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’s 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’s 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 are no longer available. The people in charge are slowly swinging the authoritarian door closed on us. They are corrupting every aspect of civil life in order 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’s no mercy in the righteous and no reasoning with a fanatic.

Finally, the deafening silence from 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’s why they hate Tucker Carlson so much. he actually talks about some of these things, thus exposing the perfidy of the Ben Shapiros of the world.

Whatever comes next next is not going to happen within the old system. It is too corrupt and too compromised. That’s the great lesson of the last year. In a lawless age, one has to let go of the law in order 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.

With news that The Weekly Standard is about to shut down due to the lack on interest, I wondered what would fill its place. The need for border security may not be a concern for the political leaders in Washington, but it is a necessity for the people in charge of the moral orthodoxy. The system requires there to be a predictable opposition that will squawk a bit, but eventually roll over for the Progressives. That means there are now job openings in the loyal cuck guard for men (and women!) willing to guard the walls against us.

If you are to become a paid chattering skull on the “right” then you better get used to writing and talking about the double-standard. A standard feature of all cuckservative bleating is pointing how there is one set of rules for Progressives and another set of rules for everyone else. Here’s a recent example in the premiere cuck site, National Review On-line. This one is about the black college professor, who was fired from his CNN job, for saying he hates Jews and wants Israel wiped from the map.

The standard cuck response to these events, is to shift the focus away from the actual issue onto the double-standard. In this case, the effete editor of NRO is begging the Left to stop giving wedgies to cucks like Charlie Cooke, when they fumble their lines. The real issue is why is criticism of Israel in violation of the morality codes, but hating white people acceptable? The cuck can’t allow that. His prime directive is to make sure whitey never thinks about this stuff, so the double-standard mew is employed to change the subject.

A travelling partner of the double-standard complaint, is the passive-aggressive assertion that the so-called conservatives are more faithful to the one true faith than their alleged opponents on the Left. Here’s an example from Power Line Blog I used last week in a post. The writer is trying to make the case that he and his fellow cucks are more faithful to Martin Luther King’s vision of a color blind society. There is, of course, the casual reference to the fact Lincoln was a Republicans and his opponents Democrats.

This is what the cool kids on social media call DR3, which stands for “Democrats R the Real Racists.” The Mr. Hanky of cucks, Dinesh D’Souza has made a business out of claiming that liberals are Nazis and Klansmen. Of course, what this gag is all about is reinforcing Prog morality. Racism is bad. So bad that any mention of race or racial awareness is disqualifying. What the cucks are doing is acting as the moral enforcers for the Left, making sure no one questions this essential plank of Progressivism.

A slightly different approach to this tactic is to hair-split claims by the Left in a way that reinforces their claims. Here’s an example about the so-called gender gap in worker wages. The point of the article is to debunk the claim that women make less than men, by normalizing the comparison. The cucks have been making this argument for decades now, so it is familiar to everyone. That means the argument gets punched up with the faux exasperation and some eye rolling, to indicate this has all be addressed in the past.

As with DR3, these gender gap articles are not about the arguments made from the Left, but about reinforcing a bit of the orthodoxy. In this case, that white women should be in the workplace, rather than at home tending their kids. The foundation of the argument is the acceptance that women not only should be working, but should have careers that transcend their lives as mothers, wives and homemakers. Carrie Lukaks may as well be arguing for the mass sterilization of white women in that post.

Another popular position in the cuck army is to be the guy who spends his days noodling over the rule book. Every time Lefty is about to pull a fast one in Washington, these guys pop up in the pages of cuck publications, talking about the finer points of the law. This post is a recent example from after the election. It is a long snoozer about the details of California election law, written from the ludicrous position that the rules matter. If only we can tweak the rules, the cheating in California will stop!

These are the two faces of the cuck army. When it is time to use the rules against the Left, they start talking about principles and morality. When it is time to talk about principles and morality, they start talking about the rules and the need to respect order. Every time the Left makes clear the rules don’t matter to them and that we live in a lawless age, the cuck army swings into action, lecturing us about the rule of law. That’s important to know. The tongue lashings and lectures are always directed our way, never toward Lefty.

Of course, much of the time in any army is spent killing time. An important part of being in the cuck army is to fill the dead time with pointless nonsense. Post that amount to nothing more than advanced whining are standard filler in conservative publications. This post at the Federalist is a recent example. What these posts are really about is demoralizing the opposition. “See, it just gets worse, May as well kill yourself.” An important part of being a cuck is to reinforce the loser aesthetic on the Right.

Finally, when all else fails, the cuck can always stab the people to his right. When someone on the right comes up with a way to throw sand in the gears, the cuck army rushes to stop them. The heretic does not even have to effective. If they are getting attention, that is enough for the cucks to rally like antibodies to surround the heretic and begin attacking them. This is a good recent example. Whatever you think of Laura Loomer, it was a funny stunt that drew attention to a serious problem.

