The Antiracist White Nationalist

Posted on July 31, 2023 by thezman

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With some obvious exceptions, the people who use the term “white nationalist” use it to mean “people they do not like.” These are people who imbue their language with emotional meaning, rather than descriptive meaning. Just as Eskimos supposedly have a long list of ways to describe snow, the people fond of using the term “white nationalist” have a long list of words for people outside of their cult. The term has no meaning other than “danger! danger!” to the rest of the cult.

Before the term became a cult signal, it used to have meaning. A white nationalist is an American term for a white person who wants to live in communities free of nonwhites, especially black people. Having lost the fight over “civil rights” in the middle of the last century, and not understanding the implications of it, these people organized around the idea of separate lands for people of European descent. They want intentional communities organized around race.

Of course, the people who use the term “white nationalist” as a slur acknowledge that the people calling themselves white nationalists primarily want a white homeland exclusively for white people, but they also claim the reason for this desire is an irrational hatred of nonwhites, especially blacks and Jews. In this way, the term “white nationalists” is shorthand for people who hate nonwhites. It is why you can be a nonwhite white nationalist now.

Putting aside the bizarre claims by the usual suspects, if we assume that white nationalists want to live away from nonwhites, then it makes sense that the areas with the least number of nonwhites are the areas with the greatest number of white nationalists or at least white nationalist sympathies. In fact, this assumption is a cornerstone of civil rights law. Diversity is a moral good, so it is the standard against which people and organizations are judged.

For example, if you want to find the state that like black people the least, you will look for the state with the smallest black population. A state with few black people is, at the minimum, unwelcoming to black people, so they do not move there. The most likely reason for the unwelcome mat is the locals do not like black people. By this reasoning, Montana is the most racist state in America. Look at this map and you see ten states that have a black population below three percent.

Interestingly, half of those states voted for Joe Biden in the last election and half voted for Donald Trump. Eight of the ten states with the highest black population voted for Donald Trump and are reliably Republican. This is often pointed to as proof that white nationalism is all about hating blacks, because these states are where we tend to find people who call themselves white nationalists. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but it may also breed white nationalism.

A more granular way of looking at this is by congressional district. The most far-left district in the country is New York’s 15th Congressional District. It is ninety-seven percent diverse, but the largest group is Hispanic. The second most left-wing district is New York’s 13th Congressional District, which is fourteen percent white. Number nine on the list is Nancy Pelosi’s old haunt. It is just four percent diverse. There are many such examples on the top-50 antiracist congressional districts.

Interestingly, when you do the same exercise for Jews, you find that the states with the smallest Jewish population vote Republican. The one exception is Florida which is number eight on the list, but trends Republican. That said, there are many solidly Democratic states that have a tiny Jewish populations. Outside of a few states, the Jewish population is so small that they go unnoticed. You are more likely to meet an alien abductee in Oklahoma than meet a Jewish person.

What this tells us is that if you are a white nationalist, you want to move to Montana, Wyoming, or Utah. These three states are in the bottom ten in terms of black population and Jewish population. Mitt Romney is the face of white nationalism. Of course, if you set the Jewish threshold at one percent, then the world is your oyster, as long as you do not mind the daily antiracist lectures from your all-white neighbors in places like Oregon, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire.

This runs counter to the official narrative, but it is something people have observed for generations with regards to antiracism. The higher the percentage of blacks in any given area, the lower the percentage of antiracists and the higher the percentage of accused white nationalists. On the other hand, the lower the percentage of black people, the higher the percentage of white antiracists. If you want to live like a white nationalist but sound like an antiracist, move to Oregon.

When you look at the data, something else becomes clear. The states that are most reliably Republican are those with the highest black populations. It speaks to the racialization of white politics. If you are black, you vote Democratic no matter where you live or how you live. Whites, in contrast, vote Republican if they are in close proximity to enough blacks to form a community. Maryland and Delaware are the exceptions, but there are larger factors at play in both states.

This is something that drove the flight of white people from the cities into the suburbs in the last century. As black populations grew in American cities, there reached a tipping point where whites began to abandon the city altogether. The legendary quantitative blogger La Griffe du Lion analyzed this with regards to urban crime. Once the black population in a city reached twenty percent, white crime victimization soared and white flight to the suburbs soon followed.

The great paleoconservative writer Joe Sobran said, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.” This was true in the sense that they talk like MLK but live like the KKK. The thing is though, the people labeled as the KKK tend to live closer to the antiracist ideal. The typical “white nationalist” will meet more black people at her grocery store than the typical antiracist will meet in his lifetime.

What all this tells us is that the racialization of politics has resulted in a bizarre cognitive dissonance among the most active participants. The most race aware white people live in the most diverse places. The most antiracist white people live in places that are so white they glow in the dark. What this suggests if you are worried about becoming a white nationalist is you should move to Oregon or Vermont. The surest way to not become a white nationalist is never meet a black person.

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Reparations

Posted on July 27, 2023 by thezman

One of the things to look forward to in the next election will be Gavin Newsome lecturing Tim Scott on the importance of reparations. This assumes Tim Scott will be told to oppose the idea by the party. By next fall reparations could be an ancient conservative principle so we could see a contest between the two parties over who is promising the bigger reparations check.

