Ideological Capture

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Image that you are a management type and you get hired into the third tier of management at a good sized firm. The top tier is the executive staff like the CFO and CEO who control the overall direction of the firm. The second tier is the policy making tier, like vice presidents and regional directors. They take the vision of the top tier and turn into company policy. The tier into which you have been hired is tasked with implementing and enforcing these company policies.

Further, let us assume you are an enthusiastic follower of a management style that is called “management by committee.” You think the best way to run any organization is through committees that debate amongst themselves and then create reports that some other committee turns into directives. Your new job is in a company that is still in growth mode, so they are not burdened with management philosophy. The third tier is just supposed to get the job done.

Soon into your new job you find other fans of the MBC school and you form a clique within the company. None of your bosses are MBC types, but they are not hostile to your ideas, just as long as the job gets done. One of the ideas you talk them into is having managers in the third tier incorporated into the hiring process. Candidates for management jobs will sit before a committee of middle managers who will then pass on their assessment to the people making the hire.

You are a committee guy so you make sure to be on this committee and you get your buddies in the committee subculture on the committee as well. This is exactly the sort of innovation you have been seeking. The “promise” of this new step is that people hired in will fit the general culture. As a practical matter, it means the committee will select for people who like committees. It does not take long before adherence to the management by committee philosophy is a selection criterion.

Since there is a decent amount of turnover in the middle and lower management ranks, it does not take too long before most managers are committee men. This new selection process, controlled by committee men, selects for committee men or the type who could be groomed into committee men. A big part of the management by committee philosophy is grooming normal people into the committee lifestyle. Being a committee man is a de facto requirement for employment.

The second tier of management has far less turnover than the third and fourth tier, as these are important posts that pay exceptionally well. By their very nature there are few of these jobs in any company, so there is not a lot of circulation, but from time to time a spot does open in this layer. Ideally, the executive layer selects from the third tier of managers to fill these roles. Presumably, these are people who know company culture and have been vetted through trial and error.

Because you and your fellow committee men have been selecting for committee men in the ranks of management, the options for the executive staff when it comes time to fill a vice president slot is all committee men. The management by walking around guy who ran the West Coast division retires and there is no one like him to bump up into his position, because that type does not exist on the bench. That means hiring from outside or elevating a committee man into the second tier.

The executive staff of the company is now faced with a crisis. While they were busy with setting the general direction of the company, they have been infested with a new management style that now limits their range of motion. If they want to change the company culture, say reduce the number of meetings and standing committees, it means making wholesale changes in the ranks. Alternatively, it means finding a way to make this new management paradigm work.

Now, if instead of starting point being a middle manager from a management cult it is a homosexual priest, a climate change crank or a neoconservative. The homosexual priest gets into the ranks and starts to agitate for his people and before long you have a lot of homosexual priests. This is how climate change cranks have infested the ranks of energy and environment to the point where they control these areas in the managerial class, publicly and privately.

The neocons are front and center at the moment and they are the most obvious example of this process. Over time they have infiltrated every nook and cranny of the foreign policy establishment. When the Democrat president takes over for a Republican, the neocons who infest Republican ranks move out to think tanks, while the neocons who infest Democratic ranks take their positions in government. When the parties swap again, the neocons swap again.

If like the executive management of the hypothetical company, you are the new president with a rational vision for foreign policy, you will be faced with the problem of finding anyone who is not neocons. Everyone with any experience in the State Department, foreign service or national security is going to be a member of the bizarre cult that has taken over these fields. Before you could do anything, it means a revolution within these areas of government.

Something similar is happening with energy. Putting together a rational energy policy is impossible because everyone in that sector is now committed to the “green agenda” which embraces irrational energy policies. Notice that the response to the war in Ukraine is a series of policies that harm normal people in the West by furthering the agenda of the environmental movement. The war in Ukraine has given license to the people making war on climate change.

This is why elections are now meaningless. So meaningless, in fact, that they will slowly go away entirely. The ruler of Italy, for example, was not elected. He was installed by Brussels, which is not elected either. The response to Russia is being crafted in Brussels, not the capitals of Europe. Closer to home, elections are now just an orgy of absurd corruption like ballot harvesting, mail in voting and so on. Why try to convince people when you can just make up the results?

The collapse of elections is just a reflection of reality. You can vote yourself bloody, but the people holding office are faced with the same dilemma as the executive managers in the above example. They must fill their staff from the pool of true believers that exist in the Washington policy establishment. They are set upon by true believers from think tanks and lobbying firms, who actually write the legislation. They are swimmers trying to change the direction of the ocean.

What we are witnessing is ideological capture. This is where a small, but committed group can wield majority power, as long as the majority is divided into smaller groups or not bound by an alternative ideology. The homosexuals could infiltrate the priesthood because the Church was not explicitly anti-homosexual. The normal priest worried about the issue would be outnumbered by the pink mafia and have no internal structure on which to rely for support in the fight.

The priest problem is good example of how you cannot solve the problem of ideological capture with rules or systems. The Church had rules against raping altar boys and fornication, but that did not deter the homosexual priests. Instead, they organized to take over the system in order to get around these prohibitions. It turns out that rules and principles are no match for a dedicated minority that has no respect for the spirit behind those rules and principles.

This is the problem faced all over the managerial class. Any reform attempt must start with the removal of the infestation. In the case of foreign policy, it means a decapitation of the neocon establishment, both in government and outside government. You would have to fire everyone, remove their security clearances and maybe put a few in jail to publicly discredit the cult. Given the scale involved, that may not be possible, even if a president was committed to it.

