Time for a White Trash Museum on the Washington Mall

I expect that you, like all good people, are delighted that there is a National Museum of African American Culture and History in Washington DC at 1400 Constitution Av NW right next to the Washington Monument.

I expect that you, like all good people, are delighted that there is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC just across the Mall from the African American Museum. Just as the African American Museum is on the left hand of the Washington Monument, so the Holocaust Museum is on the right hand of God, er Washington.

And you are pleased as punch at the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in the shadow of the Grant Memorial at 4th St SW in Washington DC at the Capitol end of the Mall

But I expect that you are shocked, shocked, as I was to discover that there is no National Museum of White Trash on the Washington Mall.

Because, as we all know, the story of White Trash, and the history of America as the dumping ground for the "waste population" of England, begins in 1584 with the arrival of the first ship of White Trash off the shores of Virginia to found the Roanoke colony, courtesy of Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of Good Queen Bess. I have written about this as my "1584 Project."

If you want a scholarly narrative on the subject, try Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Just like Dr. Jill Biden, Isenberg is a doctor.

Yes, I know, such a museum, fetchingly configured as a trash can, perhaps with different receptacles for plastics, and bottles and cans, seems an obvious addition to the glorious monuments of Washington DC. And there is a spare slot on the Washington Mall, right between the African American Museum and the Holocaust Museum.

That way we could have three Museums of the Victims, side by side: Jews, White Trash, and Black Slaves.

And then we Americans could spend the next one hundred years arguing about who is the biggest victim: Jews, poor whites, or descendants of slaves.

Of course, I am sure you can see my cunning plan behind this. It is to de-legitimize the lefty division of the world into three parts, the Allies, the Oppressed Peoples, and the White Oppressors.

Which White Oppressors would that be, cupcake?

And we all know the answer to that. The real oppressors are the whiteys in the Educated Elite, now commonly referred to among those in the know as "laptop whites."

Definition of Privilege: someone who can work at home and interact with co-workers and clients using Zoom. White Trash need not apply.

Real Science Says Pollution Reduction Heats the Planet

I got to talk to a Real Scientist over the weekend, and he proposed to me that one of the reasons for the recent increase in global temperatures is the reduction in pollution of the past half century. Less pollution in the atmosphere means that more solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface.

Was he right or wrong? Google says that maybe he is right.

A study published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that eliminating the human emission of aerosols—tiny, air-polluting particles often released by industrial activities—could result in additional global warming of anywhere from half a degree to 1 degree Celsius.

Of course, the article from Scientific American listed in Google Search Results says that "Cleaning up Air Pollution May Strengthen Global Warming." Bless their hearts. But whatabout the increase in global warming due to the previous achievements in pollution reduction? The scientists do not say.

But here is what I want to know. Do the climate models take pollution reduction, past, present, and future, into account and if so why not?

Another thing my Real Scientist friend suggested was that male potency has been negatively affected by NOx reduction. Oh no!

But, unfortunately, I cannot find confirmation of this in Google Search Results. So he might have been kidding me. Or maybe not. But you young chaps should probably not take any risks. Does that mean a sensible inhalation of nitrous oxide every now and again. No idea. Consult your physician.

Anyway, at least we have the comfort of knowing, from Dr. Fauci, that anyone not bowing and scraping to him as a Scientist is nothing less than a January 6 armed insurrectionist. Or at least I assume that is what he implied in his criticism of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz has suggested that Fauci should be prosecuted for lying about COVID stuff, in particular in respect of his testimony regarding the funding of "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan lab. So Fauci responded:

“I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?”

Ain't Dr. Fauci special!

 

Girard, Scapegoat, Whitewash and Politics

For some time I have been reading around the notion of René Girard and the Scapegoat. The idea is that when a human society is hopelessly divided and involved in blame and revenge, it tends to resolve the problems by uniting against a single person, usually marginalized or diseased, and blaming that scapegoat for everything. Then, after the scapegoat is ritually killed, the community is "healed," ending the divisions and recriminations and blame and endless revenge. Until next time.

