College Sportsball

Posted on July 26, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. Behind the green door we have the Sunday podcast, a post on the joy of work and a review of the movie Giant, which I hated. Most of this is available to those who buy me a beer. They are not hosting podcasts yet, so that is exclusive to SubscribeStar for now.

Last week, the American sporting world was sent into a frenzy over news that the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma were planning to leave the Big 12 conference for the Southeastern Conference. In addition to stripping the Big 12 of its flagship institutions, it would make the SEC into a juggernaut. They would have half of the dozen or so major brands in college football. This would no doubt set off a frenzy of moves by the rest of college football in order to keep pace.

For those outside the United States, college athletics is a big business and a big part of the sporting tradition in America. It all started innocently enough when groups of young men at college would challenge the young men of another college in some sort of athletic competition. Before long it was formalized and became a part of the identity of the college, a way for the students and alumni to bond. The colleges found it was good advertising, so they would offer good players free tuition.

Into the 1980’s college sports, not unlike professional sports, was mostly the plaything of rich people. Wealthy alumni would give money to the school so they could build arenas, pay players, and hire top coaches. To be a top donor to a college was a prestigious thing, so successful alumni were motivated to give back. Then the world changed in the 1980’s with the explosion of television. With the spread of cable, television revenue exploded, and it poured into college sports.

It is fair to say that college sports, particularly college football and college basketball, shifted from semi-professional and informal to professional and formal. Prior to the cable age, top coaches made a nice living, but the rest were paid like any other employee of the university. Today, top coaches are the highest paid employees on campus, by a factor of ten. The college athletics department is a 100 million dollar enterprise with hundreds of staff and players.

College football is the primary driver. Football is the most popular television sport in America by far. College basketball also plays a role, but it is primarily football that is driving the economic revolution in college sports. Unlike the NFL, the fans of college football have a bond with the players, as the players, in theory, are attending classes at their school and will be proud alumni one day. Despite the obvious exceptions, this is true, and the players remain part of the community forever.

Both college basketball and college football offer good examples of the dangers of an unregulated marketplace. Into the 1980’s, all college sports were governed by the NCAA, which tried to maintain college athletics as amateur endeavors. With the flood of TV money, the power of the NCAA has declined to the point where they have little say over the governance of football or basketball. Instead, what has erupted is a free market free-for-all where the big try to eat the small and even some of the big.

Prior to the financialization of college sports via the conduit of television money, college sports were a regional enterprise. Schools organized locally into conferences, which supplemented the NCAA in governing the sports and provided local management of the routine items like scheduling and tournaments. With billions in TV money, these conferences were not only empowered to break free of NCAA governance, but they could also go to war with one another in an effort to gain market share.

Contrary to what libertarians claim, this explosion in competition among suppliers did not result in lower prices to consumers or great variety of product, but rather a massive contraction of the marketplace along with spirally costs to consumers. In the 1980’s colleges gave their students free tickets. A college football game was a cheap afternoon of fun for the fans. Today, students pay for seats through their tuition and the fans often have to donate thousands for the right to buy tickets.

Further, the sport of college football is contracting. That is the significance of the latest news about Texas and Oklahoma. The old model was a conference anchored by a few big brands, like Texas and Oklahoma. The league shared revenue and cooperated in scheduling and promotion. The anchor schools got to control the league for allowing the smaller programs to freeload off their brand a little. That model is collapsing as the big brands now seek to combine and exclude the smaller schools.

Like the computer business, college football is headed to a world in which a small number of big names control the market and work to exclude everyone else from the revenue stream. In the 1980’s there was a dozen computer makers with different takes on the home computer. Today there is basically one type of PC. The same happened with mobile phones. The unregulated technology market collapsed into an oligarchy, and we are seeing the same thing happen with college athletics.

Something similar happened with boxing in the 1980’s. It used to be that every large city had weekly boxing shows where up and coming fighters battled one another for recognition and the dream of a title shot. Television put boxing on every week as a normal part of its content. Friday night fights was a thing into the 1970’s, until the cable television explosion. Within short order, greed and corruption removed boxing from the public square and now it is barely an afterthought.

This will probably happen with college sports. There are now minor leagues popping up to pay high school basketball players rather than have them compete in amateur leagues or go to college. It will soon be like tennis, in which promising players turn pro once they hit puberty. Also, like tennis, the interest from the general public will decline. A few stars will make millions, but the rest will be used to maintain a system that was busted out by the usual suspects.

The point of all this is that markets are man-made things. They are not like mushrooms that spring up wherever man leaves nature alone. In order for a market to function, each transaction in the market must have a disinterested third party with the power to enforce both ends of the transaction. It must also have the power to prevent a monopoly of supply or demand. Like a sea wall, this governing authority prevents nature from taking its course and turning the market into an oligarchy.

Boxing never had a governing body to impose order, so it collapsed into a chaos of greed and corruption. College athletics is going through the same process and will meet the same end. Without some entity to guard the interest of the whole, the participants will cannibalize one another until the system collapses. This is the nature of markets and it is why markets can only exist when a controlling authority tasked with preserving the market has the power to impose order on the market actors.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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!

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The Book of Five Rings

Posted on July 23, 2021 by thezman

Clausewitz famously drew the parallel between war and politics when he said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Therefore, is makes sense for those engaged in politics to study the tactics of war and the warrior. It is not an accident that many of the great political figures in our history were also military men. Twelve U.S. presidents were generals. For a country founded on the principle of civilian rule, having a quarter of the executives come from the military is telling.

