Show Announcement: Tonight at 8:00 PM eastern, Paul Ramsey and I will be discussing communists and the best way to execute them. You can tune in live on YouTube and on Rumble.
Over the last thirty years, many people have noticed that all moral claims within the public policy sphere can be reduced to a few time periods. In the realm of foreign policy, it is always about 1938 and the events around that time. If it is a domestic issue in the United States, then it is always 1968. Perhaps the slow Progressives will try to make it about the 1980’s when their hero was president. For Americans, public policy is trapped in one of three historical frameworks.
On the foreign policy side, it is easy to see how this works. There have been so many new Hitlers on the stage, no one can keep count. Every foolish and destructive misadventure by Washington involves a Hitler figure. They are not just a generic bad guy in the propaganda sense of it, but they represent the re-emergence of the timeless enemy and the timeless struggle. Everything about American foreign policy since the Cold War is about preventing an imaginary past.
This cognitive defect has made its way across the ocean to Europe. Whenever there is a meeting of the local satraps of the American empire, they take turns looking worried in front of the cameras, talking about the possible reemergence of you know who and the danger of resembling Neville Chamberlain. This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region.
In the United States, the other great moral framework is the Civil Rights movement, into which every local issue is jammed. Every black politician imagines herself as the you-go-girl version of Martin Luther King, which means even mundane issues like maintaining the roads is a civil rights issue. Every man in a dress not being called “ma’am” by the clerk is Rosa Parks. This framing has gone so far that nonwhites are routinely called white supremacists.
One of the features of those who have crossed the great divide is that they see the past as the past, not as an emotional support framework. Whatever lessons can be learned from the past in order to navigate the future are studied, but otherwise, the modern dissident accepts that tomorrow does not lie in yesterday. For those trapped in the 20th century, it is an endless singing of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” and morality tales where they are the hero.
This irrational attachment to the past is ironic, in that the whole point of the Progressive ideology was to advance human society forward, with forward defined as an advanced state of moral existence. While Progressives of the past often focused on material improvement, the spring has always been eschatological. Better stuff was proof of better living and better living was always a normative issue. It is why they continue to see themselves as the Elect.
The thing about ideology is that it tries to replace something that the Christian West eventually took for granted. Within Christianity there is an assumed point to living within the bounds of Christian ethics. Live a Christian life and your reward is eternal life at the feet of God. Ideology cannot offer this because ideology rejects God as the moral authority, so there must be some other reason to follow the moral demands of the ideology, which becomes the project of the ideology.
Marx probably understood this when he described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” He was criticizing specialization and its dehumanizing qualities, but he was also describing a world where men were liberated from the human condition, free to be what they chose. Communism always imagined an end point that recreated heaven on earth.
At some point, every ideology must at least imply a vision of the future as a reason to continue to live within and fight for the moral claims of the ideology. If the point of the ideology is more of the same, then why bother? Therefore, central to every ideology is a point to the struggle, a destination that promises to liberate people from whatever vexes the ideology. Therein lies the reason why the modern Progressive remain trapped in and obsessed with past struggles.
Progressivism was always a weird hybrid of Protestantism and liberalism, so it could leave unsaid the promise of Christianity, while refashioning the ethics of Christianity around claims to universalism, egalitarianism and eventually the blank slate. At its peak, it was a restatement of Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” but stripped of all Scriptural references. It resonated with an audience that continued to be informed by the vestigial Christianity they inherited.
The implied destination of Progressivism no longer works on an audience lacking even a basic Christian frame of reference. This void has been filled with a circular version of history in which events of today are recast as versions of the old glorious struggles of the past, where the good guys won, and the bad guys were sent fleeing. The Elect in this arrangement are those who can imagine themselves wearing the white rose of resistance or riding a bus in the Jim Crow South.
In this regard, Progressivism has become a hive without a queen. The queen is the promised land, and the hive is the habits of mind that form the ideology. They are the Christian zealots with no conception of God and only a vague understanding of what lies after this moment in time. This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.
This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality. Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past. The rest of us are now struggling to figure out what to do with them. They are an unwanted and useless presence to the people of the present, trying to move into the future.
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The fact that almost half of America has crossed the event horizon into gibbering psychosis is an invincible argument against the democratic process. What else could it be? The proposition that sanity and survival must be put on the line every four years is itself insane. If debating with the Left is pointless, then giving them the chance to retake control is something beyond that.
Watched the State of the Union last night. Saw the ghetto congressman punch the air with his cane like a pimp. Saw the ghetto congresswoman Crockett call Trump a bitch and Putin’s ho. Recalled what it was like not 40 years ago in the US in terms of public decorum — even after the horrors of the hippies and the 1960s and 1970s cultural breakdown. I really struggle mentally with why a people would do this to themselves. Why the people around me would, in fact. The still living. The ones who believe in this, who see nothing wrong with… Read more »
Best of all, they handed us what is probably the greatest talking point of all time: They wouldn’t even clap for the cancer kid. Seriously, people — I understand you have Very Serious Concerns about Trump’s blah blah blah, but…. cancer kid. Whatever Very Important Point you thought you were making, the fact remains, you couldn’t even muster up the simple human dignity to clap for the cancer kid. Even Hitler himself, I would venture to say, would’ve clapped for the cancer kid.
Distasteful as they are, through various forms of rigging (census, redistricting, and plain ol ballot stuffing) they are probably going to regain control of the House next year. Maintaining an appearance of legitimacy. Be happy to be wrong. But the GOP should have a roughly 30 seat majority right now if not for those things.
Yep, they aren’t going away and in the long run there will be more of them and they will be back in control. Trump/ Maga is a blip, not a correction. I would love to be wrong.
