We Need New Words

I was in the Imperial Capital yesterday and that meant sitting in traffic for long periods. I tuned into talk radio and some guy was going on about how Trump is not a conservative. He was not being critical, he was simply making a point. The people who hold the rights to Official Conservatism™ have declared Trump outside their club. A caller claimed that Trump is a liberal because that’s the only other option, if you are not a conservative. I was not paying close attention, but there’s no denying that Trump does not fit into either bucket.

Of course, most people don’t fit neatly into either bucket and that’s mostly because the labels have meanings that no longer make sense. Hillary Clinton is a liberal, a Progressive! That’s supposed to mean she is a socialist that wants to take from the rich and give to the poor. Not only does she live like royalty, she had the backing of the nation’s billionaires, as well as the billionaires from other nations. It’s a very strange world where the socialist is the preferred candidate of the Billionaire’s Boys Club.

That’s one of the many things revealed about this recent election. The party of the working man is no such thing. They are the party of government hoping to rally the not working men to their banner. When Democrats talk about “working families” they really mean welfare queens with five kids from five strange men they met at a party. This has been true for a long time, but it is now so blazingly obvious that even the staunchest of union men have to accept it. Still, the Democrats retain the label “party of the working class.”

I’ve written a lot here about the ridiculousness of calling the modern Right “conservative” on the grounds that they have managed to conserve nothing. When looked at in the tradition of Western conservatism, it is even more ridiculous to keep calling these people “conservative.” Bill Kristol, for example, is just an old school liberal with a propensity for violence. The National Review crowd is a Buckley Mystery Cult at this point. It’s impossible to tease anything out of that dog’s breakfast of assertions that resembles a political philosophy.

Even the terms Right and Left have outlived their usefulness. Most people don’t know the origin of these terms and just assume they mean Socialist versus Capitalist or Liberal versus Conservative. Like so much else about Western politics, these terms come down to us from the French Revolution. The aristocrats sat on the right side of the Assembly and the commoners sat on the left side. Ever since, radicals and trouble makers have co-opted the term “Left” because they want to pretend they are on the winning side of history and champion of the people.

Calling modern Progressives “the Left” turns history on its head. Progressives are the champions of privilege and advocate what amounts to the return of active and passive citizenship. They and their attendants will be the active citizens while the rest of us, including whoever happens to wander in from who knows where, will be the passive citizens. The only difference is the 18th century aristocrats were honest about what they wanted. The modern aristocrat prefers to lie about his intentions.

Of course, the trouble makers on the alt-right are hardly the defenders of the status quo. They can’t even be called supporters of the status quo ante. The examples from history are simply used as a critique of the current year and the people fond of saying “current year.” The alt-right is thoroughly modern, drawing on information from genetics and cognitive science, while the Progressives are still stuck in the age of blank slatism, that is both anti-science and regressive. It is the Progressives who cannot get past 1955.

As the great Walter Williams was fond of saying, the radicals are the people arguing for the rollback of the welfare state. The radicals are the ones arguing for the ending of foreign adventurism. The radicals are the ones questioning the prevailing orthodoxy on race, sex and culture. The people being purged from social media would have been much more at home with the Jacobins than the defenders of the Ancien Régime. Given their skepticism regarding global capitalism, many of the alt-right would be better termed alt-left.

It may not seem important to fret over labels and terminology, but language is the primary tool of war. Progressives weaponized the word “racist” to the point where it became a Medusa head they could wave around, turning their opponents into stone. Even mentioning the word race causes so-called conservatives to cry. If this thing that is rumbling through the West is something bigger than a minor disruption in the force, we’re going to need new words and labels that work to the benefit of the new radicals.

More important, sabotaging the verbal weaponry of the other side. The new twitter feature that lets users block key words is a no- so subtle attempt to ban certain words and phrases. After all, if you ban the word, you ban the idea  behind the word. That’s just as good as banning the person behind the idea. The challenge for the trouble makers will be to evolve an esoteric way of saying the same things. Winning the war of words is just a proxy for winning the war of ideas. One is a reflection of the other.

117 thoughts on “We Need New Words

  1. Yes, like Obama banned the words Islam, jihad and terrorism from the lexicon we used to determine the threat doctrine for our enemies. You ban the word, you ban the idea behind the word. Obama is a good saboteur and America suffers for it, until we can get rid of him and start quantifying the enemy with actionable intelligence.

  2. Have there been any new swear words developed since WW2? F is heard everywhere I go these days, Cambridge United Netball Team isn’t far behind. I know I keep pretty bad company but they never used to speak this crass. Cuck is cool, I don’t care what anyone says. We need a few new nasty words.

  3. The Deplorables who elected Trump are a large and diverse group. The “Alt-Right” are a segment of that. The dialogue here about names is to me overkill because the Left, the Dems gave us our name on a silver platter. I like the name Deplorables and the image that was created using the image from “Les Miserables.”

