Monthly Archives: November 2020

The Next Phase Of The War

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Note: I have a movie review up behind the green door. This time it is #97 on the AFI top-100 list, Bringing Up Baby. I must admit, I’me finding it a lot of fun to sample these very old movies. Like reading old books, there is a lot of secondary cultural stuff to be learned from watching old movies.

Very bad people back in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s noticed that radicals were very good at the first phase of their project, but not the second. The radicals wanted to knock down the institutions of society and replace them with something better, but they never managed to pull off that last part. In fact, the thing they cooked up as the new and improved version of what they destroyed tended to create new problems, which required new solutions that created new problems and so on and so on.

An obvious example of this is family life. The nuclear family, with clear and natural roles for the sexes, worked pretty well. The radicals, on the other hand, could not understand why divorce laws and custody laws were as they were. They could not understand why those sex roles existed. They smashed them up and replaced them with family courts, liberal divorce and weird feminist ideas about sex roles. The result has been three generations of family and social dysfunction.

At some point, even the radicals realized that their project was not the best for their cause, so they simply took over the existing institutions. The long march through the institutions was largely over by the 1990’s. The Baby Boomers had taken over and pushed out their parent’s generation. Along the way they made sure that their generation had the right opinions. Those who did not were cast into the outer darkness of dissident exile. The radicals were in charge.

This is what makes the current revolution a shabby and ridiculous version of the cultural revolution of the 60’s. Today’s radicals are the sons and daughters of those radicals, who now are in charge of everything. The street fighters are not attacking “the man” as the man pays their allowance. They are attacking an avatar of the man their parents vanquished generations ago. It is one-part public theater and one-part cargo cult, put on as if it is an initiation ritual for young adults.

There is a more sinister aspect to it. Read what the young radicals in the academy, politics and even in business, are demanding and you see that their assault on the institutions is really an assault on knowledge itself. The radicals of yesteryear were content to embrace the logic of the institutions, just put to use for their purposes. The new radicals want to wreck the logic itself. They want to replace institutional logic with something different, something that does not exist and cannot exist.

This is the heart of the anti-whiteness stuff. When they claim that institutions suffer from whiteness or are Eurocentric, what they mean is the internal logic that operates the institution is coherent and rational. The STEM fields, for example, still abide by the rules of mathematics. Medicine is still rooted in the logic of Western medicine. Because these rules are barriers to all but the talented tenth of non-whites, these rules must be racist and therefore these rules have to be eliminated.

If one is over a certain age and a fan of dark humor, there is an amusing bit of irony to all of this. The people in charge are now getting the same treatment from their pets that they gave to the Occidentals, who they assaulted as youth. After all, the reason whiteness persists is the white Progressives, and white presenting Progressives, have maintained that whiteness for their benefit. It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the sight of woke females of color screaming at the aging radicals.

Putting that aside, a medical system “disrupted and decolonized” in order to allow for the dominance of non-whites will result in something dangerous and primitive. A world with Africanized math is a world spinning off its axis. Allowing the wrong answer to stand alongside the right answer in the name of equity and equality will result in disorder and chaos within the institutions. In other words, it is not just a threat to the people in charge of the institutions, but the institutions themselves.

In order to maintain the simplest of things, you need to be able to make some simple predictions about the future. Predictions rely upon order, which in turn is the product of rules about the world and how people will act. Imagine a road with no rules. If you cannot know what other drivers will do or how the road surface will be around the next corner, the road becomes useless. You are better off walking through the woods than taking your life into your hands on the road.

This is what the woke revolution is promising and beginning to deliver. Consider the news media, for example. A generation ago it was predictably biased, but it contained some truth in the bias. If you knew the rules, you could watch a chat show or read a newspaper and get a sense of things. Today, in order to strip all that ugly whiteness from it, the news is a random nonsense with no truth value at all. The only point to it is to stimulate the true believers of the revolution.

What the woke revolution and its promise to decolonize Western societies is really promising is a return to a form of occasionalism. The formal definition of this is that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Humans are “created substances” which means they live in a world of miracles. There are no rules, only the whims of the creator. In a world without fixed rules, there is no point in knowing the rules and therefore no point in predicting what comes next.

This is a world of primitive oogily-boogily. It is why the people in charge are suddenly getting nervous about the golem they released on white people. The Democrat leaders in Washington are claiming their radicals have gone too far, while the Republicans are cheering them on, as they silently watch Trump be removed from office. Whether or not they can put the golem back into what holds a golem is unknown. The woke warriors are now everywhere in the institutions and they are not ready to quit.

What this means is the next phase of the revolution shifts from attacking normal white people going about their business, to a fight between the rulers and their pets. The political class can probably handle the people in their ranks, but what will they do about woke capital? How do they plan to contend with the suddenly woke intelligence agencies and the foreign-dominated foreign policy establishment? How will they reign in the woke mayors, governors and police departments?

None of this is to imply that the coast is clear for whites. Attacking whites is now an integral part of what makes the new radical. It’s just that the purpose of it will change from pleasing their masters to attacking their masters. The Pretender Biden does not know it, but Team Kamala has stocked up on My Pillows. The war did not end with the removal of the evil Trump. It was just the opening phase. The next phase is between the ideology of the woke and the cupidity of their masters.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

The Fanatic’s Ball

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Note: I have a post up on Taki about the end of liberal democracy. As according to the new normal, I have posts up behind the green door on popular culture.

