Whither The Interregnum

Note: In a break from the grifter code, I am not going to assume the new merch is the greatest merch in history. Criticisms and suggestions are welcome. This is new ground for me, so I expect to be terrible at first and get better over time. Please shop here and leave a comment when you can. Also send feedback to me.


A topic that John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow have discussed over the years is the cultural interregnum that existed in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. This was a topic raised in their talks at the inaugural VDare conference in Berkeley Springs. For a little more than a decade, starting toward the end of the Cold War and running through the Clinton years, certain taboo topics could be discussed in public. You could also take the rational position on these topics without being killed.

For example, Peter Brimelow published his book in immigration titled, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. The book was an expansion of an exceptionally long essay he published in National Review. His essay criticizing immigration policy and warning about the cultural damage being done by it took up the majority of the space for that issue. National Review published an anti-immigration special edition and felt no need to grovel about it.

Around the same time, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published the The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Not only did they publish the book, but lots of people bought, read and discussed it. Those alive during this period probably recall that it was a popular topic of conversation. Murray was actually allowed on television to frankly discuss the findings. Again, mainstream conservatives did not ritually denounce the book.

These are two examples of where now taboo subjects were acceptable. During this interregnum, a wide range of topics and people were allowed to operate. Jared Taylor, the founder and leader of American Renaissance, was allowed on television to talk about his views. His conference was shown on C-SPAN. Here is an old clip of Sam Francis speaking at the conference. Notice the lack of fainting and hysterical demands for violence against the people in the clip.

Today it is hard to imagine what it must have been like to live in a country where people could openly debate the topics of the day. One of the only benefits of the communications revolution is that we now have easy access to archival video from the time before the crazies took over the public square. We know there was once a place where adults could speak freely about difficult topics. The past is a counter to the claims of the present and operates as a hope for the future.

That is the context in which Brimelow and Derbyshire usually discuss this. The 1990’s was a peak time for them and the older dissidents. It was not just the peak years of their personals careers, but a peak for honest inquiry. The end of the Cold War and the apparent transition back to normalcy was a hopeful time. Instead of everything organized around a twilight struggle against communism, the focus of public life could return to the practical and productive.

There are two questions at the heart of this. Why did this period of relative tolerance occur and is it possible to return to such a state? For two decades now the lights have been going out in America and the West. The former Soviet Union offers more political freedom, because they have clear rules. The public square in the West is now controlled by a feckless, emotionally unstable mob that flits from panic to panic, destroying whatever happens to be in its way.

The answer to the first question is rooted in the past. What appears to have been an interregnum was actually a continuation of the Cold War consensus. Maintaining a broad public debate was an essential part of opposing communism. The West was where people could question the state. The Soviet Union did not permit public debate or questioning the state. This consensus carried forward after the end of the Cold War but shifted to more relevant topics.

Note that the closing of the American mind started with the 2000 election. During the Clinton years both sides of the consensus had to search around for a reason to exist now that the communists were gone. One side settled on post-Marx culturalism and the other embraced neoconservatism. For the former side, white people and heritage America would be the enemy around which the ruling class would organize, while the other side wanted Islam to be the new enemy.

You will note that the neoconservatives have produced a new enemy now that post-Marx culturalism seems to be burning out. The Russia-China axis will be the new forever enemy around which America must be organized. The other side seems to be open to this new arrangement, perhaps sensing that their war on white people is becoming dangerous for themselves. On the other hand, nostalgia plays an enormous role in ruling class thinking.

The second question is more difficult to know. The Judeo-Puritan ruling class that still prevails is a product of the 20th century. Unlike in Russia, where the old Cold War ruling class was eventually replaced by a modern one, America and the West remains saddled with a ruling elite built for a prior age. The American ruling class is sure that it can only exist if America is organized around some great struggle. It is why for thirty years they have lurched from one crusade to the next.

On the other hand, reality eventually does prevail. America is now suffering a shortage of qualified people for high skilled jobs. It turns out that airplane pilots and engineers are not floating across the Rio Grande. It also turns out that the cost of racial vengeance is not only borne by the bad whites. Managerial class whites are now experiencing the consequences of their reckless misbehavior. This is no way to organize a society for a new cold war with old foes.

In the end though, the answer to the larger question that looms over all of this is that for America to become a normal society, it must acquire a normal elite. Again, Russia provides a useful example. The old communist elites were able to transition into a new system of rule by oligarch. The 1990’s was also an interregnum of sorts for America’s old Cold War foe. The end of that period brought about a return to normalcy with the rise of a new elite reflective of the new Russia.

This did not happen in America. The cost of winning the Cold War was the belief among the ruling class that they had no need to change. They were on the right side of history so the only rational answer was to push down on the accelerator. For thirty years America has been rocketing toward the glorious future with a generation at the wheel, high on Cold War success and cultural narcissism. Unlike Russia, America’s elite has never had to confront their limitations.

In the long run, the last twenty years may be seen as the slow painful death of the Cold War ruling elite’s legitimacy. This dark age in America and the West will be understood as the slow death of an old power structure. These spasms of illiberal authoritarianism are the death throes of an old system. From the rubble of elite legitimacy will rise a new elite and new cultural framework to support them. There will be a new elite for a new America and a new West.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


287 thoughts on “Whither The Interregnum

  1. I think the argument can become too subtle. History resolves itself into quite big statements, despite all the detail along the way.

    What we’re seeing today is the same old thing only on a much more elaborate scale: it’s the bleeding-heart liberals who think with their emotions, versus those who think that some discipline is necessary in society. This distinction has been around, in exactly those terms, since at least the 1950s.

    Everything we talk about on this site is a product of this division – immigration, LGBT+, feminism, wokeness in general, support for Ukraine – it’s all bleeding-heart activism. (Btw, I see that the term ‘bleeding-heart’ is also now taboo on normie forums and use of it will result in posts being removed.)

    The difference today is that technology has amplified the voice of the left in particular, because the media is the bleeding-hearts’ natural milieu. The right may never win the media battle, but at least they need to understand what it is all about.

  2. This is off topic, but I’m at an friend’s place and the negro felon league draft is on. The slobbering Whites genuflecting to the latest gorilla pick is truly pathetic – and I’m watching some up close and personal in real time. Unbelievable – I feel like a total outsider.

    20
  3. Let me out myself here as a member of the (((Tribe))). I don’t read this blog for amusement and condescension over what the deplorables are thinking. I read it because I agree with your premises, and I’ll bet I’m far from the only one who does so. So to all your commenters putting the blame on everything going wrong on (((them))), you can all take some solace in that we reached peak Jew in this country long ago. As one Jewish blogger once put it, in fifty years Jews will be considered a curiosity, a boutique religion whose people are poor, dress funny, and have lots of kids.

    Now you said
    “The Judeo-Puritan ruling class that still prevails is a product of the 20th century. Unlike in Russia, where the old Cold War ruling class was eventually replaced by a modern one, America and the West remains saddled with a ruling elite built for a prior age. The American ruling class is sure that it can only exist if America is organized around some great struggle. It is why for thirty years they have lurched from one crusade to the next.”

    I suppose I could take umbrage at that, but it squares almost exactly with what Edward Banfield wrote in his classic “The Unheavenly City” . . . back in 1968!

    “The American political style was formed largely in the upper classes and within those classes, mainly of people of dissenting-Protestant and Jewish traditions. Accordingly, it is oriented toward the future ad toward moral and material progress, for the individual and for the society as a whole . . . To be sure, practice has seldom entirely corresponded to principles. The principles, however, have always been influential and they have sometimes been decisive. They can be summarized in two very simple rules: first, DON’T JUST SIT THERE. DO SOMETHING! and second, DO GOOD!”

    Plus ca change . . .

    12
    5
    • The most unfortunate reaction to the activist class is the fundamentalist class that defines good as strict adherence to a collection of laws rather than principles, if only because they’re fed up with being caught in holiness spirals towards impossible ideals. Legalism only further results in more activism or reactionary destruction.

      Activists are collectivists and the solution to their totalitarianism is authoritarianism. The strongest authorities are going to be the randomly rich, either born kings or lottery winners, as opposed to tyrants who want to become rich by seizing power first. The meritocratic rich are a mixed bag of genuine talent and genuine cheaters, and you get a little of both of these in characters like Trump.

    • Fuck you Christkiller. There’s a good goddamn reason you’ve been kicked out of 109 countries. We are seeing and living it right now with your bolshevik bullshit. America got fucked with your magic money, open borders, mindfuck hollywood and satanic perversion. Now you’re nervous…because we know…we know motherfucker, we are 110.

      16
      12
  4. Ever notice that there was never a 90’s nostalgia wave? No nu-grunge or nu-nu-metal lol. I think there’s more 80’s and 00’s nostalgia, based around relatively conservative music and movies in the 80’s and video games from the 00’s.

    But the 90’s is a dead zone.

    7
    2
    • I suspect that fewer babies being born in the 70s led to this, although I prefer these young adults (under 50) to the downright weird Millennials.

      • Smash Mouth, Hootie, Jewel, etc. The back end of the 90’s was downright awful. You can’t work with half a decade of just okay material and the other half a musical travesty. I’m of that era and I have hardly anything on my playlist from it after ’95 or so. The best thing about the 90’s was the SUVs and Timberlands, the worst was Mellisa Etheridge. It burned out as quickly as my age group.

        • I stopped listening to the radio circa 95, when I was 15. But for a project, I had to systematically go through the Billboard Top 100 for all years in the ’90s.

          The highlights are “Would” by Alice in Chains and an honorable mention to Mariah Carey, who despite choosing somewhat cotton-candy productions had a phenomenal and largely wasted voice when she was younger. A third asterisk gets pinned on Madonna’s “Vogue”, which despite its Casio drum-machine-preset beat aging poorly had an interesting chord progression and a cool video.

          The rest is contemptible trash, all of it.

    • The ’90s “nostalgia wave” has been going on for twenty years already but nothing from it is popular enough to be visible to normies. The average American consumer now isn’t smart enough to understand *anything* from ~1995. Pop Tart commercials from 25 years ago would baffle them as much as Shakespeare does.

      (I accidentally hit the frowny face when I was trying to reply, and it seems impossible to undo. Sorry about that.)

    • “But the 90’s is a dead zone.”

      The reason there is no grunge nostalgia is that white rock music was murdered in the early 2000s and the lyrics were too depressing to be sentimental about.

      Grunge was creative and authentic. Rock music, hair metal, had become mind numblingly rote. Grunge was honest, raw, and sometimes musically sophisticated.

      I acknowledge that its focus on self hatred and impotence were terrible for young white people. Grunge certainly encouraged depression in me.

      However, its music and lyrics were often art. A few examples: Alice in Chains’ “No Excuses.” Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike.”

      5
      1
      • And then there was Phish, who rapidly became wildly successful as a touring act as the decade progressed. This culminated in the massive Y2K concert at Big Cypress in the Everglades where they played from midnight until dawn, which IIRC was the largest single gathering that night.

        While their business/touring model was and is much like the Grateful Dead, their music was, and is, quite different. Harder, speedier (although not so much in their old age), quirkier, geekier. They’re still going quite strong and have co-ruled Madison Square Garden with Billy Joel this past decade.

        Does their success count as 90’s nostalgia?

        • You clearly don’t get the joke then. Primus does indeed suck, as stated by Les Claypool himself

          • I do get the joke but most people who aren’t Primus fans probably don’t. I probably over-thought that one 🙂

        • I saw Primus before they had an album out. They were amazing. Maybe 50 people in the club. So much energy and ability. I have never danced so manically.

      • What did happen to rock and roll? I remember it being dominant then bam dying in the 00s and getting replaced by pop and rap.

    • 00s nostalgia is a thing? I remember that decade being nostalgic for late 70s/early 80s. Then again I think there hasn’t been anything new since grunge, and there was a lot of 60s nostalgia then. Idk.

  5. I have been thinking of getting a TEFL degree to escape America if shit hits the fan. Which countries would be good to retreat to? Been thinking about eastern Europe, easier to blend in, but one of the nicer countries is the South America or the Middle East could be doable as well.

    1
    1
    • Haven’t heard from commentator “Montefrio” recently (who intimated that he lived down yonder), but Argentina is cheap, has great weather and very little diversity, aside from Spaniards (obviously) and Italians.
      Not sure where they stand on the Covid tyranny.
      That being said, while fleeing worked for our ancestors, I don’t see that as an option in the present age.

      • I am not sure there is anything left defending anymore. Even the red states of America are pozzed pretty badly, and are succumbing to invasion from leftists from failing blue states.

