Monthly Archives: June 2019

The Eternal Scold

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A popular game with the old Buckley conservatives was to figure out how to blame the actions of the Left on socialism or a quest for power. Whenever the Left found some reason to attack some aspect of white culture, the National Review types would work their fingers raw trying to explain why it was either due to socialism or a quest for political power by those dastardly democrats. Sometimes, they would combine the two, so that the quest for power was to impose socialism on us.

Some elements of the dissident right have inherited this tendency to reduce all left-wing activity to simple, individual motivations. The Left does something similar, but they prefer supernatural and mystical explanations. In fact, that is probably a useful way of describing the political divide. One side relies on magic to explain the world, while the other side relies on some form of self-interest. In both cases, the preferred answer strips the humanity from the actors and reduces them to robots or pawns.

The truth is, human society has a lot of complexity, because we have a wide range of human types. For example, the scold is a feature of all white societies, regardless of political and economic makeup. These are people who take pleasure in lecturing the rest of us about our failings. Sometimes they often find a home on the Left these days, because the Left defines the civic religion of the West. In a prior age, they would have been defending order and tradition, as part of the religious community.

These people are not motivated by greed or a lust for power. Their scolding of the population may result in elevated status or a comfortable lifestyle, but that is not what motivates them to scold the rest of us. Al Gore made a lot of money off the climate change rackets, but that’s not why he does it. He was plenty rich before he got the green fever after the 2000 election. What gets him up in the morning is the need to be Gaia’s prophet, an Ezekiel warning the rest of us about the end times.

A recent example of this is the decision, by some scolds on the San Francisco board of supervisors, to ban e-cigarettes. According to the news accounts, they will ban the sale of these devises and ban the shipment of them into the city. Strangely, people will still be allowed to possess them and use them in public. Perhaps the scheme is to ban the public use of them next and then criminalize the possession of them. That’s the way they attacked the sale and use of tobacco forty years ago.

Now, the anti-smoking crusades were allegedly about public health. Smoking is not only unhealthful to the smoker, it has a societal cost. Lung cancer is a terrible way to die and an expensive one as well. Public health is often cast in emotional terms, trying to save lives, but as policy matter, it is about saving money. Either way, the cover story for the taxes on tobacco and limits on smoking was about public health. We wanted to end smoking and therefore improve the health of the people.

Of course, that was never true. It was convenient that smoking was bad for your health, but the real motivation was the need to boss people around. The scold has to have someone they can bully. The reason is just an excuse. That’s what you see with these crusades against electronic cigarettes. There is no data suggesting they are unhealthful like cigarettes. Nicotine is not the issue with tobacco use. It is the other chemicals and the particulate matter from burning tobacco. That’s not an issue with e-cigarettes.

The funny thing about this is these electronic cigarettes are probably the best tool for quitting conventional tobacco use. They allow the user to wean themselves from the psychological habit as they wean themselves from the chemical addiction. There is some evidence suggesting the addictive power of cigarettes is not the nicotine, but the drug cocktail used to prepare the tobacco, in combination with nicotine. Therefore, this delivery system is a better way to get off the drug than other methods.

None of that matters to the crusaders. It never mattered to them when they were howling about smoking at ballparks or out of doors. What motivates these people is the need to lecture the public about morality. The scold always assumes pleasure is an indication of sin. Those hipster goofballs vaping in the coffee shop, therefore, must be doing something wrong. That’s the bat signal for the local scolds to rally and demand the activist be stopped, else the community will be at risk.

That’s the other thing about scolds. They always justify their activity by claiming they are sacrificing for the good of the community. In this case, they are looking out for the children, as if toddlers are growing beards and taking up vaping. In reality, it is just the same old people, the eternal scold, getting a rush from making other people stop doing something they enjoy. It’s not about money and it is not about power. For these scolds and busybodies, the reward is in being the scold. It’s who they are.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

Letter To Z Man

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Catching up on some correspondence this week. I think these types of shows are going to be a regular feature going forward. They are fun to do, as I get to talk about some topics I would probably not address otherwise. I’ve also gotten a good response, so people seem to like the format. The Ask Me Anything events Reddit does always get big numbers, so the concept must have broad appeal. I know I enjoy reading through those things whenever it is someone I follow or find interesting.

It’s also a good way for me to clean up the inbox. I read everything, but responding in a timely fashion has been a problem. I’m a busy guy these days. Then there is the P. O. Box, which gets a fair number of letters. I’ve learned something on that score. Reading an actual letter is much more enjoyable than reading e-mail. There is something to the tactile experience of opening the letter and reading from paper. It’s like the difference between reading an eBook and reading an actual book.

I also suspect the medium changes how the person doing the writing experiences the exchange as well. Dashing off a quick e-mail and hitting send is almost a mindless exercise most of the time. Typing up a letter, or especially writing one by hand, takes thought and care. It’s slower and more deliberative. It reminds me of when I’ve written formal letters in my business life. I write it out by hand, then type it up and have someone read it. Only when it is right does it get sent.

