Monthly Archives: October 2019

Scientific Theology

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Way back in the before times, when terms like “multiculturalism” had not escaped the academy, it was assumed that science and math were immune from the politicization that was ongoing in fields like history. After all, history is about storytelling, while math is about getting the right answer. Surely the right answer fields would not succumb to the growing lunacy on the Left, with regards to race, sex and ethnicity. Yet, here we are in the current year and the Left has declared a fatwa against math.

It turns out that lunacy and intelligence are not opposites. Smart people, the sort you tend to find in science departments, can believe in crazy things. This probably should have been obvious to the men of science a long time ago, but scientists, like the lunatics now making war on them, have always had a narrow definition of religion and the supernatural. They fell into the trap of thinking the people spouting oogily-boogily about the gods were churchgoers, not their friends at the university.

A classic example of smart people embracing wacky beliefs is the fascination with communism in the last century. Lots of brilliant people, some working on top-secret government projects, were sure communism was the future. Marxism was their religion in the same way Catholicism was for Blaise Pascal. By the standards of his day, Pascal was considered a religious fanatic, even an extremist, but there’s no disputing his influence on math and science. Religion and science are not oil and water.

That is what we have to keep in mind as the sciences of today are overrun by the modern fanatics. A person capable of sitting through an undergrad degree in biology and then advanced degrees in human sciences is also capable of thinking their penis is a human construct and they are oppressed by pronouns. People are of two minds, the moral and the empirical. The former will always override the latter when it comes to their group participation. Morality is the shared reality of the group.

That’s important to keep in mind when these epistles are issued by random clerics and imams of the academy. The people putting these together are not using their science brain, which is why that post is largely devoid of science. Instead, they are using their moral brain in order to both reassure themselves by huddling tighter with their coreligionists, but also to increase their standing within that group. You can be sure they got plenty of positive feedback from their fellow members of the hive.

The anti-science quality of that post is clear in the second paragraph. The authors talk about “dark forces” in the same way a primitive would warn villagers of spectral forces he experienced in the forest. That’s not a phrase that has any business in a post about facts, but it is not a post about facts. It is an effort to anathematize a set of facts that contradict deeply held beliefs by the ruling cult of the West. The “dark forces” are not wrong as a factual matter. They are wrong in the spiritual sense.

This is something normal people have struggled with for a very long time, as they foolishly think facts and reason can overcome emotion. They have been sure they can “win” the fight with the Left by assembling enough facts or providing bulletproof reasoning. That never works. Facts will never triumph over people’s sense of right and wrong and that is the point of that post. They are not disputing the facts. They are subtly arguing that those facts are immoral, so they must be condemned.

Of course, the reason the fanatics are so focused on the human sciences now is they see it as a way to solve a problem in their faith. A couple generations ago, before genetics began to reveal important facts about humanity, the Left could claim to be on the side of reason against the superstition of religion. Their opponent was Christianity and they were on the side of facts and reason. Now that their opponent is the new information springing forth from science, they have lost their authority.

Imagine if suddenly the Catholic Church discovered some scrolls written by Jesus that contradicted key parts of modern Christianity. It turns out that Jesus wanted everyone to convert to Judaism. One option would be to overturn two thousand years of theology and tradition, admitting that Christianity is a hoax. The other option would be to toss the scrolls into the fire and be done with it. It’s not hard to see which way things would go, which is why this idea makes for a great plot device.

That’s what the primitives of the Left are doing when they attack the new findings from the human sciences. Everything the authors believe about the world, including their social connections and personal beliefs about themselves, are tangled up in the religion of the blank slate and extreme egalitarianism. The facts that are now showing those beliefs are false, perhaps deliberately false, are just like those scrolls in the hypothetical example. It’s easy to see why they are ready to destroy science in order to save it.

It is tempting to assume that the truth will eventually triumph, but that has never been the way to bet, at least in the cultural realm. We are more likely to see Steve Sailer burned at the stake as a heretic than we are to see these primitives accept biological reality. Belief is powerful magic that can easily overcome the most stubborn facts and the most stubborn people holding them. The barking at the moon fanatics now in control of the West will let the world burn before abandoning their faith.

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The Children’s Crusade

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For the longest time, the Conservative Movement operated as the screeching gates of Tartarus that kept the damned from reentering politics. This worked because they had some great thinkers and writers, who functioned as adamantine columns. For the politically engaged, especially the youth, these writers provided the convincing arguments and critiques from the Right. That’s what made Buckley-style conservatism so effective at gate-keeping. They had high quality gate-keepers.

It was this effectiveness that was probably the undoing of Buckley conservatism in the long run. By the 1980’s, being an acceptable conservative was a good job at a good wage, so few were willing to risk being hurled into the great pit of despair. As a result, those gates and their adamantine columns were not maintained. The great writers faded away one at a time. The system itself grew corrupt, attracting grifters and lunatics, who saw Buckley conservatism as a means to an end.

As a result, even those grifters are moving on from conservatism. Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes are now peddling their warmongering fetish to Progressives. As Paul Gottfried pointed out in a recent essay, they are just drifting Left in search of an audience willing to buy their shabby neoconservative act, while dressing in the rags of Conservative Inc. The movement is left to hiring homely child actors like Charlie Kirk to run around peddling whatever it means to be a conservative these days.