        13
          • I live in the very popular/populous Middle TN! See new “foreign” license plates in the grocery store parking lots every day: New Mexico? lots of Michigan; Illinois trickling in on I-65. Wish they’d keep moving farther south to Alabama. I will be working at the Absentee Ballot Counting Board on Tuesday. Wish me luck;-)

            8
            1
          • SidVic: We have friends in that area, but you’re too close to the population transformation that’s happening in North Carolina, and we want to remain west of the Mississippi.

            We just have to eliminate certain western and southern cities along with an unfortunately large component of each state’s population, though, and the river wouldn’t necessarily be a barrier. Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas. I can get behind that grouping.

    • There will come a time when the US federal government is unable to impose its will on uncooperative regions. All you have to do is move to one of those and wait.

      “One time two strangers climbed ‘ol Rocky Top
      Looking for a moonshine still
      Strangers ain’t come down from ‘ol Rocky Top
      Reckon they never will”

      12
    • Southern Brazil is a predominantly white areas, especially compared to the rest of the country and is often touted in these parts. IIRC there are a fair number of people of Germanic descent there.

    • Unironically, Mexico City. I knew more than a few South Americans that moved there in the late 2000s. If it worked for Trotsky and Fidel, maybe it could work for you too.

    • When the SHTF in America, why would a TEFL be useful? No one’s going to want to learn English at that point.

      • For now, it is still the easiest way to get a job in a foreign country and English is still the international language of commerce. It will be a while before it is fully replaced by something else, if English gets replaced at all and the planet doesn’t splinter tower of Babel style.

  6. As I await release from moderation hell, I will also note that the demographics of White people makes leadership change impossible. There simply are not enough of us. While yes it is true that kids of the Upper Middle Class who are White will have a fine career in the food service industry, not Yale, not Harvard, not even UCLA, there are not enough numbers of them or their parents to effect change.

    Instead, we have an emerging racial caste system. At the top, blacks. Most of Hollywood is now run by black women, an astonishing change of events. Blacks will run the political system, the military, Hollywood, and a few other areas. Silicon Valley and Wall Street will be run by Indians and Asians. At the bottom will be Hispanics, then Whites at the very bottom. This leadership caste system will not reform, or cease warring on rivals (Whites) for position and power. So we will go all the way to nuclear conflict because of Twitter retweets and facebook likes.

    This is just reality. At best Whites will be a hated minority in a nation run by peoples who really hate them, and will only tolerate them as long as they are useful in skilled, hard labor like electricians or plumbers or welders. How long this skilled labor can be coerced and to what productivity is an open question against Russia and China, but then thinking has never been the strong suit of the above peoples.

    11
    6
    • Blacks don’t run sh t. They’re meat puppets for (((them))). They’re threaded through meaningless jobs in large university, corporate and government environments, none of which are actually turning a profit, except for some of the corporate ones. And even that’s coming to an end. Most will be expunged in the coming crisis as entire departments and divisions are consolidated and downsized. They’re ornamental figures on the (((techno state))).

      They will however rule Georgia with a black iron fist. By 2040 it will far and away be the worst state in the union. “That Nigeria north of Florida.” Anyone who flies through ATL can see the writing on the wall, along with the empty McDonalds bags strewn about the airport. I don’t even like the whites in that state so I don’t care. They deserve an Idi Amin ruling them.

      22
      3
    • “At best Whites will be a hated minority in a nation run by peoples who really hate them”

      Not much different than being a hated majority in a nation run by peoples who really hate them. And those people that run the nation are not blacks. Or Indians. Or Asians. Your deduction that a high visibility means you “run” something is an incorrect assumption. Look at most advertising now. It almost always has a black in it. Do you think that means they run advertising or are the target audience for the product? Don’t make the mistake of assuming superficial appearances are reality. TPTB do not want visibility. They prefer to work in the shadows.

      20
      • True. Far and away the largest white-hating demographic is white Leftists. And they, along with the Finkels, run almost everything.

        19
  7. Great essay Z-Man. My only disagreement is that we will not get a normal elite. We will get an anti-White one, and the end game of the new Elite will be Rwanda squared. There is a post on VDARE about Michelle Wu, the gist being that Asians as well as blacks hate hate hate YT because YT built something awesome that is not theirs. And they feel bad about it. The same way Obama felt cold about Europe’s magnificence. Wu wanted to replicate the Shanghai lockdowns in Boston and targeted the mostly White bar and restaurant owners. Its why blacks and Asians cooperate in hating YT — they really do hate us even more than they hate each other.

    And you can see the signs of this. Biden has announced the Ministry of Truth, with one Nina Jankowitz, who looks like an uglier, fatter “Lia” Thomas which will combat mis-information by censorship and arrests on Russia and “irregular migration.” He has also announced executive orders allowing him to seize any property however tangentially connected to Russia. He’s also stated that children belong to teachers not parents. And has announced something like $300 billion in arms for Ukraine, and his administration is openly pushing for War against Russia even or especially nuclear war. I rate very likely a nuclear war with Russia.

    Essentially, this a two-front war: one against YT with completely open borders, instant citizenship for the diverse and vibrant, elimination of all White male heroes in culture, a total clampdown with seizures of bank accounts, property, canceling of insurance ala Trudeau in Canada, and ultimately the Rwandan solution. At the same time, a total war of regime change and population change against Russia and China. Russia’s poor performance on the battlefield has made this inevitable. I think it will likely end the same way the bad mustache man #2’s two front war ended. But it will have plenty of Twitter retweets.

    10
    4
  8. O/T— The complete and utter grift that is crypto, particularly ‘De-Fi’. Literal ponzi scheme and one of the biggest advocates basically admits it in an interview.

    I’d like to say I was smart enough not to get my azz burned on this but that would be a lie. I threw a small sum of money at it but quickly realized its pure vapor so cut and ran eating my minor loss. The entire ‘Web 3.0’ scam is one of the biggest hustles / grifts to come down the pipe in a LONG time.

    Let me sell a JPEG image for $100,000. And our collective IQ is now low enough that people actually buy them.

    https://www.ft.com/content/eac0e56c-f30b-4591-b603-f971e60dc58b

    I’m more than willing to listen to the couple of crypto advocates here explain the value proposition or economic relevance of Web 3.0 / DeFi / etc in a -tangible- way. Not the BS talking points— muh decentralized. Muh libertarian.

    5
    2
    • If you want a few laughs, the Bored Ape Yacht club had many of their NFTs stolen through some simple hack of their Instagram channel. I think the “loss” was something like $17 million.

      Why anyone would want that stuff and pay for is beyond me. But there it is. I suspect money laundering is the stuff’s main use.

    • Thanks for link Apex. Based Matt Levine taking out the cryto trash. All that dude’s stuff is paywalled for me recently, but I do agree with his analysis here: the core appeal is that its a (legal!) pyramid scheme run by sociopaths.

      This aligns with my one personal crypto data point. Have a friend who made it big enough in crypto to retire young recently. She is bipolar and struggles with mental health. It really helps to be of unsound mind to flourish in this industry!

  9. I think the current ruling class will sort of just whither away over time. They will scream louder and louder, but will be increasingly ignored. Look at their insane reaction against Russia – most of the world just shrugged and figured out a way around it.

    We’ll see it in various communities as well – be it religious, ethnic, whatever. The particular group will just stop listening to whatever rules the elites are pushing. We already saw this with COVID, many groups ignored the lockdowns. There is about a 0% chance that any Mexican restaurant enforced vaccine passports on any Mexicans. One day you might just wake up and Vancouver has officially seceded and become part of the PRC.

    I don’t see any way that the West will compete with Asia, barring a massive shift in prevailing ideology. I’m not very impressed with most white people these days. Poor parenting and poor education systems has created a generation of young people who can’t deal with difficulties, or compete with Asian immigrants.

    18
    1
    • ^^^ Exactly. Even the whites are like n words these days. Ferrel cats. Even the 20 year old daughter in a rare home that’s in-tact comes home stoned and pregnant. And these kids are “dabbing wax” these days. I had to look up what that was. When I was a teenager I thought Blade Runner would be the future. Sadly, the society in Blade Runner was way classier and more complex than our current dystopia. It did get that Asians would sort of take over the place though.

      13
      1
      • Worse than pregnant. a lot of young people are fundamentally asexual. I’ve heard this from the Left calling them Puriteens and Right, youngsters talking peak sex age (under 30) are not having much sex at all.

        Its to the point that teen pregnancy is simply not an issue now

        Once a very fundamental drive gets broken on a wide scale, that society will end.

        As to Asia its dying. China for example is expected by the PRC to decline by half within 50 years. There doesn’t seem to be a rebound so its possible China in the One and Twenty will have the population it did in 1720.

        Japan and the rest of Asia are in the same boat.

        MENA will stave to death

        The West if it get muscular has a small chance.

        My guess is the future will just be decline , an end to large nation states and a return to semi preindustiral times. Energy runs low, factories stop, less people are born and 2120 resembles 1920 in a poor agrarian area.

  10. The old elite can’t see past their noses but the new elite (if they show up) are certainly bound to be focused and fixated on their own noses.

  11. “…for America to become a normal society, it must acquire a normal elite.”

    After about a 1/2 dozen of these zingers in this most excellent essay I have to say thank you Z, for your gift of encapsulating big ideas into very small sentences.
    These sorts of brilliant “mic drops” have been such a springboard for thought and discussion in our home.
    I thank thee

    10
  12. There will not be a new elite as long as the elite for the last century has the monopoly on currency creation. There will be new faces, but the men behind the curtain will be of the same bloodline and chosen for their obedience and cunning. You do not pull off the great con of controlling a country’s monetary policy just to share it with someone else. Everything flows from their currency monopoly. The control of the perception of reality (i.e., the media), the control of the education of subsequent generations, the importation of aliens that have no allegiance to the posterity of the Constitution, the normalization, make that deification, of perversion, etc. The belief that society is a random process controlled by forces outside of our control has been shown to be false for centuries. When you have stolen something from a host population, you are riding a tiger. Strictly from a numerical viewpoint, TPTB could not survive if the will of the host population was focused upon them. That is why they have made a science of human nature and understand it at a 99.999999% level. You sedate the tiger and he is much easier to control. But, they have no intention of giving up what they have rightfully stolen. And since they were able to plan and carry it out, they can plan how they will continue their control.

    30
    • Reserve currency status is fleeting and a reward for winning wars and producing more goods and services. During the last regime change, 1945, the U.S. produced 40% of the world’s oil, had massive factories, untouched by war, cranking out merchandise for the world, the only nuclear arms, a massive navy, and a spanking new, over built electrical grid ready to be plugged into by new business parks, suburbs, and state of the art factories (the only good thing to come out of the new deal besides beautiful retaining walls along creeks and rivers). Today put all of that in reverse, except for the massive navy being filled by the day with trannies and bull-daggers. The economic center of the universe will be in the Far East for the rest of our lives, and the economic center gets the most important currencies. Just a fact. As a matter of fact the entire western hemisphere will be somewhat of a backwater from 2030 through the rest of the century thanks to the demographic disaster of immigration.

      20
      • I generally agree but a lot of CCC architecture still stands. Its beautiful and functional. It also created tons of skilled tradesmen as well.

        Not welfare, not workfare but genuine improvement on the government dime

        A DR might want to look into that kind of program over handouts.

  13. Hot damn, this is interesting.
    The dissidents seem to the only ones asking, “where is this all going?”

    (Led, of course, by their premier philosophical salon. Lookin’ at the Z hoodie, too- might come in handy after the EMP.)

  14. Feels like we’re in an accelerationish phase. May just a tumble down a long stair case to another landing. Maybe not. One data point—I circulate in the “managerial class”. Their anxiety about their kids and college has gone to “11”—and that’s starting from a high level—in the past three years. The math is suddenly dawning on them. Now the perfect, high IQ, 4+GPA, 97th percentile board scores, two letter athlete, school paper editor female coming from a suburban Maryland (DC) high school can’t get in a single school that you would have rated a 30-40% shot ten years ago. And Princeton et al are proudly publishing that they are admitting white students at half their population %, because “equity”. This is a real case, known the kid since birth and have suddenly seen variants of this locally and among colleagues. Interesting to see the red pilling once you get personally kicked in the crotch.

    54
      • Right now it’s a lot of “WTF?” and fear. But to quote Uncle Billy Sherman “fear is the beginning of wisdom”.

        21
      • Wait, I take it back.

        Their precious ones are vaccinated. That means, there will be no children or grandchildren, so any flash in the pan will be short-lived.
        They’re sterile, with a 75% miscarriage rate.

        Huh. Looks like that Coloured (Indian) managerial class will be as nescessary here as it was in Africa.

        • (Correction for clarity:
          72-84% miscarriage rate for already adults when both partners are jabbed.)