That is Girard's argument in Violence and the Sacred. In another book, The Scapegoat, he proposes another notion, that in our human religions and myths we get embarrassed about the crimes of our ancestors and our gods, and start to whitewash them. Because, after all, our ancestors and our gods could not have been that bad.

Girard uses a mistranslation of the death of Remus -- of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome -- as an example.

Romulus and Remus are contesting the kingship of Rome. Girard quotes a translation of Livy:

An argument ensues, which comes to blows; anger degenerates into a murderous struggle. It is, then, in the scuffle, that Remus falls dead.

Only, Girard writes, the Latin translated as "in the scuffle" is "in turba" which means "in the crowd" and "the word turba has an almost technical meaning; a crowd that is confused, perturbed, and disturbing" and Livy often uses the word "turba" to describe "collective murders." 

Do you see what he is describing here? Nothing to see here, only a "scuffle:" not a collective murder by the mob.

In a related topic, see reports on the current move by Wikipedia to delete its "Mass killings under communist regimes" page.

On the other hand, we note that our lefty friends spend a lot of their time hyping the crimes of imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, to represent the recent past as a violent and oppressive horror show in which the whole of society, except for activist lefties, is guilty.

I suppose that none of this is remarkable. If you are spinning the narrative of continuing the current regime you propose that it is all for the best, although maybe "mistakes were made." But hey, we don't want to be too hard on our ancestors. If you are trying to change the regime, then you want to present the regime's doings as a horrible crime.

I would say, in addition, that the scapegoat mechanism of re-uniting the society around the victimization of a single individual has been replaced with the victimization of a small minority group. Thus Girard writes about blaming the Jews for the plague in medieval Europe. Thus, in a divided and demoralized Germany after World War I Hitler and his propagandists united the Germans against The Jews.

In another context Girard discusses the murder of the Scandinavian god Baldr through the machinations of the trickster god Loki. He proposes that Baldr was probably a victim of the scapegoat mechanism but that the story of his collective murder by the whole community was covered up in later versions of the myth: the evil trickster did it.

If you try too hard to prove something you prove nothing. This is the case of the myth of Baldr: guilty people make too many excuses. They fail to realize that a simple excuse is more effective than many excellent ones. If you want to deceive your audience you had better not let them see what you are trying to do.

This story puts me in mind of our lefty friends. Don't you think that they try too hard to blame everything on guilty racist-sexist-homophobes. And imperialists and colonialists? I wonder why. 

Obviously, the scapegoat mechanism is connected with Nazi Carl Schmitt's notion of politics being the friend / enemy distinction, made "real simple" by Curtis Yarvin in the maxim: "there is no politics without an enemy." Politics, then is the uniting of the community against a common enemy. Just as in the distant past a community without an organized politics would combine against a scapegoat.

Being Thankful at Thanksgiving

I could be thankful that our Democratic friends are screwing up, big time, in the Biden age. But I won't. Whatever will be, will be on the politics front. Politics is about enemies, and I don't think of Democrats and Wokies as enemies. I just think of them as fools.

What I am thankful for is the continuing miracle of America. That despite everything, as they say, the flag is still there. That our great country muddles along, despite the folly of its leaders and the conceit of its educated class, and the dysfunction of the lower class that is a direct consequence of the folly and conceit of out betters.

Mind you, I find myself more and more accepting the line of regime critics like Ron Unz. His 11/22 piece is all about how the regime manages to silence its critics, and maintain its regime narrative.

Which we have seen Big Time in recent years.

I suppose that every regime gets to write the history, so long as it manages to win its wars. And the suppression of critics is a sign that the regime is sailing in choppy waters.

Meanwhile I am sitting in the airport at the departure gate and ordinary America is walking to and fro in front of me, everyone going somewhere for Thanksgiving. And the pilots are flying and the Ubers are 5 minutes away and all is right with the world even though our leaders are screwing up big-time on the COVID and economic policy front.

In a twisted way, I am glad that we have a full Dem administration from president to Congress. Because I think that whoever was in charge after COVID would be looking at the failure of the administrative state's lockdown and vaccination policy and the aftermath of Money Printer Go Brrrr in 2020.

And by the way, the inflation was already coded in when President Trump bullied the Fed into easing monetary policy in late 2019.