The great British evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, famously said that fanaticism is man’s greatest invention. The obsessive, uncritical belief in an idea or cause is the opposite of the sober-minded and rational. The fanatic is intolerant of anything that contradicts his views, while the rational man is willing to update or even abandon his views when presented contradictory information. The fanatic sees only that which confirms his fanaticism and refuses to yield in his opinions.

The fanatic, of course, has been in the middle of every man-made social disaster since the French Revolution. It was fanatics who brought on the Reign of Terror and it was fanatics who brought on The Great Terror. Fanatics let loose by Mao in the Cultural Revolution terrorized the Chinese population. Man’s greatest invention turns out to be man’s most terrible invention. Once it is let loose, it is not easily put back on the leash, at least not until it runs out of things to smash.

This year has seen the fanatic set free to run wild in our streets. They were deliberately agitated and let loose by the petty men of the ruling class, frustrated that the people’s champion had not been vanquished. It’s hard for modern people to understand how the French radicals, for example, could have killed so many in the name of the revolution, but current events make this much easier to comprehend, even if we have not reached the bloodbath stage yet.

The thing is, fanaticism is not a well-defined group of people held in reserve and then deployed when needed. It’s more like a spiritual force that sweeps through a population, afflicting the weak minded and those desperate for a purpose. We see this with the election shenanigans. The desire to be part of the great fight against the bad man and his minions caused hundreds, maybe thousands to follow their fanatical rage and engage in thousands of acts of election fraud.

That is what is coming into focus as various parties look into what happened and whistle blowers step forward. The image that is emerging is of an orgy of corruption where the participants are free of any moral restraint. They were not working from a plan, but a belief that they were on the side of angels and therefore free to use any means necessary to help the cause. They were the righteous engaged in the great war against the wicked, unleashed by the ruling class.

The defenders of Trump will work hard to make it sound like a wide-ranging conspiracy, but that’s just how mass media culture works. Facts and observations cannot be presented as is. They have to be part of a narrative with a well-defined protagonist and an easy to hate villain. In reality, there is no grand conspiracy at work. The people involved in the election rigging are true believers. They believe what they are doing is for a just cause and they cannot see the corruption in it.

Fanatics in numbers are a lot like a flock of birds of a school of fish. They instinctively coordinate their efforts without needing to be told. Like fireflies at dusk, they are constantly signaling one another, which intensifies their fanaticism, making them more sensitive to the movements of the group. The people at the top cheered the fanatics in the streets, excused their behavior and reminded them that the evil Trump must be stopped by any means necessary. They were on a holy mission.

The thing is though, what motivates those unleashing the fanatics on the population also motivates the fanatic. That is a search for purpose. These are people who wish to be part of something bigger than themselves, but they lack the skill and ability to create anything but mayhem. This manifests as the smashing of whatever they see in their way, which can be anything. It is why they eventually turn on one another, because at some point they run out of things to smash.

That’s what makes this such a dangerous time. The petty and stupid people surrounding the corpse of Joe Biden are not going to be satisfied with expelling Trump from Washington. They will want vengeance. Part of that will be swinging wildly in what they perceive to be the opposite direction out of spite. It’s not hard to imagine them unleashing a Camp of the Saints event, for example, by reversing Trump’s immigration rules and inviting the world to their celebration.

It’s not that the people around the Pretender Biden want millions rushing the border in the hope of getting a promised amnesty. They are too stupid and short-sighted to think that far ahead. It’s that they will want the quick rush of smashing those rules and gloating over their work. Like the fanatics cheering the executioner holding up the head of his victim, they will simply be looking for the thrill of seeing their enemies, real and imagined, facing their holy wrath.

What the past tells us about times of terror is the fanatics are never satisfied with the blood of a few enemies of the revolution. The sight of the enemies blood just makes them hungry for more. There may be some in the ruling class sensing that they must first put their fanatics back on the leash, but most of too dull and self-loathing to grasp what they have unleashed. There is a good chance that the summer riots were just a taste of what lies ahead in the woke revolution.

It is tempting to assume that this revolution will eat itself, but that is not the pattern people think they see in the history book. People point to Robespierre as the example, but he seems more like an exception. Stalin’s terror campaign ended when Stalin died of natural causes. The Cultural Revolution ended when Mao died. Pol Pot lived to old age and according to his own words, died with a clear conscience. Perhaps this time will be an exception, but that is never the way to bet.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Thoughts On The Revolution

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Sometimes it is good to take a pause from the action to reflect upon what has happened and how things have changed. Life is like being a bit of flotsam on a river, carried to some unknown destination. We all know that at some point we reach the big waterfall at the end, but the journey along the way is not so clear. Unlike the flotsam, we can create our own slow part of the river in order to rest and enjoy the view.

Ten years is not a long time in the life of a man. The older you get the more you appreciate this reality. Ten years ago, Barak Obama was the president and the ugly, brutish masses had just sent a message in the midterm election. The misty-eyed drunkard, John Boehner, was about to become Speaker of the House and the Tea Party movement was promising a bourgeois revolution from the top.

That seems like a lifetime ago. I doubt anyone would have predicted that we would be at this point, facing a world in which most of the country thinks our elections are rigged and we are headed for civil war. There were people way back then who thought we were headed for a civil war, but they thought it was a bad thing. Today, you get the sense that most people would welcome the final battle to settle things.