Reading through a stack of letters, I can’t help but think we would be better off going back to that mode of communication in our personal lives. Today, the physical mail is for impersonal stuff like letters from the government. Our dealings with our corporate overlords are another reason for physical mail. With our friends and family, we rely on texts or social media posting. It seems like we have this backward. The corporate overlord should be hitting us up on-line and our family should get the letters.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Red pilling parents
  • What about Trump
  • Building real world community
  • Bitcoin
  • The gatekeeper’s ball
  • Live streams
  • Libertarians
  • Peaceful separation

Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/1z2AY6ObyEI

The Gaslights Are Lit

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The Democrats kicked off their year long process to select a party nominee for the 2020 presidential election and it felt like 2016 all over again. Instead of watching the debate, which would have been a horrible way to spend an evening, I scanned Twitter for reactions to get a feel for how enthusiasts were reacting in real time. This was something I did in the 2016 during the Republican debates. It turned out to be a much better gauge for how people were reacting than what was coming from the media.

Three things were fairly obvious, based on Twitter. One is the Democrat media was instructed to sell the hell out of Warren, which they tried hard to do, but Warren gave them little to work with after she read her prepared lines. What they are going to learn is what people in Massachusetts know about her. Like all pols, she can read from a script and seem quite good. On her own, she reveals herself to be quite dull. Her serious egghead presentation is just an act. She is a pseudo-intellectual poseur.

Another thing that was made obvious to enthusiasts is that Beto O’Rourke is just a slacker who has been getting by on his looks. The media likes him because he has the RFK routine down cold. He knows how to charm left-wing Baby Boomers. The trouble is, once you get past the horse teeth and hairstyle, you’re left with a guy who probably spends his free time reading comic books. He is in politics because it requires the least amount of effort for the best possible lifestyle. Otherwise, he is a bum.

The third thing that was obvious reading left-wing twitter is they could not stop noticing Tulsi Gabbard. The Democrat media was programmed to ignore her, so they will ignore her, but the lower ranking members, who don’t get to see the memos from the party, were noticing their hell out of Gabbard. She was the only candidate who said anything of substance picked up by the enthusiasts. The rest were judged on style. Gabbard was noticed because she made valid points about foreign policy.

Just as with the Republican Party, much of the Democratic base is largely ignored by the party. From this side of the political spectrum, it is hard to pick up on this problem, as white liberals do seem to obsess over trannies and foreigners. The truth is, the eventual winner of this primary will have to appeal to white middle and upper middle class voters. It’s why Creepy Joe Biden is the leader, despite being dead. His working-class Joe routine appeals to a very large segment of the Democratic base.

Forgotten in all the celebration of degeneracy is the large isolationism vote inside that white voting bloc. It is a peculiar form of isolationism, as it tarts itself up as sophisticated and realistic, but in reality it is people who would prefer it if America disengaged from the rest of the world and focused only on domestic issues. Gabbard, with her well thought out anti-war positions, is probably tapping into that vote. She may be the only candidate in the field that is explicitly anti-war and dovish.

She’s also skeptical of Israel, which is another factor that never gets discussed, but has always been under the surface on the Left. There was a time, not so long ago, when anti-Zionism was a popular stance on the Left. The party leaders may have been co-opted by the Israeli lobby, as has happened with the GOP, but that skepticism of Israel and support for the local Arabs remains in the rank and file. Gabbard makes no bones about being open minded with regards to our unconditional support for Israel.

Now, after these debates, it is a tradition for Matt Drudge to run a poll on his site. These polls are not scientific, of course, as if there is such a thing. The main flaw in these polls is you can vote a million times if you are that bored. They could filter out repeats based on IP address, but even so, there is no way to know if the people voting are Americans eligible to vote. Still, they say something about the enthusiasm for the candidates or lack of enthusiasm in the case of some. Gabbard won the poll going away.

Like 2016, where Trump would win these polls hands down, the party media is reporting an entirely different response. The Nation apparently wrote their reaction pieces in advance. Similarly, the Daily Kos followed party instructions and celebrated the sleepy night for Warren as a great triumph. The New York Times and the Washington Post are all aboard the Fake Indian Express as well. Everyone got the memo and they are busy trying to gaslight the Progressive voters into thinking Warren is the one.

Most likely, the media will just ignore Gabbard for now. They will no doubt have been told to celebrate Creepy Uncle Joe as the winner of the second debate. In case he sexually assaults one of the women on stage, they probably have been told to have some material on Harris ready. They have some sidebar pieces ready to tell the faithful that the homosexual is a rising star in the party. The point is to make sure Sanders gets no positive press from the debate. This time, he gets taken out early.

What we are seeing is something that does not get noticed on our side. That is, the Left is almost as angry about their politicians as normal people. Our side gets mad because the Republicans keep chasing the votes of people who hate them. Something similar happens on the Left. The old fashioned pro-working class types have no representation in the party. The foreign policy doves have no one addressing their issues. Those aging white ethnics, who supported Sanders last time, have no voice either.