The Book of Five Rings is a book on martial arts written by a legendary Japanese swordsman named Miyamoto Musashi. He was also a philosopher, strategist and luckily for us, a writer. He became famous in 17th century Japan for his unique fighting style and his undefeated record in his 61 duels. He is known to westerners through his book on strategy, but in Japan he is still remembered for his great deeds. There is a shrine named after him, which is supposed to be his burial site.

Back in my youth when I lived in another country also called America, this book was popular among conservatives. Japan Inc. was clobbering American industry and it was claimed that it was due to their superior business strategies. This book was popular with Japanese businessmen, so it became popular with American businessmen who wanted to pretend to be learned strategists. Business tycoons like to imagine themselves as warriors, so it made perfect sense.

This week the show is about this book and the lessons that are contained in it which may apply to our age. Conveniently, it is broken into five sections, so there is a ten minute segment on each of the books that make up the whole book. It is a very short book in total that could easily be classified as a pamphlet. Musashi was not the sort for beating around the bush in his writing. The last book is just one page, a total of 311 words not counting the title and the salutation.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. 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, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a 15-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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
07:00: The Ground Book
17:00: The Water Book
27:00: The Fire Book
37:00: The Wind Book
47:00: The Boom of The Void
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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The Partisan State

Posted on July 22, 2021 by thezman

It was Lenin who popularized the term partisan, as in someone who is party-minded or exclusively concerned with the interests of his political party. He coined the term to explain why socialists should abandon objective analysis of politics. In a society of antagonistic classes, the owners of property versus the laboring classes, class interests and material conditions of existence determine political outlook. Therefore, all claims to objectivity are delusional or self-serving.

We see this in the dynamics of American politics, but not in the way in which Marxists imagined the concept. The left side of the ruling elite imagines themselves as the vanguard of society. They are the ones leading social change in order to achieve their not always well-define ideals. As a practical matter, this means they are the champions and caretakers of the interests of minority groups or in the language of the moment, “the under-represented and historically excluded groups.”

The opponent is always cast as the face of established interests. After all, the power dynamic would not make a lot of sense if the opponents of the oppressed were powerless or inclusive. In partisan politics, it is always David versus Goliath, even when David is all powerful and Goliath is powerless. For most of the last half century, the American Left has had total control of the high ground in America, but they are sure they are the underdog and the Right controls everything.

What this means is that the power relationship is the keystone of the moral dynamic within partisan politics. The underdog, the oppressed, the excluded, must always be the moral superior. Otherwise, it is possible that the oppressed are being oppressed for good reasons or worse yet, the partisan is in fact the oppressor. We see this today where massive global corporations destroy the lives of ordinary citizens while simultaneously claiming this is being done in self-defense.

In Marxist theory, once the working class conquered the capital class, there would no longer be a need for politics. The workers would usher in a classless society. Without classes, there could be no class conflict and therefore no need for politics. In reality, the partisan needs an opponent to exist. The very definition of the partisan is rooted in the existence of the opponent. If one wanted to identify the inflection point of the Soviet Union, it would be when Brezhnev toasted Nixon.

In America, this problem has been solved by generating an organic opponent, custom made to play the role of oppressor, while never threatening the real power. In the middle of the last century, the American Left was in total control. The New Deal was confirmed by the fact that progressives conquered the economic depression at home and conquered fascism around the world. The best the Republican Party could do is promise to be just like the Democrats, which was pointless.

The birth of conservatism solved a massive problem. Buckley style conservatism began as a revolt against the war socialism that lingered on long after the war, but quickly became a usable opponent when debating the next great crusade, the long twilight struggle against the ancient opponent to the East. Conservatism was quickly packaged as the face of the oppressor, the tool of corporate interests. Soon, every Republican was pictured as the little guy from the Monopoly game.

Back then, the coalition of the oppressed championed by the Left reflected the demographics of the country. It was mostly white urban working class people and rural whites, with blacks as a silent partner. The silent partner grew less silent over time, but the demographics of the country grew darker as well. The original opponent was the white middle-class and has remained so. As the complexion of the coalition has grown darker, the nature of the opponent has grown whiter.

The trouble is the old Buckley conservatism discredited itself after the Cold War and no longer makes for a useful opponent. The system has been desperate to create a new enemy, but so far, they have only come up with cartoon villains. The persecution of the January 6th protestors is as much out of frustration as anything else. The Left is so angry that they cannot find real bad guys, they are taking it out on grandmothers who had the temerity to walk into the people’s house.

The ridiculousness of the new bogeymen does not mean the partisans have thrown in the towel on the project. There are efforts to create a new right-wing, which they have helpfully called the New Right. Members of the Old Right are looking for a reboot, so they are happy to join the project. The heirs of Trotsky are hard at work trying to sort this problem as well. They helped the Old Right avoid putting their ideas into practice for 70 years, so they are hoping to repeat this with the New Right.

Therein lies a critical part of the partisan society. It must always be partisans versus objectivist, with partisans having the power. The partisan puts his ideas into practice, while the objectivist is content to describe the world. The main reason for this is that as soon as the objectivist tries to act on his ideas, he is ruined. We see this in dissident politics, where you can analyze what is happening, but if you hint at any action, the C-suites of global capital are alive with ideas on how to crush you.