The same process would have to happen with the climate cranks who have infested energy and environment. The regulatory state is now stocked with people who think their lawnmower is out to get them. The same holds for the Department of Justice and the FBI, as we saw in the Trump years. The managerial class has been captured by what should be described as a cult. Across the system, members of this bizarre new religion now wield power and control policy.

This is the truth of ideological capture. Once the infection sets in, the rules are slowly turned to the favor of the ideologues. Therefore, any effort to use the rules to disinfect the system ends up profiting the ideologues. The people vote for George Bush and they get Lyndon Johnson. They vote for Barak Obama and they get a different version of Lyndon Johnson. They vote for Trump and they get Nixon. The outputs no longer reflect inputs, because the rules no longer matter.

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

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

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

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

Perpendicular Parallels

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For those old enough to recall the 1970’s, the present economic turmoil looks a lot like the stagflation from fifty years ago. Just like a half century ago, we have a mix of inflation, economic stagnation and incompetent leadership in Washington. Joe Biden is not exactly Jimmy Carter, as Carter was an honest man, but like Carter, the public sees him as a man out of his depth. Like Carter, he wound up in the job due to a crisis within the political class over a previous president.

It is a comforting parallel for many people, because if the pattern holds, it means there is a Ronald Reagan coming after Biden. The saner elements in the ruling elite will rally to a sober minded governor who can withstand the progressive crazies. Many people are looking at Ron DeSantis as the man who can save the system. Trump running in 2024 could throw a wrench in the story, but maybe the ruling elite has a plan to get that element out of the script so the story can continue.

This problem with the script is a reminder that historical parallels are like all generalizations in that they are a starting point. They help frame the times to better understand the details. We know the general plot of one side of the comparison, so it allows us to infer things about the other side. From there we have a basis from which to analyze the present. In this comparison, however, the observable similarities have different direct and root causes.

For example, the current energy crisis is different from the crisis in the 1970’s, which was mostly driven by the currency war and an oil embargo. The collapse of the post-war currency arrangements not only gave us inflation, but it also created havoc in commodities, which are sensitive to currency fluctuations. The big driver was the Arab oil embargo over US support for Israel. The embargo was always a short term strategy to get a better deal from the West.

The present energy crisis is primarily systemic. Generations of mismanagement are finally showing up in the price. The United States was the largest exporter a few years ago, but then the government reversed course and exports have collapsed, making America a net importer again. Europe is smashing its energy system in an effort to make the Russians look bad on Twitter. There is more than enough energy to go around, but the system to distribute it is collapsing.

In the 1970’s, the solution to the energy crisis was to make a deal with the Arabs so they would end the embargo. There were lots of new energy schemes launched to take advantage of the crisis, but the final solution was a deal with the Saudis. This current energy crisis does not have a simple solution. In the West, energy policy has been corrupted by the same cranks who have corrupted the culture. It will take a revolution to fix that problem in order to fix the policy problems.

Systemic problems are also at the heart of the inflation crisis. In the 1970’s, the issue was the old fashioned Econ 101 problem. There was too much money chasing too few goods, resulting in inflation. This time, the issue is more about systemic problems in the global monetary system and in the global supply chain. This is where dumb people like to say, “it is as simple as…” and then finish with their favorite bromides from the Mises Institute, but the current inflation crisis is not a simple one.

For starters, the monetary system that was put in place in the 1980’s assumed a few things that are no longer true. One was that the excess dollars created by Washington would be absorbed and laundered by low cost counties. This worked while Asia had an infinite supply of cheap efficient labor. Extra dollars could flow into these countries as economic investment. The extra from developing countries would then return in the form of assets like treasuries and equities.

That system is breaking down for two main reasons. One is China is becoming a mature industrial nation, which means labor is no longer cheap. The Chinese understand this and they are shifting policy to encourage domestic consumption rather than focus on exports. All of a sudden, those extra dollars are no longer as welcome in China as in the past. Instead of returning as assets to America, they hang around the system chasing too few retail goods.

Another cause is the breakdown of the dollar system. The dollar itself is doing great, but the rest of the global currencies are not doing so well. Their strength has been pegged to the health of the system based on the dollar being the global currency. As this system shows signs of crisis, the weaker currencies are in free fall. The Euro, the secondary global currency, is falling sharply. Of course, the ruble is booming, due to the crackpot policy response to the war in Ukraine.

The point is the solution to the current inflation is different from what happened fifty years ago because the causes are different. In the 1970’s, the Fed could tighten the money supply, wring out inflation and force a corresponding correction in the system with a deep, but short recession. This time, simply raising rates will not be enough to address the inflation problems. It could also trigger a crisis in the financial system, which is built on the assumption of free money from the Fed.

There are more comparisons like this, but the bottom line is that the crisis of the 1970’s is similar to this crisis, but the causes are different. Back then, America was a healthy business in need of new management. The demographics were good, the social capital was still strong and the working population was young. More important, the ruling class wanted a strong America and saw it as their duty to deliver it. A few tweaks to the system would unleash the economic power of the country.

The current crisis is driven by different forces. This is an end of cycle crisis as the American empire reaches its terminus. Critically, the demographics are much worse, the productive population is old and the social capital has been spent trying to prove Mother Nature wrong for fifty years. More important, the ruling class is now populated by feckless grifters and ridiculous people. They see their duty as throwing fuel on the fire in order to prove how little they care about the country.

What this comparison between this crisis and that of fifty years ago reveals is that this crisis is different in nature. There are general parallels, but the underlying causes are vastly different and that means the results will be different. New management may walk through the door in the next election, but unlike 1980 they will be taking control of an enterprise that needs bankruptcy protection. It may even require a fire sale to clear out the unproductive segments at the top.

