AFPAC III

Posted on February 28, 2022 by thezman

Note: The normal Taki post is up. This week it is not tied into the Monday post here, but rather to a special post over at American Greatness. I read and reviewed Paul Gottfried’s latest book, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. If you can drop a positive comment over there, that would be good. Fair warning, the comment section there is a full SD below what you get here. I also have some notes about my trip here.

Conferences are an American past time. We have conferences for serious things like business issues and community topics. We also have conferences for less serious issues like politics, social issues, academics, books and hobbies. The conference industry is big business in America. There are people who make their living organizing the details of conferences. Every decent sized venue has people dedicated to managing and directing conferences.

You can rank these things by their production values. The more important the event the better the production values. The well supported operations can hire good people and a first-class facility for the conference. At the other end, the conference is put on by volunteers who have a passion for the topic. They rent a ballroom at one of the hotels near the airport and hope to get enough attendees to cover the cost. In the end it is just people with the same hobby in a room having hotel food.

AFPAC III was near the top-end of the conference spectrum. It was not at the level of CPAC or global corporate events, but it was just below. There was well over one thousand people in attendance. The facility could hold a few hundred more, but beyond that this event will be moving into the big-boy size facilities. To give some perspective, if you were in the back of the room, you needed the giant video screens to follow the speeches as you could not see the speaker.

That is the other thing you see at the higher end of these things. There was a stage with the podium, in the middle and two massive video screens. The room is setup with a first-rate sound system that lets the people in the back hear the speech, without the people in the front going deaf. The video screens had the graphics and video shorts you see at these things to keep people excited between speeches. Again, it was not at the CPAC level, but they can feel the breath of AFPAC on their neck.

Therein the lies the second observation about AFPAC that is important. There is something happening here. CPAC gets all the beautiful people in their finest to tell one another everything if going to be okay. AFPAC draws the Dirt People in their finest, who know everything is not going to be okay. CPAC only lacks the smell of fresh cut flowers to feel like a well attended funeral for a rich man. AFPAC has the smell of revolution in the air and the energy that comes with it.

The energy is the third thing worth noting. On a personal note, I have been to a lot of conferences for all sorts of things. I have never felt like I was in the middle of an electrical storm until AFPAC. Most of that is due to the youth of the audience, but even the geezers were ready to spit on their hands and hoist the black flag. Rock concerts are not this fired up. If you are showing a bit of gray in the beard and want to feel good about the future, attend AFPAC IV.

The show itself was much better than you normally get at these things. The speakers know they are standing in front of a young crowd hungry for red meat. A Catholic priest opened the show with a prayer, then Nick gave the crowd a short talk, which was the signal to strap in and enjoy the ride. Marjorie Taylor Green spoke first. She is a fountain of political bumper sticker quotes. That is politics today. Then it was a run of famous live streamers with a few other politicians mixed in.

The speaker list and its arrangement are where you see the growing pains for AFPAC as it was a bit too much red meat. Pols are always going to be a fountain of applause lines as that is their business. Live streamers are not the sort of people used to organizing a speech around a topic or set of themes. As a result, they fall back on the zingers and conversational style they do on their show. The effect is something like a motivational seminar rather than a political conference.

In future events, they would be wise to bound this with two professional speakers who know how to deliver a speech that people remember the next day. The big boys will have a speaker open with a speech that gets the audience thinking, then a series of speakers to pump up the crowd. The next to last speaker is the closed parenthesis to the first speaker. The star, in this case Nick Fuentes, comes out to close the show with a speech that binds the energy with the message.

The same can be said for the security, which was done by lots of young men volunteering for the job. Like the speeches, they had tons of energy, but not the structure people come to expect at an event this size. They got the job done by being wildly overzealous, not terribly efficient. In the future, a professional team to manage the young men would be wise. It is not that they did not get the job done. It is that they missed a chance to impress with it.

The final criticism is that it went too late. The event started with a cocktail hour where the special guests mingled with about two hundred attendees. Inevitably, these go on too long, which was the case here. Then it took too long to get a thousand people seated, so the first speech started at 8:00 PM. Of course, in a room pulsing with energy, the speeches went on longer than scheduled. By the time Fuentes closed the show it was pushing 1:00 AM and the crowd was running low on energy.

Again, this is the bucket of great problems to have if you are the organizers. It is easy to remedy going forward and offers something new in the future. They should probably have a VIP dinner on Friday night for three hundred people. They meet the guests and get a dinner speech from Nick. The next day is a full day event with breaks to let people rest up, socialize and all that stuff. It should build up to the evening portion that gets everyone pumped up to conquer the world.

Of course, that is only possible if the numbers grow and that does not seem like a problem, given what has happened thus far. AFPAC I was a small affair held in the third-rate motel in Northern Virginia. Maybe 150 people were in attendance. To go from that to ten times the crowd at a major facility is special. That is the right word for what is happening with this youth movement. It is not without some challenges and it will hit some bumps along the way, but something special is happening.

That is the question that I had as I packed up for home. I chatted with many young people and I have some knowledge of the people organizing it. I have followed Nick’s career since I met him four years ago. Right now, this is just a thing that is happening, but no one can define. That has its benefits, but it comes with risk. At some point soon it has to be more than just a lot of young guys looking for something that welcomes them as young men in a world hostile to young men.

In the near future, this thing will need a superstructure of ideas to hold it together once the blows start coming from the establishment. The blows will not be name calling from the simpleton army of the SPLC. One day soon, senior Republicans will be told by their handlers to denounce this movement and its leaders. It has to have the strength to withstand that sort of assault and answer back. That comes from having a superstructure of ideas and objectives.

That has always been the problem with populist politics in America. It has the numbers and the energy, but it always lacks a positive message. People will sacrifice for only so long in opposition. Eventually, they cut deals in their mind to accommodate that which they oppose in order to get on with their life. On the other hand, people will sacrifice their lives for a dream, a dream for their children. Populism tends to live in mere opposition, so it tends to fade.

That is the unique opportunity of AFPAC and the movement it represents. Nick Fuentes comes in for a lot of criticism, but he is smart and committed. He is not the same man he was when I met him. He possesses a self-awareness you rarely see in anyone that gets famous in politics. It is extra-rare in outsider politics. Being the big fish in the small pond tends to make people feel like gods. They wake up every morning wondering who has been talking about them since they went to bed.