The thing is, the partisan state relies upon all parties believing that the struggle is real, not just theater. In America, this has meant that the upper-middle-class radicals must believe the enemy has real power and is willing to use it. On the other side, the perpetual losers must think they can win. Politics in the partisan state is a game of zebras versus lions. The zebras win most skirmishes, but in the end, the lions win the battle, and they only need to win once. The lions control every outcome.

The question is what happens when people stop believing this fantasy. Dissidents see the growing ranks of people who no longer see a point to conservatism or even conventional politics. In a world of rigged elections and grotesque levels of political corruption, voting is an insult. Something similar is happening on the Left, where the disaffected Bernie Bros are questioning the game. They already have a new party that is on the ballot in over twenty states.

The Soviet Union provides a little insight as to what happens when the struggle stops being real for the people. The 1920’s and 1930’s provided the Bolsheviks with enemies they could use to justify themselves. The war provided the ultimate enemy for the system, but then came the peace. The Khrushchev years were about making the dream of socialism real, but when that failed, the partisan state ceased to exist. Instead, it was a generation of oligarchic rule with the tattered trappings of socialism.

It can be argued that the détente with the West is the only thing that kept the Soviet Union from collapsing much earlier. The American empire needed the Soviet Empire, so it was happy to help the Soviets keep their system running. The American empire has no enemy to serve this role. The Chinese are too smart to be trapped into a new Cold War and the Russians are too weak. The instability we see is a partisan state that has run out of enemies and therefore, lost its moral authority.

Corona Warning

Posted on July 21, 2021 by thezman

It is becoming increasingly clear that most of what the ruling class has been telling us about the corona virus is false. The virus is real, and people have died from it, but everything else we have been told has not been 100% true. The origin of the virus is the most obvious example. Trump called it the “China Virus”, so the managerial elite denied that was the case. They made claims about it possibly originating somewhere else and just showing up in force in China. That was a lie.

Of course, the big lie to this point is that the measures the government imposed were rooted in science. Mask wearing was about preventing the sick from spreading the virus to the rest of us. Alternatively, it was about keeping healthy people from inhaling the virus as it buzzed around in the air. The social distancing stuff was also supposed to be science! None of the measures turned out to be rooted in anything more than superstition and a desire to abuse the population.

The reason that most people went along with these measures initially was that the official word about the virus was that it was Black Death. It is easy to forget, but the regime circulated images of bodies in the streets over in Wuhan. They used similar images when the virus hit Italy. Then they used images from horror movies claiming they were from overrun hospitals. They sold the virus as a potential extinction event, so even the most cynical prepared for the worst.

Corona has become the very definition of the big lie. The warnings about the virus were “lies so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” One should take a minute to appreciate the amazing bit of irony in all of this. Hitler is credited with coining the term to describe the people he saw as his natural enemy. Today, the people relying on the big lie to sustain themselves are making themselves mad looking for Hitler.

Putting all of that aside, we may be arriving at a point where those previous big lies start to shrink down in size and look reasonable. The number of people testing positive for the corona virus, despite being fully vaccinated, is becoming an issue. In the UK, they are reporting that between 40% and 60% of patients hospitalized with corona have been fully vaccinated. There is some confusion about the number as they originally reported the higher figure, but then the media made them change it.

We are seeing something similar happening in Israel. They have been one of the most aggressive countries on the vaccination front. They started early and were the most effective at getting people into the program. As a result, they are one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. They are currently reporting that over 60% of their severe cases are people who have been fully vaccinated. Moderna executives may want to hire food testers and people to start their cars.

In the United States, it is unlikely that these sorts of numbers will be reported as the government and media are simply too dishonest. We do have other ways of seeing if the pattern is the same here. Sports teams, for example, are the most vaccinated populations and they are seeing people come down with corona, despite having been fully vaccinated. They are young and strong, so the cases are mild. Nancy Pelosi’s staff just reported corona infections, despite being fully vaxxed.

Largely ignored by the media thus far is the fact that the vaccine makers think booster shots in the fall may be required. It is hard to know if this is just another lie to keep the money flowing or it is an admission that the vaccine is not as advertised. It could also be a way to sell another panic in the fall, when the normal flu returns. We have reached the point where the only thing we can trust is that whatever we are being told is a lie, but the motivation for the lie is a mystery.

There are a few things going on here. One is that the fanatical testing that should never have been put into place is turning up many false positives. This sort of testing is supposed to err on the side of the false positive. It is not supposed to be used on the population as a whole. It is supposed to be used when there is a serious medical condition that requires treatment. A vaccinated ball player with a runny nose should not be tested for the corona virus or anything else.

The bigger issue, however, is that the vaccines are not as claimed. Past experience with vaccines for corona viruses has shown that these approaches were not highly effective, and they were short lived. Even natural immunity fades with time, but with these vaccines it seems to fade quickly. That is fine if you want to create artificial herd immunity to eliminate the virus from a herd of cattle, but it is not so useful for human population in large diverse societies not fully vaccinated.

What may be happening is the vaccines are highly effective in the short term, but the immunity fades during the first year. This may be the reason for the booster shot stuff that will arrive in the fall. It could also be that the vaccine is narrowly effective for the initial variant, but not for subsequent variants. Given the lack of testing before the roll out, we can only guess. There is also the possibility that the vaccine is a trillion dollar boondoggle that has very little utility at all.