The French New Right theorist, Guillaume Fay, introduced the idea of an interregnum, an undefined period between the old age of the West and the new age. In this undefined and unsettled period, the West would lurch from crisis to crisis. The old order would rally to address the crisis, but not completely. Eventually, the natural order of man would prevail and a new order would emerge.

That is what we are facing now. It is clear that there is no return to the civic nationalist fantasy times of the 80’s and 90’s. Too much damage has been done to the institutions for such a return to be possible. That and the demographics would have to be fixed first and that’s not happening without a rebellion. There’s also the fact that people seem to be figuring this out and may no longer want to go back.

We live in the most interesting time any of us have seen. In the first phase of the cultural revolution in the middle of the last century, the institutions were strong enough to weather the assault. They were simply repurposed by the Left. In this phase, the institutions are too weak. Increasingly, the question on people’s minds will not be “how do we save them?”, but “how to we replace them?”

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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. 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!

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Break The Conditioning
  • 12:00: Trump Was Never The Savior
  • 22:00: Politics Is Opportunity
  • 32:00: Our Reality
  • 42:00: Live In The Truth
  • 57:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/OXaEGug7hLA

The Dead Enders

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When it comes to not getting it, there are few that can challenge the modern conservative for his obtuseness and proud indifference to the facts. For going on 30 years now, conservatives have refused to notice that America is rapidly changing in the exact opposite direction they predicted. That’s a remarkable run of wrongness that even the libertarians struggle to match. Whatever it once was, conservatism is now a fantasy camp of escapism, disconnected from reality.

A good example is this recent post on a once popular conservative website called National Review. The writer, like all so-called conservatives, is happily dreaming of the day when the terrible Donald Trump is sent packing. That’s when they can come out of hiding and everything will be put back to the way it was. The Janus Party, one face Democrat and one face Republican, will be back to the way it was before that mean old orange man stirred things up with his meanness.

The writer, like most so-called conservatives, has never thought too much about why Trump won in 2016 or why we have a crisis on our hands in 2020. Somewhere back in the 1990’s, after the end of the Cold War, they imagined what the world would be like in the future and reoriented themselves to it. They have not bothered to revisit that worldview since then. They have not thought much about why they instinctively embraced cosmopolitanism in the first place.

Like a long serving house slave, the conservative pundit never troubles his mind about his arrangements. The role of conservatism has always been the same as Dabny described a century ago. “Conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.” This is a role the conservative was born into and he resents those who question those arrangements.

That is the atmosphere around conservatism these days. They hope this is finally the end of Trump and what he represents. Like that house slave after a revolt has been put down, they look forward to serving the master of the house again. In this case, it means they have that old 2012 postmortem out, thinking about how they can embrace the new diverse America. That has always been the hallmark of conservatism. They accept what the Left says about them at face value.

Of course, with any post from so-called conservatives, the first thing to do is hit Ctrl+F on your keyboard and start typing the word “immigration.” There are two hits, one for an ad and the other a mention about executive orders. The fact that immigration was what put Trump in the White House, or at least one of the things, has never registered with conservatives. Trump was the first candidate to speak frankly about the subject and it is what legitimized his campaign.

Immigration is also why the Republican Party is headed to permanent minority status in the very near future. Virginia is solidly Democrat because close to 15% of the population is foreign born. That’s the official number. North Carolina is following Virginia for the same reason. It now has an 8% foreign born population. Georgia is at 10% and will soon be a solidly Democrat state. Helping the Left import a new people was a bad idea, but conservatives never think about it.

A search on the words “race” and “white” yields a similar result. White people in America have been subjected to an unprecedented assault over the last year and this does not rate a single mention. Instead, it is blather about being the “party of Lincoln”, a phrase intended to tell the Left that conservatives will not be any trouble. Note too that Lincoln killed many of the ancestors of the GOP coalition. Peddling Lincolnism in the South is like selling Hitler memorabilia to Jews.

Now, the linked post does provide some insight as to why conservatism is a museum piece, sitting next to whiggism and the free silver movement. The writer makes the same call as other conservatives about the future of their thing. They need to be “a coalition of work and probity.” Later, he quotes Lincoln’s Independence Hall address to add authority to the claim. “In due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

Right there is why conservatism has never conserved anything. Probity requires honestly, which requires a sober minded acceptance of reality. To assert that there can ever be a world in which everyone has an equal chance is to deny the fundamental reality of the human condition. Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, so in the context of the social order, equality is a dangerous fantasy. Probity requires a frank acceptance of this reality of the human condition.

Obviously, in the mouth of the modern conservative, probity simply means adherence to the highest of ideals. In the context of modern American politics, that always means the ideals of the Left. Those are never questioned. As Dabny pointed out a century ago, conservative principles are always yesterday’s Progressive fad. When they say they seek to be the “party of Lincoln” that simply means they intend to be the party of whoever was the last Progressive icon.

Sadly though, conservatism does reflect the sentiments of white people, especially the older generations. Facing the promise of marginalization and possibly extermination, they seek to embrace those promising their demise. That slave’s mindset is so strong, no amount of beatings will break their loyalty to the master. In the case of whites and conservatives, the master is that 19th century radical dream of universal equality and fraternity between all men.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Mediocre Man

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Notes: I have a new post up behind the green door. This time it is deep thoughts upon viewing the movie Timecop. Well, not exactly deep thoughts. Just some thoughts.

