Monthly Archives: June 2021

Autumn Awaits

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One of the most fascinating things about any revolution is the mistakes made by all sides leading up to the revolution. The errors of the people in charge tend to be the most obvious, as the winners focus on them as justification. “The king did this, so we had no choice but to do that” is the formula. Objective analysis usually reveals that the motives of the ruler and the revolutionaries were far less coherent. In retrospect, revolutions tend to look like a series of massive blunders.

The reason, of course, is that both sides of the fight tend to see the other side as a black box. They only see the actions of the other side, without understanding the motives or reasoning. With limited evidence, they fashion explanations that tend to be self-serving and petty. The aristocracy in France could have done a lot of things to head off disaster, but instead they made one error after another. From the outside, what was driven by ignorance appeared to be driven by malice.

There is a cascading effect in revolutions. The initial conditions that lead to general unhappiness soon give way to anger over specific events. One group gets angry over something, and they no longer see the ruler as reasonable. Then another event triggers different people and before long every event adds to the avalanche of unrest. In between, there seems to be some calming, but in reality, it is just the energy building up for another burst of anger and frustration at the next event.

We may be in one of those periods of calm. The dropping of the Covid nonsense and the start of summer has people thinking of things other than politics, despite the signs that this summer will be ugly in many ways. Soaring prices for food and fuel are always bad omens, bit so far people seem to be ignoring them. Similarly, the building crime wave is not getting much attention. Antiwhite violence is already a problem, but white people seem to be looking past it for now.

Even if the revolution takes a holiday this summer, there are a couple of big storm clouds on the horizon. Both are Supreme Court cases. The first one is an abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This will take up the question of the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law that bans abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. People who claim to know about these things believe the court could overturn or sharply limit Roe v. Wade.

The other case is a gun case. The court, in NY State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Corlett, will review a New York law that requires individuals to get a license to carry a concealed gun outside the home. In District of Columbia v. Heller the court ruled that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense but did not address the carry issue. Many think the courts will rule that carrying a firearm is equally protected by the Second Amendment.

If one were to identify two key beliefs of American civic nationalism, one would be faith in the courts to enforce the Constitution, if we get the right judges in place. The other is faith in the Second Amendment as the ultimate backstop. The whole purpose to voting for so-called conservatives is to eventually get a court that will strike down many of the left-wing programs, like abortion. Along the same lines, that same court will affirm the Second Amendment, thus ensuring people will never fear their government.

There is a good bet that the court rules against the civic nationalist position on both of these issues in the fall. The abortion case is the most likely shock to the system, as this was the reason to support Trump. He stacked the court with his people and now they are supposed to deliver. The Christian conservatives ignored Trump’s rather obvious personal failings because he promised to deliver judges. He did his part and now the judges have to live up to their end of the bargain.

History says they will find a way to fink on the people. In theory, it is a 6-3 court, but John Roberts has miraculously transformed into Ruth Bader Ginsberg, so it is really a 5-4 court again. Gorsuch is the most likely to find a reason to vote with the far-left. He has already found a way to fink on his side. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion granting men in dresses special rights. It is not hard to image him flipping to the far-left on this abortion case as well.

The gun case is a bit different, as the court could find some technical problem with prior rulings and send it back for rehearing. It is also not the radical change that the abortion case presents. Extending Heller to include carrying a firearm outside the home will have no impact on most of the country. Still, given the nature of Washington, it is not hard to imagine a similar dynamic as the abortion case. This time it would be Barrett siding with the far-left, sighting some nonsense about black victimization.

The regime has already begun to let the court know that they better rule the correct way, or their will be consequences. Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut is the first out of the gate threatening the judges. It will not be long before he is joined by other prominent Democrats, as well as the media. Then you have the extortion rackets run by the FBI and other players. The odds of the court ruling in favor of the civic nationalist position are very low, but their expectations are very high.

This is shaping up to be one of those unforced regime mistakes that seem to characterize every revolution. The abortion case in particular is the one that could radicalize a lot of civic nationalists. Christian conservatives are already on the edge, given the overtly anti-Christian pogroms run by the ruling class. If the court finks on them in the fall, it could be the last straw. They will conclude that there is no path forward in conventional politics and begin to organize outside of the system.

Predicting the future is always a mugs game, but history says that the regime does not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The combination of paranoia and partisan hatred keeps leading them to the wrong decision. The wise move would be to give the people a win in the courts on these issues, but wisdom requires wise men, and the ruling class is desperately short of them. Instead, the regime will be dispensing truckloads of red pills to civic nationalists when the court returns in the fall.

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!

