Monthly Archives: October 2020

Fighting Reality

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From time to time it is useful to pick up the spyglasses and take a look at some of the smaller gatherings on the other side of the great divide. The establishment Left is easy to see, as it takes up so much space and makes so much noise. The same is true to a lesser extent with the professional Right. The smaller subcultures are not as easy to see, but they can be more useful in understanding the nature of the divide and why there is a great divide in the first place.

This conversation between someone calling himself Brendan O’Neil and someone calling himself Bret Weinstein is a good example. It appears this is a regular show hosted by Weinstein, where he invites on guests of “diverse opinion” to discuss issues he thinks are important. The topic of this show, according to the copy, was what he calls the woke war on the Enlightenment. Not much was revealed in that regard, but it is useful in understanding why there is a dissident right.

Now, Brendan O’Neil bills himself as a man of the Left. He is the editor of something called Spiked, which is the successor of something called Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party. According to his Wikipedia page, he is a former Trotskyist and communist, but now he self identifies as a Libertarian Marxist. That last bit only makes sense when you know that Spiked is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, the guys who bankroll Reason Magazine.

Bret Weinstein is a bit more familiar to Americans. He is a member of the gratuitously self-described “intellectual dark web.” This a group of mostly Jewish writers who churn out conventional opinions for various mainstream sites. Weinstein got famous because he was attacked by a mob on lunatics on his college campus because he lacked enthusiasm for their latest fashions. He became a symbol of mob action on campus. He describes himself as a progressive and left-libertarian.

The first interesting thing to note in this is that both describe themselves as left-libertarian in their own way. No one describes themselves as right-libertarian, as that is something which no longer exists. The so-called conservatives would claim they are now the home of right-libertarians, but that is just another self-serving lie. They pose no opposition to the Left on anything. Conservatism is nothing more than a polite fiction now, a holding place for something yet to come.

Putting that aside, this conversation provides a good example of what happens when you eliminate the right answer. You are left trying to mold the wrong answer into something useful. Here, they refuse to consider biology plays any role in culture and politics. In particular, they refuse to accept that the people toppling statues and running Jewish professors off campus are motivated by race. It can’t be race, so they conjure strained explanations for what is happening.

At about the six-minute mark they get into identity politics. The claim by the British guy is the lock downs broke the British collective identity and that’s what caused mobs of people to go out and tear down statues. He terms it a retreat into group identity, rather than collective identity. The fact that the people doing the rioting were non-white and their targets were white people and culture, seems to be lost on him. It is a good example of what happens when you eliminate the obvious.

The response from Weinstein is amusing. He makes the obvious point that technology has made the world smaller. No matter how narrow your interests, you can find people who share your interests on-line. In the case of politics, it means on-line community around shared identity. He suggests this is a problem, as people falling into these “echo chambers” on-line eventually succumb to identity politics. It looked like he wanted to use the term “false consciousness” at that point.

Later on, they refer to the “murder of George Floyd” which gives the game away, but the show is still worth a listen. These tribes of the old Left are struggling for the same reason that the so-called conservatives and libertarians struggle. They cling to the notion that countries are built around ideas. They think that ideology can replace biology as the building block of human organization. The new man will completely submit to the prevailing orthodoxy of the new society.

The creedal nation was always a left-wing idea and it was always wrong. Like the Soviet Union, creedal America had a good run through the Cold War. For a half a century, most Americans were happy to put aside their natural identity in favor of patriotism, for the good of the country. It was a useful way for the ruling class to organize the public in the great game against communism. The Cold War is over and the reason to put aside those natural identities is gone with it.

It should be no surprise that blacks in America and the new arrivals in the West are the first to embrace this new reality. American blacks never embraced the creedal nation stuff. They have always been the least patriotic group. The new arrivals were never encouraged to drop their natural identity. In fact, they were encouraged to embrace it as they were told diversity is our strength. It is the occidentals that are the last to catch on, but that is changing.

That is what you see in that video. Both men are clinging to the old modes of thought, hoping to find a way to keep white people from embracing identity politics. Nowhere in their discussion do they condemn blacks or immigrants, even though they are the people rioting in the streets. The long post-war period was, in fact, a break from human reality, but now reality is roaring back. Yesterday men like those two in the video cling to their creedal notions, while reality returns with a vengeance.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.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.