If 2016 was the year Conservative Inc. finally cracked, 2020 could be the year Progressive Inc. has its crisis. Like the Republicans, the Democrats are a party that really only represents the foreign money that bankrolls its operations. They no longer speak for actual voters. Someone like Gabbard, who stands out from the crowd by nature, can tap into the resentment within the ranks, by simply mentioning the many taboos issues ignored by the rest of the field. She could be the Happa Trump.

For now, as we saw in 2016, the media will do what it can to gaslight the voters, by selling the cold turd sandwich that is Biden and Warren, while carefully ignoring anyone that the party fears. If the result of these preliminary rounds is rising support for Gabbard, we will see if the Progressive Industrial Complex really did learn from the 2016 debacle. The gaslights will be on full for the rest of the summer, as they use all the tools to get the result the oligarchs want from this election.

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The High Cost Of Low Trust

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Legend has it, that when the Persians were conquering Asia Minor, the great king Cyrus was warned that the Greeks were dangerous adversaries. He supposedly laughed this off as the Greeks, in his mind, were a people who lied to one another. A people who could not tell truth from fiction could not possibly stand up to the Persians. What he was referring to was the Greek market place, where commerce was conducted between buyers and sellers haggling over price. This was an alien concept to the Persians.

Like most anecdotes handed down to us, especially those from the long ago past, this is probably apocryphal. Herodotus, the main source of information about the Persians, was as much a story teller as a historian. Even so, we know the Persians considered lying and owing a debt to be the worst sins. Lying could get a person executed, if the person being told the lie was of high status. It was not that lying to a person of high status was particularly wrong. It was that the high status person had the power to punish the liar.

Naturally, the Persians would have looked at the Greek culture as deeply immoral, as it was based on dishonesty. After all, persuasion is a form of lying and democracy is about persuading people, not arriving at the truth. The marketplace is where buyers and sellers seek advantage over one another. The seller exaggerates the quality of his goods and the buyer tries to play sellers off one another to get a bargain. Not only is there no advantage to truth telling, there can be great rewards for skillful dishonesty.

Whether or not Cyrus said what is claimed is unimportant. It is an important insight into a fundamental flaw of both democracy and the marketplace. Public debate is not a search for truth, but a search for a way to convince a majority of the public. Similarly, the market is not a search for the true value of a good or service. It is the search for the bigger share of a financial transaction. Inevitably such systems reward the people who are good at gaining the trust of their fellow citizens in order to deceive them.

This truth about the marketplace, be it the political market or the market for goods and services, is not an argument against it. Any form of human organization is going to involve trade-offs. Further, men are not angels, so all social systems will be susceptible to corruption. Knowing this about democracy, for example, is why the Founders tried to construct a system that would restrain democracy. Similarly, the economic reforms a century ago were intended to put limits on the marketplace.

In the present age, this institutional dishonesty is most obvious in politics, where the parties are now completely dominated by sociopaths. A system that is supposedly built on respect for the public will is now run by people who hold the people in contempt. They take pleasure in lying to their most important voters. It’s not just the Right, the Left does the same thing, only with more skill. Elizabeth Warren will run as an opponent of big business, but in office she will be entirely beholden to global corporate interests.

What compounds this problem in democracy is the people are conditioned to think it is normal and healthy to be ruled by sociopaths. Politics becomes the inverse of what people expect in their daily lives. Among your friends and acquaintances, you expect a high degree of trust and honestly. In politics, you have been trained to demand the most extreme forms of lying. If a politician makes the mistake of uttering the truth, he is hooted off the stage. Democracy makes the people an enemy of themselves.

Something similar happens in the marketplace. It used to be that the cost and profit of an item was reflected in the price. When costs went up, the price went up. If the seller was a bit greedy, the price would reflect it. Today, when costs go up, the seller quietly shrinks the product. The greed of the seller results in larger packages that disguise the shrinking product inside. It used to be a pint was a pound the world around, but now it is closer to thirteen ounces, but it depends up the seller and time of day.

As with democracy, the real crime with these deceptive practices in the marketplace is it normalizes dishonestly. Whenever the topic of “shrinkflation” comes up, people have been trained to laugh at the person questioning it. “That’s just clever marketing” we are told, as if it is naive and childlike to question systemic fraud. The result is the virtues of the marketplace get turned on their head. Instead of competition producing the best product, competition produces the most accomplished liars.

None of this is an argument against self-government or commerce. It’s that free markets and self-government are not ends in themselves, but a means to an end. The point of human organization is the spiritual and material prosperity of the people. The form of government and the economic arrangements are about the welfare of the people, not some theoretical ideal. If defending democracy means defending rule by sociopath, maybe democracy, at least the extreme form, is not a great idea.

Similarly, if free markets result in the people being terrorized by global technology giants, maybe a little less economic freedom, in order to reign in these companies, is a good trade-off. After all, the point of economic order is not to achieve private tyranny in defense of a theory. The point of economic order is to benefit the people, collectively and individually. If it requires government regulation to have prices on goods and services that indicate the real value of the items, that’s not a terrible trade-off.