When public trust collapses, the truth no longer has meaning. What carries the day is the most compelling narrative. This should have been the lesson of Hitler, who came to power because he provided the most compelling narrative. Repeated and unnecessary lying by the managerial class regarding Covid means that the facts are quickly losing their value. Instead, it will be the best narrative that carries the day. No amount of censoring will prevent that from happening.

It is fairly clear that we are well past the public health concern with Covid. The treatments for those with severe cases are now highly effective. Most of the population has natural immunity. The variants appear to be less severe than the first wave of the virus, which is not uncommon in pandemics. In other words, we are at the point where we can live with Covid, just as we live with the flu. The question now is whether we can live with the people who have spent two years lying about it.

The Final Boss

Posted on July 20, 2021 by thezman

One of the underappreciated qualities of liberal democracy is its ability to grow and develop its own opposition. In the Cold War this was not obvious as communism in the form of the Soviet Empire filled the role. Domestically, the inner party had the outer party as a fixed partner. Democrats controlled domestic policy, with some mild opposition from the Republicans. On the other hand, the Republicans controlled foreign policy with some mild dissent from the Democrats.

This partnership collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed. A year after the voters overwhelmingly approved the appointment of former C.I.A. man George H. W. Bush as the successor to Ronald Reagan, the logic of having spooks run the country no longer made much sense. The system quickly pivoted to Saddam Hussein as a temporary fill in for the evil empire, but he was a poor replacement. In the next election the Cold War generation was replaced with the Woodstock generation.

The Clinton years were really just an interregnum. The system needed to learn how to create new enemies. We got the beginnings of the great Islamic enemy and an effort to recreate the holocaust in the Balkans. It was not until the son of the former C.I.A. man that we got the threat of international Islam as the new enemy. Fear of men on flying carpets carried the system into the Obama years. Toward the end of his second term, the search for a new enemy had started.

In this respect, the Trump election can be seen as a natural development. The system needed a bogey man and Trump was prepared to play the role. His appeal to the masses of Dirt People properly frightened the Cloud People and his reckless use of language made him easy to isolate and demonize. The new enemy of the regime would be white supremacist insurrectionists. That is the reason the regime compares January 6th to September 11th. It is their new origin story.

That is one way to look at what has been happening over the last 30 years. It is the quest for authenticity. This vast sprawling managerial state needs a reason to exist, so these manufactured crises provide it. Through the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was both a physical and temporal starting point for the regime. It is why presidents would go to the Brandenburg Gate and give speeches. The great twilight struggle against communism was the reason the regime existed and why it persisted.

The crusade against the Mohammedans was the first full attempt to recreate that old magic and provide the regime with legitimacy and authority. It is why 9/11 became a solemn holiday celebrated by both sides of the regime. Even though the left-liberals opposed the right-liberals in the prosecution of the crusade, they completely accepted the origin of it and the centrality of it. Note that the last anniversary of 9/11 came and went without much ceremony. It no longer matters.

On the other hand, we will now have two new holidays for this new crusade being used to authenticate the regime. Juneteenth will now be the new Independence Day and January 6th will be the Passover. The former is in commemoration of when the good news reached the last of the magic people. The latter is when the tides of history protected the faithful from the raging mobs of systemic racism. Perhaps this will be published as the Gospel of Saint Jaffa, a new holy book.

This new enemy the system has created for itself is more natural and compelling for the regime, so it will be more durable that the crusade against Islam. That drama raised questions about certain subjects that no one is allowed to discuss. It also had religious overtones, which invited in Christians. The only thing that makes the regime more uncomfortable than Christians openly talking about their religion is a collection of white guys noticing they are the only ones without an identity group.

The other compelling aspect of the new war on white people is that it has a historical and anthropological appeal to the regime. One side has been defined by its opposition to bad whites since Charles I. The other side has been similarly defined since Emperor Titus sacked Jerusalem. The new enemy of the regime both inspires and unites the regime in a new end times struggle to make manifest the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

What this suggests, of course, is that this jihad against white people we see raging everywhere is not going to go away quickly. All events will be warped to fit into the new world view of the struggle. Foreign adversaries will be cast as agents of white supremacy or enablers of white insurrectionists. Regime members who need to be purged will be painted as collaborators at their show trials. January 6th will be their Yom Kippur and every June 16th their Purim.

Whether or not this can work is a question no one dares ask. History has not been kind to regimes that are defined by their war with their own people. A multiracial regime at war with half the people on racial grounds is inherently unstable, as it creates both the means and the motivation to destroy the regime. If one half of the country is defined by its opposition to the regime and the other half is too dysfunctional and inept to defend the regime, the outcome is not hard to imagine.

History gives us a story arch for various forms of social organization. The old palace systems of the Bronze Age do not scale up. Empires all succumbed to internal contradictions and imbalance. Aristocratic systems eventually run out of able elites to maintain the system. Communism finally runs out of seed corn. It could be that the final phase of liberal democracy is a final war against itself. Born in sin and animated by a search for salvation, it sacrifices itself as its final act.

Conservative Whores

Posted on July 19, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. This week I respond to a critic who took me to task for saying mean things about libertarianism. Behind the green door there is the Sunday podcast on some news items of the past week.