Us And Them

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A striking feature of American liberal democracy is the great gap between the reality of the political class and the people. The Cloud People are not just floating above the Dirt People, living different lives, like aristocrats of old. They no longer have a clear vision of the Dirt People below them. Instead, they conceive of the people over whom they rule based on inputs from the managerial class. To the political class, the general public is an abstraction, not a physical reality.

One example of this is in how the political class understands hierarchy. Every Washington politician and appointee lives in a world where hierarchy is well understood and respected. The appointed class have an array of titles that indicate their position in the hierarchy. Elected officials, of course, have their office and their committee assignments, along with their seniority. This is a world every one of them inherited when they entered politics. It is how it has always been.

In this world, a senator tells his staff to do something and he just assumes they will do it, assuming it can be done. If it cannot be done, then he is going to have them find out why it cannot be done and report back to him. An appointee works the same way within the bureaucracy. They have a staff, usually of appointees, and that staff carries out the orders of the director or secretary. Even though nothing of public good is done in Washington, the petty tasks are carried out with precision.

In this regard, the political class is a petty aristocracy. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, commands absolute loyalty from his staff. Not only does his staff do what they are told, they faithfully keep his secrets. He has been in the Imperial Capital for a quarter century, without a hint of scandal, despite the obvious. Congress operates a private slush fund to settle sexual harassment claims. Over 260 claims have been paid, without a word about the details. That’s loyalty.

Scan the biographies of the political class and the thing you will be hard pressed to find is anything resembling real world experience. Few have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Those that have, worked in the law or maybe finance. These careers were just alternative paths to the place they wanted to be all along. There are no sons of the soil in Washington. The exception is President Trump, which is why he is hated by the entire political class. He is not one of them.

If any of these people had spent time in the world of the Dirt People, they would know that the reality of the petty aristocracy is nothing like reality. In the dreaded private sector, a manager at any level must be conscious of his subordinates. If that manager is going to make his bosses happy, he has to keep his people happy. Otherwise, they will not do what he asks and they will undermine his authority. This is the reason every middle manager sounds like a psychotherapist.

In the military, every officer is trained to know this. There is a strict hierarchy and ethos that says you respect the rank, not the man. Humans are human, so that theory gives way to the reality that men follow men. A good officer is one who commands the respect of his men. Bad officers think they can just issue orders and they will be carried out, no matter how stupid or ridiculous. The officer who acts like a petty aristocrat can find himself with a live grenade in his bunk.

Everywhere in the dreaded private sector, hierarchy relies about a dynamic that is not all that different from a pirate ship. Everyone understands that someone has to be in charge and that there has to be order. The question as to who is in charge and who gives the orders, however, is not written in stone. You earn your position and you keep earning it in the execution of your duties. Unlike in Washington, failure has consequences and people get fired and demoted.

This great gap between the Cloud People and the Dirt People in the nature of human organization and hierarchy is the great source of friction. We see that with the response to the Covid virus. The petty tyrants in the lowest level of the petty aristocracy just assumed the rest of us would happily follow their orders. The striking feature of this pandemic is how the political class is resentful that the public has not celebrated them in song and story for their heroism during these times.

The ruling class sees no danger in their social engineering schemes, because everyone they know thinks they are great ideas. Spend time in the Imperial Capital and it is like visiting a foreign planet. They live in a world that is divorced from the reality of the human condition. It has evolved into something closer to a college campus, where good times or bad, it is always the best of times. It is why critic race theory sounds like a grand idea to them. All of their ideas are grand ideas.

For those old enough to remember, there is a Ceausescu’s last speech quality to what we hear from our political elites and their organs. The gap between us and them has reached such a point it is impossible for us to think of them as us. This reality is slowly creeping into the minds of the dirty people like the fog. The Cloud People, however, remain locked in their old mode of thought. Nancy Pelosi truly thinks she is a beloved and respected figure to the Dirt People.

In such situations, there is always a moment when the people suddenly realize that they are not alone in their thoughts about us and them. That is what happened during Ceausescu’s last speech. The people suddenly realized that everyone else had the same thoughts about their ruler. On that day, that reality was made clear to Ceausescu’s as he gave his speech. The next day he fled the capital and a few days later he was tried and executed.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.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.

The Ash Heap Of History

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In the fullness of time, the most important development in the Trump era will be the collapse of conservatism as a political movement. The official Right had been in crisis for a long time, but the old political dynamic had locked it in place. If you opposed the Left, the only alternative was conservatism. Trump did not usher in a new era, so much as discredit the old. The Left quickly redesigned to self as a defender of the status quo and institutional power, while the Right has collapsed.