For just five dollars a month you can help feed a starving dissident in Lagos. That’s less than the price of a craft beer or a coffee at Starbucks.  Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask to feed a dissident. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

The Incoherent Right

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In a democracy, all political debate is a debate over morality, as what holds democracy together is a civic religion. The people agree to a set of political arrangements because they agree those are the right way to organize society. That’s right as in morally correct, not empirically correct. Democracy has been sold as the best form of government, because it achieves the most happiness and opportunity for the most amount of people. That’s a moral argument, not an empirical one.

This is why the ruling class is endlessly talking about what is good for democracy or what is a threat to democracy. This is all code for morality. When they use the word democracy, they don’t mean the mechanics of selecting people for public office. They mean the expression of the general will, that magical force upon which modern liberal democracy is built. The general will is the expression of the general morality of the people, the framework that defines society and the lives of the citizens.

It’s why rational arguments rarely carry the day in democracy. Debate in democratic systems is about what is the right thing to do in terms of morality, rather than what is best for some practical reason. Even economics, which should focus on base concerns like making money and overall prosperity, ends up sounding like a mystery cult, where adherents worship the economy. The so-called conservatives are willing to excuse the most monstrous things, if it is good for the economy.

The moral marketplace is the only marketplace that matters in a modern liberal democracy. Even someone like Ocasio-Cortez understands this fact. She famously said in response to criticism of her many factual errors, “If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

It should be noted that the conservatives love mocking Cortez for this statement, but it is self-mockery. Unlike them, she actually understands the nature of political debate in a modern liberal democracy. Facts and reason are not all that important. If they were, the Athenians would never have agreed to attack Sicily. What matters is moral persuasion and emotional resonance. Politics in a liberal democracy is theater, not science. The fact that conservatives don’t get that helps explain their demise.

This truth about liberal democracy is why Buckley-style conservatism has been a failure since the end of the Cold War. In the one area it held the moral high ground against radicalism, the fight over communism, it was able to carry the day. The conservatives could control the moral framing with regards to the Soviets. America abandoned all of its republican ideals, becoming a global empire, in order to defeat global communism. That shows the power of morality in a liberal democracy.

In all other areas, however, the so-called conservatives were happy to give way to the radicals, allowing them to define the moral framework. This is why the Official Right has been such a failure since the 1990’s. The Left controls morality, so the Right must always find some way to fit into that morality. That either means abandoning the field by joining the libertarians on the sidelines or embracing yesterday’s radicalism as today’s timeless conservative principle. The Right is the toady of the Left.

It’s also why Buckley conservatism is in a crisis. You can see it in this Kevin Williamson piece on who are the real racists. Like David French, Williamson is one of the clown princes of modern conservatism, regularly declaring nutty things on-line to the amusement of dissidents. In this case, he is doing the old DR3 gag, claiming that those segregationist politicians from the last century were not real conservatives. After all, everyone knows that they were Democrats! That means they could not be conservatives.

Like all of today’s conservatives, Williamson believes anti-racism is the highest conservative virtue. In fact, what’s left of the Buckley crowd has embraced the egalitarianism of the Left to the point where they are to the left of the Progressive on the race issue. The modern conservative cannot hold a single position until they find a black guy to endorse it. They seem to have decided that the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance is a documentary on the lost writings of Edmund Burke.

The point of that Williamson article is not to make some factual or even moral argument against the Left. It is all about displaying the anti-racist plumage of the writer. It’s the same game you see with left-wing comedy shows. The performer shows off his moral superiority and the audience is flattered, so they cheer. It’s moral peacocking. The difference between conservatives and a peacock is that when a peacock displays his plumage, it is sign of courage. When conservatives do it, it is a sign of obedience.

This is why Buckley Conservatism is in a crisis, headed for the dustbin of history. In order to be in opposition to the ruling orthodoxy, you have to be at odds with at least some of its moral foundation. That means having an independent base of morality. In America, the Right used to rely on Christianity, tradition and America’s frontier culture, but those were abandoned as the Left anathematized each one in turn. That leaves the Right arguing from the same moral basis as the Left, which is why they are nothing but an echo now.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

Our Interregnum

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One of the most remarkable things to happen in the West since the end of the Cold War has been the rise of identity politics over the last half decade. It is remarkable for a couple of reasons. One is that it has emerged in what economists consider to be a time of unrivaled prosperity. People should be happy and content, rather than angry, with post-national liberal democracy. A central tenet of liberal democracy is that the end point of human activity is to create a world of material plenty.

The other remarkable aspect is these movements are flourishing in the face of strong moral prohibition, often backed by force. It’s literally dangerous to be an identitarian in most of the West now. America is now a land that bans books and subjects dissenters to internal banishment. The titans of industry are studying China for ways to suppress internal dissent. Despite these efforts to anathematize identity politics, white people throughout the West are embracing identity politics.

The aggressive assault on dissidents is a direct result of the unpreparedness of the ruling classes. They really were convinced they had ushered in the post-historical moment as imagined by Francis Fukuyama. The great battles of political economy in the 20th century were settled. All the “isms” had been vanquished by liberalism and there was nothing left to discuss. The sudden reappearance of old cultures and old ideas about how people should organize themselves was like seeing a ghost.

