated. That is increasingly obvious with regards to public trust. It is much lower today than it was a decade ago. Maybe the same is true of the internal stability.

The thing is though, there are a lot of signs that the people at the very top of the global system are slowly rearranging the board. For a long time, America could count on the dollar as the world reserve currency and, more important, a hungry market for US Treasuries. The system built by the American empire relies on credit to operate and the reserve credit of the world is US debt. If there is even a hint of that changing, the great crisis will be upon us. Will those institutions and people hold up?

The Other Trump Effect

One of the things that is true of the dissident right is that it was helped greatly by the collapse of libertarianism. Starting in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s, right-libertarianism was a safe haven for realists to exist on the right but also reject large parts of what was calling itself conservatism. The two most notable issues were the war on drugs and foreign policy. Most people were attracted to libertarianism because it was serious about small government and restrained foreign policy.

After the fiasco of the Bush years and the explosion of progressive fanaticism, libertarianism seemed ready to have its moment. The Ron Paul campaign of 2008 was probably the peak. While no one thought Paul could win, it certainly looked like he could break through and be a serious candidate. Then the New Hampshire primary happened, where he got just eight percent of the vote. It was thought to be the ideal place for a guy running on libertarian ideas, but he bombed.

Talk to people in the alt-right and what you learn is they moved into dissident politics after the disappointment of the Ron Paul campaign. What they slowly figured out is that right-libertarianism was just a proxy for white identity politics. The sort of country imagined by Ron Paul could be nothing but a white country. Not only did it have no appeal to blacks, it could never be multi-racial. Put another way, if you want libertarian politics, you need white people.

Left-libertarianism is just a beard for progressivism, much in the same was conservatism is just window dressing for the prevailing orthodoxy. That is something else you hear from alt-right people. Many passed through left-libertarianism, realized it was just low-tax liberalism, moved into right-libertarianism and finally race realism. This is a common story, even among Gen-X people. They found the Ron Paul crowd the next best thing and moved into it in the 1990’s.

Something similar may be happening with Donald Trump. We are seeing some new voices in the dissident right, guys like Josh Neal and Jefferson Lee, who have recently made the trip from libertarianism. There are a lot of people in the libertarian-conservative camp, who voted for Trump as the least bad option. These are the Flight 93 voters, who never really liked Trump, but saw him as an agent of change. He would break the old model of politics and usher in an era of reform.

A strong whiff of this is turning up in comment sections and social media, where people sympathetic to Trump are increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress. The overtly racial response to Trump from the orthodoxy has probably red-pilled more people than Jared Taylor has done in 30 years. The combined effect of Trump’s failures and the intensely racial response from his opponents, is having a similar impact on whites as the failure of Ron Paul libertarianism a decade ago.

Inevitably, the left had to make race and ethnicity central to their presentation, because it is explicitly a coalition of identity groups now. There is the Judeo-Puritan elite, ruling a collection of tribes based in ethnicity, race, and selected perversions. There is simply no way for the people at the top to rally their tribes without being explicitly racial. Even their anti-male rhetoric is obviously anti-white male rhetoric, which has always been an obvious war on white people.

The new blasphemy laws aimed at whites talking race is just a blunt force implementation of the old prohibitions against frank debates about race but done so in a way to rally the tribes. On the one hand, the hope is they can stop the exodus of whites from conventional politics, by anathematizing the subject. On the other hand, it is a useful way to rally the troops. The result, however, is that our politics are saturated in race and identity. Inevitably, whites are becoming race conscious.

That is the other Trump effect. Most likely a Clinton or Bush presidency would have been another four years of more subtle race mongering. It is hard to know, of course, but there certainly would not have been the panicked response from the orthodoxy if anyone else had won in 2016. It was the shock of Trump not only rumbling through the first line of defense and smashing the GOP but then driving the populist tank into the middle of the progressive camp. The response has been revelatory.

What is happening now is that the amorphous blob of whites, variously called CivNats, Conservatarians, right-libertarians and BoomerCons, is waking up to the hard reality that defines dissident politics. That is, the problem is not the people running the system, it is the system itself that is the problem. No open system can govern a multi-racial, multicultural empire. Liberal democracy is antithetical to multiculturalism. Voting will not change that reality. Something else must be done.

