The Secret Police

Posted on June 30, 2021 by thezman

Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the panopticon, which is a type of prison designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The system allows all prisoners to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. The image that comes to mind is of a single eyeball in the sky that is always scanning for rule breakers. The key is the uncertainty. You never know if you are being watched by the guards of the prison.

This is a powerful image that always comes to mind when people realize that their rulers are spying on them. It is the wrong image. America is not a panopticon, but a synopticon. This is a concept conceived by Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen that means surveillance of the few by the many. Mathiesen belonged to the prison abolition movement which advocated for the elimination of prisons and prisons systems in favor of anarchist inspired alternatives.

The world in which we live today is one where everyone is spying on everyone, except the rulers, all the time. The local business installs cameras outside the warehouse to prevent vandals from defacing the walls with graffiti. Those cameras record everything and store it on the cloud. The owner is told the video stays on the cloud for seven days, but in reality, it is there forever. It just gets moved to a different database, accessible by the security state whenever they think to use it.

All around us, the vast network of recording devises uploads data to various databases that are harvested by the secret police and stored in their systems. Americans don’t think we have secret police, but Americans also think their votes count. The main feature of liberal democracy is it keeps the people living in a fog of self-delusion about who is really in charge of society. That is what we see with the secret police. They have no name and no location, so they do not exist for most people.

One of those people is not Tucker Carlson, however. His organization was visited by someone claiming to be a whistleblower. This person provided information to them from their texts and e-mails that could only be known by Team Tucker. The claim was that the NSA was using its super-duper spying tools to harvest their data. The idea was to find something they could use to get Tucker fired and then place it in the media. This is something the FBI does when framing people.

Like most Americans, Tucker takes his rulers at face value. If the government is spying on someone, it is in an official capacity from an official office. That is not how the secret police work in the American synopticon. The secret police are instead a loose network of fellow travelers that occupy positions inside the large institutions, both private and public. It is a secret society in which the membership is informal and rooted in shared beliefs and access to information.

In the case of Tucker, it is unlikely that the NSA was using its super-duper listening tools to gather up his e-mails. Whether such a thing exists is debatable. This data exists in databases both private and public. There is no need to sniff every packet on the internet in real time when millions of people volunteer to capture, collate and store the data on private systems. When those systems are maintained by people in the loose network that makes up the secret police, getting access is never difficult.

A good example is the insurrection hoax. The banks and mobile carriers were quick to volunteer their services to the hoaxers in the inner party. They provided mobile phone data and credit card data without being asked. All of a sudden, within hours of the event, the FBI and DOJ were getting waves of information about people who may or may not have been at the event. In the synopticon, the FBI is reduced to errand boys when it comes to framing enemies of the system.

In the case of Tucker, this is probably an operation not aimed at Tucker, but at his fans out there in flyover country. The secret police send this guy to tell Team Tucker that they are spying on him. They probably got some stuff from Google or Apple to use as a prop in this little drama. It is entirely possible the operation is being run out of Silicon Valley and the FBI official they are using is just a fellow traveler. His credentials as a high-ranking government agent adds authenticity to the caper.

Of course, Tucker ran straight to the camera to report on what happened, because that is what you do if you are a journalist in a democracy. There is the value of the self-delusion maintained by liberal democracy. If Tucker saw himself as a subject in an authoritarian surveillance state, he would have evaluated this event from that perspective and kept quiet about it. He would have assumed they were targeting him, hoping he would blab about it on television.

Now, if this operation is not about spying on Tucker in order to get him fired, then what is the point of it? The primary tool of control in both the panopticon and synopticon is psychological, not informational. The theory is that the uncertainty and lack of privacy instills submissiveness. The prisoner, never sure when he is being watched and what is being watched, begins to assume his captors are always watching and know everything about him, even his innermost thoughts.

This has always been a key feature of the secret police. They want their targets to think everyone and anyone could be a spy. Since the ruling class sees every white person in America as a potential threat, the secret police are trying to make sure every white person knows they are being watched. Getting Tucker, a guy who thinks UFOs are real, to play along in this drama is not terribly difficult. Millions of white people who watch Tucker are now thinking they are under surveillance.

In every corrupt regime, the secret police are a symptom of the rot, but they also reflect the nature of the ruling class. The KGB in post-war Russia was highly bureaucratized, reflecting the nature of the regime. They slowly began to ignore organized crime, as that was hard to address, and focused on trivial crime. On the other hand, the Okhrana, which was the Tsars secret police, was a highly personal operation. It was ad hoc and relied on individuals to infiltrate enemies of the Tsar.

In a liberal democracy like America, no one really knows who is actually in charge, so no one knows the nature of the secret police. There are formal institutions, just as we see in politics, but those institutions never do what the people want, which is what you see with elected officials. Just as with elected officials, there always seems to be a hidden agenda with the security forces. It is as if there is an invisible hand on the levers of power that is only known by what it does.

Just as the secret police reflects the nature of the system, it also gives us a sense of the system’s overall health. The more threatened the ruler, the more willing he is to use explicit force to intimidate his opponents. The confident ruler is willing to play cat and mouse, often for his own amusement. We saw this with he Tsar as century ago, where he was willing to be more explicit in the use of violence. The less secure he was in his position, the more willing he was to shoot people.

What we are seeing today is an effort to public intimidate opponents. Torturing political prisoners in secret DC jails and now advertising a domestic spying operation suggest genuine fear in the system. They really do believe that Trump was put in office by a secret conspiracy against them. This paranoia and fear is driving the explicit use of force by the rulers. That invisible hand is moving from the shadows, into the open and becoming more obvious in order to intimidate the enemy.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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

sa***@mi*********************.com

.