But now, according to the eternal law of politics, the post-COVID mess is all happening on the Dems' watch. It's only fair, because administrative government and easy money is the basic policy of the educated class and the educated class should be fully in power when the consequence of such policy is felt, good and hard, by the American people.

See, I think that if Trump were president right now then Republicans would be looking at a wipeout in 2022 and a 60-40 Time for a Change election in 2024. But he isn't. And they aren't. It feels almost like divine intervention.

My big thing is thinking about what comes after the rule of the educated class. Truth is, I don't know. Because the thing about the middle class, the main enemy of the educated class, is that we are not that interested in power. And yet politics is about power, taking state power to the enemy. How can you rule if you are not that interested in power?

I don't know. But I am thankful that in this tricky time things are not a lot worse.

Economic Policy Stupidity

I understand that the Biden drain of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is merely a ploy to be seen to be doing something. But the markets are underimpressed so the oil price went up on the news.

I confess that I am finding the developing economic stupidity of the Biden administration hard to take. I feel that I paid my dues on the economic stupidity front back in the 1970s when I was 30ish.

I thought that everyone recalled the 1970s as a Never Again decade. Particularly if you were a Democrat, because the 1970s set up Ronald Reagan, the Amiable Dunce. Oh no!

But ruling classes return again and again to stupidity. And I think it is because the whole point of being a ruling class is to do the Henry V thing and send the nation once more unto the breach. Because?

Because politics needs an enemy, and an enemy deserves a war, and what are the people but cannon fodder for the ruler's heroic war against the enemy? Anyway, it will all be worth it!

I suppose I ought to congratulate our global rulers on the whole climate change war. Because it is a new kind of war. It is not a war of sending teenage soldiers into battle, but of giving billions and trillions to worthy green enterprises that no doubt richly reward their political pals in return. A world war with no butcher's bill. What's not to like?

The rulers get to go to cool global-elite conferences and the climate-warrior activists get to stage real cool peaceful protests. What's not to like?

And then the war on systemic racism provides the rationale for new trillions in domestic spending, and funding of the race warriors in ten thousand CRT and DEI programs. Really, what's not to like?

Hey, I know, let's play this game!

Let's declare war! On the greenies and the anti-racists.

If our lefty friends can have their Ally narrative, fighting for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors, then we can play the same game.

We few, we happy few, we band of Allies, fighting or the Climate Victims against the Green Oppressors!

Or, 

We few, we happy few we band of Allies, fighting for the Oppressed Parents against the CRT Oppressors!

But I think that there is a problem, and it is the problem that conservatives have had at least since the 1960s, or even further back to the 1930s New Deal.

You see, while our lefty friends really believe with a full heart that their politics will vanquish the monstrous enemies they are fighting, we ordinary folk don't believe that politics is the royal road to justice, but neither do we think that our liberal friends are enemies.

We just believe they are stupid. Like AOC. We don't think she is evil; we just think she is a foolish virgin that believes what she has been carefully taught, from Green New Deal to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

And if politics is all about the enemy, and making war on the enemy, and then looting the enemy and handing out the spoils to the supporters, why not?  

You fill empty heads full of mush and then lead them to the breach, telling them they are saving the planet and bending the arc of history towards justice. As political leaders have done since the dawn of time.

But I just wish we weren't making the same old mistakes all over again.

Because ordinary decent people get their lives ruined by the strutting and fretting of the ruling class and its politics and its enemies and its wars and its looting.

Waukesha: Because Liberalism Made Things Worse

The important thing to understand about the Waukesha nightmare and the liberal meltdown on the criminal justice system is that liberals are in the position of the proverbial little Dutch boy, trying to save the country by plugging a hole in the dyke with his finger.

Maybe that worked in the story, but it doesn't work in real life.

The problem with the criminal justice system is not excessive bail. Or crazy Soros prosecutors. Or too many black men in jail.

The problem is the liberal welfare state, and in particular the way it has hammered blacks.

You can see that in the headline black victims.

Rodney King: "beaten by LAPD officers during his arrest, after a high-speed chase, for driving while intoxicated on I-210." Context: Resisting arrest.