Just as many libertarians a decade ago realized that that you can only have libertarianism in a white society, many Trump people are learning something similar. The disillusionment with what is happening is leading many Trump supporters to doubt the institutions, rather than the people in them. You can have liberal democracy, orderly elections, and the rule of law in an overwhelmingly white society. The lawless response to Trump is driving Flight 93 voters into the camp of the dissident right.

A Show Of Don’ts

This week I decided to do some housekeeping. I started looking at the lists I keep for posting and podcasting with an eye on doing some year-end cleanup. This time of year, I like to take some time to reorganize and reset. I noticed on my podcast list that I had some stray items and leftovers that I was probably never going to use, so some housekeeping was in order. That is when it occurred to me that maybe I could bundle all of them into a single show. That way I would not discard them entirely.

The result this week is a show about things you should avoid doing. These are all ideas I thought about using for different topics, but they never quite fit. The first segment, for example, was something I thought about in the show on fascism, but it was left on the cutting room floor, as the professionals say. The last segment is something I thought of using in a show about popular culture, but I decided I did not care enough about popular culture to do a whole podcast on it. This show is a hunter’s stew, of sorts.

Tonight at 8:00 PM EST I am scheduled to be the Josh Neal live stream. I don’t know a whole lot about him, but he seems to be interviewing people involved in dissident politics, so I figured it would be fine. His list of topics to discuss is free will, the near future of dissident politics and my thoughts about Donald Trump. The show will last about 90 minutes, and you can watch it at any time. Given that this livestream will happen during my designated drinking time, it should be an entertaining episode.

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 have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 07:00: Don’t Worry About Principles
  • 17:00: Don’t Chase The Stick
  • 27:00: Don’t Worry About Details
  • 37:00: Don’t Play The Role
  • 47:00: Don’t Black Pill Yourself
  • 57:00: Closing

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Odysee

The Reforms Of Z-Man

In the 6th century BC, many Greek city-states were succumbing to one man rule, which they called tyrants. Today the word conjures images of a ruthless and cruel autocrat, but in that time is simply meant a dictator. The reason for this would be familiar to anyone living today. The elite gained an economic stranglehold on society and used it to subvert the political system. The great inequality in Athenian life meant that the bulk of the citizens were becoming victims of a predatory elite.

To avoid what was happening in other city-states, the Athenians decided they had to reform their society but could not trust the existing elites to do it. Instead, they turned to the wisest man of their age, a man named Solon, who is remembered today as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He was given temporary dictatorial powers to push through economic, political, and moral reforms. The goal of these reforms was to address economic equality and restore political stability, to avoid tyranny.

If we look around at America today, the similarities are obvious. Instead of rich landowners preying on the populace, it is a handful of megalomaniacs, who rule from atop global corporations and hedge funds. The normal democratic system of governance has broken down, so that the desires of the people are ignored, while the small donor class wields the state as a weapon against the people. Another weapon against the people is a vulgar popular culture, aimed at undermining public dignity and self-respect.

Clearly, reform is needed. Increasingly, people are coming around to the idea that what is needed is a Pinochet, who will fumigate the political class and deal harshly with the moral and economic predators currently atop the system. It is why calling Trump a dictator has only helped his cause. The people who voted for him are not so sure it would be a bad idea if he assumed dictatorial power. In the spirit of Solon, are there reforms that could be implemented to arrest the decline into tyranny?

The first thing to acknowledge is that “get back to our constitutional roots” is the sort of thing a moron mutters to himself while watching the news. The people saying this really should be rounded up and shipped off to Africa, where they could be eaten by the natives. Similarly, rolling back the laws and legal rulings of the last 150 years is not happening either. Reform is not revolution. The way to prevent a violent end is to push through changes that could be accepted, maybe grudgingly, by the elites.

The first reform would have to be an amendment to the Constitution enshrining free association and private discrimination as a sacred right. The core idea of America was always the idea that it was a big country and people could self-segregate. If it were not working for you in the town in which you were born, you could head off to another town to find a better situation. You cannot have a mobile, self-segregating population when they need permission from the state to associate or disassociate with one another.

The trouble with mobility in a democracy is that people can move to a new place and then organize to vote for things against the wishes of the locals. New Hampshire, for example, has been ruined by people from Massachusetts moving there to escape taxes, but then voting for drunken Hibernians as soon as they get a ballot. An amendment to tie voting to your place of birth not only solves this problem, but it also makes immigration useless as a political weapon. You cannot import new voters. This amendment would be retroactive.

