CPAC & AFPAC

The American Conservative Union (CPAC) and America First (AFPAC) had their big annual events this weekend in Orlando Florida. Both were moved from Washington to Florida because of the Covid panic. Both are struggling to get their footing now that Trump has left office, so it makes sense for both groups to hold their event in the former president’s home state. That and Florida has become the last bastion of rational, conservative government, where the people remain free.

The interesting juxtaposition is that both events claim to be speaking for the future of the American Right. CPAC is trying to appropriate populism and make it palatable for the oligarchs. AFPAC is trying to turn over-the-top support for Trump into a youth movement that will attract oligarch support. Both sides have made clear that the other side is not on their side. One side is the old established brand with market dominance, while the other brand is the upstart trying to make a splash.

Another point of comparison worth mentioning is that AFPAC managed to pull of their event in the teeth of institutional opposition. Given the climate, no one would have faulted Nick Fuentes for cancelling the show. He not only went forward with it, but he also pulled off the biggest dissident event ever staged. To get hundreds of people in and out of a semi-secret event, attended by sitting Congressmen and political celebrities, without a hitch is a stunning achievement by Fuentes and his crew.

On the other side of things, CPAC was lightly attended compared to years past, in part because of the location change. Conservative Inc. is a creature of Washington and CPAC is like their annual awards show. Holding CPAC in Orlando is like holding the Oscars in Iowa. There is also the fact that CPAC is a legacy brand and legacy brands are out of favor on the Right. Two generations of failure have most right-wing people looking for something better than the same old offerings.

The two visions of the future of the right are interesting in that neither is all that clear about where they are going. CPAC is clearly scrambling to protect their brand by allowing some populists back into their “big tent.” It is easy to forget that they ran off the Buchanan Brigades back in the bad old days. For a long time, CPAC was about making sure Trump’s brand of politics never got a purchase in the Republican Party. Events have forced them to be nice to people they generally despise.

On the other hand, Fuentes is starting from a paleoconservative base. He has often described himself as a paleocon. His movement has been carried forward by the blustery thermals of the Trump phenomenon. Like the Trump phenomenon, the goals are not all that clear. Right now, Fuentes and his imitators on live streaming platforms are speaking to issues important to young white men. In is a genuinely populist and right-wing phenomenon, in that it is entirely reactionary.

The trouble for both sides is they are like farmers who have been suffering through a long drought. It had been so long since they felt the rain, they were not prepared for when the heavens would open and saturate the earth. Suddenly, political actors find themselves surrounded by fertile soil. In the case of the old guard, it means learning how to be farmers again. In the case of the new guard, it is coming to terms with the fact they have never been farmers.

Another problem for both sides is they lack a language geared toward the future, so they rely on the language of the past. The civic nationalist stuff from CPAC appeals to old people, but it has no answers for what is happening nor for what is coming as America becomes majority-minority. They cannot even bring themselves to oppose immigration, which would at least acknowledge reality. CPAC is, at best, a bit of escapism for people who have no future.

AFPAC, on the other hand, gets that demographics are changing, but there is still that hope it can all be fixed. The name of their movement gives it away. Putting America first only makes sense when you can define America. Granted, there is a fair bit of rhetorical sleight of hand here, in order to dodge the censors, but at some point, they must confront the fact that America looks nothing like America. What comes next will look nothing like what is in our history books.

What matters most, of course, is that CPAC is the past and AFPAC or something like it is the future. Nick Fuentes managed to do what the alt-right could never muster and that is create a legitimate political movement. Unlike the various goofballs that populated the alt-right leadership, Fuentes has proven himself to be an effective organizer and a highly effective leader. He is arguably the most talented figure to come from the populist uprising that was kicked off by the Trump presidential run.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The Mailbag

One of the struggles for those on this side of the great divide is maintaining a proper perspective with regards to dissident thought versus conventional thought. Most people are not on this side of the great divide. None of the people in politics or the media know that there is a great divide. For them, the two sides are the extreme far Left and the so-called conservatives struggling to keep pace with them. Reading the mass media from our perspective can cause you to question your sanity.

There is a site called Memeorandum, which used to be popular with bloggers back when copy and paste blogging was a thing. It is an aggregator of mainstream sites that tries to set the tone of daily conversation. The cable talkers rely on it to set their agenda for the day. It is why our media feels like an echo chamber. The site is a useful reminder that our mass media is highly coordinated. These people have daily scrums to decide what to make up and they direct the rest to follow their lead.

Anyway, when you look at this site, it often seems like the bulletin board in a dayroom of a mental hospital. Yesterday, this post was featured on the site along with some others on the same topic. This one was the most amusing. There is nothing about that story based in fact. It is pure fantasy, but a fantasy being played out in real time in front of people supposedly in charge of the country. The loons running the government really think there are insurrectionists plotting a coup.