When trying to understand what has gone so terribly wrong with the Occident, observers often point to intelligence as the main driver. The populations of the West are getting dumber, so they are less capable than in the past. This is not to say there are no geniuses today or that there are fewer of them. It’s that their proportion of society is smaller than in the past. It is the smart fraction that is getting smaller. As a result, the progress of the West has slowed and may be in reverse.

The typical way this is explained is this way. Imagine a man dragging a sack of rocks down a road. If he is a large man and the sack has only a few rocks, he can drag the sack as fast as he could walk without it. If on the other hand, he is a small man and the sack has many rocks, he will move much smaller than his capacity. This will show up most prominently when his path is not clear. He may even come to a halt when he comes to a hill or a long incline.

Now, one reason for this decline in intelligence, is the mass invasion from outside the Occident over the last fifty years. Minneapolis is now a dysfunctional city because of the importation of sub-Saharan Africans. The sorts of people who think Ilhan Omar is a great leader will struggle with modernity. The reason these people are trapped in the Neolithic age is they lack the cognitive ability to go much further. California looks like Mexico because it is now full of Mexicans.

Another reason, and most likely the reason for the mass invasion from over the horizon, is white people are getting dumber. A quick look at what average students did in school a century ago makes that clear. Most college freshman would flunk this eighth grade exam or be so offended by it they would need counseling. Ed Dutton has written a book on this issue and continues to do videos explaining the topic. The short version is that white people have been in decline for a long time.

There is another aspect to this that does not get mentioned. That is, the smart fraction in the West may not have changed that much, but the middle fraction has grown rapidly over the last century. Better nutrition and education have swelled the ranks of the mediocre, changing the nature of our societies. Men who used to be supervisors on job sites now run offices. Women who volunteered in the community and kept a good house now run the nation’s human resource departments.

In other words, that man dragging the sack has not changed much. He is not as big and fit as before, but he is pretty close. His sack is larger and heavier, but he also has modern tools to mitigate much of it. He’s not moving anywhere near as fast as he could, but it is not the burden in the sack. It is the regulatory burden he must navigate to even pick up the sack. Around the superior man is an army of mediocrities with a myriad of rules and regulations governing the dragging of sacks.

Everywhere you go in the West, you are confronted with rules and regulations that make little sense at face value. Every business has to have people who spend their days keeping up with the rules, which change constantly. The “compliance officer” has taken the role of the ideological enforcer. Instead of making sure everyone is properly enthusiastic for the latest truth from the party, the compliance officer makes sure everyone is enthusiastic about following the rules.

These rules, of course, are the domain of the mediocre. Now, don’t confuse mediocre with average. Average people know they are average and accept their limitations, while the mediocrity imagines himself as an elite. Every “policy expert” in Washington is sure he knows more about his subject than the people who actually do the work. Every lawyer thinks he is Blackstone. Every politician thinks he is a great historical figure. The mediocrity does not know what he does not know.

This is the reason mediocrities love complex rules. The Mediocre Man loves rules for the same reason small children love large bulky toys. Just as the child lacks the fine dexterity and spatial awareness to manipulate small objects, Mediocre Man lacks the cognitive ability to act independently. He is a man who grasps the rail when going down a few steps, because that’s what you do. His mastery of the rules is proof that he is the smartest man in the room.

This is why the West is so burdened with elaborate and complicated rules that have no obvious point. It’s why Massachusetts now has a curfew to fight Covid. It’s not just that they think Covid is a night stalker, but that an army of mediocre men came up with a plausible sounding, but ultimately absurd, reason for the curfew. The mediocre men in politics, being mediocrities themselves, embraced it for the same reason a toddler picks up the big toy. It’s what makes sense to them.

Mediocre Man and his love of rulemaking is why we have a war on reason and observation in the West. Mediocre Man sees the rules against reading Table 43 of the Unified Crime Report and assumes anyone mentioning its contents broke the rules, which the worst possible crime. There are rules about what you can say about Covid, peace be upon him, so anyone not in full compliance, even if he is right, must be hounded out of polite society. The rules demand it.

None of this is to say that the mass invasion of stupid people and the decline of native intelligence are not factors. In fact, the domination of Mediocre Man may be another result of the Occidental decline. For the same reason we have allowed millions of barbarians to enter our lands, we have allowed Mediocre Man to take the controls of society and drive us into a jungle of rules. It is why Mediocre Man has locked himself in place by a form of regulatory capture.

Just as regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries or interests they are allegedly regulating, Western societies have been captured by those rule loving mediocrities they should be controlling. The smart fraction, like those in the classic science fiction story, find themselves the slaves of stupid people who think they are the masters of the universe. The problem in the West is that it has been taken over by Raskolnikov, who thinks he is Petrovich.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

The Lessons Of Trump

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An old bit of wisdom is that you should never try to con a con man. This advice is not aimed at con men, of course, but at honest people. Grifters are intuitively dishonest, which means they instinctively work every angle to some advantage. Normal people are simply unable to think like this, even when they are trying to do it. Their scruples get in the way of their scheming. This is something that Trump should have had in mind when he took office four years ago. It was his first mistake.