An example of the callow mediocrities charged with keeping the gates is this recent post at National Review. It is a review of the Andrew Marantz book about various scary creatures he encountered on his adventure outside the hive. Simply on technical grounds, this is something that never would have made it past the editors thirty years ago. It is a dilettantish effort at comparative analysis and a ham-handed effort at gate-keeping, while accusing Andrew Marantz of trying to be a gate-keeper.

The ridiculousness of the post is made plain in the penultimate paragraph when he writes, “For all that Marantz gets wrong, everyone should agree that far-right extremists should have as little influence as possible.” That right there is exactly what dissidents mean when they accuse these guys of being gate-keepers. The writer just concedes to the Left, the people he allegedly opposes, the basic premise that those most feared by the Left can be systematically excluded from public debate.

Later in the same paragraph he writes, “Their gatekeeping either will be too tepid for progressive activists or it will enrage the Right, which will hit back — by revoking their protection against liability under of the Communications Decency Act, or with antitrust enforcement against Big Tech, or with a culture war that puts the would-be gatekeepers squarely in the crosshairs.” In other words, the point of the post is not an attack on the Left, but a friendly bit of advice to help them maintain their power.

Of course, the absurd assertion that the Right will become enraged and hit back at the Left is so lacking in self-awareness that it reads like a troll. The defining feature of Buckley conservatism is its steadfast unwillingness to fight back. They never get enraged about any of the excesses of the Left. Instead, conservatism is just a collection of sob sisters warning that one of these days, not now, but soon, they will stand up on their hind legs and do something. It’s why the word “cuck” stings them so much.

Notice also the unwillingness to address the excesses of the Left with regards to the public space. Marantz is making the case that the rich and powerful should crush the people he does not like, but dig deeper and it is really a way to justify what the Left is doing already. In other words, the mobs of heroin addicts and mental patients called Antifa are just a response in lieu of more responsible elements stepping in to control dissident opinion. Marantz is trying to justify what is already happening.

Nowhere in the piece will you find any push-back to what the Left is currently doing with their terrorist tactics. In fact, Conservative Inc. has been silent on these issues, because ultimately, they agree with them. In their historic role as the gate-keepers, they are always willing to take help from their friends on their Left. The only bad guy in the post is the people both Left and Right agree is their shared enemy. That enemy is the swelling number of people willing to fly the black flag of dissident politics.

Again, the writer is young and inexperienced, so it would be uncharitable to make more of this than is required. That’s the thing though. There was a time when Conservative Inc. did not have to rely on rent boys for content. Someone this age with an interest in writing should be covering high school sports for a local paper or maybe submitting articles to his college journals. That’s where you learn to form your thoughts and express them in a compelling manner, not the flagship of conservatism.

That’s what conservatism is reduced to these days. They operate like a grooming gang of creepy geezers, cruising the college campus for young people so dull and joyless they think pleasing an audience of seniors is cool. Charlie Kirk, an old person’s idea of a young person, is used not so much to sell whatever it is Conservative Inc. is peddling these days, but to keep young people from looking outside the bounds of conventional politics for answers. Charlie Kirk is a far cry from Russell Kirk.

In a time when many dissidents are feeling a bit low about the state of the fight, this should be a source of encouragement. When the flagship of Buckley conservatism is relying on kids like Nicholas Phillips, they’re finished. If the gate-keepers think a ridiculous dimwit like Charlie Kirk is their big gun to defend the citadel against the barbarians, it may be time to open the gates. Children’s crusades are always the last desperate effort of an exhausted combatant.

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Ethics And Authority

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Ethics are a system of moral values dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation. They can be highly personal, derived from your understanding of the world, but even personal ethics tend to correspond with public ethics. Every society has to have a set of unwritten rules that govern behavior. Otherwise, you don’t have a society. You have a collection of competing strangers. Those public ethics, the moral framework of society, must rest upon authority to give them vigor.

For most of human history, public morality was rooted in the stories and legends of the people, which described their gods and the role of the gods. At other times, the moral authority was the ruler, who took on a supernatural role in society. In Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church filled the role of moral authority, along with the evolving social structure. The feudal system established roles and duties for people within the system. Those duties to your station were part of the moral order.

This connection between ethics and authority is what has always haunted atheism, which denies the most common source of moral authority. In fact, atheism is mostly a negative identity, so the atheist invests heavily in attacking the moral authority of Christianity. Oddly, they suffer the same defect in logic as evolution deniers. When they do try to conjure a godless moral code, they inevitably slam into the old problem of Hume’s law. That is, they try to derive an ought from an is.

The struggle atheists have conjuring a moral code without the authority of religion on which to base it gets to a more fundamental problem of western liberalism. A central thesis of liberalism is universalism, the notion that there is one set of rules that are the best for all people everywhere in all times. That means the moral code that comes along with the universal political order must also be universal and timeless. Such a code, of course, cannot answer the question, on whose authority?

This is the heart of the clash between liberal democracy and Islam. When the Mohammedan is told that homosexuals should be allowed to parade in the streets, he asks “upon what authority are you saying this?” The liberal cannot answer, as he acknowledges no authority other than a mystical will of the people. The Mohammedan in contrast has his religion, his imam and the traditions handed down to him. In order to accept liberalism, he must abandon his god and his ancestors.