As I pointed out in the podcast extra, the January 6th protest has become the centerpiece of a weird form of security theater. When they said it was their 9/11, most people rolled their eyes at the absurdity of the claim. The people inside the wire, on the other hand, they believe it and they are acting on it. They have convinced themselves there is an invisible army of Trump supporters plotting a coup. Even the running dog lackeys on the Left are getting into it.

It is a good reminder to our side that the security theater of the Bush and Obama years was also entirely fake. Al-Qaeda and ISIS were real things in the world, but the people the FBI arrested in the US were probably just dumb guys they could frame. The police state the neocons erected was just part of the theater. This is probably a useful tool in helping people adjust to this side of the great divide. Our rulers have been corrupt and degenerate for a long time. It’s just more obvious now.

Still, the FBI rounding up a few swarthy guys once in a while and framing them for imaginary crimes was small potatoes compared to what we see now. This is the sort of thing the Soviets would have thought was too much. The government is now officially at war with half the country. It is such an insane turn of events that a normal person can be forgiven for wondering if he is really seeing what he is seeing. No one reading this imagined anything like this happening in America.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00 Opening
  • 05:00 AFPAC
  • 10:00 Trump
  • 15:00 Populism
  • 20:00 #NeverGOP
  • 27:00 Bitcoin
  • 36:00 Classes
  • 45:00 Manufacturing
  • 48:00 Covid
  • 51:00 Cuomo
  • 55:00 Thank You

Direct DownloadThe iTunesGoogle PlayiHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

The Big Lie

An axiom from the drug game that applies equally well to the political game is “Never get high from your own supply.” Drug dealers who start using their product usually end up dead, in jail or just another client for a smarter drug dealer. In the case of politics, the product they move is propaganda and rhetoric. In office, they peddle propaganda to convince or confuse the people into going along with policy. Out of office, politicians use rhetoric to trick people into supporting them in their efforts.

The product of politics is the lie. Maybe the lie is just an exaggeration, like the old line about two cars in every garage and chicken in every pot. Sometimes the lie is a fabrication to distract from something else. The Russian collusion hoax is an example of a lie to distract from the FBI corruption. Then, of course, you have the Big Lie, the lie so colossal that no one thinks it possible to tell such a lie. The usual suspects used this against Trump, declaring him a white nationalist.

The thing is, lies are told in the moment, but they have downstream consequences because people believe the lies and act on them. The Big Lie, as you know who described it, had big consequences later on. The historian Jeffrey Herf notes that blaming nationalists for Germany’s loss in the Great War eventually led to the blossoming of antisemitism and the persecution of Jews. That is all debatable for all the obvious reasons, but it is a good example, nonetheless.

We may be seeing something similar happening in America. The Big Lie this time is that America’s problems, its very character, is the result of white nationalism. The usual suspects could not accept the results of the 2016 election, so they concocted a conspiracy theory involving outsiders, Russians, and an invisible enemy within, the white nationalists. This Big Lie quickly evolved from something popular with cranks and the mentally unstable to a full blown collective fantasy.

According to a recent survey, the number one worry for self-identified Democrats are the supporters of Donald Trump. 82% of Democrats are “extremely concerned” about the 73 million people who voted for Trump. Right behind that, 79% are extremely concerned with white nationalism. Just behind that, 77% are extremely concerned with systemic racism. You will note there is a theme to all of the top issues. These people are sure they are at war with a violent, but invisible army of bigots.

Now, if the people buying into this were an isolated subculture that was easily ignored, then no one would care. The one thing modern people have mastered about modernity is the ability to ignore the crazies. These are not isolated crazies. These are the people in control of the institutions. They are acting on their insane beliefs, waging a full-on war against white people in general and normal white people in particular. Real people are suffering real harm because these people believe the Big Lie.

One consequence of this war on white people is the growing awareness and acceptance of Jim Snow America. White people are coming to accept that there is a double standard against whites. They may not like it, but they accept it as a part of their daily reality. You can see this on the social media platforms. Gab has added tens of millions of users, despite the claims about it, and those new users are fine with talking about the new reality of race. There are lots of race realists now.

This is one of those downstream consequences of the Big Lie. Instead of white people cowering in shame, they are seeking out places where they can speak freely and talk about what is happening. The war on white people is creating a sense of white identity that never would have existed otherwise. This in turn is bringing demographic reality to the attention of white people. The tens of millions who thought they were part of the silent majority are realizing they are no longer a majority.

Another unintended consequence of the war on imaginary white nationalists is that the morality is changing. The Left is not fighting against “bad whites” but are now being seen as antiwhite. The Left used to get away with the claim that they were trying to help or protect nonwhites from the bad whites. It was always a lie and now it is an unsustainable lie. White people can now start thinking of themselves as an oppressed identity group. They can be the hero of their story.

There is another downstream consequence of the Big Lie. There is no way to reel it back in when it gets out of hand. We are seeing this with the Covid fantasy. Tens of millions have turned Covid into a religion. The usual suspects will have to come up with an even bigger lie to counter the Covid lie. That is what the survey of Democrats shows regarding the Big Lie. Their coalition of managerial class whites and nonwhites are now organized around the fight against white people. It is who they are.