Even at this early date, it has become a bit trite to note that American conservatism has collapsed over the last five years. Not only has it collapsed, in terms of its intellectual influence, but it has become a ridiculous joke. Even the jokes about it have started to sound a bit hackneyed, as the absurdity moves beyond satire. When a site calling itself The American Conservative is making “the conservative case” for explicitly anti-white pogroms, the jokes stop being funny.

Even so, it is worth looking at why the American Right has collapsed. The majority of white people in America have at one time or another considered themselves conservative or at least were open to it. There’s never been a majority in favor of Progressive reforms, yet those reformers have always carried the day, despite the opposition of the professional Right. It takes a special skill to lose so much despite having a numerical advantage in a democracy.

One obvious reason for the collapse of conservatism is that it lost all of its intellectual vigor decades ago. We live in an age of pygmies, but nowhere is that more obvious than with the professional Right. Half a century ago, the Right was teaming with serious thinkers. A couple of decades ago, National Review had a half a dozen or more quality thinkers and polemicists. Today, no one can think of a single writer or thinker on the Right that is worth a minute’s time.

That really is the striking thing about what has happened to America in general, but the Right in particular. It is as if anyone with the least bit of curiosity about the world has been driven off and replaced by former postal workers. The distinguishing feature of the American intellectual class is its doctrinaire dreariness. Everyone with anything on the ball and a curiosity about the world operates out on the fringes. The American intellectual class is a as vibrant as the surface of the moon.

Another facet of this, a byproduct of the suffocating dullness, is an inability of conservatives to examine how they came to this dead end. This piece in the American Mind, which is supposed to be the free-thinking outlet for conservatives looking to break free of the old modes of thought, is a good example. On the surface, it is supposed to be an analysis of the administrative state, which should mean the managerial state, but instead it means “big government” in the old hackneyed way.

Note that the writer takes as a given the basic assumptions of the Left. His opposition to what he describes as the administrative state, is that it is anti-democratic, prejudiced and discriminatory. This is the sort of complaint that was popular on the Left a generation ago, when they would attack corporate America. In the hands of conservatives, it becomes a complaint about having to deal with a thicket of bureaucrats down at the local motor vehicle department.

Even more ridiculous, their critique of the administrative state tries to use guilt by association to win over their enemies on the Left. You see, the roots of the administrative state are in the Confederacy! You see that my woke brothers? The thing you now control is every bit as racist and cis-gendered as those statues you are toppling all over the country. It is not just a rhetorical devise. Conservatives truly believe that current crisis is rooted in human preference.

The weird logic of modern conservative thinking is worth noting. Professor Hamburger seems to think the great obstacle to the Progressive dream of an egalitarian paradise are the tools the Left has been using to create that paradise. Not only will they agree to throw down their weapons, they will suddenly stop their aggression. It is a bizarre form of utopian thinking. It is even more bizarre, given that the greatest threat to individual liberty is woke capital, not the government.

What is even more striking about this is just how obtuse this line of thought is, given that within conservative intellectual traditions there are far better critiques. Within living memory, Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried wrote extensively about the managerial state, building off the analysis of James Burnham. Perhaps it is understandable that Francis has been forgotten in conservative circles, but Gottfried is still around and active at publications like the American Conservative.

This gets back to the barren intellectual landscape in general, but the aridity of conservatism in particular. Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

What has been lost in this age is anyone that can look down about this dynamic between strategy and tactics and understand the ideas and historical forces that are carrying these combatants along. This should be the role of conservatism. It should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.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

The Rhythms Of Revolution

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People who work with large complex systems understand that you don’t always know what will result from even the smallest change in the system. Usually this lesson is learned the hard way, by making some small change that seems simple, only to find out it caused serious downstream problems. Large complex systems are often highly dependent on initial conditions. Those small changes to the initial state, after they branch through the system, can have a huge impact.

This was a point wiser heads made about the Covid panic. The American economy is a wildly complex nonlinear system. The people in charge of it, the Federal Reserve, have mastered just one small set of inputs. This is why they are so cautious about tinkering with the money supply. They understand that beyond small changes in interest rates, they really don’t know what will happen. Through necessity they have figured out how to buy up distressed assets to keep the asset bubble inflated.

Otherwise, no one understands what is happening in the American economy, outside of their very narrow focus. It’s why the lock downs were an insane idea. What local governments have done is not dissimilar to what the Bolsheviks did to the Russian economy after they gained power. This massive reorganization will not fully play-out for years, maybe decades. Even at this point, no one seems to know how many people are out of work or how many businesses survived.

