"Meritocracy" and class warfare

I was going to write a discussion of this interesting Brooks article, but before I got around to it, the Z-man did, and Vox Day did. They both have something interesting to say about it, and it's both not only congruent with each other, but also approaching it from a totally different perspective to come to a similar conclusion. I'll quote sections of the Z-man's post on it.

Brooks speaks as a member of the meritocracy, which he defines as the highly educated and highly connected urban class that runs the institutions. His column is mostly a self-congratulatory call to action to address the growing unrest.

The place to start is the assumption on behalf of Brooks and no doubt his intended readership that he is a member of the meritocracy. He ticks many of the boxes he repeatedly insists are requirements of the meritocracy. He is the child of wealthy foreigners, and he went to the right schools. He has avoided anything that looks like productive labor. He has no loyalty to his host country. He sent his son off to serve in the army of a foreign country.

By the standards of the people who throw around the term “meritocracy” as a compliment, David Brooks is a good example. The question is what service is he rendering to the ruling class? He has no useful skills, and he has never tried to do anything that requires sacrifice on behalf of the ruling class. His career looks like the life of a self-indulgent fop from the British literature. What has David Brooks ever done to merit consideration of the ruling class?

The first clue is a quote from Thomas Edsall he uses in his post to explain why he and his fellow meritocrats aligned against Trump. “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.” That right there captures the Cloud People – Dirt People divide.

ed note: An admission that the "conservatives" of the Establishment are as progressive as the Left that they pretend to oppose.

Opposing Trump was never about practical things like the priorities of government or the general welfare of the people. It was class struggle. The meritocratic class view their membership in that class as a sign of their moral goodness. Their ability to worm their way through the labyrinth of credentialling mechanisms in order to fill up their resume with the best associations is proof of their virtue. A perch at the New York Times is no different from an assigned seat in the front pews.

Hatred of Trump, and it was real hate, was a defense of the optimates versus the populares on purely class grounds. The problem is the optimates are a polite fiction, a fig leaf for the tiny ruling elite at the top of the system. The role of thoroughly impractical men like David Brooks is to maintain both a moral code that benefits the ruling elite and to provide a barrier between the optimates and the populares. Trump crossing that barrier was viewed as a violation of this system’s integrity.

That is the heart of the Brooks post. The headline is misleading as at no point does he genuinely suggest the meritocrats are the bad guys. Instead, he explains how people could possibly make this mistake, because their highly exclusionary systems do seem to violate their alleged moral code. Note he quickly moves along to the part his readers expect from a Brooks column. That is the part where he says the Dirt People are undereducated rubes who need to be put in their place.

In fairness, he probably sensed this and finished with “We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?” Fools grabbed onto this thinking it revealed some genuine self-reflection and perhaps a sign that the managerial elite is coming around to the criticisms leveled at them. In reality, it was another blow on the shofar to rally the people of the meritocracy.

That is how the Cloud People view things. Like the children of Israel camping in the wilderness of Sinai, they await the final instructions. They have seen the destruction of the Dirt People and they can see the ultimate end of their leader. What comes soon is the Promised Land where the meritocrats will build a kingdom of priests and a holy nation that serves the gods of the new religion. The Dirt People will be gone and what will remain is the righteous led by the meritocrats.

That is the purpose of these men of the meritocracy. Their role is to keep the dream alive and encourage the elites to push forward and faster. Whether any of this is possible is never considered. Those debates are left to the Dirt People and once they are gone, all doubt will be gone. In the end, the meritocracy is nothing more than a cheering section for a system that serves elite interests at the expense of the people and nations on which they feed.

Genetics and doctrine

I'm often amused, bemused and a bit crestfallen when members of the Church are unable to (or more accurately, unwilling to) accept things that are real, data-driven, and yet which challenge beliefs that they cling to. Not doctrinal beliefs, but beliefs that are often just as core to their identity as doctrinal beliefs are, and which in their own interpretation, they've wrapped up with doctrine, or garnished their folk beliefs with a doctrinal flourish, so that they can't tell the difference between them. This leads them to dismiss or reject actual data, because they believe that it conflicts with doctrine, when in reality it does not; it only conflicts with their interpretive mingling of doctrine and whatever philosophies of men they've tied them too.