Turning Point USA is one of the many grifts from Conservative Inc. aimed at corralling young people into the pointless enterprise of modern conservatism. It is the creation of the late William T. Montgomery, a former marketing guru. He decided to turn Charlie Kirk into the modern day Billy Ray Valentine of conservatism. The result was Turning Point USA, a campus group that holds events around the country. They host 6 National Summits and 8 Regional Conferences each year.

The most recent event, which was staged in Florida this past weekend, ended in a bit of controversy when TP-USA decided to ban someone named Brandi Love. She was scheduled to address a group of teenagers as a VIP. Brandi Love, in addition to being a distinguished contributor to conservative publications, is also a retired porn actress who advertises herself as such on-line. She now uses the skills that made her a star in the oldest profession to be a star in the second oldest one.

TP-USA knew who she was before they extended the invitation and they provided her with VIP access as an honored guest. Clearly, they saw nothing wrong with having an over-the-hill porn star promoting her work to teenagers. The reason they shifted gears is they were getting mocked for it by their critics on the Right. Their critics had a field day with it as another example of how TP-USA is just another grift peddling degeneracy in the name of conservative values.

In fairness to the organizers of TP-USA, they probably assumed there was nothing wrong with having an aging porn actress at their event. After all, the Federalist website has her as a featured contributor. Sean Davis, one of the founders of the site, must think she is acceptable for young people. His partner, Ben Domenech, made this clear on Twitter over the weekend. Later he blamed anti-Semites for getting her booted, which sets up an interesting moral dynamic.

It is these sorts of things that suggest the universe has a sense of humor. Brandi Love is the prefect representative of conservatism. She is an old whore well past her prime, desperate to keep what little audience she can. Of course, conservatism is also an old whore well past its prime willing to degrade itself for attention. When you look at it objectively, Brandi Love should have been the keynote speaker. She is the near perfect representative of the conservative movement.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this, but it points to the primary reason that conservatism was a complete failure. It was always hollow. Despite all their pretensions, they never really stood for anything. Conservatism was nothing more than a way for the unpopular kids to get a chance to sit at the cool kids’ table. The reason they welcomed an old porn actress to their ranks was to show the cool kids they were not a bunch of stuck up prudes. They liked degeneracy too!

Beyond that, it shows that the people running TP-USA know they have nothing to offer, so they have to rely on gimmicks. Last year they got grief for having scantily clad bimbos with t-shirt guns on stage like it was spring break. They are not offering young people a chance to be a part of something important. They are offering them a chance to get drunk and have easy access to whores. Clubs in Ft. Lauderdale have more dignity than to use these tactics to get attention.

Of course, we live in an age in which conspiracy theories turn out to be previews of tomorrow’s news, so you have to wonder if this was really an error. TP-USA has been pushing degeneracy to young people since its inception. They used to have promiscuous homosexuals speak to college audiences to promote sodomy. That is how Nick Fuentes got famous. He got his fans to show up at events and ask people like Charlie Kirk why he thought anal sex was a conservative principle.

Given the times, one can be forgiven for wondering if the whole point of this operation is to be the other side of the sandwich for young people. One side is left-wing antiwhite politics, while the alternative is libertine degeneracy. It is not as if this old porn actress tried to crash the party. People at the very top of the organization reached out and invited her as a VIP. It is impossible for them to claim they did not know who she was, as that is the only reason anyone knows who she is.

It is a good example of how the market corrupts. The people running this group are sure that the marketplace must always decide. That means they measure their own efforts in terms of box office. The more tickets they sell, the better they think they are doing, even if they are peddling smut to teenagers in order to do it. They probably think this was a good result, as it got them some unearned media. Conservatism submitted to the marketplace and became just another carny act in the process.

The good news in all of this is TP-USA seems to be collapsing. Their event was lightly attended, and their on-line shows had crickets as a soundtrack. Despite the fact that young people today are terribly naïve, they still retain the ability to see through these efforts to exploit them. Yesterday men peddling nostalgia for an age that will never return are not going to get far with young people worried about being hated minorities, even if the sales pitch is festooned with smut.

Lessons From The Bolsheviks

Posted on July 16, 2021 by thezman

It is fascinating in a way how so much of the current crisis parallels events in Europe a century ago, despite the many differences. This is supposed to be the peak of liberal democracy, but it feels more like the dying embers of the old aristocratic order that evolved out of the 19th century in response to the French Revolution and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, the one thing agreed upon is the current order is not satisfactory. The old order has failed.

The past is never a perfect parallel to the present, but the many points of comparison between then and now is what matters. The rise of industry forcing people into cities, altering the power arrangements in European societies set off massive cultural changes that resulted in two great industrial wars and the rise of communism. The technological revolution is having the same impact on the West today. The world after the internet is a very different place from the world before it.

The interesting thing about the Bolsheviks and the communists in general is they were the only people trying to come to terms with what in the world was happening and why it was happening. The parallel to today is that it is the dissident subculture in which there is any serious thought about what is driving the ongoing crisis. Establishment efforts like Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement, want to keep the analysis within the liberal democratic order. The fault lies with people, not the system.

Like the old commies in the industrial age, it is dissidents in the technological age who look further upstream. Like those old commies, there is a theoretical side to the analysis and a practical side, even a sense of urgency. Industry brought both new economic relationships, but also mass movements of people. Millions of Jews, for example, left the Russian empire for America. Similarly, technology has created new power relationships and set up a massive movement of people.