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Partisan Minds

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A fetish of the modern Right in America has been complaining about and denouncing partisanship in Washington. In fairness, the Left will indulge in this on the rare occasions when the Republicans do something for their voters. Mostly it is a conservative fetish, as it is the Left that drives the debate. The Right needs to maintain the fantasy that republican virtue still matters, so they regularly complain about the Left acting in their narrow interests, rather than in the interests of the country.

In theory, the conservatives are correct. Partisanship is the great bane of a republic, as it subverts the very basis of a republic. What is necessary to maintain a republic is what Montesquieu called republican virtue, the willingness to put the interests of the system ahead of personal or factional interests. For example, you must respect the office, even if you have no respect for the man holding the office. This shows up in our military culture where you do not salute the person, you salute the rank.

The trouble with the conservative approach is we have not lived in a republic for a very long time, so they are playing make believe. We live in a liberal democracy that is decreasing liberal with each turn of the wheel. In democratic systems, the ends justify the means, so partisanship dominates. It replaces republican virtue in favor of subjective moral certainty. This is one of the reasons that conservatism is worthless in a democracy of any sort. It prohibits victory as defined by the rules.

A good example of how partisanship works is in this conversation on the Daily Wire program, which is part of a series they run call Backstage. It is one of those round table deals where the stars chat about issues of the day. The highlighted clip is the discussion of Israel and their attacks on the Arabs last week. The people behind the Daily Wire are hyper-Zionists, so the conversation follows predictable contours. Israel is heroically fighting attacks from those evil Arabs.

Matt Walsh tries to point out a true fact, which is that Americans do not have a patriotic duty to support Israel or any other country. Immediately, the rules of the show are suspended as Boreing, Shapiro and Klavan leap to attack Walsh. It is an amusing bit of mask dropping, given the title of the show. The rules of decorum stop mattering to the partisan, as soon as his interests are in play. They cut off Walsh a few times and make sure he cannot get his point across to the audience.

An example of how rules are meaningless to partisans is when Shapiro claims that patriotism means love of ideas, while nationalism means love of country. This is laughable nonsense, and he surely knows it, so it is also a lie. The word patriotism comes from the Greek for “of one’s fathers” or fatherland. Of course, nationalism means a devotion to one’s own people. Both concepts have been attacked for obvious reasons, but their etymology is never in dispute.

In other words, Shapiro does not feel bound by truth when it comes to these topics, because what matters is his partisan interests. He wants conservatives to think they are duty-bound to back Israel, so he feels justified in making crazy claims like Americans have a patriotic duty to blindly defend Israel. This is an instinct that exists in the lizard brain, so he does not think of what he is doing as dishonest or immoral. It is just what he does, like pulling his hand away from a hot item.

Another aspect of partisanship is on display with Andrew Klavan. In that clip he makes the case for exterminating the Arabs. He does not put it like that, but that is the implication of his argument. In his view, the Arabs will never behave, and the Israelis are justified in using lethal force. The logical leap from those two statements is that the final solution to the problem is the liquidation of the Arabs. His excitement at the thought of exterminating the Arabs is an insight into the partisan mind.

Partisanship, like ethnocentrism, places group loyalty at the top. The first thing the partisan does when encountering people or issues is place them on one side of the partisan lines. “Is this person on our side?” is always the first question. In the case of issues or events, the question is, “how can this be turned to our advantage?” Since the partisans swaps his own individual identity for that of the group, these questions always feel deeply personal. They are life and death.

In a sense they are life and death. Since who Ben Shapiro is, from the perspective of Ben Shapiro, is his membership in the Zionist subculture, any questioning of it is a questioning of his very existence. It is why Klavan starts to salivate at the thought of killing Arabs. He cannot see them as human, as they are opposed to his group, so they are his mortal enemies. One is always justified in using any means necessary when defending your life from a threat.

You hear this in the left-wing justifications for violence over the last year. When they say “silence is violence” they are not being cheeky. To the partisan mind, you are either on their side or against their side. Words and violence are the same to the partisan mind, as anything that opposes the group is seen as a lethal threat. That is why silence is viewed as violence, as not declaring your support means opposition and the partisan is free to use any means necessary to end a threat.

There is not only no reasoning with a partisan, but there is no appealing to their better nature or their sense of virtue. Their chief virtue, the thing that matters the most to them, is their loyalty to the cause. Everything is warped to fit that moral framework, even the very definition of words, as you see with Ben Shapiro. Everything is viewed as a tool that can either be used against opponents or can be used by opponents. Facts and reason have no more resonance than clubs and guns.

This is why moral appeals against partisanship fail. It is like making the claim that pork is healthy to a devout Muslim. He does not share your morality, so your morals appeal sounds weird and offensive. Your good intensions are proof of your bad intensions, which defeats the point of making the moral appeal. The only counter to partisanship is more extreme partisanship. Once that genie has been let out of the bottle, the only way to put it back in the bottle is through any means necessary.

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.