Either way, it is a safe bet that the subject will be mainstream by next year. The effort to normalize the idea has been going on since the George Floyd riots. California is working on a reparations report. The idea is to release a big official looking study that will be the basis for the following debate. This was popular back in the middle of the last century whenever the progressives were plotting shenanigans.

Part of the plot will be a role for white people to play in the manufactured drama that will play out on cable television and the internet. Sean Hannity will take a week off for a new firmware update and come back with a new set of lapel pins and a new vocabulary to oppose the idea of reparations. It will be the old Washington Generals routine that is the defining feature of the so-called conservative movement.

Despite having a compliant opposition, it will not be easy for the regime. While most blacks support the idea of robbing their white neighbors, a large percentage oppose the idea, probably sensing it is a bridge too far. It is one thing to send whitey off to a reeducation class every year. He is still being paid to attend the DIE training. It is quite another to take food off his kid’s plate.

The bigger problem is it will put the lie to the race issue. If you demand money from whites to make blacks whole, then whites are going to assume this either closes the books on race or it is just an act of vengeance. Either way, it means unshackling white people from the guilt of racism. White people either pay the debt, so no more demands, or they see that the debt can never be paid, and it is time to move on.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Reparations Talk
Compensation
Distributive Justice
Reparations
Racial Vengeance
The Justice Of Peaceful Separation

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Bad Science

Posted on July 27, 2023 by thezman

Americans have always been skeptical of science, mostly because Americans are naturally skeptical about extravagant claims. There has always been a paradox at the center of the American identity. Americans assume there is a solution to all of the practical problems of the world. On the other hand, Americans suspect that the people offering those solutions are not on the level. As a result, American can marvel at scientific progress but hold science in low regard.

This turns up in popular culture. Watch old films and you often see scientists presented as overconfident in their abilities, unethical in their pursuit of knowledge or foolish in how they ignore the risks of the work. In popular culture, the scientist is Dr. Frankenstein, a mad scientist, or a naïve fool. These movie tropes are common because they appeal to the cultural framing of science. While scientists may be our smartest people, they are not the most trusted people.

Probably the biggest driver of this is medicine. Despite trillions poured into the medical establishment, we do not know that much about the human body. The three main drivers of health and longevity in the West are antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation, not great scientific breakthroughs. We have gotten better at treating things like cancer and heart disease, but we are a long way away from curing them. Medicine is still not sure why cancer exists, much less how to prevent it.

This persistent ignorance, however, has not stopped the medical profession from lecturing the public on health. Public health officials have spent the last fifty years anathematizing tobacco use. The claim was it caused cancer. Therefore, eliminating smoking should lower cancer rates. Smoking rates have collapsed in America, but cancer rates have remained the same. Lung cancer rates have not changed much at all, which is where we should have seen the benefit.

Something like smoking is where you see the problem most clearly. Science has figured out why smoking causes emphysema. The ash builds up in the lungs. People figured this out long before we considered medicine a science. We still have no idea what it is in tobacco that causes cancer. There is no honest answer as to what is in cigarettes that gets people hooked on them. People who smoke pipes or vape do not display the same dependency that we see with cigarettes.

Given the trillions spent on medicine and medical research, one would think by now that we would have unriddled the whole tobacco puzzle. Even if our libertarian impulse would prevent the banning of tobacco products, we should be able to ban the highly addictive additives put into some of these things. The best we have is nicotine supplements designed to keep the addict hooked on nicotine. You cannot blame people for thinking this is not entirely on the level.

Of course, there has been no bigger blow to the reputation of science than the army of grifters and conmen shouting “trust the science” during Covid. People with impressive credentials in medicine told the public that you must wrap your underwear around your head and stop drinking after a certain hour to prevent Covid. They also invented a vaccine that does not inoculate you against the infection and has some chance of killing you with myocarditis and blood clots.

It is not so much that these cranks and lunatics were all wrong about Covid, but that there have been no consequences. The seriousness of a profession is determined by its willingness to maintain its own standards. No one trusts lawyers because crooked lawyers rarely face punishment. The one profession with less policing of the ranks than the law is medicine. The same people making bizarre claims about Covid will be out doing the same act during the next manufactured crisis.

Another blight on science and related to medicine is the area of nutrition. There are two sides to the nutrition debate. The official side promotes the Standard American Diet, which is designed to boost agribusiness. The other side is the army of grifters and snake oil salesmen pushing supplements and fad diets. Nowhere in American life is the old “heads they win, tails you lose” dynamic more obvious and pernicious than in the realm of human diet and lifestyle.

Start with the official side of things. Everyone reading this has probably got a lecture from their doctor about cutting out fat and salt from the diet. The food pyramid tells us to eat more grain and minimize red meat. Generations of Americans were told to replace butter with margarine. None of this is based on science. In the case of margarine, we know this crackpot idea was pushed by agribusiness looking for a way to make money off what at the time was a waste product.

The response to this oogily-boogily is just as insane. Fad diets used to promise weight loss with minimal sacrifice. Now they come up with nonsense claims about the science of health and fitness. The latest is the carnivore diet, which claims we need to eat like our ancient ancestors. That means just meat and some dairy. Our ancient ancestors did not live on meat and dairy. They ate whatever they could find. More important, for ten thousand years we have survived on bread, not meat.