A third amendment would alter who votes in Federal elections. Universal suffrage is every bit as a crazy as open borders. It lowers the intelligence of the electorate and encourages the worst habits of the political class. An amendment fixing the voting age at 35 and assigning one vote per family household solves this problem. That is right. Only the married can vote. Maybe some allowance for homeowners could be considered, but the family is the future, and voting is about the future, so you must be future oriented to vote.

Those are big reforms that would face a lot of resistance from the billionaire predators that prosper from the current corruption. That would necessitate a pruning of the billionaire class. Bluntly, no one is going to care if Tim Cook is stripped of his wealth and thrown in a dungeon. The world will not change if Jeff Bezos drops dead tomorrow. The cemeteries are full of indispensable rich people. Therefore, the advice of Thrasybulus is warranted, which means an orderly trimming of the financial elite will be required.

Some lesser reforms to the political system would also be required. Restoring the Senate as the house of the states, by repealing the 17th Amendment is one reform. Another would be the elimination of tax breaks for charitable giving. Charities have become money laundering operations for political activity. That would also get rid of the vast sea of not-for-profit think tanks that saturate Washington. Some would survive, but only those that do legitimate work on public policy. This would restore some transparency too.

The whole point of democracy is for the elected officials to work a hedge against the rich and powerful exerting control of society. Addressing the money problem in politics is another small reform. In Federal elections, all money must go to candidates and be reported to the public, Further, no candidate could accept money from outside his state or district. The use of front men to evade this rule would come with a draconian punishment, like the stripping of all assets and permanent banishment from the continent.

There are plenty of other small reforms that would go a long way toward restoring stability and trust in public institutions. Presumably, if the big items are passed, the new political class that would emerge could address those smaller items. That is, of course, why these sorts of reforms could never pass. Political reform in a democracy is about altering the political class. The only alteration they could tolerate is that which entrenches their position as front men for the cosmopolitan global elite.

I will just note that Solon was able to get his reforms implemented and once they were in place he gave up power and left the country. The Athenians swore to abide by them for ten years. Within four years, the old social rifts re-appeared, along with new ones created by Solon’s reforms.  It quickly became clear that the reforms could only last if Solon were around to lend his moral authority to them, as well as work out the new problems he created. The Greeks were right back where they started.

Eventually, someone named Peisistratos, a relative of Solon, rose up to become the tyrant and impose order on the Greeks. Solon accused the Athenians of stupidity and cowardice for allowing this to happen. He was right about the first part, but completely wrong about the second. The Greeks were being practical in the face of an impossible problem. In time, democracy returned, drawing from the reforms of Solon and the lessons from the period of reform and tyranny, suggesting democracy is a result, not a process.

Exiles

Exile is a central part of human existence, most certainly as old as human settlement and probably predating it. Humans are social animals. Banishment and ostracism are primeval weapons, wielded by human groups for the worst crimes like sacrilege, murder and subversion. Exile as a punishment is based on the understanding that much of who we are as a human is based on our relationship with others. Our role in the group is who we are, so therefore being forced out of the group is a nullification of one’s identity.

Death, of course, is the ultimate nullification. For a group of humans to decide that one of their own must die is the acknowledgement that the person can never be a part of the group. Who they are is not just out of sync with the group. It is a danger to the very existence of the group. Exile, in contrast, assumes the exiled can be reformed. It offers the exiled at least some opportunity to regain himself and become a part of the group again. Alternatively, he can find a new group where he belongs.

While exile is as old as man, it is also as modern as man too. In fact, we would not have modernity without the prominent role of exiles in the human story. The Bolsheviks, for example, came out of exile to rock the old order and begin close to a century of struggle in the West. The Iranian revolution was engineered by exiles, who ushered in half a century of unrest in the Muslim world. Of course, America was born as an enclave for exiles, men divorced from the old country and starting new in the wilderness.

A useful way to understand the role of exile in shaping the West is to think about the birth of conservatism in Europe. Unlike everything else in modern thought, it was not the result of the Enlightenment, but rather a consequence of the French Revolution. The destruction, terror and wars that resulted from the revolution, created a generation of exiles, divorced from their lands, their people and their way of life. Their struggle to understand the revolution and formulate a response, was the birth of conservatism in the West.