    The Left is currently using the “Alt-Right” name as a pejorative because of the white nationalist and Nazi-Hitler affiliation. Someone sent me to a link to read about the alt-right and it’s origins and quite frankly I was appalled.

    I can easily see why someone coming to that site would think the alt-right is a bunch of skin head type white supremacist people who hate anyone who is not “white.”

    I am not white but I am American. My loyalty is to this country, it’s ideals, it’s people, my God and my family. It is not to any person or government.

    Using the alt-right “meme” to identify the movement that resulted in Trumps’ election is wrong because it is much bigger than that group alone. It can be a big tent. You can have your fantasy’s about how only white men built this country because you are so smart. But I would hasten to add that it is also white men who created the Marxist/socialist ideals that we are fighting today and if we don’t do it together, you won’t be able to do it by yourselves. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” for lack of a better reference.

    That is why the Left has used that phase to label, with a broad brush, those who voted for Trump. It works to their advantage and is emotional enough to keep their group hating.

    Me, I would rather stay simple and continue being a Deplorable, one of the glorious Deplorables!

    p.s. And you can keep your Pepe and Kek cartoons too.

  4. Sort of like wishing a non consensual multicultural group insemination upon some open borders alternative lifestyle feminist is the same as hoping that the dyke is gang raped by some Muslim refugees.

  5. You know what killed Belmont club? all the old fukks gassing on about how the world was shit and the sky was falling blah blah blah. just stfu, stick to gardening and Matlock reruns, and leave the work of restoring this country to those that look forward to the fight of our lives.

  6. The problem with capitalism and business in general, is that it’s all about to change, in ways that we can’t imagine. That’s why I’ve mostly abandoned it as a viable issue. Socialist, Capitalist, what will any of that mean when Automation does all the work? As a system it’s a dead man walking. Right now I’m more interested in measures that will mitigate the chaos and destruction from the transition. If a little socialism teamed with trade barriers and restricting immigration makes does that job then who cares.

  7. I like Jeff Goldstein’s term for the side I’m on, “outlaws”. The state is a Kleptocracy ruled by snakes, grifters and slobs. The hoi-polloi, the folks grinding out a living despite the oppressive hand of the state are my homies. Screw the old bag, Clinton and her broken dream of being Queen Bee.

  8. From Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” (I have it in my quotes file):

    “The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they… have always held… The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most effective way to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning.

    Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed….

    If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates… And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.”

  9. “The new twitter feature that lets users block key words is a no- so subtle attempt to ban certain words and phrases. After all, if you ban the word, you ban the idea behind the word.”

    The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

    …Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak”

  10. Twitter is going bankrupt, and is unknown to most voters. Case closed.
    The alt-right is largely pointing out that reality is ethnic identity and tribalism, and America’s attempt to pretend that such historical and genetic facts don’t exist is pushing the indigenous population off a cliff. Yes, the same population that created this formerly great nation, with no help at all from muslims, Africans, Mexicans, etc.The alt-right has also noticed that globalists and their financiers and political pawns have been decimating America’s vitality for a number of decades.
    So yes, if wanting all these lethal aspects of modernism gone is bomb throwing, hand us the sack of grenades.

  11. I went the Steve Sailor link above and watched the video of Glenn Beck’s rant. Glenn seems distraught as one whose worldview is crumbling faster than his empire. In order for him to pacify the bells of cognitive dissonance ringing in his ears, he appears to be playing the “noble captain” in the movie playing in his head. He is going down with the proverbial ship while retaining his self-perceived moral turpitude and sacrificing everything in his noble fight against racism. In this scenario, all of his recent failures make sense.

    Perhaps this is why Trump is considering Romney for Secretary of State. To mess with Glenn Beck’s mind.

    Or, it could be Trump understands that most Mormons are preppers and he figures the Mormons and the wild-eyed Alt-righters will be the majority in 2020 after the collapse.

  12. The whole internet as an alternative legitimate source of truth and information is about to face a big test. Tech-savvy people have been carefully going over the Wikileaks releases, and have been finding serious suggestions of ped0phi1ia centering on the Podesta brothers, John and Tony (recall that John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman, was a focus of the Wilileaks). This stuff is explosive, and seems to have links to child trafficking out of Haiti and Jeff Epstein’s little island hideaway. Zero Hedge commenters are linking to Reddit and 4chan threads investigating the evidence, as is Remus at the Woodpile Report. This stuff is getting out. Assange himself seems to be pointing people in this direction now, as well.