Words Are Keys

Posted on June 29, 2021 by thezman

It is a popular joke among the worst people that the best people need to find a minority to endorse their preferences before they can express them. In this context, the “best people” are the poohbahs of Conservative Inc. No matter how obvious or justified their position, so-called conservatives need to prove they are the best people by searching high and low for a “person of color” who agrees with them. Candace Owens has gotten rich by blessing the positions of conservatives.

It is the slave mentality, of course. The master is always projecting pride and power, as those are the things he values. He is the master, the man in charge, so he places the most value on the things that are useful to him as the master. The slave, on the other hand, is obsequious and submissive. The slave tries to express his will through quiet subversion, always conscious of the master. In American politics, conservatives are the slave, always displaying their submissiveness.

You see this with the growing controversy over Critical Race Theory. Conservative Inc. was silent on the issue until a black women stood up against it at a local school board meeting in Virginia. You could hear the sighs of relief echoing around Washington as conservatives finally had their champion. This antiwhite pogrom aimed at white children was no longer antiwhite, it was racist! Ever since, the conservative panjandrums have been piling in the company Lincoln with the DR3 tags.

Even Chris Rufo, the Andy Ngo of CRT, has struggled to accept the reality of his own reporting on the issue. He has been trying hard to make this about racism, rather than the long war on white people. He has personal reasons for it, but it is clear that he really believes what they say about white people. That is, if two or more white people get together outside the presence of nonwhites, they will immediately start planning for the new camp system in the Fourth Reich.

That last bit may seem like an exaggeration, but it is the root of what drives things like Critical Race Theory. Another person desperate to tone police, while riding the wave of controversy, is Karlyn Borysenko. She was sent in by the usual suspects to tell white people that the term “antiwhite” is very bad. Here she is with Patrick Casey explaining that the term antiwhite promotes white solidarity and white positivity. In this clip, she says that this always leads to genocide.

In fairness to Rufo, he seems to have figured out that he was speaking to no one by making CRT about racism against nonwhites. The parents flipping out about this stuff are all white. The people in the crowd cheering them on are white. He seems to have settled for a middle ground of implying that it is antiwhite racism. Scott Greer seems to be happy with that phrasing as well. The Wall Street Journal is fine with this new, oblique way of framing the issue.

As was brilliantly pointed out yesterday, the R-word can only apply to whites, so this new formulation is nonsensical. When someone on the Left hears the phrase “racism against whites” she hears Charlie Brown’s teacher. Racism can mean only one thing and that is prejudice plus power. In the fantasy world of the Left, the only people with power are white people, so they are the only people who can be racist. As is always the case with the Left, compromise is suicide.

The reason for this is that the Left is a hive, dividing the world into those inside the hive walls and those outside the hive walls. This is reflected in their language. There are words and concepts that can be used as weapons against their enemies and then there is language used by the enemy, that justifies attacking them. When the say language is violence, they really mean it. It is either a justification for their use of violence against outsiders or a call to violence against outsiders.

This is why the word “antiwhite” is so powerful. The Left has no way to redefine it as a slur against their enemy. Worse yet, when they attack their enemy for using it, they confirm the definition of the word. The biggest problem for them is the word strips them of moral authority. When the Left finger-wags about something like racism, they do so as the moral authorities on the issue. Cast as antiwhite, they immediately become just another snout at the trough of the culture war.

The Left has always relied upon informational asymmetry. They operate as pure partisans, while the other side is objectivists. That is, the Left wants to win every fight and the Right wants to find the correct answer. If the Right ever embraces partisanship, then it becomes a genuine fight. Since numbers matter, keeping white people chained to simpleminded individualism has been key. The word antiwhite is a key to unlock the chains and that is terrifying to the Left.

This does not mean the war is won just because the Left is on the defensive over Critical Race Theory. As Joe Sobran pointed out a quarter century ago, “The white
man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And superiority excites envy.” It is only when white people come to terms with this reality will they abandon the slave mentality and begin to assert their power again. This minor slave revolt over CRT is merely a hint of what lies ahead.

Corporate Rebels

Posted on June 28, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week it is a language lesson in how to communicate in your new country. There is the Sunday Thoughts podcast up behind the green door, for those who enjoy the sound of my voice. This week I spent a lot of time making sport of General Milley.

It has been observed that people who claim to be free thinkers are always people trapped in the narrowest lanes of dogma. They somehow confuse their love of conformity for rebelliousness. On the other hand, people who do question the prevailing orthodoxies tend not to think about it very much. Instead, they follow their nose on the alternative path, even if it violates a taboo. This is why genuine free thinkers tend to be victims of the revolutions they initially support.

In the current age, this contrast is especially stark. The people claiming to be the wild and crazy guys of politics are not only conventional, but they also tend to be wedded to the oldest ideas. They also enjoy full support from an increasingly authoritarian regime, while claiming to oppose authoritarianism. A good example is someone like Tim Pool, who is a perfect example of how the regime creates its own opposition. He thinks he is a rebel while broadcasting from regime platforms.

The Right is festooned with housebroken rebels. This is a legacy of Bill Buckley, who defined the opposition to the Left within the bounds of the acceptable. It was the Left, of course, that decided what was acceptable. Over the last 70 years, every great purge was led by the Buckley crowd. The Birchers, paleocons, populists, immigration patriots and so on were denounced and purged by Conservatives, after the Left decided they were no longer allowed in polite company.