Today, of course, there is never any discussion of how the revolution transformed the aristocracy of Europe. The radicals who rule over the West, like chimps looking in a mirror, can never stop obsessing over their antecedents. The revolution, however, fundamentally altered the elite of Europe. There were the material changes, of course, as they were forced to abandon their lands and flee to neighboring lands. There were also spiritual and intellectual changes that resulted in being exiled from their homes.

The French aristocrat living in Vienna, for example, suddenly found himself around a new elite, with different habits and different tastes. This sudden juxtaposition gave these aristocrats a new perspective on their own culture. Prior to exile, they had no reason to think about why they lived as they did. It was just the way things were as they entered the world. In exile, they had to examine why it was their way of life existed, why they existed, and why it was swept away by the revolution.

In other words, exile created a romanticism for that lost past, but also an intellectual framework to understand how that old order was lost and how best to respond to the radicalism that was unleashed on society. Further, the restoration cemented the point that the old order was gone for good. The saying among conservatives at the time was that the restored king Louis XVIII was not sitting on the Bourbon throne, he was sitting on the throne of Napoleon. It was an acknowledgement that there was no going back.

In this age, exile explains why northern conservatism was a shabby response to northern radicalism. The conservative was not the result of exile. He was always as much a part of the ruling ethos as the radical. The relationship between the American conservative and the American radical was always as co-dependents. The radical needed the conservative as a foil, while the conservative needed the radical for a reason to exist. Without one, the other could never exist as an independent mode of thought.

The closest America has come to having an authentic conservatism was in the South where the conquered and displaced planter class had to reconcile the loss of their past with a way forward as a regional elite. It never really worked, as there could never be a restoration, even an artificial one. The anathematization of Southern culture has been so thorough and complete in the 20th century, that now the very symbols of it are treated as an affront to public morality. That aristocracy was exterminated, not exiled.

What may be happening in this age of cultural upheaval, however, is the birth of a new class of exiles. White men of the older generation are seeing the world in which they were born slowly succumbing to the darkness of multiculturalism. Theirs is not a romanticism for that old age, but a growing anger at its loss. The baby Boomer conservative takes a lot of grief, and deservedly so, but every day that group inches closer toward identity politics as the only available response to the gathering darkness.

In the younger generations, there can be no romanticism or an angry response to the loss of old white America. Instead, there is an acceptance that old white America can never be restored. There is also a reconsideration of what created mid-century America and what sent it rocketing into the abyss of self-abnegation. These are the new exiles, divorced from the past, cut off from their culture and hounded by the radicals of this revolution, as the aristocrats of France were hounded by the Jacobins.

The defect in the conservative response to 18th century radicalism was it could never get past its own romanticism. The conservatives of that age were still surrounded by the results of their lost culture. In every city center, in every local village, they were reminded of the glorious past. As a result, the conservatism of Europe was always destined to be a compromise with radicalism. Constitutional monarchy was an effort to retain the spirit of the past, inhabiting the sterile, lifeless body of social democracy.

This generation of exiles will have the benefit of not living in a museum. In a way, the radical destruction of the symbols and language of old white America is doing a service to the exiles of today and tomorrow. Without the ghosts of the past, clawing at the present, the response to today’s radicalism can be independent and new. Today’s exile will not be animated by a longing for a lost past but instead be haunted by the unrealized present and an anger at the radicals who foreclosed his future.

Lessons of the Fields Trial

James Fields, the person who drove his car into a crowd of left-wing rioters in Charlottesville, during the Unite the Right rally two summers ago, was convicted of all counts last week. The top count was first degree murder, which means the jury agreed with the state that he drove into the crowd intending to harm people. Technically, he could get the death penalty, but the guidelines recommend life without parole. The jury will make a recommendation this week and the judge will formally sentence him in the next month.

Everyone with an interest in the case has made their position clear. The Left, of course, loves the sight of blood, so they are thrilled with the result. The alt-right people, who followed the case, are obviously disgusted at the show trial and result. They are correct that this whole thing was a mockery of justice. While reasonable people can disagree about his culpability, sending him away for life is a vulgar act of vengeance. Regardless, it is an event that should provide some very clear lessons for the dissident right.

