The Haunted Present

For a while now I have wanted to do a post on the intellectual origins of these rather weird political theatrics we are seeing in the public space. A mistake our side tends to make is to assume the Left is not working from an intellectual foundation. Because the Left never talks about their intellectual history, we just assumed it does not exist, outside of Marx or maybe some feminist writers. That’s not true. What we are seeing today is the culmination of a mode of thought that started a century ago in the interwar years.

It’s only one facet of it, but it is an important one. A point that cannot be made enough is that what we call Progressivism is a religion, a civic religion of sorts, but increasingly an esoteric mystery cult. The attraction for the modern Progressive is purely emotional and temporal. It is all about how the swirling torrent of Progressive fads makes them feel in the moment and how it makes them feel in relation to one another as initiates in the cult. What the show is about this week is taking a look at the sources of this phenomenon.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Spotify

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/BHZM2UpAAnc

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Lester Fewer
Lester Fewer
5 years ago

There’s two things (well I guess two among many) to keep in mind with these cretins… 1. Back in the long-ago when these things started, let’s say 1910 for example, life really was actually very hard; people were genuinely poor, not EBT poor, and they worked really hard jobs under harsh conditions. To get a fairer shake, they really did have to organize and march and get their skulls cracked in. These behaviors and techniques over time got valorized and sentimentalized and cemented as a way of thinking. I dated a girl who did “organizing” for oppressed college-cafeteria workers (sic).… Read more »

Lester Fewer
Lester Fewer
Reply to  Lester Fewer
5 years ago

Damn auto spell, that should read “bourgeois do-gooder ism”. What would Joyce and Faulkner do on a system like this?

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Lester Fewer
5 years ago

blame it on the sloppiness of the English language.

Lester Fewer
Lester Fewer
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Well whaddaya know, it’s Brave Sir Robin, unfunny as ever. Maybe the two of us should start a vaudeville team: two straight men, nobody’s funny.

Member
Reply to  Lester Fewer
5 years ago

I don’t know. Both of you are pretty funny at the moment. lol

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Frip
5 years ago
Pimpkin's Nephew
Pimpkin's Nephew
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Bravo, Karl. Concise, ironic, and well-targeted. LF has stepped in his own shit.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Pimpkin's Nephew
5 years ago

it’s a testament to xis smallness that he can’t even admit it was a well played hand.

Chaotic Neutral
Chaotic Neutral
Reply to  Lester Fewer
5 years ago

I went to the Hoover dam, and they described work conditions. This is just after ww2, was it? The men weren’t issued hard hats and many died of falling rivets. They would dip their caps in hot tar to make an improvised hard hat! It was a government project so if you died on site your widow would receive a pension. If you were severely fatally injured, but not quite dead, they would rush you out into the desert to make sure you died offsite, thus robbing your wife of the pension! Another example of how difficult and unfair life… Read more »

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Chaotic Neutral
5 years ago

do you have proof of that?

Chaotic Neutral
Chaotic Neutral
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

No just the stuff they told us on the tour.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Chaotic Neutral
5 years ago

they told you on the tour that badly injured workers on the damn were taken out in the desert to die? were these tour guides invisible by any chance?

Dtbb
Dtbb
Reply to  Chaotic Neutral
5 years ago

Were those rivets to hold the concrete together in the 30’s?

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Dtbb
5 years ago

hahaha good one! Maybe he was thinking of the Hoover State building? 😛

Alzaebo
Alzaebo
Reply to  Chaotic Neutral
5 years ago

Thousands were felled by heatstroke building the Yuma Az version of Hoover Dam. Brutal desert heat, working slavelike conditions in another WPA project. So isolated you were pretty much stuck there, as well. My beloved neighbor Beulah was 14, raising her 4 brothers and sisters since their parents had died. They were Okies headed here for the field jobs. She met a 31 year-old guy just back from a term in the Navy; he was told, “You better marry that girl before you cross the California border, or they’ll arrest you.” He did, and four of their six children were… Read more »

Timothy
Timothy
Reply to  Lester Fewer
5 years ago

Are you fucking serious? What did the founding fathers do? They took a bunch of poor people, gave them guns, beat them, shouted at them, beat them more, made sure a bunch of them died of disease, got many of them shot, beat them more, refused to pay them, and then beat them when they said “Please Sir, my wife and children are starving, I need my last six months of pay.” And you think the “intellectual vanguard” is a thousand levels lower? What? No, fuck no, they’re both just “The Middle”, the people who look up and see power… Read more »

Member
5 years ago

“If confirmed Kavanaugh should step down.” – Jordan Peterson

A good many on our side suspected and even hated this guy. I always gave him the benefit of the doubt. It seems they were right.