When someone with “MD” after their name is often seen pushing crackpot ideas like the carnivore diet or some witch’s brew promising to make you smarter, it is no wonder that we call doctors “quacks”. When your doctor says you have high cholesterol and need to take pills, you want to trust her, but then you find out that there is not a lot of evidence that the pills make a real difference. You start to wonder if she is just another type of sales rep from the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

When you combine the conflation of medicine with science and the shoddy reputation of medicine, it is no wonder that Americans have a negative view of science. How can anyone “trust the science” when the people screaming “trust the science” on social media are both wrong and crazy? Replace the phrase “trust the science” during Covid with “trust the crazy homeless guy who screams at people in the middle of the street”, and you would have the same effect.

That raises the other big problem for science, the expert. America is plagued with people claiming to be experts. Pick any noun and search for it along with the word “expert” and you will find someone claiming to be an expert in the noun. Of course, all nouns are equal in the expertise game, but some nouns are more equal than others, so you will have better luck finding a “racism expert” than someone who can tell you a good way to keep the squirrels out of the attic.

The modern age is now flooded with experts whose expertise ranges from the annoying to the ridiculously impossible. Diversity experts, for example, are not experts in the sense they have a mastery of the subject. They just repeat the magic words from the catechism in a hectoring tone. The extremism expert is claiming to be knowledgeable about a subject that does not exist. Extremism is undefinable. How can you be an expert on something that is no more than a moral signal?

It is no wonder that Americans are skeptical of science. The main ways they interface with science are horribly corrupt and stupid. Granted, medicine is not science and the people claiming to be experts in social causes are crackpots, but they are presented to Americans as the product of science. Science has now become the authority for all things annoying and offensive. If science gives us the carnivore diet and the racism expert, maybe science is more trouble than it is worth.

The Great Dilemma

Posted on July 26, 2023 by thezman

Imagine one of your friends tells you that the governor of your state was caught on video robbing a liquor store. Not only that, his brother pistol-whipped the clerk during the commission of the crime. Most likely, you would want proof. Your friend then sends you a link to a Twitter thread on the subject. Knowing the volume of nonsense on Twitter, you then go to mainstream news sites looking for something on this incredible story, but everywhere you look you find nothing but silence.

This would present a dilemma. On the one hand, you trust your friend and the story does seem legitimate. Upon further inquiry you find some stories tucked away here and there that confirm the tweet. Independent news sites are howling about the crime and the refusal of the mainstream media to notice it. The dilemma is not about believing the story is true but about trusting your own judgement. If all of the serious people are ignoring this story, why should you be outraged by it?

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is daily life in America. Events that should warrant national coverage go unmentioned, while trivial nonsense gets wall-to-wall coverage from all of the regime media organs. Compounding it is the fact that the stuff getting covered comes with truckloads of official lies and narratives designed to trick the audience into viewing the facts presented in a way that leads to an inaccurate understanding of the event in question.

We are in one of those moments today. Hunter Biden, the crackhead son of Joe Biden, is due in court to plead guilty to some minor crimes. Not happy with a sweetheart deal that is an affront to the idea of the rule of law, one of his lawyers called the court yesterday, pretending to be a lawyer for the Republicans, who had filed a brief with the court contesting the sweetheart deal. This fake lawyer successfully convinced the court clerk to withdraw the Republican filing.

This is not a small thing. The massive corruption involved in this plea deal should warrant Watergate level coverage. Instead, regime media and the volunteer army of online toadies pretend it is normal. Putting that aside, no one would know about this outlandish effort to mislead the court if not for people on Twitter. The Drudge Report has no mention of it. Memorandum, the news aggregator popular with media content creators, has no mention of this event.

In fairness, there is a CNN post on it, but you have to dig around to find it. The three primary media organs of the regime are silent. There is no mention of it in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. Putting aside the Nigerian levels of corruption in this case, the absurdity of this stunt warrants attention. Calling a court clerk the day before an appearance and pretending to be a lawyer for another party in order to trick the court is Hollywood comedy stuff.

As an aside, think about the sort of people who look at an event like this and conclude it is not worth mentioning. It is a good reminder that partisanship is not primarily about rooting for your side, but a hatred of the enemy. The regime’s media organs actively participate in these coverups because they hate the people they imagine are on the other side of the hive walls. They are not covering for the Bidens because they love these people, but because they hate you.

Putting that aside, what compounds the media silence on this story is the outrageousness of it. The law firm involved is not a fly-by-night operation that represents drug cases. Jessica Bagels, the lawyer who pulled the caper, is Director of Litigation Services at Latham- Watkins. This is what they used to call a “white shoe” law firm that represents power players in politics and finance. These are the sorts of people Hollywood uses in conspiracy thrillers like The Firm.

Of course, this casual acceptance of corruption speaks to the general rot that has become the defining feature of the ruling class. It is not that these people are breaking the rules for personal gain. It is that they no longer have any respect for the spirit of the law that is supposed to animate our society. These lawyers think nothing of tricking a court clerk because they have no respect for her or the system. In fact, these lawyers hold the legal system in contempt.

