Monthly Archives: November 2019

High On Their Own Supply

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A common misconception among the more cynical on this side of the great divide is that the people running grifts like TP-USA are all in on the grift. That the front men are just as aware of the con being worked as the people who finance them. While that can be true, it is not always true. In fact, in most cases the front man is a true believer, who really believes the stuff he is preaching. That’s why the backers picked him. They did not have to worry about him having a crisis of conscience.

That appears to be the case with Charlie Kirk, the deformed looking fellow that is the front man for TP-USA, the synthetic grassroots college group. After hooligans disrupted his college tour with difficult questions, he has reportedly been threatening to quit the show, as he was so distraught over what is happening. He was unprepared for anything but an adoring audience of fellow believers. He expected his college road show to be him evangelizing to fellow zealots. Instead he is being mocked.

When you stop and think about it, it is easy to see that he is not a cold, calculating schemer running a complex grift. For starters, he is not that bright. That’s clear by how badly he has handled the questions from the hooligans. Even a young con-man is quick on his feet when in a jam. That’s what leads them into the grifter lifestyle. Kirk, on the other hand, is completely unprepared for the push-back he is getting, because he just assumed everyone in the crowd believed the same nonsense he believes.

In fairness to Kirk, he is not alone in believing nonsense. The Bush years are a great example of how you can fool most of the people for just a little while, if you give them a reason to feel they are sacrificing for a larger goal. The flag waving and talk of spreading democracy to the barbarians was powerful magic. For people in a fading empire, with an uncertain demographic future, a moral war to make the world right again was a beautiful reprieve from their daily reality.

Now, there are cynical grifters in these scams. Dan Crenshaw, the congressman from Texas, is a great example. Like John McCain, he as figured out how to wrap himself in the flag, while peddling the nonsense paid for by the usual suspects. He’s running around trying to convince young white men to throw their life away on pointless wars in the Middle East, while telling them the future is going to be brown. If one wanted to conjure a modern example of pure evil, Pirate Dan is a good start.

In many ways, these Potemkin movements ginned up by the usual suspects mirror what is done in the pop music business. The sharps who have run that business since the inception, are always fishing for a new act. When they find one, they flood the market with copies until the public losses interest. Then it is onto the next act. Meanwhile, the boys and girls trying to become pop starts are sure they are getting noticed because they have talent. The carny folk prey on those wishing to be stars.

The difference between what is happening with the political hucksters and the entertainment rackets is there is no feedback loop. Music producers have to move product. Movie makers have to sell tickets. The political theater generally lacks such immediate returns. Both sides of the ruling class can rig the venues and seed the audience with fellow grifters, thus having the effect of being popular. Eventually, the people running these scams start to fall for their own con.

That may be what we are seeing with TP-USA. The same sorts backing this racket successfully made that ridiculous hobbit Ben Shapiro a star. They even made the odious Dinesh D’Souza a star in the last election cycle. Of course, they were able to quickly turn the Tea party into a racket. Running these scams has been so easy for so long, they got sloppy. They made the mistake of getting high off their own supply and started making mistakes. The result is the ongoing debacle of TP-USA.

The lesson though is that humans are built to believe. It is a part of our nature that is probably the oldest part of our nature. Belief probably co-evolved with language as a way to allow us to share complex thought and abstract concepts. While modern Americans may have stopped participating on traditional religion, that desire to be a part of a shared belief is still there. People will believe in something. The question is what will they believe and to what purpose will those beliefs point them.

The alternative to the cynical nonsense from the usual suspects is not just a rebuttal of their assertions. It is also an alternative set of beliefs, which in the simplest sense is an alternative vision of the future. “This is who we are and this what we do, because this is the future we want for our posterity” is what holds a people together. Politics is not an argument about the present, but the future. Offer a more promising vision of the future and people will come to believe they can achieve it.

That’s really what these scams are about, when you examine them. They keep conjuring one fake youth movement after another so the young don’t start thinking about a better future than what is on offer. If young whites suddenly stop believing in consumerism, they will believe in and fight for something else. If they stop thinking brown is beautiful, not only is Pirate Dan out of a job, demographic replacement becomes a rallying point around which to oppose the ruling class.

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!

Materially Hollow

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If you wanted to locate a point on the timeline as to when America began its descent into the current crisis, a good candidate would be when the Right decided to focus on economics over culture. While there is no specific day on which they made the shift, it happened somewhere during the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s, largely in response to that culture war. When the Right embraced fusionism, the die was cast and events would inevitably lead to the current crisis we see today.

Fusionism was the work of Frank Meyer, a 20th century political thinker, who was one of the founding members of National Review. In the book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Meyer sought to unite libertarian ideas with traditionalism, into a new conservative ideology to oppose the Left. Instead of defending culture and tradition on their own terms, the New Right would use libertarian arguments to show that traditional culture was economically superior to socialism.