          • Similar to the plot Dan Brown book “Inferno”.

            The biological weapon was mistakenly thought to be for killing vast populations. Instead, it sterilized vast populations
            – killing the future.

        • I am uncertain that stat is correct. If true its not a bad thing. These people may share an ethnic group with us but they aren’t us.

          Maybe we can just try and have three kids than just grab power.

      • Leftists and Centrists Hard to say. They tend to violence more than they Right does.

        Maybe they’ll embrace Cat Fancy or the like or they may decide to opt out of society which would be more destructive.

        Lashawn, Pedro and Bandar might be engineers in paper but the quality of work will brick.

    • I got a national merit scholar with perfect act scores. He scored 28 on the act in the 7th grade (TIP program, now closed). His soft spot didn’t close until his late teens. He started and was president of the wrestling program at his undergraduate school. The graduate schools aren’t even taking standardized test scores. He got into ucla. No dice with MIT or other top programs.

      13
      • Those are pretty much closed out now. My youngest son did get into a top 10 engineering program, went for a year, like the engineering, but since the engineers were a minority the rest of the woke crap drove him nuts (emotional support animals after Trump was elected in 2016) He ended up re-applying to very, very small, very specialized school (he’d gotten in first time—but their rules—you start over). Only provisio is in return for full academic scholarship, students had to take a prescribed curriculum and pass every class or get booted. About 70% made it through the four years.

        19
        • The school and student you reference could be the future. Like major media headlines and major media highly ranked colleges and Ivy’s, start off with “it is a lie.”

          I’d rather be extremely knowledgeable in a career and only have to act stupid around my gold credentialed colleagues than actually be as stupid and programmed as they, while understanding future opportunities whereby I can escape when the time put in and the time is right.

          To start, dissident schools should be inversely ranked according to the pop media school rankings and the amount of govt funding the school receives. Additionally by the standards that are a requirement to remain in that school as the student you reference has chosen.

          • It’s designed to turn out most of country’s supply of Naval Architects/Marine Engineers (you earn two BSc’s in four years. But it is brutal. However, when the Olin Foundation decided to liquidate and endow the Olin School of Engineering, their planning staff camped there to figure out how it worked. Olin became a top tier engineering school in five years following a variant of that model—though with more major selections.

    • Even if you get through school and get a quality education, and even if you have a lot of skills, the job market doesn’t want you. There is a guy I follow on an alternative social media platform who has been looking for months to find a decent job as a programmer. A recent post said that the more qualified he is for a job the less interested HR is in hiring him. He even spent months building a personal website to act has his work portfolio, yet nobody bothers to even look at it.

      This has been going on for years. I knew a guy back in the aughts who worked for several companies as a programmer, and said 90% of his time at work was fixing all the problems caused by the third world “programmers” that his baby boomer manager kept contracting with. He kept trying to tell this guy that in the long run he’d have better results hiring Americans who knew what they were doing rather than hire foreigners for piecework who DGAF about the final product. To no avail.

      There are many competent Americans out there, it’s just that our society would rather prioritize the hiring of less capable people, be they foreign or domestic. That way they can pay them less. But in the end there will be hell to pay, when our decrepit system comes crashing down. I pray that the competent remnant can hold on long enough, because we will need them to help rebuild when that happens.

      16
      • At my prior employer had to re-shore an IT group supporting one of the businesses for exactly that reason. The guys who sent it to India did it on the same theory as “1000 monkeys eventually producing Shakespeare”. We could barely get what we needed out of it, and the business was changing quickly and they had zero ability to deal with quickly evolving requirements documentation or mid-course corrections. It was cheaper to hire kids graduating University of Wisconsin, who wanted to stay in state and hire some senior adult supervision. Plus you could simply state the problem to them and they’d solve it, rather than hold their hands and endless nighttime conference calls and still get crap.

      • Well said. This is already happening FWIW

        Huge multinational companies with enormous gaps in staffing Some of this is wage/benefit issues, an engineer in LA needs to make $100 an hour and employers want to pay half that but lot of it is simply because those skills do not exist.

        I also know quiet a few smaller businesses, machine shops , farms with important roles and established customers who are simply going to be gone in 5 to 10 years. Vital skills gone for good No one wants to run them , in some cases they are in undesirable locations. a few the owners kids died ans there are no replacements

        People do not want to do that kind of work and lot would rather do the bugman lifestyle with added weed.

        Long term USA will be much poorer and resemble Latin America as its skills base erodes. Ugh.

    • Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people. Karma’s a bitch. Just like all those sh-tlibs getting followed home and robbed in the rich parts of LA. I’ve wished for this for a long time. We all already suffer under their bad decision making, time to ‘spread the love’ to the gated community idiots who are always protected from their lack of experience and naivete.

      13
    • I have seen this in my Ivy-encrusted family and forebears, i.e. Heritage Americans. My husband and I quit worrying about this in the 90s when our private school educated kids were not interested in applying to those institutions. Ended up in good state schools, the USMC and other institutions which made them tough enough to handle whatever life throws at them. It was the social-climbers, the Chinese/Indian doctors’ children who were worried about SAT tutors and getting into Princeton who sweated this s%^&t out. Why go to Yale if there are no fraternities there any more, where you might meet a woman of your social class? G’nome sayin’? Are these people going to end up running things? I don’t think so. I’ve noticed that lots of dot-Indians with this sort of background are interested in politics. Pushy-pushy. Turn off. Watch them closely.

      Most of the private high schools, boarding and otherwise, are full of Asian kids paying full freight and perhaps some higher-level African-Blacks playing in this pool, too. But like we did with private golf clubs and yacht clubs, i am confident we will find a way to carry on.

      12
  15. “Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant. Then it seeks to silence good.” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

    38
  16. Where is this “new elite” supposed to be coming from? The younger generations are the product of a terrible education system and is far less White. Worse, the old elite is far more cynical about all the race stuff and don’t really believe it. The younger generations really believe it. The Silent gen and Boomers did their fair share of cultural vandalism in the 60s but largely gave it up as the Boomers grew up. It is not Boomers painting BLM murals and tearing down statues. Their evil little hearts will never be satisfied with such token gestures.

    As the current generation of elites die, they are going to be replaced by a far worse elite who are true believers and with a very high degree of personality defects. Imagine a Congress filled with various more vibrant versions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters-es

    33
    1
    • That was my biggest redpill. I grew up thinking that everybody knew the truth, but is was just impolite to talk about. I panicked when i realized most believed the nonsense. Nowadays i’m organizing N-towers after a rum and coke or two.

      15
    • Unfortunately this is how I see it too. Although, Z man doesn’t say that the new elites will be an improvement. They’ll just be different. They may be worse, which is likely.

    • I’ve been making this argument for years. The Boomer Libs wanted a better deal for blacks and women (thinking incorrectly that they give a bad deal in the first place) so they promoted the equality thing as a way to give blacks and women a bit of boost.

      But most of those Boomer Libs and certainly conservatives didn’t really believe all the propaganda. However, their kids who were raised on this stuff from day one and have been told by literally every authority in their lives – including their parents – that it’s true actually believe all of this equality and systemic racism farce.

      When the Boomers finally give up their grip on power, they’ll be replaced by the true believers who already are getting angry that the Boomers aren’t doing more to fight the evil that they’ve been told since birth is out there.

      11
  17. There are no spasms or interregna or anything of the sort. Beginning in the late 60s, free speech went into steady decline, and the rate of decline has accelerated over time. About 1968, Hispanic grievance mongers went on the warpath about the Frito Bandito, and got him cancelled. Not long after that, colleges and universities began instituting speech codes to silence every voice to the right of Lyotard. The category of hate crimes, whose add-on punishments are simply juridical bans against wrongthink while committing a crime, followed thereafter. Now we have political persecution and official stigmatization as domestic terrorists of those who question the Power Structure along with the abolition of these crime-thinkers’ livelihoods.

    This is all being done to craft the anti-white narrative, protect it from criticism, and thereby, to reconfigure white consciousness along self-loathing contours. It has all gotten steadily worse and more flagrant over time, and it shows no sign of stopping. And the putative collapse of the Cold War elite won’t change a dam’ thing. The new elites waiting in the wings may be, if anything, even worse than the senescent counterculturalists.

    25
    • I had a “Frito Bandito” pencil eraser that came in a bag of Fritos when I was about 6. Man, that would have gotten me “cancelled” before 2nd grade.

      11
      • My biggest regret from childhood: The pencil eraser came in the box with the individual lunch-sized bags of Fritos. My parents said that was too expense, and always bought the big bag with no eraser, and made me fill my own Glad bags for lunches. I still remind my 80+ year old parents about it.

      • LOL, I remember those. They were cereal box “prizes.” They were useless as erasers though, so if you had erasing to do you’d have to pull them off your #2 Ticonderoga pencil and use the built-in red one.

      • To my everlasting shame, I stole the Frito Bandito eraser from the cute girl that sat next to me in first grade. I’ve had bittersweet memory associations for over fifty years. Life is stranger than fiction.

      • SamlAdams: Same! Used to love that thing.

        Ostei: You are correct. There was no real interregnum; the speech codes and anti-White and anti-Christian stances really showed up in the 60s and just accelerated, albeit with fits and starts, forever after. My elementary school was not integrated, but middle school and high school both were – and everyone knew the blacks were trouble and everyone knew there was nothing to be done but avoid them.

        By the time I got to college every last course requirement to ensure each student began with a general understanding of western civilization, politics, and culture had been abandoned. No more chapel requirements. Special exceptions for this group and that. And while some still recognized the handful of blacks around were unqualified, others were fully onboard their deification.

        I was either out of the US or focused on my young children during the 90s and in a sort of personal interregnum – increasingly conservative and Christian but not yet dissident. That came in the 2nd dubya term and the subsequent abomination’s installation.

  18. White House Requests Additional $33 Billion in Ukraine Aid https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-requests-additional-33-billion-in-ukraine-aid-11651156227

    We are at war with Russia. Full stop. This administration has treated the Ukraine situation like a house with a small kitchen oven fire. Instead of putting it out, they started splashing gasoline all over the walls. This recent declaration of war funds into the gaping maw of the MIC and senseless death is the proof.

    39
    • Lavrov said yesterday nuclear war should not be dismissed as a possibility. That old Russkie is one of the most brilliant diplomats in history. He certainly sees that there are elements in the United States who think a nuclear war is winnable.

      23
      • One day in the future Lavrov will be mentioned in the same breath with Talleyrand, Metternich, and Bismarck.

        15
        • Molotov? I mean how cool is it to have a cocktail named after you? especially when it contains gasoline.

          14
      • Yes, he really is an impressive man: the epitome of dignity under extreme provocation. It says good things about Putin that Lavrov is his chief diplomat.

        ‘Our’ Biden, on the other hand, has Blinken. We are clowns! Hear us honk!

        11
    • The Ukie Conflict is like Christmas Morning to the D.C. crowd. The Bolsheviks are getting long-delayed revenge. The MIC are getting World War 3. The globalists are getting their fuel and food bans needed to enslave humanity. And all of them are getting to steal and embezzle money like never before.

      Normie keeps grilling.

      25
    • “We are at war with Russia. Full stop.” Well, there you go again. Using logic and making conclusions and such.

      But don’t you think that our PTB will simply use their word-magic-alchemy and simply say, “No, we are not at war with Russia. Because sending money, weapons, and supplying logistical support is merely ‘sending freedom.'”?

      It’s like ol’ Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

      ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

      ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

      When was the last time you ran into a normie as clever as Alice?

  19. “Maintaining a broad public debate was an essential part of opposing communism.”

    Interesting point I hadn’t considered. I’ve often thought along the same lines about consumerism.

    Was actually talking to a friend about that on Monday, how I think America spent itself winning the Cold War. We HAD to have the highest standard of living, HAD to be the most open. Now we have an un-payable debt and ruined demographics, and no way to fix it without going bust imo.

    Adding the freest speech to that mix makes sense. Liberal democracy, too. Liberal, liberal, liberal. We ain’t no stinkin’ commies lol.

    Thanks for the practical angle, Z. Been staring into the abyss too much lately.

    11
    • ” how I think America spent itself winning the Cold War.”

      This absolutely happened, as it did to France with World War I and Britain with World War II.

      19
    • We also had to treat minorities the best. Pressure to be “fairer” and more tolerant than the pinkos played no small role in the so-called “civil rights movement.”

      10
  20. There is already a new elite rising: Indians and Chinese. Kamala is VP due to wealthy Indian donors.

    For now Chinese and Indians are willing to pay second fiddle to the tribe. They also mimic the tribe’s hatred of Whites simply because that works not out of actual hatred.