Fuentes, in contrast, is thinking much bigger than being the big fish in a small pond and he knows he is a big fish in a small pond. He also knows he will not be allowed in the big pond, so he is committed to building a bigger pond. If Pat Buchanan and the paleos had possessed this degree of self-awareness and realism, we might not be in the situation where we have to hope the youth will solve the problems left to them by their parents and grandparents.

A sign that these guys have the right stuff to build a genuine opposition is something Fuentes did in his speech. He gave a moving tribute to Jared Taylor that was heartfelt and sincere. Fuentes is loyal and you could see that in his tribute to Taylor. This is a young man with a code. He sticks by those who stick by him. That is not always good in politics, but that is the problem with our politics. No one in it has code. We are ruled by sociopaths, not men with a code. We need more men with code.

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View From The Road

Posted on February 25, 2022 by thezman

Note: No show today as I am traveling this week. I will be posting travel logs behind the green door for those interested. Here is the first installment. I also have a lengthy book review ready to go and once that is posted, I’ll update this with a link.

One of the funny things you experience when traveling to another English-speaking country is their version of your news. I first experienced this in Dublin half a dozen years ago when I popped on the BBC in the hotel. When I travel, I never turn on the television, as the room is just a place to sleep and shower. It was pouring rain so I decided to check out Irish television for the first time. I was greeted by two actors confidently spewing out laughable nonsense about the news.

One guy was talking about Trump as if he had grown up with the man and knew him like a family member. The trouble was, the things he was saying were so absurd that it felt like satire of a crazy MSNBC talking head, but it was serious. The person on the other side of this was an over-the-top version of the pompous news anchor. He was an English version of Ron Burgundy from the movie Anchorman. I was sitting there cackling like Kamala Harris while watching it.

I clicked around the many versions of the BBC and then found Sky News. I had never consumed this product, but my understanding was that it was the Fox News Channel for the rest of the English-speaking world. In reality, it was just another version of the BBC, without the same level of smugness. They had a different actor pretending to know the mind of Donald Trump, telling the audience for this stuff what they needed to hear to get through the trauma of the election.

After I recovered from the hysterical fits of laughter, I realized I was watching the modern version of the freak show. The difference is the freak show never tried to normalize the freaks. The modern freak show seeks to normalize the weirdness in order to open the mind of the viewer to the messaging. Then I realized that like all Americans, I had grown up in the same freak show, with different freaks. In other words, American mass media was worse than I noticed.

This week I have been busy with a million things and I am on the road in Orlando, so I have not been following the news very much. I caught some bits about the war in Europe, but I have not had time to look at the inevitable commentary or watch the chattering skulls on television. What I know about what is happening comes from what I know about the history of the area, prior analysis and the many e-mails I have been getting from readers in Eastern Europe.

At the airport, they had CNN on and it was all war news, but I saw no one watching is so I followed the mob and ignored it too. I’ve been in a lot of airports during tranquil times and turbulent times and the airport crowd is always a good gauge of whether something is resonating with people. In the 2016 election cycle, people stopped to watch Trump news at the airport. Even people busy living their lives knew it was a big deal so they stopped and watched the man.

Putting the news out of my head meant I missed all the talk and analysis until I arrived in Orlando Thursday evening. The Uber driver asked me about it, but it turned out his reason had nothing to do with the news. He is just a huge Putin fans so this is like seeing his favorite sports team in the championship. He wanted to talk about it because it makes him feel good to talk about it. That said, his analysis would turn out to be the most sensible I’d hear that day.

After checking into the hotel, I decide to see what the news was saying about the great Slavic invasion of Europe. War is good television and the pioneer in modern war television was CNN. They are down on their luck these days and this is the sort of thing to boost their ratings, so I hit CNN first. Memories of the freak show from Dublin rushed into my mind as one lunatic after another came on to make sure they said “Keev” several times, rather than “kee-ev” like a normal person.

Luckily, MSNBC seemed to be in a commercial loop, so I broke free and went over to Fox News, which has fallen into an alternative reality. In this new reality, it is the year 2000 and the chicken hawks are at their zenith. Instead of Saddam Hussein as the next Hitler, it is Putin. They are all saying “Keev” now too. The amusing thing is that when these simpletons say it, they stumble, because they have not had enough time to practice saying this weird new word in front of the mirror.

Like the goofy English pundits on the BBC claiming to know the mind of Trump, the current pundits all claim to know the mind of Vladimir Putin. Of course, they tell us that he is the evil monster they need to justify the warmongering. You see, if Americans do not accept ten-dollar gasoline and breadlines, Putin will march all the way to Paris, just like you know who, in what always feels like yesterday for these people. You must sacrifice for their principles.

It really is a freak show. The one exception is Tucker Carlson, which is the great irony in all of this. The people trying to understand what is happening and maintaining healthy skepticism and objectivity are cast as mindless puppets of evil. The people suddenly saying “Keev” like they have contracted a new form of Tourette’s are the deep thinking, worldly servants of all that is holy. This is not propaganda. It is an alternative reality used to impose mass psychosis.

What is amazing about the Fox News coverage is it all sounds like the stuff you see on CNN and MSNBC. It is just various ways of repeating whatever the White House is saying, but with a hint of Biden criticism. They try to compare him to Neville Chamberlain when the opportunity arises. In other words, they are following the lead of the ratings losers, instead of the most popular man in the mass media. It just shows the real face behind those masks they wear.

One final observation about Fox News. Sean Hannity was never a guy working math problems in his free time, but he seems to have gotten dumber. He always looks like he is going to snap and fly into a Chris Farley-like tantrum. His show is angry stupid man interviews stupid people pretending to be smart. You have to wonder about the audience for such content. You can excuse people for wanting to see the Siamese twins or wolf-boy, but what is the excuse for watching Hannity?

There are many theories of the mass media. They usually revolve around the Orwellian propaganda angle. When you can look at it from the proper distance, you get the sense that maybe the real point is to fill the air with the sounds of weirdos and lunatics, so the sober voices cannot be heard. A guy like Tucker lives like a serious lecturer employed by the traveling circus. Even if you like his content, it is hard to appreciate it over the sound of freaks and carnies.

