Logocide

Posted on December 1, 2021 by thezman

One of the distinguishing features of authoritarian societies is the language becomes lifeless and dull. At the same time, the public space is filled with the language of the authoritarian ruling system. The people at the top give long arid speeches and their propaganda organs fill the spaces in between with official noise. Fidel Castro would give speeches that lasted half a day. Stalin would deliver long harangues to the Party Congress for no other reason than to fill the room with words.

In America, this started to creep in after the Cold War. Bill Clinton would give long speeches that were cognitively meaningless. The word “emote” came into common usage at this time as his speeches were like the “feelies” in the Huxley novel Brave New World. They were not intended to stimulate your mind, but rather to anesthetize it so you could experience the raw emotion being conveyed. His most memorable words are those from his rare confessions of guilt.

Obama took it further by delivering nonsense speeches that were not just devoid of meaning, but an assault on the concept of meaning. His language was an assault on the mind, an effort to destroy reason. Instead, the listener was supposed to abandon his senses and float along on the warm thermals of passive happiness. His fans swore he was a great speaker, but they never quoted him. To quote the great man would invite questioning the great man and that was not permitted.

Authoritarian systems use language to suffocate and stifle the mind, because people thinking independently is always a danger. The point of regime language is to strip language of its meaning. Demagogic language makes the people incapable of the objectivity and perspective that leads to questioning. Questioning naturally leads to the formation of individual ideas. Regime language seeks to destroy the independent mind by stripping the language of meaning.

One result of this is some people become parrots, repeating slogans and catchwords without understanding what they mean. These people are so fearful of any deviation from the prescribed opinions, they only use the terms provided by the regime. It is a ritualized self-degradation. To express and judge all opinions in the accepted clichés and phrasing of the regime is to accept that words and the concepts behind them have no independent meaning.

It is logocide, the deliberate killing of words in order to kill the concepts that lie behind those words. The most obvious example is “fascist”, which no longer has a cognitive meaning in modern society. It exists only to trigger an emotional response tuned to meet the needs of the regime. The structure of modern Western government is about as close to fascism as we have come since the middle of the last century, but the word itself now means anyone who opposes the regime.

A current example of logocide is the war on information. Regime media now obsesses over misinformation and disinformation. Both words are used interchangeably, despite having very different meanings. The former means false information that is often intended to deceive. The latter is official lies promoted by the institutions of authority in order to deceive the people. By conflating these meanings, this important distinction falls away and both words just mean unofficial opinion.

Regime media has declared war on misinformation and disinformation, despite being the primary source of it. The social media publishers regularly announce their progress on the war on misinformation. Of course, the government is the biggest source of disinformation, yet no one questions them. This absurd bit of theater is intended to strip the very concept of truth from the minds of the people. It is a form of menticide intended to make people dependent on the regime.

The point of logocide is to cripple the ability of the people to think independently and to prevent them from sharing information with others. If no one can trust what words mean, you cannot trust the ideas behind those words. One of those ideas is the concept of personal trust. If your best friend is just as susceptible to repeating false information as the stranger on the street, that friends can no longer be trusted. The natural bonds between people fall away and everyone is a node of the state.

This even happens to the people tasked with assaulting the language. Look at the subhead from this story in a regime tabloid. “Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer.” Imagine the intellectual bankruptcy required to manufacture the phrase “new language for truth.” The person who wrote that is dead inside. They are a shuffling zombie incapable of action not directed by the people who now control his mind.

Notice also the creepy flavorless language of the age. No one speaks in the first person unless they are displaying fidelity to the system. In the corporate space, everything is written in soft passive language stripped of declarative statements. Corporate communication sounds like it comes from an encounter session. The people behind it are incapable of independent thought. They fear deviation and degrade themselves with therapeutic language to magnify their obsequiousness.

This is why authoritarian systems are minimalist. They lack beauty, creativity and vitality because those are burned up in the engine of authoritarian rule. A people living in fear of their own curiosity are not inventing new ways to solve problems. That requires independent thought, which means an independent language. When the point of the system is to kill the meaning of words, there can be no independent thought so there can be no new ideas, just the approved ideas.

This is what we see in the West. The suffocating conformity of thought is boiling off the will to solve problems and challenge old solutions. The centers of cultural production are now manned by automatons. They are decorated in the trappings of past creativity, but they are like mannequins in a museum display, interesting only to those who maintain their ability to see what is happening. Otherwise, the culture is a repetition of the banal official clichés and slogans.

This is what makes language the great threat to the authoritarian. To call a man in a dress a crossdresser, rather than use an approved neologism, offends the puppets of the regime, because it threatens the foundation of the regime. Clear language conveys clear meaning which implies clear truths. Standing on truth allows for the questioning of the official language and by extension, the authority of the system. The antidote to authoritarianism is truth and the honest language it requires.

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American Alawites

Posted on November 30, 2021 by thezman

Minority rule is one of those things that on the surface should be rare but is actually quite common in human history. The most common form of minority rule is when one people conquer another and then install their people as rulers. This small ruling class is backed by the conquering power. In the Bronze Age it was not unusual for one city-state to rule over the surrounding city-states. The great leader would rule not only his own people but the people he subjugated.