In the end, policing the vast sea of people opposed to the moral orthodoxy is the number one job of the cuck army. They are the palace guards, protecting the orthodoxy from challenges. Often, that means going on the attack and taking out people they see as threats to the one true faith. Stabbing right is what every cuck is born to do. In some cases, as we see with The Weekly Standard and probably National Review, the cuck will be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice for his real audience.

National Review was founded in 1955 by Bill Buckley and, until the last few years, it has been the prestige publication of American conservatism. The late 50’s is a good starting point for the movement that has been the alternative to Progressivism. Buckley was greatly influenced by Russel Kirk, so the magazine took on Progressivism, but also the libertarianism of Ayn Rand and the failures of previous efforts to create a legitimate conservatism in the United States. The goal was to create a new Right.

Reading the take down of Ayn Rand by Whittaker Chambers all these years later, it is easy to see how things have changed. In the early days of Buckley conservatism, it was understood by people claiming to be on the Right that libertarianism suffered from the same materialism as Marxism. Rand loved ideology so much there was no room in her cold heart for humanity. Today, the so-called Right is indistinguishable from the libertarianism of today. The editor of National Review actually celebrates it.

It has become a cliche of sorts that what passes for conservatism today is just yesterday’s liberal fads. The social media gag “the conservative case for [fill in name of liberal degeneracy]” stopped being funny because it became common on the page of National Review itself. Here they make the conservative case for homosexual marriage and here they make the case for transgenderism. Of course, one of the leaders of what passes for conservatism these days is a man who walks around dressed as a woman.

When confronted by the ridiculous spectacle that is Conservative Inc., it is tempting to fall into the same trap as Muslims, Marxists and libertarians, when they confront the lunacy of their cults. Whenever a Muslim explodes in public, the response is, “well, that’s not the real Islam.” In the Cold War, Marxists professors would always say that Bolshevism was a mongrel and defective form of Marxism. Of course, libertarianism spend all their time wheeling around those goal posts on roller skates that define libertarianism.

The fact is, the conservatism of Bill Buckley was always defective. It was a continuation of what Robert Louis Dabney observed a century ago about Northern Conservatism. Russell Kirk saw conservatism as a disposition, the lack of ideology. What Buckley conservatism was, in fact, was a pose. The range of allowable opinion on the Left, however, allowed for the existence of a reformist element that drew on the old Right, as well as western traditionalism. The managerial state had not yet snuffed out liberalism.

A couple decades ago, the great paleocon academic Paul Gottfried noted that the managerial state had killed liberalism. By liberalism, he meant the philosophical view that distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards worked to restrain the state and protect civil society. The system of governance refined in the 19th century was being wiped away and something new would replace it. Today, what passes for the Left and the Right both agree to call it neoliberalism and both sides strongly embrace it.

In that Fred Bauer post, you see that Buckley conservatives are on the last leg of the journey into the sun. They no longer see a reason to oppose the Left, because the Left disappeared into the sun of neoliberalism a long time ago. As has been its habit since birth, the conservatism of Bill Buckley follows Progressivism around like a puppy. Its last act on the stage will be fusing itself permanently to what was once called the Left to form the bipartisan fusion ideology of the American managerial state.

Paul Gottfried coined the phrase “alternative Right” in his speech at the Mencken conference, when discussing what happened to the paleocons. Richard Spencer appropriated the idea and started the alt-right, but it was never a coherent movement nor did it have anything resembling an intellectual foundation. It was, at best, a grab bag of ideas plucked from various subcultures in the larger umma of the Dissident Right. As a result it became a cult of personality and then fizzled out entirely.

It is easy to lay the blame for the alt-right at the feet of Richard Spencer, but the real problem is something you can pick up in Gottfried’s speech at Mencken. Paleos never fully grasped the reality of Buckley-style conservatism. Paul remains puzzled by how easy it was for the neoconservatives to overrun the conservative institutions. The reason, of course, was that those institutions were built on the same manor as the Progressive institutions. Conservative institutions were just outbuildings for the main house.

If there is to be a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, the first task is to accept a central truth of the managerial state. That is, it must approach an intellectual and moral singularity in order to exist. While it will never reach the point where all opinion is assimilated, the allowable differences are now so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. A system that evolved out the principle of universal truth, must evolve a morality that is intolerant of anything that challenges it. There can be no room for an alternative.

That means that whatever comes after conservatism must first sink roots outside the neoliberal order and maybe even outside the Enlightenment. It cannot be a reaction to neoliberalism, as that implies a dependency. The obvious implication is that what comes after conservatism, in the framework of the American Right, is nothing. That line of discovery and inquiry has reached a dead end. It is an intellectual tradition with no future and no shadow. What comes next must be a clean break from northern conservatism.