What studying the events of a century ago shows is that the great chain of causality is true in the long view. Russia, for example, has kept reverting back to being Russia, despite the changes in political economy. We see this quite clearly with China today, which is a high tech version of the Tang Dynasty. In the short run, massive changes to political economy can ripple back all the way to the nature of the people. The short run in the context of history can be a few lifetimes.

This is another parallel between then and now. The communists saw the great hand of fate in their history books. Their claims about political-economy were based in a historical understanding that said the arc of history bent toward socialism. The dissident knows that today is the result of the millions of decisions that have happened up to this moment on the timeline. A man is the sum of the mating choices of his ancestors and a people is the sum of all the choices that made the people.

That does not mean that the future is fixed. Nothing is inevitable other than the fact that people have always been wrong about the future. That is another great lesson for us from the communists. They were so sure about how things must end that they did not think much about being wrong about it. You see that with what passes for left-wing radicalism today. They just know that without white people utopia will descend on the land, but how that is supposed to work is never considered.

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00:00: Opening
02:00: Theory & Practice
12:00: Partisan Opportunists (Link)
22:00: Political Organizing (link)
32:00: Rules & Standards (Link)
42:00: Tomorrow Belongs To No One
57:00: Closing (Link) (Be Like Me)

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J. D. Vance

Posted on July 15, 2021 by thezman

It is tempting to judge a man by his enemies, especially if his enemies are the sorts of people who should be the enemy of the decent. Logic seems to dictate that if the worst people are opposed to someone or some idea, then there must be some merit to that person or idea. The worst people operate exclusively from self-interest. What is good for the worst is probably not good for the rest, so therefore what is bad for the worst must be good for the rest, if only that it diminishes the worst.

The great lesson of the George W. Bush years is that the worst people can hate someone who deserves to be hated. Every far-left crank in America was howling in agony about the Bush administration. Their complaints were every bit as insane as the people making them, so decent people just assumed Bush was a good guy. It turns out that sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just another enemy. Bush, of course, was a disaster, the worst President in American history.

That is something to keep in mind now that J. D. Vance has decided to run for office in his former home state of Ohio. Vance was always something of a curiosity, having gone from humble beginnings to the managerial elite, but seeming to maintain a connection with his roots in the lower class. His book Hillbilly Elegy was a hit among the chattering classes, always looking for some authenticity. It was also popular with normal people who found it and Vance to be genuine and thoughtful.

Now Vance is seeking to ride the wave of populist enthusiasm and white fright to a political career. At first this would seem logical, but just a few years ago he was an anti-Trump guy, like all the people he now criticizes. It made sense back then. He was enjoying publicity from the sorts of people he spent his entire life trying to copy. He had gotten rich thanks largely to the fact these people helped him along as he went from the Marines to Yale Law then to Silicon Valley.

He is singing a different tune these days. He is on the Trump train and talking quite sensibly and credibly about the issues that concern white people. In fact, he sounds far more sensible than Trump. As a result, the worst people have started to attack him for his alleged apostacy. The gargoyle of neoconservatism, Mona Charen, came out last March with an attack on Vance, calling him and white people jackals. That is an interesting bit of projection from a blood-thirsty warmonger.

Now we have this post in the Atlantic from Tom Nichols, or as he prefers the commoners to refer to him, “Five Time Jeopardy Champion” Tom Nichols. For those unaware, Tom Nichols is America’s leading expert on being wrong about everything to do with foreign policy. From his perch on Twitter, when he is not reminding us that he is a super genius and a five time Jeopardy champion, he tells us that we have all let him down and no longer deserve a man like Tom Nichols.

Writing often betrays the image the writer projects and this no truer than in the case of Tom Nichols. He tries to portray himself as an intellectual tough guy, but his writing style suggests he is a hysterical teenage girl. It is not hard to imagine that Atlantic post being submitted on tear-stained paper with some of the “I’s” being dotted with little frowny faces. The post is supposed to be about Vance, but it really about Nichols and his hurt feelings about the populist rebellion.

Tom Nichols, like David French, is the sort of person the Founders warned about when discussing democracy. They pointed out that democracy attracts the worst people who then appeal to the worst instincts of the people. Liberal democracy is the playground of narcissistic fanatics whose only interest is in flattering themselves with the applause of the mobs. Suddenly, all of the worst people are bearing their fangs at J.D. Vance, so normal people naturally feel disposed towards him.

Of course, another quality of liberal democracy is that it spawns false opposition like a shark grows teeth. Just ten years ago Conservative Inc. spawned any number of imitators to steal the energy of the Tea Party. We see the same thing happening with the different populist groups. The usual suspects are furiously trying to co-opt the Nick Fuentes thing with boy-band quality alternatives. American Moment is what old Cloud People think young Dirt People will find compelling.

With that in mind, it is wise to be cautious about anyone in the ring claiming to speak for the great dispossessed. That is one lesson of Trump. Politics is like a high-end brothel where even the most virtuous are going to tempted. If Lucifer were tasked with creating a political system to stock Hell with souls, he would head to Washington to get tips from the masters. He would probably lose his soul in the bargain. The point is, even the best of men is no match for the worst of systems.