    There are three resolutions to all of this. The first is that at least part of it is true, and the political and criminal takedowns will be staggering. People will forget all about the labels of things and will realize that the world is a different place now, and evil will be exposed. The second is that it all is false, which means that the idea that the Internet as some source of truth and wisdom will be severely damaged. The third (most likely, in my view) is that the feverish bleach bitting of the online evidence, and bleaching (literally) of the physical evidence will mostly stay one step ahead of discovery, and there will be no resolution, but instead some understanding by some, along with denial by others, similar to how the Bill Clinton assault victims stand today.

    On the surface, the Internet enables labels. Underneath it all, the Internet will continue to expose the human condition and experience in ways that no one is expecting. Which is why the powers that be are so deathly afraid of people like us, and are quick to label us with the most perjorative terms they can find.

    • The only part i disagree with is the bleach bit part. that was the barn door shutting after the barn had been disassembled and removed!

  13. While information accompanying terms such as “biological realist” are an appropriate and deserved response to identity politics, the use of race plays right into the trap of of identity politics, doesn’t it? If politics are based on actions and behaviors, it puts an end to identity politics and any slippery slope such as making exceptions of certain people who come from a supposedly less intelligent, more violent race, for example. The words being used to pit us against each other with identity politics are betrayed when it comes to objective observation of behaviors.

    • You may not like it but identify politics is our reality, whitey just started to play because there is no backing down. Whitey has only recently dicovered that All Politics Are Tribal, something our enemy learned long ago.

  14. The American public mind has been so dumbed down by our schools and media, I’m not sure spending a lot of time and efforts on words will help. Though I agree that labels have come to mean things that they are not, maybe it’s more important to start acting, rather than more talking. That is the great neoliberal strategy, nice words about ideals they’re *trying* to achieve: “Just give us another decade or two to get there, we’re trying!” Meanwhile, the dirt people squabble among themselves as the elite continue to loot us and wage wars that the media does not inform us about. The government acts to serve the elite, who are acting to serve themselves at our expense. We are all fighting over words and for crumbs.

    Many Americans I encounter can barely put together a coherent sentence. How do we persuade our fellow countrymen of ideas labelled with words they can not even pronounce, let alone understand the history led up to selecting that particular word to represent an important movement or current thinking of today. The ignorance of our people is a reality that we must deal with. People understand simple words and action. This does not mean they’re stupid, but uninformed, ignorant, uncultivated. That is unfortunately the fabric of our society. We probably will serve ourselves best by keeping language very simple and clear while persuading our fellow countrymen of an idea and course of action. I’m convinced the majority of us want the same things but words and labels have been used by elite/media to confuse us and turn us against each other. They’ve won that battle and it’s a biggie.

    Human beings understand behaviors and actions. Most of us want the same things in our society.

    • Good points, and I think that is one reason Trump pulled off his miracle. No one accuses him of eloquence. Words don’t roll off his tongue with the facility of a trial lawyer. But you get the sense, listening to him, that being able to manipulate speech isn’t his primary aim, as it is for most progressives. He may not find the perfect formulation, but he gets his meaning across and quite a bit of it is sincere. It’s a rare quality in a political candidate and enough people responded.

    • You wish they were merely dumbed down. It’s a fairly straightforward matter to educate an ignorant child.

      • I’m referring to adults who’ve been propagandized by media, government, schools, think tanks and institutions for decades. Is it that straightforward? Also, how do we fix our lying media without making them state-owned, which eventually will become problematic in much the same way? The whole point of exporting all our jobs and importing all these illegal immigrants over the past several decades is to make a huge pool of cheap labor and desperate, controllable people. They have succeeded in this and it could not have happened without the media’s help. How do we turn that around without getting control of the powerful media apparatus?

        • The media would be powerless if the populous was well enough educated. The enemy have taken over the schools and dumbed the people down enough for the media to effectively bullshit them.

      • yes, but it is nigh on impossible to educate a child after their brain has been damaged by leftist propaganda. do you think many of the sjw types are going to become normal productive citizens? if you do, we need to play poker real soon now 😛

  15. Read an article today in which we were referred to as “Multi-generational European Americans”. Lot of words to avoid use of the terrible racist term “white”.

  16. This time to me seems to boil down to two opposing beliefs:

    Man exists to serve the market.
    OR
    The market exists to serve man.

    We have the technology and online social networks to enable us to govern ourselves. Legislation could be proposed publicly online, discussed by the public online, and voted on online. Our elected representatives then act to implement that which comes from the public. No money spent without public approval.

    Those who choose not to participate in the governance of themselves quite simply remove themselves from the process by staying uninformed and not participating. No need to get into race or IQ’s, you either participate or not, it’s up to you. If you don’t like how things are, well you better act to educate and inform yourself and get online to make your voice heard and persuade your fellow countrymen.

    If people were to govern themselves this way, we could act to protect our markets from those who seek to exploit them, either for the wealthy elite or for the entitled poor. We already have the technology to do this, unfortunately the online social networks are instead used as tools by the corrupt ruling elite to monitor, censor and control us. Perverse.