Member
Reply to  Frip
5 years ago

Yup. My first reaction when I read that was, “Well, he is Canadian. One can only expect so much.”

Glenfilthie
Glenfilthie
Member
Reply to  Fabian_Forge
5 years ago

Jordan Peterson doesn’t represent Canadians any more than Hillary Clinton represents Americans. Peterson is still very much a liberal from an extremely pozzed environment.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Frip
5 years ago

Petersen has lost most of his audience with that one. Vox Deus (hehe) was going off on Peterson for weeks, and I thought his efforts were misplaced; but he was right.

Babe Ruthless
Babe Ruthless
Reply to  Frip
5 years ago

“Farewell, Jordo. But we’ll always have the pronouns.”

Glen Filthie
Glen Filthie
Member
5 years ago

Coming from a proggie family, one of the ways I was expected to virtue signal the other monkeys in my tribe was to help out at the local battered women’s shelter. I had to walk around the women there like they were nuclear bombs about to go off – as I did chores like run errands, shovel snow off the sidewalks, and do handyman chores under the supervision of my father in law who had a part time/semi-retirement custodial job there that actually paid. It was an eye-opener. I lasted a couple months. Most of the ‘victims of violence’ were… Read more »

Whitney
Member
Reply to  Glen Filthie
5 years ago

Years ago I delivered Meals on Wheels for homebound sick people. That was an eye-opener. Delivering it to healthy young people and their pack of children. I don’t even know if I ever saw an actual sick person

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Glen Filthie
5 years ago

Glenn, seriously, you should write a book about your family and their foibles. I think it would resonate with a huge number of people. Continually refer to yourself as a survivor 🙂

Babe Ruthless
Babe Ruthless
Reply to  Glen Filthie
5 years ago

Worked at a soup kitchen for a while. Seemed to be mostly psychiatric cases, to be honest. Just plain sad. Kudos to the the 60s revolutionaries who “humanely” emptied the mental hospitals.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Babe Ruthless
5 years ago

Both parties are to blame for that.

Alzaebo
Alzaebo
5 years ago

“…a theocracy run by atheists”
Tucker Carlson

Christopher S. Johns
Christopher S. Johns
5 years ago

The murderous ideology of the left vilifies the entirety of western civilization as a heinous crime which can only be expiated by the obliteration of it’s progeny. In other words, the left is operates under an ideology that endorses extermination, only this time round white men and women get to play the part of the Jews. Ironic, no? The fact of the matter is that the left has amply demonstrated these last couple of weeks why they can never be allowed to hold the presidency again – they are totalitarians who would use the power of the state to crush… Read more »

Member
Reply to  Christopher S. Johns
5 years ago

“The fact of the matter is that the left has amply demonstrated these last couple of weeks why they can never be allowed to hold the presidency again – they are totalitarians who would use the power of the state to crush their enemies, the rule of law be damned.” Lindsey Grahm’s choice of words during his famous flourish couldn’t have been better. “Boy, you all want power. God I hope you never get it.” Those two sentences carried much foreboding resonance for the white middle class. His cadence was equally good. It’s one thing to have the lines, it’s… Read more »

Babe Ruthless
Babe Ruthless
Reply to  Frip
5 years ago

Yeah, some dismissed Graham, but I think (and maybe I’m just projecting) that some of those Conservatism Inc. guys really got a glimpse into the Heart of Darkness, the sociopathy and murderous hatred of their opponents. The media tried to run interference and prevent Normie from seeing it, but I bet a lot of eyes were opened. As Zman commented a while back, even a lot of (married) women probably saw the ghastliness of it, too. The memetics of the internet age are bewildering, but I think that we’ve got to just keep banging away–in comments sections, on Twitter, on… Read more »

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Babe Ruthless
5 years ago

Scott Adams posits that the Dems explicit anti-maleness is going drive a shiton of men into the GOP’s waiting arms. I agree. welcome home boys, don’t do that again (support Dems).