Now, this is a good time to note that the phrase “identity politics” has been kicking around American political circles for decades. In the mouths of conservatives, it was always part of the grift they have been running on white people. It looks like an attack on left-wing tactics, but in reality it is an endorsement of Progressive morality. For the Left, it was always a cover for anti-white agitation. They could not come out directly in favor of anti-white polices, but non-white camp followers were free to do it.

The success of this game of good cop – bad cop played by the American political class is another reason they remain baffled by what’s happening. This game has worked for so long, its sudden failure is like the sun rising in the west all of a sudden. Perhaps a better metaphor is it seems as if all swans are now black. Everywhere political elites turn, the world is no longer as they imagined it. All the axioms upon which they based their world view are suddenly being called into question.

It turns out that Fukuyama was sort of right after all. The West had reached an endpoint after the Cold War. It was not the end of a great ideological battle, but the end point of the great multicultural project launched by the Frankfurt School following World War II. The West, particularly America, had become fully actualized as multicultural societies. They no longer possessed a core identity, based in biology, which informed their politics or restrained their politicians. It was just one big open marketplace.

The trouble is, you cannot have a nation without a sovereign identity and there can be no sovereign identity without a nation. This is the core insight of multiculturalism, which was never intended to strengthen the West but to destroy it. To have a multicultural society is to have no culture at all. Once the people’s sense of who they are is destroyed, the nation must follow with it. That is exactly what we see in the West as political classes struggle to perform their basic duties.

The reason for this, is that the people’s sense of who they are is what animates the political institutions of the state. That shared reality of a people is the soul of every nation, just as the soul animates the body. To kill it and simply try to artificially animate the body, is to create a Frankenstein’s monster. The modern Western state is now a collection of cultural parts robbed from graves around the world. It is neither organic nor natural, so it is always at war with normal human sensibilities.

Multicultural liberal democracy, when lying on the table, is ugly in appearance, but when animated it is truly horrifying. Multiculturalism becomes a monster that attacks everything around it, because at some level, like the mythical monster, it knows it is an abomination, a sin against creation. We have quickly moved from eradicating the people’s sense of identity to systemically eradicating the people. Instead of creating a new society, superior to the old, multiculturalism has destroyed the very essence of western society.

In addition to the end of the post-war cycle, we may also be at the end of a much longer cycle that began with the Enlightenment. The thinkers and philosophers who gave us liberal democracy had a mechanistic view of nature. This led them to see society as nothing but a collection of parts, like a watch. In order to make a better watch, the watchmaker simply had to improve its parts. Make a better spring or a better crystal and snap it into place. Liberal democracy is the full expression of this belief.

It turns out that human society is nothing like a watch and the people in it are not simply automata that can be tinkered with as necessary. Human society is the expression of the shared reality of the people. That shared reality is the result of actions, experiences and mating decisions made by their ancestors. Who they are is what they are. The Frenchman is French, because his ancestors were French, not because the map maker said he was born in France. The nation is the manifestation of this reality.

The confluence of these two end cycles, plus others forces like demographics and technology has brought us to this interregnum. The reason the ruling elites helplessly lash out at the gnats whirling about them is they are built for an age that is fading into the past. Their weapons are crude and destructive, but ultimately ineffective at halting the march into the abyss. The weird nostalgia of American politics is just another aspect of that effort to halt the momentum. It’s an effort to stop the clock.

Similarly, the incoherence and confusion among dissidents is due to the inability to break free from the Enlightenment ideas of liberal democracy. Those looking for an alternative, rummage around in the past for prior rejections. First it was the neo-reaction trying to revive the age of kings. Then it was the alt-right trying to revive 20th century fascism. Like clothes from a prior era, they were a poor fit and made the wearer look odd. They are answers to questions no one remembers, not the questions of today.

That’s why the on-going efforts to put Buckley Conservatism back together will fail. It was an answer to an old question. Similarly, libertarianism is in crisis, because it was a set of tools made for a tradesman who is no longer needed. Whether it is an effort to impose the old forms on the new opposition or re-brand the old stuff as a new form of nationalism, the effort must fail as it is an artifact of the past. The emerging opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy will be rooted in a rejection of its core principles, not an embrace of them.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

Right-Wing Activism

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Political and social activism is most effective when it reveals some moral contradiction hidden from public view, reveals perfidy by the ruling class or exposes some immoral activity by the rich and powerful. Activism is about changing the moral battle space so that the critics appear to have the high ground, while their targets appear to have something to hide. What the activist is doing is using morality to even the fight, but also using the disparity in power to amplify their moral claims against their opponent.

Every movie or documentary about activists takes great pains to portray the activists as plucky and sincere. They are driven by a hunt for truth or justice. They sacrifice for their cause in order to right some wrong. Meanwhile, the target is always big and powerful, motivated by lower instincts like greed, ego or power. It’s why the rich and powerful, who bankroll left-wing street activism, take pains to launder their money and support through not-for-profit front groups like Propublica.