In medieval times, the family trees of ruling elites were often quite complicated so the duke of some territory might not speak the language of the people over whom he was the ruler. Conquest also played a role. The Normans who were “invited” to conquer Britain did not speak the local language. People were tied to the land, so when a successful ruler conquered new lands, he inherited the people. His descendants would then inherit a kingdom of strangers.

Ruling classes, in general, are a form of minority rule. In South America, most of the countries are controlled by a relatively small number of families that make up the ruling elite of the country. These families trace their origins to Europe, marry amongst each other and keep a tight grip on power. It is why the complexion of the political elite rarely has the same hue as the general public. This demographic realty of ruling elites is true to some degree everywhere in the world.

The thing about rule by minority is it works if that minority has connections to the people over whom they rule. Those kings and queens in medieval Europe may not have had much in common with the people, but they shared a position within in a system that everyone accepted. Richard the Lionheart did not speak English, but his position made sense within the logic of society. Of course, empires tend to have ruling classes that are alien to the people but make sense within the context of empire.

This is what makes empires inherently unstable. Since an empire is an amalgamation of people that don’t have much in common, the one thing they have in common is they are ruled by strangers. The Habsburg Empire made sense to the people running it but to everyone else it was an unnatural combination. The Soviet Union struggled with the same problem at the end. Empires tend to become minority run enterprises that only serve the interests of the minority at the top of the system.

The American empire seems to be entering that minority rule phase where it becomes clear to everyone that the people in charge are aliens. From Gettysburg into the 20th century, America was a proto-empire. The Yankee ruling elite had conquered the rest of the country. Then the push west made Yankeedom into a continental empire and then a regional empire entering the 20th century. The two great industrial wars established Yankeedom as the American empire.

The Yankee ruling elite was joined in the 20th century by a Jewish elite that arrived just as the American empire was forming up. The subsequent Judeo-Puritan ruling class ruled the empire into the current day. While the Jewish side did not have roots in the origins of the empire, the Puritan side more than made up for it. The story of America started at Plymouth Rock with the Puritans. At least that is how every schoolboy learned it through the 20th century.

With the Cold War over and the borders wide open, the great flood of people into the empire proper is about to change the complexion of the ruling class. You see this with the South Asian takeover of Silicon Valley. The latest example is Twitter, the social media publisher, getting a new boss. Parag Agarwal will succeed Jack Dorsey as the CEO of the company. Vijaya Gadde is the policy, safety lead director and a chief legal officer and general counsel of Twitter.

If we take a quick inventory of the big tech firms, we see that Google is now ruled by Sundar Pichai. Microsoft is now ruled by a person named Satya Nadella. IBM, once synonymous with American technological innovation, is now ruled by a person called Arvind Krishna. Adobe Systems is ruled by Shantanu Narayen. VMWare, the biggest virtualization firm is ruled by Raghu Raghuram. Silicon Valley is looking like the chamber of commerce of Bangalore.

This may seem like a coincidence, but Kamala Harris is the Vice president because Indian money bought her the spot on the ticket. All of her campaign money came from this cabal of South Asians in California. She remains in her post, even though the Biden people want her out, because the party is afraid of alienating the Brahmans. They know the GOP is on its knees outside those offices begging for cash. They are planning to run Nimrata Nikki Randhawa in the 2024 primary.

What is happening, of course, is the old Judeo-Puritan ruling elite is getting pushed aside by the highly clannish and ambitious Brahman ruling elite. Those high caste Indian migrants come from a long tradition of looking out for their own, but also working the imperial system. The British Raj selected for the sort of high cast local who knew how to ingratiate himself with English speakers. Those skills are now proving to be handy in the American empire.

This is why South Asians are fantastically antiwhite. They have picked up on what is going on with the dying Judeo-Puritan ruling class. Critical theory makes no sense to the new arrivals from the subcontinent, but the slogans are easy to memorize and the targets are familiar. The new ruler of Twitter is not only antiwhite, but he is also openly hostile to the basics of Western society. He thinks the first amendment is a pointless suggestion and he has no intention of respecting its spirit.

From a certain distance, one has to admire the irony of it. India exists because of British colonialism and it is now conquering the inheritor of the British Empire. Perhaps the new Indian ruling class will start wearing khaki shorts and pith helmets. The old quip from Pat Buchanan about immigration comes to mind. He famously said, “American Indians had open borders. Look what happened to them.” One group of Indians getting revenge on behalf of another group of Indians.

Putting that aside, this is another sign that the American empire is far closer to collapse than is evident from the numbers. Actual Americans will notice that they cannot pronounce the names of their new rulers. The alien nature of the ruling class is now being pushed into the face of everyone. It is hard to imagine someone named Satya or Parag commanding much loyalty from people named Bill or even Jonquarius. Rule by alien invader will become evident to everyone.

That does not mean this new ruling class forming up is doomed. Syria has been ruled by an Alawite minority for a long time now. They control all of the institutions of power and that has allowed them to weather the attacks from America and Israel. An alien ruling class can manage to defy the math for a long time, if they are clever enough and ruthless enough. The American Alawites will have to be as ruthless but highly clannish people are never short of ruthlessness.