Something similar may be happening with the culture. Up until this year, the sports entertainment complex was the great distraction. Every type of sporting event enjoyed wide following on television and on-line. It’s always hard to know, given how our ruling class lies about everything, but television ratings for the professional sports leagues were strong enough to keep raising ad rates. The revenues of the sports leagues kept growing, despite decades of growth.

That brings us to now, when the ratings for sports entertainment have suddenly collapsed, even for the marquee events. The NBA, which is the blackest of black sports, cannot draw flies. Keep in mind that the television industry routinely inflates their ratings in their press releases used by the media. The endless celebration of all things black for the last five months seems to not have had the effect they expected. All of the other sports have also seen their ratings collapse.

It is tempting to blame this on the anti-white pogrom that has been foolishly embraced by all the sports leagues. There is certainly part of it. That said, the NFL has tried very hard to minimize this in their presentation. Even the players have realized that it is bad for business. The NHL made the required gestures, but otherwise just operated their business as usual and their ratings were immeasurably small. In other words, it’s not just the anti-white pogrom killing the circus.

The problems facing sports entertainment all of a sudden are an example of the large complex system problem. It turns out that the audience for sport is not just about interest in the product and the quality of the performance. Sports operates within the larger culture, which is a highly complex system. There are rhythms to the culture, which carry things like entertainment through the culture. The lock downs and resulting insanity have broken those rhythms.

It is not just sports entertainment that have seen their model upended by the sudden change in the social rhythms. The first debate show also saw a ratings dip. It was not as big as with sports, but given the amount of pre-game hype, the gap between reality and expectations is every bit as large. For six months the people in charge have been blasting us with anti-Trump agit-prop. Of course, everyone knows Biden is suffering from the early stages of dementia. Yet, not a lot of interest.

The American culture had evolved since the Cold War ended to provide the public with lots of things to keep them busy. For example, the entertainment rackets grew like a weed starting in the 1990’s. People forget that sellouts for sporting events were rare into the 1980’s, then all of a sudden, they were common. There was a time, within living memory, when people had three television channels. Of course, the internet of mass entertainment evolved in this time.

Easily forgotten is that politics as entertainment also grew in this period. In the 1980’s, for example, political junkies had to get by with magazines, the opinion section of the newspaper and the Sunday talk shows. People struggled with the idea of an actor running for political office. Imagine that. The political entertainment complex that evolved since the Cold War has probably been a bigger distraction for the American public than sports or Hollywood.

What seems to have happened is the Covid panic and now the color revolution has broken that system. People are not paying as much attention to these things as they did just a year ago. That means they are not being pulled along by the rhythms of that old system. Think about how many apolitical people that have suddenly been made aware of the reality of race and ethnicity. Put another way, the revolution of 2020 has changed the initial state of the American system.

How this ripples through the system is unknown. The current chaos may not be random at all, but determined by the evolving initial state of white America. In other words, this pogrom we are experiencing may, in fact, be a reaction to the changing attitudes sensed by the ruling class. The woke revolution is about restoring the old initial state, but has instead accelerated the evolution of it. The lock downs provided a better medium in which this evolution can occur.

At this point, the one safe conclusion we can draw is we have passed through a strange chaotic barrier on our way to a new normal. The old order, those old rhythms, are gone for good. That means the social controls that nudged people along toward the results desired by the ruling class are no longer working. All the make-believe excitement the media can generate is not getting people to watch the NBA finals, because it was never about the hype. It was the social structures, those rhythms.

In a complex system like a large human society, when the initial conditions change sufficiently, a new dynamic ensues. The unexpected downstream effects loop back and inform the evolution of those initial conditions. The feedback loop between downstream effects and those evolving initial conditions becomes fuel for the changing state of those initial conditions. This is the revolutionary dynamic. Change fuels more change, until the system collapses in on itself.

When the rulers broke the old rhythms with their lock downs, they started a revolution in the minds of the people over whom they rule. As those minds now evolve, seeing the reality of the world created by their betters, the ruling class is desperately trying to contain the process. Like all radicals, they remain supremely confident they will be the vanguard of this revolution. Like all revolutionaries, they will end up swinging from trees as that is the rhythm of every revolution.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.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

Blackwashing

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Note: Technical issues scuttled the podcast this week. Apparently, the Yeti USB microphone does not last forever. Too many hours of fiddling with it and I finally threw in the towel and ordered a new one. I’ll be back in business next week.

