The Cynical Phase

Note: I have a new post up behind the green door on the move Mr. Jones, which I recommend to those mulling over the current age. Learning about the realities of Soviet communism is a good palliative to those prone to optimism.


The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.

There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the opposite

In time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.

This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how “we’re lurching into socialism” when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.

Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a “radical revolution.” The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.

In other words, a revolution has occurred out of view from the rest of us and now we are seeing the revolutionaries step out of the shadows. This is not a lot different than how Stalin took control of the party and government. He quietly consolidated his hold on the party, while his rivals were thinking the revolution was still ongoing. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.

Now we are in the phase where we get used to the often-bizarre contradictions in the rules being imposed by the new rulers. Some are easy, like the fact that states have put mentally disturbed Jewish men in sundresses in charge of public health. These are ornamental positions, so putting a crazy person in the role allows the governor to display his piety at little cost. Until the Covid hysteria, no one had any reason to know their state had public health officials.

Other bits of the new normal have no explanation. For example, states are now telling people they cannot make noise in their home, as part of the alleged fight against the spread of Covid. In Europe, they are banning the sale of alcohol at certain times, claiming this is to fight Covid. Maybe they believe Covid hates loud noises and people get loud when they drink. It is insane, but it makes more sense than the official explanation, which is no explanation at all.

The lunacy of official policy will not always be humorous. The freedom loving Boris Johnson is now promoting a plan whereby Brits will be issued “freedom passes” if they comply with official edicts on Covid. For a long time, people threw around the word “Orwellian” to mean something they did not like. The English-speaking world is about to learn the real meaning of the term. Getting a freedom pass for doing exactly what the government has instructed is the very definition of Orwellian.

Another part of this phase where we come to terms with the madness of the situation is the acceptance of official silence. In a country with anything resembling an independent media, these officials would be asked to explain their polices. Boris Johnson would be asked about his Orwellian freedom pass scheme. Instead, the media is full of lectures about how we’re all in this together. You see, this is an opportunity to build back better, so you need to embrace this glorious opportunity.

Westerners have been trained for generations to think the media has an adversarial relationship with the government. This will change during this time. We will come to understand what the Soviet citizen understood. The official media is just that, official media promulgating the new lies. It’s value to the people is only in letting us know how to stay out of the camps and in providing a laugh at the absurdity of living in a society based on obvious lies. Everyone becomes a cynic.

That is something else we will learn. Pessimism is not the opposite of optimism. The man who is sure the end is near is really just another type of optimist. He believes that soon, his struggle will come to an end. The opposite of optimism is cynicism. Both the optimist and the pessimist are willing to accept the moral framework as stated. Their actions and understanding of the world are tightly bound by the orthodoxy. Both the optimist and the pessimist give up their agency to faith in the rules that govern them.

The cynic, in the context of an authoritarian society, accepts that there is no inherent logic in the system, other than to insulate those who prosper from their position. The cynic accepts that there is no truth in the system and the outcomes are random, based on the changing desires of the people you interact with in the system. The cynic knows there is no truth in a world of lies, other than his own acceptance of it. It is in this phase we are in now where we learn that you can never be cynical enough.

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332 thoughts on “The Cynical Phase

  1. read your own words again at 90, 180 and 365 days.

    then report back on being Jon Stewart of the “DR”

  2. The most astonishing thing about this great replacement, is how casually it has been undertaken. Western Civilization, with its amazing achievements, reaching phenomenal heights in science, medicine, literature, the arts, and to throw it all away, to replace the people who did this with another. Of course it’s all Darwinian, but knowing this, why can’t we stop this from happening? There is a major design flaw in that species, Homo Sapian. We know this, but allow it to happen anyway.

  3. Before we engage in risky behavior, no matter how pleasurable that might be, first observe how the “problem” is resolving itself.

    Old man Gates has found a way to get those pesky evolutionary dead ends off of his lawn. He calls it a “vaccine.” It’s not, so don’t take it.

    Bioweapons are boomerangs when deployed. They eventually go global, damaging the country of origin. They only make sense if the target can be isolated. It can’t be done by nationality, but it can be done by ethnicity.

    The left is cannibalizing itself, and the mockingbird media is being deplatformed.

    The future looks bright.

  4. you can only be a true cynic, if you know the truth.
    the pessimist can also be a passive cynic. not just a depressed optimist.

  5. Here’s cynical. When you know you’re ruled by gangsters. criminals///physcopaths, who killed Kennedy. blew the towers on 911. lied you into wars, steal your money and unleash a lab virus to bankrupt you…why the fuck would you wear a mask because they said so?

  6. That is pretty cynical, while we were talking and getting angry and what passes for plotting between those unserious, the revolution happened and ‘men’ are now pregnant while GIs walk in high heels. Maybe. But this isn’t over. The Soviets were surreal and irrational but they weren’t ‘a boy is just a girl with a penis’ irrational. This isn’t over at all, it’s just beginning. And there probably will be an opening in the turbulence ahead.

  7. I looked up some words at dictionary.com. I was educated even by the short definitions I found. Of course, one dictionary’s entry, or one Layabout’s opinion, is not the final authority. But please, take it for what it may be worth*.
    Optimism: seeing good in most things, we live in the best of all possible worlds.
    Pessimism: seeing bad or evil in most things; we live in the worst universe possible.
    Both these definitions assume that the World is “good” or “bad”. Left out of the equation is that it is Man who’s deciding what is “good” or “bad” — for himself. This remains true for a universe with or without a God. If you believe in higher powers, It/They either take human needs into account, or they don’t. But this doesn’t change the fact that humans judge “good” or “bad” in terms of how it affects humans.
    Now let’s move on to Cynicism, which is much more interesting.
    Cynicism: (1) distrusts others’ motives; (2) shows contempt for honesty or traditional norms, especially by exploiting others; (3) bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic.
    That sounds like a perfect job description for today’s politicians. Alas, it also may increasingly be a cope for the average citizen.
    *But you’ll probably think I have ulterior motives 🙂

  8. Biden is old and sick. Harris a corporate whore. Neither approach Stalin in command or ruthlessness . And America is not a war wracked peasant nation. Chris Caldwell notes that under Obama’s last three years the top ten percent of earners saw sizable increases in income and every one else nothing. In Trumps three years before COVID it was reversed.

    The top ten percent got nothing which explains elite rage and the deplorables captured nearly all the economic gains especially those working class. Which also explains elites hating Trump.

    Stealing the election and a clampdown making better off peoples poorer with goodies for foreign immigrants not available even to Latino Americans is a recipe for civil war.

    That sort of stuff caused the Arab Spring. Rising income crushed by elites clamping down.

    Biden is viewed as a corrupt and senile thief. Because he is. Stalin had no live but fear and respect. Our rulers are clowns. Mentally ill Jewish men in sundresses inspire respect.

  9. I’ve been a reader of the Z blog for about a year now. Its definately helped me intellectually understand this insane clown world circus we keep living in. On a different note, as a young man that’s participated in alot of 2A rallies and local groups it is fascinating to watch the old boomer types see how much they have lost for the next generations. The election was like cold water on a passed out drunk. I fear the proceeding stupor from waking up to that may start to turn violent in short order if the economy takes another hit and shortages happen. People around me are prepping like hell, buying ammo and guns like hell, and organizing locally. Somewhat of a white pill.

    • In my experience the only thing that will get these old Boomers to move is a threat to their retirement accounts, including the govt Social Security gravy.

      Perhaps this is where the application of MMT can be our friend, devaluing all the retirees’ savings.

      • Boomers are a the youngest about 60. With some exceptions they will only useful for training, logistics or cancer club suicide runs.
        Instead look to recruiting Gen X (though we are 50) and Millennial kids and Gen Z kids too.
        They want to be lead and to have a purpose. You can see it with Antifa and the same urges work for us to. Give them a dream and they’ll follow.
        And just as many X and Y kids are vets as previous too, We’ve been doing urban warfare for decades

    • Episodic prepping and gun/ammo supply shortages have been a feature at least since Clinton took over in 92 and the AWB of 94 (?).

      If the new Congress can pass what I’ve heard proposed, we might see an end to such and a movement to underground supply and trade. It will be difficult—if not impossible—to adequately train and use such weapons, except very remotely among close friends. I’ve been expecting such action for 20+ years.

      Half the battle is being proficient in the use of arms—not just in “owning” such. I suppose we can always train with shovels like the Germans did after WWI. 🙁

      • Most of the hypothetical hopefully not be upcoming festivities will be dirty work often against soft targets. AR’s a good but not needed as much as you might think. Read the old but still up “Sipsey Street Irregulars.” blog for all the details on that sort of thing.
        Also if you are going to jail for owning a gun anyway why not a homemade SMG with a suppressor and AP ammo, its more useful.
        Hell used smart an old .25 with a homemade can silencer or some bathtub C4 will get more done than a big old rifle.
        Eventually infantry combat will happen but by than you’ll control that space anyway.

  10. “This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.” Heh. What a wicked line.

  11. I believe Garet Garrett (not to be confused with Revilo Oliver) made a similar point about the New Deal in a little book called “The Revolution Was.”
    As for the Jewish man in a sundress, much more worrisome is that 62% of Biden’s announced picks are Jews. As are 6 out of 7 of his and Trump’s children.
    Methinks the face of the revolution has already been exposed.

    • “As are 6 out of 7 of his and Trump’s children.”

      ?. Please elaborate. Married twice? There’s the Second Spouse, husband to la Presidentte-In-Waiting, as well.

      (And, LBJ’s granddaughter has bragged about her family’s roots. LBJ’s odd swerves suddenly become quite clear.)