If one wants to be optimistic, the Illyrian emperors were Roman emperors who rose up from what is now the Balkans during the Crisis of the Third Century. This group of alien emperors culminated with Diocletian and the stabilization of the empire. Maybe one of these new Brahman rulers will go on to stabilize the American empire. After all, this class took over India after the collapse of British rule. Look at the amazing job they have done with the Indian subcontinent.

Fear And Loathing

Posted on November 29, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week I take a deep dive into the legal theory underlying the recent political trials. Behind the green door I have several new items since last week.

Since the Great Panic began almost two years ago, the question on the minds of the curious has been how long will it last? Panics are not new in human society and they are not new to recent times either. The satanic panic that started in the 1980’s never really ended completely. The “face on a milk carton” meme is still with us, despite the fact few people remember is started in a panic. That was close to half a century ago, suggesting panics never really end.

The missing kid panic changed American society. Prior to that time, it was not unusual for children to walk to school with just the older kids supervising. Kids spent their after-school time playing outside, usually unsupervised. In big cities, kids would ride public transit to school. No one thought it was strange. After the panic, supervised activities became the norm. Video games found a target-rich environment of kids stuck inside by themselves or within earshot of their parents.

That suggests the Covid panic has a long way to go and may never end. That should be obvious at this point. First it was two weeks to bend the curve so hospitals could avoid being overrun by flu patients. That gave way to a regime of total fright with people required to wear amulets reminding everyone of the great fear. The vaccine should have broken the fear, but here we are facing new lockdowns due to the omicron strain, which reportedly attacks the vaccinated for some reason.

The omicron variant is probably the most amusing twist in the great Covid panic so far, because it suggests someone in the system has a sense of humor. As many have pointed out, the word “omicron” is an anagram for “moronic”. There is also the reference to a classic Star Trek episode. The spores on Omicron ceti iii made people euphoric and gave them everlasting health in exchange for a desire to never leave. The plants and the humans became two sides of a blissful relationship.

Part of what is driving this is belief. Humans are believing machines and with the collapse of traditional religion, people are falling into cultural and political cults that scratch the same itch as the old gods. Nature cults have been a staple of human existence since the beginning. At a certain level, the people swept up in the cult of Covid feel they are being punished for a sin against nature. Covid is nature’s vengeance against mankind.

That is why good news is always bad news with Covid. The new mysterious variant that does not make people sick is “symptomless Covid” rather than the natural weakening the virus with each new mutation. The omicron variant is similarly a weaker mutation, but it is setting off panic around the world. Covid is a proxy for a new mystery god, one that reveals itself only through it actions. Like all gods, it is eternal, so its manifestations will be eternal as well. Covid is here forever.

The main driver of the panic from the beginning has been the ruling class, which is looking like Howard Hughes at the end. Instead of shutting themselves up in their mansions and wearing tissue boxes on their feet, they are obsessed with conquering death itself. The actors they hire to perform the rituals off democracy are not quite as bad, but they are a gerontocracy now. As such, they startle at the slightest touch, assuming it must be the Grim Reaper.

There is also the weird isolation of the managerial class. It is not a physical isolation as they do leave their compounds to explore the land of the Dirt People. It is a psychological and cultural isolation. They can imagine hospitals overflowing and people dying in the streets, even though they see no evidence of these things, because they are conditioned by their existence to trust their coevals over their own eyes. If they see it in their media, it is true, no matter what reality has to say.

This combination of old and isolated has created a ruling class that is deeply paranoid about what happens outside the safety of their safe zones. Note how often the word “safe” comes up in their rhetoric. They see themselves as the protectors of society, so they are constantly going on about safety. The reason for that is they assume everyone shares their fear and paranoia about the world. Covid is powerful juju for a ruling class hiding from nature, reality and their own mortality.

Of course, a big part of the panic is the opportunity for the deranged to inflict themselves on the rest of us. Covid has been manna from heaven for the sort of person who sees herself as everyone’s den mother. These people will never get enough of the state of emergency, which provides the panic stricken elite with an amen chorus giving them the allusion of consent. One side pleads to be made safe while the other side pleads to be the savior of mankind.

This brings us back to the original question. When does this panic end? Most likely, it will require a generational turnover. The gerontocracy will die off and be replaced by something worse, but something younger. That means these health panics are probably a feature of the empire now. Like superhero movies, Covid will be rebooted and reimagined every few years. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an ornamental mask on a human face— forever.

Order And Chaos

Posted on November 26, 2021 by thezman

Lost in the rush into the holiday season is the Charlottesville monkey trial concluded last week with a verdict for the plaintiffs. The jury had no verdict on some of the claims but agreed there was some sort of conspiracy by the defendants. They also decided that the plaintiffs suffered no harm as a result of it, but the defendants were doo-doo heads who deserved some sort of punishment. As a result, they awarded the plaintiffs eleventy billion bars of gold-pressed latinum in punitive damages.