Trump came to Washington thinking he was smarter, more clever and more resilient than the people he had mocked for so long from his couch. There’s no question that most people in politics are stupid. Without a government grift, they would end up peddling replacement windows door-to-door. But politics in a liberal democracy does not select for smart people. It selects for clever and ruthless people. Washington is the major leagues for the most clever and ruthless.

To his credit, he did outfox them from time to time, but after a while, they began to get the measure of him and figured out how to out-clever him. The FBI scandal is a great example of how they simply outmaneuvered him to delay the process. More important, they got him to drop it as a campaign item. What should have been a key part of his campaign as a populist champion went unmentioned. Time after time Trump tried to play their game and every time he came up a loser.

Similarly, Trump came to Washington under the mistaken impression that his opponents would follow the rules and abide by their own rhetoric. After all, he won the election, the people have spoken, time for the winner to enjoy the fruits of victory. That’s how it is supposed to work in a democratic society. From the very beginning he assumed these people would play fair, despite the fact he knew they spied on him in the campaign and tried hard to cheat him out of his victory.

This is a great example of the civic nationalist disease. This is a malady that is most pronounced in men of Trump’s generation. The civic nationalist loves rules and fully expects his enemies to play by those rules. In reality, the ends justifies the means mentality of the Left has poisoned the entire ruling class. These are people devoid of honor and virtue. Playing by the rules, especially their rules, is a sucker’s play, one Trump never figured out in his four years.

No matter how many times the political class kicked him in the groin, he refused to accept this reality. The strange thing is he campaigned in the most unconventional way, preferring rallies to the formula popular with the political industrial complex. He was a refreshingly unconventional politician in his campaign, but he was thoroughly conventional in his governance. In office, he played by the rules of Washington, while Washington made the rules up as they went along.

Probably his biggest mistake in office was in not seeing the FBI scandal as a purely political affair, rather than a legal one. He was conned into thinking it should be handled by the courts as a criminal matter, when he should have used it as a political hammer to bludgeon official Washington. By the election, all of the classified information should have been leaked and revealed. This would have kept Washington petrified about what he may release if they got too aggressive with him.

This would have fed into the subplot of his campaign. It was always Trump the reformer against the political class. Instead of working with Republicans like he was one of them, he should have treated them as part of the problem. Trump needed to be Harry Truman running against a corrupt establishment. He would have accomplished more and he would have provided a clear reason to support him 2020. Instead he kept trying to be accepted by people who detested him.

Stylistically, Trump the salesman was an amusing bit of comic relief in the 2016 election that probably won him the benefit of the doubt. The trouble was, he kept selling his voters after he had won. The campaign is about promises, while governance is about delivering on those promises. Trump did some good things in office, but he never spoke of them, instead preferring to keep promising to look into new things and maybe do other things. It quickly rang hollow with his voters.

The great lesson to learn from the Trump era is that winning the crowd is useless if you don’t have a plan to put it to some purpose. Trump is not an ideologue, which allows him to be pragmatic. That’s a great asset in politics, as long as you have the secret list in your head of things you want to do in office. This is what makes the Left so powerful as a social force. They never lose focus on their goal. They know why they seek power, so they adapt and keep moving forward.

Trump never seemed to know what he wanted to do in office. Like all civic nationalists, he has this vague notion in his head of what America should be, but he was never able to translate it into policy. The closest he came was the many administrative changes made to the immigration process. He never spoke of those, because like all civic nationalist, he preferred to dream of the mythological America where everyone happily abides but the rules of the republic.

There are many other things that can be put in the list of mistakes by Trump over the last four years, but the overriding theme is this. Trump never rose above the petty and practical to grasp his historical moment. Like everyone else is Washington, he had no vision of the future. As a result, he got bogged down into the swamp he promised to drain, playing petty politics, squabbling over small issues. The moment called for a man of vision, but instead got a pitchman from Queens.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

The Popular Fanatic

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Note: I have a new post up on Taki today about the Church of Covid. Good to see the headline writer finally took my advice. I also have a new post up behind the green door on the 80’s comedy Back to School.

An old criticism of liberal democracy was that the system would inevitably become less stable, as each election would result in a wild swing in direction. The people would support position X in one election and then support position Y in the next election, with X and Y being opposite positions on some issue. We are getting a sense of that now with Biden’s handlers promising a reversal of Trump’s policies, which were allegedly a sharp break from the policies of predecessors.

One reason for this is that liberal democracies are bourgeois societies, in which the old instinct to dress up interests in objectivity and civic virtue remain strong. It is considered immoral for a group to press their interests in a purely partisan way, so everyone insists that science and the public good are the motivations. The deliberate destruction by the elites of the civic life of societies is not just a naked attempt to remake the world in their image, but an effort to build back better.

Bourgeois objectivity, however, does not work as a brake on the partisanship that comes with democracy. Instead, it works to magnify it. Every issue, instead of being a fight between interested parties, is a fight for eternal truth and cosmic justice. Voting for party X is not about where your bread is buttered, but about where you stand in the moral hierarchy, relative to the people in party Y. The polarization we are seeing today is not about practical politics, but about good versus evil.

Of course, in order to arrive at the point of bourgeois partisanship, you first must arrive at a post-scarcity society. When the threat of extinction is no longer obvious, the people are free to indulge in fantasy and leisure items. In the Cold War, the West avoided this state because the threat of nuclear war was real. The sober-minded had the primary duty of keeping the frivolous under control. Once that was removed, the frivolous and insane were free to run wild through society.