  12. What you can do to be disruptive is, whenever you’re out & about, is insist people stay 8 or 10 feet away from you (you call it 6 feet of course.) So the way to do it is to go all Barney Fife, bug out your eyes, raise your voice a couple of octaves and scream something about “hand sanitizer” and “temperature checks”.

    Or you could give them the Rip Van Winkle routine, go about without a mask and pretend you know nothing about the latest developments, all the time hacking and spitting into a bloody handkerchief. If you’re offered a mask put it on backwards or upside down, smile and be on your way. Either way they’ll think you’re a mental and leave you alone. Might as well have some fun with this.

    • I like this.

      I recently had such an interaction at the grocery store. I shopped freely with no mask, then went to the self checkout. As I was scanning my stuff, some middle-aged wamyn asst mgr curtly stated I was supposed to have a mask on. I had planned for this and was preparing my response based on Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessup:
      https://youtu.be/vyMggFe9WRQ

      In no uncertain terms, I basically told her she needed to extend me some courtesy and ask me nicely, as I was a customer spending money in her store.

      After that, I put on my bird beak mask which I carry with myself for plagues, with “[GOVERNOR] SUCKS” written on each side of the beak and finished checking out. At that time, another worker came to check my ID since I was purchasing some beer. I decided to freak out about her being within 6 feet of me to make them even more uncomfortable.

      As I write this, I thought of another idea I could employ in the future. Make them hand me a face diaper to wear, and put it down my pants, and then ask them to hand me another.

    • Like some monks take a few steps and then bless themselves, you could take your temperature every few seconds. Lmao. Then say you have bad eyes and try to get people to read the results for you.

    • My fun has been when girls tell me to put my mask on I tell them “will you spank me for being a bad boy”?

      I also told my cousin that when a girl asks him to put on his mask to use it as an opportunity to initiate a conversation and ask her on a date. He’s pretty desperate, and I’m only trying to help. What family is for!

  13. One can be a cynic and still have a sense of humor.
    I was at the barber shop today and he prattled on the whole time over the “increase” in the “Virus” and about how “if people would do what they need to by not congregating, this Virus would come to an end.”
    I asked him, “Have you noticed that no one has the flu nowadays”, and he got rather pissed and defensive. That’s all I said. It was like I was interrupting his programed parroting of the current Official Narrative. In a new line of prattling he said that no one is getting the flu because kids aren’t going to school. I finished out the conversation by asking, “Then how are they coming down with the Virus”.
    He must have said ten times, “Well, I’m not a doctor so I can’t say why!”

    • It’s fascinating to watch the “preferred narratives” kick in. You can see it in their eyes, a quick blink, then the glassy stare while the recitation begins. Then the blink and the click back out when the monologue is complete. Any response other than the expected one does not compute, and fries their subliminal circuits.

      • At one of my favorite local restaurants the waitress server happily gabbed to me how glad she was the mean bastard old owner was gone. I smilingly listened, noting she was dutifully wearing a mask but with her nose exposed. 🙂 I’ve seen similar at other businesses. Could be sloppiness. But could be low-grade rebellion too. As far as I know, business compliance is voluntary down here, at least no vigorous enforcement.

    • I was in an uber and this moron had saran wrap (or that plastic crap you tape to your windows and then blow dry) seperating the front of his car from the back with make-shift duct work running from his dash to the saran wrap to carry heat to the back seat.

      • LOL, and the art to cynic humor is to say something in the least number of words possible to someone while they are demonstrating their idiocy. The fact that they are a fool will then take them to new lows, while you sit back and think of another question to throw up. However, if you perfect this technique, be prepared for the fact that you will eventually lose all respect for most people.

  14. Hmmm. While there are some useful tidbits in comparing the present day to the founding of the Soviet Empire… I’m not sure how far we can push that one.
    21st century Americans are not 19th century peasants. For all intents and purposes, the Dissidents are as well educated (and often better educated) than the Cloud people Most have guns. Where Lenin and Stalin faced ignorant rural farmers – today’s would-be oligarchs will face bubba and the gun club, the Western Rifle Shooters, the III Percenters, and legions of well armed stubfarts with rifles that won’t put up with shit from Jew socialists and perverts. They will be operating on their own home turf, they will know who the rats are and deal with them as expeditiously as possible. Our would-be replacements and their leaders will need the military and police – and they have spent decades undermining and alienating them. Other than a minority of vibrants and queers – most of the squaddies are red white and blue.
    A state of cynicism is a bad thing, and has existed in most liberal states so long that it gets accepted and ignored. They therefore accept and endorse gubbimint corruption and incompetence on levels other states will not.
    I don’t see cynicism as our next step forward. I see separation as more likely. You can’t run a country with morons like that in control. They will either have to be distanced… or, at some point, eliminated.

  15. Pessimism is not the opposite of optimism. The man who is sure the end is near is really just another type of optimist.

    That explains a lot. I am always reminding people who think this system is about to fail that it took Rome hundreds of years to fall.

    The example of the Soviet Union is the wrong example when it comes to failure. Perhaps the British Empire is an even better example than Rome. Or perhaps like Rome, the British Empire will simply take a few hundred more years to completely collapse.

        • And, to maintain a theme often discussed here, is that, unlike their difficult and successful resistance against the Germans just a few decades earlier, they invited in the “invaders” that time! So did the USA about the same time: it was called mass immigration from the third world. In the UK’s case, many (most?) of the early invaders had citizenship already. Once upon a time they said the sun never sets on the British Empire, but I think we can safely say that the sun has set. Fixing the exact time, I’ll leave to others.

          • Not true. The bulk of immigration came in the 1990s and after.
            I would say the United States pushed the diversity on Europe. American culture destroyed the US first and as it spread to the rest of the West we are now seeing the results. There is a lag between collapse and the initial injection but the process is quite clear.

      • Yes they do. The British elite boast of its plans.London is what they wanted.
        Like the American elite and American cities, or California…

  16. Our Puritan and nut job religious heritage will make our oppression different from the Soviet Union.
    I picture Unitarian purple haired Lesbians along with Latisha’s running our district attorneys offices and police departments all financed by the self centered usual suspects in the corporate money machine of Wall Street and the international banks.
    Somehow I don’t think this gets as ruthless as Stalin.
    I can’t see Latisha and Antifa being competent secret police.
    But I could be wrong.

    • That is the one ray of hope — these people could fuck up a wet dream. I’m reminded of the Idiocracy scene where Not Sure “escapes” from prison — “No, see, I’m supposed to be getting out of prison today.” “The line for that is over there, dumbass!”

    • That’s the thing, as soon as order breaks down enough, armed white men will have no choice but to go back to the Indian days, and repeat it but with a wider variety of people.

      Let’s be honest, white people are weak, it’s not that blacks or Mexicans are strong.

      They have to keep enough order and pressure to keep white men in line, but at the same time as they fill up their ranks with more diversity, there is much less order and competency. Interesting times ahead.

      • better to co-operate with the mexican Americans and write off the south west. that’s probably what will happen, a partitioning of the country. probably the best path for the blancos, to concentrate and purify.

        • I don’t see Mexicans flash mobbing the Footlocker to loot it. They get a job, then buy their cheap shoes at Walmart like anybody else.

        • Blancos are done. Most of ’em are like you: “I’m gonna blogpost my way to victory”.
          Politics is a material process. If you don’t have organisations and large groups of believers willing to “cross the line” then you are going to lose.

  17. Might I recommend, to all readers, Terry Gilliam’s movie “Brazil” (The Director’s Cut ONLY). It shows *incredibly* well life in an Anarcho-Tyrannical state, following a true believer has he slowly enters a hellscape where the only final escape is… well, watch it.

  18. There is one key difference between the socialist model that arose in the Soviet Union and here in the US. And that is that there are over 300 million firearms in the possess of the masses. The Soviets only needed a relatively small Jackboot Corp to subdue it’s people via extreme ruthlessness and genocide. That’s going to be difficult to duplicate here outside of urban areas. But more to your point, play the role of the passive dolt and become invisible and ignored. And then opportunistic and spontaneous.

    • They can’t even control black people and they think they are going to control tens of millions of armed white people

      Let me know how that goes

      • Yeah, Russians are different. They’ve always had the “peasant” mentality, and been ruled by authoritarians. They’re also relatively high IQ.

        White Americans are heavily armed, blacks are also heavily armed and dysfunctional, Mexicans ignore every rule and do what they want.

        Idk what the elites’ plan is, either they have some kind of hbd plan in place, or the USA is going to be a dysfunctional hellhole, there is only so much white boomer wealth to loot.

      • “They” do not want to control “them”, “they” want to control “you”; I do not wish to see how that goes.

        • At some point you and I become them

          not seen as individuals in the minds of our tormentors but a big pink blob of bad whites, a big stack of ham with guns

          I hope the thoughts of that haunt them forever

      • I forget the site, but someone pointed out the Finnish-Russian Winter War as being highly instructive, particularly for those of us in northern climes.

        • Maybe, but the Fins fought a nasty civil war pre Soviet invasion to eradicate internal communist. Excellent trading for WWII.

          Hard times make hard men and all that. American men have never been softer, and they know it. The movie Fight Club resonated for a reason.

      • they think they are going to control tens of millions of armed white people

        Let me know how that goes

        It’s going just fine.
        Thanks for asking.

        • Yeah, millions of guns are only useful if they are actually fired. Or at least waved menacingly at offenders. It seems we haven’t got there yet.

          • Yep. While white people have gone soft over the last couple generations, many people forget that we were butchering each other by the millions for thousands of years on the european continent. It won’t take much to slip back into that methinks.

        • The whites who would be the ones to resist are the ones who have had their gun rights taken away by breaking the laws of polite society. How convenient, no?

          when enough of us stop caring about the consequences of being booted from polite society, it’s going to be hell for the elites.