The only reason anyone knows about this latest Hunter Biden caper is that there are still people in America who respect the spirit of the law. They are outraged enough about this case to follow it and post what they learn online. There are still millions of Americans who feel the same sense of outrage, so they follow these people on places like Twitter. Despite the best efforts by regime media, this information still makes it into circulation and people are rightly angry about it.

This returns us to that dilemma at the start. The choice between trusting yourself or the weight of official media rests on a more important conflict. The people who think it proper to trick the court operate from the belief that any means necessary is acceptable in order to achieve their goals. The ends justify the means. The other side of the dilemma are the people who reject this. They think the means justify the ends and that we must always respect the process.

Therein lies the problem. The process no longer has the means to control these corrupt forces in the system. The only solution is to abandon the rules and use whatever means are required in order to remove the rot from the system. What this example shows is that the people who think the end justifies the means will always defeat the means justify the end unless the latter makes an exception and embraces the ethos of the former in order to restore order. That is the great dilemma of this age.

Nature Finds A Way

Posted on July 25, 2023 by thezman

Despite being our greatest ally and an obsession for Republican party leaders, few have noticed that Israel has been in disarray for years. Politically there is a battle between two main factions that see no room for compromise. This has now spilled into the streets in mass protests over a new law curbing court power. Internationally, Israel has never been less significant. Its main patron, the American Empire, is busy trying to start a nuclear war with Russia and China.

At the moment, tens of thousands of Israelis are rioting over plans to overhaul the legal system, limiting the power of the courts. This plan is championed by the conservatives, led by Bibi Netanyahu. The point is to give the parliament more power by limiting the courts’ ability to annul laws passed by the parliament. Israel is a single chamber parliament where the prime minister is the leader of the ruling coalition, so it means two thirds of government are run by the prime minister.

There is a bit of the familiar lunacy in these protests. The people setting fires and destroying things claim the other side is committing acts of violence. This is the old “your speech is violence; our violence is speech” business we have come to expect from the regime toadies throughout the empire. They also claim that limiting democracy through the courts is the only way to defend democracy. Democracy means rule by the permanent ruling elite, contrary to the public will.

What is really happening here is demographics. For generations, liberal Ashkenazi Jews has ruled Israel. Liberal in this case means pro-Western. They aligned Israel with the West, primarily the United States, turning it into a beachhead for the empire in the region and a staging ground for Jewish activism in the West. The reason Republican presidential candidates swear allegiance to Israel is because of the massive amount of influence Israel has in Washington.

This is changing as the number of ultra-orthodox and non-Western Jews grows relative to the population as a whole. The simple fact is the pro-Western population has not been having babies, while the very conservative population has been producing around six births per female. The guys with the fur cylinders on their heads have been winning the most important political battle, the fertility battle. Netanyahu now represents this very conservative demographic in Israeli politics.

These ultra-conservative voters are not particularly interested in courting Western opinion or in buying influence in Washington. They are focused on making Israel a Zionist paradise free of non-Jews, especially the Palestinians. They are also not interested in the endless political intrigue that defines the Middle East. Imagine if the Amish were hyper-violent and they seized control of Pennsylvania. That is what is about to happen to Israel as the ultra-orthodox take over politics.

Of course, the political turmoil and civil unrest should be making Israel more vulnerable to Arab attacks, but no one is worried about it. The reason is the surrounding Arab countries do not care that much about Israel, other than as a source of Western shenanigans in the region. Officially, the Arab world remains opposed to Israel, but unofficially they have other concerns. The Arab-Israeli wars were a long time ago and much has changed since then.

This reality is reflected in the population. The typical Arab in that part of the world is indifferent to Israel and Jews, but there remains a minority that obsess over the topic, so everyone just ignores it. The truth is Jews and Arabs are fine doing business with one another and living in peace. The exception is in the Palestinian territories, but the truth is no one likes the Palestinians. They are the least sympathetic party in the region and their only supporters are on the American college campus.

The subtext to the unrest in Israel is the declining influence of the Global American Empire on Israel and the region. Twenty years ago, Washington would have stopped this legislative agenda in Israel with one phone call. Today the Netanyahu regime has no fear of the Biden people. They see what is happening in the world and are thinking about the world that comes after the American empire. Israel in the post-America world will not have the luxury of indulging in liberal niceties.

The post-American Middle East may be more stable for the simple reason that Washington will not be pitting one group against the other. China and Russia are ready to fill the void left by America and they care only about business. The Russians are poised to become the dominant energy power in the world, while China is the manufacturing base of the world. Neither country sees unrest in their interests, so they could be a calming influence on regional politics.

Putting that aside, the critics of the Israeli plan to limit the courts are right to say it is an erosion of democracy, as long as you use the managerial definition of democracy, which means rule by the managerial class. What these changes represent is a frontal assault on one of the main sources of power by their managerial class. The other power center for them is the secret police. American-style liberal democracy is on the retreat in Israel because it is on the retreat everywhere now.

What is happening in Israel is an example of the great chain of causality. Politics are downstream from biology and culture. Israel is a land full of people who like wearing strange headgear as they furiously argue with one another over what John Derbyshire once described as “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” Israeli politics will not resemble Western politics because Israeli is full of non-Western people.