    The above model also applies to modern-day news and how it’s generated and used. It should all come from the public and kept very real.

    • Yes. What you propose is direct democracy enabled by today’s technology. That shift is coming, though it’s slower than I expected, as the old-guard has been able to hold on to it’s perquisites far more tenaciously than I imagined.

      Technology hasn’t kept up with voter fraud, however, or at least it hasn’t been allowed to weed out fraud. Until technology guarantees a fraud-less election, the tendency is to go Luddite: to return to paper ballots and hanging chads.

      • With technology and voting, it is still GIGO, Garbage In Garbage Out. You have people, illegals, dead people and repeat voters, voting with no certification as to citizenship and you have just made the great technology a pile of junk. It can still be manipulated. There are yuuge data bases with all kinds of information on citizens and yet when we vote, citizenship can’t be confirmed? Give me a break? Our Congress-critters, beholden to their masters, just don’t want the system to work that way. That’s how they tenaciously hold on to their perq’s!

    • What possible reason do you have to think that direct democracy is not simply greasing the skids we are already on? Athens is exactly what the designers were seeking to avoid.

      • I take your point. I would say that those who are not interested in governing themselves will not participate in governing themselves. Currently, people like us, who follow politics closely, are shut out of the process. Only lobbyists have access and corporate lawyers write the legislation.

        There is no reason all the Congressional legislative process shouldn’t be online real-time for us to monitor and debate and approve or veto, with our elected representatives there purely to implement our will and to ensure the legality of laws passed (or repealed!). I think right now you need to pay hundreds of dollars for a subscription that will give you that access. And Congress does not give a damn what their constituents think, they vote according to the will of their corporate donors. The media does not print things we need to know about that our Congress passes, things like the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act which passed and went into effect in 2013 and makes it legal for our government to propagandize Americans.

        Those dummies who do not care to take responsibility in governing themselves will give up that right to those that do. Kind of like now except the process would be further opened to genuinely be determined by those of us in the public who care. Of course, it would involve presenting legislation in plain language that describes pros, cons and real costs as well as who is proposing the law and why.

        I don’t have all the answers, all I know is we’re not at all using media or technology to the benefit of humanity. Maybe you have a better idea?

          • Amen! I always like the phrase by Don Henley in “Get Over it.” “Let kill all the lawyers, let’s kill’em tonight.” Those infesting politics in particular.

            Technology isn’t a complete answer but it does hold promise. To make things somewhat manageable, it would have to be accompanied by much smaller government. The number of things to vote on, and the volume of stuff to read would have to be dramatically be reduced to enable such participation. Or else we get to the Pelosism’s like “We have to pass to see what’s in it” kind of crap. We cannot afford mountains of laws and regulations that those interested in self government would have to deal with on a regular basis. That is supposedly why we elected “representatives.” No, what we need to fix is the lobbyist and buying of political favors problem. Term limits and strict laws for abusing your elected responsibilities. Heck, even in the financial/business sectors, there is no more such thing as “fiduciary” responsibility any longer. No, what we need is a return to law and order.

  17. And that’s why I was, and still am, Classical Liberal Jeffersonian; very small fedgov, decentralized power, no foreign entanglements, and lots and lots of individual liberty. Is this AltRight? Don’t care. And I strongly disagree with trying to define a movement that’s growing in size and gaining in momentum. That’s defining a thing which is not yet at fruition and definition now, potentially limit growth and scope of the coalition, and it is, a coalition. Let it grow undefined, unabated, I say.

    Linked article at #Gab.ai
    @ProGunFred
    #AltRight

  18. It is not by coincidence that the Greeks invented both rhetoric and democracy. As Plato instructed, rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. The democratic mind is either in greater need of that type of rule, or more vulnerable to it. The lower caste of rhetoric is propaganda.

    We don’t need new words;: when such words become associated with greatness the enemies of liberty will simply appropriate them for their own–again. The past is a treasure of definitions. Cede nothing, win everything.

    Thomas Saatz–The battle for the world is a battle for definitions.

  19. Pingback: Ban the word, you ban the idea behind the word | IowaDawg Musings & More

  20. What’s funny about Twitter’s “new” feature is they aped it from Gab, wholesale.

    Faggot Jack has no ideas; he just knows how to ban people.

    And in theory, such an overarching ability to block “bad” speech one’s way would eliminate the need to ever ban anyone.

    …But we all know Jack ain’t gonna do things that way.

    Can’t have a speech Holocaust if you don’t Holocaust.

  21. Actually, our culture is getting rid of a lot of words and terms. We may be back to just grunts soon. I’ve got a copy of David Copperfield by my work desk. Read a few pages the other day and it’s clear that we are destroying literacy in this country. I’m tasking myself to read more challenging works. (And I have actually had someone tell me I use big words.)