For starters, right-wing movements in America have always made the mistake of assuming the Left is amenable to humanitarian appeals. This case makes clear that to be on the Left is to have abandoned any shred of mercy or compassion. The kid should not have been there, and he certainly got mixed up with some bad people. Order requires he pay some penalty for what he did, but sending this young man to jail for life is vicious and cruel. There is no mercy on the Left. There never will be.

Another lesson is that we no longer live in a land of laws. What has gone on in Virginia since that rally is an abomination. This is just the most recent act of lawlessness. Over the last year or so, other men have been sent away for hard time over trivial things, simply because they are white and hold the wrong opinions. Meanwhile, the blacks involved were handed checks and allowed to promote themselves off their crimes. For white people, there is no justice in the court system, so make sure you stay out of it.

Of course, this rally did not spring from nothing. The organizers who put it together and promoted it have some culpability here. The thing that leaders must always accept is they are responsible for their people. That is part of leadership. When you lead your men into a fight, they expect that you are not leading them into a trap or into certain death. Leadership requires a sense of duty to those you are leading. The people who put this together failed in that regard and they should be judged accordingly.

That said, most involved were new to activism and can be forgiven for getting caught up in the spirit of the times. Mike Enoch, who has done everything he can to support the men being persecuted, has clearly learned a hard lesson from this. He is a guy who deserves credit for not only learning from the event but accepting some responsibility for blundering into a trap. Not everyone involved has covered themselves in glory, though, and that is a good lesson moving forward. Leadership is not just about being cheeky on YouTube.

That last point is salient, because that is another lesson of this affair. In fact, the best way to think about Charlottesville now is in the fuller context of the pogrom launched against dissidents this past year. The normal way of resolving disputes in a civil society is no longer available. The people in charge are slowly swinging the authoritarian door closed on us. They are corrupting every aspect of civil life to prevent any challenge to their authority. These show trials are just one aspect of their greater war on us.

There is no civil way forward and that means thinking different. The people who rule over us, whether you wish to use archaic terms like Marxist or socialist, or you like neologisms like cosmopolitan globalists, they do not see themselves as bound by the letter of the law, because they see themselves as the spirit of the law. Tim Cook is not ready to declare himself a god, but he has declared himself the high priest of the new faith of the ruling class. There is no mercy in the righteous and no reasoning with a fanatic.

Finally, the deafening silence of the people claiming to be in opposition to this growing tyranny, people like Ben Shapiro, is important. A lot of people on the dissident right think these anachronisms from a bygone age will wake up and begin to agitate on our behalf, but that will never happen. As has been explained many times, their real role is as defenders of the system. It is why they hate Tucker Carlson so much. He talks about some of these things, thus exposing the perfidy of the Ben Shapiros of the world.

Whatever comes next is not going to happen within the old system. It is too corrupt and too compromised. That is the great lesson of the last year. In a lawless age, one must let go of the law to avoid the law. A great Chinese curse is “May the authorities become aware of you.” For our age, the opposite is true. Never let the authorities become aware of you. If the current slide into darkness is to be arrested, it will happen because what comes out of the shadows is strong enough to stop it.

The Summer Of Hate

The Drudge Report has, for the most part, become a tabloid outlet for the political cranks and Hollywood degenerates. His page is full of the crazy rantings of media attention whores or stories about entertainment figures. The former is due to Drudge being a parasite on the mass media and the latter is due to his affliction. As a result, it no longer works as a useful portal to get the news of the day. Still, if you want to take the temperature of the Progressive loons in the mass media, Drudge is useful.

Currently, he has a picture of the bug-eyed bug-man Adam Schiff staring out from the page, in his best Charlie Manson face. In bold letters is the headline, “SCHIFF STARES DOWN TRUMP FACES JAIL MEDIA PUSH IMPEACHMENT” Obviously, the point is to grab your attention. A little below, in the center column, are links to stories from various left-wing crazies describing the looming arrest, impeachment and jailing of President Trump. “There’s a gathering storm…you can feel it” reads one link.

Left-wing sites like the Huffington Post, of course, have been on the pending Trump indictment since 2015, so every day they run at least one post swearing it will happen any minute. Alternatively, they will run a post fantasizing about Trump’s last days. They always imagine him as Hitler in the bunker, because of the usual suspects. Like kids in the week before Christmas, the Left is sure that any day they will wake up and learn that Trump has been hauled out of the White House in chains to face trial for his crimes.

