When Finnish nationalists get together every year to socialize and organize, they call their event The Awakening. It is a great term for them to use as it has multiple meanings in this context. One is the obvious awakening among Finns of their long dormant nation pride and identity. The other is the growing awareness of what globalism and multiculturalism means to them as a people. It can also mean the growing awareness of liberal democracy and what it is doing to the people.

The image of a man waking up or snapping out of a daze is a good one to use for all Western people, especially Americans. In the provinces of the Empire, there has always been a bit of skepticism about America, so they never fully succumbed to the narcotic effects of the American empire. In the heart of the empire, the combination of American mythology, civic nationalism and patriotic nostalgia have kept most Americans in a narcotic fog, unable to fully grasp what is happening to them.

There’s also a very American aspect to this concept. The Great Awakening is a cycle in American culture that dates to the founding. A mostly northern phenomenon, these periodic spasms of moral and civic reform have defined our politics. The ruling class may have abandoned Christianity generations ago, but the people are still controlled by those same biorhythms. Therefore, Americans are still prone to periods of excessive moralizing about the fallen state of society.

Amusingly, the current ruling class has bastardized the term to use it in their current anti-white pogroms. The “woke” people waging jihad against white people claim to be suddenly aware of white supremacy, white privilege and male privilege. In reality, they just gobbled down the latest batch of hallucinogenics issued from the global human resource departments. The full expression of false consciousness is middle-aged childless women claiming to be woke on the patriarchy.

As an aside, it is rather symbolic that the ruling class would embrace the concept of an awakening to decorate their latest enforcement efforts. It is the hallmark of the global ruling class to take naturally occurring phenomenon and destroy them in an effort to squeeze a few dollars from them. It is appropriate for a parasitic class of rapacious vermin to try to monetize and politicize the awakening concept as they try to prevent people from waking up to the reality of that parasitic class.

All that aside, there is an awakening going on outside the big stages and production houses of America popular culture. No one in corporate media is allowed to mention it and most are happy to comply with that edict, but it is a real thing that will define the near future, possibly the election. Like most social change, it is happening slowly in many little ways, so it is not obvious. Even for people on the edge of the awakening, the changes can be frustratingly subtle, but it is happening.

People are waking up to the reality of race in American politics and culture. You see that with the collapse in sports viewership. Before the Left unleashed the latest anti-white pogrom, white people loved their sports. Then it went away and then it came back decorated with the latest political slogans. Suddenly, what it was, what it always was, was clear to many people and they have abandoned it. It’s not just the politics in the games, but the politics around all of us.

Another area where people are becoming more aware of the reality behind the illusion is in the mass media. The “fake news” stuff is a nice partisan chant, but even the most partisan Trump people have been clinging to the belief that the media going woke would cause them to go broke. The Biden corruption story is waking many up to the reality of our mass media. It’s not a business at all, but one of the many tentacles of the ruling class, used to keep certain people in power.

The thing that the people behind this story probably don’t get is how this puzzle piece suddenly brings into focus a picture that was not all that clear for many. The media claiming this Hunter Biden story is Russian propaganda is like a bucket of ice water on the heads of many people. The outlandish dishonesty at work here cannot be explained as mere partisanship. The whole Biden story, his dementia and now his corruption, is a stunning eye opener for many Americans.

Again, it is easy for even the most cynical to miss it. “Oh, normie will go right back to his sports ball” was what we heard months ago from the most cynical. That did not happen and now seems unlikely to happen. The spell has been broken. The same is happening with mass media. The center of gravity for normal people moved from the assumption of bias to an assumption that what is in the news is a lie. There is a palpable breakdown in trust between the people and the ruling class.

This Hunter Biden story may be another inflection point. Many people are looking at this and wondering just how deep the corruption goes. After all, the FBI has had this material for months and never followed up on it. In fact, they appear to have been actively concealing it from Congress. Were they planning to blackmail Biden with it if he won the election? When people can plausibly start to wonder such things, they have lost all confidence and trust in their ruling class.

Like most things, cultural awakenings are not neat and tidy. The pedantic cannot appreciate that these things happen in fits and starts. Often the real action is happening in private conversations between friends and family. A catalyzing event brings those private conversations into the public, but it was a series of minor little things that nudged people along in the private deliberations. In the fullness of time, 2020 may be known as the year of the American Awakening.

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Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

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.

Media Note: I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around 9:00 PM eastern and runs for a couple of hours. Are you into midgets? Westerns? Maybe midget westerns? Well, I watched Terror of Tiny Town and posted a review to my SubscribeStar page.

A defining feature of the managerial state is that it creates problems that require it to then fashion complex solutions to solve. A group of experts from the managerial class made some reform, which then created unintended problems. The solution is to draft a new set of experts from the managerial class to solve this new problem. Inevitably, this creates new problems and the process continues into forever. A good current example of this is what to do with the tech monopolies.