Often this segment of members is part of the big plurality of members (maybe even majority, sadly) that often fall under the rubric of something Nephi warned us of in 2 Nephi 28:21 "And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell." Those who refuse to acknowledge how thoroughly the devil has infiltrated and poisoned our society against righteousness are often blinded in many other ways too; usually because they're too caught up in their worldly identity of some kind. Although perhaps that's not entirely fair. Nephi also said, to his brothers after his own vision where he saw his father's vision, that the wicked take the truth to be hard. But aren't we all wicked, fallen, and in need of repentance? My experience is that everyone takes some truth to be hard, because we're just not in a position to accept it. In fact, quite clearly we cannot accept truth unless we are prepared for it. Not just doctrinal truth, but any truth. We reject political, ideological, social, cultural, or scientific proof that we're not ready to receive just as readily as we reject doctrinal truth we're not ready to receive. If we can even comprehend what is being said to us, we can't fit it into our existing framework or understanding, so we reject it or dismiss it rather than accept it and accept that our existing framework or understanding needs to adapt to accept this new data. It's the work of a lifetime to constantly grow, line upon line, precept upon precept, until we come to a full understanding, and we can't be expected to understand things that are beyond us until we've built up every line and precept necessary to accept the next one.

Anyway, that's a bit rambly, but I know what I'm going to post next is going to be controversial to many, because it won't fit with their framework. But... it's true nonetheless. Let me preface this just a bit by making an analogy. 

Abraham famously bore Isaac, right, his son and heir. Isaac himself bore two sons, Jacob and Esau, and Jacob, after being renamed Israel, bore twelve sons of his own, which are the basis for the tribes of Israel. God covenanted with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Israelites became the covenant people, endowed with certain blessings. Abraham and Isaac obviously had other children as well, however. Abraham had children with Hagar and with Keturah. Isaac, as noted above, bore Esau, who was along with his uncles above, the father of nations. Did God love these people less than the Israelites? I believe not, because that would be contrary to God's own word. He loves all of his children, and puts all of them in the environment that they need to be in to reach their potential on Earth, and prepare themselves for the best eternity that they can. So, if one group of people, one genetic lineage, has access to blessings that another does not, it is because that situation will be of most benefit to both groups of people in the eternal long run. People and peoples are not interchangeable widgets, where one is the same as another, and God knows that even better than we do, tailoring the environment perfectly to the person who is to receive it in this mortal life. "All are alike unto God" should not be interpreted as "all are the same unto God." We are all alike in that God values us, and wants us all to flourish, and has tailored our mortal experience to best allow us to do so.

Now, of course, this doesn't justify ignoring the plight or suffering of people or peoples in hard times, but it does mean that we shouldn't engage in virtue-signaling hand-wringing about the lack of equity in the world too. People who take it upon themselves to "change the world" by trying to bring about equity and whatever in broad strokes tend to be arrogant and full of hubris and self-righteousness, so full of their own self-importance that they don't care that their crude "solutions" to problems like poverty, opportunity, or whatever are actually breaking more than they fix. In reality, it is beyond the reach of the vast majority of people to even fix themselves, and help their immediate family, friends and maybe community. The very tiny super-minority of people who can actually go abroad and make some kind of change for the better among strangers should be supported and applauded, but few of us should aspire to that. Beams and motes and all that. We've all got enough of our own problems still.

Anyway, all of this is to say that peoples are different. Not just in terms of culture and superficial physical differences, but in terms of actual genetics, behaviors, and capabilities. Again; does that mean God loves some people more than others? No, it means that some people need a completely different environment to flower spiritually than others.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much you're aware of PCA charts, but they are charts that use data points to map genetic difference. This is quite interesting:

From a doctrinal standpoint, I don't think it really makes any difference to notice that sub-Saharan Africans, i.e., the "black race" which is certainly very accurate in spite of the spirited denials that scientists will make about their being such a thing as race, are significantly separated genetically from a cluster or arc that includes literally every other population on earth. Africans in this sense should be seen as sub-Saharan Africans, as north Africans, while not shown, will tend to cluster with west Asians and Europeans. Which makes sense given that many millennia of interchange we know about between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

It also raises some interesting questions about the fact that the Lord did not see fit to give the Priesthood to the black race until the 70s, when the Brethren, in earnest prayer, finally felt that the time had come. Church historians, or at least many of them, including those who wrote the article on the Church website on Race and the Priesthood chalk it up to cultural views and a mistake on the part of early Brethren, who were unable to look past their own cultural perspective to see the current cultural perspective of people as interchangeable widgets. 