In the English speaking world, it has become common to “blackwash” movies and television shows. This is the process of removing white characters and replacing them with non-white characters. The stated claim is that popular entertainment needs to reflect the changing nature of the audience. Of course, the reason the audience is changing is that the same people blackwashing films and television shows are ethnically cleansing white societies with mass immigration.

For a long time now, Hollywood has been taking great care to make the good characters black and the bad ones white. For a short while, the bad guys could be Arab terrorists, but now bad guys are white again. If they need to be foreign baddies, then they are neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or Russian gangsters. Of course, the smartest characters are black or female. If we’re lucky, the brainiac is a black lesbian. Every computer hacker is now non-white or female.

On occasion the blackwashing gets ridiculous. Some figure from white history is played by a black actor. A black guy in a show about medieval Europe could be amusing, but that’s not how it is done. Instead, we get black cowboys saving a white town or a black playing King Lear. It will not be long before we have historical dramas in which well-known figures from white history are played by black actors as black people. Imagine Ben Franklin played by Morgan Freeman.

The most recent absurdity in this process is the TV series Fargo. The series kicked off six years ago as an extension of the movie with the same name. As the name suggests, the show is primarily set in North Dakota, but it has scenes and plots that range out into the rest of the region. The first season was primarily set in Bemidji Minnesota. In fact, only the second season is located in North Dakota. The idea is to root the story lines in the sorts of people who settled that part of America.

Of course, that part of America, up until fairly recent, was all white people, with a population of Native Americans. Until the people fond of blackwashing started dumping Africans into Minneapolis, for example, Minnesota was known for being one of the whitest places in the country. It was the Scandinavia of North America. In fact, North Dakota was almost all Scandinavian people. It was settled by Norwegians and Icelanders, who migrated out of Canada, along with some Germans.

That’s what made the first season enjoyable. It was a good plot with good characters set in a place that is a bit quirky. Of course, it had no black characters, because there are no black Norwegians. This being the high point of the colored revolution, the fourth season of the show is now entirely black. Since setting a black crime story in North Dakota is ridiculous, even for the people behind the blackwashing, they located the story in 1950 Kansas City, Missouri.

The point of blackwashing is to erase white history and culture. The world condemns China, for example, when they do this to Tibet or now the Uighurs, but when it is done to white people the great and good celebrate. As Joe Sobran pointed out many years ago, the motivation here is envy. The very existence of white people is a daily reminder of the failure of all others to accomplish much of anything, despite being blessed with the best the earth has to offer.

We will soon reach the point where no characters in movies or television are white, unless they are criminals. The ad makers are far down that path. The ads that are about a product or service, which is rare these days, always have a racial makeup that represents the fantasy of the ad maker, rather than reality. The ads about how much the company cares about us, most ads now, are multicultural orgies of diversity that exist nowhere on earth.

Popular entertainment is a leading edge. It tells us what is in store for us as soon as the great and good think the time is right. The bellowing about white supremacy after the debate show is another clue. It was not enough for Trump to dismiss bigotry or racism during and after the show, They demanded he denounce white people. That’s because the mere existence of white people is a reminder of the great achievements of white people relative to the other races. Therefore, whitey has to go.

The blackwashing has been normalized in entertainment and sports. It will next move into other aspects of life. Whether or not that can be normalized is an open question, as someone has to keep the plates spinning. More important, will white people keep letting themselves be pushed off the stage of life? The pessimist says yes, whites would rather be dead than rude. The optimists say that eventually, whites wake up and take back their lands from the blackwashers.

Either way, the reality of this age is we have moved beyond the quest for diversity into the beginnings of the vengeance phase. The daily attacks on whites going about their business and the evolution of Jim Snow laws are parts of it. The blackwashing is another part of it. Ethnic cleansing is not just about removing the people, but also about removing their culture. It takes a special hatred to erase a people from the book of life and that is the point of the blackwashing.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Conspiratorial Rule

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It is hard to know, but most likely the conspiracy theory is one of the oldest parts of human society. In fact, the popularity of conspiracy theories is probably a good measure of social trust. Low-trust societies, like you find in the Middle East, tend to be shot through with conspiracy theories. High trust societies in Northwest Europe tend to have less of it, but even they are prone to bouts of conspiracy mongering. The Great Fear that swept through rural France is a good example.