    The questions are

    1. how long will they be willing to be second tier

    2.what happens when they want to move up to the top tier? Will the tribe turn over willingly some of their power and control (maybe in exchange for subjugation of whites and support for Israel) or will their be deep tribal conflict?

    Only thing can be stated for sure is whites will side with the tribe in the case of any major inter tribal conflict between the 3 elites

    28
    1
    • ” … what happens when they want to move up to the top tier?”

      China is the only country in history to have *assimilated* their Jewish population.

      (((They)) probably know that.

    • At the national level, the rise of the Indian CEOs have acquired massive political influence in a very short time.

      In my own space, I’m seeing Indian and SE Asians pop-up in the upper-middle management ranks like weeds.

      18
      • Self selection is something most whites just don’t seem to get, even when its demonstrated to them in their own companies over and over.

        23
      • Where I’m at it’s the opposite. Tide is coming in for whites. We’re not Fortune 500 by any means, though. Maybe barely surviving covid taught the business some lessons.

      • Indians pop up like weeds due to H1b, in group preference and whites having no in group preference

    • ‘They also mimic the tribe’s hatred of Whites simply because that works not out of actual hatred.’

      I don’t that’s true, mate. But also look at where the Indians and Chinese are employed — typically in the science, engineering, and IT sector or as physicians. They are tolerated because they are needed there. And they know it. Contrast this with the chosen ones, who are concentrated in media. liberal arts academia, law, and politics. That’s where the power is in this backward society. Those are the commanding heights.

      If you’re talking of Indian billionaire oligarchs, they merge with the global oligarch elite. An Indian Tata or Ambani will be quite comfortable with a Soros.

      13
      2
      • “I don’t that’s true, mate. But also look at where the Indians and Chinese are employed — typically in the science, engineering, and IT sector or as physicians. They are tolerated because they are needed there. And they know it.”

        Are they needed? I don’t know about you but have you noticed all the ads on TV now for vaccines? We never needed these in the past but now we do? We can’t sell you anymore pills, so we’re shifting to vaccines! I think every industry you named is over saturated and only kept afloat with 0% .gov money which has essentially been flowing since the dot com but with short intervals of not total theft of savers money. People wonder how things have changed so quickly even since 2000 and i think that is the answer, they’ve been buying up and consolidating everything with 0% money for almost 20 years.

        14
          • In a sense, they are already most Americans’ landlord through mortgages. Not only do they collect rent through interest, they don’t have to pay for repairs or upkeep.

          • C matt

            You are correct and to fix that i would get rid of property taxes, so you know, when you finally pay off your note you actually own the house! I also think 401ks should be abolished, not tying peoples retirements to the stockmarket and finance in general would do much to fix many problems. You know, so when the market crashes again by 60 or 70% they can’t use that as an excuse for bailouts.

            3
            1
        • This is a very good point. Just because we’re flooded with engineers doesn’t mean we really need them. It certainly doesn’t follow that more technology, past a point, is a great benefit to society.

          In my sector Pajeets are two-a-penny… they perform mostly consulting make-work – much like the whites do also. A shocking amount of IT work is in fact make-work. When you start to realise this, you realize why nobody is too keen to accept this truth.

          Example: It has become very fashionable in programming circles for the last five or so years, for a business to migrate their on-premises systems to ‘The Cloud’ – which usually means either AWS or Azure (Google Cloud Platform doesn’t seem to figure too much).

          The reasons cited are ‘scalability’ in anticipation of ‘growth’. These folks imagine using the same technologies as the Big Boys, and getting similar results… Look at us grow, baby!

          In practice, they don’t need it. Often they don’t. They just think they do. It’s all so tiresome. If you ever want to understand how much make-work there is going on, expand the updates trojan package that Windows downloads… most of it is just junk. My God! The Snipping Tool has a new UI!

          You might have a ‘security update’, protecting you from that not-very-common-and-hard-to-exploit vulnerability… if you’re lucky.

          12
          • I think someone other then state or even federal .gov should audit the healthcare system. I remember back in 08 reading an article in the economist about Ford and GM, they had workers who’d reached a certain age but they couldn’t fire due to Union clauses. So they warehoused them in giant buildings where they would sit at lunch tables all day and read magazines and newspapers. I know for a fact that prob at least 50% of all healthcare administrative jobs are like this. I have one ;). Its truly a soul killer but its the best job i’ve been offered since getting out of college. Its all politics and as .gov takes over more and more of the economy its only going to get worse.

            19
          • Charles Hugh Smith had a chart showing the rise of hospital administrators vs actual providers. It’s even worse than teachers

            I blame third party payment systems, insurance commissioners, and corporate medicine.

            I guess the job of admins is dealing with all the other admins. How to pare that devouring growth back?

            14
          • “The reasons cited are ‘scalability’ in anticipation of ‘growth’.”

            Have we even had growth since the early 2000’s or is it just never ending bubbles and bloated asset prices? If we had growth i imagine most corps wouldn’t be trying to switch to a stream of income model IE you pay a monthly fee to use something instead of owning it. Seems like tons of places are doing that now, i think i even read an article recently that stated apple was thinking of not selling Iphones anymore and “leasing” them to “consumers”. If we actually had growth, we wouldn’t have so many bullshit jobs.

          • ‘Just because we’re flooded with engineers doesn’t mean we really need them.’

            Very true. What has made Indian engineers and IT ‘professionals” attractive to the multinationals for the last three decades has been their relative cheapness (say, $80,000 for an Indian versus $130,000 for a white American, and secondly and just as importantly, their docility (‘Yes sir, no sir, kick sir, slap sir). The immigrants have destroyed the US labor market. There never was a shortage of skilled domestic labor — the arguments that there were, were disingenuous and obviously bogus and contrived. This destruction of the local labor market is another reason why white Americans don’t go for engineering, science, and IT. Just no future there.

          • Every group in an organization wants to increase their budget. The bigger the budget the more status and higher pay usually the group head.

            Also it is job security to implement needless but popular among higher management solutions. It can be very risky for a head of marketing or engineering if the CEO goes to a CEO get together and his staff isn’t doing something the other CEOs staff are doing.

            CEOs want to be seen s doing the cool things too

      • Clearly you haven’t been in a pay-in-person gas station or 7-11 recently. Look up photos from the construction of the Hoover Dam or the NYC skyscrapers. Compare to the photos from China and the subcontinent from the same time. And then answer this: If Chinese and Subcontinental engineers/physicians/mathematicians are so great why are their countries so dependent on remittances from the US and schemes like these https://tinyurl.com/t4s8pjfs

      • OK, but your optics are off. Even Ralph Lauren aka Lifshitz, from the Bronx, knew this. He copied the Preppy New England look and made a fortune, esp in “Life Styles,” copying what WASP homes looked like. Really?

        No one really wants to look like the current models in Paris, guys wearing pleated skirts, not kilts, or in NYC or in the movies made in Hollywood. Saw this in the WSJ lastw week. Everyone wants to see Brad Pitt or Ellen (yes) DeGeneres. She cares about the Gorillas in Africa, for Pete’s sake! We can’t tell one chink, or Patel, from another. Sad but true. I believe people will fight for this. We’re tired of this nonsense.

    • “They also mimic the tribe’s hatred of Whites simply because that works not out of actual hatred.”

      After 20 years working with Indians in high tech, I’d say that there’s more contempt of Whites than hatred, and while it’s not universal, it’s definitely there.

      The contempt is of the gypsy variety — they are contemptuous
      of you because you fall for their grifts.

      Ultimately, they don’t hate you, they just love their own more and if Whites allow them to wield their nepotism as profligately as they do and to take over White-created companies, well, why shouldn’t that generate contempt? It’s very hard to be respectful of people who willingly allow you to conquer them.

      19
      • Indians are very caste oriented. Upper caste Indians in tech discriminate against lower caste Indians.

        They see that Whites are no longer upper caste and are now a source of derision. They, and the Chinese, see that the tribe runs the show so they, logically, copy the tribe. Why? It works. Only White people feel that they shouldn’t give preference to their tribe and that every other one is fair game

        3
        1
  21. I remember that period well. I was a Marine in the First Gulf War. When I got home, the Cold War was over for real and there was a feeling of boundless optimism in the air. Life was good, music was good, things were fun.

    The first warning signs to not-paying-attention me were watching the 1994 elections while back in school in California. Barbara Boxer was saying some stupid crap – and winning.

    In hindsight, that nice period of calm ended very suddenly on 9/11. Since then there has always been a crisis, a war, or some excuse to increase government power and their control over me.

    33
      • Remember the summer of the shark attack? It gave me a sinking feeling seeing the public fixated on frivolous things. Immediately followed by 9/11, of course.

      • Amen Red –

        We didn’t realize how good we had it or how insane things would get.

        Hindsight is of course always 20/20.

    • The early 90s to September 01 really were a great period of time. In some ways those years were even more optimistic than the 80s because the Cold War had ended, Germany was reunifying, etc.

      That sense of optimism in my corner of the world was buoyed by a robust economy. Heck, we even had a great sportspuck team with fans that couldn’t get enough of the Russian players wizardry.

      15
      • While it may have been good for the East Germans, the re-unification of the Reich was a really bad idea. First of all, the country itself didn’t exist until 1871, thanks to the machinations of Bismarck. If it had remained 39 individual duchies, margaves, etc. the world would have remained a more peaceful and pleasant place. Why give the krauts another chance at death and destruction?

        4
        2
      • Ah, yes, Germany reunifying…
        Only to be treated to leadership by the “former” communist, Mutti Merkel. Amd wasn’t she a Godsend to Germany, and more widely, to Europe? Speeding up the pozzing of Germany, and the racial dilution of Europe through the power she wielded? Finishing off Germany, the only possible keel and counterforce to the post-colonial Grench, Belgians, and Dutch, to the delight of the little hats. Cross that one off of the “To Do” list.

    • “Life was good, music was good, things were fun.”

      Wasn’t that the time when gangsta rap got big? And grunge, while not too bad, wasn’t exactly optimistic either.

      • Gangster rap was comedy music and the popular grunge bands were, by rock standards, harmonically advanced. All of it can be read as aesthetically optimistic, if optimism is what you’re looking for.

        Mocking death and avoiding vi-IV-I-V are also degenerate, if you like.

        The important difference between popular music then and now is that today’s is made by and for much dumber people. On the bright side (maybe?) it’s much less popular.

        • This situation is akin to the Beatles a generation before. In one sense, yes, the Beatles were a complete dumbing down of pop music (from Jazz/ Big Band to rock n roll – much simpler vocabulary). Thus, in one sense they started the downward trend; however, on the other, they were so good with what they did (and The Beatles are awesome). The Alt Rock of the 90s had some really excellent musicians who continued the path of dumbing down, but they produced interesting music. Take Nirvana – Cobain produced some amazing melodies. Take Soundgarden – The notes and timbre of Chris Cornell is incredible. Take The Smashing Pumpkins – 1979 is one of the most wistful and nostalgic songs ever. Take The Red Hot Chili Peppers – pure funk and groove (with some cool chords).
          Modern music is, besides being killed by Beatdoctor making all organic changes in rhythm mute (just listen to how much Zeppelin would vary tempo in a song, which is natural), is just punched out with variations of the I IV V progression (as noted above). So interesting are The Beatles chords that only one of their hits (Let It Be) used a I IV V model (and yes – pedantics, I know it is the I V VI IV – but still the same principle). Something like “Give It Away” uses chromatic notes moving opposite the bassline. Heart Shaped Box references the Dorian mode.
          And, with modern music, even if the chords are interesting, it all feeds so coldly calculated and produced, as if written by computers, rather than a human.

          10
          • I recall seeing somewhere, maybe in the Get Back documentary, that the Beatles had a very good understanding of music theory, even though they had no formal education in it. They made up silly names for certain chord or key changes.

            As a side note on how bad the music industry is today, the Beatles won 7 Grammys, which includes 3 after they broke up. Beyonce, Kanye and Jay_Z have a total of 76.

            2
            1
          • @DLS, for those waxing nostalgic about pre-9/11 music, Milli Vanilli won a Grammy in 1989. What’s more, veritable Mozarts such as Vanilla Ice and 2 Live Crew ruled the airwaves. If you want the good stuff, you have to go back to the 80s, and preferably no later than the mid-80s. Today’s “music” is more tuneless, and perhaps a bit more reprehensible than the stuff from the 90s, but it’s not any stupider.