The jury did not fall into Star Trek jargon, but they may as well have, given the structure of their decision. According to lawyers who followed the case, the punitive damages are symbolic due to rules governing the relationship between punitive and compensatory damages in civil cases. Typically, courts limit the ratio to a single digit. That is, punitive damage awards are capped at something less than ten times the compensatory damages, which in this case were one dollar.

This reality is of no consequence as the trial was always political activism on behalf of the ruling class. In a sane society this never would have been in a courtroom and the lawyers who brought it would be deported. Ours is a society in crisis, so ridiculous things like this are common now. The lawyers got their win and regime media was happy to promote it as a great blow against free speech. For a day, the blue-checks on Twitter were celebrating the win.

That is the first lesson of this trial. Two lessons, actually. One is the reminder that political activism is all about boosting the spirits of your side and depressing the sprits of the other side. In the language of Osama bin Laden, activism is about making your horse look strong and their horse look weak. When given the choice, people will always pick the strong horse. Everything about the UTR event was bad activism for the participants and good activism for their opponents.

The other lesson here is that the world has now moved on from that chapter of political opposition to the ruling regime. Hardly anyone in regime media noticed the trial when it was happening. The verdict was a one day event celebrated by trivial figures on low-end social media. Basically, the story rated a wire report that was picked up by websites as part of their automated filler. The world has moved on from this sort of drama, which is very good news for dissidents.

Another lesson of this case is one of the oldest. If you lie down with dogs you will wake up with fleas. Guilt by association is a real thing. You may think it is unfair, but it is just how the world operates. If you hang around with screwballs like Chris Cantwell, then you will be judged by that association. The fact is, all organizations, especially in politics, are judged by their worst members. It is why high standards are essential in all political activism. You are judged by the company you keep.

Similarly, this should be the final nail in the optics debate. Both sides of this case revolted the jury. They clearly saw that the plaintiffs were liars and doing this for political reasons, but the defendants were wildly offensive to them. It is not hard to imagine the jury’s motivation here. They wanted out of that courtroom and as far away from all of them as possible. The symbolic award was a way to end the nightmare and inoculate themselves from retaliation by the Twitter blue-checks.

The fact is, the alt-right and its traveling partners never much cared about the issues they claim are at the center of their politics. The big names of that thing were there for attention and internet likes. Spencer represented himself in the case because it afforded him more time to talk about himself. The narcotic of minor celebrity is powerful stuff and it led the big shots of the alt-right to embrace increasing extreme rhetoric as they chased the dragon of internet celebrity.

The final lesson here is that America is no longer a rules-based society. This case like so many of late, had no business in a courtroom. The underlying claims are un-American and fly in the face of civil society. The people behind this case have no business in a Western society. Until this is remedied, no sane person should ever put himself in a position where he may end up in court. Even if you are completely in the right the courtroom is no place for a white person.

Scars are lessons. Stupid people accumulate as trophies to their past stupidity, while smart people carry them as lessons. These trials are scars on the face of Western civilization and they need to be seen as such. It is not about winning and losing, but about the far deeper problem that lies behind them. The people behind these cases are the same people behind the riots. The great lesson in all of this is the battle is not about policy, but between order and chaos and chaos is winning.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

Posted on November 25, 2021 by thezman

Idle Hands

Posted on November 24, 2021 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the HBD delusion and I have a short audio post on the Charlottesville verdict. With Thanksgiving upon us, posting here will be light, but I will be posting some content behind the green door.

By now it is obvious to everyone that Covid has become a bizarre mystery cult embraced by those into left-wing politics. There are some exceptions, like the HBD crowd, which was driven mad by Covid. A few dissidents were gripped by the great fear, but most have recovered. The bulk of the people hooked on Covid, however, are the sorts of people who obsess over climate change or check under their beds at night to make sure Hitler is not hiding there.

The HBD people were driven mad by Covid because it was a reminder of their exile and the price they have paid for holding bad ideas. This issue was in their wheelhouse, but their status excluded them from the conversation. If they had been in good standing, this would have been their time to shine. Instead, they were left to jump up and down on the sidelines desperately trying to get the attention of their old friends. This is the agony that comes with exile.

The Covidian proper is someone who traffics in the usual fads. She totes her groceries home in grimy canvas sacks because Gaia supposedly hates plastic. At one time, she had a weird food allergy, maybe a series of them. The overlap between Covidians and Glutenites is near 100%. Of course, she was sure that Trump was Hitler and she was also sure Kavanaugh was going to stuff her uterus full of Bibles. Covid is just the latest stop on the crazy train for her.

She used to think the problem was too many people. This has been lost to the mists of time, but the Gaia worshippers started out as hardcore misanthropes. Mankind was a plague, a virus on the planet that had to be contained. This was the primary motivation behind unlimited abortions. These people think mankind is the enemy so anything that is bad for humanity is good. That is the appeal of Covid. To the Covidian, it feels like Mother Earth is getting her revenge.

Revenge is a big part of left-wing politics. The Wisconsin massacre was immediately hailed as revenge for the Rittenhouse verdict. Social justice, of course, is just a dog whistle for racial vengeance. Environmental justice, according to the EPA, is where the nonwhite populations exact revenge on white people on behalf of Gaia. The word “justice” is a universal dog whistle for vengeance. As a result, the Department of Justice is now the inquisition of the new religion.