In the larger sense, the happenings in Israel are another chapter in what will be a haphazard and often chaotic retreat of the Global American Empire. The war in Ukraine is one of those chapters. There is a good chance that a war with China over Taiwan will be another chapter. Like weeds growing through a sidewalk, however, the nature of the world is slowly pushing through the cultural and political norms imposed on the world by the Global American Empire and returning to its natural state.

Who, Whom?

Posted on July 24, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the rather boring Amazon movie Air, which is about sneaker pimps, a review of the classic comedy, The Philadelphia Story and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Imagine you are suddenly thrust into a world where you and everyone else in this world has a unique religion. Everyone has their own moral code, and everyone has a unique way of demonstrating that moral code. There is a finite number of moral principles, so there can be a lot of overlap in this area. On the other hand, there is an unlimited number of ways to exercise your beliefs, so everyone can easily see the differences between themselves and the rest.

This would be a rather strange world, but it would also be an extremely dangerous world as soon as everyone figured out that some of the people had within their religion an extreme intolerance of other religions. Some people may have as a part of their religious practice the forced conversion of non-believers. Others may look at everyone as fair game as far as murder. Some could be cannibals. Quickly everyone would realize they are in an extremely dangerous world.

At the same time, some people would figure out that their moral code is pretty close to the code of some other people. They may have different practices, like feast days and which animals they sacrifice on those days, but when it comes to the important things they are on the same page. While these people may not want to change their practices, they will quickly see the benefit in cooperation and compromise. They can team up to defend themselves against the cannibals and killers.

While mutual defense is one reason to cooperate, another reason is to create a mechanism to identify those with whom they can cooperate and those who must either be avoided or defeated. You cannot get anything done if you are never sure if the guy coming down the road is harmless or dangerous. Quickly this new world would sort itself into tribes of people with similar moral codes cooperating with one another in order to avoid being prey to other people.

At this point, these loose associations for mutual defense will undergo a transformation in order to work. Some will fall into disarray and the members will be picked off by other groups through conversation or predation. Some groups will reorient themselves into a unified organization in order to convert the rest. Others will do the same in order to resist being converted by others. In other words, the world of individual religions will quickly give way to a world of group religion.

It is not an accident that this religious model follows the same pattern as urban street gangs in the last century. Organized crime was not just based on ethnicity. They relied on a moral code to hold them together. It was not enough to be Italian, Jewish, or Irish to be a gangster. You had to adhere to a way of life. The reason these people thought of their fellow gangsters as family is they shared the same moral code. It is also why they would kill one another. The code was bigger than men.

Morality in any human society tends toward monopoly. In our fictional world of individual religions, the first thing to happen is compromise for mutual benefit resulting in a consolidation of moral codes into moral tribes. Those tribes, if they could not physically separate to prevent conflict, would inevitably come into conflict until one tribe was able to dominate the other. Barring geographical barriers, in time this imaginary would have one moral code and one way to express it.

There is another thing going on here other than mutual protection. A moral code only works if you believe it is correct. This means you must think other moral codes are incorrect or you are leaving open the chance that your code is wrong. Intolerance of competing morale codes and religious expression is a requirement of faith, for no other reason than to reinforce your own faith. By definition, a moral code must be intolerant of other moral codes in order to remain a moral code.

At this point it is tempting to think this is wrong because in the real world you get along well with the Hindu guy across the street. You are not a Hindu, but you are fine with him being a Hindu and he seems to be fine with you being Jewish. In reality, the reason you two get along is you are both sublimating your religion to the moral code of American society which says you must accept different secondary religions. One part of your primary religion is pluralism, whether you know it or not.

It is also why the people in charge aggressively hunt down people who hold beliefs that they see as dangerous to their beliefs. They automatically view white nationalists, for example, as violent, because from their perspective, people with such contrary beliefs must be violent. The beliefs of the white nationalist are incompatible with the moral code of the new religion. As we saw in the example above, the inevitable consequence must be confrontation between the two camps.

This is what makes the present situation so dangerous. The moral code of people putting child molesters and crossdressers into the schools is incompatible with the moral code of parents. As we saw in our simple example, they must always see one another as hostile because there can be no compromise. There is no middle ground between those who think men should be allowed to mutilate children and those who think children must be protected from those men.

It is also what makes the new religion so aggressive. Much of what defines it is the belief that it must conquer the moral codes of other groups. To tolerate dissent is to question the one true faith. To aggressively stamp out dissent is a public act of piety that reinforces belief. Not only is peaceful coexistence not possible, but peaceful separation is also not acceptable to the new religion. In this clash between moral codes, the only question that matters is who will overcome whom?

The Roots Of Social Justice

Posted on July 21, 2023 by thezman

The show this week was going to be about the religious underpinnings of what I call the New Religion of the ruling class, but as I was doing it other things came to mind, so it is more of a survey of the antecedents. In retrospect I probably should rework the show around that idea, but that will have to be another show. As a result, this show is more of a thinking aloud about the roots of social justice.