The growing race consciousness of whites could be reversed if the rulers could drop the whole white nationalist thing and find a new drama to entertain their people, but that would mean admitting the white nationalist stuff was always a lie. Then there is the fact that many of the rulers believe the Big Lie. Dingbats like Ocasio-Cortez think there is an army of Nazis outside the green zone, ready to ravish her in her office. The Big Lie now has taken on a life of its own. It has escaped its handlers.

This gets back to that old axiom from the drug game. The people running the institutions are getting high off their own supply now. They are sitting in front of a big pile of white nationalism, snorting it up as they promise retribution. They have become the victims of their own trade, unable to make sound decisions. Even if it were possible to back off the antiwhite pogroms, they no longer possess the agency to do it. They are just as much a captive of their product as their former customers.

In the search for villains in the aftermath of the Great War, no one thought another industrial war was possible. They could not see what would come of the lies, especially the Big Lie, in the next decades. Similarly, we cannot know what will come from the growing racial awareness of whites. As the rulers assemble Jim Snow America, white racial awareness will evolve along with it. The one thing we know is no one learned anything from the last use of the Big Lie.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The Narrative Void

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” is a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that has always been popular on the Right. While the Left does not have a monopoly on utopian thinking, it has never embraced realism. The Right, on the other hand, has always had an element that accepts the reality of the human condition. Not everyone on the Right or even a majority. One reality of the human condition is that most people, even the sober minded, prefer the escapism of fantasy to reality.

The fantasy view of politics is most obvious on the Left, of course. Much of what constitutes our current politics would best be described as a paranoid delusion or maybe even a psychotic break. Six weeks on and official Washington is still playing the game of make-believe over the January protests. For five years they were convinced that invisible Russians using mind control rigged the 2016 election. Left-wing politics, which means mainstream politics, is just a long conspiracy theory.

Another thing that is made obvious with left-wing reality avoidance is that it is deliberate, something of a cottage industry. There are people who invest all of their time patching up the fantasies and inventing new ones. Here’s an example from the conspiracy site Vox, about how Progressives are trying to “catch-up” to right-wing media. The absurdity of the post is not rare. These fantasies are churned out like shark’s teeth in order to have a steady supply of new fantasies for the Left.

This is something most on this side of the great divide get about the Left. They need a devil to oppose in order to have a rallying point. The absurdity of claiming Trump was a secret Nazi was never noticed, because they needed him to be their devil. Since their devils are always imaginary to begin with, they need to be churning out new ones, because eventually the imaginary ones are no longer useful. Progressives have been plotting the final showdown with the Devil since the Mayflower.

The American Left is really just escapism. It always has been, but in a post scarcity world where even the poorest people are materially safe, the escapism has had to conjure increasingly bizarre rationales. Whether it is invisible Russians, invisible Nazis, invisible Klansman and now invisible insurrectionists, the fantasy requires a villain, so they will conjure one when one does not exist. The Left is Dungeon’s and Dragons for mentally unstable, upper-middle-class white people.

Escapism is not just the domain of the Left. Libertarianism is the most obvious form of it outside the Left. In fact, the escapism is so strong it is possible to place libertarians on the Left, next to the orcs and wizards of Progressivism. The political spectrum would then be realism at one pole and escapism at the other. The libertarians generally accept the reality of math, so they would be somewhere between the midpoint and the end point where we find the modern American Left.

In case it is not obvious, the escapism of libertarianism lies in the fact that you can never have a libertarian society. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained at length how it is impossible to go from a modern society to a libertarian one. Even if you sort that puzzle, there is no way to maintain the libertarian society within libertarian theory. Put another way, the libertarian society is like any other fantasy world. Its appeal is in its impossibility, not in its plausibility. It is escapism.

For at least half a century, the Republican Party has been built on the escapism of what we now call civic nationalism. Evangelicals, for example, unhappy with left-wing social changes, organized to get their people elected. They finally got one of their guys in the White House and he did nothing for them. The reaction to this burst of reality was the Tea Party movement, which was really just a civic nationalist reaction to the failures of the Bush administration. It too crashed on the rocks of reality.

Donald Trump was the ultimate civic nationalist and he got nothing done. Part of the anger at Trump and his voters is that they accidentally proved that civic nationalism was always a big lie. The fake anger of the Left was always about their escapism, not anything Trump actually did in office. The real venom comes from the GOP, who sense he ruined the game for them. The Trump phenomenon ruined the fantasy of civic nationalism, removing that form of escapism from the system.

This is a truth that the core of the dissident right has always grasped, but never found a way to exploit. Most people, especially people in politics or cultural movements, are not interested in reality. They want a story, a narrative, that makes them the good guy fighting the selfless fight against the bad guy. Politics in general is not about reasoning from fact to some new facts or truths. It is not about making broad generalizations based on observable truths. Politics is about storytelling.