Covid is not just about the vengeance of Gaia. It is about a general all around vengeance toward the enemies of the faith. That is what lies behind the redefinition of words like “vaccinated” and “immunize”. By redefining these words, it allows the Covidians to exact vengeance on the unbelievers. It allows the Covidians to retroactively blame the enemies of the faith for this great plague. It is a witch hunt in which the witches are doing the hunting.

Of course, vengeance has always been a traveling partner of radical politics because radical politics is at odds with nature. The great smashing of the system never ushers in the promised Utopia, so someone has to pay for it. Covid, however, reveals that the thirst for vengeance is what draws people into radical politics. Like the bitter, self-loathing wife beater looking for an excuse to knock around the old lady, the radical seeks out politics that promise the chance for vengeance.

There is more to the Covid phenomenon than vengeance. The ritualized mask wearing and obsession with vaccines suggest there is a mystery element. There is something magical about all of this that appeals to the Covidian. Talk to a Covidian and few have a high school level understanding of biology. They talk about Covid as if it is an evil spirit, some dangerous miasma. The mask has become a talisman and the vaccine is a blessing from the shaman to ward of the evil.

This is why women insist they have Covid despite testing negative. It’s not a lot different than saying you have been touched by Old Scratch or bewitched by the old woman who lives in the woods. First, it elevates her status. The evil one has targeted her for some reason. Second, she is a victim and gets sympathy. Of course, she is a hero for battling this great plague on her own. The negative test ties it all together allowing the accursed to suffer for all of our sins on Twitter.

This is the promise of the new symptomless Covid. The evil one is so evil that it is now able to infect without anyone knowing about it. The true believer can now claim to be infected, but fighting it, even when she has no symptoms and the test comes back negative for Covid. It also means wearing the proper amulets is now more important than ever, since spotting the damned is now impossible. Society will now be reorganized around the beliefs of this new mystery cult.

Taken together, what Covid has revealed is that something has gone horribly wrong with Western people. The self-loathing, the thirst for vengeance and the paralyzing fear of existence all point to a common cause. The West has reached a point where we hate our very existence. We have evolved down a cultural dead end and we have no way to escape it, so we are hoping for a great destruction. A great plague or natural disaster is seen as the hope of mankind, because it promises a do-over.

The flip side of this is that Covid and these other mystery cults are just a way to give purpose and meaning to life. Western society has arrived at the point where there is nothing left to do but consume. A species built to compete with the world has conquered the world and is now left to graze in the fields. Our success is our curse and the price to be paid is eternal self-torment. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and too many idle hands have created this devil we call Covid.

Why They Hate Us

Posted on November 23, 2021 by thezman

Tech Note: The site was down for a period due to a server issue. During the upgrade a canigulator valve got stuck, causing pressure to build up in one boiler. The subsequent rupture injured several of the mushroom people who work in the bowels of the server room, but they still managed to get us back on line. They are heroes.

Back in the Bush years, the slogan they liked to use regarding their race policies was “the bigotry of low expectations.” An army of people no doubt spent months conjuring the slogan and field-testing it with audiences to make sure it hit the mark. They made sure it was completely anodyne while conveying the required adherence to left-wing morality regarding race. The slogan said George Bush cared while also saying the Democrats were the real racists.

In fairness to the civic nationalists, they have a point about the Left when it comes to the issue of race. Despite all the talk about racial justice, they talk about nonwhites as if they are children. For example, they literally argue that black people are incapable of acquiring a picture ID. Even if you want to limit that claim to the population that is dependent on the state, this claim is never made about the whites. You can forgive civic nationalists for being a bit rustled by this.

Putting that aside, there is another element to that old slogan. The underlying claim is not just that the Left treats nonwhites like children but that the Left assumes the nonwhites lack agency and therefore cannot be held accountable. This is not a small thing to say. It goes behind the hoary clichés about racism and speaks to how the Left sees themselves and the world. They see themselves as the puppet masters and the rest of us are just the puppets.

You see another glimpse of this in the Wisconsin massacre following on the heels of the Rittenhouse verdict. The Left was clearly trying to get a riot going. The over-the-top language was intended to inflame the sorts of people who set fire to Kenosha way back when all of this started. When the hip-hop guy ran down women and children at the Christmas parade, the Left was giddy. They thought their rhetoric had triggered the response they thought was appropriate.

Now, it does not really matter if this guy was triggered by the extreme left-wing rhetoric that has flooded our lives for the last few years. It is fair to say he is not watching CNN every night, but his social media activity shows that he is aware of what is going on in the world. It is one of those realities of this age that even the dumbest person cannot escape the media. Unless you live off-grid in the woods, you live suspended in a solution of messages from the mass media.

The causal relationship here is not really important. It is pretty reasonable to conclude that people who do these things are crazy. Whether they are shooting up a school or attacking a Christmas parade, they are not acting rationally. What matters here is what the Left thinks is the causal relationship in these and other events. They clearly think there is one. It is why the less fanatical elements in the media are trying to downplay the Wisconsin massacre. It is bad optics.