There is another component to effective activism that may be the most important in the modern media battle space. That is the element of surprise. Those posters someone created that read, “It’s OK To Be White” worked because the Left did not see it coming. They were unprepared for how to react to it. Worse yet, their normal instinct to surround a threat and scream at it compounded the problem. By calling it heresy, which is what they mean by racist, they revealed their moral contradictions.

The street artist Sabo works a similar angle. The Left has a big blind spot when it comes to the arts. They assume they have a monopoly on artistic expression, because so many of their cult members pretend to be artistic. It is a bit of the self-flattery that is integral to modern Progressivism. Sabo turns that against them with clever and very well done guerrilla street art that lampoons liberal self-regard. Not all of it is effective, but some of it hits the Left where they never bother to defend themselves.

This is something right-wing activist need to consider, especially when it comes to guerrilla tactics like street actions. Unlike the left-wing activists, which have the full support of the ruling class, the Right must always be looking for soft targets. The Left can mass up a bunch of zombies to fill a street and have their media organs broadcast it around the world. The Right must operate like guerrilla fighters, probing for weak spots in the perimeter, so the actions have to be small and precise.

For example, the Left is largely blind to the realities of immigration. For them, it is a purely moral issue at this point. They don’t even understand the financial interests of people like the Koch Brothers or the Silicon Valley oligarchs. That’s a pretty big blind spot that can be exploited. Instead of a banner drop over a highway, a better target is the apartment complex that runs migrant flophouses on behalf of local employers. It’s a soft spot that is undefended and the Left is not prepared to react.

This is one of those issues that angers middle-class white people. They don’t know about these flop houses, often operating on their edge of their towns. They don’t know the mechanics of smuggling in these indentured servants from India to work in programming shops and engineering firms. That’s never presented on Fox News, because the Murdochs would never allow it. Revealing the perfidy of the ruling class by bringing these flophouses to public view will rustle the right people.

That’s just an easy example of low-hanging fruit that dissidents tend to ignore. The Left is so powerful and so explicit in how it wields power, it has a gravitational force. It draws even its harshest critics into it, so they must fight on left-wing terms. Immigration becomes a moral issue pitting the romantic immigrant narrative against the cold-hearted nativists over what to do with illegal immigration. The real opportunity, however, is legal immigration, which has a much greater impact on white people.

The thing that right-wing activists need to keep in mind is their target audience is often incredibly naive about the world. The reason so many college kids fall for the TPUSA scam is they grew up in nice suburban neighborhoods with nice bourgeois parents, who think we still live in an orderly republic. More important, the people in charge are very good at concealing the truth from these people through control of the media. As a result, even though the result of the great replacement are all around them, they don’t see it.

The most red-pilling act is when that hidden reality is suddenly made plain. Tell the typical Baby Boomer about books being banned or banks closing down accounts of political activists and their blood boils. Even though this stuff is plastered all over social media, they don’t see it, because they are trained not to see it. For most of their lives, banning books is what happened in backward communist countries, not in a place like America. There was never a reason to think about it.

That’s an important thing to keep in mind for all dissidents. The shared reality of the modern age is carefully and effectively manipulated to keep people blind to what’s happening around them. The people running the media are good at their craft. That’s why guerrilla tactics like those “It’s OK To Be White” were so effective. The people in charge have grown used to a predictable enemy. They don’t know how to respond to those sorts of tactics. That’s their weak spot that can be exploited.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

June Grab Bag

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Being new to the monetization game, I’m learning things about the world that I never put thought into until now. I went to the P.O. Box for the first time last week and discovered it was full of letters and donations. I must admit, I was taken aback by it. Like most people, I don’t get much of anything in the mail these days. I get the occasional notice from a government agency or something from our corporate overlords, but otherwise the mail is junk. Most days, all of it ends up in the trash.

Opening old fashioned envelopes with handwritten notes inside was something I have not done in so long it was like learning a new skill. There really is something different about reading a handwritten letter, even a printed one, that is different from reading an e-mail or comment. It is similar to the difference between reading a book or newspaper versus reading on-line. Maybe it is just nostalgia, but there is a difference. It’s not just the tactile sensation of it. The brain seems to work different too

Initially I though the right thing to do was to send thank you notes, but most of the correspondence did not have a return address. The point, for most, is to maintain anonymity, so that makes sense. I abandoned the thank you card idea and thought a roster of first names and states, but maybe that’s not a good idea. While I noodle over that, thank you to all of those sending donations and words of encouragement through to the post office box. You know who you are.

Now, for Subscribestar members, I am putting a little content up there on the weekends, just as an experiment in paywall content. I’m not sure where I want to go with the donor content just yet, so I’m in my experimental phase right now. I think at some point I will just create a premium space here for all donors and subscribers, but I’ll play around with the Subscribestar site for a while as I experiment with different ideas. I’m a big believer is measuring twice, in order to cut once. I’m also open to suggestions.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Great Debates (Link)
  • 12:00: Libertarian Bashing (Link)
  • 22:00: Xirl Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Brown Triumphalism (Link) (Link)
  • 42:00: Comedy Is Not Funny (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: Juneteenth (Link)
  • 52:00: Horns of A Dilemma (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/raqEQxAhdW8

The Biden Buggy

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In 2016 there was the Trump Train, now we have the Biden Boat or, given his age, the Biden Buggy. According to all of the polls, even those in keys states, Joe Biden is the clear favorite to win the nomination. He’s polling at around 30%, which is twice his nearest rival. In fact, the latest batch has him with three times the support of Bernie Sanders, who has been in the second seat for a year now. Everyone else is in single digits, bobbing up and down with the news cycle.