          I know it’s easy to look at the recent past and think they’ve already won because no one has fought back. But do you want to play those odds that no one will EVER fight back and use their guns in our lifetimes? That’s a bet I’ll never take. Doubt you will either when you sit back and think about it

      • They control blacks in the ways that matter. Black violence and ruin, black “votes”, blacks employed in gov’t, blacks on the dole. Blacks gather when and how they want. Blacks have neighborhoods and even chocolate cities. I sure hope all those armed white guys are practicing their target acquisition with masks on. Never know when Costco will go hot on ya.

    • The people in the Soviet Union were heavily armed. The soldiers leaving the front brought their guns with them. Didn’t help.

      • I’ve seen conflicting reports, and the Internet actually hinders historical research rather than helping (favoring newer content of those with an axe to grind rather than historical facts), but, word was that citizens in Saddam’s Iraq were allowed to own a full auto AK. I’d guess the reason they were allowed is that, well, it didn’t matter.

    • Yes. But. (always a but)

      Genocide and mass incarceration will not be necessary.

      Authorities can make you radioactive to employers, banks can deny their services, media companies can deny services (free email).

      China has this figured out. At least there when you get on the wrong side of the party line, you can work your way back to their good graces with “good” behavior by slavishly following the party line and their dictates.

      Fall from grace from the Wokeness that’s coming, and you’ll be begging your friends/relatives just for basic sustenance under the table.

    • The trick is going to be keeping all those armed white people from using those weapons on each other (the vice of being a white guy is that you argue and fight over every..last..thing). As you and I have almost no control over any of that, your admonition to play the invisible dolt looks like a good way to go.

  19. A relative of mine borrowed something from me last week. They returned it yesterday. It was broken. They didn’t mention it to me I just discovered it when I tried to use it. When I said something they said oh sorry I figured you could fix it. far-left obviously. These are comically terrible people that are ruling over us right now.

    • My brother in law was like that

      Only the old fashioned solution worked. I knocked him on his rear never to be bothered again except when I had to throw 2×4 at him as he ran away after taking a cheap verbal shot

      But now we’re best friends. Ahhhh. We all love happy endings 🙂

    • Yup! In other words, “Let’s see if I can get away with this…”
      Now blow that up times a million and you have their political angle.

    • No one can take advantage of you without your permission. You need to withdraw that permission or accept your victimization.

    • I live in a conservative neighborhood, that had quite a few Trump signs. Only one house had a Biden sign, and they are the only neighbors who don’t rake their leaves. So a two inch thick carpet of leaves on their lawn keeps blowing over to the lawns that are kept up.

  20. The cynic, in the context of an authoritarian society, accepts that there is no inherent logic in the system, other than to insulate those who prosper from their position. The cynic accepts that there is no truth in the system and the outcomes are random, based on the changing desires of the people you interact with in the system. The cynic knows there is no truth in a world of lies, other than his own acceptance of it. It is in this phase we are in now where we learn that you can never be cynical enough.

    So I have been right the whole time? Well, that’s a bit of a relief. Not much, but some.

  21. have been reading about Epicureans vs Stoics, and am currently leaning towards the former. Am open to reasoned persuasion to switch…

  22. “This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head” haha too effin funny! to those who don’t get the joke, look up the means of Trotsky’s death…

  23. All true. And like the USSR the system has to eventually die a natural death, a process far beyond the control of any group of people, even inside the system. Few people contemplate that we’ve been a socialist country since 1933, a project that was well underway even in the progressive era. When the Supreme Court defined “commerce” as anyone doing anything at any time, it was all over. We wouldn’t know freedom if it bit us in the ass and we now think it’s a TSA known traveler number.

    • Yep, SCOTUS and the “Commerce Clause”. Never could understand how they could get the interpretation so wrong and for so long. Then it finally dawned on me. It was deliberate. The Court has always been looking for the magic trump card to do away with having to find some pesky loophole to the Constitution to rule upon. Then they found a skeleton key, the Commerce Clause. Viola, rule by a committee of 9.

      Is that cynical enough for the group? 😉

    • Yes I vaguely remember from a history class or article about the Fed’s jurisdiction to regulate, I think Milk. Even though the milk wasn’t crossing State lines, the court ruled it could have been so sold, so the government was justified in regulating it! Such ancient decisions make it a bit easier to accept the more recent ones, like that a person is any sex they want to be, and we must respect their choice.

    • I’ve not seen it, but the movie gets noted on occasion as it’s the film that won the best picture Oscar the year that It’s a Wonderful Life was released.

  24. At least once a week I get an email from some local independent restaurant that’s part of a group formed to essentially beg congress for relief money. After 8 fruitless months of pleading and half the restaurants already gone they still haven’t figured out there will be no money. Instead of organizing to say ‘FU this is BS and we aren’t letting you kill our businesses over lies’ they write open letters to our lunatic governor attempting to appeal to her non-existent sense of compassion. I’d say most people are nowhere near the cynical enough stage.

    • Yeah, normies haven’t realized letter writing and phone calls won’t achieve much of anything.

    • A plurality of normies still believe that you can stop the despotism by appealing to the decency of our rulers, not realising that they do not possess so much as a shred of decency.

      Another futile response is marches and street theatre. That is exactly the response our rulers expect and want.

      • All true. Cold indifference, and cynicism is a species, is the best approach to contemporary society. Obviously imminent violence cannot be ignored, but that’s not the norm.

        The Post is running stories about how grand D.C. will be again. It is unintentionally hilarious.

    • I’ve seen that too, quite discouraging. I would have hoped that the people with the most to lose would generate some leadership in this fight, but my impression has been that a goodly number of them watch too much cable news and believe all the hysteria themselves. It reminds me of Winston’s neighbor in 1984 being grateful that his kids called the secret police on him after hearing him rant about something in his sleep.

  25. It’s easy to maintain contradictions in a world of hyper-specialization and compartmentalization. Very few intellectuals these days range over the whole of some particular field, much less every field. The result is the loss of the ability to see things in their most general character. Turns out, when you break things down into their atomic bits and assign different people to exclusively study their little nook of the universe, you lose the ability to make sound generalizations regarding the whole.

    The trick used by the ruling class is to capitalize on these divisions by convincing each person that what he sees in his immediate vicinity is true for him, and that there is nothing else to the matter. I personally don’t believe that our rulers do this as part of some deliberately designed plan. It’s just a symptom of the poor state of Thinking in this age. Ideas move the body. And if the ideas are bad, then the body will follow suit. The medieval philosophers were masters of logic and precise thinking, but their assumptions were often poor. And there is perhaps no graver threat to the enterprise of Thought than precise thinking within the context a degenerate thought-paradigm.

  26. There will be some value in the news eventually if you learn to read between the lines, just like people in communist countries did.

    • It’s worse. We don’t have any journalists smart enough to write between the lines, and there are no cynical infiltrators from our side. We only get truth when they get emotional and blurt it out, and it’s only emotional truth.

      There’s no news behind the news, no real events that give anything away, no secret that if only we knew, no consumer attitude that can help us navigate the system from out here. The class of people who make and “make” the news just viscerally desire our destruction, all in the same way, all in the same words, with the same lunatic intensity. The news is them making it happen.

      We’re already far less civilized than the USSR was. Barring other cataclysm, we’re soon to make Rwanda look like Renaissance Florence.

      • Our present day equivalent to “reading between the lines” is doing one’s own content search without Google and some such on the web by moving from one site linked to another and trying to make sense by mentally filtering the gibberish out as fast as possible.

      • The broadcast “news” is simply the means by which one can monitor the current narrative stream. It is the way that they tell us what we should believe and think. Take it from there, for your own reasons, and for your own uses. They are actually doing us a favor by communicating all of this to us, so we know what is going on at their end, for our own situational awareness and such. But don’t let them know what is going on at our end…

      • This circles back to the “stupid” factor for me. How many times I catch some news story and think “this isn’t even very good as propaganda: they don’t even know how to lie properly”.

        The one I’ve been turning over in my head lately is Joanne Jacobs who is a real respected “conservative” education blogger, and all-around normie idiot. Just the other day I saw that she had posted up that study that Z had mentioned in regards to the shutdown schools shortening lifespans. Even at my sleepiest, most trusting state that “study” doesn’t pass the smell test, but here she was pushing it as a justification for removing all Covid restrictions on schools. Those are our betters, the people on our side that are supposed to lead us out of the darkness? Oof.

    • It’s going to be epic with Sleepy Joe at the helm. Much truth will unguardedly emerge from his mouth, like when he said his campaign had the finest voter fraud organization ever. It will be a new golden age of “journalism”, with whole brigades of new hires from Columbia and Barnard spinning his pronouncements.

    • Whatever story they are avoiding at all costs is true.
      What they accuse their enemies of doing is exactly what they are doing.

  27.  “This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.”

    “Penultimate.” You made me laugh on an otherwise bleak day.

  28. Great article, zman. Loved this. Yes, I agree that the revolution has already happened and that we are now moving into the next phase.
    But was it really a “socialist” revolution? Is egalitarianism really their goal? It strikes me that where were are now, and going forward, looks a lot more like feudalism, only instead of a landed aristocracy, we are ruled over by a technocratic elite who own everything, run everything and decide everything. “Wokeness” is just the moral and spiritual cement that binds them together – a new “Christianity”.
    For those of us not fortunate enough to belong to those hallowed circles, we toil our tenant holdings and learn to follow (or get round) their bizarre diktats. Maybe it will take a “Black Death” to finally rid us of them?

    • Maybe it will take a “Black Death” to finally rid us of them?