          • @ostei – I agree with you; however, I lived through the era, and there was also a clear line between Pop (e.g. Milli) and more ‘legitimate’ bands, and both shared the public space. Today, legitimate bands still exist, but are completely snuffed out and dwarfed by the Pop machine; the balance has changed.
            @dls – The Beatles had no formal training. However, they had great ears and tenacity, and they picked up techniques and modes and chords from listening to things outside Rock and Roll. There second album alone showcased their incredible creativity (Dylan himself remarked that the album was full of “outrageous chords”). Harrison’s solo on “Till There was You” is a master class in phrasing and taste. But to illustrate the original point, there’s a song called “Not a Second Time.” A critic praised it for having “aoleian cadences” to which Lennon replied, “I have no idea to this day what that means. To me it sounds like something involving birds.” But if you listen to the song, despite the pretentious name, all it is is that Lennon’s vocal emphasizes the 6th note (The ‘minor’ note) instead of going back to the major tonic (the 1st or 3rd). When you listen to it, it just makes sense. They also regularly messed with meter, but I doubt they counted it out; they just played it because it sounded good. Take a favorite of mine, “All My Loving.” Lennon is playing triplet rhythm the whole time, but does it is a quirky way no teacher would ever teach (in short, he never resets after the three notes, he keeps strumming up and down), but it gives it swing. They were brilliant, and they absorbed music well. They simply didn’t learn the terms, but they learned the purpose. (Sorry for the essay!)

        • Saggy pants (and the nitwits) are still with us, and spitting in public has been replaced by crapping in public. I don’t count this as progress.

      • I can only posit that the negative attitudes in those two genres were a luxury afforded by the general optimism of the times.

        One positive aspect of grunge is that it really did begin in the garages and bars of the Pacific Northwest and had a real DIY vibe in the early days.

        People make the same claims about gangsta rap, but the history there is not as clear.

      • Prior to 1987 rap was just a goofy and harmless, if somewhat idiotic gimmick. Along about 1987 though it morphed into the baleful garbage and filth that is now our national soundtrack. It is also, one imagines, the playlist in Hell.

    • Ahhh…that unthreatening interlude between Gulf War I and 9/11. Just Bill Clinton’s underwear and his exposed romps with that young Jewish concubine of his. Those were the days. Then Bush jr et al began the multi-million murder of others almost halfway around the world and it has been nothing but chaos since.

    • The good pop music pretty much ceased in 1992. It was at that point, at the age of 24, that I became so bored and disenchanted with the pop music scene that I abandoned it for classical music, and I never went back.

      6
      1
    • Maxda: Interesting memories. My ‘first warning sign’ was simply returning to the US in the mid 90s and suddenly discovering that the house with the picket fence in a nice neighborhood now included lashings of Han and Pajeet. America was still primarily White when I graduated college in 1980 and went overseas. When I came back for good in the mid 90s, it was a whole new world – I felt as though I returned to simulacrum and haven’t truly felt comfortable here ever since.

  22. This is an extremely interesting and counterintuitive line of discussion.

    The mid-90s marked the early days of the publicly accessible Internet where Usenet and BBS, which had mostly been the domain of STEM scholars and engineers, transitioned to HTML websites and forums and the virtual “Wild West”.

    The Internet is an amazing and useful thing. It really is one of the pinnacle accomplishments of white, western societies. But the public commodification of it completely ruined it and irrevocably ended the beauty of it. There was an interim where early adopters, mostly white men, had the freedom to say almost anything, but then by the mid-2000s it was all on the trajectory of ruin.

    I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this coincided with the changes discussed in this ZMan post.

    30
    • The internets also came to my mind reading this post. I was 18 in 2000 and still remember the internet being kinda useless. Then in exploded.

      My priest said an interesting thing on the topic; he basically said we will eventually become more mature with the internet. In my own words, we’re like kids with firecrackers with it now.

      • Maybe.

        Had a music teacher tell me once that rap was a fad, and it would pass.

        That was 40 years ago.

        15
        1
        • To be fair – they said the same thing about The Beatles. But for some reason rock-n-roll just seems to have vanished/evaporated.

          • It really hasn’t. It’s just severed itself from the mainstream music producers, which is a good thing. If you look around you can find the YouTube channels of independent groups doing some fantastic rock and rock variants.

          • Boarwild: Rock is wypipo music. I actually prefer it that way. Helps to further identify (absent the hair color, piercings, problem glasses, political slogans, or vax status) those to avoid. There’s plenty of excellent metal being played throughout Europe.

    • Hmmmmm. Excellent post fellas.

      The internet is a tool, and a darned powerful one…but it is not dangerous in and of itself, any more than a chainsaw. The onus is on us to master our tools…or they will master us.

      The other aspect is this: your mind is like your body – if you feed it crap and don’t exercise it… it will crap out and betray you.

      16
      1
    • Indeed.

      For me personally, I would wager that, despite my ranting about it being “The Devil’s Work”, The Internet has been a net boon.

      I joined FaceBorg in the very early days, and actually found it a useful tool to connect with people. However, the dross set in early with that one (plus, I found out how much time I’d wasted) so I left.

      But it’s a trove of great information, particularly blogs by technically minded folks; some of whom seem to be very good at keeping politics out of their spaces. I mean, you can teach yourself: fracture mechanics, mathematics, computing, aspects of medicine (personal remedies, and the ability to do thorough research that the MDs won’t do have helped her no end).

      But we all know about it’s dark side; so perhaps as a net for Western Civ, it has been net loss? Don’t know. But it sure isn’t looking good.

      But it’s a damn good tool when used well. A damn good tool.

      11
      • I see it a lot like public education. It takes effort, but resources are there if you want to learn, a heck of a lot of distractions and you have to filter out the indoctrinators.

      • Agreed. I recently fixed our washing machine with a $20 water inlet sensor and a YouTube video. Same with my riding mower. For entertainment, I have spent hours watching Rick Beato break down rock songs with his “What makes this song great” series.

  23. I like the optimism. I was thinking last night about how all this might settle without open civil war. One of the path is for states/regions to begin ignoring the federal government. We see a little of this on the marijuana issue, with states going their own way.

    The next step would be quality of life laws, like Desantis is attempting in Florida. I could see a situation where the Supreme Court decides a law is unconstitutional and the State in question says “So what”.

    I have been thinking hard about a peaceful way forward for a few years now. I keep coming back to localism and regionalism.

    24
    3
    • I keep coming back to war. We will never be allowed to peacefully coexist with tyrants. Just like they can’t tolerate one single person unvaxxed they won’t be able to tolerate on free speech state or region.

      It’ll become “Put on that mask and STFU by order of the state”.

      28
      • Hoagie-

        I believe we may exactly this when they attempt to declare martial law and cancel the November midterms.

        • If this ain’t the most obvious season finale climax ever scripted, you bet.

          “White nationalist Putin collaborators have done for saintly Joe and Kamala!

          Remember Jan 6!
          It’s a coup, the Revenge of the Trump!!”

          (Followed by, “get your 3 year olds vaccinated NOW!!”

        • I suspect they aren’t going to do that. The Washington Generals, I mean Republicans will be “allowed” to win to defuse the situation and make some effort to have an economy where the theft can go on.

          Its really just the same team so no one really cares who wins.

      • I go back and forth on this one. I could see the progressive tyrants starting Civil War 2, but could also seem them saying, eh, let Texas and Florida go. Those rednecks don’t deserve us. CW 1 was really the creation of one man. Anyone other than Lincoln may have compromised or let the South go.

    • What is happening in the schools and Disney is a direct result of doing away with the social construct known as, “the closet.”

      It’s even worse in the schools, where they have inverted the concept to facilitate the corruption of kids via the transition agenda.

      20
      • If it comes down to it I suspect a lot of things will come out of “the closet”; things with switches that say “auto” perhaps.

      • DeSantis should not have pushed this law in the way that he did, so that it appears as if he is punishing Disney for their allegedly protected speech. This invites the corrupt courts to strike down the law as unconstitutionally interfering with Disney’s supposed free speech rights. Although, it is very possible the law would have been struck down anyway. I will be very surprised if this law is not challenged and overturned by the courts.

        Either way, it’s still a ray of hope in these dark times. The fact that a group of GOP lawmakers did this so quickly and without a bunch of posturing and preening is a ray of sunshine.

        11
        • My opinion is the exact opposite. Let Disney know this is precisely because of its insane position. Pour encourages les autres. The arrangement it had was a privilege, not a right, and even if the law is truck down, all others are on notice this privilege will not be extended to Disney fellow travelers.

          16
          • Agreed. Even with the federal leviathan, I don’t think you’ll get five supremes to allow the feds to tell a state how it should structure state taxes and city boundaries. But even if struck down, it will be a costly process for Disney opening its rat trap.

          • This is durected to DLS (no reply button).

            Well, if it gets up to the Supremes, since it would involve a national (actually, international) corporation, this’ll be a great opportunity to apply the Interstate Commerce Clause to give them the win. Some sort of Stare Decisis will be involved, a poisonous doctrine if ever there was one. Sigh.

    • An interesting concept came up on Blab. The poaster said that the constitution is an agreement between the gubbimint and We The People. If they decide to deviate from it, so can we.

      The govt has already said many times “so what?” when it has imposed unconstitutional laws. They need to hear that back, in no uncertain terms before they change.

      16
      1
      • “The poaster said that the constitution is an agreement between the gubbimint and We The People. If they decide to deviate from it, so can we.”

        Although it begins “We the people of the United States,” the document had to be ratified by the states, not by the people.

        All amendments have been ratified by the states, not by the people.

        Until the 20th century, US Senators were elected by the general assemblies of the states, not by the people.

        The ordinances of secession in 1860 and 1861 were actions of the general assemblies of the states repealing those same general assemblies’ ratification of the Constitution in the 1780s.

        “The People” were never involved in anything connected with the US Constitution.

        And although corporations are legally people, “The People” is merely a legal abstraction.

        The poaster is drifting towards unreality, but unreality is pret-ty crowded as it is. He should steer clear of it.

        Tell him I said so.

        • The state governments are the closest representatives of the people. In fact, they are more representative than a national popular vote, under which CA and NY would impose their will on everyone in between.

        • A common thread throughout your comment is the dissolution of the republic, to be replaced by a gradually hyperempowered central government under which any State sovereignty was only very grudgingly acknowledged.

          Building on some of your thoughts, adding some more.

          The Constitution intentionally tried to strike a balance between various power centers, most famously, as the tale is told, is the purported balance between the branches of the federal government. (Arguably, the Supreme Court under the leadership of John Marshall almost immediately expanded its role beyond that envisioned in the Constitution in Marbury v. Madison.) But commonly disregarded is the balance between the STATE governments and the FEDERAL government, something supposedly enshrined in the 9th and 10th Amendments, but in practice, progressively undermined.

          The 14th Amendment altered citizenship being that of individual States, to being a national citizenship. Beyond that, it was the final blow against any mandated qualifications for the franchise being permitted to the States.

          The 18th Amendment of 1913 altered the election of Federal Senators by the vote of the State legislature to direct election by citizens of the State. Ostensibly passed as a “good government” measure to reduce corruption (upon recommendation from so-called “Progressives”), this opened the door to national scale corruption. How many Federal Senators enter office merely wealthy, only to become fabulously wealthy, eh? Beholden to corporations, enormous, immortal “persons”, or to national scale “interest groups”, even by foreign interests, and financially incentivized to be bribed?

          Also, in the ill-omened year of 1913, came the 17th Amendment which regularized Federal income taxation on individual citizens or corporate “citizens”, an uncircumscribed power which immediately became, and remains, a political football. Tariffs, imposts, and duties imposed some limits to the pretentions of the Federal governments powers to tax, but no more. And hand in glove with this was the institution in that year of the Federal Reserve as controller of the currency instead acting in the role of the Constitutionally-mandated Treasury. Oh, boy, Lord Rothschild and friends were licking their chops…

          Also, the gross abuse of the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause has served multiple schemes to centralize control into the hands of the Federal government. Originally conceived as a way to stabilize and regularize commerce of all kinds between THESE United States, instead it has been yet another tool to undermine State sovereignty and change the formulation to THE United States. So much for the “laboratory of democracy”.

          A few examples of the ongoing subornation of the Constitutional Republic.

          Water under the dam, I guess.

    • Flair1239: Localism and regionalism could work but only if population movement could be controlled. Since it hasn’t been and still can’t be, leftists have been fleeing their self-created hellholes and moving en mass to crap in other people’s beds. I’m still shocked at what DeSantis has been able to do while retaining apparent political appeal, when Florida’s population seems to be composed of NY Juice, Cuban immigrant descendants, Haitans, and Puerto Ricans.

      The flight from blue states to red rapidly accelerated with the wuflu and vax shot and now they truly are almost everywhere. And the most rural small towns are the most vulnerable – doesn’t take that large an influx before the Cali and NY ‘neighbors’ take control of zoning and school boards and your kids can’t afford to live within 50 miles of you any longer.