I'm not so sure. I don't think the Lord simply allowed a mistake to persist; I think it was his plan all along that things unfold the way that they did. The Lord is usually very efficient, and things that happen often kill many birds with one stone. Even if the cultural perspective of Brigham Young or others played a role in how it played out, it probably also met other needs that the Lord needed met. 

Anyway, that's really neither here nor there, other than that the knowledge that there's a big genetic rift between the black race and the rest of humanity as we know it today begs the question. If there's a genetic difference, with attendant genetic predisposition to different behaviors than everyone else (and there is voluminous data that there is), then does that mean that we shouldn't be surprised to see a different path to eternal glory? Heck, I see a different path to eternal glory between me and my own brothers. The Lord has an individual plan for each of us, but who we are genetically and culturally is part of that path. And who we are genetically and culturally makes a huge difference in our behavior patterns. Speaking of data: https://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-black-struggle-reader.html

I'm aware that the shallow will immediately dismiss all of this and suggest that its racist. Hence my lead-in; although I'm not a Ben Shapiro fan, he's right about one thing: facts don't care about your feelings. As a corollary, these facts don't interfere with doctrine either. God is no respecter of persons. In the parable of the talents, the guy who turned two talents into four got the exact same reward as the guy who turned five talents into ten. And I'm not suggesting that white people have five talents and black people two or anything like that. The reality is more nuanced than the parable; it's not that we have a different quantity of talents, but rather that our talents are different from each other's. But that doesn't matter; if we make the most of the talents and situation that we have, we can qualify for the same exaltation. On the other hand, if we covet the talents and situation of others, we are in a bad place with regards to eternal progression.

The data involved here is convincing to those who are prepared to accept the truth. And it does have consequences for what kind of society we can and should attempt to build that will be fair to all and have a shot at long-term success as a society. But if we persist in the delusional idea that we're just interchangeable widgets with no cultural, genetic or behavioral differences between us that are more than superficial, we're setting ourselves up for failure, because we're in denial about one of the most salient points of creating a successful society; how to account for diversity that actual means some kind of significant difference. (The data also strongly suggests that racism, as most people believe it to be, is a hoax and a shakedown racket. Similar data can be compiled for sexism, although that's beyond the scope of this blog post.)

I think the Nephites and Ammonites did it best. They had friendly relations with each other. They went to and fro between each others lands in trade and other travel. The Nephites gave the Ammonites lands of their own and protected them from Lamanite aggression, even as the Ammonites supported the Nephite armies. But they didn't just give up on their differences, either. The Ammonites had their own lands, in Jershon and later elsewhere, where they could practice their own culture and set up their own societies. Which, in many ways, were more successful than the Nephite ones, at least for a time.

One of the more important Z-man posts

The New Iron Curtain

I'll be editing so I'm not just copy-pasting the entire thing, but this is something that everyone in America needs to realize. The courts are not your friend. They are not your last resort. They are not going to give you a fair trial. They have been weaponized—illegally, sure, but who's going to tell the courts that they're acting illegally when they're the ones who determine who's guilty or liable or not?—against normal Americans and time-honored American customs. The American government, from top to bottom, has become an abusive spouse; defined by their abuse of the American people. Sadly, too many of the American people are in denial about the fact that they play the role of a battered spouse with Stockholm Syndrome in this metaphor. Although, of course, that's often the role that the battered spouse plays; making excuses. "He only hits me because he loves me."

Anyway, on to the Z-man's post, or at least portions of it:

Since about the time he took over the primetime slot for Fox News, people have been predicting that Fox would fire Tucker Carlson. The regime toadies said he would be fired due to his reckless heresy. He talked about taboo topics and questioned official dogma, which can never be allowed. The so-called conservatives repeated the same lines, as is their habit. Normal people, of course, know that anyone speaking truth to power is not going to last long in the modern media.

It turns out that Tucker was not fired for anything he said in particular, but most likely as a result of the lawsuit Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems. It is possible that as part of the settlement, Fox agreed to get rid of people hated by the regime. The first to go was Dan Bongino, who was sacked before the ink was dry. Carlson got the axe Monday morning, which suggests it took them a while to find evidence to fire him with cause, thus voiding his contract.