This is the great lesson of the interwar years. The people on the winning side knew the war was a horrible blunder committed by their rulers. Because they were on the winning side, they had an easy story to explain it. The bad guys were to blame, even if their own rulers were reckless and stupid. Ultimately, the fault lay with the losers and they would be made to pay for their crimes. The losers, in contrast, had no story to explain why their rulers lied to them and “stabbed them in the back.”

Into the void raced liberalism, communism, and fascism. Liberalism could blame the old rulers, but it suffered from being a story told by the winners. Communism told a story that failed to include the facts of the war. Communism was always a story about the future, not the past. Fascism, in contrast, offered a story that included the past, the present and a future. To the modern ear, Hitler sounds like a raving lunatic, but in his time, he was a master storyteller. He made fascism a pleasant fantasy.

This is why our present is full of bizarre conspiracies and fantasies. The Left has total control of the institutions, but they keep churning out new fantasies, because they cannot square the circle of who they are. How can the underdog also possess the high ground of society? How can they have control of the institutions, yet the system still suffers from institutional unfairness? The Left is spiraling into madness because its plot has an unreconcilable contradiction at the heart of it.

We are living in an interregnum of narrative collapse. The various right-wing fantasies, like libertarianism, conservatism and civic nationalism have collapsed. Those stories no longer make any sense. Only old people cling to them. The Progressive story is in the process of narrative collapse. The explosion of conspiracy theories and subcultures is due to the hole at the middle of a politics. The future will belong to those who create a new story that adequately explains the past, present and the future.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


Election Reform

Note: It seems that the comment plugin is hopelessly broken. The developer is useless, so I need to find a solution for commenting that is more reliable. For now, it is the basic comment system that comes with WordPress. This summer, I hope to move off the WordPress software (I host my own site), so I’m not going to invest time in a new commenting system for WordPress.


Most discussions about political reform are a way to avoid facing the reality of the people in charge of the system or the system itself. Often, it is a form of escapism where the proposed reform will magically make the people in charge into the sorts of honorable or virtuous people the system demands. Regardless of the political system, reform is an internal operation, performed by the people in charge for the benefit of the people in charge. The reformers always need elite support.

That said, thinking about how the system should be altered in order to serve the ends of society can get at what is wrong with the system. Take voting, for example. American elections are now hopelessly corrupt. The path forward for those not supportive of the ruling class is to protest the whole election. When the votes are rigged and the parties are decreasingly polite fictions, voting is a waste of time. Every vote cast, regardless of the candidate, is for the ruling party.

For most people concerned about this, voting reform would probably start with the companies counting the votes and the voting process. They would want open and accountable voting systems, for example. That way the vote can be compared to actual humans in the district. Maybe the voters would have to present a picture ID in order to vote, which would mean no more mail-in voting. The idea is to reduce the amount of fraud by making it more difficult for the ruling party to commit fraud.

The trouble though is all of those things are just polite ways of saying voter reform means making it harder to vote. The ruling party has always used this claim to justify smashing up the voting system. Democracy, they tell us, is about everyone participating equally in the voting process. That means the system has to be usable by the retarded, the lazy and the disinterested. The only way that can be done is to make the system easy to rig. If the retarded can vote, the imaginary can vote too.

That right there is the point of thinking about voting reform. The honest reformer here must start with the fact that too many people vote. In a democracy, the truth is decided by fifty percent plus one. Although it rarely happens, an election can be decided by one vote, which means the winner is picked by that retarded guy. In a close election, the winner is picked by a handful of the dumbest people. Put another way, in a democracy, the toughest problems are decided by the dumbest people.

Really, what voting reform is about is how to stop the stupid, the crazy and the disinterested from voting. You figure out barriers to put in the way of these people in order to discourage them from trying to vote. Voting is still open to all citizens, as long as they can navigate the voting process. The trouble with this approach is it is not honest about what it means to be a citizen. It says everyone is a citizen with a vote, but in reality, it subtly takes the vote from the undesirable.

Building a system on a lie opens the door for the sorts of people who seek to undermine order so they can plunder society. This is the story of the last century. The drive to open up voting for blacks, for example, was never about bringing blacks into the process so they could have a voice in government. Blacks and black voting were just a cat’s paw for others seeking to undermine the social order. We see the same thing happening now with giving foreigners the right to vote in our elections.

That is what modern voting reform is, when you stop and think about it. One side lies about making it easier to vote, so they can stuff the ballot box. The other side lies about making it fairer, so they can prevent fraud. This is why efforts to fix voting will only make things worse. It is a game built on a lie that encourages both sides to keep lying about their intentions. In a game that rewards the best liars, the people behind the massive election fraud have the advantage, which is why they win.

The real question of voting reform is what sort of person should be participating in the governance of society? When you start from that point, voting reform stops being about rigging the system and about defining citizenship. A citizen is someone who has a stake in the outcome of elections. They have skin in the game. The health and prosperity of society is an extension of themselves and their people. That last part is vital, as the individual can only exist in the context of his people.