It is not entirely spontaneous, of course. You see that with the vapid repetition of the word “Keev” from these airheads. There are people behind the curtain injecting phrases and opinions into the system for the freaks to repeat. On the other hand, it is a system that operates by the logic of people who think the purpose of life is to win the catchphrase contest each day. The mass media is the freak show populated with credentialed members of the managerial elite.

The End Of Empire

Posted on February 24, 2022 by thezman

At the end of the Cold War, the American empire was at the height of its global influence and power. The verdict of history was that it had the best economy, the best military and the best political culture. Thirty years on and no one looks at the American economic model with envy. China is viewed as having the best economy. While the military has amazing weaponry, its culture is looked upon as increasingly bizarre. Of course, the political culture has become coarse and unstable.

The sharp decline in the competence of the Global American Empire is where the decline is most evident. The place to start is the blunders in the Bush years, where they miscalculated at every step in the crusade against Islam. One can argue about whether they should have anticipated the 9/11 attacks, but the response was poorly conceived and poorly executed. Like a sports team that takes a far weaker opponent lightly, the empire survived the encounter with Islam. It did not win.

The Obama years brought new failures. The administration started with the goal of resetting relations with Russia, which had been soured by the behavior of the Bush administration in the Russo-Georgian war. They sent Hillary Clinton to cackle with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The Obama administration ended with Hillary Clinton’s election team manufacturing a smear campaign and conspiracy theory around the now famous Russian collusion hoax.

The Trump years were mostly filled with noise, but the fact that Trump was president at all suggested the competence of the empire was cratering. The system left to the current ruling class was supposed to prevent both Clinton and Trump. Worse yet, when the system failed and Trump was selected, the people in charge engaged in a four year tantrum rather than making the best of it. For his part, Trump spent his four years giving the Israel lobby a blank check.

The Biden regime has ushered in a new era of bungling. The exit from Afghanistan was never going to be smooth, but it had to be done. This was known in the Trump years but the system refused to cooperate with Trump. A competent system would have let the hated orange man own the ugly exit. Instead, they left it to Biden and then proceeded to find ways to blunder no one thought possible. The sight of Afghan herdsman sitting in abandoned Blackhawk helicopters was a poignant symbol.

Now we have the Ukraine debacle, which threatens global stability. This crisis is a long time coming so it is not all the fault of the Biden administration. The Empire has been trying to encircle and destabilize Russia since the Bush years. The overthrow of the Ukrainian government by the Obama people and the installation of a puppet government was just one step in a long process. Biden does own the attempted coup in Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Ukraine is a complicated place with a tragic history. That history has mostly been defined by great armies marching through its territory. Modern Ukraine is the product of the communists committing genocide, then the Nazis committing genocide then the communist returning to impose three generations of communism. Since the end of the Cold War, Ukraine has been defined by corruption and a massive brain-drain as its people head for the rest of Europe.

Ukraine is the counter to the old De Maistre aphorism about government. He said that every country has the government it deserves. This has always been interpreted in the West to mean bad government is the fault of the people. This is not how De Maistre meant it, but even if he did, Ukraine shows the idiocy of that sentiment. No people deserve the governance Ukraine has received over the last century. It is proof that government is a ruling class tool of control.

It is the corruption that has come to define American policy with regards to both Russia and Ukraine recently. Senior members of the political elite have had family members put on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarch. The most famous of which is the drug-addled son of President Biden, who was put on the board of Burisma Holdings, the energy conglomerate owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. Ukraine has been buying a lot of influence in Washington this way.

Now we have the Russian military moving into Ukraine on the pretext of protecting both the large Russian population in Ukraine and the two breakaway republics in the east of Ukraine. This could have been avoided if the Global American Empire had recognized the reality of the situation. They could have hashed out a deal with Putin on the issues at the heart of the crisis. Instead, we got months of bizarre hysteria that only served to undermine peaceful solutions.

The fate of Ukraine is not particularly important. What matters in this crisis is the display of staggering incompetence by the empire. They managed to turn what should have been a minor diplomatic matter on the fringe of Europe into a global crisis. The result is soaring energy prices in a time when the global economy is still staggering from two years of incompetent Covid polices. We have double digit inflation now. Just wait until massive spikes in energy prices hit the system.

The incompetence does not end here. We are now seeing a parade of experts from the imperial chattering class compare Ukraine to the Sudetenland, Putin to Hitler and Biden to Neville Chamberlain. Some are just yesterday men looking for one last grift before they exit the stage. Most are people locked into a blinkered mindset bounded by their ignorance and self-regard. To people with any knowledge of the issue, they sound like idiots because they clearly do not know what they do not know.

Much of this public relations campaign is aimed at shifting the focus from the failure of American foreign policy. The Russia hawks blaming Biden is a way of shifting the blame from the permanent foreign policy establishment. That too is another example of the incompetence of the system. Instead of learning from their error, they are shifting the blame to a convenient target, so they can continue in error. Thirty years of failure since the end of the Cold War has taught them nothing.

Put side the armchair diplomacy and what we are seeing is the world slowly adjusting to the reality of the Global American Empire. It is the sick man of world politics and the world knows it. Putin easily outmaneuvered the empire on this issue. The Europeans made sure to not make any enemies on the Russian side. The empire is left with talking tough from a distance. This is what the end of empire looks like. The question now is just how quickly it reaches its inevitable conclusion.

The Anti-State

Posted on February 23, 2022 by thezman

Since the Greeks, educated men have pondered how it is man came to live in societies governed by political institutions. By the time societies reached the point where they could have men sitting around thinking about this stuff, rather than farming and fighting, the answers had been lost to time. The state, in one form or another, has been a thing that exists since the “memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” For just as long, men have been debating the form of government.

A core assumption, for as long as anyone has known, is that government has a practical purpose for society. For example, it is the job of every form of government to defend society from external and internal threats. The government adjudicates disputes between members of society. It is the state that deals with the rulers of other societies on the matters that concern them. Since private government has been the norm, the state defends the interests of the king or ruling elite.

These are obvious things that everyone accepts, but there has always been another purpose to the state. The welfare of the people has always been one of the duties of whoever is in charge. Again, private government has been the norm, so the king or the aristocracy is supposed to look out for the people. For most of human history this has meant economic interests. A good ruler gets powerful because his policies allow his people to grow rich through trade and commerce.