I think we are going to see some “election integrity” moves later this year. There’s a reason Biden pardoned James Clyburn – the guy who runs the vote rigging operations.
Best case scenario, we’ve bottomed out. Maybe. Maybe not, though. There’s no way to tell.
Either way, for those of us with more yesterdays than tomorrows, who’ve watched this get worse and worse for 30 years, we know we won’t see any restoration (which ain’t happening, but I’ll go along). There are simply too many of these people now. The audience of decent people for whom these displays are offensive is smaller and smaller by the year, and our voices less and less likely to ever be heard.
“The worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst'”
Indeed.
Few years back, one of the locals here had a son with brain cancer. Agony and endless operations. Economically poor family. The kid was ten years old.
I prayed to God for a resolution, any resolution that brought him relief and benefit. A month or so later, he finally died. His family was heartbroken, of course, but I was relieved. Silently relieved.
The Left shows its inner desolation and malevolence by politicizing a kid with brain cancer.
It’s worse than that even:
Announcer: Leroy, have you ever seen a chicken?
Leroy: Yep!
Announcer: Where?
Leroy: On TV!
Announcer: Support the Fresh Air Fund and ….
Those SOTU shoutouts were very well done and intended to reinforce the point Trump made at the very beginning of his speech, “There is nothing I can say or do that will make them happy.” He then proceeded to prove his point. The Secret Service chief almost lost it when the kid hugged him. That was a beautiful moment. But the best part came later when Trump said basically, “They said they needed a new law to control the border. Turns out, we just needed a new President.” Genius. Trump took the fight to them, and the Democrats’ reaction is… Read more »
They’re too busy taking cruises and partying in ‘senior communities’ and chanting “Hands off MY SS/medicare gibs” to notice or care what their own solipsism and the depravations of homo erectus and the indios have done to their kids’ and grandkids’ quality of life.
Sadly, this is true of my own ‘Silent’ gen relatives, now in their late 80’s.
They get a pass with all the Boomer hate but the first, very first go-to is always with the “I” word. Could be a mention of the fucking Cicadas and it’s “well, I’m not a Cicada…” It’s almost a game now when we speak, this repetitive behavior.
They were egalitarians after all, and watched the bad shit happen to this country when I was 4 with “well, as long as it makes them happy” or “as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else” garbage.
This raises a very important anthropological question: why didn’t Trump succumb to madness? His views really haven’t changed much since the age of the Yuppie even though his compatriots have mostly played the go-along-to-get-along game. Why the intransigence on his part, and is it replicable?
There was an experiment long ago (IIRC) and often commented upon since. Fish school, but the phenomenon of “schooling” was poorly understood. A researcher captured a fish from a school and operated on its brain such that they hoped it would no longer school. To learn more of the phenomenon, they placed the fish back into the school, yet the deviant behavior was not noticed. Why? Well it turned out that all the “normal” fish now followed the “altered” fish. Some people just don’t school, but they do lead. Trump is a deviant. Surely a rare occurrence at best—perhaps even… Read more »
Eagles don’t flock…
Hearing a .556 wizz past his head seems to have removed Trump’s “let’s make a deal” instinct.
With all the boomer hate, what gets lost is most of the things the Dissident Right hates have their genesis from the time that the Silent generation were adults.
Yes. That was a terrible show. One side was all white other than their diversity props. It was elderly and male. The other side was largely non-white and white women in pink pant suits. They are much younger. The vulgarity, not a civilized vulgarity, but a savage’s vulgarity is increasingly in our future. Pimp canes and salon nails hos neck rolling and yelling and cussing in our August bodies. Of course, these hucksters and villains will also open the US to foreign predation. At the same time, young men have awakened. It isn’t over, but it is going to get… Read more »
The schools my kids attended back in Collin County, Texas, are now 30% White – taken over by south and east Asians. In places like Houston and San Antonio, it’s blacks and mestizos. Demographics is destiny, and Merka no longer has one.
The Empire of Merka needs to die. We need to carve out a country of our own, and by constraints imposed by reality it will be smaller. So be it. Preserving European people is objective #1, not preserving land area. People are first, and water, energy and minerals are second. I told one of my wackjob relatives 3-4 years ago this was going to end in 200 million dead, not as a threat but as a prediction. He was stunned and said nothing in response but it was clear that he thought it lunacy. Now, he is visibly afraid, and… Read more »
This should be the daily drum beat from our kind: we want our own nation. There is simply no going back, and the sooner we urge more to get past the mental hurdle, the better. Most thought this unthinkable just a few years ago. Trump will just be an interregnum but will not stop the inevitable dissolution of the GAE. Trump will not be the one to take us there, but he will be a transitional figure.
It was small to begin with, but with each expansion, we embraced more and more non-whites, from the Louisiana Purchase to the annexation of most of the Southwest from Mexico. Those are not white lands. For a time they were colonized (similar to Rhodesia, in a sense), but no longer, and they won’t be again. It’s time for us to pull up tents and come home. Wherever that will be.
I guess that scene from Birth of a Nation with the negroes in congress shuckin and jiven, lazing about was pretty damn prophetic in more ways than one.