Christopher S. Johns
Christopher S. Johns
Reply to  Christopher S. Johns
5 years ago

Oh, and just in case anyone may have thought I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole, see the photo below the initial tweet:

https://twitter.com/johnston_kelly/status/1048586260023934976

miforest
Member
5 years ago

One thing about the lynching issue. Lynching was a vigilantly justice thing , and suspected criminals black and white were hanged. the fact that is usually wasn’t racially motivated has been carefully flushed down the memory hole.
I used to read a historical magazine called Kentucky explorer, and there were old newspaper articles about lynching’s for all sorts of criminal suspicions.

Drake
Drake
5 years ago

The craziness of the past few weeks – crazy accusations supported only by faith and dogma and violent reactions to a denial – reminds me of China’s Cultural Revolution. Teens who had been completely immersed in Mao’s nonsense went crazy. They tore down their temples and historical monuments. Then they put their teacher’s and professors on trial – literally beating them to death if they didn’t grovel in shame and admit their crimes against Marxism. The mindset of the American Left seems to be in exactly the same place right now. The biggest difference is that they can’t pour out… Read more »

miforest
Member
Reply to  Drake
5 years ago

hence the leftist obsession with gun control.

Drake
Drake
Reply to  miforest
5 years ago

Yes – no mystery there.

Babe Ruthless
Babe Ruthless
Reply to  miforest
5 years ago

If there’s one area in which the right, including the dissident right, is failing, it’s spreading the word on *why* regular people need the right to have a gun.

Most normies never get beyond “but if we ban guns, less people will get shot!” They don’t get it at all. And since the Establishment sure as hell isn’t going to tell them, that’s our job.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Drake
5 years ago

Nixon showed the way on handling unruly students.

Apex Predator
Apex Predator
Reply to  Drake
5 years ago

I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that is the trajectory we are on in colleges. And furthermore, were there no rule of law I can also tell you that RIGHT NOW most college kids would put their admins and professors on trial and beat them to death in much the same manner. There is only a thin veneer of civilization left and its cracking and peeling before our eyes as the radicals flood out into the world at large. They’ve been programmed for Kindergarten to College for about 30 years now so this is not even… Read more »

Timothy
Timothy
Reply to  Apex Predator
5 years ago

People were saying this decades if not hundreds of years ago, nothing has fucking happened.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Indians are to America, like rust is to iron. They all need to go back.

Kodos
Kodos
5 years ago

This podcast is a great take on things. I’ve thought along the lines of this “hauntology” myself without having heard the term before. I think in 2008 lots of progressives really thought utopia was right around the corner with Obama becoming president. They thought the Muslim world was just waiting for America to show it was Muslim-friendly and suddenly all the terrorism would stop, etc. When Obama couldn’t usher in utopia, the Left freaked out and has been freaking out ever since, blaming Republicans for standing in the way of the inevitable glorious future.

Timothy
Timothy
Reply to  Kodos
5 years ago

Um no.

“The Left” believed that conditions would go from shit to not shit.

Conditions remained shit.

On top of that, all of the droughts and natural disasters are so bad, the Pentagon is certain that the future is going to be increasingly more dangerous.

The media eggs on both sides, people are tit for tat these days, it goes on and on.

“They” are not going to stop till you stop, and you aren’t going to stop till they stop.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

maybe at the end of the day, we are trying to find a rational explanation for irrational (i.e. insane) behavior. which is a futile effort.

Dutch
Dutch
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Bingo. I have to make my statement longer. So bingo! Again, bingo!!

Dutch
Dutch
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

To expand on your thought, that is why all the time and effort we spend to deconstruct their behavior and thinking is worse than useless. It is the application of logical assumptions to infants screaming and banging their highchair trays. It is also why there is no point in doing anything other than ringfencing these people from the rest of us, and let them throw their monkey crap at each other. Once the pukes the likes of Dada and the beat poets were held up and sanctified, rational thinking was thrown out the window. Now we need to round up… Read more »

Epaminondas
Member
Reply to  Dutch
5 years ago

Easy enough. Round them up and ship them off to Israel.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Epaminondas
5 years ago

you misspelled “bottom of the ocean” 🙂

but yes, they should be rounded up and put to work in the fields.