      There is a lot of evidence that the Black Death created a labor scarcity situation that was excellent for the lower and middle classes.

      • Indeed. Once the Black Death subsided, even lowly peasants were in high demand due the shortage of labour. Consequently, they could charge more and demand more advantageous terms.

        • but back then the ruling class could not import the European equivalent of a few million Central American peasants to keep their lawn mowed.

      • Bill Burr (comedian) had a good riff about how he didn’t trust the rich/elites; felt like they’d kill off the “surplus” population if they thought they could get away with it.

        If AI happens, and the robots can build all the things, don’t think for a second the elites wouldn’t kill most of the poor/middle class off in a heartbeat. To save mother earth, or something.

    • It seems to be uncharted territory. The socialism debate is used to keep the moron normiecons and moron left busy arguing.

      Idk what the plan is – but the globalist elites have suddenly cracked down on all religion. Before just Christians were the target of hatred, but since COVID started, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus are getting the shaft too. Macron is not backing down either.

      I think the white, Christian working and middle class was the only group they were afraid of, islam and blacks were tools to destroy it, and now that it’s been dismantled they are going to fuck everyone in the ass.

  29. “In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.”

    Finally I have a retort for those who say I’m too cynical.

    • I still get kind of short with those who go, really?, when the latest crazy rule is issued. They still think it is going to stop and return to normal.

      • Exactly. Amazing to me how many Trumpsters are manic about vote fraud (and rightly so), but then put on their mask to walk down the sidewalk.

        • I have been doing my own work on the voting databases, to try to confirm who, or if everyone, is blowing smoke. It’s a good personal reality check. I don’t really trust anyone on any of this. So far, the evidence looks really damning. Don’t know if Sidney Powell can make a case out of it, though.

          • @Dutch – The guys I trust the most in this election debacle are the professional financial auditors and fraud investigators. They’re pros who know how to look for red flags and discern involuntary carelessness vs premeditated swindle. You’re right – the evidence is damning … unfortunately, though, we’re looking for justice in a system rigged against it. I’m guessing Sidney Powell has an airtight case that would pass the “reasonable man” test; it just doesn’t pass muster with the elite.

  30. In a sick way, I’m kinda looking forward to the Bidenreich’s mandate that we all sign up for Twitter and Facebook and log into our four hours of mandatory TV viewing per night. Just seeing what you guys come up with in order to sound pious but mock the Powers That Be is going to be hilarious. E.g. that “penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head” line. Classic.

    • In Soviet Russia you could get sent to the gulag for 10 years if you were caught shutting off your radio when the broadcaster was reading “Letters to Lenin/Stalin”…which were all the same and went on for hours.

  31. A cynic is a guy who no longer reads the newspaper or watches the network news and is now thinking there’s no point in voting. That’s where I’m at now and I hate it.

    • I rely on sober minds here to inform me of all the news I need. Thanks to Z, I now know about BlowJo’s ‘Freedom Pass’ . I don’t know if it is a bad or a good thing to be so distrusting of the UK’s media organs that I must get important info from elsewhere.

      The trouble is, even just browsing to The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and the like means that I will definitely see some woke garbage – can’t risk it! At the moment, I guess only The Mail on Sunday is half decent and this is because Peter Hitchens hasn’t been given the boot yet.

      • I’ve sworn off the national news for months, just taking in the local. But I can barely stand that now as the first ten or fifteen minutes is spent blathering about covid. It’s coming from every angle and apt to drive a body nuts.

        • The one thing that is guaranteed to keep me hunkered down on my own acreage is the mask mandate. That is the most egregious breach of rights of association and personal freedom that I have seen in many decades. I remember the rage I felt when forced integration was slammed into us. This has the same feeling. But the worst part is watching your friends acquiesce.

          • I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one. People complain but them wear them. I havent yet. There is no beating this. It seems like the American public has been waiting for this for decades. Its like an iPhone. You didn’t even know it was what was missing from your life: masks.

            I had a job interview where the guy interviewing me wore a mask the whole time!

          • People naturally fear the unknown and fear disease. Plus with all the gaslighting, its no surprise.
            I’ve seen people I know are sound minded on our side come unglued over this.

        • Just yesterday on the local radio news channel, after spending 5 minutes talking about how full the hospitals are, the anchor said “,but they’re always this full at this time of year.” I almost drove off the road!

      • Freedom pass—if they actually use the term—is a good descriptor. But really folks, it’s been in *use* here in the USA for at least 15 years or so, only by another name.

        How quickly we forget. Remember the airlines and their no-fly list and intrusive TSA check/pat down process? A few years later you could go to any certified vendor and get a TSA “Precheck” certificate/card. You merely had to fill out a form, give personal info, submit finger prints, and pay $50.

        Presto, you now had an internal passport—just like in mother Russia during the commie era. BTW, this pass allowed you to move to special boarding lines, with a simple showing of your “freedom pass”—I mean “Precheck”. Used it once on a cruise ship. Suckers line was well over 100-200 people, Precheck line, empty.

        • Yes, and no taking off your shoes or belt and digging electronics out of your bag. No microwave scans. It’s easy to be seduced by the privileges of party membership.

          • Yes, it left a bad taste in my mouth. You really have to grow up in such an environment to accept such privilege as “normal” or even proper.

            Looking backward (what else to do at my age) I hope I have not screwed up the kids—I had a distinct advantage growing up in a blue collar household, we worked for, or did without—they have never wanted for anything.

            Wife and I both have second thoughts on the whole thing. Funny how values change as you age.

    • That’s me as well…I stopped watching the TV or network news a few years ago and haven’t suffered for lack of it. Last time I will vote as well.

      Now if I even hear a second of the chattering cyclops I get pissed.

    • Combat soldiers coped with the threat of death in the meat grinder by accepting that they were already dead. Accepting that the USA is as dead as a bag of hammers makes it much easier to cope with what is coming.

      • From Star Trek DS9. Very fitting.

        First: “I am [Rank] [Name], and I am dead. As of this moment, we are all dead. We go into battle to reclaim our lives. This, we do gladly, for we are JemHadar.

        • Mediate on your own death and how much peace it will bring you every day in the matte of the stoics. It will make your life better.
          The only ones who won’t benefit are those with minor children or other helpless people they must care for.

    • Don’t hate seeing the light. The word “cynic” has negative connotations, most of which Z-man just decimated. Most heroic lives are rooted in the cynicism of prevailing, false orthodoxies.
      Now take another look at the sheep around you – they’re not living, they’re existing. Poor bastards, like hamsters on a wheel. But now you know where to invest your talents & energy, and that will make all the difference.

    • What I hate is that the charade makes me hate people that I don’t even know.

      Its easy to hate some faceless bureaucracy or the pudgy, greasy face of my gaypedo governor, but now I find myself with a level of disgust and disdain for many of my fellow citizens that I have never had before. And I lived in Caifornia. Many people deserve to be hated these days, but the problem is many is rapidly approaching most.

      That’s a big part of the evil in the commie “system”: it is inherently dehumanizing. The infinite rules and their arbitrary nature breaks our faith in each other.

      And for good reason. The absurd contradictions of the serpentine regulations of clownworld end up being a million ways to divide us and pit us in constant, ruthless competitions, the spoils of which are often even more pointless.

      All at the whims of bureaucrats and sadists. All while we know full well it is a scam and those in charge are weak and defective.

      • This. I find that I am hating people who I knew were not on my side, but I never had a reason think about until now. They’ve either gone full Covidian or they are gloating about the election. It is a terrible thing to have to order the world into those you hate, those you trust and those you cannot be sure if they can be trusted.

        • “It is a terrible thing to have to order the world into those you hate, those you trust and those you cannot be sure if they can be trusted.”

          True, but I’m finding great reduction in uncertainty since the election and before that, the scamdemic. Folks are dropping all pretense and by doing so remove all doubt. It’s a shrinking world, I admit.

      • I cannot tell you how much I hate myself for having been turned into a cynical curmudgeon first slowly in 2009 and then rapidly since 2016, but as Zman said pessimism is not the opposite of optimism and only cynicism is left in me. Oh, how I hate this.

        • Don’t hate it, own it. Stay out front of what is going on (you cannot be too cynical…), and you will see the world, and other people, with the eyes that most others don’t have. It is as if you are the adult living in a world of children, or you are the human at the zoo. Sad, but empowering. Operate and make decisions subtly, but in plain sight, and most won’t even know what you are up to.

      • You can have a lot of fun by openly laughing at the narrative. Many of our fellow “citizens” literally can’t process anything that is approved. The reactions can be hilarious.

        • yes manc, humor is a great tool. I use it often. The cynic must have some levity. There is joy in life even if it is not plain to see. We can create it from the madness. On that note, I officially now know more people (by association) who have waited several hours in line at the new In and Out burger that just opened here than have died of the wuhan. We go into threat level magenta on friday. Luckily for in and out takeout feed is essential. Lols.

        • Like was discussed a few days ago on one of Z’s posts. Humor and mockery is a great weapon against the insanity and silly posturing of our rulers and their petty followers.

      • Turn your anger and frustration into problem solving fervor. First, focus on the problem. Within your sphere of the world, which targets of opportunity are feasible? How might you solve the problem? Think outside the box. And every thought shall reside solely within the confines of your cranium. Get fit, get ready, and up your situational awareness. One day, someone will get up to dance and he/she will be the wacky outlier. But then another, and another, and soon a stampede. Do not despair. Take heart, and become a serious person.

        • Thanks Tom, I am working on all of the above. Since being liberated from most of my income, I have taken up with other tasks to prepare best I can for the unknowns. I am grateful that my mind remains free – unlike many I know, and that I have struck a handful of new friendships while rucking thru this muck.