In the current age, the contrast between the swelling hordes of people outside the bounds of the acceptable and the so-called conservatives is glaring. It was not always so, which would explain why so-called conservatives carried on as if they were rebels trying to topple the system. In the 1990’s, for example, Conservative Inc. could plausibly argue that the paleo remnant turning up at Ross Perot rallies or Ron Paul events were just a noisy minority, not the real alternative to the Left.

A similar dynamic seems to be at play on the Left. The internet is full of people claiming to be the real Left. They tend to rally around people like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez as the rebels against the system. Unlike those conventional thinkers in the mainstream media, the democratic socialist are the real rebels. They are the ones challenging the established order. The fact that democratic socialism is the plaything of a billionaire currency speculator never seems to matter.

This false consciousness is understandable among the street gangs and rioters recruited to cause mayhem. Most of the people were see smashing windows and bellowing about Nazis are just day labor hired for the task. The typical “black bloc” is populated with drug addicts, homeless people, and random losers. They are organized by the children of managerial class types, building their resume. Nothing opens doors in the managerial class like a turn as a street radical.

The real puzzle comes with the branded radicals. In this case, “branded” should be read as corporate branded. The Young Turks, for example, imagine themselves to be rebels fighting corporate media and corporate politics. They take their name from the Young Turk Revolution that toppled the Ottoman Empire’s monarchy. Cenk Uygur, one of the creators, describes himself as a young insurgent. He and the others are leading a revolution from the Left against the system.

The fact that his channel is the creation of the system, operates on the platforms of the system and is funded by the people who benefit the most from the system seems to be lost on him and his audience. What makes the whole thing even more amusing is that Cenk Uygur is a middle-aged man. The only thing that would make their enterprise more ridiculous is if the “Young Turks” were a collection of octogenarians working from the human resource department of Goldman Sachs.

If you want to see just how much American politics has been corporatized and homogenized since the end of the Cold War, look at the Left. The typical left-wing person in America will defend to the death the right of Apple or Amazon to exploit their workers in order to make a profit. The far-left of American political discourse now arrives at the debate dressed like race car drivers. They are the house slaves of the American political plantation, but think they are John Brown.

One reason for the political discourse being dominated by deluded corporate flunkies is it pays extremely well. Cenk Uygur would be spending his days in traffic court if not for his willingness to play this role in corporates politics. Instead of struggling to pay the mortgage, he gets to live in a mansion. This is where Bill Buckley was a pioneer back in the before times. He made selling out into a highly lucrative career by making it look like a principled stand against his paymasters.

That explains the cynical, but what about the truly deluded? The internet is full of people volunteering to carry the torch for corporate conservatism or corporate progressivism, while thinking themselves as free thinking rebels. These people volunteer to be sheep while thinking they are wolves. The people showing up at this summer’s Trump rallies are not doing it for money. The losers calling them fascists on Twitter are convinced they are fighting the racist system.

The simple answer is that the supply of people who are not terribly bright, but sure they are on top of things is quite large. Even if 20% of the population falls into this category, the system has an army of noisy simpletons it can control. That is more than enough to drown out the real opposition. It also creates social proof. People unhappy with the system can find a corporately controlled mob to join. The fact that it is safe inside the Cenk Uygur and Tim Pool tents adds to the appeal.

There is another reason. This quote from John Derbyshire’s We Are Doomed is useful in this context. “The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”

That is what these sorts of politics satisfy. The fans of Cenk Uygur or Tim Pool get to feel like they are on the winning team. They are also told that the tides of history or the immutable facts of the universe are on their side. The exaggerated size of the audience offers the social proof and the pseudo fellowship of on-line communities. Most important, they get to hate on the bad guys. That is the real draw of this sort of corporate sponsored politics. You get to safely hate your enemies.

What never intrudes is reality. When Tim Pool says “I am not afraid of being challenged or wrong” he means that in the context of corporate sponsored politics. He is perfectly willing to sit down with the folks sponsored by Amazon or Apple to talk about the latest pronouncements from Team Walmart. What will never happen is any of these people sitting down with someone who genuinely questions the premise of corporate sponsored politics or the system that makes it possible.

In a way, the corporate sponsored rebel is the commercialization of the old tactics used by state security agencies. The FBI does not have to run COINTELPRO, because YouTube and Twitter do it for them. Instead of agents from the state secretly supporting the accommodationist wing of the opposition, corporate America hires them, gives them a big platform and the freedom to operate on-line. The rest fall in line because they just assume the marketplace has spoken.

Dissident Economics

Posted on June 25, 2021 by thezman

I have been a reading a biography of Nikolai Bukharin, probably the second most important Bolshevik theorists after Lenin. You cannot read about old commies without also reading about their ideology. These guys were consumed with politics and the disputes about politics. All of their relationships were through politics, usually along ideological lines. In fact, they never seemed to have genuine friendships, just ideological allies in the many ideological disputes at the time.

The Bolsheviks were a lot like the intensely on-line people of today. The people who make Twitter what it is are 100% committed to both their politics and the life of politics they experience on-line. It is why every minor disagreement becomes a great drama that always ends in tears. Bukharin and Lenin would have big fights over what turned out to be trivial difference in language. Of course, all of the old commies were fond of denouncing one another as deviationists.