This view of the world is behind the censorship regime. The unsophisticated make the error in thinking that the motive behind it is fear of their facts and reason. “They are afraid of our message” is a popular slogan in certain quarters. This is true only in that the Left thinks people lack agency and can easily be manipulated into rebellion or violence. That is what lies behind the claim that language is violence. They assume everyone does what they are told.

In the Charlottesville circus trial this was part of the plaintiff’s case. They brought in the equivalent of tarot card readers to explain the secret messages between members of the alt-right organizers. These so-called experts explained the secret meanings of the jokes and memes and then explained how they are calls to violence. At the heart of this is the assumption that humans lack agency and are so suggestible that they will become savage at the sound of certain words.

Magic word theory can probably be placed alongside magic dirt theory and magic shape theory in the domain of left-wing magic. Magic dirt theory is the claim that the soil upon which one stands controls your actions in some mystical way. People born on bad dirt turn out bad, while people born on magic dirt get all the breaks. Magic shape theory claims that metal and plastic shaped into something scary like certain types of guns makes people violent or suicidal.

This explains the Left’s quest to control all areas of cultural production. When you assume that people are infinitely suggestable, whoever controls the message controls the people, which means whoever controls the message centers, the centers of cultural production, controls the people. From the point of view of the Left, it is not censorship but leadership. They have seized the centers of information production in order to lead the people into the promised land.

At a retail level, this is not important. If the guy smashing you over the head with a skateboard is motivated by a bizarre understanding of humanity or he just hates you because you are white is not doing you much good in the moment. Step back and it is an important insight. That guy smashing people with his skateboard is not operating from mere partisanship. He is not just mad at the victim because they do not agree on tax policy or race policy. He is acting in self-defense.

At the heart of the crisis, at the center of every riot over the last few years, is one side convinced they must use any means necessary to remove the things standing between them and the egalitarian paradise. If that means killing those who do not want to go along, they feel completely justified. After all, their objections are a call for violence to stop progress. The guy swinging the skateboard believes he is acting in self-defense, even when the attack is unprovoked.

The question alongside that central truth is can society go on if some minority of the population is sure they are in a life and death struggle with the majority? The weaponization of the mentally unstable, minorities and fanatics in a war against stability and normalcy is a threat to the very existence of society. If this was coming from a foreign power or organized crime, the answer would be clear. It would me a war of survival against a direct threat.

All human society is an ongoing negotiation around a compromise. Why would anyone seek compromise with those whose opening bid is your death? The middle ground is still horrible. This is why the Left is waging total war on society. The only rational response is to respond accordingly. The compromise is that our commitment to civic nationalism must give way temporarily in order to deal with the threat in the same way chemotherapy is an exception to deal with cancer.

This is not without precedent. In times of war America has suspended the writ of habeas corpus, confined whole populations and commandeered the economy. In times of extreme emergency, free people suspend their distrust of power in order to wield it against the enemy of freedom. At some point, even the most feckless in the ruling class will have to come to this realization. Otherwise, they will be swept away by the same forces being unleashed by their foot soldiers in the media.

Sideline Men

Posted on November 22, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Takis post is up. Not all that related to this post, but not entirely unrelated either. I like the Taki post this week. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door for those on the side of angels. I was on for two hours last night saying bad things about lots of people. You can find the replay here.

One of the great innovations in American politics introduced by libertarians is the ability to turn the sidelines into the moral high ground. In order to avoid taking on the Left, especially with regards to morality, libertarians became expert at finding a neutral position that worked like a cloaking device. Because the libertarian position offered no threat to the Left, the Left ignored it. This allowed libertarians to pretend to oppose radicalism while never threatening it.

This cloaking strategy took the form of them finding some “principled position” that was often so unrealistic that it did not bear considering. A good example is the homosexual marriage debate. Normal people understood that what the crazies were doing was attacking the very concept of the family. The exclusivity of family offends the core concepts of the open society. Reducing marriage to a handshake agreement open to anyone eliminates its exclusivity.

Instead of confronting the reality of this, libertarians took the position that the state should have no interest in marriage at all. In other words, the libertarian answer to the assault on the institution of marriage was to advocate the elimination of the legal concept of marriage entirely. This allowed them to subtly agree with the Left while claiming to stand on some abstract principle. The libertarian moral high ground was just a way to stand on the sidelines and do nothing.

This habit of mind soon infected Conservative Inc. A strategy that allowed them to tell well-meaning rich people that they are fighting the good fight, while never upsetting their friends on the Left was manna from heaven. One manifestation of the this is the “conservative case for…” strategy where they find a way to make the left-wing position into a right-wing principle. Another is the agree and amplify approach. The Democrats are the real racists is the most popular example.

Over the weekend the so-called conservatives were trying to pair the Andrew Coffee case with the Kyle Rittenhouse case. Coffee is a drug dealer who was involved in a gun fight with cops at his drug den. His girlfriend was killed in the gun fight. The state charged him with her murder on the theory that he initiated the gun battle, so he was culpable for her death. He was acquitted on the grounds that he had a right to defend his drug den from the cops and black lives matter.