The odd thing to me is the resistance I see to using the word “religion” to label this mode of thought that dominates the ruling class. The behavior of the managerial class ticks the boxes for a theocratic mindset. The only thing missing is a well-defined god, but all the other behavior mimics religious fervor. If you replace God with “arc of history” the puzzle is complete, as far as a religion.

There seems to be two camps that oppose the religion idea. One camp are Christians who think a religion must have all the things in their form of Christianity, which means most of Christianity is a false religion. The other camp is those who cannot move past the idea that people are motivated by something other than money. In both cases the opposition is about their own needs and desires.

Regardless, there is a case to be made that what we are seeing is religious instinct flowing through an ideology. At the end of the show, I get into this a little bit with the post-Marx culturalism stuff. I think the best cause and effect argument, however, is the Social Gospel Movement through Progressivism to the current woke stuff. That strikes me as a solid evolutionary arc. Maybe that can be a future show.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Is It A Religion?
Transcending A Broken World
Individualism
Puritanism
Social Gospel
Tikkun Olam
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Our Alaric Moment

Posted on July 20, 2023 by thezman

Note: If you enjoy the sound of me droning on about things like affirmative action, then you will enjoy this show I did with Jose Nino. I am not the best interviewee, but this one turned out better than most of them. Jose is a good host.

If you were living in the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century you probably knew that things were not going well. This assumes that you were prosperous enough to have time to think about these things. You could see that the infrastructure was failing and that the empire was struggling to maintain order. On the other hand, the decline had been happening for a long time so things may have seemed normal. Without some way to compare the present to the past, you only have instinct.

Today we have mountains of facts and figures to tell us how things are doing in the Global American Empire. There was a time not so long ago when these facts and figures made up the bulk of news coverage. Economists became court wizards, explaining the latest unemployment figures or trade numbers. They were also called upon to bless whatever polices were being debated in Congress. In the Obama years, economic data was the way we measured the glories of the empire.

That has all changed now. One reason is no one in their right mind takes anything the government says at face value. People had grown used to the way the media biased the numbers depending upon who was in office, but the mortgage crisis cratered the public’s confidence in the numbers themselves. If all of the court wizards explaining the numbers could not see the mortgage fiasco coming, then why should anyone believe them about unemployment or inflation?

Then you have the general lying that has become a feature of government. The lying about Covid not only disgraced the medical profession, but it finished off whatever trust people had in the official numbers. If the government lies about how many people are dying from Covid just to move more product for the drug makers, the government will lie about how many people are working or the inflation numbers. No one trusts the numbers because no one trusts the people issuing the numbers.

There may be something else at work. Into the 1980’s, the numbers out of the stock markets were predictable. The markets went up as the economy improved out of a recession and the markets went down before a recession. In between the blue-chip stocks maintained a consistent price-to-earnings ratio between 14.00 and 16.00, which was the gold standard of the market. You could compare a stock’s performance to the S&P 500 to gauge the stability of the company.

That changed in the 1980’s with the new global currency arrangements. The P/E ratio of the S&P 500 as of this moment is 26.43. That looks high compared to the historic averages, but it is low compared to recent times. Just before the mortgage crisis the number climbed to 123.73. It collapsed soon after, but even in the midst of what they said was a near death experience for the financial system, the P/E ratio for the S&P 500 only dropped down into the historic average range.

The point here is we cannot trust the numbers if the numbers have no relationship to anything we have experienced. When the end of the world has the same numbers as what most consider to be a golden era for the empire, those numbers cease to have any meaning to us. Throw in the fact that most people do not feel like they are richer than their ancestors and those inflated stock figures carry even less weight. We are left to rely on our instincts to judge things.

Of course, our sense of things, that gut feeling, is the result of a many small things that we experience every day. Three-quarters of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction because they go to the grocery store every week. They see that despite the crowing about inflation coming down, food remains expensive. Granted, no one is starving in America due to a lack of affordable food, but it is that thing they see every day that gives people a sense of things.

Think about something simple like a pint of premium ice cream. A few years ago, a pint was sixteen ounces. “A pint is a pint the world around” was true from peak of the British empire until just a few years ago. Now a pint is fourteen ounces. The price for the new pint is not the same as the old pint. The price is more than the old pint. A few years ago, the old pint of ice cream was five dollars. That is about 31¢ per ounce. Today the new pint is over seven dollars or 51¢ per ounce.

That is a seventy percent change in the price. This is one example and probably not a representative one, given that butterfat prices drive dairy prices. Even so, this is something people see all over the marketplace. Shrinkflation is a word because it is a thing that exists. People notice that the containers are getting smaller, or they are getting less full in the case of things like snacks. Meanwhile, prices go up. This subtly tells people that something is going wrong.

This is probably why we are no longer getting a parade of court wizards analyzing the latest economic numbers. According to the numbers, Joe Biden should be dozing into reelection with an insurmountable lead, as his court wizards flood the airwaves with the good news about the economy. Instead, no one talks about the numbers and Biden is as popular as rectal cancer. It is possible he could lose the election to a man sitting in prison or be deposed by the secret police.

This brings us back to where we started. There were those in the Roman Empire who sensed the true state of affairs. No doubt some of them lived and died expecting things to fall apart, only to stagger on long past their time. Then there were others who internalized this reality and just accepted that no matter how grim things might appear, the empire was a permanent feature of life. The people probably just tried to make the best of things, even as they noticed the decline.