Of course, there is a lifetime between now and the first votes. For a guy like Biden, who is pushing eighty, that could be literally true. He is by far the oldest man to run for the nomination and would be the oldest man to enter the White House if he won. Trump set the record when he was elected in 2016, but Biden is a decade older. It remains to be seen if the media will allow that to be an issue. Right now they seem to be tasked with selling good old Uncle Joe to the voters, as the sensible antidote to Trump.

In fairness, Biden really is the Democrat version of Trump. They appeal to the same demographic. Biden has been pitching himself as “working class Joe” for close to a century now. It’s his go-to line whenever he is out campaigning. He tells voters about how everyone has known him as “working class Joe” or sometimes he uses the phrase “lunch pail Joe.” The fact that he has never done a minute of honest labor in his life never seems to matter. The old working class whites like it.

Like Trump in 2016, Biden is the last dance for a demographic about to disappear over the horizon. Trump found a way to win over voters, who remember back to All In The Family with fondness. Either they remember their dad as the Archie Bunker type or they were the Archie Bunker type. Biden is making a similar appeal, but with a decidedly romantic tone that recalls the Democrats past, when they talked about a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage. When the party was white and male.

While Democrats still need white votes, they are now the party of non-whites and increasingly the party of anti-whites. That’s probably what has all those old union types scrambling onto the Biden Buggy. They are tired of having to vote for someone that hates them. They are tired of pretending they are embracing their dispossession. It’s their last chance to have one of their guys at the top of the ticket. That’s why stories like this work for Biden. It sells to working class whites.

The risk, of course, is that this sort of talk will alienate black voters, who now make up 25% of the Democrat primary. Biden is considered a righteous honky, because he was Obama’s Stepin Fetchit for eight years, but blacks are notoriously fickle. If Harris can get some traction, they could easily abandon Biden for her out of racial loyalty. This stuff can also rustle the females, who are already worried about Joe and his habit of sexually assaulting women in public. Women are close to 60% of the Democrat vote.

Even so, the Biden bubble fits with a pattern in Democratic politics that goes back to the Reagan years. They looked at Reagan’s victories and concluded they needed to go Hollywood, which they did in a major way. The modern chat show format, for example, is a result of Clinton era media strategy. After Bush won in 2004, using a quantitative approach to reaching voters, they went all in on “big data” to elect Obama. After Trump beat Clinton in 2016, they will look for their Trump this time.

One challenge for team Biden is how to run as the nostalgia candidate, while pretending to be the candidate of the future. Given that his future will end at any minute, his credentials on the issue are not very good. More important though, the Left is about the glorious tomorrow, not the forgotten past. Look at their successful leaders and they were young and endlessly yapping about the future. Joe Biden may be as old as JFK, but he is no John Kennedy. He’s more like Walter Mondale.

The obvious challenge for Biden is his age. In his prime, he had a habit of saying nutty things that sunk his previous presidential ambitions. As he has aged, the tendency to say crazy old guy stuff has gotten out of hand. Like the habit of feeling up girls on stage and smelling their hair, his public utterances make people uncomfortable. For a man pushing eighty, weird public statements and moments of confusion will give even the most enthusiastic Baby Boomer pause.

His handlers have kept him under control, for the most part, by keeping him away from the public and the press. The media will do what the party tells them, but it is not hard to imagine some young ambitious activist working for the Post or the Times accidentally asking Biden the wrong question. At the debates next week, you can be sure the other candidates will try to get the old guy off his game, hoping he has a senior moment that will remind the public he was in office before they were born.

This is why the media activists are pumping air in the tries of the Warren campaign. She is the fall back candidate for when the party has to take the keys away from the Biden Buggy and put Uncle Joe in a home. She is no spring chicken herself, but her handlers are not wiping oat meal off her chin either. Her new economic pitch is aimed at the same old white people Biden is attracting with his lunch pail Joe act. That and she can appeal to angry single women and the snotty cosmopolitans.

It speaks to the age that both parties in the 2020 presidential election will be running explicitly nostalgic campaigns. Trump is a crude reboot of the Reagan years. His new slogan, Keep America Great, is a call back to the Morning in America ads Reagan used on his re-election campaign. Biden and maybe Warren are running as throwbacks to another age, when Democrats were the party of working class whites. Despite the celebrations for the browning of America, everyone seems to miss the old days.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I know have a PayPalsetup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

The Long Road

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A familiar phenomenon in dissident circles is for the super-black-pilled to come out of the woodwork, anytime someone suggests reforming the system in any way. They will properly inform the reformists that the current system is beyond hope. Either the problems are past the point where reform can work, or the system is so corrupt reform is impossible. There is a sense in some corners of the dissident right that even talking about engaging politics is corrupting. This Spandrell post is an example

Another spin on this is to write-off all political actors as gatekeepers, assigned by the state to prevent dissidents from changing minds. The alt-right boys tend to go down this road, finding a way to describe figures like Nigel Farage as insufficiently authentic, because they hold some positions they don’t like. These guys are super-black-pilled on Trump right now, because he turned out to be a politician. It is another way of rejecting engagement in politics, as a pointless and possibly complicit activity.