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

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

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

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

The Game

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There is an argument that we live in a novel political environment in which the mass media is the political authority. They get on an issue and the political and corporate classes respond to it. We saw this with the George Floyd story that was orchestrated by the big media operations. On the other hand, political actors will seed the media with fake stories hoping they will put it into their megaphones. The Russian collusion hoax cooked up by team Clinton is an example.

A couple of weeks back, Tucker Carlson observed that most Republicans wake up in the morning and go to the New York Times. They and their staff read the thing over breakfast, because it is their guide throughout the day. This is true of mainstream conservatives as well. What passes for the Right in America is entirely controlled by the Left, which is controlled by the media. Old school liberals sound like Trump people when they complain about how the media runs their party.

There is a lot of truth to the media-ocracy claim. The backers of the Ukraine fiasco have been feeding the media nonsense tales about Ukraine. They handed them Ukraine lapel pins they had made up for the occasion. Note no one in the media looked into who supplied everyone on television with those pins. Instead, it was a unified media voice, a wall of sound, selling the Ukraine story. Washington and the political class in Europe were swept up in this unfolding disaster.

The thing is though, the Russia hoax makes clear that the media does not have a coordinated center. The details of the hoax have been supplied in the court case against Clinton crony Michael Sussman. He relied upon confidence men like Franklin Foer, who exist to inject false narratives into the media echo system. Once these fake stories get loose, they rocket around the system, repeated by the sociopaths who are attracted to life in the media echo system.

Further proof of the passive nature of the media system is the war in Ukraine, a place few in the media can find on a map. There are three observable trends in the coverage of the war thus far. One is there are few Western reporters trying to cover the war on the ground in Ukraine. They went over for the photo-ops when it started but made sure to stay in Kiev. They quickly went back to their countries and left the reporting to contractors and interested think tanks.

That is the other thing about the media response to the war. The work-at-home war correspondents now do their reporting from press releases issued by outfits like the Institute for the Study of War. Alternatively, they rely on Ukrainians on the payroll of the American of British intelligence services. In both cases, a five minute search on-line would reveal these sources to be entirely fake. Instead, they just pass on the information without bothering to question any of it.

The lack of original reporting and reliance on single sources with narrow agendas has resulted in a uniform opinion in the media. Even the so-called conservative media, which took off their American flag pins and put on the Ukraine pin, repeated the same stories from the same sources as if it was holy writ. What the Ukraine story reveals is the media echo system operates like a murmuration of starlings, rushing through the news cycle in response to external stimulus.

This reality will lead some to assume this system is controlled by a tiny cabal of deep state actors in a hollowed out volcano. In reality, the people trying to inject their special brand of poison into the system are often tangled in the system. The Covid panic is the perfect example. It was people hoping for media recognition who kept injecting ridiculous claims into the system. These were not deep state players, but often just ordinary people hoping for fifteen minutes of fame.

The “frontline workers” posting their made up tales of woe on social media is the perfect example of how small players can move the media swarm. Hoping for attention, nurses and doctors started positing on social media stories that made them look like selfless heroes trying to save Covid victims. This psychosis, and it was a form of psychosis, was picked up by the media and amplified. These fake stories became fact, which spawned new fake stories made up by media members.

The Covid hoax, and it is fair to call it a hoax at this point, was not the result of clever scheming like the Russian collusion hoax. Instead, it was something like a stampede over a cliff. Unlike the animals in the herd, the people in this media stampede could question the rush over the cliff, but like the animals in the herd, they feared being trampled more than they feared the end result. As a result, fantasy became holy writ and Covid turned into a bizarre mass media religion.

In a way, the berserk obsession with disinformation and misinformation is not entirely motivated by malice toward the general public. The people running the New York Times and Washington Post still cling to the old myths about the media. They think they should be the cynics not falling for their hoaxes. They sort of get the problem, but they lack the proper perspective from their position inside the swarm to see that it is the nature of the swarm, what makes it possible, that is the problem.

It is tempting to think that at some point the public will get wise to the fake news and this madness will come to an end. If no one believes what is in the media, then the media’s ability to shape the news comes to an end. The trouble with this theory is most people have already figured out that the news is fake. The Ukraine war is a prime example, as most people never cared enough about it to listen to the story. Public apathy and skepticism have not changed the behavior of the media.

Instead, what we may be heading to in the short run is a world in which the mass media operates like an on-line role playing game for the managerial class. They get to play the various quests that get created in the media echo system. Since they live in a consequence free world, as in they never pay the price for their error, they are free to explore their dreams within these fantasies. Once the quest is over, they transition to a new quest or maybe play a different character.

We see this happening with Ukraine. As it becomes clear that this story will not end well for Ukraine or the Europeans, the players are looking for a new quest. Joe Biden’s heroic management of the economy through the Putin-Trump inflation spiral looks like a fun new expansion pack. Maybe they play the China as dangerous dragon add-on that came with the Covid edition. Maybe someone is about to release something entirely different and inject it into the media echo system.

The result is we are headed to a world in which the normal people go about their lives as best they can. Every once in a while, they will take notice of the streaming role playing game that keeps the managerial class busy. That will usually happen when the role players mistake their world for the real world, gas prices and baby food shortages being two current examples. Otherwise, the managerial class is becoming a virtual world, a metaverse to occupy an otherwise worthless ruling elite.

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

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

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

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

Holiday Thread

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Here is my Taki post. I have been doing a lot of commentary on the various struggles within conservatism. Their struggle is interesting as they are feeling around for an answer but first making sure to avoid any of the right answers. It is a lot like how crime is discussed in conservative media. They first make sure to remove all reverences to race and then try to explain crime. The same thing happens in these spats over how to revive the corpse of conservatism…

Here is a very useful map of Ukraine. It shows the military groupings, the various conflicts on the front and the important towns and roads. Once you get the hand of the symbols and legends, you see they the happy talk from the West with regards to the Ukrainian army is nonsense. Like an amoeba surrounding and consuming one cell organisms, the Russian army and local militias has broken up and is now consuming the Ukrainian army operating in the Donbas.