All of that changed on August 24, 410 AD when Alaric led the Visigoths into the eternal city, sacking Rome and setting off the collapse of the Western empire. The empire staggered on for a bit longer, but it was over at that point. All of those bad signs people had sensed probably seemed obvious in retrospect. Even so, the sack of Rome by the Visigoths was a shock to the world. The signs seemed obvious, but people still thought that the imperial order was permanent.

This is most likely the fate of the American empire. There are lots of signs that things are going poorly for the empire. Getting whipped by a collection of bronze age goatherds in the graveyard of empires should have been a wakeup call, but the empire is now picking fights with Russia and China. Meanwhile things deteriorate domestically, both economically and culturally. Yet, we stagger on, but somewhere out there is an Alaric moment just waiting to happen.

The Stars

Posted on July 19, 2023 by thezman

Imagine if tomorrow members of the Biden administrations, including Biden, start going around in public in the nude. They show up at press conferences and photo sessions fully naked. Now further imagine that no one in the media bothers to notice this and continues as if it is perfectly normal. Maybe the cable channels start to add a “clothing disinformation expert” to their rotation of fake experts. Regime toadies decry nakedness disinformation from Russia.

Of course, this will be joined by waves of volunteer auxiliary toadies on social media defending the new policy. All of a sudden, as if they just got a new firmware update, they are off the Ukraine train and on the naked train. They start harassing normal people, demanding that the normals defend their opposition to the new nakedness, as if walking around naked was always common and the normal people suddenly decided that it was not acceptable. Naked Twitter becomes a thing.

Maybe this sounds ridiculous, but given the age in which we live, it should be one of many absurdities on the list of probable things. We live in an age in which outlandishly stupid people are presented as experts. The president just had another bizarre press conference with the Israel president. Of course, Biden mumbling to himself as he reads his script is nothing compared to his bizarre sniffing of children. Biden alone is enough to fill up the bizarro land bingo card.

In other words, what is strange about this time is not the steady stream of weird and bizarre behavior, but the normalization of it. Everyone reading this remembers a time when the media would have had a field day with a president struggling to make it through these perfunctory events. They would have made excuses like he was tired, or it was a bad camera angle, but they would not have continued like it is perfectly normal for the president to be a senile old coot.

That is something to keep in mind as the next chapter in the plan to disqualify Trump from the 2024 election unfolds over the next months. The ironically named Department of Justice has informed Trump that a grand jury is investigating him for crimes that probably do not exist. This is the first step in bringing an indictment, which means another theatrical arrest of the former president. The same cranks and crackpots who would be pro-nudity will be cheering this online.

As if it was all coordinated, Jeb DeSantis had prepared a little script where he not-so-subtly cheers the prospect of Trump being removed from the race. Given that the only way Jeb wins the nomination is if Trump is removed, this is not surprising. The naked opportunism is not the part that matters. What matters is it is clear that his campaign is based on the assumption that the system is so corrupt that no one will complain when the frontrunner is legally barred from running.

There is an old saying in sports that pressure reveals character. People never exposed to pressure often mistakenly think pressure makes character, but you see that the former is correct with Jeb DeSantis. In the hothouse of Florida politics, he looks like a strong leader. In the pressure of national politics, he has failed every test. Worse yet, he cannot seem to get past Trump making fun of him. Instead of being a strong leader, we see he is a small, thin-skinned twerp of man.

Putting that aside, the normalization of lawfare is well underway. Again, as if it were coordinated, the media is pretending this is normal. They make no effort to ask if this is how a healthy political class should operate. Instead, the game is to shift the focus from the propriety of this behavior by the government. The question in that post could be said as, “given the outlandishly lawless behavior of the Biden administration, is it now okay to arrest people noticing that behavior?”

It is not just Trump getting the Stasi treatment. In Michigan, the secret police have arrested sixteen senior citizens for the crime of participating in the 2020 election process as alternative electors. The media is trying hard to disguise the fact that these people are very old, but here are their ages. Three years after the fact, the regime is rounding up old people and threatening to put them in prison for the remainder of their days, because they dared to participate in the system.

This is not normal. The regime toadies will work hard to make it seem normal, but what we are seeing is not normal. Sissies in conservative media will mew about this being banana republic behavior, but this does not happen in the third world. They lack the human capital to operate a police state. This is what happens in a modern state undergoing a soft coup against the system itself. America is becoming a police state run by alien weirdos who hate the majority population.

More important, it is becoming the new normal. Once Trump is removed from the ballot, people will come to accept that they are not allowed to have candidates that address their issues, unless the people in charge approve. The pundits will turn themselves into experts on judging if a candidate is acceptable to the people in charge. While we will lack a formal council of political clerics like Iran, the unofficial council of clerics will make their voice known through the pundit class.

Imagine if tomorrow you are at a social event, and everyone is naked. You are still wearing clothes, trying to explain why you are the normal one. Your conservative friends tell you that nudity has always been a conservative value. One of them produces a pic on his phone of Martin Luther King giving a speech naked. He says to you, “Democrats are the real clothists.” At that point, the pressure on you to strip down and submit to the new normal may be too much to resist.