A new wrinkle was added in the 19th century with the growth of liberalism. The state was not just about practical things, like war and trade, but also had a duty to protect and promote freedom and opportunity. The state needed to be organized around the principle of liberty and equality. This meant that the law was neutral in that everyone was equal before the law. It also meant that the people were free to do as they pleased as long as it did not cause direct harm to others or the state.

That is a big leap when you stop and think about it. The role of the state has evolved from the private interest of the rulers and the economic interests of the people to cultural and spiritual interests. A government dedicated to preserving the liberty of the citizens is different than a government dedicated to protecting the interests and privileges of the rulers. The state is now in the business of securing the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the people.

Various forms of socialism take this a step further. Instead of the government getting out of the way of the people and making sure no one interferes with their pursuit of happiness, the government needs to make sure no one is being exploited and that everyone can achieve their potential. This requires the state to take an active role in shaping the lives of the people. The state is now charged with making sure you are able to maximize your potential.

This very brief summary of government is useful in thinking about what is currently happening throughout the West. Until now, government existed for a positive purpose, to accomplish some goal or promote a set of ideas. Communism may be irrational, but it had a rational, positive purpose. Communism promised a world where everyone is equal and free of exploitation. Liberal democracy was supposed to deliver a world free of coercion and limits on your liberty.

The West is now reorganizing away from these sorts of positive purposes to an entirely negative purpose. Antifascism is becoming the organizing ethos of the ruling elite and that naturally means the government. By fascism, they mean a collection of ideas and concepts they think are integral to fascism. Things like racial discrimination or opposition to men wearing dresses. The point of the state is to eliminate all of these precursors to fascism from human society.

What we are seeing is the evolution of the first anti-state. Instead of being organized around a set of aspirations linked to the nature, culture and history of the people, the state is organized around exterminating ideas and concepts associated with the nature, culture and history of Western people. In order to eliminate these things from humanity, the state must use every tool at its disposal. It also means leveling existing society in order to rebuild the antifascist state from scratch.

This is why something like structural racism now takes up so much space in the discourse of the ruling elite. They look around at the inequality of man and conclude it must be systemic. Then they look at history and see that Western societies were created by Western people. They conclude that society was created to benefit Western people, so they must exist to the detriment of non-Western people. The solution is to tear down the system in order to eliminate structural racism.

It is tempting to think that communist societies were similarly organized around opposition to a concept, but that is not true. Communism promised something at the end of the struggle against capitalism. Since there was no practical path to that promised land, fighting the imaginary enemies of the revolution was a way to deal with the resulting disconfirmation. Blaming the wreckers for why the promised bounty of communism had not materialized was a coping mechanism.

The antifascist state, in contrast, is not making any promises about what comes after the struggle against the basket of “isms” they oppose. Justin Trudeau is not talking about the glorious future. He is seizing power in order to wage war against the concepts he and his coreligionists believe are lurking around every corner. That peaceful protest by the citizens was seen as Kristallnacht. Screaming “never again”, the forces of the antifascist state have swung into action.

Since the purpose of the antifascist state is to oppose fascism, it is vitally important that fascism exists. That is another main task of this new model. There is a lot of time invested in proving that the threat to “our democracy” is real. This is not done to convince the public to support their actions. This is done to maintain their own commitment to the cause. A main task of antifascism is manufacturing fascists as proof that it is a real thing that must be opposed.

The result is one side of antifascism justifies any means necessary to fight fascism, while the other side conjures a never ending supply of fascists. Unlike the terror that was unleashed by the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks, the terror of the antifascist state is not a defect of ideology. The growing terror is a feature of the system. Since fascism can never be defeated, the war against it is permanent. The price of antifascism is the permanent terror campaign against incorrect thoughts.

Antifascism is irrational and immoral, but it does solve a serious problem for the managerial elites in the West. Strip away the political theory and managerialism is essentially management by committee. This is horribly inefficient and we see the results all over society. Roads are crumbling, schools are a mess, public services are increasingly sclerotic and inept. The system is failing to deliver the basic services people expect from their political and social systems.

This new civic religion of the ruling elite is providing both a purpose and a justification for defending itself against the complaints of the people. All dissent is quickly labeled racist, fascist, white supremacist, etc. Not only does this justify the abuses were are seeing, but it also justifies the unresponsiveness of the elites. They no longer have to dignify the complaints of the people, because those complaints are white supremacy and therefore illegitimate.

In the end, government is a set of compromises to solve the immediate problems that come with large-scale human organization. A god-king is not the ideal form of rule, but it solves the problems that need to be solved. Popular government brings its own unique problems, but it solves the problems of inherited rule. Communism failed primarily because it could not solve the problems it promised to solve. Those compromises that came with it became intolerable.

The antifascist state is a solution to a problem that does not exist. Instead, it is a luxury good for a swollen managerial elite disconnected from reality. Unlike communism, it is not promising a new tomorrow. Instead, it promises endless struggle. There is a limit to how long any society can struggle, even against a real enemy. At some point the West will exhaust itself in the struggle against this imaginary enemy. The question is how much damage will it do on the way out?

Apartheid States

Posted on February 22, 2022 by thezman

For as long as anyone has been alive, whatever we have defined as the Left in America has always come with a healthy dose of hypocrisy. They have one set of rules for themselves and their allies and an entirely different set of rules, often the opposite set of rules, for their opponents. The cry of hypocrisy from their opponents are met with accusation about bad faith or dishonestly. The Left in America, since the middle of the last century, has been defined by partisanship.

This is another aspect of the crisis in Canada that tells us something about what is happening in the managerial elite. The Right has been largely silent on what is happening and the outlandish hypocrisy on display. Look through the few posts in Conservative Inc. about the crisis over the last month and you do not see their favorite catch phrase at all. The main takeaway is that the so-called conservatives are mostly on the side of the government in this matter.

This is not just an American phenomenon. In Canada, the people who supposedly speak for the conservative voters have been struggling to produce a reason to oppose Trudeau’s power grab. You get the impression they are ashamed to be lumped in with those dirty truckers. The is true all over the English-speaking world. The Brits, who should take a special interest in Canada, have been giving the crisis a good leaving alone, while focusing on Ukraine.