The map also reveals the reckless stupidity of the Kiev regime. They should have pulled out of the Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. Those troops cannot be supported and therefore have no way of surviving the Russian advance. Instead they are left to be annihilated as another “heroic last stand” publicity stunt. Thousands of Ukrainian lives have been lost so that the west can own the Russians on Instagram, which should be a special sort of war crime…

Happy Memorial Day!

The Rocks Of War

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

Wars often turn over rocks exposing truths about the age that have either been ignored or hidden from the world. Old tactics, in the case of the Great War, were exposed as obsolete by modern weapons. Sometimes it is in war that the hollowness of a great power is exposed. This was the case of the Soviets in Afghanistan. That war exposed the internal weakness of the regime. The war in Ukraine is similarly exposing problems in the collective West.

The first lesson of this war so far is that Western intelligence has been exposed as useless in understanding modern Russia. At every turn, the information provided to political leaders about what Russia is doing and planning to do has turned out to be more fantasy than reality. The West has been operating on assumptions that may have been true twenty-five years ago but are no longer true today. The result has been a total political failure in response to the invasion.

The big example of this was the claim that the Russians could only support their army in Ukraine for a couple of months. Western strategy was built on the assumption that the Ukrainians just had to hold out for a month or two. They would dig into fortified positions and wait out the Russian assault. Instead, a highly mobile and patient Russian assault is slowly decimating the Ukrainian army. Three months into the conflict and the Russians are on the cusp of victory.

This is another rock turned over in this war. The West has been preparing for a war with a Russian army than has not existed since the Cold War. The Soviet way of war was something called deep battle doctrine. This is based on a highly mobile, combined arms approach to fighting. The Russians would find a weak spot in the enemy front, concentrate forces there, break through the lines and then flood the zone with armor and infantry, creating chaos in the enemy rear.

The Soviet approach required large numbers of men. It imagined millions of men mobilized to fight in the West. This is not the new Russian way of war. The Russians, like everyone else in the West, have been living in the age of low fertility and rising standards of living. Mobilizing millions of men and throwing them into battle like Stalin did against the Nazis is no longer acceptable. Instead, the Russians have organized around reducing casualties to the minimum.

As a practical matter, what those hunkered down Ukrainians have been facing is something like what the Mongols brought to the fight. Instead of one massive army centrally controlled from the rear, it is a collection of small units, self contained and self-directed toward narrow goals. These units combine infantry, armor, mobile artillery and air support, along with the use of drones. This is combined arms warfare reduced to small units working independently.

Because these units are smaller, they are more intolerant of personnel losses, so they are more cautious. A unit that loses its tanks is no longer effective as a unit, so the premium is on reducing losses. The goal is to use speed and mobility to find weak spots in the enemy and quickly exploit them, with minimum losses. Overall, this is a much slower approach to fighting, but once a weakness is exposed, it can be exploited much faster due to the improved mobility and flexibility.

This is on display in the Donbas. The Russians used artillery and airpower to break down the Ukrainian defenses at Popasnaya, which is a strategic town in the middle of the contact line. The Russians were then able to rush units into this breech and employ the modern version of deep battle doctrine. These small units combined to turn the contact line into a series of pockets surrounded by Russian units. Now the Russians are pounding these cauldrons with artillery and air power.

The result is the West, primarily Washington, prepared the Ukrainians to fight the wrong war against the wrong army. Instead of a short defense against a Soviet siege, they are getting a war of attrition against a highly mobile and flexible army using the right weapons for such a fight. That is another aspect of this war that should be a wake up call to Western planners. The Russian weapons are better and more useful than the Western weapons supplied to the Ukrainians.

In line with the new way of fighting, the Russians have developed weapons that can be incredibly useful with small, combined arms units. They do not require a complex information grid so that commanders in the rear can direct the action. Modern technology is used to make it easy for these small units to fight effectively on their own or quickly combine with other units on the fly. The Russians have also done their homework and have evolved effective counter measures.

This is why the many “game changers” the West has sent to the Ukrainians have failed to do much damage to the Russian forces. The javelin has been a bust. The Man-portable air defense systems (ManPads) are worthless. The Russians have made these weapons obsolete. The big shock is their drone defense. The kamikaze drones and the Turkish TB2 have not been the game changer that was promised because the Russians have evolved effective jamming tools.

Probably the biggest rocks turned over in this war are economic. The assumption of the West when they instigated this war was that the Russian economy had not changed since the end of the Cold War. For a long time, the West has looked at Russia as a gas station masquerading as a country. It was a version of Venezuela, wholly dependent on selling natural resources to the West. If the sale of those resources slowed just a bit, then the Russian economy would collapse.

This has turned out to be wildly wrong. Now, part of this failure is due to the raging bigotry of the neocons behind the war. Their seething hatred for the Russian people has blinded them to many things. The economic revolution that has taken place in Russia is the biggest one. It turns out that the Russian economy is much more resilient and flexible than anyone in the West realized. As a result, the sanctions regime has turned out to be a disastrous failure.

That has turned over another economic rock. The European economy has been revealed to be a house of cards. The sanctions regime is creating havoc for the Europeans, because their economy was based on the assumption that the Russians would always supply them with cheap necessities. The EU is a mommy economy where Mother Russia makes sure her babies are warm and fed. Shortages and spirally prices are bringing this reality home to Europeans.