This is the problem vexing the West. In a liberal democracy, no one can ever know who is in charge, as that runs counter to the basics of democracy. In theory, decisions are made by fifty percent plus one vote. When the vote is secret, no one can truly know who rules over them. The fact that powerful interests manipulate the system in order to get the results that favor them at the expense of society adds to the mystery. People keep voting, expecting a certain result, only to get the opposite.

Of course, the inevitable war on religion that is a natural part of democracy means the other source of authority is slowly eroded. The recent case of the Congresswomen holding orgies in her office is a good example. Otherwise sensible people like Congressman Matt Gaetz are baffled as to why this women resigned, because there is no longer a moral order in America to rationalize such things. In a Christian nation or even a Muslim one, Representative Gaetz would not so confused.

It is only through the shared belief in an authoritative common morality where custom becomes a habit of mind. You cannot have ethics without authority, so when custom and religion are abandoned, as required of democracy, you inevitably abandon any sense of a shared moral order. Eventually, the people, even their leaders, have no reason to support the basics of society. A world of atomized individuals can only be controlled with force and the cost exceeds the benefit

Of course, humans cannot live without a moral order. We have evolved over a very long time to be a part of a community. That means being part of a shared moral order. The void left by democracy’s obliteration of social and religious authority is filled by all sorts of fads and spasms masquerading as morality. It is how we quickly move from celebrating homosexuals as perfectly normal to demanding gay men put on sundresses and begin taking hormone therapy. Morality without authority is chaos.

In this regard, the crisis in the West is due to a lack of moral authority. Democratic systems rest on the assumption that everyone is in charge, which is another way of saying no one is in charge. Since there is always someone in charge, those holding power work to conceal this reality. Instead of powerful men standing before the public as leaders, they hire servants to run for office. Once in office, those servants do as their told, regardless of what they said to the public to secure their office.

The charade of democracy inevitably spills into the culture as a war on any institution that could provide a basis for moral authority. It is not an accident that as democracy spread in the West, religion collapsed. Then it was local civic institutions and then finally the family. The waves of vulgar depravity that have swept the popular culture meet no resistance, because there is no authority for resisting it. There is no answer to why this stuff should not be tolerated, so it spreads like a cancer.

In fairness, the cultural devastation that comes with democracy is more of a dynamic than a causal relationship. The West was already in decline when liberal democracy took root and it was that decline that allowed it to spread. The dynamic between politics and culture is both a symptom and cause of the decline. The fanaticism and insanity of the current age is really just the final spasms of a society that has been in decline for generations. Democracy is the suicide pill for a people out of reasons to live.

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The Sham Of Democracy

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Over the weekend, the news brought word that someone calling himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed by special forces in Syria. According to President Trump, “He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” He apparently blew himself up using a suicide vest. Presumably, real men are boastful and arrogant as they deploy their dynamite vests. Or maybe real men simply allow themselves to be captured and sent off to Guantanamo Bay.

Of course, we cannot even be sure this actually happened. The Russians are telling the world they doubt this thing happened. They point to various factors that would seem to contradict Trump’s story. This is a bit ironic, in that the people accused in the biggest hoax in American history are now claiming this is a hoax. You get the feeling that maybe the three-year long Russian hoax has caused the Russians to suspect that American politicians are not the most honest people in the world.

All that stuff aside, this news event is another example of the incoherence of modern American politics. Two weeks ago, Trump was boldly and proudly saying he was pulling troops out of the quagmire of Syria. This was confirmed by the Left, which claimed his decision was resulting in a genocide. The pols owned and operated by the Israeli lobby, which is the Republican party and most of the Democrat party, were kvetching about how this was all very bad because of something about whatever.

Now we have Trump out crowing about those troops that were supposed to be out of Syria, conducting an operation in Syria to kill some guy. Even nuttier, this guy he had not mentioned until this event, was literally Hitler. Of course, the Left, who regularly tells us Trump is literally Hitler, is now less than enthusiastic that Trump is doing what they demanded he do last week. In effect, the man they say is literally Hitler, went ahead and killed the guy he says is literally Hitler, so that makes Trump literally Hitler.

This whole story reveals that democracy in the current age is just a sham. At every point, the various camps pick a side, which could very well be the opposite of what they said last week. It’s as if each of these events is a play put on by the political class, where the actors draw lots to see who plays which role. Today one party is anti-war, while tomorrow the other party will play that role. Like actors boasting of their versatility, our politicians are proud that they can take any side on every issue.

Further, why in the hell is America in Syria? You’ll note there was never a debate about this or resolutions passed authorizing the use of the troops in Syria. According to available timelines, it was under the Obama administration that America started to get entangled in the Syria mess. In 2011 he authorized aid and intelligence support to irregulars battling the Syrian army. Presumably, this came from American troops in Northern Iraq, a place he claimed to have withdrawn all US troops.