What we see happening in Canada is the normalization of the double standard that has always been a feature of left-wing politics. On multiple occasions Trudeau has said that certain types of protests are permitted. The grounds for determining this is who is protesting whom. BLM protesting, for example, is always acceptable, because they exist to fight the white power structure. An Antifa riot over the behavior of the police is acceptable, as long as they wear their masks.

What we just witnessed in Canada is more than the implementation of this stated policy but the formalization of it. The point of making this a permanent emergency, which is what they are doing, is to make permanent this new double standard for political participation in Canada. A Sikh truck driver honking his horn to protest vaccine mandates is not allowed because white supremacy. A Sikh truck driver plowing through a group of white kids, because white supremacy, is okay.

Of course, this is not some out of left field manifestation in Canada, but a continuation of a process that started in 2016. The people protesting Trump were allowed to assault people and damage property. The thousands of rioters who set fires and smashed windows during his inauguration were never charged. Douglas Mackey, the man behind the Twitter character Ricky Vaughn, is awaiting trial for the crime of making fun of the anti-Trump people online.

The model for what Trudeau is doing is January 6th. Left-wing rioters disrupted the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings for a week. Nothing happened to any of them, but hundreds of Trump supporters face long prison terms for the crime of disrupting official proceedings, despite no official proceedings at the time. Trudeau is simply following the lead of Washington. The fawning praise from the media as he seizes control of Canadian society is confirming his understanding of the new rules.

Apartheid came to mean racial discrimination, but in reality, it was an authoritarian political culture that created a hierarchy of citizenship. In the case of Africa, it was the white founding population that sat at the top. It was not particularly different from the caste system on the Indian subcontinent. Instead of culture defining the layers, the African system was based on definitions of race. What is shaping up in the West is an apartheid system based on perceived political beliefs.

In the case of Canada, Trudeau and the rest of the political class are committed to the post-Marxist ideology that has evolved in the elite. That is at the top of the new political order and those who worship at that alter have full privileges. At the bottom are those who hold what are defined as the most dangerous ideas, things like nativism, patriotism and nationalism. Those people will have the least privileges. As Macron made clear during Covid, these people are not even people.

Again, notice that the limited commentary in the conservative space is not using the old lines about hypocrisy. The reason for this is the so-called conservatives do not see hypocrisy in these actions, because they fully approve of the new order. They agree with their friends on the Left that those old liberal values are part of the basket of ideas associated with who Hillary Clinton labeled deplorables. Their quibbles are with small issues like the implementation and the optics.

January 6th and now the trucker protests are stops in this great transformation of society by the unitary hive mind of the managerial elite. Derek Chauvin goes to jail for life for the death of George Floyd. Kim Potter gets two years in jail for shooting an unarmed man in a traffic stop. Mohamed Noor got four years for executing a white woman trying to flag down the police. Everything is now defined by this new hierarchy as conceived by the hive mind.

There is no one inside the hive mind to object to this transformation, because that risks being ejected from the protection of the collective. The random cruelty of the system against its perceived opponents is as much about defending itself from internal dissent as it is from external threat. If the police are laughing about trampling old people with their horses, they are not going to question the order to drag a party member from his home in the middle of the night.

This is the new world order. At the top is this uniformity of opinion rooted in two assumed truths about the world. One is the people at the top have a duty to root out the enemies of the system. The other is the enemies of the system lie in the populations over whom the system rules. Like the old apartheid system, it is a system organized around a permanent threat. In such a system internal dissent can never be tolerated as it threatens to weaken the defenses.

This is why the conservatives are so muted. It is also why the far-left in Canada voted to support the power grab, despite their alleged opposition to such things. The far-left instinctively knows how partisanship operates. There is no equivocation on their part, because they understand the game. The conservatives will need to purge a few of their members to finally get themselves in the good graces of their colleagues. In the end, they will support the new apartheid system.

Managerial Menticide

Posted on February 21, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. The subject of it and today’s post is the new way to look at the system ruling over us. Of course, Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those needing audio stimulation. Much of it is about the situation in Europe and the evolving Canadian dictatorship.

One of the problems with the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is that it relies on the old Left-Right dichotomy of American politics. This framing persists despite the fact that it is a vestige of a bygone era that no longer works today. The political divide is now between those who adhere to the basket of ideas called Western liberalism and those who defend the post-Marxist managerial state. The latter group is made up almost entirely of members of the ruling class.

In other words, we now live in a world divided by those in the system of control that hovers over the West and those who live under it. The Dirt People versus Cloud People framing is a much more honest, if a bit sarcastic, framework for the world. The ruling system is like a miasma that hangs over society, infecting the minds of the people and their relations with one another. We can see the elites at the top, just barely, but the system they control is all around us.

A big part of what ails society is this sense that things are not as they seem, but it is hard to get a read on why. That noxious miasma that lingers in every aspect of society often leads people to doubt their own senses. Their experience tells them things about the world and people in it, but everywhere they look they are getting messages telling them that what they think they see is not true. Instead, they are to believe something that is often the opposite of what they experience.

This is where the Opposite Rule continues to work. Those who are aware of the contradictions of daily existence can apply the rule to the information stream that comes from the system, filling the area around them. Whatever is in the air at the moment, start from some version of the opposite, and the truth will be near. The Opposite Rule of Liberalism is best restated as the Opposite Rule of Managerialism. This organic, self-aware system that rules over us is the opposite of truth.

A useful example comes from the daily barrage of “information” from the system about the crisis in Ukraine. Here is a story from the New York Times headlined, “Russia has been laying groundwork online for a ‘false flag’ operation, misinformation researchers say.” Note that this story is not behind the usual paywall, as they want wide circulation of it. Note also that the writer is one of the infants they employ to copy and paste material into “news reports.”

This news report starts with a news report from a European based group called European Expert Association, which is described as “a research group that focuses on security in Ukraine.” When you take a look at who these people are, it becomes obvious that they are Ukrainian activists. These are not neutral observers searching for the truth about the crisis. More important, when you look at their resumes you see all the familiar NGO’s that are pushing for war with Russia.