The civic nationalist types used to answer this question with money, because they have been conditioned to put a price on everything. They no longer answer this question for the same reason. The trouble with a money requirement, like owning property or paying taxes, is it turns citizenship into a commodity. In theory, a foreigner who owns property in a society should have a vote, even though he really has no skin in the game. He can always sell his property and go to the next place that will have him.

The starting point, when you think about citizenship as having a stake in the outcome of society, is biology. The prerequisite of citizenship, the minimum requirement for voting, is having been born in the jurisdiction. If you were born in the place, then you can qualify for voting there. Voting where you were born would solve the problem of invaders piling into a state and changing its character at the ballot box. The state of Virginia would go back to be a normal state again.

Being born into the jurisdiction is a nice feature, but it is not the answer. Most people in jail were near home when they committed their crimes. What you want is people with a stake in the future of the society. Obviously, these are people who are parents or will be parents at some point. Rationally, the ballot should be limited to married people with kids or maybe married households over a certain age. A 30-year old couple can be assumed to want children. The old couple probably had children.

The other aspect to this thought experiment is what sort of behavior does a society want to reward? The current voting system is neutral about behavior. As long as you are probably a human and you possibly exist, you can vote. The fact that you are in jail, a foreigner or imaginary does not matter. That cheapens the value of citizenship, which in turn cheapens society. Our current voting system encourages everyone to be a rootless raider, a vulture feasting on the carcass of society.

Anchoring the vote in biology flips this around. It encourages the sorts of behavior that are required to maintain social stability. Extend this to holding office and you end up with a system rooted in the goals of the people, rather than in the goals of outsiders, which is what we see today. More important, it shifts the focus from the present, which is what we have now, to the future. This is why aristocratic systems are conservative. The king is always thinking about perpetuating his line.

The point of this sort of exercise is not to create a reform program. The ruling party has no interest in election reform, other than to cancel the next elections. The only way they agree to reform is if they are standing on the gallows. The point here is to break out of the conditioning that comes with the current voting mindset. Elections are supposed to be a tool, not a goal. Once you accept that, you can start thinking about who should be wielding the tool and why.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


Modern Narodism

Note: I have a final word on car buying the financialization of the car business behind the green door. The regular Taki post is up as well. Comments about it can be made here, as Taki no longer has a comment section.


The political reactionary is an essential component of left-wing mythology, going back to the French Revolution. In fact, most reactionaries are an invention of Left, so they always have an enemy. It is why they tend to go on murder sprees once they gain control of the institutions. The hunt for counter revolutionaries and running dog reactionaries provides fuel for permanent revolution. Once the revolution runs out of enemies, the revolution loses energy and collapses in on itself.

Even though the term reactionary has been abused by the Left, used as a slur against critics and opponents, it does not mean there are no reactionaries. The Thermidorian Reaction was a real thing. The Restoration of the French monarchy was, in part, a reactionary development. The restoration of the monarchy after the death of Cromwell could be classified as a reactionary event. After all, Charles II did order the body of Cromwell to be disinterred and displayed in chains.

While the Left owns the term, political reaction is not just a right-wing phenomenon nor is it strictly political. It can be argued that socialism and communism are reactions to the Industrial Revolution. After all, it was the Marxist who popularized the term. It was an 19th century pejorative for the current state of the world at the time. Various forms of socialism were a reaction to the sudden growth of a new class, who gained their wealth and power through the acquisition of industrial capital.

Narodism, which was a socialist movement in pre-revolutionary Russia, was a reaction to both the rise of capital and tsarism. The Narodniks, as they were called at the time, were a form of agrarian socialism rooted in the idea that the wealth of Russia was in the peasantry and small craftsman in the countryside. Initially, they were a reaction to the size and scale of the tsarist system of rule. They soon evolved into a reaction to the growing power of capital, just like other socialists of the age.

The interesting thing about the Narodniks is they were more than just a political or economic movement. They were a cultural movement as well. Faced with the sheer size of the tsarist system and the rapid cultural changes promised by the growth of industry, their response was to go back to the cultural roots of the people. The term Narodism comes from the word “narod”, a word equivalent to volk, which is a term familiar to most on the dissident right.

This is something relevant to this age. The technological revolution has allowed the managerial state to grow into something inconceivably massive. We live in an age in which there is little privacy. The eyes of the system are everywhere, even in our homes and in our private conversations. There is no way to escape the unblinking eye of the surveillance state. One force behind the current unrest is the growing sense that all of us are subject to the unwanted gaze of the managerial state.

Another aspect is the rise of the new class. Like the sudden appearance of the capital class in the industrial revolution, we suddenly have a new powerful class that gained its power and wealth through the capture of information. This new class did not get rich by building a better mouse trap. They got rich capturing an information bottleneck or a monopoly of some information service. Michael Bloomberg literally got rich from a monopoly on information to the financial service sector.