          • If exercising your brain causes you to burn out and crash, you lost the race at birth. But since IQ is hereditary, you can garner solace by blaming your parents.

          • IQ is not a switch—off/on. Most all of us have enough to improve if we use it. Some will take longer to learn, but we all can, if we keep at it.

            This is particularly good advice as we age. Watch TV 5 hours a day, drinking beer, and eating snack food and your “perceived” limitations will become self fulfilling.

      • This sounds terrible to say, but I am starting to look at a lot of fools around me as less than human. Up until the last few months, I could always rise above and try to look at the deluded and dangerous as merely misguided or evil opponents. I am starting to see them as a plague that must be burned out.

        • The good news is, they view you as exactly the same.

          Said another way, the battle lines are being clearly drawn now. You are either a True Believer who loves Big Mother and the State, or you are an outsider / dissident. Fence sitters will be purged by True Believers for not being pious / woke enough so they sort of automatically shake out to one side or the other.

          • I prefer an honest enemy to a fence sitter. I trust my enemy to oppose me by any means necessary and I can understand and respect that,
            I can’t trust sitters at all. They might as well be an empty suit.

      • Hating your enemies or for the religious the Enemies of God is a good thing. Its give energy for action and creates the urge to get rid of the pain.
        The key is to not let it define you and to let it go when its no longer needed. A positive identity for yourself or your people can’t be tied to a negative identity of others.
        That last lesson is why White Nationalists are often such failures, if magic comet AH14W got rid of all the POC they’s be without purpose.
        Not letting go is also how you go full skinhead and you never want to go full skinhead.
        An atomized, faithless like a a consumer is just dying slow and being a Prog is stupid.
        You, we need a purpose, Hallmark Chanel Nation, Space Colonizes, but unlike Progressivism.something with a definitive end.
        Get that and you have a chance,

    • Same here. I don’t wanna be a cynic, but right now that’s the only point of view that seems to correspond to reality.

      Only question is, will it play out as has been played out before, or will being the most heavily armed people on earth count for something?

    • Resignation. Surrender. Fatalism. Disillusionment. Quietude. Contemplation. Reassessment. Cleansing. Renewal. The lull before the storm. Big storm coming.

  32. The speech by Gavin Newsom resembled a evangelical preacher caught in a tryst. Then the true believers accepted his mea culpa and went right along with his rule.

  33. We’re fast approaching the point where the political elite issue their virtue signaling edicts, the media slavishly hammer them home. And then everybody ignores them entirely.

    In CA we have police departments across the state issuing official press releases that they will not be enforcing various aspects of the governors edicts. That’s upstream from the street level where cops know it’s all nonsense and don’t want to bother.

    • Interesting. I saw similar contradictions and confusions when I journeyed by train into London yesterday. Certain rail operators have signs say ‘You must wear a face mask’, and immediately under the words ‘unless you’re exempt’ appear. It is so easy to flout that nobody bothers to enforce it.

      The London Underground signage was slightly different, stating on individual billboards ‘Wear a face mask’. One would then see other billboards saying that ‘Some disabilities are invisible’ – a nod to those who cannot wear the mask. There are so many contradictions and loopholes that even the authorities seem not to care too much.

      Naturally, in the rural areas of the UK it has been flouted, with signage in place to ensure ‘compliance’ when checked, but when backs are turned then forget about it. Friends who own small businesses have even noted the meek and apologetic appearance of many bobbies sent to a scamdemic checks – they know it is balls too.

      • Just like the late Soviet Union, no one really believes in any of it, top or bottom, it’s all just going through the motions, at all levels. Personally, I’m rooting for the next major solar flare – then we’ll REALLY see a great reset.

          • Get hit with a big enough one and every computer and other electronic device other than rad hardened ones gets fried.
            Downside of that is , half the population starves to death since the trucks don’t run and the GPS locked tractors don’t work.
            If electricty still works which is a big if, we go back to 1960 or so sans TV and radio. If not 1820 and 90% of the global population dies.
            In any case I wouldn’t count on it to save you. You want this dystopia to end, learn to organize and take power.

          • “One Second After” a good fiction book about this. By William Forstchen; wrote it after the EMP Commission released its report to Congress a decade ago. Good thriller, but chilling as heck.

            Ted Coppel also wrote a book called “Lights Out” that’s just facts and scenarios.

            Bottom line…worst case scenario is 90% of the US population would be dead in a year.

            No point prepping for it. The hordes and the military/cops are just going to take your stuff away using trained violence.

            One bullet solution applies.

          • On 09-02-1859, a huge solar flare was so disruptive the discharge melted telegraph wires in many areas. It is conjectured that if such were to happen today, the damage would be immense. Likely it would literally fry the electric grids and who knows what other electronic devices. a “Dark Angel” scenario is not that far-fetched.

          • Aliens not required. Mother Nature has some very nasty tricks up her sleeve. The only reason we’re here is because things like big (multi-mile) rocks only fall to Earth at intervals measured in hundreds of millions, billions of years. In contrast, huge solar flares are probably much more common and didn’t pose a threat to pre-industrial humans, but once you string wires, the equation changes somewhat.

      • It is the inconsistent enforcement that will become the terror. The cops looking the other way will lead someone to assume the rules are not enforced, but then some new set of cops taser the poor bastard and hauls him away to gaol. It is the never knowing that becomes the terror, by in your own mind and in practice.

        • I read the memoirs of a American caught up in the Soviet terror in the 30’s. The randomness of the nightly wakings from sleep, beatdowns, interrogations and then the rare kindness broke many minds. We all know the Orwellian tortures and mind control. To see it coming more into fruition now really shouldn’t shock us, but it does.

        • Stalin introduced an element of irrationality to his terror that made it even more terrifying. Often the most loyal lower-level party member was arrested, while a local nuisance was allowed to be free because he was “a poet.”

          • There’s the case when Stalin, arrested a guy, sentenced him to death for “Anti-Soviet Activity” , then commuted his sentence to life in the GuLag, then released him, gave him a mid-ranking job in the Party, then presented him with a medal, all without the guy ever figuring out what was going on. As noted above, the arbitrariness is part of the punishment.

          • This is instructive on what to do when the Eye of Souran falls upon you. Say nothing, do nothing, demand nothing, offer nothing, go still and mute. The arbitrariness of what will be done to you can only be made worse, not better, by responding or demanding. A hardcore version of what your lawyer tells you what (not) to do when the cops pick you up or interrogate you.

          • Then real poets, such as Osip Mandelshtam, were destroyed because they recited a verse at a party–that was never even written down–which reflected poorly on Stalin (the Kremlin mountaineer with the rollicking cockroach mustaches).

        • Someone else said it but Russians were accustomed to autocrats and being treated like peasants. It’s a different situation.

          • Further, if this is the demographic age who gives a crap about these weirdos and their ideology? Or one’s own ideology when you get down to it? It’s just another way of fighting and losing on their terms. Just throwing it out there.

          • This is thing isn’t it. All these tweets and proclamations, etc. coming from the enlightened should be preceded with the text “All things being white-“, but it’s not.

          • That’s also why I’m not a fan of the national socialism nostalgia. Feeds right back into ideology.

          • If I got this right, ideology is exactly what we need. Its just NSDAP ideology is not the right one.
            Take power, use power, achieve useful goals. Nothing else works to impose order on a chaotic system.
            To do that and to get out of this mess, you must have an ideology and a good one. Leave me alone is a temper tantrum not a goal.

          • ‘It’s OK to be white’ isn’t an ideology and is a hell of lot more effective than dismantling critical race theory. What’s a stronger anti-immigration argument than ‘I want to be around people like me?’ They can call you a nazi for saying self evident things, but they look ridiculous. Besides, the ideology wars are settled as Z has written. Liberal democracy won.

          • That’s excellent rhetoric and a useful tool.
            Ideology though contains purpose and dialectic as well.
            Also Liberal Democracy is kind of what a revised republic would still be at least after the interregnum.
            However most LD nations are falling into police states which is a failure state for it. The next stage is going to authoritarian with tragicomic attempts to keep the system alive. That is what the entire COVID hysteria is, masks as social religion and a vast distraction as the entire great reset simply fails and the ultimate depression levels everything.
            Even if we pull off a last minute save its going to very fail hard as it purpose , increasing material and social well being of its citizens can no longer be maintained.
            The future will be authoritarian long term, either religious or racist.

          • My opinion, ideology is inherently leftist. It’s always going to lead to some form of totalitarianism because somebody’s going to start playing God.

            Also my opinion, there’s no right without religion. Without a higher power there’s no limit to what people will attempt.

          • Might not be wrong but you won’t get Christendom in the US for several centuries even if demographics pan out in any case
            Christianity is a dead letter in Europe and no amount of social grandstanding in Eastern Europe or Russia has done a thing to change that.
            They’ll revert to something to animism if they stay European which I think they will, if not they’ll die.
            For the near future though, no free social capital , take power, use power or be a slave.

          • Perhaps. It might not be the one you want though.
            A home altar to household gods, ancestors works well enough for families and tribes but not so much for big men who think they ought to rule over people who aren’t like them. Its not the kind of social capital complex societies need.

          • Sadly, agree with your last statement. From my spotty readings of history, no matter the earlier circumstances, the people will never tolerate chaos for long. They will demand order, which allows “the man on the white horse” to arrive, and impose one form of authoritarian rule or another. The only counter-example I can think of would be the breakdown of Rome. But even in the Dark Ages most areas would have regional rulers, minor kings, dukes, whatever. You might just be a serf, but this implies a stable place in a societal structure.

          • Being a serf with a decent lord is in some ways better than being an atomized consumer.
            A Lord has obligations to you, see you in at least some cases as his people and allows you your traditions.