    I think it’s time we get rid of the notion we can put people and ideas into boxes. The Left loves to label you, so they can easily dismiss you.

    • In thinking about it, I think we should call ourselves the Steak Eaters Club. No vegans/vegetarians allowed 😉

      • I don’t care if someone comes from Vega as long as they believe in individual liberty and less federal control of my/our life.

  22. “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.”

    There’s nowhere to go for the leftist with words meant to label any and all people with a different worldview.

  23. Do we really need new words? Any suggestion for a new label will find a few among our natural allies objecting to it for some reason. That aside, general terms don’t enter the language because somebody proposes that “we” all start calling ourselves This and calling our opponents That. Did anyone say, “Let’s define ourselves as the alt-right”?

    How new political and social terminology gains acceptance is something of a mystery. Probably a handful of people use an expression and it gathers steam because of a widespread, undefined feeling that it expresses an idea better than old, worn-out, irrelevant terms.

    It is much more important to call down the thunder every time the other side misuses emotion-laden words like “racism.” The misuse and over-use of “racism” as a curse is already starting to lose its sting. We need to fight back against such tactics more than try to find inoffensive descriptions of ourselves.

  24. Z,

    One thing I’ve noticed about your commenters is that for the most part they seem to be fully invested—”plugged in”, if you will—into the political system. The System, as the hippies called it.

    They don’t seem to realize that they’re living in full-blown Weimerica.

    And Weimar problems demand Weimar solutions….

  25. I kind of like “The Basket” for the name of a new party or political bloc. Kind of like “The Mountain” (La Montagne in French), the French Revolution group headed by Robespierre, except with a different orientation and methodology; then again…

    I also like “Subsidiariationist” because by default only the intelligent and articulate will be able to enunciate it correctly, but also by default, that will doom it to be a minority party.

    It’s a knotty problem!

  26. There is always a right and left in democracy. The left is the party of disorder and the party of power. Of course that’s not the labeling: the labeling is always “fairness”, “equality”, “inclusion”, “progress”, etc. But think about “change”: how does one make a change without the power to do so? And after change happens: how does one make sure that it’s sustained without a new bureaucracy to enforce it? Of course there are changes which are self-enforcing… but then you’ll realize that the left does not make such changes. Their changes always require a bureaucracy, police, education.

    As for the left somehow being non-aristocratic — quite false. The alliance of high and low against middle in a situation where power is formally constrained is the very soul of the problem; indeed it predates modern democracy. As we expect once we see the pattern, most of the greatest leaders of the left have been aristocrats of their time. These days, of course, titles come from Harvard and its sprawling empire of tributary dioceses. Our esteemed President has nothing less than a JD degree magna cum laude from Harvard. His scheduled replacement? JD from Yale. Even the interloper Trump has an ivy league degree, if only a B.S. in economics.

    Your error in classification is in thinking of left and right in ideological terms. Ideology is surface manifestation; a symptom; a rationalization. Only a small minority is motivated by ideology in the absence of power; this is, for example, what libertarians are. (Libertarians get 2% of the vote; note that the lizardman constant is larger. Also note that a substantial minority of Libertarians talk as if they think their party has a chance to win power in the long run.) What is real is power and social networks.

    It’s common error. For example, were the Nazis “right” or “left”? Everyone at the time, and subsequently (except for a few on the right attempting a silly game of gotcha), knew them as the right; indeed the far right. Even though they were “left” in all sorts of surface manifestations, i.e, being “socialist”. So why “right”? Ultimately it’s not about what they did at all. It’s because they had no friends at Harvard.

  27. I like Dirt People. It’s obviously non-elite, but it’s also confusing, tactically ambiguous, scary and off-putting all at the same time. We shouldn’t even try to define it, as that will put us all in a box. Let the crazy liberals have a go at it. It will drive them even crazier.

  28. Expression will never be stopped. Just wear a red hat and it conveys much these days. Instead of naming things and people by name, use euphemisms. “The Wookie” has a whole new and well understood meaning. Those who want to play whack-a-mole with all of this will never prevail. They will exhaust themselves in the effort.

    “The Flying Monkeys haven’t been seen much these last few days”. See how easy this is?

    • Use of euphemisms flexes our creativity and wit, it spreads culture and amusement. Like superior satire, it is clear, while deniable. It is amusing and fun, one of Alinsky’s requirements.

  29. Ronald Reagan was a pragmatist. Pragmatist, realist. Fine if we need labels. But even here “realist” is causing oogly-boogly because decades ago someone coopted that for an arcane leftwing publication.

    Realist is a pretty straightforward word. We need to keep words as what they are defined to mean, not allowing them to pick up a stigma because of how someone once misused them for their own purposes.