Got a reality check the other day. My local medical group, now on its umpteenth, financialized ‘owner’ was undergoing the installation of a ‘new system.’ When I got there to check in, it was obvious that DEI is still going strong, an obvious black company. Not one non black to be seen. Also clearly from Chicago from what I could tell. Long line, so plenty of time to observe. One male, running the show — if you call him repeatedly telling the desk ladies … themselves 40-ish with: nose piercing; wrist tats…. “try turning your computer off then back on… Read more »
The absolute erasure and reconfiguration of the white mind is one of the most incredible phenomena in human history. The vast majority of white people, once full of perspicacity, vitality, virility and beauty, are now shambling gray drones with nose rings, tattoos and green hair. They have no critical faculties and no agency. They worship those (negroes/perverts) they are told to worship and despise their own people without demur. It is sad, it is infuriating, but more than that it is utterly dumbfounding.
I’m starting to believe that almost all whites would literally rather die out than be called racist for excluding non-whites and this can’t be changed.
I used to believe that whites are like this due to incessant media conditioning, but I’m starting to worry that it is worse than that.
Even the most rebellious figures on the right must show that they love non-whites, like Trump with that black muslim kid in the SOTU.
I’m starting to believe that my people are mostly an incurable suicide cult. I don’t know how this happened.
Whites seemingly have a genetic predisposition for pathological altruism. Scandinavians have the worst case of it, and Eastern European/Mediterranean peoples somewhat less so. As far as I know that defect/mutation has not been isolated and identified but it almost certainly exists.
I agree. It seems that somewhere down the line, maybe as early as the mid-60s, something snapped in the white collective unconscious. We are behaving like a psychologically maimed people.
It was the teevee and being taxed to death to pay for the kids of their enemy who are all up in their territory
11/22/63.
JFK. Care to elaborate on why that event ostensibly reverberated so powerfully among whites?
That would be a lot of elaboration, Ostei. I’ve written so many essays on the occult and deep-deep state ritual of that murder that I’ve lost track. Many years ago.
It wasn’t the breaking of American innocence, it was a full-on national rape. Right in front of everybody, so there would be no doubt who was in charge.
Don’t really want to go over it all again. No offense intended.
Line…..believe this is hard wired behavior. This is Ed Dutton territory in his musings about Human BioDiversity. Our slow life living strategy evolution of living in cold climate, often indoors in winter, and having to get along within the tribe or you get kicked out into the snow to die. The Fast Life Living folks can punch each other out like the chimps then run away. That doesn’t explain the 30 Years War for the Slow Lifes though. We are what we eat. Look around at all the obesity and terrible health. Only getting worse. Yesterday, my son-in-law was diagnosed… Read more »
Thanks for the kind words, Range.
Most people are naturally followers, so it’s vital that elites lead them in a productive and benign direction. People were probably the same in the 1950s but followed social cues to get married before kids, keep a neat lawn etc. Now the TV tells them to be slovenly and select weird pronouns.
You’ve said it all, brilliantly and concisely done.
First-rate.
The US has been heading toward a leftist apocalypse since Lincoln, a minority President, trashed the Constitution and ruled by martial law…Lincoln emulators Woodrow Wilson and FDR pushed the US further and further left, constantly expanding Federal power with help from a leftist Supreme Court, and ending with Obama’s rule making whites a discriminated against minority…But this didn’t happen in a vacuum, it was enabled by the votes of women, as more and more States and ultimately a Constitutional amendment, gave them the franchise… But the Democrats blundered by openly attacking the family, which peeled off some of the female… Read more »
I think you’ve hit upon the key as to why “Western” (e.g. Caucasian) society has gone soft — feminization. Women are by and large the way you characterized them. It’s probably simply their biological nature. Now that they are equal partners with men in power, indeed outnumber them some places (e.g. HR or the university), is it any wonder that the remaining men “allowed” to work alongside them will tend to be selected for feminine, passive traits? This problem is only going to get worse until some crisis or series of crises reawaken the ancient wisdom and we will learn,… Read more »
Z: “In this regard, Progressivism has become a hive without a queen. The queen is the promised land, and the hive is the habits of mind that form the ideology.“
Anglo-Welsh: “…almost half of America has crossed the event horizon into gibbering psychosis…”
Might one be able to argue that the reigning Zeitgeist of Talmudvision and Joovies and Scrotial Media and an utterly corrupt edumakashunal establishment constitute a very effeminate and viciously brutally Hive-Minded Queen?
Not a single corporeal entity, such as an Elizabeth II, but something more akin to a feminine “Egregore”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
Or a societal Succubus?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succubus
“Egregore”
“a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.”
Can verify, yes, and yes, and yes again, but I have far too much to say here and cannot talk about it. I wanted to thank you for bringing up the concept to this group’s attention. A medicine man introduced me to this vital clue many years ago when he told me the Indians call such an “oversoul.”
It is an influence, a driver even, but discussion of the physical and mundane is more practical at this time.
We’re going to need weapons here, but this specific thing is what whites are made for. We are uniquely attuned and capable when it comes to the subject of the imprinting of the electromagnetic background.
If we are subsumed, the gates of heaven may close. This is why our half-breed broken branch has formed a genetic strategy to boil off their outliers while retaining a recursive core in a parody of our dynamic.
(Terah, Abraham’s father, was black, remember, just as Eve was white, under the thumb of the Semitic “adam”, or “true human”, as those savages saw themselves. )
It has been hypothesized that UFOs are egregores, although I haven’t seen that specific term for the phenomenon used.
They are angels. Not the good kind, either.
I’m impressed that only about half of Americans are propaganda zombies. Our Democracy is a 24/7 four-walled show of unanimity / demand for obedience, yet the statistically typical American pretty much totally blows it off. That’s why he’s being “replaced.” Even in our media-degraded state, an America governed by average American opinion would be a utopia—compared to what we have. Democracy demands relentless brainwashing, psy-ops, lies, and corruption because normal people aren’t evil and stupid enough to please our masters. If they even slightly submitted to popular will, everything would be different. Trump merely accepts the idea in principle—that the… Read more »
So this. The left is the spiteful mutant, the Loki who openly opens the gates to the hordes and plots our death and destruction.