These postings in the media are mostly part of a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign orchestrated by the NeverTrump loons. Like a disease, these people have spread from their warrens in so-called conservative media to all of the mass media. In one of life’s ironies, these people are determined to prove everyone right about the nature of subversives. The NeverTrump leaders have apparently decided that Kevin McDonald’s books were how-to manuals. Thus, we get this organized subversion of the media.

Putting that aside, the reason these sites are desperate for trashy stories about Trump being hurled into a dungeon is there is an audience for it. Just as steam whistles like Sean Hannity dominate conservative cable, these sites are catering to an audience that wants to hear confirmation. Because all of the media is run by the usual suspects, this segment has always been overserved, but that does not change the fact the audience exists. In America, there are millions who think Trump is the Hitler described in the prophesies.

The question that arises is what happens if nothing happens? What is palpable on the MAGA side of the world is that the people who voted for Trump are becoming dispirited because he has done pretty much nothing in two years. Nothing that matters to a large swath of his voters. Despite efforts to spin it otherwise, Trump won on immigration and what it represents. His failings on the issue have started to convince many of his supporters that it was all just a big con, and nothing was ever going to happen.

Of course, as Trump morphs into Jeb Bush, the Washington political elite has no reason to get rid of him. Trump as useful idiot is certainly better than Trump as martyr. The base of the Democratic party may want impeachment, but the people in charge want the status quo, so they are probably trying to figure out how to look busy, while doing nothing, hoping that is enough for their crazies. The trouble is the NeverTrump loons will never quit, so they will be stoking those fires until the oil runs out.

One result of the Obama years was a rise in black violence, peaking with series of BLM murder sprees set off by the White House. From the 2010 election forward, Team Obama had been working to get their voters angry, hoping that would result in good election results in 2012 and 2014. The trouble was those angry blacks thought it was authentic, and they expected something to happen. When it did not happen, they decided to take matters into their own hands. The result was a summer of BLM murder and mayhem.

Will something like that be in the cards for the summer of 2019? It is hard to know, but the Democrats take the House in January, and they are showing few signs of restraint. They toned it down a bit in the election to not scare the remaining whites in their coalition, but they seem to be determined to go full crazy once in power. Maybe it is just a pose. Perhaps they are hoping a well-choreographed bit of theater is enough to satiate the howling mobs of their coalition. Maybe they have unleashed forces they cannot control.

On the other hand, Trump has been a cunning political animal, even if he has been all thumbs when it comes to governance. He clearly thinks having Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as foils is good for his re-election campaign. That means he will be doing everything he can to poke that hornet’s nest. The stage is set for a year of NeverTrump loons stoking the impeachment fires, while the steam whistles in conservative talk radio and cable TV blow full blast making sure the red hats are fully engaged in the fight.

The trouble with the future is it is unpredictable, so how all this unfolds cannot be known in advance. Most likely, the Democrats have not yet worked out how to proceed and Team Trump is a circus of confusion. Still, the ingredients are in place for a very ugly year and when the Left gets ugly, it always means bloodshed. Now that those Antifa mobs no longer have Richard Spencer to chase around, they will need to do something. Odds are, it means attacking red hat wearing Trump supporters in the coming summer of hate.

Thoughts On GrifterCon

One of the toughest problems for dissident political movements to navigate is the army of grfters and subversives that are always on the prowl for easy targets. The Tea Party movement is a great example. The people who initially got involved did so for all the right reasons. They were nice, white middle-class people upset about what they saw happening in Washington. It was the sort of spontaneous civic nationalism that many white people still cling to as a solution to our present woes. It is the good sort of populism.

The trouble is, the movement was quickly swarmed by an army of grifters and opportunists, along with the body-men of the establishment. These people showed up offering help, organization and in some cases, a famous name to add credibility. Before long the whole thing became a bust-out, with the grifters carrying off what they could, before it collapsed in a heap.  The caravan of hustlers has now moved onto peddling neo-libertarianism as the antidote to both populism and identity politics.

Of course, something similar has happened to the Trump phenomenon. This story in Politico about various clowns and freaks in the MAGA movement is emblematic of what has become of Trumpism. Ali Alexander, one of the organizers, appears to be the spawn of Sammy Davis Jr. and an Easter Island statue. Judging from his postings, he takes a lot of drugs or suffers from psychotic episodes. The Tea Party, at least, drew a decent class of grifter. Trump’s baggage train is just freaks and lunatics.