The reason we have tech monopolies is Congress drafted laws that allowed the firms to turn into behemoths. In gratitude, these firms then showered their favorite politicians with cash, in order to avoid getting the Microsoft treatment. This allowed the firms to get bigger and turn the thank you cash into threats. It is not unrealistic to think these firms are now able and willing to blackmail politicians with information gleaned from their social media, e-mail and mobile devices.

The starting point for this problem is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996. Section 230 says that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This means that on-line intermediaries cannot be held accountable for what passes through their network or platform. Specifically, the intent was to protect them from libel claims.

At the time, this made sense for two reasons. One was the government did not want the internet service providers walling off the internet as a collection of private domains that they policed as a private space. They wanted the internet to be open. Second, they were told that it was practically impossible to monitor what was posted on-line in real-time, so it would cripple this new industry to treat them as publishers. To let the industry grow, it had to be the wild west on-line.

So far, so good, but like everything else done by the technocrats, they created new problems they could solve at some future date. This immunity from libel claims, for example, has made it possible for the big social media companies to operate as regulators of the public square. It has allowed domain registrars to violate individual rights under the cloak of immunity. Even banks are getting into the act, claiming their web portals are covered under section 230.

This brings up another feature of managerial state. It is a strange version of Chesterton’s gate that is baked into their thinking. Once their creation is set loose, no one ever looks back to understand why they created it and what it was intended to do. It just becomes this thing that sprang from nothingness, like the organic institutions for which they have so little respect. We see this with Section 230. It’s just this thing that is either treated as a force of nature or a thing that must be destroyed.

The thing is, much of what ails us could be solved by simply going back to the original intent of the law. The tech companies argued that they should not be treated as publishers because they could not regulate what was on their platform and most important, they did not want to regulate the content. They just wanted to act as facilitators that allowed people to come together in the public square. It was not their job or intention to tell anyone what they could say on-line.

Right there is a solution to much of what is happening. If Twitter, for example, is regulating speech on its platform, then it is no longer covered by Section 230, because it is clearly able and willing to act as a publisher. We call a dog a dog because it has all the characteristics of a dog. Twitter is a publisher because it now has the vital characteristics of a publisher. Applying the original logic of the law to Twitter means it either stops censuring people or it transforms into something else.

Another simple remedy that exists in the law is property ownership. It is well established that when ownership of something is in doubt, the law starts at the creator and then establishes a chain of custody. Stolen goods for example, are returned to the last person who can establish ownership, either through a purchase agreement or proof there are the originator of the item. If you made it, it is yours until you agree to sell or gift it to another person, who then becomes the legal owner.

If we treated your information the same way we treat all other property in the western world, the tech companies would no longer be allowed to harvest this information without your permission. They would have to get your permission every time they sold your information. Most people, of course, would refuse and the business models of these firms would more from rentier to retail. They would have to charge you for the service they provide, like every other business.

Way back in the 2016 election, the liberal pundit Mickey Kaus observed that the Republican party could have cut Trump off early if they just adopted some of his ideas, especially on immigration. If they more gracefully advocated for some limits on immigration and maybe a new attitude on trade, Trump would have lost. They did not, so we will never know, but the implication was that they refused to go down that road because nefarious forces behind the scenes were preventing it.

We get similar argument about the tech monopolies. Congress is now conveniently split on how to address the problem. Bill Bar has initiated what will no doubt be a glacial process to file anti-trust claims against the tech giants. We’ll all be dead long before any of these turn into results. The assumption is that it is all just a show, while behind the scenes the pols bath in cash from the tech giants. It is certainly a useful and satisfying conspiracy theory, but it is mostly wrong.

The truth is, the managerial state turns the ruling class into children, always living in the moment and searching for a present distraction. Instead of taking the prudent and mature view of the problem, tracing it back to its origin and then simply applying the law as intended, they turn it into story time. In this story, they are once again cast as the strong female lead, taking on the sinister bad guys. You go girl. In order to defeat the bad guys, they must create a super complicated solution.

In many areas, this is not much of a concern. The issue of tech censorship is one that can largely solve itself. In order for Twitter to exist, they need the state to keep their competitor out of business, but those same children playing make believe in response to the problem are unable to maintain their end of the bargain. People will find a way to meet on-line and exchange ideas. The result will not be ideal or even very good, but it will allow people to communicate on-line.

This is not happening with important stuff like building roads and keeping the hospitals open. All over the country, technocrats agree that we need more new housing, so builder need more power to build developments. That results in the need for more road and more schools, but building roads is boring, so the children of the managerial state use their time dreaming up smart communities and smart transportation plans. They get to pretend they are smart and popular while the rest of us sit in traffic jams.