What happened to the American Right is it embraced the materialism of the Left, but sought to use those arguments to arrive at traditional ends. Rather than reject the hollow materialism of socialism and communism, the New Right would embrace it and celebrate it. Man was no longer a spiritual being operating in a material world, but a narrowly self-interested economic unit, who pursued his subjectively-defined ends in the most efficient way possible. Culture now took a back seat to economics.

Of course, what they were doing, even if they did not understand it at the time, was conceding the culture war to the Left. By shifting from a defense of culture and tradition on their own terms, the Right was no longer going to challenge the moral claims made by the Left. Instead of disputing the morality of Progressive reforms, the Right would put on the green eye shade and explain why those reforms were too expensive or upsetting to the economy. The Right became the accounting department of the Left.

Again, at the time, this probably seemed like a clever strategy. Post-war America was concerned about peace and prosperity. If you wanted political power, thus control of the culture, so the argument went, you had to win the argument over how best to achieve peace and prosperity. A political platform that promised economic growth and a foreign policy that promised peace through strength was the winning ticket. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s looked like a proof of concept.

The trouble was this could work as long as the general culture remained intact, ready to simply say no to the latest Progressive innovations. It turned out that 20th century conservatism was a free rider, living off the cultural surplus of post-war society. Like the Left, the New Right consumed this cultural surplus, but never contributed anything back to the cultural stock of society. More important, it allowed to atrophy the tools a people need to defend their culture and traditions from the Left.

By elevating economics over culture, the Right could just as easily justify left-wing assaults on civil society. The destruction of small-town America, for example, is largely a right-wing project. They are the ones defending oligarchical operations like Amazon and Walmart, that convert social capital into profits, draining the life from small town America. As long as it can be justified economically, the Right is happy to see these economic pirates raid your town and your neighborhood.

Think of it this way. For generations, social organizations relied upon local businessmen to underwrite them. The local church relied about its wealthy members to pay for the upkeep of the church and bankroll church activities. Local youth sports leagues were sponsored by local small business. Google is not going to pay for the repairs to the church’s pipe organ. Amazon is not going to sponsor your kid’s ball team. The price of cheap goods from Walmart was the spirit of your community.

This is why the cultural decline is accelerating. In the 1990’s, the mainstream of the Left snickered at homosexual marriage. A generation later and you get fired from your job if you are insufficiently enthusiastic for the guy in accounting, who recently started pretending to be a woman. The political Right has no answer for why this madness is intolerable, as they cannot find an economic argument suggesting it is too expensive or bad for global finance. They don’t know why transvestite story time is wrong.

When it all comes down to money, it means every man has a price. More important, it means his price will be at wherever the cheapest seller is at the moment. That’s been the story of the Buckley Right for the past thirty years. They are always ready to sellout to the lowest bidder, thus the culture war turned into a race to the bottom. The wreckage of Buckley conservatism is the result of a political strategy based on knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

If there is to be a revival of the American Right, it must be a cultural revolution, not an economic one. An authentic alternative not only says Bob from accounting cannot wear a dress, but Bob cannot be in our town, as he is not one of us. We don’t tolerate men who wear dresses, because that’s who we are. An authentic alternative rejects economic man and embraces the whole man, who is defined by is community and his role in that community. Spiritual man must reign over economic man.

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!

Chaotic Evil

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Over the weekend, the news brought word that Greg Johnson had been arrested in Norway on incitement charges. The details are still coming out, but the basics are that a far-left group claimed he was a terrorist and the Norwegian authorities just took their word for it and had him detained. Presumably, they will deport him from the country and try to have him banned from the continent. That is a popular tactic for radical extremists to use in Europe to harass Americans they don’t like.

Of course, calling these domestic terror groups radical or extreme is just a way to express contempt for them using common language. It’s not an accurate description of where they stand on the political spectrum. When Antifa or the SPLC can dictate terms to the political class, they are neither radical or extreme. They are the mainstream, well within the conventional of the ruling class. It is what we use to call normal people, with their rules and procedures, who are now the outliers.

This is a lesson that dissidents have to internalize. Many on this side of the divide are stuck in the past, with regards to the political landscape. They assume we live in a rule-based society, in which one can appeal to a neutral authority for relief when the Left violates the rules. If that world ever existed, it is long gone. We live in a soft authoritarianism, where the rules are whatever the people in power say they are at any point in time. It’s not rule of law. It is rule by left-wing fanatic.