This is an age old problem for outsider politics. Radicals in the past argued that engagement in formal politics was an endorsement of those politics and as a result, a sellout of the movement. There are still some IRA-types holding out against the Good Friday Agreement. Various communist movements in South America would suffer from schisms, because one faction wanted to join the political process as a party, while the other faction wanted nothing short of a communist revolution.

The salient question for modern dissidents is whether dissidents should engage in formal politics. Was it a good thing for Nigel Farage to win the EU elections, or did it prevent something better from happening? Is it better for Trump to win in 2020 or will it just prevent progress on dissident causes? In the case of Trump, since it is a future issue, is it better for dissidents to back some other candidate, in order to demonstrate to white voters that fake nationalism is a loser and can never be tolerated?

The answer becomes even more complicated if you accept, as is the case for most dissidents, that there is no electoral way out of the troubles created by electoral politics. That is, the solution to liberal democracy is not at the ballot box. The ballot box is the problem, so its perpetuation is a continuation of the problem. Logically, participating in the democratic process means perpetuating that which you oppose. Even if that is not correct, and it is not correct, there is that sense of hypocrisy hanging over it.

There’s also an unspoken truth that plays a big part in the debate. Politics is a form of ritualized combat. The groups form up, lock shields and do battle. For those in the groups, there is that sense of shared suffering and shared triumph that can only be achieved in group activity. For dissidents in America, for example, to participate in Trump’s campaign, feels like a temptation. They are getting the short term joy of that group activity, at the expense of the long term goals of their movement.

The danger of disconnecting from conventional politics, whether in the formal sense, as in elections, or the informal sense, as in meta-politics, is self-ghettoization. This has always been the problem with white identity politics in America. It has existed as a sub-culture that is out of tune with the rest of white America. Whenever they pop up in public, they seem weird and alien. In Europe, far-right politics suffered the same problem, usually devolving into fascists cults without a coherent reason to exist.

So, there is the dilemma. On the one hand, engaging in conventional politics runs the risk of expending energy on pointless and discouraging ventures that could possibly corrupt the movement and the dissidents. On the other hand, not participating runs the risk of becoming a weird sub-culture that has no impact on the culture war. Instead, it becomes a reason to do nothing, but congratulate one another on their isolation from the dominant political culture. Either road appears to be a dead end.

The reason this dilemma exists, is dissident politics, at least in America, has never matured beyond the juvenile state. In the post-war years, Buckley-style conservatism started as a legitimate reaction to radicalism, but never matured beyond a parlor game, so it was easily co-opted. The reaction to it, paleo-conservatism, went down the engagement path, but was always reactionary in nature. It never matured past being a long critique of liberal democracy. It was commentary, rather than a movement.

In contrast, the New Left that emerged in the 1960’s, from the remains of communist movements in the prior generation, did mature past this point. As a result, it was able to engage in politics, as the corrupter, rather than the corrupted. At the same time, it was able to stand apart from politics, providing a long running argument against it. The New Left was successful as a political movement because it had a clear agenda, taking over the institutions, and a clear purpose, to turn those institutions into weapons.

Modern dissidents, of course, face a very different battle space than the leftists of the past century. The New Left faced an establishment that was more or less sympathetic to at least some of their goals. They also could free-ride on other movements like black civil rights and the anti-war movement. They were also working in an industrial state, not a technological surveillance state. These are all critical differences that make the New Left a bad example for modern dissidents.

Still, it is a starting point for dissidents. The movement has to mature past the point of confusing activity with goals. A mature and self-aware movement will instinctively understand that the agenda is fluid and immediate, but also subservient to the larger goals of the movement. For example, if supporting a particular candidate weakens the opposition or advances some small part of the agenda, then engaging in politics is correct. If there is nothing to be accomplished in a given cycle, then sitting it out is correct.

The point being is that for a mature dissident movement, politics, whether reformists or adversarial, are about the larger goals. Trump winning election is not an end, but one of many opportunities to weaken the resolve of the people in charge and rally those who oppose them. Once that utility has been extracted, then the political activity of supporting Trump loses its value. This is true of activism and meta-politics. The goal is always to weaken the resolve of the other side, while boosting the spirits of dissidents.

The radical’s long march through the institutions was not implacably dogmatic. They compromised and adjusted, doing what they must to win each small battle, often turning defeat into a bloody-shirt to rally the faithful. Dissidents will need to make a long march through white bourgeois culture. It is not about capturing the institutions, but about capturing the foundation upon which they must rest. The New Left scaled the walls to capture the city. Dissidents will need to tunnel underneath it.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I know have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!