Another thing that shines through when reading about the old communists is they had a Calvinist’s faith in their own destiny. The inevitable end of capitalism was as certain to them that the sun would rising in the morning and setting in the evening. Their only concern was in mapping out how it would eventually meet its end. They made some very prudent observations about what they called capitalism. In fact, they gave us the word capitalism as a label for what they observed at the time.

The weird thing about their observations of capitalism is that you get the sense that their good observations were accidents. They were so obsessed with proving the inevitability of communism, they looked past their bets observations about the present. Often, they would focus on the nutty claims about the present, rather than the insightful one, because the nutty claim fit their narrative. The French Revolution reads like a new madness gripping humanity. Communism has the same feel.

The funny thing is though, all political theorists on the Left, I would place libertarians on the Left as well, had this assumption about their politics. Once they arrived at some sort of theoretical framework to explain the world, they started to assume that events would naturally arrive at some determined end point. The superiority of markets would inevitably triumph over central planning. The moral superiority of communism would inevitably lead to revolution and the end of capitalism.

Of course, this determinism is prominent with our rulers. They are always reminding us that they are on the right side of history. That is their get out of jail free card, which allows them to dismiss critics. The communists were like this. The logic errors in Marx were dismissed as technical issues that would work themselves out as capitalism reached its denouement and socialism rose up as the inevitable replacement. It was the source of their fanaticism, this certainty about what was coming next.

Interestingly, this fixation on the inevitable future led them to do no thinking about the details of that future. This is something we see today. On the one hand, their sense of historical inevitability drove them to smash the present, but it prevented them from thinking about the details of that inevitable future. We see this today with the latest spasms of the cultural revolution. They are sure that white people will not be in the glorious future, but how that will work is never considered.

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 15-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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Marxism
17:00: Austrians
32:00: Marketism
47:00: Dissident Economics
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/I4MbT0GY3F4

The Hothouse

Posted on June 24, 2021 by thezman

The sales pitch for the American political system is that it is a robust debate between two distinct political parties. The Republicans and Democrats are coalitions of interests opposed to one another. The groups that make up each party are held together by a shared ideological outlook. The Republicans are the conservative party, and the Democrats are the liberal party. The political process adjudicates the disputes between the parties over public policy and the result is a compromise.

In reality, America is a one party system. It has been since Gettysburg. The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes. The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.

As for those two ideologies, they are just two faces of a single ruling class ideology that is something like a religion now. There is left-liberalism and there is right-liberalism held together by a common moral framework. Like the old Bolsheviks, the left side of the American ideology is maximalist and radical. It wants to usher in the promises of the revolution right now. The right side is more cautious, preferring an evolutionary approach to ushering in the promised utopia.

Unlike the old communists, the American ideology has always existed in a popular political system, so it is built to sell itself to the public. The main role of the right-liberals is to protect the left-liberals from themselves. They function as barrier between the tenets of the one true faith and any questioning of the faith. The left side is the heart of the beast, driving the agenda and pushing society along from one fad to the next, always chasing the avatar of egalitarian paradise.

This arrangement has worked amazingly well. Perhaps too well. It has been over a century since there has been a threat to the system. Anarchists and communists at the start of the last century started to get some traction, but they were never really a threat to the basic arrangements. Otherwise, it has been smooth sailing for the uniparty system for generations. The left-liberals are free to dream up new social innovations without being disturbed and the right stands quietly at guard.

The trouble is the party is looking like a freak show inside a hot house. For example, the Air Force now has drag shows to boost morale. To normal people, this is completely nuts (pun intended), but to the people in charge it is perfectly normal. In fact, they think it is bizarre that anyone would question it. They are not entirely wrong, as the people who arranged it will never be pressed on it. The politicians all agree that drag queens are who we are now, and the press echoes the sentiment.

Where the ruling orthodoxy finds itself is in a place where there is never a need to explain themselves and defend their positions. The right-liberals never challenge the left-liberals on orthodoxy. Both sides just put on shows where they pretend to disagree, but then kick back together after the show to laugh about it. The right-liberals have insulated themselves from defending their position. They tell themselves that they are simply too good to discuss these things with their critics.

The folks at the Daily Wire are supposed to be the smart kids of conservatism, but they spend their days making sure the hothouse is airtight. Ben Shapiro’s one venture outside the tightly controlled environment of his life ended in disaster. Ever since that public relations debacle his people have made sure that no one can utter a discouraging word in his presence. In fact, that whole scene has become a closed shop, never interacting with anyone outside their hive.

It is not just the pundits who have become hot house flowers. Look at what happens to the military leaders when they go before Congress. This guy went before Congress and told one whopper after another. To outsiders, he looks like a complete fool, but inside that room he is just par for the course. Anyone reading this could have wrecked him with a few simple questions, but no one in the room has the intelligence or the temperament to question anything.

This is the motivation behind the mass censorship and de-platforming. The people inside the political system are incapable of defending or even discussing their positions and they live in fear of having to do it. It is not so much that the critics have great arguments or have superior debating skills. That is a silly conceit. It is simply that the people outside the system, the dissidents, are comfortable defending their positions and discussing them in public. They can take a punch.

This underlying sense of weakness is probably what lies behind the persecution of the January protestors. January 6th, from the perspective of the ruling class, was an emperor has no clothes moment. The torture and torment of the protestors is as much about reassuring themselves that they are tough and in charge as it is about sending a message to the Dirt People. The ruling class revealed themselves to be cowards and now they are lashing out in a fit of petty spite.