Now, the Coffee case is interesting for a number of reasons and one can argue that his acquittal was justified. It is in no way analogous to the Rittenhouse case. Comparing the two is a way to defend some abstract principle of self-defense while not taking on the reality of the Rittenhouse case. It was a purely political prosecution. If he was black the Left would have made him a hero. Because he was white and his attackers were antiwhite, they wanted to murder him.

Another example of this is the CRT business. It is explicitly antiwhite and the people pushing it are not afraid to make that point. The response from so-called conservatives is to claim that it was an assault on black people or Asians. They scoured the land for examples willing to play along. Christopher Rufo, the guy turning the issue into a career, went out of his way to beat back the antiwhite angle. The reason he opposed calling it antiwhite is it offended the Left.

Conservatives have been hiding under their beds for the last five years as the Left has run various antiwhite pogroms. First the excuse was Donald Trump made them sad, so they had to stay in bed. Then they not-so-subtly blamed the people who voted for him, those insurrectionists white supremacists. Now that Biden is as popular as rectal cancer, they feel the coast is clear so they can crawl out from under the beds to pretend they are leading a political movement.

House mouse Rich Lowry has a post wagging his finger at “woke culture” in which he, wait for it, says the Left are the real racists. You see, the response to the antiwhite pogroms of the last half dozen years is not a rigorous defense of white people, but rather a declaration of race denialism as a conservative principle. Meeting the Left head on would be wrong. Instead, they will find some comfy place on the sidelines where they can smugly pretend they have the moral high ground.

It is tempting to think this stuff is intentional, but guys like Rich Lowry lack the intellectual agility to think this way. He is just an obsequious dullard. Instead, the reason behind this approach is instinct. To be a conservative in the modern sense of it is to assume the Left is the moral superior and they are on the side of angels. This is the starting assumption on the so-called Right. Therefore, to oppose left-wing morality is to become the bad guy in the political drama.

Since the conservative ecosystem selects for the soft and the cowardly, it is full of people unwilling to look their superiors in the eye. That has been the great gift the libertarians have bestowed upon them. It was the entry fee for libertarians to join the coalition of cowards knowns as conservatism. Whatever the Left proposes, the Right will find some morally ambiguous space from which they can pretend to be standing on principle while offering no resistance.

While frustrating, events of the past few years have made this clear to most people and this trick is losing its magic. The odious David French, a man so soyish he makes Rich Lowry look butch, condemning Kyle Rittenhouse in a far-left website is now met with howls of laughter. Current events are providing much needed clarity. In this time for choosing, the cowards who choose the sidelines can be condemned and ignored while the business of beating back the darkness can begin.

Letters An Such

Posted on November 19, 2021 by thezman

It is that time of year where the loafing begins. Every year the loafing seems to start earlier for some reason. When I was a young man, people worked right up to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The boss would let people go early on that Wednesday, but lots of people worked the following Friday. Then it became a four day holiday for most people, even working class guys. Then Wednesday became a day when people took off to get a jump on travel.

Covid seems to have added some more loafing to the schedule. Last year Tuesday was the big travel day, at least for car travel. That means Thanksgiving is pretty much a five day weekend for most office people. I’ve noticed that my work e-mail is in sharp decline this week and that many people will not be around at all next week. Thanksgiving is quickly becoming a full week off for many people. That means the Friday prior will soon become a day in which nothing gets done. Loafing is our strength!

There is plenty to moan about in this life, but the expansion of Thanksgiving into a weeklong holiday is not one of them. It is a quintessential American holiday that has not be corrupted by the times. They have not found a way to blame white supremacy or claim it was invented by slaves. There is the Indian guilt issue, but those efforts have largely failed take hold. Despite the worst people trying their worst, the holiday remains a time to enjoy the simple things and be thankful for them.

The negative this year is the Covidians have started to demand vaccine passports from relatives in order to come over for dinner. How much this is happening is unknown, but it is an idea being pushed by the usual suspects. A fake poll was created that claimed 60% of people are demanding vaccine passports at Thanksgiving. It was just a bit of guerilla marketing from a sleazy marketing firm, but the media wants to hear this, so they have been pushing the idea.

Most likely the real number is pretty close to the number of people who were sure Boris and Natasha were hiding under their bed. The same people who put on their serious face to explain to you why Trump is Hitler now put on their serious face to tell you that you have to wear a life jacket so they will not drown. Covid has made plain that our crazy people problem cannot be solved with conventional means. Physical removal of the crazy people is the only path back to normalcy.

That may turn out to be the gift of Covid. If these people are sure that the rest of us pose a threat to them, maybe they remove themselves. Carve out a bit of Mexico or perhaps a spot in the Amazon for them. They can be safe because they are all in it together and the rest of us can get back to normal. Imagine a world without Covidians, it is easy if you try. If such a thing occurred, Thanksgiving would become a global one month holiday because the world would be so grateful.

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.