What we are living through right now is the choice Vaclav Havel described in his story of the green grocer. We can submit to the official lies, pretend that arresting old people for questioning the source of the official lies is perfectly normal. The other choice is we choose to live in the truth. Most will submit because that is easy, but some with refuse and remain living in the truth. They will win and we know this because the communists are gone, and Havel’s words are still with us.

The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world;
And without care of having any rest

We mounted up, he first and I the second,
Till I beheld through a round aperture
Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;

Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.

Absurdistan

Posted on July 18, 2023 by thezman

The word “antisemitism” acquired magical properties in the 20th century for the same reason that the word “fascism” acquired magical properties. In both cases, they came to mean the worst thing possible. If you wanted to anathematize a political or economic idea, you found a way to compare it to fascism. If you wanted to anathematize a person, then you found a way to accuse them of antisemitism. The meanings of the words were lost in favor of their magical properties.

This has never made much sense in the American context. Fascism in its heyday never gained much of a following in the English-speaking world. There were British fascists, most famously Oswald Mosely. The Irish had the Blue Shirts, who were about hating the British more than loving fascism. Otherwise, fascism was a continental thing. After the war fascism lost whatever appeal it had for obvious reasons. Despite it not being a thing in America, the right people worry about it more than ever.

The same can be said of antisemitism. America has always been a multicultural and multiethnic society, which is the reason for the distinctive American accent. This is also why racial and ethnic prejudice has been superficial. The more like the core American you look, the less prejudice you experienced. That means blacks experienced a fair bit of prejudice, while Jews or the Irish experienced almost no prejudice. Americans have never been tribal like the rest of the world.

While fascism has remained a cartoon epithet, antisemitism does seem to be catching on in certain parts of the culture. The other day, internet gadfly Brett Weinstein noted that Hitler is making a comeback on Twitter. This was probably in response to fans of Nick Fuentes posting clips of their cult leader saying mean things about Jewish people at one his club meetings. The usual suspects took the opportunity to pretend they are the victims of this easily ignored carnival act.

Despite the absurd claims of the anti-anti-semites, talking negatively about Jewish people does seem to be on the rise. At this point, the only reason anyone has to pay attention to Nick Fuentes is his ranting about the Jews. His time in the Kanye West entourage was highlighted by him and Kanye West on the Alex Jones show praising Hitler for killing Jews. Recently he has been ministering to the black people, preaching the good news about Hitler.

Putting aside the weirdness of this, the most interesting aspect of the new antisemitism is the shallowness of it. The old school antisemites put far more time into making it into a worldview and theory of history. Mike Peinovich, formerly Mike Enoch, has used Kevin MacDonald’s books to create a political movement as well as a detailed framework for interpreting history and current events. Nick Fuentes, in contrast, is simply claiming Christ commands him to purge Jews from society.

Putting the Fuentes version next to the Peinovich version and you see that the former is dumber but reaching a broader audience than the latter. Black YouTube was perfectly fine with giving Fuentes the “N-word” pass just so he could preach the gospel about the Jews on a show debating the holocaust. In fairness, blacks have always had an uneasy relationship with Jews. Jesse Jackson’s “Himey Town” comment is an example, but it has always been in the shadows. Now it is in the open.

It is easy to dismiss the concerns of someone like Brett Weinstein because we have been hearing it for decades. No one alive today has lived in a time when the usual suspects have not been calling someone Hitler. Their cries about Fuentes and his Mexican Hitler act sound like more of the same. On the other hand, it does feel like this is different than the past. While the old school guys remain buried by the system, these new school guys are not getting the same treatment.

One reason for this is Fuentes is the digital John Stewart, who used bathos and pathos to insert subversive messages into the mainstream. Fuentes is doing the same thing but on the new digital platforms. Like his target audience, Fuentes has grown up socialized by the internet, so he is comfortable communicating in short clips, using a combination of sarcasm and seriousness to make his point. Fuentes can connect with black YouTube because they speak the same language.

There is something else going on here. While the old school antisemites were serious in their politics, hoping to create a mass movement around their message, the new school guys are anything but serious. This is Generation Clown World fully trained to live in the clown world bequeathed to them. The audience for Nick Fuentes or Fresh and Fit would be bored by someone like Kevin MacDonald. Few of them could read his books, because they lack the attention span to read a book.

It may be tempting to dismiss them for this reason, but in a world where Joe Biden is called the “leader of the free world” by people who are supposed to be respectable and sober-minded, the Nick Fuentes act is not so ridiculous. In fact, the whole livestream subculture reflects the decadence at the top. The reason the fans of Fuentes laugh at the scolds waging their finger at him is because those scolds are wearing fright wigs and big red floppy shoes.

In the end, the rise of this new brand of antisemitism is really just another turn of the wheel in a culture that is becoming increasingly absurd. A Mexican livestreamer leading a brown-black alliance against the Jews is just the next ridiculous turn of the wheel in a society that is increasingly absurd and ridiculous. The next turn of the wheel may bring Jewish crossdressers demanding the return of slavery. In Absurdistan, you can let your imagination run wild as long as you like and subscribe.

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