Epaminondas
Member
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

I’ve always had trouble with spelling.

Rod1963
Rod1963
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Jordan Peterson has them pegged as Po-Mo’s with a very strong nihilistic streak and a gloss of Cultural Marxism. It would explain their embracing suicidal policies and their attempts to destroy Western Civilization. And their willingness to throw various groups under the bus once they were done with them shows this. First they catered to Blacks, then women, then gays, which they threw under the bus in favor of illegals, trannies and Muslims. We are not dealing with utopians anymore but ruthless and destructive SOB’s. Beyond that we just need to recognize them as a fanatical enemy that we cannot… Read more »

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Rod1963
5 years ago

doesn’t feel like we are losing at all.

if you have ever body surfed, there is a feeling when a wave starts lifting you up, and pushing you forward. that’s what i feel right fucking now 🙂 Trump is going to take us all the way to shore.

Joachim
Joachim
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Time for white lab coats and psychology? Brain scans and postmortem dissection? To me, this is, partly, old religiosity in new garb. As many modern Christians can’t ever be troubled by race/immigration, because “all are one…” and modern Christian thought makes them feel good, provides them with meaning and purpose, so leftists are emotionally attached to visions of egalitarian heaven on earth, reason, evidence, logical consequences be damned. Perhaps also, their psychology is such that conditioning (like the egalitarian conditioning were relentlessly bombarded with) takes more firmly hold, is unbreakable, save perhaps by a massive shift in thinking in nearly… Read more »

Teapartydoc
Member
5 years ago

I’m going to drive around town today asking folks if they know where my concubines are stashed.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Teapartydoc
5 years ago

“where is my beautiful wife?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8

LineInTheSand
LineInTheSand
5 years ago

Upvote to Z for a commenting system in which a comment can get votes. That feature is fun.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  LineInTheSand
5 years ago

It’s nice to have it back 🙂

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

OT: Zman, from what you have aid about your extended family, it seems like you have “jumped” a class or two (or something to that effect). How does that affect your views on the world (and your place in it)?

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Thanks for answering 🙂

Joachim
Joachim
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

Have you considered shutting it down because doxxing you is likely among the highest priorities of the ADL, SPCL, Antifa, etc.? They have hundreds of dedicated people, and millions upon millions of dollars behind them. I’ll even wager that they have government contacts to help them with this. You are the most prominent, intellectually astute, well read, persuasive dissident rightist who is still anonymous. I certainly don’t feel comfortable demanding a veritable banzai charge from you. The fact that if we were all arrested and summarily shot tomorrow, even most conservatives would shrug their shoulders and change the channel (or… Read more »

James LePore
Member
Reply to  thezman
5 years ago

I was in my room one night in our third floor apartment when I was thirteen, looking out my window when I saw a cop stop his patrol car, get out, pull his gun and start chasing a guy who seemed to appear out of nowhere. When they got to the corner the cop slipped and crashed into some garbage cans. The guy kept running. The cop twisted around and fired a couple of rounds but the guy got away. My father and I went down to help the cop, who had broken his leg. We waited with him until… Read more »

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

asians of any kind are good at memorizing things, and taking tests. but put them in a real world situation that doesn’t have a pre-canned solution (i.e. they have to figure something out on their own) and they fail, spectacularly. Would you go to an Indian doctor? If you say “yes” then you are a fool. Hire an Indian engineer? hahah

Timothy
Timothy
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

You do understand that most medical advances on lowering costs and improving care are happening in India right? Did you know people get better treatment for less money in South Korea, that includes the plane ticket over there.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

too bad the Wakandans didn’t help the rest of Africa. in fact, I bet they were secretly keeping their neighbors uneducated.

Drake
Drake
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

They were selling other Africans to the slavers to fund their floating trolley cars.