All ruling elites have an abundance of sissies and ridiculous people. They are the entertainment and decoration for the serious men who run things. Those serious men are made serious by regular contact with reality. Remove that contact and those serious men become as silly and ridiculous as their retainers. That is where the empire finds itself now, ruled by fops and popinjays living in a hothouse. They live in fear of someone opening the door and letting in reality.

The Gatekeeper Is Broken

Posted on June 23, 2021 by thezman

A popular concept in right wing politics is the gatekeeper or sometimes called the controlled opposition. This is the person or group that appears to be in opposition to the Left, but is an insulation layer between the Left and genuine critics. The function of the gatekeeper is to prevent people from abandoning the political morality of the Left, while at the same time making sure to lose every fight with the Left. They channel opposition into positions that can never succeed.

Ben Shapiro is the most obvious example. His primary role is to funnel all opposition into a dead end. His answer to the tech monopolies, for example, is to tell people to build their own new internet. After all, only a communist would demand the government prevent private actors from trampling your rights. Of course, he always tone policing the language of the people he claims to represent. The point is also to cleanse the language of rhetoric that could be effective against the Left.

What gets little discussion is just how this happens. There is an assumption that the people playing the role of gatekeeper know what they are doing. This is that bourgeois objectivism that is the bane of right-wing politics. It is the assumption that all political actors are motivated by self-interest. They are keenly aware of those interests and their actions reflect it. Therefore, people on the Right assume the gatekeepers are acting with purpose and are probably in league with the Left.

A good example of this is the CRT business. Parents around the country suddenly learned that the schools are teaching their kids that white people are born evil and their only way to salvation is to hate their ancestors. The gatekeepers immediately leapt into action to lecture them that saying CRT is antiwhite is wrong. Suddenly, the purpose of conservatism is to prevent anyone from noticing that the cultural revolution is explicitly and overtly antiwhite. It almost seems coordinated.

There is a familiar pattern to how the system has responded to opposition to the antiwhite pogroms launched by the party. The defunct social media platform Parler was not about creating an alternative to Twitter, so much as creating a regime-acceptable alternative to the genuinely open platform Gab. When that failed, the usual suspects were ready with another version called Retalk. Many of the people promoting this effort were anti-Trump cranks now trying to lure his audience.

An underappreciated aspect of the gatekeeper production system is just how quickly it spits out hollow clones of legitimate opposition. Once Nick Fuentes started getting national attention, the clone machine started making copies. Here is a fake America First clone produced soon after the election. Fuentes has been promoting the term “America First” for a while. He sells branded products and his supporters wave big flags at rallies with that slogan, so the system just cloned it.

The system also appears to be trying to clone Fuentes himself and his imitators among the young generation. Here is a group called American Moment, formed by four young gay men to be an acceptable version of the groypers. The system men were out flogging it as if it were coordinated. Here is National Review promoting it. Here is American Mind, promoting itself by promoting the fake groypers. As if by magic a group of nobodies was suddenly a topic of conversation.

In the effort to co-opt Fuentes and his youth movement, we see a pattern emerge in how gatekeepers are created. First, we get the fake version of the genuine alternative mentioned in conservative media. Then what quickly follows is a halfhearted negation of the fake version of the alternative. This pseudo-dialectic is supposed to draw in those unhappy with the system. They have to pick a side in this fake debate. The point is to exclude the genuine opposition from the process.

The sandwich technique is a staple of liberal democratic politics. Since few arguments in favor of the status quo can withstand scrutiny, they create a set of false choices to contain all discussion. In economics the choice is “free enterprise” versus “communism” with regards to corporate corruption of society. In other issues, like the race debate, one choice is an absurdly immoral position and defeatism. You either buckle under or you are a Nazi, and you deserve the assault from the Left.

Of course, the main project of so-called conservatives is to figure out a way to create a fake Trump in order to sideline the populist and nationalist opposition to the corporatist uniparty monopoly. Trump did not get anything done in office, but the system still fears him, because of the bad thoughts he arouses in the people. Trump running in 2024 would both reveal the ridiculousness of conservatism (again) and generate the sorts of conversations that the regime considers dangerous.

The first version of fake Trump is J.D. Vance. He is a more successful version of the character Keven Williams has played at National Review. That is, a guy from flyover country who abandoned the people and culture that produced him in order to confirm the biases of the managerial elite. He provides them with authenticity, by displaying a sympathy for and a knowledge of the Dirt People, the great dispossessed, but he confirms the Cloud People patronizing view of them.

You will notice that the system defends itself with rhetoric. Democracy is all about winning arguments, not establishing, or accepting truth. It is why democracy produces so many sophists. It is also why Twitter is so popular with regime lackeys. People with the natural instinct to defend their masters and a gift for doing so in a few sentences can become heroes on the platform. A system built on clever rhetoric and logical fallacies is naturally good at defending itself with the same tools.

This natural defense does have its limits. A decade ago, the Tea Party movement was easily coopted by corporate flunkies. This time it is struggling to do the same thing with the populism Trump rode to office and the growing dissident movement. The fake groypers, for example, cannot draw flies. Their YouTube shows should have crickets as the background noise. This is despite the hype and protection. Fuentes and his merry band draw tens of thousands to obscure platforms.

It could very well be that this natural defense mechanism only works if the system itself is viewed as fundamentally legitimate. Once people begin to think the system is rigged or inherently corrupt, the defense mechanisms not only fail, but they also become proof of the corruption. National Review outsourced their management to Bangalore recently because the site no longer has an audience. In other words, the failure of gatekeeping is a sign of systemic failure.