As such, the old Chinese curse should always be at the front of the mind of the dissident. That curse is, “may the government become aware of you.” The Chinaman, having lived under some form of authoritarian bureaucracy for thousands of years, is conditioned to understand the reality of his relationship to society. The Chinaman knows that the bureaucrat can and will inflict unlimited cruelty as only a bureaucrat can, if given the opportunity. The wise person avoids making himself known to them.

In the case of modern dissidents in the modern West, it means avoiding any and all contact with the crazies the managerial class deploys as lures and traps. That’s the only utility of groups like Antifa, Hope Not Hate and the ADL. Their role is to keep beating the bushes in order to lure dissidents out into the open. Then they can attack, giving their handlers in the bureaucracy the excuse to bring the hammer down on the people involved in the skirmish. If a few left-wing street activists are harmed, so be it.

The primary weapon of the soft authoritarian is the lie. Because they operate inside a thicket of rules and regulations, they know a well-placed lie can turn those rules into a spider web, tangling up the victim for years. In the struggle to free himself, he may make addition mistakes, allowing other spiders in the system to vomit forth their digestive acids onto the victim. Even if the victim can free himself, he has lost time and resources, making him weaker and more timid.

This is on full display with the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. The people involved are not very bright. Most are the sort who, in a saner age, would be manning a rural Post Office branch or maybe stamping forms down at the title office. In a soft authoritarianism, they rise through the ranks, spinning their webs on behalf of the system, getting rewarded for their treachery and deceit. That plot was a revolt of sexless bureaucrats lashing out a reminder of what they are not.

This sort of ruling system attracts a certain sort of person. The type that enjoys tangling people up in a web of lies is a timid sociopath, who hates himself and therefore the world that created him. These are people who can only enjoy what they feel as pleasure by witnessing the suffering of others. Look around the Left and you see sexless, passive males and bitter deranged females. These are people who live to inflict misery on others, hoping it will bring them relief from their own miserable lives.

What this means for dissidents in the West is cleaning the mind of those old civic nationalist notions of a lawful society judged by neutral arbiters. That world does not exist and cannot be conjured into existence. There is no shaming these people into acting like normal people, capable of living in a civilized, orderly society. They are chaotic evil. They have no respect for rules, other people’s lives, or anything but their own desire for revenge against a world that has made them some hideous.

It’s why moaning about the collapse of free speech in the West is just self-flagellation, unless it is to convert people to the dissident cause. The ethos of the modern dissident is to never allow an outrage to go to waste. Use every incident to force the civic nationalist to confront the reality of his situation. For now, the best that can be done is to spread a quiet cynicism about the system. A society of cynical people is much more expensive to rule than a population still under the ether of civic nationalism.

More important though, it means operating in the shadows. The days or organizing in public, holding well-advertised gatherings and participating in constructive public debate are gone. That reality will surely make many angry and indignant, but for a dissident to have any hope, he must always accept the reality of his situation. Otherwise, he will always be drawn into that web of lies and deceits that are spun to ensnare the people into the soft authoritarianism of the neo-liberal order.

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!

Past Is The Future

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A bad habit dissidents have inherited from conservatives is to instinctively dispute the claims made by our enemies. If a cosmopolitan globalist says X, the tendency is to argue that X is wrong. This has been the habit of mind for conservatives since the birth of Buckley conservatism in the middle of the last century. The motto of that crew should be “well actually” as that’s what they have spent generations saying to every left-winger they can find. Many dissidents have brought this habit with them.

Here’s an example of someone called Dave Rubin making the claim that America is a proposition nation. Anyone can be an America, as long as they fill out the right paperwork down at the right government office. He is echoing an assertion popular with a certain sort of conservative pundit. Unlike a country like Israel, to use a totally random example, America is not a nation that occupies a territory it sees as a homeland, but a land that contains people, who more or less agree not to murder one another.

The responses are all of things that we have come to expect whenever someone promotes the propositional nation assertion on a pubic platform. There’s a call and response quality to this stuff. The guy allowed on the stage, to stand in the spotlight and hold forth on various issues, is accompanied by a chorus just off-stage that responds to what he is saying. The trouble with the model is the responses don’t actually address the intent of the statement. Instead they fixate on theory behind it.

As a practical matter, Rubin is correct. America is a propositional nation, in that citizenship is now entirely meaningless to the native born. It has value to the millions pouring over the border every year, but to the people who hold US citizenship, it is a stock certificate for a company that no longer exists. Stock certificate is really not the right way to put it, as it is more like a debt certificate. Every year that tax on people holding citizenship goes up, as the land gets enriched with the dregs of the earth.

Now, the people who reflexively push back on the proposition nation stuff certainly wish this was not the case. They are correct that American citizenship should count for something and not just be handed out like candy at Halloween. In other words, they are right about the theory, but wrong about practical reality. More important, the people in charge are not going to change their policies and make citizenship count again. That means citizenship, as a practical matter, is now completely worthless.