In total, what the war in Ukraine is revealing is that the collective West has been living in a fantasy world for the last few decades. Without a real challenge, they have been allowed to indulge in whatever fantasies they liked. Like trust fund babies raised in insular opulence, Western leaders are unprepared for a world where they have to perform their role as elites. The war is exposing them as a toxic blend of self-indulgence, stupidity and ignorance.

The truth about war is that the rocks that it turns over cannot be turned back over to hide the truth underneath. The West will now have to face this new reality, especially on the economic front. The grand schemes for creating a new world order in the image of Western elites will now have to give way to this new realty. What has been revealed is that the new world order is one in which the West must compete in a multipolar world of civilizational equals. That means a new elite for this new age.

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

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

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

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

Sociopath Or True Believer?

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Outside of the progressive hive, there has been a long running debate, going back to the 1980’s, about the awareness of the people in the hive. Left-wing people say things that are clearly not true, but they seem to believe what they are saying. They have some of the facts and seem to grasp certain concepts, but they come to conclusions that are obviously false. The question is whether the people in the hive really believe what they say or do they know the truth?

The default assumption, popular with mainstream conservatives, is that progressives are well-intentioned, but wrong on the facts. These are reasonable people who can come to the right answer if you slowly explain it to them. Conservatives have built their entire movement around the assumption that there is some way to explain things to the Left that will trigger a revelation. They will see their error, throw down their weapons and embrace the conservatives as brothers.

Along with conservatism, this view is fading from the scene. It is a generational thing as conservatism and most conservatives were formed in the post-war period. Most people have now concluded that the Left knows they are lying, but they are consumed with partisanship, so they are fine with lying. Far-left cranks will claim men can get pregnant because it advances their interests. The blank slate is central to their program, so they defend nutty ideas like the trans business.

In a way, this is a coping strategy for conservatives. They cannot accept that there are people not driven by facts and reason. To do so would mean the whole facts and reason approach is a waste of time. If the hive is immune to reason, then there is no point in reasoning with them and therefore no need for conservatives. Instead, they fall back on the mendacity claim. That way, if they can expose the lie, the liars will have not choice but to admit the lie and receive the truth.

There is no doubt that self-interest drives mendacity in politics, but this only works at the personal or small group level. Politicians lie for personal advantage. Their staff and allies will join them in the lie if it benefits them. It was clear that Jen Psaki knew she was lying and she knew everyone knew she was lying. It was her job and the path to a television job where she would make big money. This is how things work in entertainment and politics and everyone knows it.

The behavior of the hive, in contrast, is not for petty advantage. It looks more like a religious duty. People in the hive now declare their pronouns and claim people are assigned sex at birth as an act of faith. The motivation to put pronouns in an e-mail signature is no different than the motivation to wear a crucifix. It is way to signal your membership in a religion. In fact, religions have often required these displays as a way to separate the faithful from the rest.

Here is an example of how this works. This article in the Atlantic is about how dog breeds are a social construct. It is based in a shoddy bit of social science that was concocted to address the dog breed line used by people who question the blank slate arguments of the hive. Dog breeds are used by critics of the hive as a proxy for the human family and human diversity. Just as there are different breeds of dogs, there are different breeds of humans with different characteristics.

The first thing to note is that this was an organized effort. On the same day, the Washington Post had the same story about the dog breed study. This was then picked up by small sites that republished it. That is how it works in the hive. The second thing to note is the Atlantic writer is someone with impressive academic credentials. Mx. Wu has a PhD in microbiology from Harvard. She did her undergraduate and masters at Stanford. Box ticking aside, those are impressive credentials.

Despite those credentials she has never worked in the human sciences. Instead, she has been a small time contributor to on-line sites. Her role here is to give the fake study legitimacy by having someone with credentials endorse the study. This is what the lawyers would call mens rea. The rollout of this fake study says they know they are promoting a fraud. They selected the sites and authors in order to best promote what they know is not true.

On the other hand, where is the personal advantage? The problem with the conscious mendacity angle is there is no personal advantage for the people involved. It is not as if Mx. Wu gains something from this. It will not boost her career in science, assuming she wants a career in the human sciences. The Post used a random dingbat on the staff for their version of the story. Instead, Mx. Wu is selflessly sacrificing her credibility to show her commitment to the progressive faith.

The camp that argues that self-interest is what motivates these will point out that Mx. Wu could be working from self-interest. People with her credentials who promote crackpot ideas like the blank slate are quickly elevated in the hive. Credentials count for a lot with the Left. If a credentialed person says the moon is made of cheese, the faithful will believe it. Therefore, Mx. Wu is simply gaming the system in the hope of being quickly elevated to high status in the hive.

That brings as back to where we started. It is clear from examples like Mx. Wu that there can be no reasoning with these people. A woman with her training should see right through that study. She chooses to promote it, ether because she is a sociopath or she is a true believer. In either case, facts and reason will have no purchase on her mind or the minds of the people like her. What motivates members of the hive is either sociopathy or faith, neither of which yields to reason.

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

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

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

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

An Empire Of Lies

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An informal metric for measuring the stability of a society is the distance between reality and the official truth of the ruling regime. The more lies the regime tells, the less stable it and the society over which it rules. Official lies are a good proxy for the degree of authoritarianism within the regime. The degree of authoritarianism is a good proxy for the level of official insecurity. The more thuggish the regime the less support it enjoys, thus the more it needs to lie to the people.

At the extreme end of this metric is a place like North Korea. The regime is deeply paranoid about everything. The Kim family does not trust anyone in the ruling class and no one in the ruling class trusts anyone, especially Kim. The one thing everyone agrees upon is they cannot trust the people. This is why they get images of the tubby Kim in heroic poses or stories of him making ten holes in one playing golf. The regime feels it needs to present him as a god to intimidate the people.

