Awake to a sense of your awful situation

Normal people have been stubbornly unable and unwilling to face reality, because it's ugly and they'd rather believe a prettier delusion than face facts. That's not sustainable in the long run, but it can go a long way before running face first into the brick wall of reality. The Z-man knocks one out of the park again. He's sometimes hit or miss, and his lack of a spiritual dimension limits his ability to talk about our situation as much as he should, but in spite of that, he's pretty astute, and more to the point, he's able to synthesize and eloquently detail what's going on. I'll edit the post here and there, mostly for length, and add some editor commentary a bit.

Paul Gottfried has a post up on the topic of elite whites incessantly condemning white people for alleged crimes against nonwhites. A feature of the current crisis is a rich white person, usually a woman, wagging a bony finger at white people for the alleged crimes of their ancestors. Of course, these white people always live in the whitest areas and rarely interact with nonwhites. This always brings the charge of hypocrisy from the sorts of people who think this matters.

The question that white civic nationalists ask themselves when confronted by this strange behavior is whether the antiwhite scolds believe it. The practical brains of the people attracted to civic nationalism cannot accept anything but a practical answer to the question of motivation. The antiwhite scolds must see some profit in this behavior so they are cynically exploiting it. They do not actually believe what they are saying, which explains how they live.

Gottfried offers up an alternative to this thesis. These antiwhite scolds are acting from some form of self-loathing. Eric Hoffer made this observation seventy years ago in his book The True Believer. People who join causes tend to do so because they have a desire for self-abnegation. This is driven by a hatred of their natural identity and a desire to swap it for some other identity. The group identity then becomes their own, which is why they so viciously defend the group.

I'm going to excise an example given about Hitler both because it's not nuanced enough to be real, and referring to Hitler in any capacity tends to be too emotional to be useful. Let's just... not.

How is it that someone like Elizabeth Warren can wag her bony finger at us about our white privilege, while she enjoys a lifestyle free of diversity? How is it that Sandy Cortez presents herself as the woke warrioress while married to a guy who looks like he should be leading the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade? Ilhan Omar divorced her brother so she could shack up with a guy who looks white to Jared Taylor.

All of the antiwhite stuff comes from people who are as white as a Klan rally or clearly infatuated with whiteness. The model of the universe held by the typical white American cannot explain this bizarre phenomenon. This is why they tend to start chanting the word “hypocrisy” even though the target is immune to the charge. That there is a clue as to what is going on with these people. For the antiwhite scolds, there is nothing hypocritical about what they are doing. It makes perfect sense.

"Conservatives" love to quote the probably apocryphal quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, while being completely blind to their own doing so with regards to their responses to liberal outrages, liberal attacks, and liberal insanity. The fact is, that that's exactly the reaction that liberals want to see. It is self-affirming to have weak, bowtie wearing nebbish "conservatives" who think Ben Shapiro is a sharp wit calling them hypocrites.

The place to start here is understanding what they mean by white. It is not skin tone or even ethnic heritage, but rather a state of mind. Elizabeth Warren feels no shame or remorse about defrauding at least one university about her heritage, because as far as she is concerned, her lived experience says she is an Indian. She is not white because she has lived as a nonwhite, therefore society has treated her as a nonwhite, so her lived experience is as a nonwhite.

Even for those who cannot do this mental jujitsu, the mere fact that they accept that whiteness is a social condition is enough for them to see themselves as nonwhite, even though they are ghostly white. It is hard for normal people to accept this, but people with a need to believe in something have an amazing capacity to believe in the most creative and egregious nonsense. Anti-whiteness fills a need for these people, so they find a way to passionately believe in it.

That gets to a much more complicated part of this. What is the void that needs to be filled and is being filled by anti-whiteness? That is answered by asking, why is it that a mediocre lawyer is a senior senator? Why is it that a former barmaid is now the most famous Democrat in the House? What justifies the exalted position of the people who populate the managerial class? It is not smarts or achievement, so how is it that we are ruled by a collection of mediocrities?

That is where these secular fads come into the picture. Elizabeth Warren feels justified in her scolding because she fervently believes all the things the beautiful people believe, which places her on the side of angels. The anti-whiteness is not the point. It is the embrace of it and the thorough understanding of the language it employs that demonstrates the piety of the person espousing it. They could just as easily hate broccoli as they do whiteness. It is the hate that matters.

This is the final stop on the managerial train. A system that seemingly selects people at random and places them into positions of authority and status results in people in these positions looking for a justification for their good luck. Since they cannot accept random chance as the answer, they latch onto every passing fad that promises to justify their position with regards to the rest of us. Who they are is not us, which is proved by their enthusiasm for hatred of us.

This is the other thing that conservatives simply do not wish to believe, in spite of the fact that it is right in front of our noses and has been for all of my five decades of experience. Our enemies, and I use that word deliberately, have created their entire identity around hatred of normal, white people and their culture and their religion and their freedoms, etc. That's the main thing that defines them. They're not going to abandon it because you came up with a tricky logical argument about why their proposals don't work. Don't work for what? Their goals are completely alien and different than what you think that they are. They don't care.