Alternative Ruminations

Posted on June 22, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is a new movie review behind the green door. This week the movie is Fargo, the great 1990’s crime comedy. For those on SubscribeStar it is here and for those on Buy Me A Beer it is in your e-mail and here as well.

Alternative history is one of those things that should be more popular in Hollywood, as it opens the door for creativity. “What if the South won the Civil War” would let the filmmaker run wild with all sorts of claims about the past, for example. For the same reason, it should be more popular with people in general. It makes for a good start to a campfire story. “Imagine if our enemies from the past had won and we were forced to live in a world of their creation…” is a good scary story.

For whatever reason, alternative history is not very popular. Revisionist history, on the other hand is popular. In fact, revisionism, outside of one subject, is the norm in the history departments of the West. The only thing historians do is question the official narrative of various historical events. The new narrative usually tries to explain the past according to the new morality. Fitting the past into the great story justifying the moral claims of the people in charge is the point of history.

This is why any attempt to question the official narrative of the Second World War is strictly prohibited. The entire ruling class structure is built upon the myths and legends fabricated in the aftermath of the war. The moral center of the American empire is the assertion that the morality of the empire is universal. More important, it is the logical endpoint of the great historical dialectic. It is the fulfillment of the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence, words made flesh.

This has created a massive blind spot in our ruling class. By condemning old enemies, especially the fascists, to the pit of the demons, they don’t have to think much about those systems and how they could have evolved. How would fascism have evolved if the British cut a deal with the Germans over Poland? If not for Churchill’s blood lust for war, a deal could have been made to avert war in the West. How would that have changed the course of fascism in both Germany and Italy?

One possible outcome is it would have quickly evolved into something very similar to what we see in America. The rapid rebuild of the German economy by the fascists bound the state and corporate interests in a way that is familiar to us today. Organized labor was suppressed, in favor of the state speaking for labor. This is not much different from the present model in America. Using Jews and Slavs as cheap labor is not all that different from what American business does with guest workers.

It is generally assumed that the economic model of fascism could never last, as it was really just a form of war socialism. First it was the war on the devastating consequences of the Great War. Then it was the build up to reassert power in Europe. Once war broke out, the economies of fascist states were organized around war. This type of economics is assumed to burn bright but not last. If left alone, the inequities would lead to social unrest and demands for reform.

This was the experience of the Bolsheviks, in a different context. The revolution and then the civil war forced the party to requisition everything they could touch and put it toward the war effort. Once the civil war was over, it became clear that the system could not last. People would not continue to sacrifice their labor for the party when the party was no longer under direct threat. How long would the German people have tolerated the iron rule of the party without the threat of war?

The present gives us some clue. For some time now America has lived under the iron grip of the uniparty. The last agent of change produced by the political system was Reagan and that was half a century ago. The reforms of Reagan were popular, but never challenged the ruling class. Since then, the system has produced one clone after another, with the exception of Trump. He was quickly neutralized and then ejected from the system like a dangerous foreign object from the body.

The party has also kept the country on a war footing. The Cold War shaped the American empire and the ruling class. They need war to exist, so when the Cold War ended, the search for new enemies commenced. First, we got the crusades against the Muslims, which got started with Bush I. Now it is a tossup between China and Russia as to who will be the new devil. The uniparty needs war socialism and war socialism needs an enemy to justify its excesses.

This is why some believe the fascists would have had no choice but to start a war in Europe, even if the British had not been so willing. This type of political system needs to be on war footing. The permanent revolution of communist systems is an effort to institutionalize the creation of enemies around which the system can rally. The current war on white people is very similar. It is an effort to create a permanent enemy of the party that can never be defeated, but must always be opposed.

Of course, the American empire has been at war for close to a century, but unlike the fascists or communists, it persists. The reason is it has not picked the wrong enemies around which to organize the war. It could have been dumb luck. The Soviets came to believe they had to tread lightly around the Americans. The Kennedy administration’s desire to blow up the world over Cuba was a key lesson. The American ruling class was composed of fanatics, not sober minded realists.

Taken together, it suggests that there really was no alternative timeline in which war was averted and the fascists tried to figure out how to make it work. The Americans were on the prowl for an enemy. The fascists systems needed an enemy to justify their control of society. Stalin’s revolution from above required an enemy around which to organize and he was running out of internal enemies to kill. The great contest between various forms of war socialism was inevitable.

Against Nature

Posted on June 21, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. I will now be remembered as the first dissident to denounce Charles Murray. Someone has to be the first. There is also a new Sunday Thoughts podcast up behind the green door for those interested.

Liberal democracy is both an ideology and a form of government. In the former case it is generally defined as a democracy constrained by the principles of liberalism, which are individual rights, secularism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and a market-based economy. The underlying assumption of liberal democracy is that all members have a stake in society and therefore have a right and a duty to participate in the political life of the society.

As a practical matter, this means elections between multiple distinct political parties able to participate equally in elections. It means power is diffused through multiple branches of government by assigning distinct powers to each branch. Most important, it means the rule of law in everyday life. That law is bound by a set of principles, usually codified in a written constitution, that spell out the limits of government. It also defines private property, equal protection before the law and civil liberties.

This is the very general definition of western political systems. Children in the West are taught this in school. These things are repeated by politicians in various ways and echoed by the mass media. Whenever there is a need to a bad buy on the world stage, western leaders, which usually means American leaders, point at the accused, and claim he is violating the principles of liberal democracy. Putin, for example, is the arch-villain because Russia is not a liberal democracy.