Another parallel to the Narodniks we are seeing is the “back to the people” approach by the various tribes on the dissident right. The Narodniks adopted the traditional clothing of the rural people and worked hard to portray themselves as the vanguard of the authentic Russian people. We see something like that on the dissident right. There is a desire to return to a more authentic way of living, rooted in local community. Like the Narodniks, the dissident right is more cultural than political.

The thing is though, the argument in favor of the Narodniks being reactionary falls apart when you look at their overall goals. They may have wanted to “return to the people” in a cultural and spiritual sense, but they did not want to return to a past system. Their program was a departure from the past and present. A proper way to describe what they imagined was something like a return to a point in the past and a do-over back to this point, but with a different set of choices.

This is something that kicks around the dissident right. There is an understanding that there is no going back. Even if you could restore things back to some point in the past when things were better, the roots of the present lie in that past. Liberal democracy is the fruit of American history. A do-over would most likely lead us right back to where we are now. In this regard, modern dissidents are more realistic than the Narodniks in that there is no idealized past or population at the center.

In this regard, civic nationalism is closer to modern reaction. They have created an idealized and largely fictional past. It was a series of innovation by their enemy that sent the country off course. They believe that if we just return to “our constitutional principles” everything will magically get back on the righteous path. Not only do they want to rip the past seventy years from the history books, but they would also like to remove all of the history that makes their imagined past plausible.

One last note on the Narodniks relative to this age. For the most part, the movement was a failure in that it failed to achieve any of its goals, other than the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. Their effort to educate and train the peasantry into a revolutionary force was a failure. The Narodniks were mostly urban intellectuals who had no understanding of the peasants. The assassination of the Tsar lost them whatever support they had among the people.

What they did, however, is lay the groundwork for what came next. Their idea of building an alternative base of power outside the system was adopted by 20th century revolutionary movements. Their tactics also informed others. Their organizational style and use of small group tactics were also a forerunner. Their ideas on generating debate outside what was allowed was an important contribution. They understood that the people needed to be reconditioned before they could challenge the system.

This is the final parallel to modern dissidents. Much of what goes on in dissident politics is a debate about challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. While we do not have peasants in the traditional sense, we do have them in a spiritual sense. Rewiring how they think of themselves and the system that created them, the “converting normie” thing, is an important part of dissident politics. Like the Narodniks, this must happen in small groups using non-traditional tactics to work around the system.

This is why the Narodniks and modern dissidents would fall outside the traditional definition of reactionary. The initial energy is a reaction to the changes in the culture brought about by rapid innovation, but there is no desire to return to the past. Instead, these movements are pre-reactionary and proto-revolutionary, a transition phase in the response to the current age. Dissident politics is a rejection of the modern and what created it, with a vague understanding of what comes next.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


Taki Post: Watch Your Step

Societal decline is best imagined as a drunk man falling down a long flight of stairs, maybe a long spiral staircase. He begins at the top, the peak of the society, then carelessly makes the wrong steps and begins to tumble down the stairs. It is not a rapid or steady fall to the bottom. Instead, he hits a landing, rights himself for a bit, but regaining his confidence he makes another wrong step and takes another tumble.

Some of the landings are long and he is able to function at that level for a while, thinking he is still at the place he started. Maybe he takes a few tentative steps back to the old position higher up the stairs, but eventually it is another misstep, and he falls back down past that landing to another landing farther down. This is societal decline. It is periods of decline punctuated by periods in which it feels like the decline has been arrested.

This is useful to keep in mind as we watch the new regime come to grips with the new reality they face….link

Extra Black

We are more than halfway through Black History Month and I realized I had done nothing to celebrate the season. This week we remedy that with a whole show on blackness and its traveling partner whiteness. That is one of the things that gets missed in the rapidly evolving ethos of Jim Snow America. The concept of whiteness can only exist in the presence of non-whiteness, especially blackness. Without the juxtaposition with non-whiteness, whiteness is no longer discernable.

This is not entirely by accident. Blackness, as has been discussed here many times, is a negative identity. Black identity depends entirely on the relationship between blacks and whites, real and imagined. Everything about being black in America revolves around the black relationship with whites. Remove whites from the equation and blackness has no meaning. If whites pack up and leave, blacks will have to follow them, as whites are their reason to exist now.

This is what the anti-whites are up to with whiteness. They are seeking to make white identity a negative identity, dependent upon nonwhites. The infamous anti-white tract, White Fragility, is about defining whiteness in a negative light in objective terms, but also as something wholly dependent on nonwhites. The pogrom against white parents and their children in the New York City schools is another example. To be white is all about the relationship with nonwhites.

Unlike blackness, whiteness can have no positive connotations. Everything about being white is bad, according to our genocidal rulers. Most important to white people, the only escape from the dark cloud of whiteness is to remove all whiteness from society, which is simply a call for genocide. Since all whites are guilty at birth, the only logical solution to the whiteness problems is to kill whitey. Since many of the people preaching this are white, it makes anti-whiteness something like a suicide cult.