Dissidents are fond of talking about red pills, which usually means coming to terms with who is the enemy and the reality of so-called allies. In reality, the people busying themselves identifying and describing the enemy are still operating under the assumption that citizenship is still a real thing or at least a real thing that can be recaptured if we can just defeat the enemy. The fact is, that old concept of citizenship is meaningless and will never be otherwise. That’s the ultimate red pill.

It also means any sense of duty or obligation to the country is not only meaningless, it is foolish. Citizenship either arises from a social contract, to which all members are bound for mutual benefit or it arises from a shared identity of the citizens. If anyone can become a citizen, without the consent of the citizenry, then there can be no mutual benefit, no social contract. Similarly, if anyone can join the group, then it has no fixed identity and the members therefore gain no identity from it.

This is what makes the propositional nation stuff so difficult to grasp. In a normal nation, people are either a citizen, a subject or an alien. In a nation of citizens, the people are sovereign, beholden to one another. In a nation of subjects, the people serve a ruler, who is the sovereign. The alien, in both cases, is resident under whatever conditions set by the nation. In the propositional nation, everyone is an alien. The country is just an ad hoc collection of people interacting with one another as economic units.

In this weird, post-national country created for us by our ruling class, all relationships are transactional. This is why anyone can be an American. As long as the newcomers participate in the economy, they are the same as anyone else as far as the people in charge are concerned. The rulers have no more of an obligation to the people than the people have to one another. The ruling and administrative class maintain order, not because it is their duty, but because they gain some benefit from it.

Of course, this is why the ruling class has abandoned so much of what is considered the duties of a ruling class. They have no duties. They enforce the laws as they want, when they want, solely for their own benefit. Where there is no benefit, they have simply abandoned those duties. It turns out that anarcho-tyranny is not so much the result of managerialism, but the inevitable result of post-nationalism. In a world solely governed by material relations, sacrifice becomes just another relic of the past.

In a way, post-nationalism is just a reversion to a more primitive organizational model, one that arose in the late Roman Empire and the early middle ages. Under the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, for example, groups formed up around ethnic, religious and regional affiliations to negotiate with the rulers collectively. The rulers did not feel a natural duty to the people over whom they ruled. They just wanted their taxes and an orderly administration of their lands. That’s the propositional nation.

That what makes accepting post-nationalism the ultimate red pill. Once you come to terms with the fact that there is no convincing the people in charge to respect your citizenship, you realize there is no going back to the civic nationalist model. Instead, the way forward is through the oldest form of nationhood. That’s where a nation is defined by a people with a common heritage, a common set of ancestors. The way forward is to go back to the most basic form of human organization, the nation.

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!

The White Shadows

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I’ve gotten some negative feedback of late about the fact I sound too scripted and spend too much time reading news stories. I think both are related, as I don’t use a script when I do this. I just make some notes and, of course, read the passages of news items I’m doing. Of course, if I’m reading too much copy then I will sound scripted, so that would be why I may sound too scripted. It is one of those things I did not notice until someone pointed it out to me. I have been reading a lot more than commenting.

It is always best to respond to criticism by swinging wildly in the opposite direction, so that is what I’m doing this week. There will be no reading aloud in the show. Not only that, I did not even make notes to remind me of the things I wanted to say in each segment. It’s all off the top of the head in one take. The only prep is I came up with five topics for the show. Otherwise, it is just me talking about the topics as it comes to me for an hour. Even the closing has more me than usual.

Now, I like to mix things up, which is probably not a good thing with this type of content, as people prefer regularity. Someone finds the show, they like it and expect more of the same each week. Variety is the spice of life, not the staple of life. That said, I do what I enjoy and I like variety, which means trying new things and testing out ideas that I think could be fun. This week is a show on dissident organizing, which is pretty far outside my normal content. Just call me Zee Alinsky now.

The reason for this is the topic keeps getting raised by people I meet at various dissident events, like the one I was at last week. It comes up in my e-mail every time I write about an event. There are a lot of people who would like to connect with local people of their kidney to form a social group. There is a great unmet demand for community among our people, but organic, grassroots organizing from the Right is not something you can just buy a book and learn to do.

This week’s show is not intended to be the final word on organizing, but rather a starting point on the topic. The one thing we have going for us is a lot of creative, bright people willing to tackle tough questions. The more these topics are discussed by people with an audience, the more our smart people will think about them. Eventually, the answers bubble to the surface. That and it spreads the word that there are lots of people all over who want to belong to a dissident group in their area.

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

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 05:00: Small and Local
  • 15:00: Community First
  • 25:00: Set High Standards
  • 35:00: Going Old School
  • 45:00: The White Shadows
  • 55:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/dYsj200Ji94