          • Capitalism leads to communism. It’s well established. The best you can do is stand athwart history yelling ‘no!’

            Play their game and lose. Play your game, like we did in ‘16, and win.

            I had a sense then the times had changed. I still think this is the death rattle of the old age.

          • I get where you are going. Capitalist efficiency leads to Communism.
            If I don’t have any work because the top guys decided a machine, a foreigner or whatever efficiency measures make the top people more profit people learn eventually that in actuality will be better of with an assigned job at People’s Bread Factory#427 . Even if its really same as the old boss at least I’ll get my allotment of bread and whatever else I can steal to trade off.
            In any case I agree with you COVID 19 is killing the old system and like any dying empire, nothing no matter how shabby is off the table to try and keep it alive a while longer.
            Its compounded by a weak and useless cuckold “conservatives” who have less of a core set of beliefs than the Left does. If we didn’t have so many useless turds we could right the ship of state very easily.
            As it is unless Preisdnent Trump pulls a hat trick of the Right gets off its useless ass , we are screwed, blued and tattooed the later via Bill Gates.

          • Yep. Efficiency, competition, eventually monopoly. Give people scraps, tell them we’re in it together. Nice racket.

          • Play their game and lose. Play your game, like we did in ‘16, and win.

            Did we win that or were they just unprepared? And made the appropriate hamfisted fixes this time?

            Take heart Brother, enough people were willing to elect an outsider goofball that spoke out of both sides of his face because he promised them 1/2 of what they wanted and delivered 1/10th.

            After 4 years of mediocre achievements, 5 years of every media organ screaming orange nazi bad, and pulling all the stops, they still had to put the fix in. This doesn’t bode well for them. Anger seethes below the surface.

            And of course we stand astride history screaming no. It’s a fallen world. We strive for the best we can obtain not the perfect.

          • Definitely a win. Then the whole thing got subverted and we ended back to chasing the black vote (never happen as long as Republicans are seen as the white party), hoping hispanics become good Republicans (too cynical about politics), and women…

            Still had to resort to censorship because they had no answer. They got whipped.

          • Capitalism leads to something, but I’m not sure it’s communism. Rather, it seems to lead to a commodified, administered society, where everything, including culture, is subjected to market forces, and if found wanting, cast upon the ash heap. But, of course, there is another massive factor in all this: anti-white racism. It is not at all apparent that capitalism is the tiger and AWR the tail. Could well be the converse.

          • Meh, the Right is constantly paralyzed with fear of taking power they might somehow somewhere misuse it.
            Seems like horse hockey to me and if they were thinking it through, they’d worry about their creeping totalitarianism after they get power rather than throwing away the chance of a hypothetical.
            And yes we can afford that luxury as I can’t find any non theocratic Right Wing states that have gone down that route.
            A set serious of goals, of duties of the citizen and the state might not be perfect but its not meant to be and unlikely to end up in political tyranny either.
            And if some people feel oppressed that a married couple can’t get an easy divorce or that corporations have public duties , so be it. What matters is that it works and authority used for rational time proven purposes works

          • They want to be in the cool crowd. Seems to be changing, or at least I hope. The hardest part will be becoming racist in the way it’s understood, i.e. whites for their interests. Which isn’t actually racist of course.

            I get it. Normie’s appetite for indignity makes me want to throw up.

          • Some of them are spiteful mutants
            Of the ones that aren’t Normie middle class or above has every reasonable material need met. All that left is status seeking and sucking up the indignity is high status.
            It will be our job to change that. If we manage to do so not only do we take power but if we do a thorough enough job we won’t have to break the last group.
            Its common historically for this to happen and for foes to be deliberately degraded. The Reds did this a lot and the enslavement and rape of Boudica by the Romans was a classic age example.

          • Oh is it? How many of our fellow citizens would let their children be molested by the Scranton Sniffer to be able to keep seeing pictures of the Kardashians on antisocial media? Exactly how accustomed have we all become to the taxes, the “taxes,” and minor indignities of everyday public life? Why don’t you go to your local DMV and tell the clerk “hurry up, nigger (hard R), and tell me what happens. Go ahead, we are so accustomed to having SO much freedom.
            I’d think for most young white males, being treated as a peasant would be an upgrade from their current status as a bug-eating, pod dwelling, atomized economic consumption unit.

          • Well, most savage revolutions happened down here and even today our autocrats listen people much more than your democrats. Our neighbourhood has never been very law abiding. But we are practical people. half kilogram of TNT under car or competent gunman are much cheaper than courts or elections. Personal responsibility delivered by Eastern European methods gives wonderful results to keep any kind of bosses at bay. Our Nationalism operates like Antifa and nobody down here need foreign labor or refugees or whatever.

        • From my experience in the bureaucracy I found that the absolute worst thing you can do is not to enforce rules for a time, and then suddenly start enforcing them. People become quite resentful and even the enforcers aren’t sure what changed.

          • I found precisely such an example in my recent listening to Buddhist audio programs.
            I had to look up one just to verify what a tape said. The source text is the Pali Canon, the Digha Nikaya 26 “The Wheel Turning Monarch.” Of course this teaching is a legend, but the relevant part:
            The monarch’s job was to take care of his people, including feeding them (I guess they had socialism in 500 BC in India.) The point of the story though: A King failed to provide food, so people began to steal or rob. Twice a man is brought before the King to be judged for robbery. He says he had nothing to eat so he had no choice. Mercifully, the King forgives him and gives him food. But the next time the King has a change of mind, and instead executes the criminal. This had the unhappy result of the robbers now killing the “police,” rather than be arrested. The society devolves into chaos.
            Probably the intended moral is that the ruler has many duties to care for the welfare of his people. But a second one, surely relevant, is that he should be consistent in his applciation of the law.

          • Damnation! We’re already in the consolidation phase of the revolution? I thought our side were going be the revolutionaries. Now it’s just cynically trying to keep our heads down to avoid the re-education camps at best or gulags at worst? Man, HTF were things ever allowed to get to this point? These first two holiday season posts are taking a darker turn…

          •  I thought our side were going be the revolutionaries.

            “The parting on the Left is now a parting on the Right, and the beards have all grown longer overnight.”

          • I have a very carefully produced list of names, that is now apparently worthless?? when did the public executions take place?

          • It’s a curated list. The kind of list other people see and say, “Well! Look what this fellow has done here! Some of these names were unexpected, but see how they all fit together!”

          • The Long March Through The Institutions has already taken place and it was quite successful. Where have you been?

          • Trying to make money. The American Right a few exception including most here, cares about nothing else.
            A huge chunk of them hate the moral right more than the Left does because a moral society puts limits on how that money can be spent , no more rent boys for them and some kinds of social signalling and expects people to behave well.

          • Yeah, when you have a family, you do try to make living to take care of them. Is that a problem or novel idea?

          • No. Don’t be stupid. Society goes beyond “muh family income” and if you can’t see pat that, you end up pasty.
            Boomer Trash and hell later gens too are the kind of people who hire an illegal alien instead of a neighborhood kid and than brag about saving on wages and the supposed better work. After they wonder why junior just voted for Bernie.
            A pro-tip , cheap wages and weak moral means a lousy country and if you care about your country and its obvious the Boomer trash and laters never did than you fight that.

          • Abp, you know we’re mainly on the same side here, but you’re making a lot of assumptions about “boomer trash” & laters. Personally, one’s first responsibility is to one’s immediate family – to see they’re well taken care of and protected – not to the detriment of broader society, but to successfully integrate our progeny into the society as we see/think it should be – not to the degenerate crap that surrounds us.

          • Boomer trash =/= all Boomers.
            Still given the shape society is in and that it appears that generation was so busy living the good life or was too busy with whatever they did nothing to prevent much less reverse the mess we are in forgive me if I hold much of that generation in some contempt
            Bill Joel might be right in that y’all didn’t start the fire but you didn’t put it out either and a lt of you just poured gas on it.

          • I’ve said before that the 60’s were a disaster decade for this country. That being said, I was 10 years old in ‘66 and just having a great time as a kid growing up in a White city – but even then I hated those fucking leftard hippies with their VW vans, peace signs and Woodstock bullshit. By the time I came of age in the late 70’s, I got my first real job, got married and had a couple of kids. Spent the next couple of decades working to make a decent living and raising two individuals the best we knew how. Not trying for a sympathy play, but it sometimes bugs me to get lumped in with (some of) the turds that were a number of years older. None-the-less, a lot of crap has gone down the last 30-40 years, and for sure, some elements of our generation are more than deserving of disdain – or worse.

          • No s***. I just figured we’d be eventually ousting the f****** with pitchforks at the least, but more likely semi-autos.

        • Inconsistent (or asymmetric, or dual-standard) enforcement is certainly becoming evident. But the really new thing is trying it in the most heavily-armed nation in the world. How many dead cops and politicians does it take before inconsistent enforcement becomes no enforcement? Not many, I think. Shortly after that will come a retrenchment, where cops (other than reasonable county sheriffs) work only in a few disarmed cities, and outside of that, everybody goes armed all the time.

          • Things will stay peaceful and compliant, until they don’t. The swing from one to the other might be a bit dramatic…

          • This is a cope. When looking at the 2nd amendment guys, I see no reason to hope they will ever do anything.
            They have drawn their line in the sand at the guns themselves. Why would any tyrant ever take guns away from people who use them as pacifiers? The rationale behind the guns will drift further from tyranny to self defense to heirloom. We’re already very close to the self-defense rationalization now.

          • Because they can’t help themselves. As pretty much everyone here has said at some point, all the Left would have to do is refrain from X and they’d get everything they want. Orange Man himself could have been their wet dream of a president, had they simply decided to praise him for “growing in office.” Instead they went nuts, and here we are. They are religious fanatics, guns offend Moloch, therefore they will come for guns.