      Localism, like so many other things, can work with a homogeneous White population. Not in clownworld.

  24. I hate giving the goofballs in the Swamp good advice, but they’ll never follow it anyway, so here goes: There are only two ways to do a hard system reset in a totally ideologized society. One is a DIY project for the proles involving rope and lampposts, and y’all don’t want that, so you’ll need to do the other: A Khrushchev-style “secret speech,” in which you blame the “cult of personality” that somehow kinda sorta just developed around the recently-deceased Boss.

    The new Boss gets up there and decries all the previous administration’s manifest failures as “deviations” from the One True Faith; said “deviations” being the result of the massive cultural gravity of the Cult of Personality. Then he — or in this case she — reshuffles a few names at the top, makes some seemingly (and some actual) sweeping changes at the top, amnesties and rehabilitates some old “enemies” of the Regime — only the broken, powerless ones, of course — and in general carries out a wholesale course correction as a way to honor the old Boss’s memory.

    The problem is, that kind of thing takes minimal savvy, and the Boss-in-Waiting is somehow even dumber than the Old Boss, so that’s out. Ah well. But if you want to turn the ship around without too much bloodshed, that’s the way to do it. Make of it what you will, Swamp Things.

    15
    • Without bloodshed is how we got her. I’ve become a traditionalist: kill’em all, let God sort them out.

      Or as we used to say in Nam: “Kill a commie for Christ”.

      18
    • Khrushchev was the last True Believer and wanted to save the system. He also was highly intelligent. There is literally no one in the Swamp who wants to preserve the system and has the brains to do it; we are ruled by transaction amoebas. So it ain’t happening. I’m even starting to move nuclear war from an insane possibility to insane probability. That’s how stupid and avaricious the Swamp is.

      25
      • Khruschev is underrated.

        Anyone who survived that many purges, eventually prospered, and then evaded his own purge to a quiet retirement is one sharp tack.

        25
      • Yeah, y’all don’t have to worry about it. They couldn’t do any of that if they wanted to… and they don’t want to. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see them try, at least a little bit, before going Full Retard. Keep some popcorn on hand just in case.

  25. As has been mentioned here many times, it seems the internet and more specifically, social media has played a large part in the closing of the American mind. One would think that’s counterintuitive as the net opened new worlds, connections and information for billions of people – a new sort of potential enlightenment. And while that is the case to a degree for many, it has also allowed tards, freaks, degenerates, cat ladies and other dross to aggregate and spout their blather and hysteria which in turn ends up exerting influence that in the past never would or could have happened. It’s also allowed the nefarious and government (one and the same) to more easily spread their propaganda and lies to mold opinion. That’s going to be one of the big challenges – what to do about the virtual public square.

    25
    • The big thing the internet did was give those people reinforcement. In their regular, offline lives they would start spouting this stuff and it would turn them into social outcasts, so that worked as a regulating mechanism. They can find reinforcement and support for any bizarre position they hold plus recruit others into their insanity. As you point out, it is a big challenge going forward. Strict restrictions on porn and banning minors from social media are obvious first steps to take.

      23
      • That’s where I blew it during covid. I was sure the whole hysteria would blow over in a month, when Karen cottoned to the fact that she’d actually have to spend time with those little self-propelled lifestyle accessories, her kids, instead of shipping them off to government daycare while she went and self-actualized at Target and the nail salon.

        And I think I would’ve been right in the pre-social media era, when Karen’s status contests had to take place face to face. But thanks to Faceborg and Twatter, they now take place virtually — Karen loved the lockdowns, because she could always go that extra mile on her kids. Oh, Heather, you make your kids wear two masks at all times? How little you care! Mine wear three, and I douse them head to toe with hand sanitizer every half hour…

        36
      • “Strict restrictions on porn and banning minors from social media are obvious first steps to take.”

        Assuming we can keep the lights on.

        I read this book in college:

        https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Dark-Age-Roberto-Vacca/dp/0385063407

        Made a lasting impression on me. The sale price tells you how much in demand this book still is.

        We very well might not be able to keep the lights on.

        Martin Armstrong has said many, many times that the combination of socio-political collapse and the Grand Solar Minimum could very easily thrust the world into a new Dark Age.

        There are whole governments *committed* to that very thing. They call it the Green New Deal or UN Agenda 21 or UN Agenda 2030.

        They keep shutting down the modern world: pipelines, coal mines, nuclear power plants, and so on. But at the same time, they plan to run a total surveillance state. Hard to explain, even accounting for staggering stupidity.

        And y’all already know my no-longer-secret fear that whoever has the missing $20 trillion from the DoD also has Nicola Tesla’s notebooks.

        16
      • I noticed this a long long time ago, like in the late 90’s or early 2000’s, with, ahem, furries. These weirdos were around in all the old Internet forums back in the day, and stuff like IRC, but most people just mocked them. Yet instead of being relegated to a fringe they just found more and more people and continued to grow as a subgroup. The thing is, every group of degenerates found a home online, later on it was reddit or Tumblr. We are living in Tumblr’s world right now.

        It is interesting to note that a sociologist or some other form of researcher these days cannot even really touch this stuff, despite the massive influence it has had on our culture. They cannot touch it because the idea of some horrible degenerates enabling each other online is not just accepted but celebrated, to the point where they are encouraged to actively seek out kids to join their communities. There is no longer any social regulation on behavior allowed.

        15
    • An analogy:

      Coca Plant -> cocaine
      Opium Poppy -> morphine, heroin, etc.

      The plants and the chemical derivatives each have their “proper” uses in folk/traditional medicine and modern medicine respectively. But the drug abuse potential, with usually disastrous consequences to the addict and assorted collateral damage, is for all practical purposes exclusive to the refined product.

    • Great comment.

      I’ve long felt that one of the worst parts of the Internet is that it allowed the freaks to find each other and organize in normie-impervious blocs.

      Conversely, the Internet seems to have further broken down and atomized the great mass of normies, which has made any individual normie incredibly vulnerable to the phalanxes of freaks.

      11
      • This was becoming a thing in the 80’s. To quote Andrew Vacchs the anti pedo guy/attorney/ mystery writer in his 1983 novel Flood “Even the F*cking Freaks have affinity groups”

    • usNthem: Same as with the real public square. Just as the extremely limited franchise kept early control of all the excesses of populism, democracy, and equality, limited internet access could do the same. As usual, it all goes back to jettisoning equality in everything. Hierarchy of all sorts – who votes, who gets to have a say, who runs things, who organizes things, who gets access to knowledge, etc. The big trick is who the deciders are – and that goes back to first principles. No papers will ever truly control people on the margins – only other men can do so, and they must be both empowered to do what needs to be done, yet simultaneously controlled and restrained by some sort of community-wide moral code and standards. Christianity used to provide that. It no longer works for multiple reasons, but I don’t see paganism replacing it as a unifying purpose.

  26. Religiosity and a return to the spiritual is key. Z alludes to arising from the rubble of elite leadership; almost all of the essay’s in Solzhenitsyn’s should-read anthology, “From Under the Rubble,” speak to the absolute need of this element in order to truly rise Phoenix-like from the ashes to some better state. For Solzhenitsyn’s Russe, the Orthodox faith, though diminished and subverted during the long winter of Communist subjugation, remained key, one of the bedrocks of the Russian folk. Given the heterodoxic nature of America, one wonders if appeals to the spiritual are of any use. Concurrent with that, the diversity that now enriches us seems to augur for a splintering of the body such that even the Great Physician won’t be able to properly set the break.

    12
    • If you’re saying what I think you are you are correct. Mooslems and homosexuals will no more leave us alone than will leftists. It’s their way or the eternal highway. We can’t live with them either. Again that stupid concept of “diversity” loses.

      15
      • Hoagie –

        Precisely why I stand by a confirmed belief: in the long run the Dem Party will fracture. The Muslims & queers is a prime example; they’re working @ cross purposes to one another. Blacks too – no fan of the queers.

    • ” … a splintering of the body such that even the Great Physician won’t be able to properly set the break.”

      There was never a time when Massachusetts and, let’s say South Carolina were going to live under the same government *permanently.*

      When the country breaks apart within the next ten years, it will not be for the first time. And there are *many* countries on this continent. Always have been.

      11
  27. Mostly agree with your fine essay but wished to comment on this:

    ‘America is now suffering a shortage of qualified people for high skilled jobs. It turns out that airplane pilots and engineers are not floating across the Rio Grande.’

    One could argue that this has mostly always been the case in the USA. US universities before WW2 were mostly a joke and serious American students would go to Germany to do their doctorates. The influx of European scientists during the ’30s and ’40s — people such as Fermi, Einstein, von Braun, von Neumann, Teller, Ulam, Courant, and a host of others — changed the complexion of the US university system, and the (declining) impact of this influx can be felt even today. The USA has never really been self-reliant in science and engineering, and the career paths on offer to scientists and research engineers are uncertain and relatively poorly-paid. And perhaps this is because the USA has a social and political structure not consonant with a modern society — perhaps more in tune with the early 19th century. Because of the influx of highly skilled immigrants it never had to modernize socially and culturally. My humble opinion.

    9
    10
    • Seems we had a different caliber of “highly skilled immigrant” back in the day.

      But both the servicification and financialization of the US economy drives brighter minds from science and engineering to business and law. Average engineer is lucky to make $40-50k coming out of school; a BBA in finance can net you upwards of $70k, and the math is a heck of a lot easier.

      • I would only quibble with your starting pay scales. I believe engineers and finance majors both start out in the same general range, but engineers cap out more quickly.

  28. Up until the noughties, a man like Christopher Hitchens was able to defend David Irving, praise his biography on Joseph Goebbels as the best book on WWII he’d ever read, and even intimate that the Holocaust-deniers had a point or two worth debating.

    I wonder if the Trotskyite old faggot would have the balls today – I often hear people lament his early passing but as a fan myself, I am not altogether confident that he would; rock stars should die young.

    14
    • I suspect Hitch would have followed the same path of people like Andrew Sullivan. He would have gone from eccentric gadfly to ignored outcast without much fanfare. Conservatives would have posted a few laments about his expulsion from polite company, but then back to burying their face in the crotch of their left-wing masters.

      This is the nature of post-Marx culturalism. It operates like an increasingly manic murmuration of starlings. Those who fail to keep up are abandoned. Those left behind are left alone as long as they do not cause too much trouble, like you see with Sullivan. Those who cause trouble come under attack, like you see with a Michael Tracy.

      21
      • Hitchens would have had the same fate as Richard Dawkins had he not died right as the woke stuff really started to pick up steam. The first blow for Dawkins was him claiming that asking a woman out on a date wasn’t a form of brutal rape, followed up by a series of minor instances of crimethink that banished him from leftist grace. Now he’s irrelevant.

    • Interesting question. I was a big fan of Hitch and Gore Vidal back in the day. Vidal went off the reservation during the later 1990s, and especially after 9/11. I remember Vidal getting some fire because he interviewed & sympathized with Tim McVeigh. Then after 9/11 he went blast on the GAE. He called Britain a glorified American aircraft carrier. That made Hitchens and Vidal, who were kindred spirits of different generations, break apart. Hitchens supported the GAE in the name of muh freedom and liberty, but it was because he was on the libertarian left. Not surprising he was a star on The Daily Show and Real Time.

      Gore had the good sense to die in 2008, and Hitch in 2011. I don’t think either would’ve gotten on the Trump train, though I suspect Vidal would have been more kindly. Hitchens had a lot of friends in the media so I don’t think he would’ve been ignored quite like Sullivan. I think he would’ve continued to take the contrary opinions of his brother Peter, and we’d be seeing dueling essays over the Ukraine question.

    • Hitch has his good points, but he had a lot of shitty takes too. He was a big supporter of communism and leftism. He was virulently anti-Christian. He was very progressive on race and depending on the circumstance could be pretty anti-White too. He was an unapologetic drunk.
      He was somewhat anti-Islam, but only to the extent that he saw Islam as anti-progressive. The usual kvetching about throwing gays off of roof and not being feminist friendly.

      His defense of free speech is second to none though. So I’ll always give him that. There is a debate he had on hate-speech laws on youtube which is worth watching.

  29. The red diaper babies and their descendants from the post war period and the sexual revolution and civil rights 60’s have yet to burn themselves out.
    We are still suffering from it.
    The new elites if they are to take us anywhere or help us establish anything worthwhile will need to be free of this nonsense.
    Secular utopianism as brought to our institutions since the 50’s is poison and our Christianity has been toothless in fighting it.
    The sane Christians in America should have acted like Muslims would have and the moment the Supreme Court banned public prayer a fatwah should have been called on DC and it’s courts.
    Instead Christian’s in America caved
    Now we as Christian’s are estranged from our government and increasingly our own culture.
    The Russians now seem to have that religion part on track in their culture and it is backing their system of government, which means their system may be a formidable force.