By 2012, the Obama administration was openly supplying weapons to various groups of irregulars going under names no one in his administration understood. Now, in 2012 there was this thing called an election going on in America, in which this stuff is supposed to be debated. Mitt Romney, the alleged opponent of Obama and leader of the opposition party, proposed doing exactly the same things Obama was doing in Syria, but promising to use different rhetoric to justify it to the public.

This is, of course, why the public is slowly beginning to sour on the ruling class of America and democratic politics in general. If democracy was a real thing, someone in politics would have proposed not getting tangled up in the Syria mess. Instead, everyone agreed to angrily disagree with one another about the right way to agree with one another on a plan none of them understood, a plan put forth by the military-intelligence complex that runs American foreign policy. It was just a show.

For his part, Trump, who is pretty much a naive civic nationalist, is saying sensible things about these endless conflicts. Despite his faults, his instincts on this stuff are correct most of the time. He wants out of the whole region. As he said, the biggest mistake the country made was getting involved in the Middle East. The trouble is, he is not actually in charge of anything. Two times now he has ordered troops out of Syria and we still have troops in Syria. Now we have new raids in Syria.

Clearly, the people really in charge of American foreign policy decided to let Trump know who is really in charge, so they conducted this raid. That leaves Trump little choice but to act like it was his idea. Despite his good instincts, he is slowly being turned into another organ grinder’s monkey for the military-industrial complex. It is another example of how voting makes little difference in a democracy, because the people in charge simply ignore the results of the elections.

The fact is, until the Israel lobby decides they no longer need us in Syria, America will be involved in the Syrian conflict. The army of lobbyists, crawling over Washington like aphids, paid for by foreign interests and the military-industrial complex, will never stop bleeding the nation dry. Only when the American middle-class collapses and there is no more cash to be stolen from them, will the endless wars come to an end. That’s the beauty of democracy. It completely consumes the fools who support it most.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Travelogue: Oklahoma City

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A local group had a get together and invited me to join them. The organizer is someone I had met at American Renaissance last spring, so we got to know one another socializing that weekend. He is the leader of a local group that used to be part of Identity Europa, but is now affiliated with American Identity. That’s the group Patrick Casey run to help local groups organize. I’m committed to supporting the local organizations as best I can, so I make arrangement to fly in on Saturday.

Because I have a tight schedule, I booked an early flight out of Lagos to Oklahoma City and then back to Lagos. Given that the main even was Saturday evening and would go to around midnight, it meant little sleep over a 24-hour period. The flight out of OKC was 5:00 AM, which meant getting to the airport around 3:30. That meant staying up until it was time to head for the plane. Taking a two-hour nap in the middle of the night is a good way to miss your flight, so I pulled the all-nighter.

I’ve always been amazed at my ability to run on limited sleep. Friday night I got about four hours sleep, as I had to be the Lagos airport at 5:00 AM to park and get through the security. I took a nap on the plane for a couple hours, but once I was on the ground in OKC, I went all the way through until the next morning. That’s six hours sleep in a 48-hour period. I don’t know many people who can function on so little sleep, but this has been a thing for me since I can remember. I don’t sleep very much…

I think if I was tasked with fixing the nation’s airports, the first thing I would do is ban carry-on bags larger than a small bag. No backpacks or roller bags. I bet half the hassle of loading a plane is idiots trying to drag a steamer trunk on to the plane. I saw a guy with a backpack so big it looked like he was setting off to climb Everest. He also had a big roller bag. Assuming normal clothing needs, that guy was lugging around at least a week’s worth of clothes, even assuming some heavy winter gear.

I think the second change I’d make is to put a weight factor on the ticket. Maybe call it a piggyback tax, just to be clever. I sat next to a 300-pound women coming out of OKC, who slopped over the seats on either side. I had the window, which meant I did not have use of my right arm, because her blubber had it pinned to my side. I’m not a body negative type, but her life choices end up taxing the rest of us on the plane. She should have to pay kicker based on her gravitational pull or maybe just her weight…

In Oklahoma City, I met up with the guys and the great Jared Taylor for a tour of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. This is not something I would have done on my own, as I assumed it would be a small local thing. It turns out to be a big sprawling complex with exhibits on everything you can imagine that is related to cowboy culture and the American West. It is fair to say it a comprehensive collection of exhibits on the topic. They even exhibits from popular culture like movies and music.

The funny thing though is they have been instructed to decorate the place with the symbols of multiculturalism. We forget that Native Americans were the first token of multiculturalism in America. Slobbering over Indians is something you see in the parts of the country with connections to the Old West. The Museum is festooned with Indian stuff as a result. It also has blacks, women and Hispanics, so if you are from the east Coast, they have all the politically correct stuff you have come to hate….

The guy were all young, which is something I find a bit amusing. I’m becoming a senior man in dissident politics. Ten years ago the voices of dissident politics were paleocons like Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire. Now I’m the old guy in the room. In fact, at the dinner I was the second oldest person in the room. Jared Taylor was the only guy older than me. I don’t get hung up on the age thing and I enjoy being around bright young guys who are way more advanced than I was at that age. It’s encouraging.