On the other hand, the lawsuit could simply have frightened or embarrassed the plutocrats who own Fox News. They are regime members, after all, which means they care first and foremost about regime opinion. Tucker has no doubt been a problem in this regard for a long time. This embarrassing lawsuit, punishment by the regime for Fox not falling in line, may have frightened the Murdoch clan. Firing Tucker is a way to win back support of their social class.

The most likely explanation is that Fox either agreed to clean house as part of the settlement or they got the message being sent by these lawsuits. Fox getting sued over election stuff is ridiculous, but the full might of the regime was brought to bear so that it was clearly impossible for Fox to get a fair trial. The judge ruled against them at every turn, so Fox had no choice but to settle. There is another case out there as well, so they have to play ball or face bankruptcy.

This may seem farfetched but consider that the New York Times was sued by Sarah Palin for defamation and won, despite their own emails admitting that they defamed Palin and did so knowingly. Granted, the judge in the case told the jury to rule in favor of the Times, but it is a good example of how the courts treat the media. It is incredibly hard to sue the media, even when they willingly lie about you. Yet somehow the court went the opposite way in this Fox News case.

What is happening right in front of our eyes is the weaponization of the court system by the regime to suppress dissent. They cannot shut down a cable channel or throw their hosts in prison, but they can lawfare into bankruptcy any organization that violates the ideology of the regime. In other words, they told Rupert Murdoch that he can run his operation as he sees fit, but they will sue him into the poorhouse if he steps out of line or fails to get rid of people who violate regime dogma.

This is merely the highest profile example of this new control mechanism. The Alex Jones case is another example. Jones was tagged with a billion in damages for saying nutty things about the school shooting in Connecticut. Like the Fox News case, the particulars were just an excuse to force Jones into a morality play in which he was the villain, and the jury was instructed to condemn him. He never stood a chance at trial because the trial was rigged from the start.

New York did the same trick to the National Rifle Association. They used the court system to batter them into bankruptcy. This is made easier by a court system filled with judges who think this is a great idea. Even if a judge is uncomfortable with these Stalinist tactics, they understand power. If they want to stay on the bench or move up the ranks, they have to do what the regime demands. If the regime can take down Fox News, they can take down a judge.

Lawfare is not a new thing. Shakedown operations like the alphabet soup gang have been using lawfare for decades. They would jurisdiction shop for a court that would hear their novel legal theory. Then they would judge shop for one of their co-ideologues and before long a heretic is in an unwinnable court case. The most recent example of this sort of grift is the Charlottesville civil cases. The whole stinking affair was an affront to civil society and the rule of law.

What is happening now is that these small-time rackets have been institutionalized into a tool of the regime. Since they can use the court to take away all of your money for any reason they like, they can suppress the speech they dislike by threatening to impoverish anyone that entertains unapproved speech. Since the law is the last resort for the weak seeking protection from the powerful, the regime has effectively closed off the last civil route to challenging regime policies and programs.

In effect an iron curtain is descending across American society. On one side are the regime leaders and their toadies. They get to indulge in the material benefits of the shrinking American pie. On the other side are the common people struggling to come to terms with what these people have done to their country. For now, the real power of that iron curtain is that the people on the losing side refuse to believe it is there and instead keep operating under the old rules.

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.

Unreality

A portion of the Z-man's post from today about our elites.

What is going on here is that the people inside the bubble created a glorious story for themselves regarding Russia. The story said that if they could bait the Russians into war, they just had to sit back and wait for Russia to collapse. This version of reality created by the cult was a reboot of the Bolshevik Revolution. This time, war would crack the Russian regime and the heroes would ride into Moscow to finally exact their revenge on their ancient enemy.

That has not happened. In fact, it is the American Empire that is now cracking under the strain of this war of attrition. Western economies are struggling. There is growing unrest in the public about the political class. Meanwhile, the Russians have organized themselves for the long haul. The story Western elites told each other about this war are falling a part, but rather than face reality they fill their minds with more versions of the big lie from the biggest of big liars.

This form of elite escapism is not unique to Ukraine policy. This is the defining feature of our ruling class. When asked about how all of these magical electric cars will be charged, people like Pete Buttigieg just reply with some hand waving or maybe say they will supply more sockets. He has no idea and he has no reason to care, because his world is the world of fantasy.  The people running energy policy are just as divorced from reality as the people running foreign policy.