    • Ronald Reagan the brilliant genius pragmatist realist successfully did…what, exactly? Crack a few (rather excellent) jokes on national TV?

      Did he restore patriarchy? Did he stop redistributing your money to single mothers with five different children by five different men? Did he fire 90% of Washington and otherwise shrink the size and scope of the government?

      Or did he amnesty the first 3 million illegal alien Mexicans?

      No one seriously referencing Ronald Reagan as the prototype for their political outlook has a political outlook with a future.

      • See the post by Hokkoda. Under Reagan the Federal Register shrank for the first and only time in our history. And if you don’t know what the Federal register is, I suggest you do some reading.

        • Sure, the official number of official government employees may have declined on the official books, thanks to the outsourcing of government to “private” business. Turns out, private companies can do all sorts of things that the government can’t do, and so the government employs a bunch of worthless incompetents in its own agencies (affirmative action hires, for instance) and then bids out the actual work to politically connected contractors. It’s why most of the real military work is now performed by PMCs, why Snowden was a contracted employee for the NSA, and why the Obamacare website cost 6 billion smackaroos and still didn’t work.

          And a lot more palms get greased along the way.

          • What you are talking about is the “re-inventing government” program under Clinton/Gore. Read a few goddam things or at least link it. The Federal Register is the compilation of federal regulations. Geez.

          • No, it was definitely during the Reagan-Thatcher that privatization of government functions began in earnest. Outsourcing, if you like. A big part of Reagan’s shtick was running government like a business, and a big part of running government like a business was privatizing it in chunks bitten off here and there. Or contracting it out, as the case may be.

            There is even a case to be made that it began tentatively with Carter, who deregulated the airline industry.

          • “government employs a bunch of worthless incompetents in its own agencies (affirmative action hires, for instance) and then bids out the actual work to politically connected contractors.”

            Precisely the business model for a certain large state transportation agency in a large and growing southern state with lots of prime ocean view real estate.

      • Reagan’s entire second term was a right off, due to his dementia. He gets a lot of credit he doesn’t deserve. Not that he was a bad president or anything, just not a great president.

        • He didn’t have dementia then. He had Democrats in charge of both house and Senate. His hands were tied as far as legislation goes. If you were alive then you would think he belongs on Mount Rushmore. If you were and don’t, you weren’t really alive.

          • Thank you for that. Reagan was sabotaged by congress in many ways, but the was amnesty. After he was out of office he publicly said it was the worst decision he ever made.

            BTW, anyone here really think the number of Mexcans and other brown people here from South of the border is still 11-12 million? That figure hasn’t changed since 1965.

            More like 40-45 million as of now.

          • 40 million is the lower bound for illegals. Think about it this way: there are officially (legally) 325 million people in this country, not including the 40 million illegals, who are for all intents and purposes 100% brown mestizos and indios from south of the Rio Grande. And only about 200 million of that 325 million are white.

            So add 40 or so million to 325 million, and you have 200 million / 365 million.

            Feeliing a little bit outnumbered yet?

            Your children are—white births for the last several years have been the minority of all births in the geographical region formerly known as the United States of America.

            In the current year, white children are a minority in the land their forefathers conquered.

          • I was alive then and he most definitely had dementia during his second term…like you do now. besides the illegal amnesty mentioned above, he also acted cravenly after the marines were blown up in Lebanon. He passed some nice tax cuts and got the economy going again, which are not small things. but he doesn’t belong on rushmore or anywhere near it. nostalgia is not your friend.

          • I never denied the amnesty you worthless sack of shit. So. What should he have done with Lebanon? Started another war you would criticize him for getting us into? How would you compare him to the other guys on Rushmore? Lincoln killed 600,000 of his own countrymen. Roosevelt was an imperialist who got us into wars and destabilized the globe, ended up splitting his party giving the presidency to Wilson–he is what would have happened if the nevertrumpers had been successful. Fefferson’s policies led to the war of 1812. The only one who belongs there is Washington. And twenty years of peace and prosperity means Reagan belongs there too. Fuck you.

          • When Reagan was president, the Social Security Trust Fund was “going broke”; it was thought that it would run out of money soon, based upon the number of prospective retirees & the amount of expected contributions by workers.
            At the time, Soc Sec contributions were maxed out at 2% from employees wages, plus another 2% matched by the employer’s contribution,on salaries up to a certain ceiling.
            [BTW, “contribution” sounds so much better than “regressive tax” doesn’t it.. ]

            Reagan’s unfortunate remedy was to raise the Soc Sec taxes to max out at 7.5% from employees & equal amount from employers. There was, and still is (so far), a maximum salary subject to Soc Sec tax.