That said, Vance is making the sort of noises familiar to dissidents. He is clearly familiar with the dissident subculture as he has used phrases like “red pill” when describing his political transformation over the last five years. He hangs out with Tucker Carlson, and he is bankrolled by Peter Theil. Neither man can be called a dissident, but they are not lobbing R-bombs at us. Vance defended Nick Fuentes, who has not been favorable to J.D. Vance, which suggests Vance is more than just hologram.

Politics for dissidents is always about advancing dissident ideas, so judging Vance is all about his utility in that cause. Like Trump, he is willing to drag taboo subjects into the public domain, which is always good for dissidents. Unlike Trump he seems to have a better feel for his potential base. Vance is also a younger man who can speak to younger people, who do not respond to flag waving. Unlike Trump, Vance is not a man lamenting the loss of the past, but the loss of the present.

You never know what is in a man’s heart, so Vance’s sincerity remains a question, but he will be useful. Even if Vance is a dissident at heart and sweeps to a landslide victory, nothing changes for us politically. The same parasites will be calling white people jackals and pushing cultural genocide. There is no voting your way out of the defects of democracy, but democracy can be a bus dissidents ride to the next stop. As is always the case, the Vance phenomenon is an opportunity.

Historical Fiction

Posted on July 14, 2021 by thezman

“The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable” is an old Soviet era joke about the party’s habit of rewriting history to serve the current moment. Like so many things Soviet, it applies well to the current American regime. Not only do they rewrite the past, but they also magnify events from the past to make them seem like they just happened yesterday. They diminish more recent events so they seem distant. The old communists were amateurs compared to liberal democrats.

The rewriting of history is best done by people who have a certain historical outlook and a facility for language. It is a unique sort of sociopathy that allows them to create highly complex models of the past that are decorated with well-established facts, but are otherwise filled with distortions and outright fabrications. Erasing a man from a picture and banning any mention of him still leaves a hole. Rewriting the man’s history, weaving it into the story of the opponents solves two problems.

You can see how this works in this hysterical screed from the left-wing propaganda site the Bulwark. At this point it is inaccurate and dishonest to put the neoconservatives on the political Right. They agree with the establishment Left on everything except some foreign policy items. They actively make war on the establishment Right. Of course, they are even more hostile to dissidents, nationalists, and populist than the most deranged lefty. Neoconservatives have returned home.

Putting that aside, note the natural way in which the writer builds an intellectual framework that fits the needs of the moment. Within in that framework are all of the usual bogeymen that haunt the minds of these people. We have various internet characters who have tormented them. There is the Russian conspiracy hoax and the foaming at the mouth Trump hatred. Of course, Evangelicals are in there. The only thing missing from the list of bad actors is Tsar Alexander III.

All of this is designed to dirty up the Claremont Institute, which is the only establishment Right operation to take seriously the crisis of the present. They operate American Greatness and the site American Mind. Of course, they have been willing to look at Trump and the movement that carried him to office in a serious way. Michael Anton was one of the first establishment figures to make the case for Trump in 2016. This is why the fevered minds of neoconservatism despise them.

The psychopathic hyperventilating is amusing at a certain level, but it obscures the really important nugget at the start of the screed. “The Claremont Institute was founded in 1979 by Peter W. Schramm, Thomas B. Silver, Christopher Flannery, and Larry P. Arnn, all students of Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa.” Then just a bit later, “Jaffa’s work on Abraham Lincoln was groundbreaking, and can be credited for recovering a sense of Lincoln’s intellectual seriousness.”

It is easy to skip over that as the cult of Lincoln has become a fixture in both the establishment Left and the establishment Right. Both left-liberals and right-liberals claim Lincoln as their own. National Review trots out Lincoln every time the left-liberals are banging them over the head about race. You see, Lincoln was a Republican, so it means it was right-liberals who saved America from slavery! They do the same ridiculous thing with MLK, even though he was a Marxist.

Forgotten is how this cult of Lincoln was created and who created it. That person is Harry Jaffa, who should go down as history’s greatest fabulist. He is responsible for what is known as the second founding thesis. You see, the real founding the country was not with the Constitution. That is just words on paper to solve practical issues facing the newly independent colonies. The real founding of the country, the moral and spiritual founding, was with the Declaration of Independence.

According to Jaffa, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” is the primal roar of the new people, a new concept of a people. The Founders wanted America to be a land of universal equality. That was the ideal they setup for themselves. The Constitution fell short of that because of the needs of the moment.

The Civil War, however, was not a continuation of a cultural dispute dating back to the English Civil War or even a war over slavery. It was the second founding. The old errors and sins of the first founding were washed away with the blood of millions so America could continue toward that original ideal. Slavery was abolished and the Constitution was modified. Those modifications have been used ever since to alter the country in pursuit of the founding ideal contained in the Declaration.

This is also where we get the proposition nation stuff. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” You see, that original rhetorical flourish was actually a call to create an entirely new type of nation, a proposition nation based on ideas, rather than people. It is not hard to see the mischief that has come from the embrace of this rewriting of history.

In a slightly different context, John Derbyshire noted that some people have an unnatural skill at creating “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content”. Harry Jaffa and his followers were such men. For that matter, Strauss falls into this camp as well, but that is a topic for another day. Because the second founding idea provided the right-liberals with a fig leaf over the race issue, it has become their creed.