The event itself was nice. I like casual affairs, as it is the social aspect that matters more than the speeches. In addition to the organizer, Patrick Casey and Jared Taylor were there to give a talk. I gave a talk on some items I covered in a podcast. I’m a not great at speech-making, but I’m not the worst. I think it was good enough to make the points I needed to make. I think I’ll repeat some of it this week in the podcast and expand on some topics are wanted to cover but did not have time…

All-in-all it was a great trip and the sort of thing that is good for the dissident soul, which is why I highly recommend building local groups. The place to start is the event that exist like Mencken and American Renaissance. It was at AmRen I met the Oklahoma boys and that’s how I found myself speaking to their group. Having a circle of fellow travelers with who you have regular meetings and social interaction is the way forward for dissidents. It’s great to see our young guys carrying that forward.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Autumn World Tour

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Every once in a while, I like to do a show on world events, not so much because those events are interesting, but because they are illuminating. We tend to get wrapped up in our politics and lose perspective on things. It’s only natural. We care about the stuff close to home, so we get emotionally evolved. Events abroad, however, have no emotional resonance, so we can look at them with a clear eye. That means we can see the salient points, without all the emotional baggage.

The Brexit story is probably the best example of this. Talk to a Brit and they have strong opinions about what is going on with their government. Those opinions run counter to what you see from their news, which is something all of us can understand. For most Brits leaving the EU is a symbolic issue. It is not about the facts of leaving the EU so much as what it would represent in the culture war. Like the battle of immigration in the US, each side of Brexit has emotional reasons for their position.

The self-abnegating side wants to remain so they can disappear into the nothingness of Europe, but most important, stick it to the other side. Like all leftist politics, it is just a pose. For the other side, it is about regaining their national identity. The trouble is, none of that really matters. What Brexit is really about is the rotten ruling class of Britain. These people hate the people over whom they rule and they take pleasure in defying them. The people stalling Brexit are doing it mostly out of spite.

From an American perspective, this is blazingly obvious. We look at a Jeremy Corbyn and wonder how such a grotesque character came to lead one of the parties. More important, how is it that he can walk around promising to sell out his fellow people, as if he is the head of a foreign army. Further, how can the Tories tolerate people in the party who are actively and unashamedly trying to subvert their party? From the perspective of an outsider, this whole Brexit show says England needs a rebellion, not Brexit.

Of course, this is true on America, maybe more so. It’s when you look at something like the Brexit story that you start to think about what is happening in America with the same detached perspective. To Europeans, what is going on in the Imperial Capital with our rulers looks like madness. There’s also the added fact that our rulers have control of the world’s most potent military and a nuclear arsenal. If you can imagine Jeremy Corbyn with a nuke, you know how the world feels about America right now.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/ny8pOYfyYVI

The Gay Debate

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For the longest time, it was assumed by science that there was not a single gene that caused homosexuality. The reason is a gay gene would make the person less sexually fit and therefore less likely to reproduce and pass on the gene. It does not take much of a disadvantage for a trait to disappear from the pool over enough time. If such a gene did exist, so it was thought, it would have disappeared from the human gene pool a long time ago and homosexuality with it. Therefore, something else must be at work.

Human societies have, for the most part, assumed homosexuality was to some degree a choice. Like an excessive desire for drink or criminality, that natural inclination could be controlled with enough determination. Like alcoholism or criminality, homosexuality came to be seen as a moral failing. On the other hand, there was always that sense that like alcoholism or criminality, some people are born bad. For whatever reason, they lacked the mechanisms to control their passions or the will to do so.

The source of this divide is the philosophical argument that there are facts that can be tested and values that are purely opinion. A scientific theory is one that can be tested, while an ethical proposition cannot. If something cannot be tested and possibly falsified, it is not science. In the case of something like human traits, it means there is either a biological mechanism to explain it completely or it is purely a social construct with no biological root. Traits fell on either side of the fact-value divide.

As in moral philosophy, the fact-value divide with regards to human traits is starting to come apart, as science gives us a greater understanding of human genetics. For example, complex human traits like intelligence are not the result of a single gene, but the result of many genes. In the case of intelligence, science has identified 55 alleles that influence general intelligence. How these switches are set influences intelligence, but the combinations are also an important factor.

In the case of homosexuality, it is starting to look like it may be the result of both a combination of genetics and environmental factors. A recent study has found two SNPs that influenced both male and female homosexuality. These are not the “gay genes” some thought existed, but two “switches” that have a strong association with homosexuality in men and women. That means homosexuals tend to have these two markers, but it does not mean all people with them are gay.

As with intelligence, something as complex as human sexuality probably has many genes that influence the trait. It could also mean other traits come along with the ride, as they are also associated with the set of genes that cause homosexuality. It’s entirely possible that this set of genes is responsible for a range of behaviors that are often associated with homosexuals. In other words, the attraction to the same sex is just one result of many from a set of genes turned on or off in the person.

A useful way of thinking about this is to imagine genes that cause someone to become an alcoholic. Let’s say ten genes positively or negatively influence a person’s propensity to alcoholism. If all ten switches are on, you will be a serious drunk. If all ten switches are off, you will be a teetotaler. Then there are the combinations in between. Alcoholism is therefore a spectrum. The person’s ability to control their drinking will depend upon where they fall on the spectrum and their access to alcohol.