            Social Security has always been a ponzi scheme; also, certain ethnic groups with lower than average life expectancies, contribute much more than they will ever receive as a group. To use the Left’s vocabulary against them, Social Security has always been “UNSUSTAINABLE”. Either rates go up, retirement ages increase, or benefits go down (especially when they don’t rise as fast as inflation); Reagan lost a perfect opportunity to destroy one of the Left’s favorite projects, which has also become a prime way to surveil and control people.

          • blah blah blah

            name one way that Reagan changed the culture, the government, anything? I am going to go make a cup of coffee while you make something up. and introducing the Bush clan to the highest office in the land is not an accomplishment.

  30. The return of the dark ages is upon us. When ideas antithetical to the status quo are being actively suppressed and punished, the resurrection of alchemy, the language of transformation, cannot be far behind.

    While our current popes, cardinals and bishops are busily resurrecting the whipping posts and the fires of purity, heretics must once again resort to speaking of converting base metals into gold.

    • Or it could be an opportunity. The more the opposition tries to restrict free speech, the bigger we can make the discussion space. It’s like playing go on a board of infinite size. Their need for control keeps heading them into an intellectual ghetto of their own making. Our desire for free exchange of ideas just opens new spaces for debate.

      • Hi El, I would really like to agree with you but as the recent mass purge of the right on twitter shows it is we who are being driven to the ghettos of the interwebs. Any platform which is 95% right wing can have no significant influence on the normies. The left controls the major platforms, the only silver lining to this black cloud is their implicit support for the moribund freedom of association.

        • Freedom of association for large platforms controlling our speech. Not so much Christian bakers. Civil rights suit time?

        • That’s a good point, AT. Let’s see how this Gab thing works out. If it turns out to be a twitter killer, my theory might have some legs.

          • At this point Gab is our best hope, but we can’t force lefties and normies to play, they need only remain on a sanitized twitter/facebook. The large platforms have freedom of association unlike Christian bakers. I am uncomfortable forcing my presence on the unwilling, I guess I should try to get over that.

        • the left controls the major platforms *today*

          after a little anti-trust and a few class action lawsuits…they won’t.

  31. Two thoughts:

    1) The term I like the most is “radical center”. To me this means pragmatic and center-right, but iconoclastic at the same time, with an “attitude” and a willingness to fight.

    2) The way they are trying to conflate the “alt-right” with”racism” is from the same playbook they used to discredit the Tea Party. Alt-right to me has nothing to do with racism. At worst, it is politically incorrect and racially insensitive, but it is not “racist”. To me, it is just a way of looking at the world where you march to your own drummer in terms of which elements of right-wing dogma you believe and aren’t constrained by prevailing conservative orthodoxy.

    • Back in the 90s, Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis wrote for a newsletter called Middle American Radicals, it had the same flavor as the alt right. Preservation of white people and white nations are job #1 in the alt right. If you want to call that raysism go right ahead, we own raysisms fam.

      • I’m not the first person to say this, but I don’t mind repeating it. If Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, etc. want to look out for their own interests as racial or religious groups, why shouldn’t whites? I also find those who say it doesn’t matter what “race” America becomes through immigration, including those on the right, clueless, ignorant and befuddling.

  32. This goes back a lot of years for me, but I believe it really comes down to the Government Party vs. everybody else. The problem is that the Government Party (like any State Party) is actually pretty small in terms of total numbers. They tend to cluster around Government centers of gravity (N. VA, of course, military bases, large Government hubs like Denver, etc.) which gives them a disproportionate impact on media, culture, and where the money flows. It really does come down to money in the end.

    To swell their numbers, they’ve even made up an entire “race” category: Hispanic. While people who share a common Spanglish dialect come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes, “Hispanic” basically just means a white person who speaks Spanish. They’re no less white than my Sicilian forebears. But, what does the Government Party put on all its forms? “White (non-Hispanic)” In other words, they made it up as a means to divide people, and to increase the number of people who identify with the Government Party. There is no “Black (non-Hispanic)” choice because, well, that’s as useful as dividing yellow and green Skittles.

    That’s why the cities are so important to the Government, and why there’s this “national popular vote” nightmare movement out there. Government is omnipresent in urban areas from the greater concentration of Government schools, to public transportation, to all the public resources and government buildings. Out in flyover country, those things are much more diffused.

    In Levin’s “liberty amendments” he suggests that tax day be moved to one-week prior to the November elections. I have one more sarcastic addition: no food or supplies are shipped into any urban area for 10 days prior to the election. I’ve read that NYC, for example, has only a 3-4 day supply of food. Figure they could stretch it out for about a week, and then things would start to get real. They might be smart, and they might control the levers of power, but you can’t eat those things.