The result is a strange paradox. The issues that rise to the top are increasingly trivial and ridiculous, but the partisanship around them becomes more intense. Two men playing house is a fact of life going back to the dawn of man, but suddenly the embrace of this became a defining issue. If that was not ridiculous enough, what followed was a parade of men in dresses demanding we play along with them. Then it was people with a list of bizarre pronouns demanding validation.

At some level, the bourgeois partisan knows this, but instead of acknowledging the obvious, the demand for public judgement becomes more intense. In the Cold War, the Left had get out the vote drives, by which they meant rigging the voting in major urban areas. Otherwise, there was a quiet understanding that voting should be left to those who pay attention. Today, voting is a moral duty and we are endlessly reminded of it in the months before an election. The truth must be decided.

This is probably the only thing about liberal democracy that makes sense. If everyone votes, then the winners can claim a mandate. If Trump voters, for example, realized the vote was being rigged and boycotted the election last week, the winners could not legitimately claim a mandate. This used to be a tactic in low-trust societies ruled by an elite seeking legitimacy at the ballot box. In modern societies, everyone assumes the truth is fifty-percent-plus-one, so everyone must vote.

Here is where we stumble into another paradox of liberal democracy and another source of partisan anger. All human societies have elites and those elites control the institutions of the society. In theory, popular forms of government either check the power of the elites or place real power into the hands of the people. In one variation, the powerful propose and people dispose. In the other variation the people both propose and dispose. Democracy is about the public will.

In reality, voting is entirely meaningless in a liberal democracy, as the elites control public policy exclusively. The winning side in 1992 thought they were getting a folksy John F Kennedy, when they just got a skeevy Bush I. Bush voters thought they were getting a dim version of Reagan, but got Lyndon Johnson. The people celebrating Biden think they will get reeducation camps and proscription lists, but instead they will end up with a less coherent version of Bush II.

As the researchers in this 2014 study found, those elites that are a permanent feature of all societies control public policy in a liberal democracy, just as they do in every other form of government. In liberal democracy, however, the people are blind to this reality, instead believing that the market place of democracy decides. If elite opinion tracked public opinion, no one would mind, but when elite opinion is at war with the public, it becomes another source of partisan rage.

This leads to the final paradox of liberal democracy. The most rational strategy for minority interests is to withdraw consent, as this strips some legitimacy from the winner of the democratic process. Instead, partisans become more intensely partisan after each electoral defeat and every betrayal. In two years, those red MAGA hats will be a bloody shirt inspiring partisans to vote for the GOP, who will promptly betray those voters at the first opportunity. The anger will keep rising.

The reason that the world appears to be going mad is that liberal democracy, without the brake of thermonuclear war, is a runaway train of partisan fury. Instead of disputes being settled at the ballot box, each election intensifies the dispute. Haldane famously observed that fanaticism is man’s greatest invention. That’s because it is his greatest weapon. As partisan fury rises in liberal democracy, the fanatic becomes the most valued participant. It becomes rule by fanatic.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

The Parable Of Bob

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Imagine someone living in a typical American city. We will call this guy Bob and Bob lives in the city of Metropolis. Bob is a single man living in the city, working at a job while he enjoys his youth, looks for a mate and figures out what to do with his life. Bob does not care all that much about anything else. After all, he has a decent apartment, enough money to go out on weekends and plenty of friends. Like most people starting out in the world, Bob is just a visitor passing through.

Now, Bob has a steady girl now and he is starting to think more seriously about things like where he should live, or maybe where they should live. He’s thinking about what he should do for a career, rather than a job. He’s also starting to notice the world around him a bit more. For example, the bus he takes to the subway stop is always dirty and it stinks a bit. The subway has bums and the toilets don’t work. The trash barrels are always overflowing, no matter the time of day.

Just as Bob is starting to think more about the world around him, the Mayor of Metropolis, let’s call him Mayor Dick, announces he is going to go on a listening tour around the city. He wants to know what is on people’s minds. Mayor Dick says it is time for the city listen to the people and address their issues. He will hold town hall style meetings in every neighborhood of the city. Bob decides he’s going to go to one of these meetings and tell the mayor about the transit system.

To Bob’s surprise, the first meeting has lots of familiar faces. He realizes that these familiar faces are his neighbors, people he sees every day, but knows little about, other than they seem to be around a lot. Even more surprising, he learns that they are there to talk about the transit system too. Like Bob, they don’t understand why the buses are dirty and why they let bums loiter in the subway station. When Mayor Dick arrives, they all take turns telling him about the problems with the transit system.

Now, Bob feels pretty good. For the first time in his life he is involved in his community and beginning to know his neighbors. He was never much for politics, he never voted, but this feels like a good thing. Bob is not naive though. He knows politicians love making promises, but rarely deliver. Still, this Mayor Dick guy seemed sincere and he seemed to understand what was being said about the transit system. He even said he had ridden the subway to their town hall meeting.

Not long after the listening tour ends, Mayor Dick holds a press conference where he announces changes to the transit system. After talking to the community, he has slashed the budget for cleaning the buses. He has had all of the trash barrels removed from the subway stops and he has given the city’s bum population free transit passes so they can ride the buses and subway as much as they like. The city’s main newspaper writes glowing articles about Mayor Dick’s new initiatives.