That last part is where the either/or way of thinking falls apart. Someone with a lot of the drunk switches set to on, but living in a society without alcohol or one with severe repression of it, like Saudi Arabia, is less likely to be a drunk than the same person living in Ireland. In fact, that person with the high genetic propensity to alcoholism may never express those traits, because they are never exposed to alcohol. At the extremes, at least, environment can overcome nature with regards to behavior.

Now, bringing this back to a behavior like homosexuality, it is plausible that it is a spectrum, like the alcoholism example. Anyone who has been out in the world long enough knows that gays come in many varieties. At the one end are the flamboyant Milo Yiannopoulos types, while at the other end of the spectrum are the prudish Lindsey Graham types. In reality, homosexuality probably has more complexity than a linear range. Those switches result in a variety of manifestations.

What it means is that the trait is probably not purely biological. There’s a lot of evidence that homosexual males share more than two SNP’s. They also seem to share grooming stories in their youth. Homosexuals report a significantly higher rate of childhood molestation than do heterosexual men and women. This may simply be a downstream result of genetic factors, but it has been something science has observed for a long time, going back to when homosexuality was treated as a mental disorder.

This is where the fact-value divide closes. If it is a fact that some human traits fall along a range of propensity, based on genetics, then environment plays some role in how those traits are expressed. Put in terms of this topic, if homosexuality is a propensity, then cultural logic that discourages the activity will reduce the amount of homosexual activity in the society. This is the same logic behind banning alcohol. If it is hard to get alcohol, many people prone to alcoholism will never become drunks.

We may be seeing this put to the test with the youngest generation. There have been quite a few surveys indicating young people are the gayest generation. Here’s a story from last year on a survey of young people and sexual identity. Here is a post from the Progressive-adjacent blogger Audacious Epigone using recent survey data. According to that study, nearly 1-in-5 people under the age of thirty identify as something other than heterosexual. It appears that Gen-Z is super gay.

Now, such surveys should be treated with some skepticism. Young people are dumb and most are prone to repeating what they see in the media. Because the usual suspects tell them homosexuality is the best, many will claim to be some exotic sexuality as a moral signifier. The problem with surveys is respondents tend to tell the survey taker what they think is right. What these surveys may be picking up is the public reaction to the new morality being imposed on them by the usual suspects.

Even so, if sexuality, particularly homosexuality, is purely genetic, independent of environmental factors, then we should not see a real shift in homosexual activity when the culture changes. A study of venereal disease rates would probably be a good proxy to measure homosexual activity. If what the survey data suggests is true and we are seeing a real increase in homosexual activity, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that culture plays some role in the frequency of homosexuality.

That means debating these cultural issues is not only valid, but a necessary thing for every society. After all, if sexuality is purely natural, then debating the culture issues surrounding it is a waste of time. On the other hand, if culture matters a lot, then debating the morality surrounding sexuality is a primary concern. Do we want more homosexuals or fewer homosexuals becomes a valid topic of debate. Leaving it up to nature is no longer a justifiable response.

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The Perfidious Right

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A feature of Buckley-style conservatism has been its willingness to borrow the language from those it purges, but tarting it up with modifiers in order to make it acceptable to their masters on the Left. They are not really borrowing the ideas, as they have no interest in those. What they are looking for is the energy of the people they purged, in the same way a mythical beast sucks the life force from its victims. The idea is to direct some of the excitement toward themselves, without having to do anything.

It’s not just an American thing. It may be better to cast it as a feature of English-speaking politics. A great recent example is from England, where the Tories decided to steal the thunder of the nationalists by putting Brexit up to a vote. The game was to pretend they wanted Britain to leave the EU, but have the vote go the other way, so the Tories could pretend to be nationalists, without having to clash with their paymasters and moral betters. It did not work out that way, but that was the plan.

The first example of the Buckleyites playing these games was way back in the before times when they purged the Birchers. There’s little doubt that many of the Birchers were nuts and unstable. They accused everyone of being a tool of Russia, which makes them a forerunner of the modern Democratic party. The thing is, Buckley purged them from the movement, but kept extreme anti-communism as his issue. Conservatism was thereafter defined by a less than serious opposition to communism.

Often, what the so-called conservatives will do is bolt on modifiers to ideas popular among their base or in dissident circles. The game is to pretend to be enthusiastic for the thing, while telling the Left there is no reason to worry. The compassionate conservatism stuff peddled by the neocons is a great example. The unspoken meaning was that these compassionate conservatives were big fans of Reagan-style politics, but would make sure the Left was happy with whatever they were doing.

As Buckley conservatism fades into the background, the push now is to revive it by tarting it up as a defense of nationalism. The first effort was the Yoram Hazony book and roadshow this past summer. Now, Rich Lowry has a book out claiming to be a manly defense of American nationalism. Lowry was at the Hazony show over the summer and no doubt noticed that no one bothered noticing him. He wandered around the venue like a lost soul. Suddenly he is a nationalist.

Of course, his brand of nationalism must first be accepted by the globalist oligarchs that keep Conservative Inc in business. According to the official blurb for the book, “He explains how nationalism is an American tradition, a thread that runs through such diverse leaders as Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan.” You see, as everyone knows, nationalism has always been about diversity, because everyone knows diversity is a nation’s strength.