To even pretend to consider them “loyal opposition” or “fellow citizens” is insane.
Unless a lot of pieces are removed from the chessboard then Trump will be just a speedbump on the road to a glorious progressive future.
The period from 1938 to 1968 was essentially the Third American Revolution, after the first two revolutions 1776 and 1865. The government finally slipped the constitutional leash of limited and enumerated powers, and created a welfare/warfare Leviathan for which anything and everything was justified in the name of “democracy,” “civil rights,” “social security,” and so on. The Four Freedoms replaced the Bill of Rights — Roosevelt specifically stated that the Four Freedoms should be available “everywhere in the world,” thereby launching the Global American Empire on an endless and impossible quest to stamp out “Fear” and “Want” “everywhere in the… Read more »
Heckuva comment.
“There HAS to be a reckoning. The GAE has to collapse.” GODSPEED.
The old order became too corrupt, senescent, spoiled, and genocidal to bear, so more capable elites see this as their chance to usurp the current rulers.
It’s the ‘3 generations from rags to riches’ problem, thus, the 4th turning.
As Saml said, once the grandkids have become a cargo cult, trying to run things as if they were still in a past that no longer exists, opportunities open up for the ambitious.
Allowing our past history and current guidelines to be rewritten based on the deranged fantasies of parasitic symbiotes makes that cargo cult even more unworkable.
And, yet, the cargo cult persists into the next generation and beyond. I doubt there are 5% who can explain why Chesterton’s Fence is where it is in just his own worldview, instead, relying on post hoc fallacies and the fig leaf of “tradition”.
This is bad. Traditions evolved for a different culture, a different people. We know traditions won’t work with the current demographic, and without a realistic means of changing the demographic, we can’t just cargo cult our way through it.
Bob the builder will be waiting on the other side to get started. What will become of clueless Carlos?
“Marx…described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”
In the West today, that’s become “to be queer in the morning, gay in the afternoon, trans in the evening, and have an abortion after dinner.”
Sounds like a Darwinian dead end.
There is a practical side to progressives living in the past while dreaming of the future. Normies have already been sold on the idea that Nazis, Jim Crow and black slavery were the worst things to have ever happened. Since leftist women, Jews and soy boys love hysteria, it is an easy way to energize the troops. Focusing on those agreed upon evils has worked to silence opposition and provides great cover for the left’s carrying water for wealthy globalists now. White men were in charge during those evil times so now that they are working on making real the… Read more »
Brilliant!!!!
We need to end our post ww2 mythology. It has led to all stupid decisions since including the ukraine and civil rights nonsense. Back to basics of what is in it for me and my kin and countrymen. Enough of the theft for dumbass projects at home and abroad.
Today’s progressives are malignant narcissists. The problem for them is that they suddenly are easily ignored and dismissed, and, worst of all from their perspective, boring, dreary and uninteresting. The last bit is particularly painful for a narcissist. The “Right” is actually exercising power for the first time in our lifetimes, and we understandably train our focus there, but from the perspective of the progressive, the marginalization is the worst aspect. Extreme violence certainly is possible as they fade into dreary irrelevance, but they also are prone to curl into the fetal position if their clanking of pans doesn’t get… Read more »
That’s the thing that is driving the Democrats insane right now. Trump and his movement have become fashionable, and the Left have become politically and culturally unfashionable, as well as personally repellent. For years, the Left has also banked on their Vichy “opponents” being as void of likable human characteristics as they are. That is no longer the case.
For years, the Left has been attempting to forge a cult of personality around leaders with none. Last night Trump showed that he still has that charisma and it eats them with hatred.
I noticed this a few years ago. Leftism became horribly uncool and the place for bossy scolds and obnoxious black women. Imagine being a young zoomer going to school and your teacher put up pride flags everywhere. Who wants to be a leftist? It doesn’t even get you chicks anymore. Democrats have nothing to offer men in general but especially White men. We saw that with Kamala where she said she would help black guys get weed and welfare. it was hilarious but no surprise black guys had no interest. Conservacucks are horribly lame, make no mistake. But Andrew Tate… Read more »
Yes. And our side is ready to take the next step to being truly cool. We are going to repudiate the pimp Andrew Tate and his ilk. We are going to reclaim ourselves and our women by being willing and able to physically confront and dominate pimps and porn hawkers like Tate and beat them to the margins. That Tate is cool is a sign of just how degraded and negrified this civilization in death convulsions is. Tate is at the bar buying friends but he isn’t long for being thrown out on his ass. That is where this is… Read more »
Or not live at all.
Tate being just a ghetto Epstein who hid his IDF uniform in the closet, you’re damn right we’re going to beat that pimp. His money came from USAID, just like AIPAC, ADL, and SPLC’s did. And the Kagans’ ISW, the Institute for the Study of War.
You’ll have to leash women and your daughters, then. Are you ready to do that?
That is reality rules.
I’d say most people, including the dissident right would find that a possibly disagreeable, and for sure daunting task. But can any deny that at least some serious reining in must be done in order to return a semblance of normalcy and sanity to our society? I don’t think so.
No you won’t. They will return to nature and the natural order once young men do. Those that don’t will be a dead end. Not everybody is going to save themselves.
I see. The problem is not self-serving female rebellion against God and nature, the problem is . . . men.
Funny, that’s what the women say too! lol
Sigh. Same as it ever was.
You ain’t ready, in other words.