This is why their reaction to one of their social experiments murdering children at a Christian school was so vulgar. That need to not be us required them to no share in the general horror of the event. It is why the NYTimes found the first opportunity they could to side with the killer. It is why they are now rallying around an imaginary narrative about a brewing backlash. Who they are is not us, so anything that amplifies that is embraced, which is why anti-whiteness is so popular with them.

This is why there is no reasoning with these people. You cannot bargain with them or appeal to their humanity. Who they are literally depends on them hating us. Like the people on the top floors of the office building, making fun of the rank and file, our ruler’s sense of identity is now tied to hating the people over whom they rule. For them, their life literally depends on hating normal white people. As we saw yesterday, for the rest of us, our lives now depend on hating them back.

And that's where the Z-man's lack of spirituality leads him, in literally the last sentence, to the wrong conclusion. We don't need to hate them. In fact, it's spiritually poisonous to do so. But we also need to properly recognize who and what they are and what they represent. The Nephites didn't hate the Lamanites, except when the Nephites were in the depths of apostasy themselves. But that didn't stop them from reluctantly killing thousands upon thousands of them when their own lives and freedoms depended on doing so. You can't make a good decision about things if you're in denial about reality. We were warned. Repeatedly. The Book of Mormon talks about it quite a bit. And this part was for everyone, from the New Testament:

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

That's not just some abstract warning about somebody else somewhere else. It applies to people you know. It applies to your government, who treats the American people with all the classic hallmarks of a dangerously abusive and manipulative spouse. It may even apply to your friends and family. It may even apply to you.

Corruption and the J6 Hoax

A slightly edited Z-man post or two.

A classic example of a cultural shift was Watergate. The sorts of shenanigans done by the Nixon people during the 1972 election were considered normal and then all of a sudden they were declared beyond the pale. Prior to that time, the FBI was prohibited from getting directly involved in politics. Then all of a sudden, they were plotting with the Washington Post to overthrow the president. Those unwritten rules of political conduct suddenly changed and Nixon was removed.

Another example from politics comes from the 1990’s. Current affairs programming followed a set of unwritten rules. It was supposed to be a calm exchange of views, hosted by a moderator who pretended to be objective. The Clintons showed up in Washington and this changed. All of a sudden Clinton people were flinging their pooh at the moderator and anyone else on stage. It did not take long before this became the new normal and now all shows are pooh flinging contests.

This week, Tucker Carlson is doing shows on the hidden surveillance tapes from the Capitol on January 6th. These tapes had been hidden from public view by the Democrats until the Republicans took control of the House. Kevin McCarthy, the new Speaker, let the production team of the Tucker Carlson Show review the 40,000 hours of footage and this week they are reporting on it. They also have permission to show clips of that hidden footage in their reporting.

So far, nothing earth shattering has been revealed. The guy who showed up wearing animal skins, the QAnon Shaman, is seen being given a guided tour by the police, who seem to be having a blast leading the guy around the building. The QAnon Shaman is now in prison, doing four years for allegedly leading a violent insurrection. He was not allowed to have access to this footage in his defense, because in America the accused are no longer entitled to defend themselves in court.

This is where you see one of those cultural shifts. Most people reading this remember when such a thing would be a massive scandal. The judge and the prosecutors would have been reviled as fascists for denying this man a right to a defense. Of course, the media would have been demanding the footage from the beginning. Instead, they are up in arms over Tucker having access to the material. They fear he may create a “dangerous narrative” using these tapes.

The media was always biased. We used to be more mature about this and accept that politics is about friends and enemies. In the colonial times, everyone knew the bias of the newspapers and thought nothing of it. Then all of a sudden there was a culture shift and we were supposed to pretend the media was neutral. They were the fourth estate, speaking truth to power. We have just experienced another culture shift. The media is totally corrupt, using power to obscure the truth.

Another example of the culture shift is in the tapes. Tucker showed a scene from the J6 show trial in Congress. One of the politicians showed a clip of Senator Josh Hawley running from the building like a little girl. It turns out that the video was heavily edited by the Democrats. Hawley was with a group of other pols being herded out by the police and he was the last guy to leave. In other words, the Congress doctored a video and presented it under oath to the public as fact.

Everyone has always accepted that politicians lie. The reason they lie is to get elected, avoid scandal, or avoid responsibility. In other words, self-interest. This is the nature of all human activity and everyone accepted it. Doctoring video and presenting it as fact in order to promote a crazy narrative is something different. In a prior age, the people involved would be facing criminal charges. After all, they charged Roger Clemens for lying to Congress not so long ago.

More importantly, they doctored video to make a sitting Senator look like a sissy and then used the hearing to broadcast it to the world. It appears they worked with the media to promote this lie. Ten years ago, this was so beyond the pale that no one would have considered it. Now all of a sudden, the culture controlling the House and Senate has changed and this is now the new normal. How long before they move onto assassinating one another?

None of this is startling for people on this side of the divide, but it underscores an important point about the current crisis. The corruption at the top is so deep and so pervasive that the time for reform has now passed. How can the system reform itself when the people running it are so thoroughly corrupt? How could a genuine reformer work with people who are so corrupt? How can you fix the rules when the culture has evolved to reject the very idea of rules?