          • Shut up. Maybe many of them are the sissies you say they are, but many millions of this simply know what it means to draw a weapon on the government and their own neighbors.

          • #triggered
            What neighbors? The ones globohomo moved in and now constantly agitates about how evil their white neighbors are?

            Those men we honor in songs, statues and pictures of on our money started a revolution for far less.

            The AVERAGE American pays higher taxes than the serfs of Medieval Europe paid.

            One of the complaints in the Declaration was King George’s riling up the Indians against them.
            “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

            What else is institutional racism and white privilege and diversity is our greatest strength and BLM riots than “excited domestic insurrections amongst us?” That line itself would be erased if they could do it.
            There is no activity any human could concievably do that the US government does not claim it has the right to regulate and in most cases, actually does. You can’t even take a dump without the US government up your ass deciding what kind of toilet you can use and how much water it uses and what the sewer line is ad infinitum.
            Firearms are one of the most regulated things in existence. They have added all sorts of crap in the 50 years and dreamt up entire classes of people that are “prohibited possessors” and guns that are outright illegal. A prohibited possessor did not even exist until the late 1960s.

            Yes, I agree (with the founders) that prudence with something like an armed insurrection is at the top of the priorities. But an armed insurrection would have looked a LOT different in the times before the 1960s and especially before WW2 than it would look today and at many points along the way. Every expansion of the police state was easier to fight, by definition than it is today.
            But don’t you worry because it’s never going to happen.

          • The Fathers of the nation didn’t start a revolution for less. In fact, they didn’t start shooting until the king literally came for their guns, so there’s that. For that matter, they weren’t planning on shooting anyone at Lexington, it was just supposed to be a show of force.

            Same thing with the War of Northern Aggression – there were lots of equally significant things happening prior to the outbreak of violence

          • The police are now strip-searching people on the side of the road in incidents that look like more like a rape than police. All for marijuana.

            Police can flat out execute people with total impunity. Daniel Shaver is a fine example.
            The law has been weaponized. Selective prosecution has unleashed anarcho-tyranny nobody ever thought was possible. It’s to the point where anyone not an insane leftist can be attacked in the streets with total impunity and any effort at self defense from said maniacs lead to long prison sentences.

            “Border” checkpoints are now routinely installed far away (IIRC, it is up to 100 miles from the border) from the actual border to harrass our actual people while the actual border is porous and undefended. 100 miles from the border actually captures something like 70% of Americans.

            Our votes are completely ignored. No matter what the population wants, there is no connection whatsoever between what we want and what we get. There is something like an 80% correlation between what the so-called “elite” want and what they get. The majority of Americans (probably 90% plus of actual Americans) want borders enforced. They oppose things chain migration and lotteries and scores of different types of visas. (Z-man has an episode devoted to all this alphabet visa program). Up until last month and surely resuming if Trump doesn’t pull this off, anyone wanting to work for the government must be subjected to anti-white hatred indoctrination.

            The so-called elite and press et al are constantly ginning up hatred and resentment for us (with lies) and then covering up the crimes that happen at least partially motivated by the resentment and hatred spread by them. Grown men attacking white children is now a thing. Whether throwing them off of balconies or shooting them in the face, this is now happening. Commit an act of self-defense against one of these people and face prosecution.
            We are being reduced to a hated despised minority in our own country that our ancestors created. Ask the Afrikaners how that’s working out.

            Straighten your damned bow-tie. You’re like every other cuck defending your cowardice as nobility and prudence. Next thing you know, you’ll start giving the “dissident case” for mass immigration.

          • BLM got one thing right, ACAB. All Cops are Bastards and a few of them were willing to take the fight right home to them.
            Worked pretty well too.
            Not recommending it as its illegal and we aren’t like that but if we were and The Right was willing to behave that way, well society might crumble but you know we might get some justice too.
            Problem is we have laws from a previous society , a more moral one and aren’t willing to embrace actual liberty ans forgo most laws,
            You want PCP? Knock yourself out. I’m packing a machine gun.
            On the topic the Left for all its flaws is willing to act, something it seems we aren’t. Maybe that is for the better or maybe it just makes us weak. I dunno.
            As much as I hate rioting and worse the riot LARPING I have to say at least they were doing something other than bitch and mouth off about guns.
            I’ll caveat, there have been a lot of protests of late, enough the media is making a point to avoid covering them so maybe just maybe people are getting the point. There comes a point in which talk no longer works, the votes are rigged and something else has to happen.

          • There is a time and place for everything. The time is approaching. One must accept their death before acting.

          • That is a bullshit cop-out.
            I get the lack of organization and forgive that , we all suffer from it. I respect the reluctance.
            Thing is if you won’t do what is needed as your fucking country is stolen all the high minded “muh neighbors.” talk is just high minded excuses for yellow cowardice.
            Let me give you a hint, the soap box is useless and censored, the ballot box is stolen right out from under you noses and Communists plan to take your. This isn’t America anymore and no amount of vote harder will fix anything. Ever.
            If you are so terrified of the natural results of fighting back that they are paralyzed then frankly those people ought to either give their guns to someone with a spine or just turn it in. You and yours deserve the camps.
            Pay attention to the people saying they want to put Trump supporters in camps. They mean it.
            And no I am not telling you are anyone else to do illegal stuff. We are in the middle of anoither kind of battle right now and it would be dumb.
            I am telling you to toughen up and get ready for war.

          • What are you talking about? The criticism is that nobody has started shooting anybody yet and therefore, so they say, the whole bunch of 2A guys are a bunch of pussies.

            You are not saying anyone should be stacking bodies now, so I’m not sure who you are disagreeing with.

          • I’m saying that we haven’t seen any evidence that anything no matter how bad would cause them to start stacking bodies.
            Maybe its a slow boiled frog effect or something I don’t know but the mighty right allowed well lets see
            The US to turn family formation inside out and cram gay marriage down people throats. Nope.
            Create a fake justice system that includes torture via solitary confinement in SuperMax as a punishment. Nope.
            To actually and effectively suspend do process via plea bargain or in actual terms via the NDAA Nope.
            Allow mass private manipulation of the election and censorship. Nope.
            Abortion to kill millions of kids (and note here I personally am OK with abortion) even they say they are anti abortion A tiny bit years ago but mostly Nope.
            The US to be demographically turned into Brazil for cheap labor. Nope.
            Allowed mass shutdown an an ongoing economic collapse and police state over a flu bug Nope.
            The entire economy to be turned over to globalists who plan a great Reset to enslave everyone. Nope.
            The entire electoral system to become rigged and the only guy fighting that is President Trump Nope.
            And if he loses do to court rigging?
            Seriously our forefathers risking everything over far less , a few minor grievances and taxes.
            And sure I’m willing to wait but I’m not the guy talking up guns or saying “just you wait” and shaking his fist either.
            Honestly from here it looks like the Left is correct, the Right are useless and while they won’t comply with gun control, they won’t use the weapons either under any circumstances.
            By the time they do anything they’ll be be given striped PJ’s and a delousing shower despite all the guns on planet Earth.
            And the reason for all this is simple, Unlike the Left, or our Founding Fathers, the Right doesn’t care anything about the greater good or any communal society at all.
            And yes sure the Left is wrong on most things but they want things enough to take them and to fight for them.

          • The criticism is that nobody has started shooting anybody yet and therefore, so they say, the whole bunch of 2A guys are a bunch of pussies.

            I ABSOLUTELY did not say that.

            I said “they have drawn their line in the sand at the guns themselves” and “Why would any tyrant ever take guns away from people who use them as pacifiers?”

            Do you even dispute this?

            I do not recommend or even advocate anyone do anything. And I most certainly never said or implied or even hinted at, that anyone should start shooting anyone else, let alone cops or other agents of our wise overlords.

          • This reminds me of something I saw on Usenet almost thirty years ago, written by an American Indian: “The Constitution is the White Man’s ghost shirt.”

        • In re: “Build Back Better”/”Great Reset”

          In the USSR, mass arrests happened when targets weren’t met. Peasant farmers or engineers..it make no difference. The PLAN couldn’t be wrong..therefore, those arrested were deliberate saboteurs. Called “The Wreckers“.

          Another category arrested: “The limiters“. Say you’re an engineer who refuses to authorize overweight trains on the rails, know that it would lead to failure. You’re also a saboteur (the plan can’t be wrong, remember).

          The crew of the train that derails?…arrested for being “A Wrecker”, if they survived the crash.

          Bottom line: Article 58 of the criminal code could be so broadly interpreted that everyone was a criminal.

          Build Back Better/Great Reset will be much the same.

          • I am just getting through Gulag Arch Vol I regarding The Wreckers & show trials, Article 58. Its nuts to read it and look around and make connections to our present situation. When I point this out to normies I do give them the momentary jolt of putting it into their terms of “oh well, this documentation won the Noble Prize, so now that is a conspiracy rag too huh, its all just bs right.” They just put their head back in the sand, right or left ideology it doesn’t matter, that is the go to move.

        • That’s the entire point of Anarcho-Tyranny. You’re always guilty of something, so when they decide they want to get you they have a whole host of “completely legitimate” offenses you have committed to choose from. The fact that those offenses are usually disregarded is no defense when they decide to target you.

        • If we won’t organize against tyranny we deserve what we get.
          And yes the good guys will lose people , you might die. If you are so afraid of death, you never have a good life anyway.

        • I’ve lived in a totalitarian state, that’s how it works. They lull people into thinking they can get away with something in order to figure out who to arrest next.
          When his grip became tighter, the Boss deliberately tried to incite trouble for the same reason. Turn the water off for a month, cut the power during the World Cup etc.
          It’s a trap.