    28
    • Please notice that what you criticize American Christianity for what did not happen in Russia. Part of the collapse of the Russian Orthodox was indeed a collapse in faith like you see stateside.
      Meanwhile, the very nature of Christianity is that is not Islam. If you want Islam, you can certainly have it, it just will not be what everyone is pining for in this discussion.
      If you want a strong Christendom, then my answer to that is show up at the best church you can next Sunday, get on your knees, and start praying. Wanting Christianity to be Islam for a few minutes for a convenient revolution you did not want to participate in as an outsider to both is silly.

      8
      2
      • Missed the point, I do not want Islam I want Christianity in the west to possibly be more like the Russian Orthodox faith since post communism.

        11
  30. I think the organizational foreign policy principle of the elites we are seeing finally dying, literally in the triumvirate of Biden/Pelosi/McConnell, is not the Cold War, but the “arsenal of democracy” of 1933 and the bipartisan drive to realize the failed vision of Woodrow Wilson. Pelosi was born in 1940, Biden and McConnell were born in 1942, and all of them dreamed of becoming the next Franklin Roosevelt, who dragged America kicking and screaming into international entanglements and alliances, based on moral, not practical, arguments.

    14
  31. It’s a piece focused on the nineties, but every point brought up I can only think of intrinsic it all is. The Puritans wanted to cleanse Christianity of all traces of Catholicism. The new world just gave them a place to start over anew and eventually they turned their gaze to their Southern cousins and eventually the world.

    If today is bad, it’s because of the sixties. If the sixties are bad it’s becuase of the thirties. If the rot goes back into the mists of time then we cannot be conservatives by definition. If that’s the case, we need to find the nearest bastille.

    21
  32. As for immigration in particular, I think the end of rational debate is more sinister. The Left had opposed mass migration due to the financial devastation it would inflict on the White working class, which was its bread and butter. The neoliberals/Establishment Republicans wanted cheap labor. The Left, soured on the lumpen proletariat the working class Whites represented, decided to join hands with neoliberals/Establishment Republicans and proceeded to flood the nation with aliens. Since the Left controlled all forms of communications, this was the presented as a positive development.

    Compare and contrast the first and second Clinton Administrations to document this switch in positions. Even films of the era presented mass migration as an evil Establishment Republican project. See DROP DEAD GORGEOUS with the lovely Denise Richards circa 1999. In books, a leftwing journalist wrote in 2003 REEFER MADNESS: SEX, DRUGS AND CHEAP LABOR IN THE BLACK MARKET, which even the Buckleyites applauded.

    So until around the end of the first disastrous W Administration, the Left and Paleocons (and some more mainstream traditional Cons) were on the same page about immigration. Then the Neoliberals and Neoconservatives decided to wage a simultaneous jihad against Muslims abroad and Whites at home.

    While the Neoliberals and Neoconservatives may want to call off the War on Whites because like all American wars it is starting to blow back and also take them as casualties, it is too late. This will have to continue to burn them, hopefully with an even higher body count of White progressives at the hands of the non-Whites they fetishized. The turning point will be the harvesting of at least one Cloud by their pets probably in the next few years. This has a potential to finish off this corrupt system although we also will have to suffer through it. Certainly the War Machine will end spectacularly as Whites continue to exit its evil clutches and the United States suffers on its own soil after trying to light the world afire for fun and profit.

    This is more of an end than an interregnum.

    27
    1
    • Why should I have loyalty to a regime that devalues my citizenship and probably hates me and my kin?

      There’s an old Elvis song titled “It’s Your Baby, You Rock It”…

      16
    • This is the end
      Beautiful friend
      This is the end
      My only friend, the end

      It hurts to set you free
      But you’ll never follow me
      The end of laughter and soft lies
      The end of nights we tried to die
      This is the end
      — The Doors

    • “This is more of an end than an interregnum.”

      I agree. Where “end” carries the meaning of “goal” or “purpose.”

      What I see is the fruition of a very long process that has put into effect a very old desire to eliminate the only
      *real* impediment to world domination: European man, specifically in his highest numbers and power, the white American man.

      Degrade and destroy his natural habitat (on both sides of the Atlantic), and he will wither away, preferably to extinction but, failing that, at least he will no longer be *the* obstacle to world conquest by the devils now destroying and seizing control of the worlds food supply, and poisoning everything and everybody physically, morally, spiritually, and culturally.

      Rockefellers. Rothschilds. Jesuits. Freemasons, Illuminati. (((Learned Elders))). Satanists. Call them what you will; a dangerous path by any other name would smell as rotten.

      This process has been in the works for a LONG time. And various circumstances have converged since 2000 to the point at which “they” can now take off the mask and show their hand. It’s public now. They are flaunting it. Rubbing our noses in it.

      I don’t think it’s an interregnum. I think we are approaching the fruition of a purpose or hope (if not an actual *plan*) with roots many decades back.

      I think it kicked into high gear–entered the home stretch–with the election of O’Bama.

      He had been chosen and prepared by somebody for many years before being launched in 2008. Even a brief reflection on events since January 2009 to the present will reveal what I’m struggling to describe.

      A brief look at his mysterious past with all its attendant questions will take you towards (if not to) what I’m trying to say.

      I think we are seeing the fruition of the long march through the institutions.

      Some of what we see is natural degradation and decay of a civilization that lost its logos about 200 years ago. But a great deal of it–the worst of it–what we are seeing now–is deliberate.

      And I don’t think the geriatric ruling class that we have now is going away–at least not voluntarily. They have well-trained clones to take their place.

      We are in an existential struggle.

      22
      • Excellent comment. I agree with most of it other than the last sentence of this:

        “And I don’t think the geriatric ruling class that we have now is going away–at least not voluntarily. They have well-trained clones to take their place.”

        The Ruling Class will be ushered off the stage by their none-White clones who are not very bright and not particularly effective. This had led to a new, unprecedented problem: the clones also are insecure and appear willing to launch a nuclear war rather than be seen as the substandard people they are. Not only are we in an existential struggle, it is one that very easily could end in the extinction of our people if we start to win, which is the ultimate Catch 22.

        10
        • Mr. Infant wrote, “well trained” not “COMPETENTLY trained”.

          My adult nephews and nieces have their global warming, raycism and sex ed catechesim fully memorized. Like trained seals, they bark on command and expect a fish.

          Running a power grid, sanitation system or supply chain? Not so much.

        • ” … not very bright and not particularly effective.”

          That made me chuckle, and I thought, “Well, yeah, he’s right, so we’re damned either way.”

          But I stopped chuckling as I read the rest of your post.

          We can survive a few tactical nukes. But assuming that the nuclear arsenals are still around and that they are what we have been told they are, one can only hope that everybody–everybody–understands what a full-scale nuclear exchange would mean.

          THAT would not be “winnable.”

          And “they” would never be able to come out of their rat holes after wards. I hope “they” understand that.

          But these are people who talk about a “Samson Option.”

          • Yep. Whatever their verbal skills and intellect, at the core we are talking batshit crazy folks. In a sense, it almost–almost–is as scary as nuclear war that people who think nuclear war is a good option are in position to start one.

  33. It’s not enough to be new and different from the past. Leadership is supposed to be composed of the best of us (strongest, smartest, wisest etc). And it used to be that ascendancy to the top required running a gauntlet of harsh trials that revealed the top dog. It was earned in tangible accomplishments.

    Not any more. Our leadership is now “selected” by a vote of the “average” citizen (aided by overwhelming vote fraud). People with no history in the roots of the community, no skin in the game, no purpose except allegiance to the government gravy train, now vote for conman promising the largest ephemeral bribe. And hence we get what we deserve.

    If we do not wake up, Ukraine is our future. That culture and society has devolved into a toxic stew in which a miniature prancing Jew fag leads a cadre of tatted up neo-Nazi skinheads in a rape and pillage of babushkas while protected by a dwindling corp of sane white guys dying out in a war of attrition against other sane white guys. You can’t make this shit up. We are way beyond redemption via the voting booth.

    38
    • disagree due to scale differences. we are big enough to prop up ukraine’s charade; who/what is big enough to prop up a US sized performance? Rome split into two parts without any major bloodshed; we will too, probably 3 – 5 pieces.

      • Rome didn’t have joggers, though. At least parts of the splitting US will experience a short zombie apocalypse.

        15
        • again, disagree. the nigs are doomed once white control ends. mexicans are already grinding them down all over the country.

          • The only people capable of grinding down the nigs are the Chinese, who will use them as part of the food chain.

            6
            1
      • But a lot of those Roman regions were still culturally homogenous. The current continental US is not. The Roman breakup is more akin to the US losing its colonies in Europe, the Middle East, or southeast Asia.

        • “But a lot of those Roman regions were still culturally homogenous. The current continental US is not.”

          ^^^This.^^^

          But there is news on that front, and it *might* be good. We’ll have to wait and see.

          The population is sorting itself out–as they did in “Yugoslavia” after the “ethnic cleansing” episode.

          Here in the South, we are being overrun by carpetbaggers to the point that in some Southern cities, there are now moratoriums on *all* new construction b/c local infrastructure is overwhelmed.

          I went to Columbia, South Carolina, on Hallowe’en (a Sunday) to take my granddaughters trick-or-treating and to admire my grandson’s new (used) car (which he used that very evening to take out what my daughter described as “our psycho neighbor’s mailbox”).

          My daughter is the president of their neighborhood association, and as she and her husband and I, outfitted with bloody marys, were walking down the street behind the girls, who were zooming around (all the streets were closed and were thronged with kids and their parents and grandparents), we came to a house on my daughter’s own street, where there was a young couple handing out treats.

          May daughter was surprised b/c she didn’t know the house had been sold, let alone occupied.

          We walked over so my daughter could make her little “welcome” speech, and found that this couple had moved in the day before (Saturday) after buying the house online–sight unseen–earlier in the week for the specific purpose–as they told us–of “escaping from Maryland.”

          And that is happening throughout the South.

          Governor Desantis in Florida offered all kinds of relocation assistance to LEOs after they got defunded in Commie cities in other parts of the country, and he picked up a lot of hew residents that way.

          But it’s happening on such a large scale that it is driving property values through the ceiling.

          My daughter and son-in-law told me in October that their house had increased in value by $130,000 since they had lived there (less than two years), and that they planned to sell and move to the country in March (last month) and “build a smokehouse,” which was the extent of their plans last fall.

          They find themselves priced out of the market.

          “We’re stuck,” she told me.

          I said, “Look for rural land being sold at public outcry from the courthouse steps. There are always some of those to be found.”

          But not so far.

          Anyway, the population is already sorting itself out, but we don’t yet know who these carpetbaggers will turn out to be.

          • The same is underway in my neck of the South. A few observations about it, and I’ll start with a White Pill.

            This is our second wave of Northerners and Californians. The first were the arrogant, narcissistic types who prompted local bumperstickers that read “WE DON’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH.” Since you are a Southerner, I don’t have to elaborate further. This wave is quite different. These are Californians and Northerners who think like us. They tried, up until the bitter end, to stay in place and came to realize their home no longer existed. They liked where they lived and hated to leave up until they hated the place they lived. They know the score.

            The Black Pill is they are not us, even if they can assimilate with us, and it looks like they can indeed do so. In two generations, the South simply no longer will exist as a culturally distinct place. What the Judeo-Puritans wanted to eradicate 150 years ago will happen in the next fifty years.

            Now for the Red Pill. I have long been of the opinion that the only way bloodless separation is possible is if the Left peels off first. I firmly believe the 2020 election was stolen to forestall California, in particular, from going its own way. Over time, the predominantly White areas will not tolerate such an arrangement and will become powerful enough to resist it. Once that happens, the dissolution begins. There probably will be a precipitating event such as a lost war or loss of reserve currency status.

            The unraveling is happening now in the way you described, self-sorting. The power centers remain where people are leaving, but they will grow weaker as their cities become less populous and less and less tolerable.

            I’m quite pessimistic about most things but this one, which I sincerely believe is happening and is the future, gives me hope. I could throw in the caveats about the Great Replacement and so forth, but The Unraveling cannot be undone, only slowed. I would love for my grandchildren to live in the South I knew, but will settle for them living in a place similar to what we had and in many places still have.

  34. Given that at this point, we generally agree that our task is awakening other whites, I wonder if politics is the appropriate venue for dissidents?