On the other end of the spectrum, you get a place like Switzerland that barely has a government relative to the rest of Europe. Many Swiss residents do not know who is currently holding the position of president. It is a rotating position currently held by someone calling herself Simonetta Sommaruga. The Swiss government has no need to turn her into a rock star or make while claims about her. The official truth of Switzerland is easy for everyone to see, so they have no need to lie.

Obviously, it is an informal metric that is subjective. An extreme case like North Korea is easy to use, but where would France or Germany fall on the scale? They are closer to Switzerland than Ukraine or the United States, but not so close that anyone in France would say they believe their government. In fact, that is the story of the West since the end of the Cold War. Every Western nation has moved down the scale of honesty toward the North Korean pole over the last three decades.

Lying has consequences. One lie begets another lie which then requires more elaborate lying to cover up the previous lies. This lowers trust in the state, but it also lowers trust in institutions and eventually lowers social trust. Step one is the lies erode faith in the ruling class of the country. Step two is people lose faith in the institutions for not having punished the liars. The final step is the people who wake up to the official lies lose trust in those who keep falling for the lies.

You see this with the school shootings. Generations of lying about the nature of crime and the role of guns in these school shooting, have made it impossible to have a civil conversation about the issue. The bodies were not even cold after the latest school shooting and the usual suspects were out in public telling the all to familiar lies about the causes of these crimes. The only thing that comes from this is normal people grow to hate these liars a little more than they did yesterday.

How many people watched President Biden speak about the Texas shooting? The answer, if it was possible to get an honest one, was close to zero. Joe Biden has been a promiscuous liar for generations. Now he is an incontinent zombie barely able to read his script. That script is written by the same collection of sociopaths than have infected politics since the Clintons blew into town. Even the sociopaths have lost interest in the production of these ridiculous theaters of mendacity.

Tragic outliers like a deranged lunatic going on a rampage are just part of the human condition, but can something be done to limit it? It feels like this stuff happens more often now, but who can know? The even bigger question is why are these obviously deranged people ignored by the people around them? The Buffalo shooter was ignored by everyone, despite the obvious signs. The liars fill the space with lies about the subject so that getting a straight answer is impossible.

Of course, the reason the liars exist is they keep people off balance. Official lying has been outsourced in what may be the most cyclical public-private partnership in human history, so that the rulers can just nod along with the symphony of lies. Biden’s script writers just go to one of the websites of the many organizations who exist to produce official nonsense and jot down a few of their lines. The mass media, of course, then blasts this and their own lies to the public.

One of the underrated aspects of Orwell’s Animal Farm is how the pigs used deception to create doubt among the animals. It reached the point where the animals could not trust their own memory. The other day, the Washington Post claimed George Floyd was shot by police. How long before school children are taught that he was hanged by the Proud Boys? More important, how many people will tire of correcting the record and this lie becomes official truth?

The official lies are not just about keeping the public confused. It also serves to keep the managerial class huddled together. On the topic of official lies, the classic Vaclav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless” comes to mind. Amazingly, the people who shower the public with disinformation, the official lies, claim to be fighting against disinformation, often citing Havel’s essay. The lying is an important part of their identity as a besieged group defending “our democracy.”

In the final years of the Soviet Union, the general public no longer believed anything said by their government. The people in government were every bit as cynical about the official truths, but they were paid to lie so they lied. What held it together is both sides were sure the other side believed the lies, at least enough of them that the rest dared not question the lies. The collapsed came when everyone realized that no one believed what they were forced to say or forced to hear.

Havel opened his famous essay with this line. “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called dissent.” He then explained, “It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity.” That was almost fifty years ago in a world that is largely forgotten by modern people, yet terribly familiar to us now.

The final sentence of that opening paragraph is, “What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.” One paragraph from a dissident operating in an alien system from the past captures the current moment in America. A decade later that system collapsed. That is what the sea of lies from our rulers tells us about what lies ahead. A regime built on lies always ends in collapse.

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

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

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

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

The Sussman Trial

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

When Americans think of government corruption, it is government officials getting the public’s money confused with their own money. Maybe a politician takes bribes to do the bidding of someone with interests before the government. It can also be a civil servant taking bribes to do someone a favor. Alternatively, it can be the government insiders colluding with outside players so that the insiders make money from a government contract or a government program.

While those are examples of corruption, the problem goes beyond people in government stealing from the public. In the general sense, corruption is an indifference to the rules that supposedly govern society. The corrupt do not see the rules as limits on their behavior, but as obstacles to overcome in pursuit of their goals. They have no respect for or allegiance to the spirit of the law. More important, they have no respect for the morality that lies behind the law.

This contempt for the spirit of the law is on display in the ongoing trial of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussman. He is charged with lying to the FBI about his relationship with the Clinton campaign. He brought the phony Russian collusion hoax material to the FBI claiming he got it as part of his work on cyber security. According to the FBI, he said he was not representing anyone with regards to the issue. In truth he was working for the Clinton campaign on exactly this issue.

Charging someone with lying to the government is usually a way to leverage a lawyer or public official into cooperation. The charge itself is relatively minor, but it has serious career consequences, so it is a good tool to use on a lawyer. In this case, it appears the prosecutor is using it as a way to build a larger narrative to explain how the biggest hoax in American history was perpetrated on the public. This trial provides the general plot structure for the rest of the story that will come later.

That plot structure is this. Sussman was running a group of dirty tricks people for the Clinton campaign back in 2016. Using a lawyer for this provides them with some confidentiality in the event things go wrong. Sussman hired a group called Fusion GPS and some other freelance operators to manufacture dirt on Trump. They would then feed this to reporters on their payroll. Franklin Foer is someone they used to put these fake stories into the mainstream media.