Lowry is not the only body snatcher trying to repackage the arguments of Pat Buchanan into a new movement palatable to the Left. Someone calling himself Colin Dueck has a book making the same claims as Lowry. Here’s his latest bit of self-promotion on the National Review website. His big idea is the clunky term Conservative American Nationalism, which he would no doubt pitch as CAN. Maybe he’ll take to calling himself the CAN-man or sell coffee mugs with CAN on them.

Dueck is a defender of the liberal international order and he is primarily concerned with preserving that order, while addressing public unhappiness with it. His book does not clearly make that point, but he has made that point himself. Here is a short clip of him doing so from last year. In other words, the game here is to use the language of nationalism to defend the liberal international order. It’s the same gag they ran on the Tea Party people. Borrow the language in order to neuter it.

You see the perfidy in the opening paragraphs. Dueck writes, “With regard to foreign commitments, America’s conservative nationalist tradition goes back to George Washington’s Farewell Address, along with Thomas Jefferson’s confirmation of it, urging the country to avoid permanent entangling alliances.” Notice the modifier attached the phrase “entangling alliances.” The implication is that Washington was fine with temporary entangling alliances, just not permanent ones.

In his farewell address, Washington said something different. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.” At the time of his address, the United States had few political relations with Europe. Yet, even these temporary connections were seen as a threat by Washington.

Later, Washington is even more explicit. “Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.” Washington was describing Buckley conservatives perfectly.

Of course, the main flaw in these new calls for nationalism in America, even if they are sincere, is that the time for that has passed. The people now throwing around nationalistic language were the people, who purged people like Pat Buchanan back when it was still possible to preserve the historic American nation. Instead, the Buckleyites usurped the confidence of the people, in order to convince them to surrender their interests to cosmopolitan globalists.

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Better Beliefs

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The one universal quality of left-wing politics that is true in every time and place is the need for an external enemy. It is onto this enemy the movement focuses its attention, making it a rallying point and a rallying cry. Ideally, the enemy is mysterious, maybe even a bit supernatural. A supernatural enemy supports the idea of the movement being in a decisive battle for the future of humanity. An important element of left-wing politics is a sense of urgency. There’s no time to wait, as the final battle is at hand.

Orwell, of course, understood this well and created two the great left-wing bogeymen in English literature. Emmanuel Goldstein is the “enemy of the people” during the two minutes of hate at the beginning of the novel 1984. In Animal Farm, Snowball is the blame for all the farm’s troubles, after he disappear. In both cases, the bogeyman is a traitor, who willingly turned on the cause. In both cases, the bogeyman is mysteriously absent, thus can be amplified as an almost supernatural villain.

Eric Hoffer said, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is certainly true, but it has a peculiar application on the Left, as the positive beliefs of left-wing politics are most often the least understood by the adherents. A feature of left-wing politics is a vague understanding of what they are for, but a detailed understanding of what they oppose. In fact, it is what they oppose that gets the attention. The bogeyman becomes an obsession.

For example, the modern Left in pretty much just a collection of incoherent bellows and yelps with no real purpose, other than opposition to white people. Last week the Left was anti-war and now this week they love war. Their position on foreign policy is dependent on whatever Trump has to say about the issue. The American Left is purely reactionary, tethered to Donald Trump like a slave being taken to market. Their politics are devoid of practical meaning It’s just ways to point and sputter.

This Rolling Stone article in the latest ways to spot an evil doer is a great example of how the Left invests everything in its bogeymen. The ADL, a left-wing terrorist organization, maintains a database of symbols they claim are used by the supernatural members of their even more mysterious enemies. Putting aside the absurdity of the bowl cut or the OK sign being secret symbols, think about the sort of person who thinks this way. It is a person obsessed with what they imagine is in the shadows.

That is why the Left invests all of its energy into inventing and describing various aspects of the Eternal Enemy. It’s not that they need the bogeyman as a rallying point for their coalition. That’s a mistake paleocons like Steve Sailer make. He’s a practical guy so he projects practical reasons onto the actions of the Left. If they were sober minded enough to reason through these things, they would not be on the Left. To be on the Left is to abandon all reason in favor of a set of beliefs.

Belief is powerful magic. Because the Left controls the high ground of the American empire, their beliefs are imposed on the rest of the world in a million little ways. For example, Neo-Nazis are the most hated group in the world. People from around the empire hate Nazis more than they hate criminals. The fact that Neo-Nazis really don’t exist, while criminals are a daily part of life is important. People have been convinced to hate an imaginary enemy more than the enemy at their door.

Of course, democracy is the most fertile ground for left-wing magic, because democracy provides no mechanism for uniting people. In fact, democracy is all about creating divisions, over which the public argues and comes to some compromise. Short of an official religion and extreme intolerance of alternative beliefs, a secular religion fills the void as a unifying set of beliefs. Democracy makes a people crazy, emptying their heads of reason in order to fill it with the nonsense of civic religion.

It is the desperate need for bogeymen that must be the focus of any successful dissident movement, because it is the spirit of the ruling class. The reason the Left advertises those lists of “hate symbols” is to encourage stupid people to adopt them as some form of rebellion. Again, the Left needs enemies to exist, so when none exist, it manufactures them. As the saying goes, the demand for Nazis long ago exhausted the supply, so the business of the Left is in creating new Nazis to meet demand.