Of course, this is the New York Times, the first draft of history and the leader in the American news media. They do not just take this at face value. They hand it to a group called the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit “research” group. These are the go-to guys for the Times reports on misinformation and disinformation. To the shock of no one in the Times offices, the researchers at Global Disinformation Index confirmed everything said the European Expert Association.

The reason the Times was not surprised by what they heard back from the Global Disinformation Index is the person running it is Anne Applebaum. She is a notorious warmonger and neoconservative. Here she is advocating for the liquidation of the Afghanis and the Syrians as a “solution” to those problems. Applebaum is a big believer in what Stalin supposedly said about people causing problems for the regime. No man, no problem. Applebaum just scales it up.

Her partner in this enterprise is a Ukrainian activist named Peter Pomerantsev, who is probably on the payroll of a Western intelligence service. His biography does not pass the laugh test. His role in life has been to seed Western media with anti-Russian information dressed up as Ukrainian nationalism. The rest of the staff of the Global Disinformation Index all have an axe to grind with some enemy of the neocons, past, present or in the future.

The point of this walk through the swamps behind the ministry of disinformation is to illustrate how the new rule works. If a media outlet is claiming to root out disinformation, you can be sure they are not doing that. Instead, start with the assumption that they are waging a disinformation campaign. That is what you see in the New York Times story and any story containing the words “Global Disinformation Index.” Then you can begin to figure out what is really going on with the story.

Of course, the entirely new obsession with misinformation and disinformation by government and mass media is a big lie. Since forever, people have known that governments lie all the time. They have known that the media is partisan, a form of activism more often than not. Yet suddenly we are being told that the media and the government are now declaring war in false information. Since they are the only possible source of disinformation, this means war on themselves.

The big lie, for those unfamiliar, is a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. This is now the default tactic of the managerial state. They tell us that Eskimo truckers protesting vaccine rules are white supremacists. Then they bring in a “hate expert” to claim that freedom is a form of violence. These outlandish whoppers are then signed off on by new experts who sagely tell us the moon is made of cheese.

Unlike normal propaganda techniques, this new tactic is not to further a cause, although it can be used that way as we see with Ukraine. The neocons are simply taking advantage of a defense mechanism that has evolved since the Cold War. By flooding the zone with outlandish nonsense, the system prevents cogent analysis of what it is doing or contradicting it in any way. It is a form of menticide to paralyze the people by suspending them in a solution of false narratives.

This is the utility of the Opposite Rule. It helps clarify the new relationship between the leviathan and the people. Instead of viewing society as a hierarchical structure that is responsive to the will of the people, you see that it is an adversarial relationship between a ruling organism and the people. This ruling organism is the vast administrative state made up of government, corporations, the academy, non-profits and the mass media. It is a fully integrated organism.

The endless waves of information, mostly false information, is its primary defense mechanism against what it sees as a threat. That threat is the people over whom it hovers like a noxious cloud. The point of the false information is to keep the people in a fog of confusion about who really rules over them. You cannot rebel against that which you are not even sure exists. Menticide is the primary defense mechanism of this system of social control we call managerialism.

The Three Questions

Posted on February 18, 2022 by thezman

One of the segments of the show this week is a topic that seems to be difficult for smart people to grasp. This is something that comes up in the discussion of conservatism and where to go now that Buckley-style conservatism has failed. All of the debates just assume some starting point without thinking much about it. They talk about Burke and Locke as if they were gods, rather than men. We have to respect what they said because they are the authority of all political knowledge.

A political theory is a lot like a proof in mathematics. In math, a proof will rest on axioms of mathematics and certain constants like the speed of light. You start from these fixed things that are always true. From there you derive knew truths or new solutions to problems of the universe. Political theory works the same way. The Founders started with Locke because they started with Natural Law as their authority. This was the universal constant upon which they built their politics.

This sounds rather esoteric and pointless at first, but the biggest question in all politics is by whose authority? When put to left-wing politics, few people championing things like critical race theory or antiracism could provide an answer. They just assume they are our moral superior. They do not know that the stuff they absorbed in college or had fed to them by coreligionists in their political cult come from some rather bizarre theories of history and human relations.

Not that it matters, as a practical matter. These people are quite dumb, but simply asking the question puts them on their heels. From our perspective, the effort to build an alternative politics has to start from this question. It is why things like “common good conservatism” must be viewed as a distraction, possibly a deliberate one, aimed at preventing genuine analysis of the current condition. They want to avoid any discussion of the authority for their claims.

This is obviously a big-brained topic that gets boring for most people, but it has important practical implications. That is the point of the show today. The practical questions that naturally arise from these theoretical issues are useful in dealing with the political crazies, but also in dealing with allies and converts. Being able to talk sensibly about the practical application of politics, segment three of the show, is probably the best thing anyone can do to change minds.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
03:00: By Whose Authority?
23:00: To What End?
43:00: How Do We Do It?

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Performative Democracy

Posted on February 17, 2022 by thezman

One of the striking things about the Canadian trucker protest is that we have been able to get a good look at Justin Trudeau. To this point no one outside of Canada has had a reason to care about him. Sure, he is a ridiculous person who likes wearing funny outfits in public, but that is democracy. Until now few people outside of the great white north have grasped the depth of this man’s ridiculousness. The whole world now sees that Canada is ruled by a feckless airhead.

In fairness, Canadians can point out that while Trudeau is a ridiculous person, he is not wearing diapers and unsure of his own name. In the theater of the absurd that is western liberal democracy, Joe Biden has to be the headliner. The Global American Empire has a dementia patient in charge. Not only that, when Joe Biden was at his peak fifty years ago, he was considered one of the dumbest men in Washington, so he is a dunce with dementia now.

Most people tend to write off these examples as exceptions. After all, the system does produce some serious people. At least that is the hope. What keeps people voting is the belief that someone will come along who will actually do the people’s bidding and be reasonably good at it. In the daily life of most people, there are plenty of capable people doing important work. In a nation of three hundred million, we should be able to find enough competent people to fill these offices.

The trouble is the system is stuffed with people who are probably worse than Justin Trudeau or Joe Biden. Is Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi an upgrade over Joe Biden in terms of cognitive ability? Is Justin Trudeau more ridiculous in his role than Maxine Waters or Ocasio-Cortez. Allegedly the most important legislative body on earth has a bag lady and ditzy barmaid. You can probably find one hundred members of Congress who are more ridiculous than Justin Trudeau.