The way this fraud worked is Sussman went to the FBI with fake documents alleging a secret channel between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. As a partner in a connected Washington law firm, he gets priority access to senior officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, others are planting the story with their people in the media with the claim the FBI is already looking into it. The media hacks then call the FBI for comment and add that to the story.

There is nothing new here. Political actors have been using friends in the media since the dawn of the printing press. The reason we have the Sally Hemmings fable is that opponents of Jefferson slandered him in the media of the time with the claim that he was having sex with his slaves. In this age, when all of the mass media is in the pocket of the uniparty, the fake news is mostly about promoting the aims of the party and distracting people from that which is bad for the party.

An interesting wrinkle in this case is that Sussman got the fake documentation for the Trump-Russia link from one of the goons on his dirty tricks squad. That trickster was a person named Rodney Joffe, who was some sort of IT consultant. He was the guy who allegedly created the fake documentation. He was also an FBI informant, according to the various filings in the case. This raises an obvious question about who actually concocted the Russian collusion hoax.

That may be the point of this trial and the long running Durham investigation, which promises to continue for many years. By pinning the scandal on Sussman, they can also pin the scandal on Hillary Clinton. That serves the interests of the uniparty by making sure she does not run again on 2024. More important, it paints the FBI as the innocent party, hoodwinked by those dastardly Clinton people. Sussman has been paid to take the fall, which is why he is not cooperating.

That may seem a bit Machiavellian, until you remember that the senior staff of the FBI were engaged in wholesale spying on the Trump campaign. There is no question that two dozen or so characters involved in the Spygate scandal defrauded the courts and violated their oath of office. One guy was charged in that for doctoring an e-mail that was used to defraud the court. Otherwise, the rest have sailed off into lives of comfort, having done their part for the cause.

Then you have the Mueller investigation. This was engineered by people in the Department of Justice and the FBI who knew at the time that the claims about Russian collusion were manufactured by the Clinton campaign. That is something else that has come out in the Sussman trial. The FBI knew the documents provided were fake and they knew the source of them. Since the source was a confidential FBI informant, it is possible that the real source was the FBI all along.

All of this sounds like the grubby political intrigue that has distinguished the Clinton era of politics, but it also highlights the depravity of the political system. Across the upper reaches of the political system is a deep contempt for the rules. The claims made about Nixon fifty years ago have now become the culture of Washington. The charge against Nixon was that he corrupted the institutions for personal gain. Today the institutions corrupt anyone unfortunate enough to have contact with them.

Corruption has consequences. Once a ruling class stops respecting its own rules, the rest of society soon follows. For example, it was the Russophobia created by the Clinton dirty tricks campaign that opened the door for the neocons. Five years of demonizing Putin and Russia to attack Trump made it easy for the usual reptiles to launch this pointless war against Russia. Every time you buy gas or food, you can thank Hillary Clinton for the sticker shock.

Another example to consider is the media. One of the things revealed in the trial thus far is the degree of collusion between members of the elite press and the people running the dirty tricks campaign. Fusion GPS was founded by journalists. None of the “reporters” who participated in this hoax have been punished. Many of them have been given awards for their “reporting” on the story. The media is every bit as mobbed up as the people on the political class.

One final note on the Sussman trial. The judge in the case is connected to the FBI gangsters exposed during Spygate. He also used to pal around with Sussman when they were learning how to be crooks together. The jury has several Clinton donors, to make sure the jury remains impartial. For those old enough to remember, the trial now has this level of objectivity and probity. Anyone thinking Sussman gets convicted should calibrate their expectations accordingly.

The lack of public interest in this case is due, in part, to the media organs of the party being told to ignore it. The bigger reason is that the staggering level of corruption in the ruling class has been normalized. People are no longer shocked or offended by the lying from Washington. It is the rare times when someone speaks honestly that grabs the attention of the public. The Sussman trial confirms the obvious. America is a kleptocracy run by a thoroughly corrupt ruling elite.

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

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

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

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

The Faustian Bargain

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Note: The Taki post is up. This week it is a discourse on the proposed replacement for originalism in conservative jurisprudence. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly popular to examine what went wrong with the conservative movement. This was mostly the result of Trump winning the Republican nomination, despite universal opposition from conservatives. At that point it was no longer possible to ignore the collapse of conservatism. Prior to 2016, the movement was the gatekeeper for the party. Trump and the Dirt People kicked open the gates and found nothing worth keeping inside.

One result of this is the sprouting of proposed alternatives like Yoram Hazony’s national conservatism, common good conservativism and integralism. Libertarians, of course, maintain the fantasy that this is their time. There are certainly others working to produce something to fill the void on the Right. All of these proposed alternative start with a basic claim that conservatism failed. None of these new conservatisms bother to think too hard about why Buckley conservatism failed.

This is what makes this post from Paul Gottfried important. He was around when many of the critical turns of the conservative movement were made, so he has a perspective on it that few have today. Most of the main players from the growth phase of Buckley conservatism are gone now. With them went the personal disputes that ended up shaping what became mainstream conservatism in the 1980’s. The one thing the Left has right is that politics is always personal.

Gottfried tries to do three things in the post. One is to bring attention to the recent scholarship on Harry Jaffa, who was a central figure in the debates about the shape and direction of conservatism. Then there is the fact that there was a time when debate was possible within conservatism. Others have noted that there was an interregnum in which sensitive topics like race and immigration could be debated. That window closed in the 1990’s, eventually taking the public square with it.