Therefore, the successful resistance to the Left in a democracy is one that avoids playing the role cast for it by the Left. The battle for the shared reality of the public culture is a war of attrition. The winner is the one that is most efficient in the use of resources, but best at driving up the cost to the other side. Whatever comes after liberal democracy, the people who replace the Left, will fill a void created when the Left collapses after having exhausted itself maintaining its control of society.

This is a lesson of right-wing failure in its fight with the Left. The Right in American always countered left-wing belief with empiricism. Facts and logic would prevail over the emotions of the Left. Ben Shapiro chirping “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a rallying call for the Left. The reason is it turns the resistance to the Left into an easily demonized opponent. The alternative to left-wing belief is not the lack of any belief whatsoever. The alternative is a different, more appealing set of beliefs.

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The Media Awakening

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In the current crisis, one of the useful and clarifying ways to divide people is in how they respond to the mass media. On the one hand are those who just assume everything reported, regardless of the alleged partisan bias, is fake. It’s manufactured for some undisclosed reason and fed to the many airheads working in media. The other side of this dive are those who still think the political theater is real. They take one side or the other in the mock battles between the two wings of the bipartisan uniparty.

You see this in the “fake news” stuff among Trump supporters and opponents. For those supporting Trump, the fake news outlets are those that “report” bad things about their guy, while the real news outlets are the sites that sing his praises. Of course, the people in the anti-Trump camp take the opposite view. In other words, these people don’t think the news is fake. They think the other side’s news is fake. It’s the same old Red Team – Blue Team dynamic, just decorated with new language for the Trump era.

For the legacy people, the fake news meme has been a coping strategy to deal with the collapse of the old politics. Every day, an assumed partisan comes out and says something that seems at odds with his side. This past week, so-called liberals have been out saying all the things neocons used to say in the Bush years, regarding the forever wars on behalf of Israel. They have all but called Tulsi Gabbard a dirty hippy for her support for a withdraw from the never-ending Middle East theater.

It really is incredible to watch the assault on Gabbard. Her position on foreign policy is what we were told was the mainstream of the Democrat party. Even before Bush and the neocons bankrupted the nation on pointless wars of choice, the America Left was anti-intervention. They were the side that argued for multi-lateral talks and negotiated settlements to disputes. For eight years Obama preached this line, as he cut deals with Iran and allegedly pulled troops out of the Iraq disaster.

Now, politics is about lying, so lying about past positions, even if those positions were held just an hour ago, is nothing new. The game is to attack an opponent for their lack of purity at the moment, thus elevating yourself. When Hillary Clinton attacked Gabbard as a Russian asset, it was about trying to rehabilitate Clinton, at the expense of Gabbard, not about the facts as presented. Clinton is worried that the investigation into her 2016 election shenanigans may leave her holding the bag.

That’s something even the naivest legacy person can grasp. It is the conduct of the media that is the tell. Instead of pointing out that Gabbard is saying the same thing all of the Democrats, including Barak Obama, said during the Bush years, they are piling on the Syria issue. The far Left is even joining in on attacking Gabbard as a tool of Putin, Assad and other bogeymen of the Left. In other words, we don’t have a media in modern America. What we have are amplifiers of the party line.

It is not just the left-wing engaged in this. It works on all sides engaged in the official political process. This post in American Conservative is a good example. It is written by one of the army of dingbats in the Washington dingbat chorus. The people hired by B and C list news sites, are young, dumb and eager. They repeat what they are told with breathless enthusiasm and seriousness for whoever will pay them. They don’t ask questions, because they dream of making it big in political media.

That story is complete nonsense. It is the neocon line of attack on Trump, hoping to finally destroy Trump, before he dismantles their forever war regime. The line being pushed is that any inquiry into Ukraine is illegitimate. Since all of these people are up to their eyeballs in Ukrainian corruption, the last thing they want is a thorough examination of American involvement there. Joe Biden is not the only guy who was taking bribes from various Ukrainian oligarchs over the last decade.

American Conservative is supposed to be an anti-war, non-intervention publication, but here they are pimping the neocon party line. Like the people at Mother Jones, what the people at American Conservative want most is to be in the club. The so-called ideological positions and resulting policy claims are just decoration. In the end, even the fringe media is just another amplifier of the party line. Their dissent is a sales pitch to keep the racket going. Otherwise, they repeat what they are told.

That right there is the divide in retail politics. One side gets this and the other side is still trapped in the old model. The legacy people still spend their time pointing out the hypocrisy, thinking this time it will make a difference. The dissidents, when they pay any attention to it at all, just note that our media is propaganda. That “both sides” are working for the same team. Otherwise, retail politics is a game for legacy people, who still visit the Drudge Report and watch cable news programs.

This is probably where the awakening for most people will start. The journey to this side of the political divide begins with awakening to the fact the media, small and large, is just propaganda. The people pitching it are not any side but the official one. If word comes down that Marxism is the new conservatism, Ben Shapiro will be doing show in the glories of Lenin and Mark. When people wake up to this reality, they begin their journey as a dissident. It may be that fake news is the dissident’s best weapon.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!