It is not just at the top of the system either. Again, the habit is to think of the people as exceptions rather than the rule. The rest of the system has decent people who can be elevated to the national stage if people just vote harder. Then again, one of those people is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is supposed to be the antidote to someone like Ocasio-Cortez, but in reality, she is just another flavor of the same thing. Silly people are the one thing that both parties embrace.

When you look down at the entry point of politics, what you see is the system seems to select for these people. Here is a young women with a bright future. She is currently in the Nebraska senate. Her Twitter profile reads, “State Senator in Omaha’s District 8. Vice Chair of Urban Affairs. Bi queen. Abolish ICE. She/her.” It is not hard to see her getting elevated to Congress at some point and then becoming a national figure as the first pronoun American in Congress.

Her web site says she is an “entrepreneur and small business owner” but that is a gross exaggeration. When you dig into her business career you learn she owned a boutique for a short time and then founded “Safe Space Nebraska, a nonprofit organization that protects bar patrons from harassment.” That is not the work of an “entrepreneur and small business owner”. That is the work of a public nuisance. She is why in a better age the scold’s bridle was popular.

Gormless dingbats like Megan Hunt are not an exception. She is the rule in modern politics, up and down the system. In fact, when you look down the ranks what you see is that demented old men like Biden and feckless airheads like Trudeau really are the best the system can produce. When you look at the actuarial tables, it is clear that a guy like Trudeau will be remembered as Canada’s Pericles in a few years. Joe Biden will be the Zoomer generation’s Patrick Henry.

The Founders, of course, were opposed to democracy because they assumed the people would be manipulated by craven opportunists. Ambitious men with little regard for the common good would play on the passions of the people. This would inevitably lead to factionalism. The people would care more about the narrow pursuit of their faction’s interests rather than the public good. Democracy becomes mob rule, where different mobs take turns ruling over the other mobs.

We are certainly seeing that in modern America, but what the Founders never imagined is that the craven opportunists would be stupid and ridiculous. Justin Trudeau is a simpleton, but he also possesses a rare set of social skills that has allowed him to rise to the top of his government. Joe Biden was a stupid crook, but somehow managed to stay in the Senate for generations. Even in his current condition, he was able to manipulate the system to win the White House.

What the results are telling us is that mass democracy in large technological societies selects for moronic sociopaths. The most likely reason for this is that democracy quickly becomes pointless in a large technological society. It is just window dressing for the managerial elite that operates the vast administrative state. The system can tolerate Joe Biden, because the president is a ceremonial position. In fact, all of the elected offices are ceremonial, just part of the performative democracy.

Circling back to where this started, the trucker rebellion in Canada is probably the first real test of this system. Thirty years ago, Justin Trudeau would not be tolerated because the Cold War required serious men in these positions. Three decades of easy times has allowed the system to evolve into the absurdity we now see. Reality, however, is coming back from holiday. This will be the first real test of performative democracy and the actors and actresses that populate it.

Storm Clouds

Posted on February 16, 2022 by thezman

If you are over a certain age, something you will remember is that the economy used to be a central part of the daily news feed. People talked about the economy because it was always in the mass media. Of course, you had lots of news about finance, especially the stock market. This dovetailed with the stories about the federal budget and the resulting deficits. People used to talk about the federal debt because it was a number that was easy to conceptualize.

All of this has been pushed aside in favor of other topics now. Look at the front page of the New York Times on any day and the one thing you are not going to see is news about the debt or even the economy. Instead it is foreign affairs or perhaps a long story on the fight against Trumpism. The Washington Post is pretty much just a copy and paste operation, relying on press releases from government agencies. It is as if the economy and related topics no longer exist.

One reason people are not talking about the economy over lunch is the mass media has been told to drop it. The real power of corporate media is the power to ignore, which is what they have done with economics. When was the last time the New York Times did a big story on the finances of the government? There was a time when this was a stock feature. People used to know the size of the federal debt because it was a number that was made meaningful by the media.

Another reason econ-talk has moved to the fringes of the public debate is the people in charge launched a culture war against the people back in the Bush years. That is when the great shift in media focus started. Bush became Hitler and the Left reorganized itself around the great crusade against fascism. This academic psychosis started to spill into the retail politics of the Left. By fascism they mean anything and anyone that opposes the grab bag of incoherent beliefs now called the Left.

The great leaving alone of the economy was also made possible by the fact that the system seemed to be on autopilot. The mortgage meltdown of 2008 did not result in bread lines or mass unemployment. The accounting scandals from the prior decade had no impact on daily life. We have had several market crashes over the last twenty years and no traders have leaped from their office windows. Like war, the gyrations of the economy have been “made for television” events.

The truth is the economy is something people care about and it is something they can know about without the media. If you are a Dirt Person, you have been watching your food bill tick up over the last year or so. You have chatted about this with people at work and with friends at parties. Food inflation is becoming a feature of life. Now gas prices are starting to creep into the conversation. The solons in the mass media may not notice it, but everyone else sees it when they gas up.

The last time inflation was a thing, Reagan was going around the country while running for president, saying, “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” This sounds way over the top, but it resonated with people because at one level he was right. Crime is about social trust and the crime of inflation robs the people of their trust in the basic functioning of society. Inflation puts everything about economic life up for grabs.

Compounding things now is the fact that the core demographic responsible for there being an economy has lost all trust in the government. The inflation numbers recently posted were met with scornful laughs. Everyone knows they are under-gunning the inflation numbers, because these are people who have lied about everything for the last decade or more. The same people who wear ceremonial face gear and lie about the Covid problem are now reporting seven percent inflation. Right.

This is why inflation should be the number one topic on people’s minds as we proceed through the long dark winter Biden has inflicted on us. Even the fake numbers the government released say that something must be done. The Fed has committed to tightening the money supply starting in March. History makes clear this will result in a recession and an uptick in unemployment. Put another way, the bad news on the economy is just getting started.

How will the public respond to the first real recession in decades? How will they respond to the rambling about it by a geriatric old fool who can barely put two sentences together? How will Americans respond to the stream of managerial sociopaths that will be sent out to insult our intelligence? How will the media respond? They have been the Greek chorus for the system for so long, are they even capable of dealing with a practical issue at this point?