That is the missing piece to the puzzle. Nonwhites participate in these antiwhite pogroms for personal gain and racial vengeance. The thing is though, they would get nowhere in their efforts without whites at the top of society supporting it. In fact, the driving force behind anti-whiteness are white elites. They are not under a spell or being tricked by a historically crafty. Anti-whiteness is the logical endpoint for white people driven by self-loathing. It is the ultimate form of self-abnegation.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct DownloadThe iTunesGoogle PlayiHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Over Supply

Note: I have a new post up behind the green door. I’m buy a car, which I hate more than just about anything, so I will be posting about that experience for donors. Given my loathing of car buying, it will be an adventure.


One of the first lessons in economics is that demand drives supply. The more a product or service is desired, the greater the supply of it, barring some artificial constraint on supply. The relationship between supply and demand is expressed in the price for the good or service. A rising price means demand is outpacing supply and a falling price means supply is outpacing demand. If demand falls low enough, supply will disappear as there is no profit to be made in the transaction.

Supply and demand used to be an article of faith in capitalist countries, but it seems that our rulers have abandoned that axiom. Take for example labor markets. They insist that flooding the American labor market with new people from abroad will lift wages and increase employment. All that diversity will cancel out the collapse in demand relative to supply and something will happen. With regards to the labor market, the new article of faith is that unlimited supply drives up demand somehow.

Now, a lot of people think this new universal truth about the labor markets is just a trick to fool people into voting away their inheritance. Collusion between the cheap labor lobby and the cheap voter lobby has resulted in this weird libertarian argument that the old axioms about supply and demand do not apply to labor markets. That way heritage Americans will not resist the flood of foreigners into their country. That could be true, but it is not an isolated example of this new economic law.

You may have noticed that the car makers are making a big splash by announcing they will abandon the internal combustion engine within the next decade or so. Jaguar is the latest car maker to say they will stop making normal cars within the decade. They say they will be fully electric by 2025, which is not far off. Other carmakers have been less aggressive in their target date, but the general consensus is that all of them will be electric-only within the next decade.

The question no one asks is why? The embrace of electric cars has been tepid in the United States and Europe. They are an interesting experiment. If you are the sort that likes owning a novelty product, then buying a Tesla is an option. The government literally pays you to buy one, so there is that. Even so, the demand has not been great, because there is not great need for electric cars. For most people, a car is a tool and the current internal combustion models do the job perfectly well.

Then there is the fact that it is a terribly impractical thing to own at this time, as there are few charging stations and charging takes too long. More than half of US drivers cannot have a charging station at home, because they live in a rental unit. Many homeowners cannot have one because of the cost or their homes are not capable of having one installed. Then there is the power grid. Estimates range from $4 to $10 trillion to upgrade the power grid for electric cars.

This is of no concern to our rulers. They are sure that if they crank up the supply side the demand side will do something and then something else will happen and before long the roads are full of electric cars. Now, some will claim that these announcements are just like Soviet five-year plans. They are not realistic targets and the people behind them have no intention of doing what they claim. In other words, they still accept the laws of supply and demand, they just like lying.

Maybe that is true. The fake meat business, on the other hand, suggests they really believe the new economic model. Five years ago, the number of people walking around demanding a burger made from beetles that tasted just like a burger was zero. We have vegans and vegetarians, for sure, but we also have schizophrenics and manic depressives too. Mentally ill people are a part of the human condition. Normal people want to eat a balanced diet that includes meat.

Despite zero demand for meat made from grass and insects, the “Impossible Meat” racket is picking up steam. The billionaires are getting in on the racket and the Davos crowd is telling politicians it is the future. In fairness, the fake meat is not revolting, but that is not the threshold. Cat food does not taste terrible under the right conditions, but people do not want to eat that either. Fake meat is the e-book of the food business, in that it is a solution is search of a problem that was solved long ago.

These are some big recent examples, but they are part of a general trend in which the overclass abandons the laws of supply and demand. Given that market capitalism starts with supply and demand, it may be that we are now post-market societies. We are becoming something like a high-tech version of the palace economy. This was a common way to distribute goods in the Bronze Age. Given that the managerial class has a distinctive Bronze Age quality, it makes perfect sense.

On the other hand, supply driven economics has a poor history. In the 1970’s the great and the good pulled out all the stops to impose the metric system on America, but it was a complete failure. No demand meant no acceptance. The same is true of soccer and women’s sports. For half a century the great and good have been pushing these on Americans, but they remain fringe interests. Those iron laws of supply and demand, like reality itself, are resistant to wishful thinking.

The other side of this is that the people pushing these fads know this and believe they can warp reality to their will, or they are lying. Jaguar marketing is probably packed to the gills with the sort of people who live in whites-only neighborhoods, but demand the company bring in Robin DiAngelo to lecture them about their privilege. Fake meat and electric cars are just the latest boutique moral signifiers. Another turn of the wheel and some other fad will fill this role.