Lee Zehrer
Member
5 years ago

Just because everybody believes it doesn’t mean it’s false, but that’s a good place to start .

Drake
Drake
5 years ago

I’m surprised they are bringing up lynchings right now. Your example is one where #they believed her.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

let’s focus on lynchings, not on the wholesale slaughter going on in the nig community now. fine with me, let the ghetto oven clean itself.

Timothy
Timothy
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

You ever read about Chicano when it was full of Irish? No fucking difference.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Haven’t listened to the entire podcast yet, so maybe Zman will touch on this later. It seems to me, that the nucleus of the prog mindset is Gnosticism. These cat turd eating cretins genuinely believe to their core, that they possess the secrets of the universe. And wouldn’t their complete dismissal of reality (and its consequences) fit within the Gnostic framework?

Teapartydoc
Member
Reply to  Karl McHungus
5 years ago

Eric Vogelin Science, politics, and gnosticism. 1959.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Teapartydoc
5 years ago

just bought it. oddly, the kindle version is $5 more than the paperback version

Chaotic Neutral
Chaotic Neutral
5 years ago

You see sort of the same phenomenon with the material aspects of race. The left is angry that the promise of the civil rights era has not been satisfied in terms of equality of blacks and whites. I believe many of them actually thought that whites would be displaced by blacks after “oppression” was removed. They can’t stand the fact that white civilization was really right all along. At some level they realize that the difference is biological. So the strategy has shifted to fraud; they want to create a black elite through interbreeding, which is part of the fixation… Read more »

LineInTheSand
LineInTheSand
5 years ago

The show’s intro music was Iron Maiden’s “Phantom of the Opera.” Z was a metalhead in the 80s. Very implicitly huwhite.

Babe Ruthless
Babe Ruthless
5 years ago

You actually see a crude alt-right version of “the present that could have been” in the memes that run, “in 1968, we thought that by 2018 we’d have a cure for cancer and flying cars. Instead we debate triskaidekasexuality!” I suppose that in the American alt-right mythology the divergence point between the path that should have been and what we actually got was the 1965 immigration bill. You could argue that if They are trying to always live in the “next 1932” and nip the next You-know-who in the bud, then the new nationalist movements are also an expression of… Read more »

Ripple
Ripple
5 years ago

Pronounced Zhak Dehr-ree-DAH.

Babe Ruthless
Babe Ruthless
Reply to  Ripple
5 years ago

His pronunciation of “portmanteau” and “Derrida” sealed the deal for me: he’s now the official intellectual heir to John Derbyshire.

NoMan
NoMan
5 years ago

test

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  NoMan
5 years ago

es

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
5 years ago

The sloars are against stay at home moms, because they know no man will ever marry *them*

Epaminondas
Member
5 years ago

Liberalism/leftist/progressivism is a mental disorder. History is like a therapy session for these people.

Timothy
Timothy
Reply to  Epaminondas
5 years ago

So half the population is mentally ill, wow, very educational.

Moran ya Simba
Moran ya Simba
5 years ago

I totally agree w the stuff said about non-white immigrants and I do not exactly hate Indians. Asians, south- and east-, are being told they have ‘grievances’ in the US and they lap it up. This is vile incitement. America may have scooped some of the smartest Indians but I prefer the Indian Indians, on average. Most of the Indians I dont get along with are in fact Indians who immigrated to America, and lo and behold, now they have become arrogant (not all of course, some of my best friends are Indian-American but the story gets too long).

Al from da Nort
Al from da Nort
5 years ago

Z Man; I just finished the podcast and want to explicitly thank you for all the work you do. I particularly appreciate your efforts to deal with the obvious (to me) religious aspects of ‘progressivism’ in a historically coherent manner. I never bought into utopian equalism (blank slateism, whatever) even before I returned to Christianity. I returned in part because, given any real-world experience with the underclasses (or upper classes), the Christian doctrine of human depravity is the most obvious thing in the world (and that it applies to me too). Yet the Progs. deny it and all historical and… Read more »

Oldgit
Oldgit
5 years ago

Not epigenetics, I think. More like Lamarckism or Lysenkoism.

Karl McHungus
Karl McHungus
Reply to  Oldgit
5 years ago

Or a virus.