Because the West assumes that liberal democracy is the best political system ever created, no one bothers to ask what sort of people is necessary for a liberal democracy to function as expected. This was the lesson of communism. It required things of people that are not present in sufficient quantities to make communism work as communist ideology promised. Even after murdering millions that did not fit in, the Soviet system never accomplished what the creators promised.

Similarly, fascism made assumptions about the population. For a fascists society to function in the long term it required a people who were homogenous. A system built on the nation must be controlled by the nation. A diverse, heterogenous population cannot make a system based on ethnic solidarity work. That is supposed to be the lesson of the last century. Fascism could not work, because such a system excludes certain people from the political process, which is always wrong.

The short life of communist and fascist systems would seem to prove that point about matching the system to the people. What about liberal democracy? The relatively short run of this ideology suggests is requires massively diverse populations. Every western democracy quickly committed itself to overwhelming its native population with people from around the world. Even societies with no experience with immigration quickly embraced open borders and multiculturalism.

The trouble here is we actually know something about the internal dynamics of highly diverse societies. Empires since the bronze age have struggled with how to organize populations of people with little in common, beyond their ruler. This is always the challenge of maintaining an empire. More recently, the United States was founded with a highly diverse population. While the majority were of English stock, the cultural diversity was pronounced, predating settlement.

There are four ways to manage a diverse society. The most common solution is the use of hard segregation. This is the preferred method of empires. The various tribes are sequestered into their areas. The ruler makes sure that the tribes respect the boundaries of one another. Even ancient cities had separate quarters for separate peoples of the empire. In America, this was the common way northern parts of the country dealt with the black-white issue.

In the South, another form of segregation was used, a soft segregation that accepted the math of the racial problem. The black population was simply too large to sequester them in their own physical space. Instead, a soft-segregation based on separate logical spaces was developed. The races had separate spaces within the public space, that reinforced that the two groups were operating in different spheres. Southern segregation was a cultural phenomenon, rather than a physical one.

Both of these approaches were deemed in violation of liberal democracy in the last century, so both have been banned. The soft segregation of the South was eliminated by force and the hard discrimination of the North, while tolerated, is condemned as an artifact of the worst of times. The most highly segregated parts of the country are in the areas most obsessed with racial equality. These are also the areas that embrace the ideals of liberal democracy with the greatest enthusiasm.

This conflict has resulted in a new way to manage diversity. There is the loud and constant repetition of the ideals of liberal democracy, coupled with equally loud demands for racial, ethnic, and sexual equality. To reconcile the conflicts, we get a growing list of exceptions to liberalism and democracy in order to rectify the fact that diverse people have diverse life outcomes. Proportionality is now the operating synthesis of egalitarianism and liberal democracy.

Equality before the law, for example, must give way to racial policies that discriminate against whites, in order to get blacks caught up in some area. Often, past violations in the pre-liberal democratic age are used as justification. South Asians in America will get special privileges, because the British were not always nice to their subjects when India was her colony. Equality before the law has given way to a honeycomb of exceptions and carveouts to achieve a desired proportionality.

What we know thus far about this approach is it creates social conflict and slowly undermines the very basics of the liberal society. Put another way, what this effort to make liberal democracy work in a diverse population tells us is you can have one or the other, but not both. A liberal democracy can work if the population is fairly uniform, with a clear majority operating in its interest. Diversity, on the other hand, seems to only work with an authoritarian government or no government.

This is another lesson of history. The Balkans could work as a highly diverse society, just as the North of America worked as a multiracial society. It required hard segregation and a very firm hand to enforce it. On the other hand, early America made a multicultural and multiracial society work by leaving the people to sort out their own local arrangements with regards to diversity. People self-segregated and evolved rules to maintain the peace, based on their local conditions.

Neither approach fits into liberalism very well. The segregation required to keep the peace in a diverse society not only violates the basic rules of liberal democracy, but it also violates the morality of the liberal democrat. In other words, the required morality within liberal democratic system prevents the system from doing what is required to maintain order in a diverse population. The ideals of the system come into conflict with the natural realty of the human condition.

If liberal democracy demands maximum diversity of the population, but you cannot have liberal democracy with a diverse population, then we are back to the same problem posed by communism and fascism. Liberal democracy, at least as currently defined, requires a population incompatible with it and a ruling elite embracing a morality that prevents them from doing the basics required of a ruling class. As with other political ideologies of the last century, this one violates nature.

The Myth Of Democracy

Posted on June 18, 2021 by thezman

Happy Juneteenth everyone! Officially, this long tradition dating back to Monday is celebrated on Saturday, but the ruling regime has declared the preceding Friday as a day off for our hardworking civil servants. The rest of us, of course, will have to continue slaving away at the salt mines, but the people who really make this country work will get the day off to celebrate the people who built the country. Even as we toil, we should take a moment to think about both groups.

In a way, the ridiculousness of this new holiday fits perfectly with the absurdity of modern liberal democracy. The show this week is mostly about how the system is nothing like it is claimed. Instead of bringing the citizens into the decision making process, it systematically excludes the majority. This new holiday is a great example of how it works. Exactly no one wanted it. Few even heard of it. The people have many higher concerns, but they are ignored in favor of this novelty.

It is also good timing for Charles Murray’s new book. The thesis of the book is that the elites need to accept biological reality or face the wrath of the angry Saxon. This new holiday is a good example of what he means. Ruling class whites pandering to blacks creates friction between whites and blacks over trivial items. It encourages nonwhites to embrace tribal politics, which discourages whites from embracing the active indifference necessary to make a multiracial society work.