The observation about bureaucracy is it becomes sclerotic over time. The people inside the system stop caring about the purpose of the system. Something similar happens with the managerial state. The people inside become hyper-educated toddlers, unable to grasp the concept of time. They spend their days trying to impress each other with their highly complex public policy solutions. Governance becomes a giant parlor game where the more ridiculous the idea, the more the children cheer.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

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.

Media Note: I will be on the Counter-Currents livestream this Sunday. Greg uses these as fundraisers, so if you like hearing people like me on these shows, consider sending Greg a few bucks. You can do that via Entropy.

The Feds announced to great fanfare that they foiled a plot by far-right extremists to kidnap the daffy governor of Michigan. They coordinated this with the governor so she could try to gain some sympathy. Of course, this being the age of lies, the extremists were mostly anarchists and random goofballs talked into this by the Feds. Putting aside the absurdity of this case, it does raise a good question. That is, why has there been so little organized violence in America?

Now, people will point to the left-wing riots over the summer, but that was always intended to be theater. Those people in the streets are not resisting anything or trying to topple the system. They are creatures of the system. As soon as official sanction is withdrawn, they melt away, as we saw in 2016 and now 2020. What we have not seen is violence from people who genuinely wish to topple the prevailing order or strike a blow against it for political reasons.

This is not just a current year issue. The 9/11 attacks were a spectacular example of how an open society is vulnerable to attack. There are plenty of Muslims in America and some portion of them hate the government. The 9/11 attacks should have inspired some of them to do similar attacks. Instead, a few misfits were caught in lone-wolf style efforts, but otherwise, not much. As with the fictional right-wing militias, the FBI was left to arresting on-line losers pretending to be Al-Qaeda.

It’s easy to miss the lack of organized violence, as the media floods the zone with agit-prop about invisible Nazis and peaceful riots. These are campfire stories they tell the true believers so they will remain vigilant. In reality, there has been precious little push-back of any kind, much less the violent sort. They had to turn Gavin McInnes’s goofy fan club into a terrorist group, because they were so desperate for material. The demand for extremists of any type far exceeds the supply.

Consider this. When was the last time someone fired a shot at a president? Despite how hated Trump is by the Left, there has been no Squeaky Fromme. According to Wikipedia, the threats to Obama were humorously ridiculous. The worst thing to happen to Bush was that some Iraqi tossed a shoe at him. Like Obama, the threats to Clinton were random goofballs. The last President to get shot at was Reagan. Assassination has become a thing of the past in our politics.

Going back to the Muslim stuff, the thing no one ever asked is why were these guys so bad at violence? Timothy McVeigh showed how easy it is to make a big bomb from common materials. Instead of hijacking airplanes, they could have had suicide bombers in rental trucks popping up all over the country. Think about how many soft targets there are in a typical city. Think about how many vulnerable choke points there are, like bridges and tunnels. Yet, nothing ever happens.

Now, the Feds will claim that their vigilance is what keeps us safe from this sort of stuff, but that is obviously not true. Their effort to subvert the 2016 elections has revealed that the brain-drain in the FBI reached a critical stage long ago. Like the Michigan incident, their big collars are goofballs they talk into saying dumb things on-line. A real terrorist plot would have nothing to fear from the FBI. The lack of such incidents is due to factors outside of the law enforcement operations.

One possible answer for this is that people engaged in politics are not the sort that see force as a political tool. It is the foxes versus the lions phenomenon. Modern politics is about abstract concepts, not group interests. Union guys a century ago were willing to blow up the company offices because both sides were lions, engaged in a battle for physical stuff. Today, political combatants are foxes, engaged in a battle of wits over complex theories about how best to run society.

Another possible reason is people are becoming more docile and stupid. The latter is fairly well established. Not only is the demographic mix lowering overall intelligence, but the smart fraction is getting dumber as well. Organized political violence needs smart motivated people. Since the Industrial Revolution, western culture has selected against violence and force, in favor of cooperation. The result is a more docile population that is getting dumber with each generation.

Of course, political violence may be a lagging indicator or even knock-on effect of political turmoil at the upper reaches of society. The West is middle-class and peaceful, but in a steady decline. At some point, like a failing business, the impending collapse becomes obvious to enough people that they abandon orderly politics. This rush to the exits of conventional politics leads to an explosion of political violence. Perhaps that is what lies ahead for the West.

Perhaps Steven Pinker was right and the arc of human evolution leads away from violence and humanity is headed to a peaceful demise. Occidentals have become the panda bears of our species, happy to eat and sleep, but too disinterested in their own survival to reproduce or defend themselves. The rest of the world, which seems more violent and aggressive, is simply a few steps behind, as they have always been, on the evolutionary timeline, but they too will go gently into the night.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

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.