    You’re “counter culture” in America today if you:
    – are married and have more than two children
    – own your own business
    – attend worship services regularly
    – have children you homeschool or send to a charter-school
    – don’t do drugs
    – have low debt/income ratios and pay your cc balance every month
    – think “TMZ” is in Korea
    – understand science to be the pursuit of knowledge, not the establishment of hierarchy
    …among other things

    I don’t actually think we need a new language. I think we need new avenues for communication. If Twitter wants to block words, start a system like Twitter that doesn’t ban words. That’s why Fakebook has been actually pretty good about this. They know that they are a commodity at the end of the day. It’s not going to take much for a company to come along, and to offer to “port” all of your Fakebook settings/pictures/posts/history over to their new clone system where they don’t ban things. This is not hard to do, and Zuckerberg knows it. They’ll lose in court if they try to keep Fakebook users from taking their data with them when they leave.

    No, I refuse to play this language changing game. When somebody starts talking about climate change, one of the first things I mention is that they used to call it global warming. When they talk about being a Progressive, I mention that they used to call themselves Liberals, and before that Socialists. Just the other day, one of my Fakebook friends who happens to be black had a friend go off on me for my “white privilege”. He didn’t even try to persuade or argue…he went straight for the “racist” grenades. I just laughed at him, and told him he sounded like he was trying to get an “A” on a college Sociology paper, and that shouting out “white privilege” is just his way of using his own racism to shut down debate. I could run for the hills, or I can stand and fight.

    I choose to stand and fight.

  33. Even a political Linnaeus couldn’t save the Humpty Dumpty that you just pushed off his perch. Actually, even the classification from the french revolution doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. That is part of the reason the Classical (Marxist) interpretation of that event had to be abandoned in the seventies (but is still taught in the universities and kept alive by commie writers). Nobles were found on both left and right. The Jacobins were part of the Mountain, guys who sat high up in the assembly because they were not running things in the beginning, but were the social critics the alt right is today. Unfortunately, when they got their shot they came to enjoy killing their opponents a bit too much. But we don’t talk about that. Makes the “good guys” sound like Hitler, or something. Foe our situation, I think about the gubernatorial election in Minnesota some time back when the Republican and the Democrat went at each other so hard it made Jesse Ventura look more sane, and he was elected. Only in this case we got a chance to see our guy take on the Dem and the Repub one at a time and whip them like he was just come down from the Shao-Lin Temple in a Kung Fu movie.

  34. I had thought that transnational progressivism was a good name for the other side but it did not stick. The “Plutocrat-Managerial alliance” is probably accurate, but too wordy and without any roots in everyday political discourse… not likely to stick.

    If we call the anti-cult of modern liberalism alliance Realists, why not just go full propagandist and call the other side Fantacists or the Utopians. After all, it is they who want to fit biologically diverse humans to their Procrustean bed. What little I know about how evolved systems work suggests to me that even if they try genetic engineering, that’s every bit as likely to catastrophically fail as eugenics (Nazis and West) and mass behavioralism (Second World).

    Maybe we should just call them the Cult.

    • I’ve kinda liked Utopianist for awhile, it accurately describes their desire to bring about a perfect society, and their faith that they can pull it off if the rest of us are willing or can be forced to pay the cost. As a bonus it also encompasses the fundamentalist libertarians.

  35. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. George Orwell, 1984

    • The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who don’t–
      Robert Heinlein

      • “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

        This is known as “bad luck.”

        • “Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
          ― Robert A. Heinlein

      • “There is an old song which asserts ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted … and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.” – Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

      • “…for this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God…”
        Signed,
        Your Heavenly Father, Creator of EVERYTHING in the universe!
        in II Peter 3.5

  36. For lack of a better term, I call myself a Realist. Old-school philosophy majors will wince at that, but I have no idea what else to call it. There are certain facts that one must bow to, if one wants an internally coherent worldview. Such as: there is a minimum IQ required to maintain a technological society; IQ is strongly correlated with race; some races on average fall below that threshold. Such as: Human societies are baboon troops writ large (I often joke to my liberal acquaintances that I’m the only guy they know who really believes in evolution); therefore, human groups are inherently hierarchical, paternalistic, and violent. We didn’t have the science to express it this way back then, but politics used to revolve around an instinctive understanding of those facts. Asking myself “what would Lord Curzon do?” is usually a pretty good rule of thumb, so I guess “retro-Tory” would work…

    • I use the term “biological realist” rather than “race realist” as it is more accurate, but much harder to attack. It also covers all the other stuff like sex, evolution and ethnicity.

      • And abortion. It’s not that the Government Party doesn’t know that’s a baby. It’s that they do not care. The biological realist understands the child to be a child, and that it is being discriminated against simply because of what it looks like and where it happens to live.

    • “Realist” ?
      Be careful there, back in the ’60s & 70s there was to be a far left newsletter called “The Realist” published by Paul Krassner. Wouldn’t want anyone confusing us with him.

    • Indeed, it is doubtful that a nation with an average IQ below 90 can even maintain the technology that exists currently, let alone improve it.

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