I noticed this a few years ago. Leftism became horribly uncool and the place for bossy scolds and obnoxious black women. The Left still thinks itself the “Cool 😎, hip, and free” kids “Fighting The Man!” when instead they are The Man and are acting accordingly. (Or maybe they’re The Woman given how much they scold, hector, and shriek at everyone and everything. Dunno, posters here can noodle it out) Who wants to be a leftist? It doesn’t even get you chicks anymore. Democrats have nothing to offer men in general but especially White men. That’s the thing. The Left… Read more »
Timothy Leary said “Open wide,
Sugar cube give your mind a wild ride.”
Alas, the good Doctor’s brain was fried
By too much Diethyalimide,
Ending his career.
Oh, the trip, the trip, the acid trip,
The far-out hallucinogenic trip,
Lose your grip and flip your shit
And go screaming down the hallway.
‘Self-immolation may be their only way to attract attention, and even then it might not.’
It might not, sure. However I believe this to be their best option, and I heartily encourage it.
‘Self-immolation may be their only way to attract attention, and even then it might not.’
It might not, sure. However I believe this to be their best option, and I heartily encourage it.
They won’t. Their carbon footprint would be off the charts if they started themselves aflame.
We might be able to bring the days of (land) whale blubber street lights.
I just knew those gals would come in handy for something other than sandbags when the shooting starts.
Save the whales!
Jack Dobsen: “Today’s progressives are malignant narcissists. The problem for them is that they suddenly are easily ignored and dismissed, and, worst of all from their perspective, boring, dreary and uninteresting.”
Apparently Cluster-B is one helluva drug.
Me, personally, I’ve spent my entire life trying to flee from Cluster-B.
Cluster-B refuses to leave me alone.
Cluster-B has needs. Why won’t you listen!?
I’m sure if the Conservatives send a strongly worded letter it’ll have some effect.
That simian-like Al Green did us a favor by bellowing and pointing his cane to interrupt the president’s speech. All the news media must have pictured it, because whatever their ideologies, they can’t resist a striking image. I hope Trump and his press people will save that and use it continually.
It’s not just the loss of the Christian framework. It’s also just the loss of any personal connection to those past dates. A 25-year-old was born 30+ years after 1968. What resonance does that have to him or her. The story is too distant for them to put themselves into it. (Some young blacks and Jews still try, but even they are stretching it.)
As to the 1938, it might as well be 1066 for all they care.
It connects with the overall prosperity of the west post-WW II. Anyone who was born and grew up post 1946 has no living memory of truly hard times. This effect gets stronger the more recent the birth. The generation that lived through WW I, and then the Great Depression, seemed to have the sense to keep some “guard rails” on societal impulses, because they damn well knew what hard times were and didn’t want to create conditions that could recreate them. Those generations are gone now. Even the WW II vets are nearly gone. The following generations have torn down… Read more »
Are there any more than a few WW2 vets even living? This August will be 80 years since VJ Day. Even if they signed up at 17 in 1945, that would make them 97 years old. Even those alive would be in their homes or assisted living in their wheelchairs. Even most of the silent generation are gone. They were kids in the great depression. Both of these generations failed in their duties to the next generation, the Boomers. They allowed the progressives to take over the schools and melt the minds of the kids who grew up into self-righteous… Read more »
IIRC the last WWI veteran died in the early 2000s, so just over 80 years from the end of that war. So we can expect the final WWII veteran to leave this plane of existence within the next 5 years. 10, tops. And yes, there are only a sliver of WWII vets left, who must all be pushing or past 100. As a child in the 1980s, it felt like they were everywhere growing up. I knew of at least two just in my little rural stretch of nowhere-special-ville. It’s .. sobering? To have lived long enough now that they’re… Read more »
The WW2 and Korean War men were the dads and uncles of my generation. We played with army men and built model tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers. My dad was merchant marine officer, Korean War.
The wars were still fresh in everyone’s minds in the Fifties and early Sixties. Men were heroes, dads were loved and respected. That was before the Feminist Movement really got its teeth in the nuclear family.
I was a tween and teen in the 80s and I remember all the VFW clubs that were around my area. I’d walk past them and you’d hear all kinds of ruckus and noise coming out of them. There were always a stream of old guys (IOW, not Vietnam vets) going in and out of them, many of them in uniform or part of a uniform. By the 90s they were mostly all gone.
For a long time already, WW2 has been books and movies about WW2. Young people don’t watch those movies but they’ve seen them advertised and referenced and ranked. They know what the music in them sounds like. They don’t read any books, but they see book jackets in aspirational lifestyle pics. They know which titles match which class of person. It’s the hollow core of the myth that lets it resonate. No one now living knows much of anything about Hitler. Everything says he’s here and he’s you—and defeating him is the only morality. If he were real, as he… Read more »
“What would you do if fascism ever came to America?”
Covid answered that question.
Never forget.
“Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past.”
Yes. Also like Blanche DuBois, they depend on the kindness of strangers. Someone else always has to pay for their dreams.
I wonder if the ongoing stovepiping of Social Media might solve, or at least amelioriate, that problem. I enjoy reading the Leftist fever swamp sites like Salon from time to time, and they have an elaborate “delusion architecture,” as I think the shrink jargon has it. It’s this entirely self-referential world — all their articles are dripping with hyperlinks, but they only ever go to other articles on their site (or a few on likeminded sites). It’s hilariously cattywampus to reality, but it seems to work for them. The problem is that the Democrats actually listen to these people, but… Read more »
I don’t know how you can stomach it, my friend. Maybe it’s my lack of intellectual capacity or my raging hatred of these mutants that clouds my ability to even glance at their trash. Kudos to you for being able to do it.