In the fullness of time, future historians will look at the 1980’s as a time for choosing, when the political class struggled to redefine itself. They could have gone down the road of reform and prepared for the word after the Cold War. Instead they signed on with the Clintons and the road to perdition. That has led to the flowering of a culture of corruption at the top of the political order. That is why J6 terrified them. They have known this long before that protest.

And

The looming presidential primary season is about to be a good test case for the claim that the system is inward looking. That is, what we get in the national media with regards to politics is for internal consumption by the political bubble. They are not trying to sway public opinion, but rather signal things to one another. Like fireflies at dusk, the various nodes of the system use the media to blink to one another. Those outside just happen to see it but are not the intended audience.

This post in Breitbart covering CPAC is an interesting example. Mike Pompeo is running for president, so he shows up to give a speech. In his speech, he promises to throw old people off the Social Security and Medicare system. The reason he wants to do this is he says these systems cost too much. You see, with all the baby boomers retiring, the costs are starting to rise quickly. Therefore, the logical solution is to start throwing old people off the programs. Problem solved!

To a normal person, this sounds as sensible as coming out in favor of slapping children or killing puppies. There is no constituency in favor of cutting Social Security or Medicare funding or even limiting access. Further, old people are the biggest voting block in the Republican Party. Look around at CPAC and you see more gray hair than gray hoodies. He would have been better off giving the speech in Klingon. A reasonable person may think Mike Pompeo is insane.

He is not insane. He is simply a man who has lived his entire adult life inside the system, so he has no idea how normal people sound. He is used to chatting with friends in the system about the need to reduce spending on Americans in order to spend much more on Ukrainians or illegal aliens. For him, this is perfectly normal. He would probably be shocked to learn that there is no constituency for this. After all, everyone he knows thinks something must be done.

Now, Mike Pompeo is a ridiculous person by the standards of normal people, but he is typical of the political class. He is what passes for serious in that world. You see it in the media that serves the people in the system. Real Clear Politics gives him a big thumbs up for being courageous in his call to throw old people into the streets. Time Magazine says he is just the man the Republican Party needs. They are signaling to the system that this is what is good and proper.

If our mass media cared at all about the hoi polloi, the headline in the Washington Post would be, “Jobless Rando Shows Up At CPAC, Rants About Old People.” The New York Times would ask, “Why did CPAC let this weirdo speak?” No serious person, not even the people in the system, thinks Mike Pompeo should be president. No one thinks he has chance to register in the polls. That is not the point. The point is to participate in a debate among the political class.

Speaking of jobless randos, Nikki Haley also showed up at the event to give a speech in favor of killing white people and sending their stuff to Ukraine. She was not quite that explicit, but like Pompeo, she is deeply concerned about people on the other side of the world, but not so much about people in America. Even though she must know this is a losing hand with the voters, she knows it is a winning hand in Washington. Like Pompeo, her campaign is about internal politics.

Of course, CPAC itself is part of the same system. It bills itself as the convention for conservative activists, but in reality it is mostly a tradeshow for the grifters and confidence men who populate the conservative ecosystem. They decorated the event with yokels from flyover country in order to give the impression that they have genuine support among the hoi polloi. In reality the point has always been to promote internal dialogue and signal to the rest of the political system.

The curious thing about all of this, and it jumps out at you with CPAC, is that Trump did the system a huge favor in 2016. CPAC would have gone bust by now without the Trump victory and populist surge. Even with Trump running in 2024, CPAC struggled for an audience this year. The speakers talked to more empty chairs than people, judging from some of the pics people have posted. Without Trump, they are left with zombies like Mike Pompeo to sell tickets.

The same can be said for the entire system. Imagine how insulated and cutoff they would be at this point if Trump never came down the escalator. The Republicans would have selected a goofball like Jeb Bush. Maybe he beats Hillary, maybe not, but the result would have been the same. Large swaths of voters would be wondering what in the hell is going on, but with no way to tell the system. Without Trump, national politics would be even more bizarre than it is now.

That said, the persistence of this internal monologue that is presented to us as democratic politics says nothing really changed. The internal monologue has been more shouty and angry since 2015, but it remains an internal monologue. Once the door is shut on Trump and his voters this election, the internal monologue will return to sounding like an opioid laced talk show on National Public Radio. The people inside it will drift off into the dream world of their own making.

It may already be happening. Chris “Thanks Dad” Sununnu went on the far-left chat show Meet the Press to announce that Trump will not be the nominee. Maybe he was telling tales out of school, but most likely he is stating the general consensus within Washington with regards to the primaries. It brings to mind what Talleyrand famously said about the Bourbons after they were restored to power, “They have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing”.

What the Republican primary is going to be this time is an argument between the party establishment and the rest of Washington. The former will be insisting that all the Trump stuff is over and it is time to get back to looting the white middle class, while the later keeps pointing to Trump saying, “He’s still here.” Put another way, the voters are now a guest that refuses to leave the party. The political class is debating how best to make them leave and go home.