    I’ve often wondered if it would be more effective to organize around a religion. It wouldn’t be too difficult to put together a generic Protestantish dogma, give it a new paint job, and use it as a vehicle for promoting nationalist and pro-white values.

    Religions tend to have better legal protections than political groups, and are a more effective tool for building communities. After permeating the culture with the new religion, then you can move to politics.

    • Don’t expect legal protections for an overtly pro-White religion that is getting increasingly popular.

      11
      • You don’t really need to be that overt, you just need it to be implicitly white, in the same sense that NASCAR or camping are.

        The object is to create a cultural tool rather than a political one. Use it to build a community, and soft pedal the politics. The church needn’t be an activist group in itself, but it could provide a pool of candidates that could be recruited for activists.

        I hit on this idea listening to an old Zman podcast where he was discussing how bike gangs vetted candidates for membership. I don’t think we want to be trolling the biker bars for members, though, and this seemed like it might be a promising option for developing a community. Especially when most of the established churches are peddling full strength moonbattery from the pulpit, a church that just acts like a normal church might be attractive to like minded people who have walked away from the established churches. And while you don’t want the church to be explicitly political, it can still leave a trail of breadcrumbs….

    • Upvote for out of the box
      Down because no- no fakes.
      Won’t work.

      If Infant is correct about Tesla’s notebooks, then this sh*t just got more real than anyone here can imagine. Playacting won’t cut it this time.

    • Bruno the Arrogant: I strongly disagree that the dissident task is “awakening other Whites,” and I also disagree that there is general agreement on such a purpose. There is a subset of the DR (or ‘3P,’ as I’ve been informed DR is as out-of-date is altright) that still believes in preaching to the masses. Zman can and ought to correct me if I am wrong here, but I don’t believe this site is one that shares that purpose. Zman may have been so inclined five or more years ago, but I don’t believe he is any longer.

  35. My gut says that the interregnum period in the US largely overlapped with the Bush Senior presidency.

    Recall that Bush Sr. and his people were extremely foreign-policy oriented. Their main issues were wrapping up the Cold War and prosecuting Gulf War I against Saddam Hussein.

    These were also the more sober folks who tried to assure Russia that NATO would not expand eastward.

    Because of this overseas focus Bush Sr. always polled very well on foreign policy.

    I can’t remember a single significant domestic initiative from that regime other than Sr getting torched on tax hikes during the ’92 campaign.

    So, in the US interregnum, the lack of domestic policy focus from the top left a bit of a vacuum that many groups were permitted to fill.

    In Russia, the interregnum lasted much longer, culminating in the specific hand selection of Putin by Yeltsin.

    I believe Putin is Yeltsin’s penance for what Yeltsin permitted the West to do to Russia. Yeltsin was a morally and spiritually weak man, but he did not appear to hate his country or his people.

    I believe Yeltsin saw strengths in Putin to do what was necessary to save Russia from being split up and devoured by Western plunderers.

    29
    • Putin did not want Russia to suffer the fate of the American South nor the vassalage of the European states.

      13
      3
    • The War on Whites got its start under Bush I, who promoted mass migration and deindustrialization to the hilt. I lived abroad when it started, and came back to the United States as his reign of terror lite started to wind down. Those of us on what we now call the Dissident Right watched in horror an discussed it hushed tones even then as that unfolded, and, if anything, did not apprehend how horrible it would prove to be. In fact, the Dissident Right really began with the Buchanan Brigade reaction against Bush 1. Some even voted for Clinton, who in the first term sought to undo the mass migration although he ended up fully onboard and presided over NAFTA; those two things are inextricably linked and started under Bush 1.

      So I would include the War on Whites as Bush 1’s primary domestic program and it was interwoven with his foreign policy obsessions. In my eyes, the two worst Administrations were Bush 1 and Bush 2, and that includes the current trainwreck.

      19
      • *To clarify, the War on Whites stared with the “civil rights” insanity, affirmative action, and Immigration Act of 1965, but those opening salvos were at least disguised as something not punitive and destructive. Bush 1 took it to the overtly destructive stage.

        16
      • Good post. I generally agree except for this:

        ” … the two worst Administrations were Bush 1 and Bush 2, and that includes the current trainwreck.”

        I have to say that the *worst* administration was Lincoln’s. *Needlessly* causing the *combat* deaths of more than 600,000 men out of a general population of about 32 million (not to mention the six-figure number of deaths of civilians from starvation and disease) gives Lincoln that distinction.

        16
        2
    • bush sr was done in ’92; more or less the beginning of the interregnum period. it was clinton who was in office for the rest…

    • The Nation magazine, back in 1998 ran a piece by some bint whose name escapes me entitled “The Harvard Boys do Russia” it described in some detail just how the looting of Russia, its societal destruction, and decade life expectancy reduction was carried out and by whom.
      The same people started doing the US in Bush the Lesser’s second term (I like to use the 2005 Bankruptcy Act as a marker.). We are seeing the same wholesale shorter life-expectancy.

      And here it is!
      https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russia/

      I see the bint’s name is Wedel.

  36. Merch suggestion: something with “DISSIDENT” across the front, loud and proud. Maybe with a large “Z” in the background behind it, but maybe a different font than the current one. Plenty of young graphic designers who would be happy to make a design for you for a pretty low cost (there’s some sites out there where they contract their services). Or a pithy quote. Also I really think a graphic of the Alaric artwork (public domain) would be super cool. It’s an awesome piece of art. Just my $0.02

  37. The ruling elite of the GAE see themselves as post national. They’re citizens of the world, rulers actually, or so they see themselves.

    As such, they can express complete disgust with the United States, which is just one of many provinces within the GAE. And pursue policies that are detrimental to that province and the people who love there.

    It’s really quite remarkable. The only historic parallel I can thing of is the Roman Empire from the third century on.

    22
  38. Excellent piece, to which I’d just add that “america” has been organized for “crusade” ever since Abe Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation after Antietam — his reason for doing so less “freedom” than mobilize public opinion in Great Britain against recognizing the Confederacy. Lincolnite America is over, and good riddance, and any future polity has to recognize and exorcise the demons that the evil man and his toadies unleashed upon the continent – nay, the entire world.

    Imagine being a Yankee soldier looking up from Hell and seeing the consequence of what you fought for. Must hurt.

    31
    3
    • The urge to crusade has been “a ghost in the machine” from the very beginning. JQA famous quip about not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy was made in opposition to that urge two hundred years ago.

      19
  39. nothing to add to this post, really. we are fortunate the progs are so keen to tear down their own system, speeding up the renewal process greatly. and with far less bloodshed. the more virulent the virus, the quicker it burns out. i would expect large numbers of whites in the military to leave as their current time reaches an end. that will put paid to military adventurism. the military will be just another affirmative action jobs program, like in europe.

    14
    • A Greek philosopher once said that a state would go to ruin once its founding principles had been put into practice in an absurdly extreme fashion. Think of the triumphalism of the 19th centuryu Abolitionists carried to the absurdity of 20 century affirmative action and sexual license.

      16
      1
      • Who would ever have suspected that attempts to inculcate White European civilization into human savages little more advanced than the great apes would have ended in a dismal failure? 😀

        11
  40. “ It turns out that airplane pilots and engineers are not floating across the Rio Grande.”

    You haven’t seen this week the push for more diversity in the cockpit? That’s their answer. Then there is this:
    https://time.com/5753435/amazon-atlas-air-cargo-crash/
    In training when he didn’t know what to do he would just push buttons.

    Hell we have political leaders and administrators that do essentially the same thing. Have a nice flight, careful crossing the bridge.

    This interregnum thing, how long is it going to last?

    18
    • “Oh, lord have mercy myself,” Aska said as the dive began

      Jesus.

      The NTSB reports and findings are always fascinating, but as usual, will be coated in the official smear of not-blaming a single person – and maybe pulling some politically incorrect punches.

      There used to be a show here in the UK, Air Crash Investigation, which featured mostly NTSB guys and their investigations. Indeed, it was testament to some of the older pilots exceptional courage and skill (former Navy and USAF), that many crashes in the 70s, 80s and 90s were nowhere near as bad as they could have been.

      I don’t fly anymore (unless an ’emergency’) for various reasons – but having an Aska in the cockpit ain’t gonna be getting me keen to get back in the air. Just imagine: fondled by Somali airport security for bombs, treated like prisoner because China Flu, only to find an Aska clone at the helm…

      22
      • I was a Private Pilot for a while in the 1990s (quit as it’s really only useful if you own an airplane which makes owning a boat look reasonable ). Here’s the FAA view on any airplane accident/crash:

        Pilot error. Even if the wing falls off because the maintenance crew didn’t tighten some bolts. Pilot should’ve caught it on pre-flight inspection.

        The Atlas Air crash definitely WAS pilot error. Hell, it was management error hiring that idiot. And now three men are dead and an airplane is destroyed.

        10
        • Flying at the commercial level is not inherently complicated. With modern weather radar, autopilots, reliable engines, ATC, etc, in many ways it’s never been easier.

          What hasn’t changed is this: the airplane environment is mercilessly and fatally unforgiving of mistakes.

          It takes a certain sort to be that focused during critical phases of flight, day in and day out. So the “weeding out” process needs to remain sacrosanct and inviolate.

          This doesn’t mix well with a society focused on DEI above demonstrated ability.

          The Atlas crash is an excellent example of a pilot who should’ve been washed out of commercial aviation much earlier….but for DEI.

          The speculation about the China 737 crash is, if accurate, much the same (rumored the crew fixated on an engine failure at altitude and led to an unrecoverable stall at high altitude instead of flying a rather benign drift down procedure first).

          The gatekeepers at US airlines and the FAA are still there; I’d put my family on any US air passenger carrier without hesitation. But one hopes the DEI rot doesn’t infect this particular field.

          (Side note: don’t believe all the vaxxed pilots dying in droves BS. It’s not happening.)

          1
          2
      • OrangeFrog: “I don’t fly anymore.” Wise decision. I made my last reluctant flight, taking my sons to visit my mother and some tourist sites, back in 2007. Never again.

    • Never forget that the billion dollar F-35 that bounced off a carrier deck in broad daylight and calm waters in the Mediterranean Sea and then fell into the drink was piloted by the “best” female aviator that the Navy has ever produced! Will we never learn?

      27
      1
        • The radio coms from the civilian ship in that incident were hilarious, in a deadpan kind of way.

      • “Never forget that the billion dollar F-35 that bounced off a carrier deck in broad daylight and calm waters in the Mediterranean Sea and then fell into the drink was piloted by the “best” female aviator that the Navy has ever produced!”

        I don’t doubt it.

        Do you?

    • It sounds like this panic-stricken copilot fired up the engines to full blast and then put the plane into a nosedive before the crash. In the end it sounds like the pilot was struggling to pull the controls against the copilot, but how many seconds did the pilot hesitate to act because of an subconscious ingrained fear of being labeled a racist? And did those seconds end up mattering?

    • Picture of the copilot: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/amazon-atlas-air-fatal-crash-pilots-sue-2019-9-1028539152

      I remember arguing with my liberal sister about affirmative action about 15 years ago. I remember asking her, “Do you wants pilots and surgeons promoted by affirmative action?”

      Liberal bitch that she is, she answered my question the way she usually does. She looked at me with smug contempt that I could say something so stupid and evil.

      • “The family of the pilot is suing…”

        Hahahahaha
        (Hysterical, manic rising laughter ensues)

      • Similar to a problem we had few years ago with the 737’s crashing in Third World countries? Has Boeing 737 Max gotten back in the air yet? Anyway, at the time I saw/read an interview with an American pilot who encountered the *identical* autopilot problem on his 737 Max and survived. He said he’d heard other pilots also describe encountering the problem and correcting for it in the nick of time.

        The problem is corrected for by taking *immediate* manual control of the plane, then avoiding the stall condition—which if I recall was somewhat counter intuitive to normal stall prevention operation. My impression was that such action was dependent on skill, experience, but perhaps not as much training—as no one could expect such a freak occurrence.

        Anyway, to get an idea of what went wrong, one needs to view the computer controls of the new 737 plane. It’s a wonder to behold. A computerized touch screen in front of the pilot with icons you press to automatically take off, or land, the airplane. What could go wrong with that? Hell, you or I could fly one of these big boys—well, at least until something goes wrong.

        And that’s just the problem (IMO). One of the crashed planes had a black box recording of the pilots frantically looking through the plane’s operation manual for what to do as they plummeted toward the ground. They blamed Boeing for the “computer problem”, but in reality it was Third World pilots of limited ability thinking that the difficulty in flying a plane consisted of pressing icons on a computer screen in the correct order.

        We will see more of that in the US as our AA efforts put more and more low level ability/intellects/mediocrities in the cockpit.

Comments are closed.