Of course, this raises an important question. Is it better to be ruled by maniacs who think reality is an optical illusion or is it better to be ruled by a class of sociopaths willing to lie about everything? From a moral perspective, the former is worse because they really believe in their cause. There is no reasoning with a fanatic. On the other hand, can you reason with a pathological liar? How can you know? These questions suggest that the real supply problem is at the top.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The Mumbly Joe Problem

An old expression mothers used to say to their children in the before times was, “Be careful what you wish for.” Getting what you want often comes with unforeseen and undesirable consequences. The logic behind it is that a strong desire for something is a near term thing. You want whatever it is now. The trade-off that comes with that thing you desire, on the other hand, has long term consequences. This is something that the managerial class will be experiencing this year.

The 2016 election became an identity event for the managerial class. The cool belief to hold was that Trump was a rube and his voters were all yesterday men condemned to the dust bin of history. The same people who thought the same thing of Hillary Clinton in 2008 were suddenly sure she was the future. It is the nature of luxury beliefs that they have no intrinsic value. What matters is their moral potency in the moment. In 2008 the cool kids mocked Clinton. In 2016 they loved her.

The traumatizing effect of having those luxury beliefs rejected and mocked by the voting public in the 2016 election transformed opposition to Trump from a luxury belief into a moral imperative. Opposing Trump before the election was like any other fashion statement in that it was confirmatory. The beautiful people were confirming a truth by displaying it to the public. When that was mocked by Trump and the public, opposing Trump became the identity of these people. It was who they are.

This is an important element. When the starting point of your identity is opposition to some group or other group identity, there can be no compromise with that group. The managerial class became class conscious and part of their identity was opposition to the hoi polloi. The great and the good were the moral superiors of the masses. Their job was to guide them, but when the masses rejected them, they could not turnaround and agree with them. This is what made it impossible to work with Trump.

Who they were was entirely bound up in getting rid of Trump. For four years the great and good plotted and schemed, without thinking much about what comes after they get what they wanted. They rigged their own primary just to avoid having Bernie Sanders win the nomination, because they knew he would lose. They rallied behind a time-serving dullard in the early stages of dementia. They pulled out all the stops to “fortify” the general election and install that old man in the White House.

Now, they have a dementia patient running the government. Every day it becomes clear that Mumbly Joe is struggling with serious cognitive decline. He was not the brightest bulb in the bunch when he was in his prime. Now, he sounds like an old man in a nursing home, parked in front of the window. It has already reached the point where they cannot trust him to speak with world leaders. It is not unreasonable to assume that he will not be able to perform his duties in the near future.

Here is where we see that the great and the good are not the master villains many on this side need to believe. Sure, South Asian money bought the VP slot for one of their own, but no one seriously thought about what happens when Biden loses his marbles and has to be removed from office. The political class tried twice to remove Trump and could not pull it off, despite his own party ready to support the effort. How likely are they to engineer a coup against the guy they installed?

This is not to say they could not remove him if he is just a drooling lump, but that is not how cognitive decline works. People in his condition have good days and bad days and within the day they have good periods and bad periods. What happens over time is the bad stretches get longer and more frequent. Mumbly Joe could be borderline for many months before it is clear he is no longer fit. This is fine if nothing important happens for the next four years, but that’s rather unlikely.

Then there is the fact that a White House is like court. All of those appointees have their own agendas and they often represent narrow interests. Having a weak man in the Oval Office is always ideal from the perspective of these people. Then there is Biden’s wife, who is quickly becoming the Edith Wilson of this administration. It is not hard to see how the players inside the administration can exploit this reality to secure their own positions in exchange for remaining silent about Biden’s health.

Let’s assume for a second that Harris, Pelosi and Schumer come up with a scheme whereby they can remove Biden and install Harris. They would either have to rope in a majority of the cabinet or pass legislation to establish a committee that would determine the fitness of Biden. This would throw the government into crisis. Public approval of Congress is already approaching single digits and half the public is convinced the last election was rigged. A crisis could easily get out of hand.

If by some miracle Biden does them a favor and drops dead before they have to remove him, they are still not out of the woods as Harris has zero support. Most of her own party thinks she is an obnoxious dimwit. The public would rally initially, but after a few speeches she would remind everyone why they would rather have cancer than have her on their televisions. She would quickly become a highly unpleasant version of Gerald Ford, a place holder until things could be sorted.

The point is the managerial class got their wish. The bad orange man is gone, but it is going to come with a hefty price tag. It will not be long before many behind the rigging of the election will have buyer’s remorse. That will only add more fuel to the fire. Given that the geniuses behind this caper could not see just a few months down the road, it is unlikely they will navigate this minefield they created for themselves. That’s why they want those troops in the city. They know they will need them.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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 sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.