The main point of Gottfried’s post is to place the blame for this and the collapse of conservatism at the feet of the neoconservatives. Before the neoconservatives gained power, it was possible for Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford to live together. Jaffa was largely responsible for the Lincoln fetish among conservatives. He claimed the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments were a perfecting of the original Constitution by reincorporating the sentiments of the Declaration.

Bradford was a Southerner and a Southern conservative. This not only placed him at odds with Jaffa’s reimagining of the Founding and Civil War, but it put him on the losing side of the internal struggles within conservatism. He was on the Russel Kirk wing of the Right, which was purged by Buckley in the 1980’s. In fact, Bradford was one of the first to be hurled into the void by conservatives. Paul Gottfried blames this urge to purge squarely on the neoconservatives.

There is truth to it, but the desire to excommunicate rivals exists in all movements, so it is hardly unique to the neocons. The question is how were they able to change the rules in order to disqualify the arguments of their opponents? After all, no one was purged for being factually incorrect. The dispute between the paleos and neos was over moral questions and that is where Jaffa comes back into the room. It is Jaffa’s work that gave the neocons the chance to rig morality to their advantage.

The central claim of Harry Jaffa is that the Constitution was an imperfect effort to encode the sentiments of the Declaration into the political framework of the new nation created out of the break from England. The contradictions within the constitutional order eventually led to the Civil War. This allowed for some necessary corrections to advance the nation down the road toward the sentiments in the Declaration. Lincoln becomes the Moses of this new nation forged in liberty.

Of course, this requires a reading of early American history that steps outside of the actual facts and written accounts of the Founders. It also requires a new version of the events leading up to the Civil War. That was all made easy because it proved a path forward for conservatives to embrace egalitarianism. They could finally claim that their opponents on the Left were the real racist because Lincoln was a Republican, freed the slaves and said stuff about all men being equal.

That is not being fair to Jaffa, who deserves a much more through debunking than time permits, but this was his contribution to conservatism. The cult of Lincoln he created for the Right cut them loose from the old conservativism, rooted in the natural order, and provided them with a new moral foundation. The New Right would be about equality and liberty. The New Left, in contrast, would be about equality and justice, thus tying the two together through egalitarianism.

Here is a post on the same site as the Gottfried post, in which the editors reject the new normal of American politics. Everything is good until this. “In reality, race is not the ultimate fact of human identity or the central problem of American life. Different ethnic populations have different general tendencies, but not different natural rights. Everyone is capable of learning to live well in this country, but only if we confidently endorse both our geographical and cultural boundaries.”

The linked post in that quote is worth reading, as it rips the mask from the “new conservatism” and exposes it as the old conservatism. The great fork in the road, the shadow that hangs over human history, is biology. The story of man is not one tale with many chapters, but many stories of many people, all of whom have their own unique understanding of themselves and how they should live. The genuine man of the Right understands this and accepts it. Equality, in short, is inhuman.

When you pick up one end of a stick, you pick up the other. This is the problem that destroyed 20th century conservatism. They were offered a Faustian bargain from the likes of Harry Jaffa. They accepted the egalitarianism of the radicals as their foundation stone and in exchange they were rewarded with riches. Conservatism was once again Northern Conservatism and followed the same path that another Southerner observed about them in the 19th century.

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

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

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

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

Jibber-Jabber

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The show this week is the season finale, so to speak. No show next week as it is a long weekend in the United States. I need a little break to catch up on some other items, so this is a good time for that. This week I empty out the mailbag and address the complaints that have come in since the last time. The title for the show reflects the fact that the show has no theme. It is just a grab bag of topics that have accumulated since the last mailbag show back in the winter.

Something I did not notice while compiling the show was that I have not received any Covid questions or comments in a while. For a long time it was close to a daily occurrence, then it settled into the same pattern as other topics. Looking back, the last Covid e-mail was back in in the winter. That means the topic has pretty much fallen out of the news cycle now. There are efforts to revive the franchise but rebooting Covid is going to be a tough sell, even to people on the Left.

Next up for a starring role on the big stage is the election. You can see the shift already, as we head into the unofficial start of summer. Ukraine is starting to slide down the page for the New York Times and the Washington Post. This is no doubt this is coming at the direction of the party, who may be figuring out that it is a loser issue. The big spending bill that just passed signals the end of the line for the Ukraine story in Washington as events on the ground turn negative for them.

I have to say, this may be a hilarious election season from a dissident perspective, as it is nothing but bad news for the uniparty. The GOP has managed to stock their ticket with zombies from party central, but those zombies will have no choice but to say mean things about Washington while campaigning. Of course, Trump will be out there on the campaign trail and you know he will be slinging mud at McConnell. It means nothing, but it should make for good theater.

The real action is on the other side. I fear I may blow a funny fuse watching the inner party explain how inflation, gas shortages and a declining stock market are the fault of white supremacists invading Ukraine. Even better will be watching Jean-Pierre, the black lesbian Biden spokesbot read these lines from her script. I though Shark Eyes Psaki was peak ridiculous in that job, but then they managed to find another gear and give us someone dumber that old Jen.

It is going to be a rough period economically and a lot of our people will suffer as a result, so we need to avoid being callous. We also have to avoid getting sucked into the madness we see in convectional politics. The best way to do that is to enjoy the absurdity of it and the ridiculousness of the people. If I were to make a banner for the Dissident Right convention, it would feature the band playing on the deck of the Titanic as it went under. That is our best approach to the current crisis.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

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

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

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Opening Ceremonies
  • The Ideal Society
  • Abortion
  • The Economic Crisis
  • The Fuentes Drama
  • Voting
  • Rootin’ For Pootin’
  • You’ve Changed Man

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Full Show On Odysee