In modern times, the conspiracy theory has been formalized. The assassination of John Kennedy is probably when this formalization process began. For example, a conspiracy theory needs a series of hard to accept coincidences. In the case of Kennedy, we have the amazing marksmanship of the shooter and then his unlikely assassination at the hands of a Jewish gangster, while he was in police custody. The Jack Ruby part is what made the whole thing perfect for the conspiracy theorists.

The first step in a conspiracy theory is that the obvious answer or the official answer must be eliminated as a lie or implausible. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the start of the conspiracy dynamic was the dismissal of Oswald as the lone actor. It is a variation on the old Sherlock Holmes line. Once you eliminate the parsimonious explanation, then the more complex and convoluted explanations become more plausible. That opens the door to endless speculation.

We see this with the QAnon cult on-line. All of it starts with the assumption that the obvious answer is wrong. For example, it is plainly obvious that Bill Barr is covering up the FBI spying scandal. He’s had years to do what should have taken a few months. Instead of accepting that rather obvious and plausible explanation, the QAnon people reject it and instead weave wildly complex theories about how half of Washington is about to be charged with crimes.

Another aspect of the formal conspiracy theory is the liberal use of the associative property to connect unrelated events. Person A knows Person B and Person B once had lunch at the same place as Person C. If any of these three people can be tied to the event in question, then it is assumed the other two are connected. The weakest associations are enough to assume a conspiracy. The associative property is an essential element of the modern conspiracy theory.

In the case of Kennedy, for example, organized crime is a popular player, because Jack Ruby was a minor criminal. His tenuous association with organized crime opens the door for linking any number of underworld characters with the assassination. It also opens the door for all sorts of theories about the Kennedy administration’s connections to organized crime. The associative property then ties communism, organized crime and the Cuba situation to the assassination.

Probably the most overlooked aspect of the formal conspiracy theory is the personalizing of complex events. The conspiracy theorist assumes there is a small group of people behind the events in question. These super-intelligent, shadowy figures pull the strings from the shadows. Even when a government agency is at the core of the conspiracy, it is really a core of individuals within that core that is secretly manipulating the organization.

This turns up with the spying scandal. The reality is, the Washington-based intel community is horribly corrupt. The spying and subsequent cover-up is a product of a culture of corruption in these institutions. For the conspiracy theorist, that does not work, so they focus on a few “shot callers.” Of course, it was not just mere partisan zeal that led them to spy on Trump people. They are part of some shadowy organization that is secretly doing all sorts of bad things.

Probably the most important part of the modern conspiracy theory is that it must flatter the person obsessed with it. For the conspiracy buff, the thrill is in feeling that they have figured it all out. Those super-intelligent people working in the shadows were not smart enough to outwit the conspiracy hunter. Everyone else falls for the official story, but the conspiracy theorist knows the real truth. Paradoxically, the conspiracy theory makes the world a much simpler and safer place for them.

The best example right now is the Left’s obsession with white supremacy. They cannot accept that their vision of Utopia is not very popular. That’s the first step in a conspiracy theory, the rejection of the most plausible reason. That allows them to spin wild tales of secret Nazis and spectral supremacists. Rather than confront reality, which is frightening and disconcerting, they have created a series of conspiracy theories to explain why the world is not as they imagine it.

This is why conspiracy theories are a useful metric to gauge social trust. When order begins to break down, people naturally look for reasons. That opens the door to speculation and then conspiracy theories. This, in turn, erodes social trust, which is the foundation upon which every ruling class rests. As that foundation falters, the ruling class looks for reasons. Since blaming themselves is always off the table, they naturally begin to speculate, which opens the door to conspiracy theories.

America is now ruled by conspiracy theorists. That is clear in the debate surrounding the first Trump-Biden debate show. The Left is obsessing over white supremacists and the old Gavin McInnes fan club, the Proud Boys. They have any number of conspiracies involving those things, but now they are cooking up conspiracies as to why Trump did not properly denounce them. It must mean something! For the people in charge, it is conspiracy theories all the way down.

None of this is to say there are no conspiracies. The FBI spying scandal, for example, is a good example of a conspiracy. It was corrupt and self-important mediocrities playing at spymaster. In a functioning society, they would be in jail now and that would be the end of it. In a conspiratorial state, they remain free as one side conspires to defeat the white supremacy conspiracy, while the other conspires to cover it all up. The QAnon people strap on their aluminum foil hats to sort it all out.

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