I used to work in academia. Compared to the everyday lunacy of the ivory tower, it’s nothing. Plus, these days they’re really suffering, and that warms my heart.
I know that “true believer vs. cynical opportunist” is often debated when it comes to the other side, but I think the debate is over. The Democrats don’t listen to these people because they have to. They’re under the same delusion architecture. That should have been made obvious the past few years, especially with Project Ukraine. Look at how the Democrats behaved during the speech last night. Look at that forum that CNN hosted a month or two ago. They’re all the same. They believe in the things they say. I don’t know how you make a true believer stop… Read more »
Yeah, they’re crazy. But that might end up being what the various social media silos are for — a sort of Choose Your Own Asylum. I also believe that in the fulness of time, whatever real public heath service that replaces the CDC will do a study, and find that these people are giving themselves what amounts to PTSD via their constant online outrage. The stress chemicals never get a chance to flush, so they get addicted to cortisol; I bet it has a hallucinogenic effect at a certain saturation level.
There appears to be one Democratic Congressperson who is not on board with the current Democratic obsession with the deplorable 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘰. He’s a guy named Ro Khanna who represents Silicon Valley. He’s basically been saying that it’s not enough to be against DT. If you are seen as advocating the policies that have got us into this mess, you will lose. I think he’s pissing into the wind and the current Democratic Party is too afflicted with TDS to heed any such advice. They appear to think Trump will self-destruct and they need only sit back and watch it… Read more »
Was that the same ‘Ro Khan’ who was on WLS Chicago for years? After his radio stint gave him his ‘in’ to politics, he commiserated on how pretending to be a conservative on talk radio was a lucrative misery he could hardly bear. Wtf is he doing in Silicon Valley, he’s from Illinois for eff’s sake.
I didn’t watch the SOTU “response”, but it had to be difficult opposing:
Nah, it’s a business. Every Dem in the audience made $20mm minimum during the Biden-sponsored Treasury looting. So they put on a theatrical performance for the suckers last night. Clearly there are “true believers”, but few are in on the big grift. The true believers are at home watching. It really has become pro wrestling. That fraud Mike Johnson was nodding like a bobblehead as Trump listed the grifts while we all know he passed every one of those bills without a peep about USAID. I was hoping the pimp with the cane would rush the podium.
During that CNN forum (I think it was that), we literally got a “A black woman is speaking – listen and learn” moment. These people are all in. Their status in the party also depends on the party’s adherence to this stuff. Now, is someone like, Gavin Newsom actually a believer of all this nonsense? Probably not, but Gavin has no future in the Democrat Party.
Now, when it comes to conservacucks like Mike Johnson, yea, they’re grifting, but it’s been that way for decades.
For sure some are all in. But mostly, it’s a minstrel show for the Scarsdale and Bethesda housewives. Mike Johnson is like Vince McMahon was in the early days of WWF – straight man. The Tech Bros are pissed because they sweat blood in start-ups for $20mm and AOC, Crockett and their minstrels just rob the Treasury in broad daylight.
Please don’t tell me the ‘brain cancer kid’ Severian mentioned was black. He had to be, it’s too perfectly Republican.
No reason they can’t be both grifters and true believers. Doesn’t have to be either/or, and in most cases, I expect it is not.
Yep. As Winston put it in Ghostbusters, “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.”
‘but the entire system is built around them not facing the consequences of their own decisions’
The system, or sistem if you will, is female-populated and feminist-driven. America infantilizes and disney-princessifies its females. They are the sacrosanct sex, the consequence-free sex and that is exactly why they have done, and will do, so much malevolent damage.
Daddums will stomp every male on the planet down, but he just cannot punish Ims Pwincess. Enough decades of that, you get New Amerika and all her prog-nation allies.
These days I’m often reminded of that line given to the successful but grumpy writer of romance novels played by Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets”. When asked by a fan why he was so good at writing female characters, he said it was easy. He just left out reason and accountability.
I agree that the left-liberal ecosystem is more cloistered. The New Righters and Dissident Righters have more interesting debates, I’m pretty sure, and they live in the real world, pretty much, but I couldn’t tell you if the left-liberals have their own version of Hanania and Fuentes and Tucker and Zman, plus funny side acts like Drukpa and Perry Abbasi. I would think not. I used to be a left-liberal, and they have debates and personalities, even humor, but their online sphere very much resembles what we’d call boomer civnat vibe, except they like Democrats not Republicans. Although I am… Read more »
I’ve wondered about that myself. The “Right” seems to organize its ecosystem on the gatekeeper principle — “this far and no farther!” The most disgusting, flag-sucking, Toby Keith-listening Grillers and Normies go no farther than, I guess, Hannity. A little farther and you’ve got Hanania, a little farther and you’re at Ben Shapiro, a little farther and you’re at Breitbart or whatever. Still light years from us, but there’s a continuum. (I don’t know where any given gatekeeper is on the continuum; it’s just for illustration. I don’t read any of these clowns — why bother?). I kinda doubt the… Read more »
What I find funny is to anarcho-capitalists, the DR are “normies” and “grillers”, and just as oblivious to it.