There are other things wrong with Murray’s argument. The great Roger Devlin has posted a comprehensive review on VDare. There will be other reviews from dissidents in the coming weeks. Ed Dutton may have summarized it best when he said that Murray is right, but he should have written this book in 1965 or even 1985. At this point, the die is cast and there is no escaping the thing he is warning against. The fact that Washington just created this absurd new holiday is proof of that.

Of course, the fact that both parties eagerly embraced this idiotic idea makes clear that the elites will never face reality on their own. History says they will have their awakening as the trap door swings open. The system we have today is unsustainable, for the simple reason the people at the top define themselves by their hatred of the people over whom the rule. Most of the pols who voted for this new holiday did so out of spite and the rests did so to curry favor with those spiteful mutants.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Theory Of Democracy
12:00: Abortion
22:00: Homosexual Marriage
32:00: Immigration
42:00: The Reality of Liberal Democracy
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/sB7ICEPV9kc

Middlemen

Posted on June 17, 2021 by thezman

The American economy is a middleman economy, designed around the idea of there being a person or group of persons between the parties of a transaction. No matter how trivial the transaction, there is someone trying to get in on the deal. This middleman brings nothing to the transaction. He adds no value and only facilitates the deal because the rules have been set so that he is required. The middleman is the ever-present silent partner that is the point of the economic arrangements.

If you go back a century, selling a house involved three parties. The seller and buyer, of course, and the government. You had to register the transaction with the government so it was known who held the deed for the property. If there was a lien on the property, then the bank would be involved, but only on one side. Today there are dozens of people involved in the transaction. The government is promising to add dozens more in order to flood stable neighborhoods with magic.

Just about every transaction in the economy now has silent partners. This is why the economy is still a mess due to the Covid lockdowns. Shutting down supply chains was always a dumb idea, but getting them restarted means activating millions of middlemen who have to get paid for the system to work. In a completely financialized economy, nothing moves without money moving first. The money men are the ever-present middlemen in every deal, no matter how small.

The riddle for all human societies since the first settlements was what to do with the people who could not work or would not work. The old and the sick needed care, so they not only were not working, they took someone out of the workforce. This meant that those who did work had to produce extra. It also meant that those who were loafers had to be dealt with so they were not freeloading off the system. Of course, many of the loafers were called the rulers, so that was a problem.

The way out of this problem has been productivity. The farmer who could grow enough food for his family plus the king’s share was never enough. He had to grow enough to feed himself, plus the king and some extra for the king to sell. That way the king could field an army and have a nice castle. Every king wants a better castle, so the drive to produce more with less is a feature of human society. The great ideological wars since the Enlightenment have been about how best to do this.

The claim by communists and capitalists was that eventually, productivity would produce so much that scarcity would be solved. Human society, if planned the right way, would produce so much with so little that want would disappear. That could never happen, of course, but the West has reached the point where everyone has the basics if they want them. In America, poor people are obese because they spend all day eating and watching television in comfortable homes.

That does not mean the problem of economics has been solved. The old free loading problem is still there. Those millions of middlemen baked into the economy are still there, snatching away a little from every transaction. Not only are they skimming from every transaction, they no longer help facilitate the deal. Instead, they often just steal the entire value of the deal. America cannot build a road or bridge, mostly because the money is stolen before the first shovel hits the dirt.

In other words, all of those middlemen are now consuming the host. This army of people involved in every deal are no longer just a weird patina on the economy, but a very serious rot of the system. This is why hedge funds are buying up residential housing to create new renters. The very top of the rentier economy has run out of people from whom to skim, so they are forced to eat their own. The big skimmers are now going after the small skimmers down the ladder from them.

Running a skim is nothing new, but even the mafia understood that you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. The modern mafia, the managerial elite, entangled with the powerful, are moving from sheering to skinning. They have busted out everything, so now they are busting out the bust outs. The hedge funds robbing the real estate bandits is like a bank robber robbing drug dealers, in that it says the criminal ecosystem is out of balance.

The story that started with the problem of scarcity has arrived where it started. What is to be done with those who don’t produce? Every society needs an elite and they do not produce in the conventional sense. Their duty is to coordinate. What happens when you have too many people in the elite? Turning them into middlemen seemed like a solution, but now we have too many middlemen. So many in fact that they are now making it impossible for the productive to stay ahead of demand.

The old image of economics is of a group of men pulling a wagon. In the wagon are the unproductive, like rulers and bankers. The goal was to keep the people in the wagon to the barest minimum. The modern wagon is still relatively light, but now the men pulling the wagon are surrounded by an army of people impeding their progress, as they demand a fee for every step. Worse yet, the people in the wagon are creating people who take up positions between the men pulling the wagon.

That has been one lesson of Covid. The reason the economy did not collapse when millions were sent home from their jobs is that most of the people being sent home were not doing anything all that useful. Some were, for sure, but the empty offices went unnoted for a reason. Just as every snowstorm in Washington reveals that vast number of unessential workers, Covid revealed the vast number of middlemen. Many were unaware of their middleman status. They thought they were essential.

Of course, the bizarre fads vomited up by the Cloud People is another sign that we have too many people standing around looking for something to do. Idle hands to the Devil’s work and Old Scratch is spoiled for choice these days. We simply have too many middlemen with time on their hands. The system is overstocked with them, so they sit around dreaming up new ways to horn in on the life of the productive. Now the middlemen have middlemen and that cannot go on forever.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Monthly Archives: June 2021