It is not confined to the elites. This is how the managerial class maintains its sense of identity and cohesion. The answer to the primary question of life, who are we?, is supplied by the many narratives that define the managerial class. Whether it is pronouns, support for deviant sexual practices, saying “keev” all of a sudden or any number of affectations, the point is to signal membership in the club. For these people, the answer to the big question is one of the approved narratives.

This is why the neocons have managed to dominate foreign policy. They are expert at creating complex narrative structures that provide simple moral choices for the audience, moral choices that favor their preferred outcomes. In a society that lives by words, rather than deeds, being good with words counts for a lot. Robert Kagan tells one side stories about monsters and heroes, while his wife tells the other side similar stories, always with the same monsters and heroes.

In the fullness of time, Francis Fukuyama’s seminal essay, The End of History, will be seen as the point at which Western elites became untethered from reality. For them, history was always a nightmare from which they could not awake. All of a sudden, the nightmare was over because history was over. What was ahead was whatever their imaginations could conjure. They could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as they had a mind.

Much of what constitutes democratic politics in the West is the people debating with one another about the precise time their rulers wake from their dream. Surely they will see the folly of making war with Russia. Maybe this event will do it. Surely they will see the lunacy of banning fossil fuels. Maybe now they will see it. So far, nothing has worked, suggesting nothing will work. Elite escapism is now too much a part of what defines the elite, so their can be no awakening from their dream.

On top of that is the hostility the elites feel towards the Dirt People, the non-elites. Part of this is the seedy illicit affair that our government is having with foreigners, especially Third World people, right under the noses of the American people and in our very homes. Looking at the insane demands of our elites and their various hangers-on among normal people who wish to signal their allegiance to the elites, I'm reminded of Paul's warning to Timothy:

1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.

2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,

3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,

4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;

5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

Goals

I use blogs as a kind of journal, although thematically. My main blog is for—mostly—discussion of my science fiction and fantasy hobbies. I have another one for hiking, and one for my Street Fighter-like video games, and a few others as well, although for ease of use, my main blog ends up getting bleed from all of the other topics, and every other blog is somewhat content impoverished as a result. This blog is, in theory, for the discussion of political, social and religious opinions and polemics and navel-gazing, or whatever. It's actually got the potential to be a much better blog than it is, but because I tend to only complain about social and political problems, it's probably neither very positive, nor very useful, and updated much too infrequently to be of use to anyone at all, even me. And I blog for me; I tend to not mind that others can see my journal in the form of a blog, and I write in such a way that if someone were to stumble across it and identify me, I wouldn't have anything to be overly embarrassed about on it other than the amateurishness of the writing. That said, there's an opportunity to transform this blog into more of a real spiritual journal, rather than complaints about problems in our world. Which brings up our goals for the new year.

I sometimes shy away from New Years' resolutions, because I think that if a goal is a good one to set, then there is never a better time than the present, rather than waiting for a milestone like the new year. In our case, the new year actually was a good time to set goals, because it marks a period of change in our household. My youngest two sons still have their permanent addresses here, but with one at college out west and the other on a mission in California for another year, we only had my 24 year old daughter at home. She just got married less than a week ago, and after we finish cleaning up the mess that our house has become due to her living here, my sons being in town (not the missionary one), extended family hanging around, and tons of wedding stuff to figure out what to do with, we have embarked on a new chapter in our life as new nearly empty nesters, coincidentally at the beginning of a new year.

My wife has already expressed an interest in two goals; one forcing a more positive and less complainy attitude; while we excise the bad habit of complaining, we'll need to probably convert complaints into looking for silver linings. As the bad habit recedes, we'll hopefully just have much more positive things to see and say in general.

She's also expressed an interest in scheduling monthly temple visits, which has been difficult these last few months due to a variety of factors, including our hectic wedding preparations, as well as monthly double dates with some other empty nester friends of ours.

I've wanted to reaffirm some goals that we've set in the past, and don't not do, but which we're not as consistent and faithful as I'd like us to be: morning and evening couple prayers, and every day scripture slash Come Follow Me reading. I'd also like to continue making sure that my most days Book of Mormon reading converts into every day Book of Mormon reading.

And finally, since my daughter married a non-member, we've got a lot of concerns about her spirituality on an ongoing basis, not to mention his. I'm not quite sure what the goal is there, but we want to make sure we continue to see her at church every Sunday and maybe do scripture study with them every Sunday evening.

There can always be more, but I prefer not to run faster than we have strength, as the saying goes. Let's work on these and then see what else develops as potential throughout the year.