Bob and all of his neighbors are outraged. How could this be? He was at the meeting and no one said they wanted more bums in the subway. Everyone specifically said they wanted fewer bums. Bob starts to think that maybe people at other meetings may have confused the message. On the bus to work one day, as a naked hobo masturbates in the seat across from him, he hears on the radio that Mayor Dick, after the success of his last listening tour, will hold another next month.

Talking with his neighbors, they agree that they need to get the word out to the rest of the city about the transit problem. After all, there is no way they wanted things to be made worse with the buses and subway stations. Maybe they don’t use the system that much or had other priorities. They all agree to form a group to raise awareness around the city about the shabby condition of the transit system. They will attend every meeting and make their voices heard by everyone.

Along comes the next listening tour and Bob and his people are set. They show up at every meeting wearing red shirts with their slogan on it. “Bus Reform Now!” is their slogan and they bring hats and buttons to every meeting. To their delight, everyone is receptive and peppers Mayor Dick with questions about the problem. Mayor Dick tells the people he has heard what they have to say and he promises to address it. “Now is the time to build back better” he says.

Bob is feeling pretty good at this point. He organized a city wide campaign to raise awareness on the transit issue. He got people all over the city to tell the mayor they wanted the system cleaned up. Not long after, Mayor Dick holds a presser where he announces that the city’s lunatic asylum will be closed and the inmates released, with free passes, into the subway stations. All cleaning will cease, even inside the stations and the toilets will be abandoned to chance.

As Bob and his neighbors watch this, they are stunned. This Mayor Dick guy is either an idiot or up to something. No one could want more bums and no one has ever said they wanted lunatics in the subway stations. Theories begin to circulate about what is really behind the mayor’s action. Meanwhile, the media begins to talk ominously about a secret conspiracy to undermine the city government. They brand Bob’s organization as dangerous subversives trying to undermine the government.

Bob and his neighbor have had enough. There is an election coming up and they are going get Mayor Dick thrown out of office. They agree that Bob is the right man for the job, since he organized the transit awareness group and people now know him. Bob signs up to run for mayor. To his surprise, he is greeted with big crowds all around the city as he goes to speak about his plans for the city. A keystone of his campaign is to reverse Mayor Dick’s changes to the transit system.

Everyone is feeling pretty good about things. The media has mostly ignored Bob’s campaign, continuing to call him a dangerous subversive, but the crowds at his events say that the people want change. The election finally arrives and not only does Mayor Dick win, he wins rather handily. It was not very close at all. Bob and his neighbors can’t believe it. The media claims that Mayor Dick’s listening tour and transit reform was the key to his victory. They hint that maybe he could be president one day.

Days later, Bob is found dead in his apartment. He has two gunshots in the back of the head, so the media declares it was suicide. Bob’s girlfriend, now his fiancé, tells everyone that Bob was not suicidal and he did not own a gun. The media claims Bob had a serious midget porn problem and was mixed up with Russian gangsters, so even if he did not kill himself, he probably deserved it. It is another example of how democracy must always be vigilant against people like Bob.

–The End.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.

Off The Cuff

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Elections in America have become like a troublesome employee, who is never content to just do the job. Instead she is always creating drama, where none should exist, so that everyone has to stop what they are doing and tend to her drama. Things that should be mundane tasks inevitably become long drawn out affairs where trivial issues require meetings and discussion. While the work eventually gets done, everyone is exhausted by having to deal with the drama queen.

An election should be a simple affair. Eligible voters go to the voting place, verify that they are the person they claim, cast their lot and those lots are counted. American elections are first past the post, meaning the most votes win, so it is not as if we have complex apportionment issues to resolve. Despite the simplicity of the task, our elections have now become pointless drama that ropes in the public, like the story of little Timmy falling down the well. It’s exhausting.

America is a joke country now, well past the point of reform, but if one is looking for something that could be reformed, elections are a good start. A simple change could eliminate most of this drama. Jurisdictions have 12 hours to count their votes or the election is void. The incumbents get another term. In the case of House and Senate seats, the state loses that seat for the term. Right now Pennsylvania would be facing two years with no House members.

Of course, no such rule could be implemented. America is no longer able to patch potholes in roads or keep the schools functioning, so implementing even modest reform is well beyond the capacity of the kleptocrats. That means we are left with the drama that will surely get worse with each election. The only alternative is to tune it out and leave the drama to the drama queens. In fact, the right answer going forward is to just stop voting entirely. The votes don’t count anyway.

Just as feeding into the high drama employee validates her drama, participating in elections now validates the corruption. When the crooks rig the election, they plausibly claim that it was the will of the people. After all, the people were dumb enough to participate in the charade. They must like it. If in the next election, turnout is 30% and the Democrats win with 110% of the vote in Michigan, even the crooks will have to acknowledge that the whole thing is just a ridiculous sham.

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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. 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!

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Me Talking A Lot
  • 57:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/ZPclxRaKdVw

The End Of A Story

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Note: I have a new post up behind the green door. This is a review of the next film on the top-100 greatest movies, Unforgiven. I’m a fan of Eastwood, so I’ll probably be doing more posts on his work.