That does not change the fact that this is nonsense, but like Stalin rewriting history, it is powerful nonsense. In fact, the current antiwhite pogroms aimed at extirpating all signs of whiteness are rooted in this. The advocates justify their cultural genocide on the grounds that it is part of this process to reconcile America with its long failure to live up the original idea. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are really just modern day manifestations of the Founders, dreaming of a proposition nation.

At the core, the dissident project is about peeling back the layers of lies and fabrications like second founding theory. History is a story of a people and our story has been rewritten by strangers who see us as enemies. Correcting the record is not just an exercise in trivial exactitude. It is about re-centering a people on the foundation of their past so they can once again reach for the stars. If the folks at the Bulwark want to know “what they hell is happening” there is the answer in a nutshell.

The Time Warp

Posted on July 13, 2021 by thezman

One of the weird things about this age is how certain groups of people remain locked in a form of psychological stasis. Their views of the world remain the same as they were at some point in the past. For some it is always 1985 and the biggest fear is the commies will get control. Some are locked in 1968 where they are trying to keep corporate interests from crushing the working man. These people live like modern people, but their worldview remains in the world of the past.

From the perspective of dissidents, the most obvious of these groups are the civic nationalist types. Long time users of Gab have suddenly been made aware of these folks after Trump and Trump fans were dumped from Twitter. The J21’er is a person who signed up for Gab in January of 2021. They decorate their profile with patriotic symbols and far too much information about themselves. Politics for them is right out of a civics textbook from the late 1980’s.

These people are not just lost in the past. They have plenty of examples in the media who are right there with them. This post in the American Conservative is a good example of the type. It is a long piece about the future of conservatism that reads like it was written in 1992. No mention of immigration, the most important issue facing the world at this time. No mention of race and racial politics, which has convulsed the country since the end of the Obama administration.

The writer is a regular at the site so it is safe to assume his views reflect those of the editorial staff. It links to many other sites that wave the conservative flag, so it is in tune with the sensibilities of that old tribe. This is the right world to use as they exist like an isolated tribe in the Amazon, unaware of the world that exists outside their remote villages. This is one of the links in the post. It is a debate about conservatism by people who should be in a museum exhibit about the 1990’s.

It is not just a phenomenon of the legacy Right. The BreadTube phenomenon is an example from the Left that parallels the one on the Right. These are people promoting things like socialism, communism and anarchism, but from the perspective of the 1970’s when such topics were actually discussed by adults. They want to steer young people away from identity politics, but they also want to combat what they call “far-right extremism” that appears on YouTube and other places.

This is where you see the time warp. The people they consider to be far-right are people like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson. Not only that, they stick to an old 1970’s liberal view of politics when the Left was sure their ideas were so convincing, they could engage with their opponents and win every time. Like their analogs on the other side, they seem to have missed the last couple of decades. They are unaware of the fact that people get fired from their job for holding the wrong opinions.

Of course, the establishment Left itself is trapped in a time warp. The people banging on about structural racism and white supremacy also bang on about the dangers of corporate media and corporate power. They do so on global corporate platforms, often from the corporate offices. If people actually wore the labels of their supporters, the street protestors would look like NASCAR drivers. Their little outfits would be festooned with corporate sponsors. “This riot brought to you by Amazon!”

Listen to the people behind the Critical Race Theory stuff and they carry on as if it is 1955 and the imaginary Jim Crow stuff is real. They claim to be fighting the racism of whites and the oppression of the white power structure. They are weirdly unaware of the fact that none of this ever existed or exists today. Everyone with the least bit of power is on their side. Their people they are attacking are without any representation in the halls of power. For the antiwhites, time stopped in 1968.

Some of this is just human nature. People stubbornly cling to old ways of thinking about things out of habit. There were still supporters of the Whigs long after they had disappeared into the past. Ideology provides structure and a way to understand the world, so abandoning it is difficult for some. Until they find a suitable replacement, they stick with the old views. We see this with the Trump phenomenon. Many jumped on it simply as a way out of conservatism.

Then we have demographics. White people are the oldest tribe in tribal America now, so whites are going to be slower to adapt to the new reality. The fans of Ben Shapiro are old people mostly. He is what they hoped the future would be like and what they imagine it was like in their past. For someone who is 70 years old, it is tough to accept that all they fought to preserve will be washed away. The dream of returning to the civic nationalist paradise is better than facing present reality.

Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. The people locked in these time warps will eventually return to this part of the timeline. Again, you can see this on Gab. Many of those J21’er have quickly adapted to their new home. Every time a bell rings a new dissident is born and every day the bells are ringing, thanks mostly to the behavior of the ruling class. The behavior of the government the last year has collapsed many of these time bubbles.

Something similar is happening on the Left. Jimmy Dore, for example, is a man who considers himself on the Left. Yet, he is every bit as skeptical about the radicals as the typical dissident. Glenn Greenwald is another good example. Matt Taibbi is another guy who is having an awakening. These are people looking around and coming to the realization that their old views on things no longer track with reality. The old Left is starting to have their own red pill moment.

Political transformation is like the old line about bankruptcy. It is slow at first, often glacial, then it happens all of a sudden. The individual begins to break free from their time bubble and then all off a sudden they have their awakening. As is always true about the behavior of people, some are too timid to look up. They fiercely cling to their ole ideas like a dog with a bone. Their fight to remain trapped in the past is a weird sort of conformation. Some people will just be lost to time.

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