In fairness to Trump and the millions of people who voted for him and still support him, they cannot do much about these freak shows. The media loves to promote old weirdos like Roger Stone, because it makes Trump look bad. He provides easy copy, and he is willing to be their Sambo, dancing at the end of whatever string they offer. People like Loomer, Molyneux and Cernovich show up because they sniff a few dollars. They are performers and they go where they can find an audience willing to pay them to perform.

The fact that the place was empty suggests politically active whites are starting to wise up to this stuff. Last year’s C-PAC also experienced a drop in attendance. Maybe people are starting to figure out that these events are just a way to keep them busy while their pockets are picked. Maybe white people are rethinking their politics. The utter disappointment of the Trump presidency thus far has probably been the worst thing to happen to this sort of political racketeering. It is smartened up the chumps.

Still, there is a pattern here. The Reagan years birthed Conservative Inc., which hoovered tens of millions out of the pockets of middle-class white people into various projects that never accomplished a thing. The Contract with America institutionalized the system into a permanent political-industrial complex. The Tea Party, of course, was a complete bust and now Trumpism is becoming an embarrassing freak show. Any resistance is either co-opted or turned into something embarrassing.

The thing that all these failed movements have in common is they accepted the premise of liberal democracy. From Reagan to Trump, all efforts to reform or challenge the system did so within the context of liberal democracy. They also assumed that the fight must take place on the platforms of the Progressive media. Inevitably, the media picks the most embarrassing members of the alternative to come up on stage. This happened with Reagan, Gingrich and even Bush. We see the same thing happening in the Trump era.

This suggests two rules for dissident politics. One is a variation of the oldest bit of political advice. Never been seen with crazy people or wearing funny hats. Professional pols have people who make sure they are never in the same shot as a crank or weirdo. Smart pols also avoid putting themselves in situation where they can look silly, like driving a tank wearing an over-sized helmet or getting goosed by a farm animal. For dissidents, it means staying clear of attention whores and people with heads full of nutty ideas.

More importantly, it means staying as far away from Progressive media as possible. This has been a topic for a long time on the Dissident Right, but the side in favor of engagement has always won. Their argument was that it was the best way to get the attention of the public. Today, that is not the case. Mass media is the worst way to get the attention of the public, because it is all click-bait, agit-prop, and tabloid nonsense. The fragmentation also means a much lower ROI. There are better ways to get the public’s attention.

Maybe that is a bit of white pill to take away from the failure of GrifterCon to attract much of audience this weekend. Maybe people now associate being in the news with being mentally unstable or being an unreliable degenerate. While a story about Roger Stone may get eyeballs on a news site, the people viewing it do so for the same reason people look at pictures of a snake trying to swallow a goat. The freak show has reached a point where it is self-discrediting. That would be a great development for dissidents if true.

The World’s On Fire

This is the first post using the latest version of WordPress that automatically updated overnight. It is complete garbage. It is as if they formed a committee tasked with ruining the product by making it more difficult to use. One of my goals for 2019 is to move off WordPress entirely and now I am much more motivated to do it. I am not sure if the YouTube or Spreaker embed will work, but we shall see. I am not sure how any of this will work.

Also, this week, I have been de-platformed by Spotify. Apparently, the tender little babies who make up their customer base were vexed by my presence. I do not know how many people were listening to me via that platform, but it must have been enough to get the attention of their morality officers. Frankly, Spotify is a garbage platform anyway, so I really do not care. It says something bad about the younger generation that they like that platform. It is radio for people who like being told what to like.

Anyway, this week almost did not come off as I was busy with the above ground life, but a foolish consistency is important in these things. That and I was not sure what to do this week, other than the French stuff. Then looking around, I found other fires burning that are worth discussing, so we have a show about issues on the edge of the abyss. It is funny, but whenever I get stumped for content, the world comes to my rescue.

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 have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The British Turd Sandwich (Link)
  • 12:00: France On Fire (Link)
  • 22:00: Migrant Tipping Point (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Trouble With China (Link) (Link)
  • 42:00: Crisis In Italy (Link)
  • 52:00: My Heart Is An Alligator (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker