Thoughts On J. D. Vance

Posted on July 17, 2024 by thezman

Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate was not a total shock to the system, but the system was unhappy, nonetheless. The old neocons are howling in agony, claiming he is another Hitler. The slow-witted neocons are similarly unhappy, but they are going with the “he’s not Reagan” line. These are the people who claimed George Bush II was the heir to Reagan. The dried out husk of Buckley conservatism is going with their usual perfidy.

It is not just the yesterday men of the official right who are unhappy. The more strident of the online right are vexed that Vance is married to an Indian and was once a member in good standing of the regime. They think he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They look at this slot on the ticket as the heir to Trump and therefore the guy who will lead the cause after Trump’s term ends in 2028. They wanted someone who was more clearly on their side, even though such a person does not exist.

The problem with all of this analysis is that it operates within the conventional framework of politics. Despite his civic nationalist inclinations, Trump is the nullification of the conventional political framework. Over the last decade, there have been two main camps regarding Trump. There are those who think he will operate the levers and gears of the machine to their liking or not to their liking and those who get that he exists to destroy the machine, even as he tries to operate it.

With that in mind, the election of Vance should be seen as Trump starting to understand what is happening. People forget that he was set to announce his pick after the debate, but then put it off so the focus could be on Biden. Vance was most likely not the pick at that point. Tucker Carlson said that Trump decided on Vance around the day he announced the pick. In other words, there is a good chance that Trump’s brush with death had some impact on his thinking.

The way to view Vance ideologically is as a compromise between Trump, the civic nationalist, and his core base of support. Trump and his older voters maintain that the system of America is fine. The trouble is the people running the system. It is why they are so invested in Trump the man. Vance and the subculture in which he primarily exists understands that the system is the problem. They are not revolutionaries, but they think systemic change is necessary to avoid disaster.

Some get this to a degree. Patrick Deneen uses different language to describe Vance, but the idea is the same. This Wall Street Journal post comes at the topic from a more dissident perspective. Graedon H. Zorzi is a worth a follow if you are interested in more nuanced analysis of current events. If you look at the list of people Vance follows on social media, it is a list of people who think critically about politics. In one fashion or another, they are critics of the system.

What Vance represents, and you can put people like Christopher Rufo in the same bucket, is either a final defense of the system or a waystation on the road to what Charles Murray calls the white backlash. This subculture that produced Vance is both a compromise between white identity politics and the old civic nationalism, and a synthesis of the two. It is an identitarianism that is majority white, but tolerant of a fringe that is not white, but fully assimilated.

None of this is to say that this is deliberate. There is no evidence that any of the people in this subculture think of themselves as gatekeepers or facilitators. They are simply staking out ground that is morally tolerable yet they are realistic about what is actually happening in the flesh and blood country called America. To a great degree, they are reactionaries, responding to the fantasy world that is the conservative response to the madness falling from the clouds of the managerial elite.

This is what gets missed in the criticism of Vance from the online right. Vance was not a political guy and when he was encouraged to get into politics, he adopted the politics of the people around him. When he got a good look at what those politics meant, he reacted negatively and started down the path that led him to this point. Anyone who has been to a dissident event has heard a version of this story many times. The people Vance chooses to follow all have similar stories.

The question that remains to be answered is if this subculture that produced Vance can create a plausible political program and challenge the orthodoxy. So far, they have stalled where prior efforts have stalled. They present their analysis of the system and then when asked, “now what?”, they have no answer. Patrick Deneen’s last book is a great example. He explains the defects of what he calls liberalism but then gets frightened by the implications and quits the project.

Another angle to this is that this subculture has attracted the interest and limited support from members of the oligarchy. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are two examples of billionaires who seem to support this project. Claremont operates like a political version of Y Combinator, sponsoring people and projects within this space. Some have proven to be defective, like Richard Hanania, but others, like the IM1776 project or Passage Press, have been more successful.

Trump tapping into this space and thus getting support from members of the oligarchy bodes well for him and the subculture that produced Vance. No reform effort can survive without elite support. This not only bodes well for the project, but it means Trump has a chance to not only win the election but get something done. Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is that this is the real Flight 93 election, a last attempt by reform minded oligarchs to save the system.

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Thoughts On Conspiracy Theories

Posted on July 16, 2024 by thezman

Before anyone was sure what happened to Donald Trump on that stage in Pennsylvania, the conspiracy theorists were hard at work. It is reaching the point where conspiracy theories are the primary driver of public discourse. No one can accept the official version of things, so we are left to create our own versions. Throw in the fact that it is easy to manipulate digital images, video and sound and we will soon doubt what our senses tell us about anything in the digital space.

It is fair to say we are living through the conspiratorial age. Fifty years ago, the only people who trafficked in this material were the people who lined their clothes with aluminum foil and vacationed at Dallas. Today, no one believes official narratives, so everyone has their own theory of reality. If not for conspiracy theories, no one would have any idea what is happening in the world, as the official narratives often sound less plausible than the so-called conspiracy theories.

The term conspiracy itself is a conspiracy of sorts. Many people think it was created by the CIA as a way of tarnishing those skeptical of official narratives. In reality the term existed as far back at the 1860’s but was popularized by Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in the 1940’s, which was long before the Central Intelligence Agency existed. Even so, the term is primarily used as a way to discredit people who question the official story.

The irony is that the people most fond of throwing around the term “conspiracy theory” are the people most fond of conspiracy theories. The media exists, to a great degree, to fabricate narratives, even when the facts are clear. The great change in the media came in the middle of the last century with the rise of narrative journalism, called new journalism, which sought to contextualize the news through the creative use of narratives into which the facts were fitted.

Of course, it is a conspiracy theory to say that the media works with the regime to create these narratives as a way to distract people. CNN posting a piece about how analysis of the audio at the Trump assassination attempt suggests there were three different shooters using three unique weapons is really a plot to insert this conspiracy theory into the online discourse. This allows the authorities to dismiss all of the alternative explanations as conspiracy theories.

For a conspiracy theory to gain traction the event in question has to be anomalous enough to feel unlikely. We do not get many assassination attempts at the moment, so the Trump event feels like something not to happen by chance. The other piece of the puzzle is the official explanation has to seem unlikely. Given that our authorities lie so much, this piece of the puzzle is now a default. Logic says they lie so much because they are hiding things they wish to remain hidden.

In the Trump case, there seems to be too many coincidences that had to happen for that shooter to get on that roof by himself. Sure, it is probably just crazy luck that he happened to star in a BlackRock ad and be the only young person who did not spend his free time on line, but most people find that unlikely. The FBI rushing out to say he was just another lone wolf in their system, one that always seems to know about these guys before they commit a crime, also raises eyebrows.

The other aspect to this is the death of the supernatural. When people believed in the old gods, they could accept the unlikely as the work of the gods. There was no need to think more about it. Fate is just a part of life. In the Christian age, miracles were not just an explanation for the unlikely, but they were also proof that God played an active role in the affairs of man. Today, Christians say that Providence tipped Trump’s head to one side so that the bullet nicked his ear rather than ending his life.

In this age, people assume there is a material explanation for everything, so that means everything can be explained with actors and actions, cause and effect. People can accept that it was mere chance that Trump tilted his head when he did, but they cannot accept the million unlikely events that allowed that shooter to get on the roof and take shots at Donald Trump. One coincidence is proof that life is a roll of the dice, but a string of coincidences is proof of a conspiracy.

Another part of the conspiracy theory phenomenon is that humans have a natural desire to know who is in charge. Our base assumption, in all matters, is that someone is the final boss in every story of life. When an angry customer walks into a store she demands to see the manager. She does this on the assumption that the manager is the guy calling the shots. When the space aliens arrived in old monster movies, they always demanded to be taken to see the leader.

We live in an age where it is unclear who is in charge. The magic of democracy is it tells people that they are in charge, but that is impossible, and people sense it, so without a clear shot caller responsible for what is happening, people naturally look for an explanation that provides that shot caller. Every conspiracy theory assumes that there is someone, or a small group, who has the power to affect the course of history and the foresight to alter those events to their liking.

The first question after Nursing Home Joe drooled through that first debate was “Who is really running the White House?” It was clear, and has been clear for a long time, that Biden is incapable to doing much of anything. Therefore, someone else has to be making the decisions. Since our system does not have an answer for this and official sources deny the question is valid, we have the perfect environment for conspiracy theories about who is running the government.

Not only does democracy create the conditions for conspiracy theories, but the liberal tradition is also a conspiracy theory of its own. Once Western man dropped God as the final boss of the universe, the search was on for what was the first cause. Theories of history, for example, are simply attempts to create a compelling story that explains why we ought and ought not do things. Fairy tales about elves with bags of natural rights are a way to replace God with a really good story.

Perhaps Francis Fukuyama was right to some degree. The end of history is not as he imagined it, but instead it is the end of the line for the West and its quest to find the answer to the great question, who is really calling the shots? Perhaps we return to the old gods or maybe some new version of the Christian God. Alternatively, maybe we just shake ourselves to pieces with conspiracy theories. At the end of history, the last man is a guy wrapped in aluminum foil staring into a mirror.

Perhaps An Inflection Point

Posted on July 15, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about the remake of the classic film Gladiator, a post about the stupid people at the NATO summit and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

By now, everything that can be said about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend has been said in every way that can be said. Thanks to cameras being everywhere all the time, most facts were known in real time. It did not take long for the internet to identify the shooter and then for the authorities and their media platforms to confirm the details. An iron rule of life is that it is better to be lucky than good and Trump is the living embodiment of it.

Of course, the same is true to a degree for the shooter. The official story will be that he was a loner, a victim of bullying, who just snapped. Just as the FBI swears every serial killer is a middle-aged white guy, they swear ever assassin is a loner. Regardless of his motivations, many things needed to fall into place for him to get on that roof and get a chance for the glory he was seeking. Ninety-nine percent of the time these guys are caught before they get out of the car.

Putting that aside, what matters right now is the politics of this event. Sensing that this was not good for their side, the regime rolled the dice and sent Biden out to “address the nation” from the Oval Office. Anytime they put him out for public view there is the risk he reminds the world that he is a desiccated husk. Even when he avoids looking like a nursing home patient, it is clear that it is taking all of his remaining energy to get out the words they have on the screen in front of him.

It is the habit of the regime to cry out in agony as they attack, but then that tactic fails, they go for a different version. They attack then call for peace before they think the other side has a chance to respond. For close to a decade they have been calling for the death of Trump and his supporters, but now all of a sudden, they think it is time to put aside our differences and come together as brothers. Note that there was no remorse in Biden’s call for unity over the weekend.

Imagine you are walking down the street, and a guy runs up and smacks you in the head, a thing common in coastal cities. Just as you are about to respond, he starts yelling, “why can’t we just get along bro?” Then a crowd forms up demanding that you accept the guy’s offer of peace and reconciliation. It is absurd, but it is how the progressive mind operates. These are people with no scruples and no self-awareness, so they are incapable of remorse.

It is a hollow gesture, and the regime will soon be back to anathematizing Trump and everyone associated with him. When they call Trump an “existential threat to their democracy” they mean it and they are correct. What they mean by “their democracy” is rule by the semi-permanent ruling class of credentialed experts and policy makers who hide behind the democratic process. If the voters back populist candidates like Trump, then the system loses its legitimacy.

It is not that Trump will usher in revolutionary change if elected. It has never been about that for the regime. They could have cut a good deal with him at any time. It is what Trump represents that terrifies them. What these people fear is a system whereby elected officials compete for public support and then have the power to pass laws they think are popular with the public. They hate this idea for the same reason they were scandalized by the overturning of the Chevron deference.

This is one reason why there will be no going back. This is the new normal and will remain so until one side destroys the other side utterly. We have been in a cold civil war, as John Derbyshire has called it, for a long time. The war has gotten hotter over the last decade and it got very hot over the weekend. It may cool down a bit over the next few weeks, but by the time the Democratic convention rolls around, Joe Biden will be threatening drone strikes on your town again.

Of course, demographic reality plays a role. Trump is symbolically the voice of white America right now. He may live the gangster lifestyle, but he will still only get ten percent of the black vote. Every major black celebrity will take turns calling him and his voters the usual scare words. On one side of the civil war is the ruling class white progressives, the Alawites of America, leading the nonwhite hordes that will soon be a majority, against the shrinking heritage America.

On the other hand, parts of that shrinking heritage America were radicalized when they saw Trump rise like El Cid from the stage floor. It was not so much that the scales fell from their eyes about what is happening, but that they were reminded of the basic truth of what it means to be an American. It is not the Bravo Sierra that comes from creepy weirdos like Ben Shapiro. What it means to be an American is when the bullets start flying, you run toward the shooter.

A Russian blogger got it right. “In the eyes of the US population, Trump will be promoted as the living embodiment of that very “American Dream” – a self-made billionaire, an American patriot, whom his enemies tried to kill for his love for his homeland, while being protected from all troubles by the Higher Powers.” For many in heritage America, Trump stopped being a politician on that stage and became a symbol around which they can rally against the forces of darkness.

That is when the battle is joined. Until now, the cold civil war has been a one-sided affair, because white people did not know there was a war. They told each other that the actions of the regime were for money or power. Now they are starting to sense it is about something else. The “existential threat” is not against “their democracy” but against heritage Americans. If the regime thinks killing Trump is funny, they will have no qualms about killing you and your family.

Assassinations are often triggering events. The most famous was the assassination of Archduke Frans Ferdinand. That kicked off the Great War. The assassination of Kennedy kicked off the cold civil war that still rages today. Perhaps in time the failed assassination of Trump will be seen as the turning point in the cold civil war, the point when the good guys finally figured out that they are under attack and begin to organize a resistance against the gathering darkness.

The Borg

Posted on July 12, 2024 by thezman

I decided to call this show The Borg, after the fictional entity in the Star Trek universe, but I could have gone with Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone. The thing that this show describes is a self-perpetuating system. The purpose of Conservative Inc., and all nodes of the managerial ecosystem, is to maintain itself by defending itself from outside threats through assimilation and subversion.

The trouble with the self-licking ice cream cone idea is that it suggests the self-perpetuating system is benign. The United Nations, for example, is not actively trying to change much of anything. The damage it does is incidental to its existence, in the same way the damage done by the postal service is just the result of it not being particularly good at delivering letters and packages.

The Borg concept, on the other hand, is an aggressive entity. It sustains itself by seeking out and assimilating new life forms. The process by which it sustains itself is a constant danger to everything around it. Cancer, for example, destroys its host by replacing good cells with cancer cells. The death of the host is not incidental to the existence of cancer, but the end point of it.

This is true of managerialism in general and specifically true with regards to anything resembling an American right and Conservative Inc. The conservative ecosystem that forms up one part of the political class exists to absorb, assimilate, and subvert anything viewed as a threat along its assigned place on the wall. Since its purpose is to do those things, it has evolved to find causes and people to assimilate.

The minor controversy over Project 2025, a scheme hatched by The Heritage Foundation, is a good example, one used in the show this week. Its purpose is to assimilate what it can use from the populist uprising led by Trump, subvert his efforts, and snuff out anything that cannot be assimilated or subverted. Heritage is the Borg queen of the hive mind that is the conservative industrial complex.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
Background
Skin Suits, Day Walkers & The Borg
Co-opting
Project 2025 (Link) (Link)
Agenda 47 (Link)
Conclusion

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Enjoying The Mob

Posted on July 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: If you are interested in hearing me gas on about a variety of things, then you are in luck as I was on Coffee and Mike Tuesday. Listen here.

The oldest argument against democracy is that it is essentially mob rule, which means it is susceptible to the terrible dynamics of the mob. Something excites the mob and the members of the mob compete with one another to show they are more excited than anyone else inside the mob. In his Lyceum Address, Lincoln warned that the mob is the antitheses of the rule of law, because inevitably the mob comes to see the law as a barrier between itself and its goal.

It is why ruling classes have always feared mobs. Mobs are fickle and once they get going it is not clear where or how they end. It is a sign of our decline that the Cloud People caught the democracy bug and they have been chanting the phrase “our democracy” as if they have a strange form of Tourette’s syndrome. Everything they do is in defense of “our democracy” while even the slightest push back is called a threat to “our democracy” which is always a signal to the mob.

The promiscuous use of mobs has been the main tool of the regime going back to at least the Obama years. The entirely fake antiwar movement in the Bush years might be the first use of an official mob. It was, however, in the Obama years that the official mob was perfected. The rape on campus nonsense set mobs of internet feminists upon the remaining white boys in college. Then we got the BLM mob, which unleashed a one-sided race war on the white middle class.

Cancel culture is another form of official mob. First, they unleashed the “me too” nonsense, which set mobs of digital lunatics on men who were accused of being too normal around the ladies. That moved to digital kooks chasing after imaginary fascists and racists online. Antifa can probably be viewed as the first digital mob to break into the analog world or maybe it is the other way around. Either way, like the antiwar mobs, it was a creature of the regime.

The thing about the digital mobs is they took what existed in the analog space, the media frenzy, and then democratized it. Instead of a gaggle of credentialed press people chasing a guy down the street shouting questions, the digital mob is internet characters filling up the timeline of the victim with accusations. The dynamics are the same, except now one does not need a credential. You just have to possess a weak mind and access to social media.

It is what makes the present crisis around Joe Biden amusing. The people who have profited from the mob are now being eaten by the mob. The great and the good are taking turns telling their favorite media actor that Biden is too old, too feeble or too narcissistic to be president. The same people who brought us the Russian collusion hoax and the Covid panic are now hammering away at Biden. It would take a heart of stone not to see the humor in this.

This has always been the problem with mobs. Once the mob forms up it keeps going until it either burns itself out or is snuffed out. The former only happens after they have tasted the blood of their victim. The latter happens when they taste enough of their own blood that being a mob is no longer fun. Since the White House is not going to start shooting media toadies, which would be a welcomed result, it means this mob ends with the head of Joe Biden on a pike.

This brings up the other problem with mobs. The mob exists purely in the moment, which means anyone in contact with the mob exists in the moment. The reason Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and wounded a third is no one in the mob, including himself, could even think, much less act outside the moment. If Rittenhouse could have saw one step ahead before the mob set upon him, no one outside his family would have reason to know his name.

The mob chasing Biden is not thinking about what comes next. They can only think about the joy they will feel when Biden steps aside. The chaos that will erupt in the regime when suddenly they do not have a body to parade around as the official nominee is outside the event horizon of the mob. What if the mob forms up in favor of someone that turns out to be worse than Biden? What if the mob splits into warring tribes organized around the various parts of the regime?

No one can think about that right now. All that matters for the members of the mob is creating some new way to yell “get him” at Joe Biden. They sense that time is running short, so they have to put everything into it, or Biden will escape. Realistically they have until the end of next week to drag his corpse from the ticket. After that, the mob will run out of steam and the regime will run out of time to stage a fake process to name a replacement, so they will be stuck with Biden.

From the Dirt People perspective, this is all to the good. The more intense and grinding this mob fury is over Biden, the deeper the anger between factions of the regime after the frenzy is over. One of the ironies of the mob is the longer it goes, the more destructive it becomes of its own ends. That means the nastier this fight gets, the more the regime damages its own interests. With any luck the Democratic convention is an even more chaotic replay of 1968.

Of course, this is the lesson of democracy. Of democracy, John Adams wrote, “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts it is more bloody than either.” Maybe that is what this mob chasing Biden signals. The democracy fever that set in after the Cold War is now reaching its natural end point.

The Suicide Cult

Posted on July 10, 2024 by thezman

Note: If you are interesting hearing me gas on about a variety of things, then you are in luck as I was on Coffee and Mike yesterday. Listen here.

There is a big NATO summit going on in Washington right now and the main focus of the meeting is what to do about Ukraine. Here is Biden talking about doing something with the wife of the NATO Secretary General and then calling him an “intellectual wigger” for some reason. Perhaps Biden thinks this will get him more support in the black community or perhaps he has no idea where he is, but that is part of the background noise of this summit.

The point of NATO, formed up after the Second World War, was to keep Germany down, the Russians out and the Americas in. It is just assumed that NATO is an American creation, but it was created by the UK and France. The Treaty of Dunkirk was signed by France and the United Kingdom on 4 March 1947 with the express purpose of mutual defense in case of attacks by Germany or the Soviets. The real purpose was to bind the United States to Europe forever.

This formula worked throughout the Cold War, as the Red Army sitting on the border of Western Europe was a daily reminder for why the so-called free nations of Europe needed to stick together and under the protective shield of America. The fact that it was highly unlikely that the Soviets would move into Europe was never considered, as the threat was simply too convenient. The Warsaw Pact was formed almost a decade later in response to the formation of NATO.

This should be ancient history, as the Soviet Union is gone and the Cold War has been over for more than a generation, but it helps explain the present psychosis that has gripped the NATO countries. For half a century, their identity and therefore the reason for their political and economic elites to exist was based in this fear of the Russians flowing across the border. What it meant to be European came to mean fear of the bear and the desperate clinging to the eagle.

In other words, European elites need the bear and the eagle, because who they are literally and spiritually exist between the two. Much of what passes for European diplomacy over the last decade or so has been an effort to poke the bear into being the bear again and telling the eagle that she is still that majestic eagle of yore. This is why the Europeans flew into action at the start of the Ukraine war. Their reason to exist had finally returned and there was cheering in every European capital.

The trouble is the eagle is too old to fly. Biden hosting what will most likely be his last NATO summit is emblematic of the problem. The America that beat the fascists and secured peace for half a century is no more. The arsenal of democracy, like old family heirlooms of a once proud dynasty, has been auctioned off to the highest bidder and like Biden, is a shuffling husk of its former self. Biden mumbling crazy things on stage is the perfect image for the current moment.

One cannot help but wonder how the alleged leaders of Europe can sit in their chairs watching this desiccated husk cling to office and not see the problem. An America that produces a leader like Biden is nothing like the America that produced the young and reckless Kennedy or the sharp and charming Reagan. How is it possible for these people to not see what is plain to anyone who looks? How can they possibly think they can and should tempt war with Russia?

Of course, the main reason is that the European elites are just as dilapidated and broken down as the American elites. Look across Europe and you cannot find anyone who would be allowed to shine the shoes of great leaders of the past. Instead, it is managerial functionaries who have been elevated into positions with impressive titles and no real power because they are obsequious toadies. They may as well be actors hired from the local circus.

In truth, they are actors. Europe, having been remade in the image of the progressive masters across the sea, has the same problem we see in American politics, which is a system that selects for people willing to read their lines. It is why you never find anyone in European politics who had a job in the dreaded private sector. That is a disqualifier on a resume, so the politically ambitious avoid anything that requires practical knowledge and instead work on their obsequiousness.

Amusingly, many of these so-called leaders claim the Ukraine war is an existential crisis, apparently thinking “existential” means “external.” Even more amusingly, they are correct despite not understanding what they are saying. The Ukraine war is the result of an inner conflict in Europe. To be European no longer has any meaning, so what is the purpose of the institution set up to protect it? The so-called leaders have no answer when asked, “why defend Europe at all?”

The proof of this is the steady invasion from the south. The people terrified of an invasion from the east celebrate mass migration. So much so that they are now rigging their elections to prevent any efforts to stem the flow. Keir Starmer’s first act was to welcome boats full of Africans to the UK. The unsaid truth at the NATO summit is the answer to the question at the center of Europe’s existential crisis is suicide. They will end the question of Europe by exterminating it.

Maybe in the end that is the final point of NATO. Just as the people who run imperial foreign policy would rather blow up the world in a nuclear Armageddon than see their ancient enemy prosper, the so-called leaders of Europe would rather see the end of Europe than think about leading an independent Europe. This NATO summit is Jonestown, and the leader promising salvation is a deranged old man who everyone hopes brought the Flavor Aid.

Preference Cascade

Posted on July 9, 2024 by thezman

The regime media’s ongoing meltdown over Joe Biden’s mental decline might be a bit of foreshadowing for what lies ahead in American society. What was on display the night of the debate is called a preference cascade. This is when people suddenly realize that their private doubts or preferences are shared by everyone else. One person realizes he is not alone in his doubts, for example, so he voices them and all of a sudden, this private doubt sweeps the room as public doubt.

Up to that point, everyone privately assumed that everyone else held an opinion or preference that was contrary to their private opinion or preference. This is preference falsification, which involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the privately held preference of the person. The person may disagree with what she perceives to be the collective opinion but she keeps this private. This is the underlying condition for the preference cascade.

Regarding Biden and the media, they were seeing what the world has been seeing for years, but they chose to keep quiet about it. One reason is pressure from the top of the media operations who collude with the political elites. The bigger reason is the herd mentality of regime media. The thing these people fear most is to be expelled from the system, so they invest most of their energy in making sure they never wander too far away from the rest of the herd.

On the night of the debate, as Biden stared into nothingness with his mouth open like a nursing home patient, the conflict between the privately held opinion of Biden’s condition and official opinion grew so large some people snapped. This is what set off the chain reaction we saw that night. All of a sudden, the poles have reversed and those who doubt that it is a good idea to question Biden’s fitness keep quiet because they assume the herd holds a contrary opinion.

This is creating an enormous problem for Team Biden. They are going from one regime platform to the next hoping to pressure these people into abandoning the public position on Biden’s brain condition, but that same herd mentality is preventing them from changing opinions on the matter. They are now playing the race card against regime media, with the Congressional Black Caucus leading the charge. Questioning Biden’s fitness is now the new racism.

What the regime is slamming into is a problem of their own making. Decades of lies about the nature of the regime were made possible by manipulation of the public through the herd mentality of regime media. Note how the regime worked tirelessly to remove anyone from the media who questioned official narratives. The purge of diverse opinion from Fox News is the most recent example. The regime built a herd and now the herd has broken through the fence.

This may turn out to be a good analogy for society as a whole. The two-party system that emerged from the Cold War was built around a new consensus. The end of history was the triumph of Western democracy and by extension, the triumph of the managerial elite that came to control Western democracies. One party would promote a domestic agenda shepherded by the elites, while the other party would champion an international agenda that spread that domestic agenda globally.

The glue holding it together was both their confidence in their ability to remake the world, but also their shared belief that the general public was fully committed to what the elites now call democracy. For thirty years the public has been subjected to a firehose of propaganda about how “our democracy” works. You have to accept the results because it is the result of democracy and no one better question “our democracy” or you are worse than Hitler.

The truth is though, this process and slowly undermined public trust in the institutions associated with democracy. Only kooks and simpletons accept anything from regime media at face value. Most people think the political parties are corrupt. If not for Trump, the Republican Party would be facing the same fate as the Tories. Even the military has lost the trust of the public. Recruitment is in a crisis because the people who used to buy the flag waving no longer wave the flags of their fathers.

In other words, we have a condition similar to that which prevailed in the media with regards to Biden’s mental health. The gap between what people think privately about their political system and what they will state publicly is growing. Every fake news item about it, each dodgy election result and the increasing despair at daily life are widening that gap by undermining trust in the system. The conditions for a preference cascade are just about in place, waiting for the match.

Wild fires start because no one can easily predict which spark at which location will set the woods ablaze. The solution is to prevent the conditions that can lead to a wildfire, rather than police the sparks. The regime has chosen the other path. They invest their time in preventing sparks. The reason regime media looks like a zombie horde is anyone with a spark of curiosity was forced to hide his own misgivings for fear of being ostracized, but that just created the conditions for this media wildfire.

We see the same in the general public. In the fullness of time, we may look at this ongoing populist revolt as a genuine defense of the system by the public because they still believed in the system. The real peasant revolt that comes next will start with the preference cascade when everyone all at once realizes that everyone else detests their rulers and the system that makes them possible. History says these sorts of wildfires end only one way.

A Hive Without A Queen

Posted on July 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about my annual trip to the doctor, a post about the Biden crisis that is vexing our beautiful people and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Ross Douthat wrote a column where he contemplated the reality of the modern president, which probably serves no real purpose to the functioning of the managerial state. He makes some obvious points but then quotes Curtis Yarvin and his brain falls out of his head. The rest of his column is nonsense. This is the risk of reading Curtis Yarvin. Your brain cells begin to die at an alarming rate, mostly as an act of suicide in order to avoid reading Yarvin.

It is interesting how all of a sudden, the kept men of what we call conservatism use Yarvin when they want to sound edgy. There was no need to name drop Yarvin in this post, but Douthat wants his readers to know that every once in a while, he puts on the leather jacket and rides his Vespa without a helmet. Back when Yarvin was Moldbug and had an audience, so-called conservatives had no idea he existed, but now all of a sudden, they are all big fans.

Putting that aside, Douthat raises two valid points with regards to whether the job of president matters. One is the system found a way to work around Trump, thwarting his reform efforts and inserting their shenanigans into his program. With Biden, it is clear that he has been incapable of doing much of anything since the 2020 election, yet the machine has trundled along regardless. That is eight years where the machine of state has operated in spite of the president and without a president.

There is nothing novel about this. America has been a corporate state for a long time and corporate systems are designed to operate leaderless. Large companies often go extended periods with no one in the big chair. Maybe they have a caretaker or maybe it is a committee doing the basics, but the system rolls along until a new CEO is found to sit in the big chair. Often, the process of hiring the CEO is about finding someone who will not change anything important.

If you think back to the end of the Cold War, both parties were set up to prevent an undesirable candidate from winning the nomination. The stakes were too high to risk having a madman with the nuclear codes! Since the Cold War, both parties have tried to select for neo-liberal dullards like Bush and Obama. Look past the superficial and there was not much of a difference between Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Nothing of consequence changed with each “new” president.

That is the main reason the system freaked out over Trump. It was not just that he comes from outside the managerial class, but that he wanted to use the power of the presidency to do things. The people who actually run things were scandalized by the suggestion that an outsider could take the job and make the machine do things they did not want it to do. In other words, the managerial state has been running itself for a long time now and it is what is viewed as normal.

In this context, the twentieth century takes on a new look. The managerial system that emerged with FDR was born in the crisis of war and economic collapse, but it emerged from those times as the moral default. This base assumption that everything could be managed outside of the electoral process slowly gave way to a view that everything must be managed outside of politics. This led to the second phase of managerialism, which is consolidation.

You can probably date that to Watergate. The last president with real power who actually used it was Nixon. He was run out of town, in part, because of the “imperial presidency” claims by the managerial class. As someone noted in the comments behind the green door, this was also when they passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. This handed power to the agencies, rather than the president, with regards to administering spending.

It was also in this time when the media lost its working class character because it was fully professionalized. In the 1960’s the typical Washington reporter was a high school grad, but by the end of the 1970’s they were not just college graduates, but graduates from elite colleges like Columbia. With professionalization came credentialization across the managerial system. What we think of as politics now operates within the corporate structure of the managerial state.

In theory, Congress controls the purse strings, but no one in Congress reads the bills that get voted out of Congress. These are written by staff that work with the agencies and the special interests linked to the agencies. Most of the rules that impact the citizens are crafted in the agencies, away from public view. Thus, we have arrived at a system that not only has no need for a president, but it can run fine without a House or a Senate. All of them could be replaced with code.

Note also that few House or Senate seats are competitive now. About ten percent of seats can go either way in an election. The most common way to lose you spot in Congress is quitting for a lobbying job. Death is the next most common exit. The third way to lose your place is to anger the system. Then you get a well-financed primary opponent and banishment from Washington. It is another reason the system seems to be on autopilot, immune from the voters.

This brings us back to the main question. Not only can the system operate without a president, but it also operates without a Congress. The theater of democracy is not just a pithy expression but the literal definition of our politics. It is just a show that provides a fig leaf for the managerial class. It is not unique to America. It is true of all democratic systems, because in the end, no society can last with the people having a final say on things, so every society has a ruling class.

The solution to this conflict between the ethos of democracy and the reality of human organization is the managerial state. Through this the economic elites run society, but the curtain behind which they stand is the theater of democracy. As America declines, the willingness and ability to maintain this illusion declines with it, thus we go from the theater of democracy to the farce of democracy. The penultimate stop in this process is the theater of the absurd we see emerging with Biden.

On Patriotism

Posted on July 4, 2024 by thezman

Most years the polling services and regime media outlets do polling on patriotism to coincide with the July 4th holiday. This year is an exception, probably because it is an election year, and the regime is at war with itself. Given that the numbers last year were dreadful, no one in the regime was interested in the topic. This was a good decision, given the intrigue swirling around Biden at the moment. No need to remind people that no one else is happy with their country either.

One exception comes from the New York Post, which had one of the young zombies from Conservative Inc. write a post about how her generation is not patriotic because the schools failed them. Seeing this sort of boomer-bait out in the wild is a bit weird if you no longer consume regime media. That post reads like something from the Young Republicans essay contest of 1995. There are few things more jarring than a young person who sounds like an old person.

Objectively, it is easy to see why patriotism is in decline. Most people define “patriotism” with the general happiness of the country. Right now, even those who doing well in the material sense are cranky about the country. Their leaders are buffoons, and the Dirt People continue to not know their place. The Dirt People, of course, are unhappy with the Cloud People for all the obvious reasons. You do not have to dig deep into the issue to see why patriotism is at rock bottom.

Of course, below the surface of those youth numbers lies the demographic reality that an empty vessel like Mx. Schlott is unable to notice. Most young people are not white and not only have no connection to the country’s past, but they have also been conditioned to hate that past as part of their identity. Import enough barbarians, arm them with the tools of cultural destruction and it is no surprise that they make war on the past of the host people and their culture.

It is tempting to hate the barbarians flooding into the country, but the fault lies with the rich people who run the country. The barbarians are just rationally responding to what they are experiencing in the process. They are invited in and encouraged to smash the place up, so from the barbarian perspective, why should they have any respect for the place they are encouraged to smash up? They are literally hired by the overclass to destroy the very idea of America.

Putting that aside, the root cause here is democracy. It is not an accident that the cultural and spiritual decline accelerated with the dramatic increase in the use of the word “democracy” in public discourse. Before this became a feature of our political Tourette’s syndrome, reformers talked in terms of returning to a past ideal, rather than pulling out a clean sheet of paper. Making war on the past was never part of the agenda, even for the cranks on the left.

Starting with the end of the Cold War, this changed. Along with the rise in the use of the word democracy, came the idea that what American needs is a rewrite. Clinton ran on the claim that America was desperate for radical change. This was despite the fact the country had gone through a great economic boom. Obama was even more explicit in his desire to fundamentally reorder the country, because in his view, everything was wrong with the “words on the paper.”

The authority for this program to reinvent the country was democracy, by which they meant the real will of the people. It might seem like people were fat, dumb, and happy with consumerism, but the new democrats knew better. What America wanted was radical change and that is what we have gotten for close to three decades. It is what Biden promises, despite having been in office for four years. Note the critique of Trump is that he wants to take us back to the past.

This is the poison of democracy. In order to win office, you must win a majority to your program, but to do that you must first get public attention. No one gets attention with a program of keeping things the same. Imagine a protest where the speaker calls, “What do we want?” and the crowd responds with “More of the same!” and you can see why democracy selects for change over stability. In fact, the only way democracy can work is as a race to find the most radical path.

Then there is the nature of the people rewarded by democracy. You see it in the interview with Mx. Schlott linked at the top. She has cultivated a disdain for the present, but also an indifference to it. This is the heart of the liberal who is sure she knows what needs to be fixed and how to fix it but cannot be bothered doing the mundane tasks that make society possible. Democracy loves the booshie snob with a head full of impractical, but fashionable ideas.

It is important to note that the issue with democracy is not the mechanics of measuring the general will on an issue. The problem lies with the assumption that everyone has a purpose, so collectively society has a purpose and therefore the point of democracy is to discover that purpose and then reorder society in pursuit of the purpose, even if it means trampling the laws. In a democracy, even the rules of democracy are fair game when seeking to move society towards its spiritual end.

Of course, this is why patriotism is impossible in a democracy. To be patriotic, one has to love his ancestors and their accomplishments so much that he is willing to sacrifice to maintain those accomplishments. This means the natural limits on men of the present is the accumulated wisdom of the past. You cannot have a program of constant change and a love of the past or even a healthy respect for your ancestors. Democracy hates the past and anyone who thinks otherwise.

This is why patriotism is dead. It is not the demographic changes or the material conditions that have killed our love of the past. It is the institutional hatred of the past that has become the state religion. In order to fully embrace democracy, one must not only break free of the past, but turn and face it like an enemy. Despite all the pretensions about the future, our lovers of democracy care little about what comes next, only the next round of ancestor hatred.

This may seem like a grim view of the present, but it is only through the clear lens of realism that an alternative can be formed. Conservatism failed to hold onto anything in the face of this democratic onslaught. That means what comes next must not be a defense of the past, which has already slipped away from us, but a new offensive built around a vision of a new future. What comes next will have to be built on the bones of the democrats, not on what they have destroyed.

The Chevron Case

Posted on July 3, 2024 by thezman

Imagine if when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, they drew a sharp line between public and private discrimination. Maybe in Katzenbach v. McClung they drew a bright line around the Commerce Clause and ruled that as long as you were not conducting business across state lines, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not apply to your business. In other words, what if the court said that the principles of discrimination and inclusion apply only to the government?

The answer is we would have a vastly different world. Just consider the Katzenbach case in which the court claimed that the restaurant in question was not doing business across state lines, but it was possible that it could one day buy product from a vendor in another state, so the Commerce Clause applied. If the court had ruled rationally, we would now have a world where private discrimination was still legal, just as long as you did it locally, not nationally.

Of course, if the court had drawn the line between private discrimination and public discrimination, most of our race troubles never would have manifested, because normal life would not contradict official morality. A colorblind state is well within the spirit and sensibility of the American people. The liberty to associate or disassociate with whom you choose, for any reason you choose, is also consistent with the history and sensibilities of the people.

That is not what happened, and we have suffered a half century of demographic collapse as a result of the court imposing a new moral framework. It is a good example of how even small changes in the law can lead to a revolution in how people interact with each other and the government. We may be seeing another revolution brewing with the most recent court rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors.

The Loper decision ends what has been called the “Chevron deference” which is the longstanding principle where the courts defer to federal agencies with regards to regulations, interpretation of regulations and enforcement of regulations. Put simply, if a business or industry did not like a federal regulation, they had to convince the regulators to change it or get help from Congress. The courts would defer to the alleged experts in the administrative state.

What the Supreme Court has done in these two cases is continue to dismantle the logic that animated the Chevron deference and much of administrative law. They are going about it in two ways. One is the Court is saying that these agencies only have powers explicitly granted to them by Congress. Second, companies and industries can now go into the courts for redress. They can challenge the expertise of the regulators and the process used by the agencies to make policy.

This may sound arcane and boring, but keep in mind that most of the federal rules that directly impact your life are not passed by Congress. In fact, no one in Congress can tell you how most of the rules come into existence. The reason for that is the federal agencies craft the rules that regulate every nook and cranny of life. Until now, they did so without having to answer to anyone. Technically, Congress oversees these agencies, but Congress is full of simpletons.

What the Court seems to imagine is a new paradigm. If the Gaia worshippers, for example, want to ban gas stoves, they will need to get enough votes in Congress for a ban on gas stoves. Currently, they just have to cajole or bribe people in the administrative state and convince industry that they can profit from the new shenanigans in order to ban your gas stove. You, the citizen, have nowhere to turn to get your gas stove back.

There are now over 200,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations and few people have the slightest idea what they mean. This is why large companies have lawyers who interface with the agencies overseeing their industry. It is why small and midsized companies have trade groups. It is why there is a large army of lawyers whose specialty is administrative law. This is because the leviathan, which is the administrative state, has tentacles reaching into your most private matters.

What made this all possible was the habit of Congress, going back to FDR, to grant agencies in the executive branch broad powers to make laws, interpret those laws and enforce those laws. The way they did this is to give an agency a mission and then a budget to set off on that mission, which was used to lobby Congress for more money to expand the scope of the mission and underwrite various schemes that allegedly were in pursuit of their mission.

The direction of the Court is to ignore the vague powers granted by Congress and focus only on the specific powers granted by Congress. If Congress passes the Puppies and Rainbows bill that authorizes the Department of Education to do what they can to promote puppies and rainbows, the Court will not intervene. Once the DoE makes a rule requiring puppies and rainbows in the schools, then a school system can go to court arguing that the DoE was never granted this power.

There is a long road to go and many more court cases to define this new paradigm, but the end of that road is an administrative state that is limited by the specific powers granted to it and one that must defend its rules in court when challenged. For the same reason our coins have ridges, bills coming out of Congress will have to come with specifics, rather than pages of esoteric language designed to give the administrative state unlimited power to craft new rules.

In the short term, it means that every comma in those 200,000 pages of Federal regulations is now open to challenge in the courts. Inevitably, some popular rules will be struck down and that means Congress will be forced to pass actual laws reestablishing those popular rules. On the other hand, it also means there is a chance to get rid of odious rules that serve narrow interests. Getting a light bulb ban through Congress, for example, never would have happened.

It is not all puppies and rainbows. Rich people have been bribing Congress for generations and America presently has the worst class of rich people since the French Revolution, so it means lots of terrible laws from Congress. The difference is that this stuff will be out in the open where now it is in the shadows, allowing both Congress and its wealthy owners to play dumb and pretend to be something other than odious carbuncles strip-mining the middle-class.

Civil rights looked like a small change in private behavior in pursuit of a greater good, but it led to the demographic madness of the present. These rulings in pursuit of reducing the managerial state to mere bureaucracy may not look like much, but they threaten the moral authority of managerialism. Rule by experts no longer make sense when experts can be challenged. This may one day give people room to salvage whatever is left of the American experiment.

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