Good point, I don’t think left-liberals have the gatekeeping the right-liberals do. I guess their wingnut opposite to our neo-Nazis are their transexual pedophiles. (I am not making a moral equivalence here…just pointing out the most offensive wings of the spectrum.) I know there are quite a few left-liberals that dislike the perverted stuff, but the official Left has little problem with it. The official Right, on the other hand, will with great prejudice disavow and denounce wingnuts, and really anyone that is okay with being rude to the other side, up to and including civnat grillers like J6ers and… Read more »
It’s not just the 2nd tier sites like Salon. You can read the same trash in every major news outlet in the English language. It’s all propaganda or corporate press releases and all in the same forms. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is either. It’s as if they have been deliberately trained to write propaganda and are incapable of writing anything else. You would think a subject like the nation’s infrastructure would be fairly straight forward to write about. The Association of Civil Engineers give us like a D grade every year. But they just are incapable of… Read more »
That’s the other reason I read Salon, frankly — intel. The philosopher David Stove once said that there are certain philosophers who are worth reading only because they make important mistakes clearly. Salon is like that — literally everyone on the Left believes the same stupid, insane shit they do, but they are so dumb and slapdash that they’re always saying the quiet part out loud. It can be very informative.
Then Zuckerberg and the gamers might save the world.
If we can indeed create a Matrix-like virtual reality and the cocoons to go with it, we’ll have a place we can stuff these bizarros. We might even use them to solve the AI energy crisis!
I’m a reader of Sev and like him, I sometimes browse Salon. I’m grateful to let Sev risk lowering his own IQ and just read his commentary on their latest drivel. However, I did read a long article about travel guru Rich Steves. I probably wouldn’t have, but in the 1990s I’d seen some of his PBS travel series (still on) and more importantly, heard him speak at a travel event in early 90s where I bought a few of his books and even had him autograph them. While that apparently didn’t make them valuable enough that they weren’t tossed… Read more »
It’s not that “progressivism” lacks a vision for the future. It very much has one, in a general sense, perhaps ill defined around the edges. Their problem is that, despite all the rigging, they still need a baseline number of votes to make it happen. And their vision of brown replacement + degeneracy isn’t a winning platform for getting them. Yet. Because it’s not far enough along. So they do have a vision, they just can’t tell you what it is. They have to pretend they want something else. These rallying cries to the standards of a glorious past are… Read more »
Whoever advises the progressives, i.e., finances them and tell them how to spend the money, omitted the part about it taking a long time. Given progressives are impulsive and are now horrified to learn they are dull as dishwasher, they are in total disarray. They may have a vision but the time and space reality are a real problem for them.
Their vision is Wakanda. What they will get (and deserve) is Rwanda. Why there MUST be a White ethnostate if there is to be a future for White children.
The obsession with 1938 and 1968 reflects the Jewish control of American culture and political discourse. The crusade against Hitler (who was no threat to the USA) but was a threat to Jews and their Great Socialist Motherland (the USSR) and the civil rights movement, which removed the last barriers to Jewish control of the USA, are the great lodestars of the Jewish mind. Every threat to Jewish control is a new Hitler, every attempt to end discrimination against white gentiles or oppose perversion means the KKK is on the march. No opposition to the Jewish agenda is tolerated. Even… Read more »
The modern leftard is absolutely useless and unwanted. Their refusal to move forward without all of the decades old slogan chanting use to be merely annoying – now it’s something even they will likely come to regret. They need to be walled off, at least figuratively, until something more permanent and worse for them is figured out.
Montressor has a really fine cask of wine you should sample.
While it’s always 1938 and 1968 with the Progressives, I can’t seem to shake 1917, especially with Whites rapidly becoming outnumbered.
This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region. A failed armored attack in Kursk? Well I never expected that! (First time as tragedy, second time as farce, eh?) This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality You get the mindset of the people in power who lived through 1936 – 1939, but that’s a hard thing to square with people (like ourselves) who… Read more »
In postmodern AINO, one may diddle the neighbor boy in the morning, attend a drag show in the afternoon, tongue bathe a negro’s general rectal area in the evening, and gaze upon crucifixes submerged in urine after dinner. What’s not to love!
Just spit out my coffee.
I’ll spring for a replacement cup one of these days.
Adam Schiff has entered the chat
And stolen Ostei’s avatar
“The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.”
Talk about distilling matters to their essence! That single line succinctly captures much of the problem in this cushy but frustrated (and frustrating) age.
Zman’s last couple of essays have been exceptional — even by the daunting standard he set for himself long ago. Really outstanding material!
I would humbly suggest one more year to add: 1868. The post civil war period was the second founding of the country, in which the sophisticated northerners came to rule over the hillbilly southerners, for their own good of course. This was on display during the SNL 50th anniversary a few weeks ago, with Tom Hanks playing a hick MAGA supporter. This is how northern progressives have seen the other half of the country for the last century and a half. The year 1968 was a bookend to 1868, and we could all finally be equal. Now the only thing… Read more »
Hanks is a great example of what I was talking about in my post. He knew all along what part he was playing in the masquerade, the pretending he was doing. Now in his later years, he’s less shy about taking that mask off.
Hanks, for some reason, always gave off a creepy vibe to me. It was like he was hiding a sewer beneath that nice guy cover he always tried to maintain. Plus he seemed insincere and not quite human. He ruined Private Ryan, an otherwise not really accurate but serviceable WW II movie because he was vain enough to not realize he was about 20 years too old and looked it, for his part.
Tom Hanks puts the eep in creepy. Just looking at him, the urge to slap immediately arises.
I mean, one couldn’t punch him like an actual man.
BTW, Christianity is more than just “Pie in the Sky, in the Sweet By-and-By”, it is the key to the worthwhile, virtuous life here-and-now. Our cultural overlords understand this and have tried with might and main to pervert the morals of Joe and Josephine Average, with considerable success. Want to give these folks the metaphorical finger? Live a virtuous life. It is the ultimate rebellion.
Well said.
Good essay and the reference to Blanche DuBois a person focused on her notion of beauty that once was and fearful of what is to come is a good analogy of today’s progressivism.