One of the things that was debated on the fringes of politics the last few years is whether this period was a replay of the late-60’s and early 70’s or a replay of the early and mid-60’s. Were we heading to some new and much worse phase of radicalism or was this a rear guard action as this spasm of radicalism burned itself out? Put another way, was this the dawning of the age of Jonquarius or the sunset of the radical awakening that was kicked off in the 2000 election?

The outright theft of the 2020 election tells us that we are probably witnessing the end point of a radical phase, rather than a beginning. The reason, to stick with the historical comparison, is that Trump is clearly Nixon in this drama. The Left, which controls both the aesthetic and the cultural norms of official Washington, reacted to Trump just as their analogs reacted to Nixon a half century ago. They were willing to break every rule to get rid of him and finally did it.

The way they have rid themselves of Trump is interesting for a few reasons. One is that they did it in reverse order this time. For a backward age, in which everything is a deliberate attempt to reboot old franchises, running the old Nixon playbook in reverse suggests the cosmic forces have a sense of style. Instead of rigging an election to keep Nixon out and then impeaching him after he got into Washington, they impeached Trump first and then rigged the election to throw him out.

Those old enough to remember Nixon will recall that long after Nixon was gone, the Left still groused about the man. They made movies trying to portray him as worse than they painted him while in office. They used him as a pejorative when assaulting Republican political opponents. Everything that made lefty sad in the 1980’s was called Nixonian, as if Nixon was the face of evil in the world. Nixon was a great enemy that served them so well, they could not bear to let him go.

You can be sure this will be true of Trump. In order to keep their conservative toadies in line they will be calling them “Trumpian” whenever they dare speak out of turn or show any signs of life. Republicans, of course, will fully embrace the term to police their ranks for anyone that questions the oligarchs. For the political industrial complex, the Trump era will be like a brush with death. It will color their perspective on everything and modify their politics long after Trump has left their midst.

To further bolster the analogy is the fact that Biden is a vegetable. Carter came in after Nixon, but exactly no one in Washington respected carter. They laughed at him to his face and treated him like a servant. They were slightly embarrassed by him, but he was a necessary place holder, so he was tolerated. That’s Biden. He was installed as the nominee and now president because the political class does not know where they go from here, so they put in a place holder.

With Carter, the promise was that all the professional hacks would get their jobs back and begin to rebuild an activist foreign policy and continue remaking the post-industrial economy, while the establishment found some better front men. This is why the neocons were all on the Mumbly Joe bandwagon. They expect to slither back into the foreign policy side and begin preparing for war with Iran next decade. The bankers will get their men back in to restart the globalism process.

The thing to keep in mind with historical analogies is they are never perfect and only a fool gets hung up on that fact. They’re comparisons, not replications. The reason they are useful is people don’t change all that much from generation to generation. The people who pushed out Nixon in the 1970’s are not all that different from the people involved in the coup against Trump. Many were around back then. That means they will react to the aftermath in a similar way.

That said, the differences are important. There is no conservative movement brewing this time to be a useful gatekeeper for the establishment. Conservatism has been so discredited; few Trump supporters will be fooled by their efforts to legitimize the shenanigans that have gone on during Trump. They will try, of course, but the result will be a further discrediting of themselves. Too many people are wise to that game now for it to work on anyone but the extremely stupid.

Further, there is no new thing on the horizon this time. The reason Buckley-style conservatism got off the ground is the people in charge immediately saw it would be a useful foil for them in the charade of democracy. Buckley’s over-the-top Brahman act legitimized conservatism. A vulgar little dwarf like Ben Shapiro is never going to be able to pull that off. The fact is, the bench of Conservative Inc. is full of misfits and mediocrities, best suited for parody, not legitimacy.

The point here is this era is probably not the beginning of the end as many disappointed dissidents would have you believe. There will be no internment camps for racists or truth and reconciliation commissions. Instead of the beginning of the end it is just the end of a cycle of radicalism. Just as the New Left spent their last bit of fervor ejecting Nixon from Washington, our woke crazies of this age have spent themselves now. Their reason to exist is about to leave town.

Further, this may signal the end of another story. That story is the tale of the American Empire that began in the middle of the last century. After conquering Western Europe and much of Asia, the American Empire engaged in a long face-off with the Soviet Empire. Just as the Peloponnesian was a multi-generational affair, the Cold War spanned close to three generations. It changed the culture of America and cast a long shadow after it was over.

The first truly imperial generation rose up in the middle of the last century too. They remade the culture and economy in their image. The story of the last 70 years has been the story of that generation, but just as the empire is in decline, so is that generation. The weird backward-looking nature of modern politics, the endless cycle of reboots and remakes in Hollywood, the stalling of technological advance, all suggest we have reached an end point.

The multi-generational cycle that was kicked off with the start of the Cold War and the struggle between two global empires may be reaching its end. All the old purposes that drove that cycle are gone now. There are no communists. There are no Nazis to hunt as a reminder to remain vigilant. Every battle in the culture war has been won. There is nothing left to do, so the imperial generation has been replaying old fights in a politics of nostalgia, but now their time has come to an end.

That is probably what we are witnessing. The generation that made a fetish of free speech, good government and democracy, is now closing the show with censorship, corruption and now the undermining of democratic legitimacy. They are not doing this because of Trump or what he represents, but as one last replay of a drama that has outlived its reason to exist. It’s fitting that the capstone of this generation’s nostalgia politics will be a man who cannot remember yesterday.

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 a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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.