          • The whole thing still falls part no matter what.
            Ceaușescu tried to rape his way to population growth and figured kids didn’t need rearing that cost him his life once people figured out the scam.
            The Berlin wall also fell as did the USSR.
            We’ve learned from those mistakes so we may need a hefty push. So be it.

        • We are probably heading for the Latin America style police, who will look the other way for a minor fee. Or arrest you for bribery! You just can’t win 😀

        • Maybe somebody can answer this for me and tell me I’m wrong, but that randomness is exactly what I’ve always taken away from the terror inflicted by the commies.

          It seems the left sees Nazi boogeymen everywhere , but my reading of history is that the Nazis were nowhere near as capricious in their “terror” as the commies have always seemed to be. They (the Nazis) had declared state enemies and were ruthless in eliminating them, but it was very clear which side of the fence you were on and that didn’t really change randomly.

          This is why I’ve taken to telling people lately : “look the commies are just lunatics who kill people at a whim and change their minds like hormonal women, you might be good one day and a state enemy the next. If we’re going down the road to tyranny – give me a nice Nazi-ish state any day. At least they’ll be very clear on who the enemies are – and I’m pretty sure I won’t be on the list. Sucks to be on the opposite side – but maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time and energy destroying the tolerant country you USED TO live in. There’s simply no way I will ever willingly sing the Internationale, I’ll choose Sieg Heil thank you very much.”

      • These things, the indifference locally, the slipshod manner in which they are being imposed, are indications that COVID orders are not coming from one’s local or even national government who have some understanding of the place but from a centralized somewhere else with little understanding of the place

      • I hope your friends, very politely, of course, ask for and make a record of the names of the filth making these checks.

        • A good point. I had thought about this, but I am not sure they are at this stage yet. Instead of being deeply suspicious of these people, a few kind words lull them back into a false sense of security.

        • One encouraging sign – yesterday at my new job I overheard some people raging about Kate Brown (worthless degenerate Oregon governor) issuing another one of her royal edicts. She now dictates that people can not have more than 6 people over for Thanksgiving and has actually encouraged people to turn in their neighbors for violations. One of the guys was overheard to say “snitches get stitches”. It’s probably just bluster – this time. If this kind of arbitrary shit goes on much longer you will start to see a shadow government forming that will issue reprisals for rats and Karens.

      • In my area, anarcho-tyranny is in full effect. The stores brutally enforce mask rules while not stopping shoplifters in order to appear not racist. Traffic cameras are everywhere while unregistered ATVs roam city streets in large numbers with zero enforcement against them. Huge “soda” tax (all liquids except alcohol and milk) but foodstamps are not taxable.

          • A very stern warning. And if that very stern warning is ignored, they will get an even more very very stern warning next time.
            Besides, the looting was mostly peaceful.

          • In San Francisco, sad to say, the reality is that curfew/masks/isolation is not enforced against the homeless, and people wander into stores all day stealing without being stopped. Some of them wear masks, more for anonymity, but it’s not required. This remarkable state of affairs cannot hold: I am still wondering what Gov. Newsom’s endgame is.

          • May be apocryphal, but have seen photos ostensibly taken inside CVS and Walgreens stores in SFO where the shelves are simply bare. They’ve simply stopped stocking the most commonly stolen items that are not under lock and key.

          • If you’re bored, Wikipedia seems to have reasonablly good summaries of “critical theory” and its demon spawn “critical race theory.” For the latter, they even offer some very wise criticism of said “theory.” Yep, the fundamental problem of the Left is valuing narrative, personal stories, over that darn science that demands proof and testability of hypothesis. Much more fun to create your own version of reality, make up shit as you go along, and blame others for your misfortunes, wouldn’t you agree? That, in a nutshell, is most civil rights movements and, for the matter, communism by accounts here…

    • In CA we have police departments across the state issuing official press releases that they will not be enforcing various aspects of the governors edicts.

      I doubt that will last, but if it somehow did, it would be a nice white pill.

      • I assume municipalities that do not enforce these edicts will be threatened to have state and federal funding withheld if they do not comply. That seems to be effective. I just read an article about Belgian police saying they will be knocking on doors over Christmas to ensure compliance Covid orders. They will not demand entry as that would violate the law. So many people are willfully complying it is pathetic.

        • Had a MA State Trooper on security duty ask me to pull my mask up when looking my car over prior to pulling onto the ferry. Responded “Jawohl! mein Feldwebel!” He didn’t seem amused.

        • People are absolutely retarded when it comes to the cops. They make the cop’s job so easy.
          The rules are stacked against you. If a cop says hello, demand a lawyer. I’m not even kidding. A cop who starts a casual conversation with a citizen can get anything they say into court.

      • Clark County (Washington) – which is Vancouver – had an announcement that cops would not cite or arrest people without masks, but would give them a free public health lecture. 🙂

        •  would not cite or arrest people without masks, but would give them a free public health lecture.

          So the police we imagined we were paying to stop crime and keep order are “educators” propagating the official line.

        • They talk a good game, but let us see what happens when the state or feds put them under pressure. Elections don’t protect us from bad politicians. Why should elections protect us against politicians calling themselves sheriff?

      • CA is actually a hotbed of resistance, but it mostly goes unreported. I accidentally witnessed a big confrontation last Saturday, between a ton of partying Trump demonstrators, and a few hardcore Antifa/BLM types (black body armor, makeshift weapons, the whole deal). Right in a busy intersection in the middle of town. Press coverage, including local, zippo.

          • I didn’t stick around to find out. It looked about to get very ugly. But I did see a whole line of LEO trucks barreling in that direction after I left. The Trump partyers had the Antifa guys outnumbered by about 20 to 1. I think the cops showing up probably gave the bad guys an excuse to stand down.

        • I agree. There is a lot of tension brewing under the surface. Sure, there are plenty of resigned and defeated types about, but they were never going to be of much use to anything productive. The harder these mass lefties clamp down the more distillation will occur.

        • Thanks for this. Our media deliberately keeps Americans isolated and ignorant of ho much is going on to enable the people who pay for ads and pull their chains in power.

        • Honest question, do you find like I do that nearly every liberal outside the major hub of the bay area (and I am assuming LA) (1) complains about the overreach of power by Newsom while (2) drawing absolutely no connection between the policies they’ve supported for ad infinitum now? Because I like so many have given up trying to have that conversation.

          • Yes, I find that generally to be true. What I did not expect is that, since the election, the hard-core Libs I cross paths with have gone very quiet and subdued. I think it is because of four things. One, everyone knows the election was stolen, and they just don’t want to go there (though I’m sure they’d take the bait if I brought it up). Two, they just elected a dementia patient, and might be thinking a bit about what that means. Three, they elected a regime in bed with Antifa, and that is not a good thing at all. Four, which wraps all of this up together, is that they did indeed (likely) get rid of Trump. But not what he kind-of stood for, and now they own all of the problems. I think there is a bit of maybe not buyers-remorse, but instead buyers-trepidation.

          • Interesting. Other than the committed useful idiots I know, that mirrors my experience as well, with the exception of refusing to acknowledge the doterring old man aspect of it.

          • All the little archipelagos of Harrisbiden in my heavily Trump area were gone immediately after the election. No joy In victory, no talk about it period. This is a rural area and they are now caught out as the ones who supported a usurper.All the Trump stuff still up.

          • Trump is a brand now. No matter what happens with the election I think there will be a market for MAGAwear for years to come. Trump is now a shorthand for “fuck the masks, fuck the Karens, fuck BLM, fuck Antifa, fuck the media, fuck the entire establishment up the ass with a hot fire poker.”

    • Same here with the local sheriff (an elected office), however, seems the government has no problem hiring agents to inspect and enforce the new ordinances. They need no “police” powers as in arrest and jail, they simply observe and cite infractions. Later on businesses are punished by removing liquor or business licenses. So far no indication of agents knocking on private residence doors for a head count, but churches have voluntarily closed for the duration—except those few smallish, Christian sects that meet in private homes. And so it goes.

        • Indeed. “Sects” is often used as a derisive descriptor, but of late I’ve learned respect for these “resisters”. Whether you are a believer or not, they fight the good fight in a common cause, resistance to tyrannical government.

          • Next step will be sitting side by side on a log by the beach.
            Taking turns drawing a fish.
            Back to the future, it seems.

          • “Good Christians” is going to be the individual/group term to accompany the sociological/geographical description of “good schools.”
            All the Good Christians live in areas with Good Schools (or should asap!), but not everyone who lives where there are Good Schools is a Good Christian — yet.

          • The mainline churches have been so pozzed that we need, so to speak, separation of church and church as much as church and state 🙂
            Not to be overlooked, you can honor a vow of celibacy and still have sects.

    • A few sheriffs in NY state have declined to enforce the governor’s new edicts.

      In response, the governor is labelling those sheriffs Nazis.

        • We might just get that. A lot of people realize that a White Right and Friends (POC who habitually vote Republican more or less ) America would be far better while not making the weak but decent people feel like racists.
          80%+ White Right is damned good goal.

    • People are just ignoring the laws in Ontario too. We will see what happens at Christmas. During Diwali here the police had to break up several Diwali festivals, browns just ignore the lockdowns completely.

      Even among whites, many are planning to just have a normal Christmas. But we’ll see if they ramp up the police state or not. There is a snitch line, but outside of the goodwhite strongholds nobody will be calling in.

    • I’m still waiting to hear how the newly passed law that will mandate certain proportion of People Of Color on corporate boards will play out. How can this not be racial preferences?

  34. This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head

    Good one, I’ve banked that for a rainy day.

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