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Thieling It

Posted on November 18, 2021 by thezman

For a very long time, there was a zone of acceptable behavior in politics that was bound by both political coalitions. One side of the political class established the right side and the other camp established the left side. Within those two boundaries is where you found acceptable political discourse. If someone on the right side started noticing things, they were thrown over the wall into the void. Similarly, if someone called shenanigans on the liberals, they were marginalized.

Most people noticed the barrier on the right side as it was the tallest. Those gatekeepers also made a big deal out of being gatekeepers. In retrospect, conservatism was nothing more than a gatekeeper’s handbook. On the left side, the grandees did their policing more subtly, with a sense of shame. People like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich were tolerated as long as they knew their place. They got to pretend to be real socialists as long as they never threatened the established order.

The story of the last decade or so is the collapse of both walls. Donald Trump swung a wrecking ball through Conservative Inc. What started as a vanity campaign set off a populist rebellion first aimed at the gatekeepers on conservatism. Forgotten in all of this is the way Trump humiliated the Bush wing of the party. The mediocrities running conservatism did the rest. The whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity, corruption and perfidy.

Something similar occurred on the left side. The Bernie Sanders challenge to Clinton in the 2016 campaign exposed a massive crack in that foundation. His 2020 run forced Liberal Inc. to blow up it up to prevent Sanders from winning. In retrospect, the 2020 shenanigans should include the rigging of the Democratic primary. The result was a collapse of the gatekeeping on that side. This is an underappreciated part of the whole effort to install Joe Biden as president.

It seems that some of the empire’s rich people have noticed that the walls are down, so they are coming up with solutions. One is a new university in Texas that will gather up various exiles from the establishment into something of a think tank. Their stated claim is they will challenge the orthodoxy of the academy. The money for this is coming from a guy calling himself Joe Lonsdale. He is part of the Peter Thiel network, so it is safe to assume that Thiel money is involved too.

When you look at the list of people involved, it is basically civic nationalism gathering the remaining troops for one last stand. The “left-wing” people involved are the old liberals who never embraced cultural Marxism. The “right-wing” types are mostly people who never had a chance to work at AEI or Heritage. The one thing all of these people have in common is they are exiles from the establishment foundations. This project is an effort to create their own version of Heritage.

The problem with challenging the established orthodoxly is you need to do so from an alternative moral order. Civic nationalism has never had a moral order at its center, so it was never much of a challenge to the ideologues. This is stunningly clear now that cultural Marxism is off its chain and running wild. What does Conservative Inc. say about the corruption of the law we see in the Rittenhouse trial? Their advice is you should throw your guns in the nearest lake and stay home.

Into this moral void is flowing the integralists. These are mostly Catholic revanchists who think the answer to the present is to rewind the clocks. They keep turning up in the pages of the American Conservative. Here is Sohrab Ahmari explaining why he has joined the new university. Here he is explaining their new moral order along with some fellow revanchists, also involved in the new university project. Buchanan’s old publication seems to be part of the new gatekeeper operation.

Interestingly, it appears that Rod Dreher has not got the memo about the new direction of his platform. Here he is reacting to a post by Patrick Deneen, another Catholic revanchist, lumping Dreher in with David French. It is an excellent observation as both men are cafeteria Christians. They pick from the vast menu that is Christianity to create for themselves a religion that suits their needs. Dreher takes issue with it, but he should have read it as a warning. His days are now numbered.

Another interesting fact is the Catholic revanchists are involved with the Yoram Hazony project, which is also funded by Peter Thiel. We have one oligarch and some lesser allies working to fund a new building project. The new walls on the right will be built on a new brand of nationalism, stripped of the icky parts, and a civic nationalism rooted in a desire for the old throne and altar conservatism. It is a do-over of sorts, starting someone in the middle of the last century.

Taken as a whole, the Theil project is an interesting play by one of the most important and ambitious oligarchs. Unlike many of his fellow oligarchs at the table, he seems to get that a storm is brewing. If they wish to avoid the national razor, they better figure out how to create order from the chaos. Unlike the other oligarchs, people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, Thiel is not trying to curry favor with the cultural Marxists. He seems to get that they are the problem.

The trouble, of course, is that this is a rearguard action. In order to rebuild those old walls, there has to be a ruling class consensus to defend. That was always the point critics missed about Conservative Inc. It was created as part of the ruling class consensus that formed up after the Cold War. One reason it is in ruins is the consensus no longer exists. Into that void is flowing the demographically driven identity politics that so frightens the civic nationalists.

That is another thing missed by the civic nationalists. You see it in that Deneen post about his new brand of conservatism. Defense of the liberal order, which is the heart of civic nationalism, was itself a creation of the post-Cold War consensus. Without that political center, civic nationalism is nothing more than armed men defending a city that has already been put to the torch by the radicals. The Rittenhouse story is not just a young man on trial. It is civic nationalism on trial.

While it is wise to assume the worst from these new projects, the fact that they exist should be read as good news. When the oligarchs are sensing that things are heading into very dangerous waters, it means they are ready to stop playing make believe and engage in serious politics. Cultural Marxism poses a greater threat to them than it does the common people. If the oligarchs start to question the prevailing moral orthodoxy, it opens the door for a legitimate challenge.

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