Thank you from those of us who have no idea who this Blanche person is.
I think she was a character in a movie with Marlon Brando. A Streetcar Named Desire, mayhap? Or was that Stella? Hell, I don’t know.
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play written by Tennessee Williams. I suspect if it had been written for modern America it’d have to be titled something along the lines of A Bus Named I’ma Bust a Nut in dat Ho.
Hitler and Jim Crow are just crying wolf. The people in the elite who constantly cried those names were knowingly yelling Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! into the shepherder’s village. But the shepherders were fat and rich and indolent. They didn’t need their sheep anymore so what did they care? Well, the spiritually healthy of them cared a great deal. They have real morals and a spirit that is strong so that it is the one that created the spiritual/moral complex of Occidental man’s long and rich spiritual traditions – both Christian and pre-Christian. But the dumbtards you speak of believe it.… Read more »
‘Then let them pick lettuce, clean slaughterhouses and blow leave’
A week ago on this page I got told I was Stalin for saying the same thing. Heck I was Literally Stalin(!!) for suggesting distasteful consequences for doing evil.
‘What to do with them? Their demonic leaders and cynical criers of wolf must be punished.’
Otherwise, all this Trump and dissident stuff is just a loud fart. It’ll distract the enemy for a moment, then they’ll be right back at it like nothing happened. Because it didn’t.
Nice points but I think this all assumes we can stay within the current arrangement, but just get better management. I agree there is no return to the past, and those who have perpetuated this destruction on us must not only be stopped but punished, but I don’t think we will be able to fix the crazies. They are too far gone. The crazies, plus the foreigners and the current demographic trajectory mean we have to forge a new nation. I simply don’t view these others as my people, they are not and never will be. Enough is enough.
Utah still has firing squads. These, and similar old traditions need to be revived.
‘This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend’ Oh, they’ll be ‘comprehending’ it in due time. Very insightful writing, however. They fill the void inside left by their rejection and hatred of (that evil mean patriarchal) God and His Scripture as guide in life. God the FATHER is replaced with their self-serving ideology, and it ain’t no coincidence that feminism is the leading entrenchment and profitable delusion. Amerika is a nation saturated by the occult, and… Read more »
One other thing that stood out last night. He referred to the “Rio Grande.” I’m surprised he hasn’t renamed that one yet. Shouldn’t it be the River Grand or the Grand River?
I also liked the line about the “slow progressives” of the 1980s. It took a second for me to figure that one out. Lol.
For some time I noticed I tended to refer to similar particular years in my (reading/film-watching) interests: 1936-38 for pulp adventures, 1957 for atomic age sci-fi and horror, 1986 for comic books, maybe 1968 for counter-culture. While these years may not be the actual ‘high points’ of their cultural markers they are what I always think of. Perhaps it is just a function of my particular age.
Oddly enough, I’ve been watching a lot of 50s-early 60s sci-fi and horror lately. They’re not very good and the FX is really bad, but they are very entreating to me.
So, if Z is right, we live in The Big Chill, endlessly looped. Personally, I much prefer Chill Wills.
I get the 1938 reference, but 1968? What does the release of The Beatles White Album have to do with it?
there was a whoo-ha in paris
’68 was the peak of the worldwide “student revolution” (boomers demanding early inheritance of regime institutions) that still deforms the politics of the West, especially in America and France.
The Sixties™ were prepared earlier by MKUltra, Operation Mockingbird, the Port Huron Statement, etc., but they took a few years to show up on TV.
RFK and MLK assassinations and widespread rioting in the hoods, too.
the dem convention in chicago that year is often seen as a bellwether event
Fantastic essay – as per youghe – but alas, there is this line: Live a Christian life and your reward is eternal life at the feet of God. Poor choice of words: believers (those of us of the mystic/trancendential variety, at any rate) don’t do “reward ‘at the feet’ of a benevolent master;” rather, there is an issue of communion outside the limitations of time and physical reality…heaven isn’t a place, it’s a “state.” (Alas, my experience is that trying to communicate this to a materialist is like trying to point out the unique timbre of musical instrument to someone… Read more »
I have a theory and it has to do with that old adage about how much trouble a lawyer without any other cases can cause with the one case he does have (because he has nothing better to occupy his day with). My theory is that so much of domestic government is on autopilot and the executive branch really has no control over it, that the president is basically cucked. There is nothing for him to do all day, so that’s why we end up mucking around in the world and causing so much trouble.
Progressivism, Communism, Fascism. Protestant, Jewish, Catholic. + liberalism = modernity.
Tempting thought.
Reminds of a theme that I see on ‘X’ where a leftist gloats about some economic number going down with critics noting that if “number goes up” means more of what Biden was doing then it’d be better if it went down.
We sure spend a lot of time relitigating the past while complaining about Progressives living in the past. When we do this we cede the moral argument that the past is where the future is found. I’d really like to know what comes next. We all seem so certain that it’s the black pill scenario and it is unavoidable. But 5 years ago it was a certainty that an idiot like Joe Biden could never be elected President. And 1 year ago Trump was heading for certain defeat and prison and not necessarily in that order. Is it possible to… Read more »
After Churchill of Asia (Diem) and Churchill of Slavland (little Z), we need Churchills of Mexico and Canada.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lyndon-b-johnson-visits-south-vietnam
[…] ZMan looks back in anger. […]
[…] https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=33693 […]
Billy Bragg, a minor pop celebrity and self-described “part time socialist” wrote this UK-centric gripe about ideologies back in 1986:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/billybragg/ideology.html
“Have I ever told you kids about the 60s?”