This long vacation from reality that our ruling class has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War is about to end. They can stick to whatever theories they remember from their grad-school seminar on diversity and equity but the reality of the human condition has not changed. The ruling class of any society is responsible for the general welfare of the people in that society. When they fail, they are held accountable. This is an immutable law of human organization that never goes away.

This is why the situation in Canada bears watching. Trudeau is a simpleton who has no business being in charge of anything. Contrary to the old chestnuts about democracy, he is not the ruler the people deserve. He reflects the competence of the ruling class that installed him in office. The people who thought this feckless pansy was right for the job are so far proving to be incapable of managing this trucker crisis. They have made Canada the first English speaking dictatorship.

The American people are far more docile and subservient than Canadians, but until a few weeks ago people assumed the Canadians were a beaten people. It turns out that there is still some life left in Canadians, which suggests there may be a flicker of life left in Americans as well. Put enough pressure on people and they will find the courage to rebel against their masters. Inflation, recession and widescale unrest is the sort of pressure Americans may need to find their spine again.

The holiday from reality is over and we are about to enter into a period in which serious topics with real meaning return to the fore. The reckless sissies and addle minded old fools who have been playing make believe for the last few decades will now have to face a real crisis. Similarly, a lethargic and prostrate people will now have to remember how to stand up for themselves again. It will not be long before the last few years of the culture war seem like a golden age of tranquility.

Managerial Musings

Posted on February 15, 2022 by thezman

Man people have noted the similarities, as far as practical application, between 20th century fascism and modern managerialism. The starting place for the comparison is the marriage of corporate power and state power. Instead of harnessing the two in the name of socialism and nationalism, the two sides exist within the managerial state in the furtherance of technological and financial capitalism. The system is also decorated with the language of Western liberalism.

The important difference, of course, is that fascism was in response to the chaos of communist terror and liberal collapse. Managerialism, in contrast, is an American phenomenon that evolved in response to the limits of the political structure in the context of expansion and industrialization. The Constitution was written for a pre-industrial people. After the Civil War it was modified several times, but that just turned the fine balance into a set of irreconcilable contradictions.

What managerialism attempts to do in practice is apply extra-governmental solutions to problems either created by government or beyond the limits of government. The expert class in the other institutions create solutions to these problems. Often these solutions create new problems, which require other experts to solve. Of course, these solutions always require the permanent expansion of institutional power. Managerialism is a self-licking ice cream cone.

The most prominent example of this is the military-industrial complex, which is the clearest example of managerialism. The state is tasked with defense of society, which is why nations have militaries. These are the people trained specifically for the task of war and national defense. During the Second World War, the military relied heavily on private industry and this marriage has endured ever since. Together they seek new enemies to justify new expansion of the system.

During the Cold War, the politicians could always be relied upon to find an enemy for the military-industrial complex to use as a rallying point. When relations with the Soviets were civil, then it was some proxy war in the third world. For forty years there was always a reason to expand the military-industrial complex. Then the Cold War ended and the system needed new villains. A quarter century crusade against Islam has just wrapped up and the hunt for a new villain is underway.

Domestically, this public-private partnership is not so clean. Instead, the relationship is accidental and indirect. For example, the bum problem that has plagued every city in America since the 1980’s was not deliberate. The people who got the asylum system shut down did so for narrow reasons. The bum problem was totally unexpected, because they assumed the state would find a new solution. Instead, “homelessness” became a lucrative private enterprise with no solution.

We are about to see something similar with the new soft-on-crime policies promoted by left-wing politicians. Their motivations are ideological, not practical, but the practical consequences are creating a serious problem. American cities are being overrun by petty crimes like shoplifting and smash and grabs. Since these crimes are not prosecuted, the criminals have become brazen. These scenes are becoming a feature of social media and the local news.

Since this problem has been created by the state, there can be no state solution, so it is left to the private side to fashion a cure. Retailers are now calling on the internet retailers to crack down on the traffic in stolen goods. The thieves apparently put their goods on sites like eBay and Amazon. Here we have the public-private partnership coming up with a solution they created. The state actors get their ideological points and the private actors get to expand their control.

The public-private tyranny Americans are now experiencing is reflected in the mainstream political order. The modern Left, despite its pretensions, exists to create social problems for the managerial elite to solve. Conservatives, on the other hand, are the cheer squad for the private actors tasked with finding solutions. Note that both sides have abandoned economics and focus only on creating cultural mayhem (Left) and proffering technological solutions (Right).

This weird political dynamic is most obvious in libertarianism. In the middle of the last century, libertarians were indifferent to social issues. Their singular focus was on economics, specifically market economics. Today, libertarians like Nick Gillespie spend their days promoting free weed and thinking about what it would be like to wear something pretty under the leather jacket. What started out as an economic movement is now a carnival of weirdos promoting the managerial state.

This is the aspect of managerialism that has gone unnoticed. The whole point of rule by expert is to strip away politics in order to efficiently address the practical problems of human society. Just as libertarianism and conservatism have abandoned practical issues in favor of bizarre social fads, the managerial state is no longer interested in filling potholes and painting classroom walls. Instead, it obsesses over imaginary demons of its own creation.

This shift from practical issues to abstract issues coincides with a growing incompetence and inefficiency in the system. This is where you see a comparison between both fascism and communism. Both of those systems started with great efficiency and energy, but that quickly dissipated. Fascism, of course, was smashed in the war, but communism descended in a tragic comedy of bureaucratic bungling and political corruption, as we see with managerialism.

Just as historical comparisons have narrow limits, ideological comparisons fall apart when taken too far. Managerialism is not fascism and it is not communism, even though it shares practical attributes with both. Like both, however, it evolved for a time and place, one that no longer exists. Much of the chaos we see today is due to a frantic search for something to replace communism as the necessary foil. The system is destroying itself in the hunt for a reason to exist.

What all of this suggests is that we not only need a new narrative of the last century, but a new understanding of managerialism. We are still working with the concepts produced by Burnham and then the paleoconservatives. These are concepts produced when communism was still a real thing and managerialism was seen as the energetic response to it. Instead, managerialism needs to be viewed as one manifestation of something that also produced fascism and communism.

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