Travyon Martin: "fatally shot in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic American." Context: Martin was on top of Zimmerman, bashing his head, when Zimmerman shot him.

Michael Brown: "fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri." Context: Brown was suspected of a theft and wrestled for Wilson's gun.

George Floyd: "murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest." Context: Floyd was resisting arrest, and high on drugs.

Jacob Blake: "shot and seriously injured by police officer Rusten Sheskey in Kenosha, Wisconsin." Context: Blake was going for a knife when shot.

All of these victims were not just victims of police brutality, they were the logical consequence of the last 150 years of educated-class politics that treats the lower class as helpless victims unable to fend for themselves.

Item: I say that the cultural agenda since 1800 should have been to encourage farm-workers and industrial workers to become responsible middle-class citizens and grow out of any serf status lingering on from the Middle Ages -- or slave status lingering on from King Cotton.

Item: I say that the welfare programs passed in 1965 were exactly the worst thing to do when African Americans were emerging from a century of Jim Crow. It blitzed the black low-income family, and the black low-income family is still blitzed.

Item: I say that politics and government are only good for waging war and handing out loot and plunder. The more government, the more everything devolves into a war and the more the economy is reduced to a handout of loot and plunder.

Item: I say that humans are social animals, and that nearly all human social life should be enmeshed in a network of voluntary social, religious and cultural institutions, and not by government. I particularly mean that poverty should be managed by mutual-aid organizations and not by government.

I say that if you want to understand the politics of our liberal friends it makes sense if you realize that they have No Idea that the "items" above are the reason why blacks are in endless problems with family dysfunction and run-ins with the police. They have No Idea that mental illness and homeless problems issue directly from their politics that has hammered families and encouraged people to look for help from the government instead of their families.

So liberals want to lower bail requirements, because they see, before their eyes, how low-income people are oppressed by the criminal justice system. They just cannot see upstream that the overburdened criminal justice system is the consequence of their policies.

So liberals want to create housing for the homeless, because they cannot bring themselves to understand that people with broken lives, issuing from liberal policies, are blotting life out with drugs.

Obviously nothing can be done while our liberal friends are the ruling class, because they cannot see, will not see, that all these problems are a direct consequence of the wise and evolved policies that they have legislated and administered over the last century and more.

All is Narrative Including Civic Nationalism

The Zman has a post-Rittenhouse piece on Civic Nationalism, and he critiques it thus.

Civic nationalism is the argument that a country can be organized around a set of ideas, rather than people and land. The citizens, rather than connected by blood and history, are connected by ideas. 

Ideas being, e.g., the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But, of course, "people and land" and "blood and history" are just as much ideas as the idea of equality and government under law.

They are all "narratives." And the Zman understands this:

Civic nationalism, to a great degree, is a reaction to the internationalism of Western ruling elites who are post-national. The post-nationalists want to eliminate borders and the national sovereignty. In their place will be international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state. Civic nationalism is an effort to confront this old enemy of civilization with a nationalism free of past baggage.

In other words, the civic nationalists want nationalism without the Hitler baggage.

And narratives tend to be sacred narratives such as the Woke Religion narrative as described by Schellenberger and Boghossian. They have assembled a table of Woke Religion: A Taxonomy, describing -- for Racism, Climate Change, Trans, Crime, Mental Illness, Drugs, and Homelessness -- the Original Sin, Guilty Devils, Creation Story, Sacred Victims, The Elect, Supernatural Beliefs, Taboo Facts, Taboo Speech, Purifying Rituals, and Purifying Speech. It really is genius.

Now, my idea is that all politics is tribalism, and "fake" tribalism at that. I got this idea from reading C.R. Hallpike, who says that the original hunter-gather bands didn't have much of a tribal mentality. Tribalism, he writes, started when people started living the villages that were big enough that people didn't know all the other poeple in the village.

And, to put Nazi Carl Schmitt back in the mix, with his notion that politics is about friends vs. enemy, we can say that tribalism is about our good people vs. the enemy's bad people. 

See, once you get a society bigger than a band of kindred, where everyone is related to everyone else by blood, then people start to construct a tribal narrative that imagines everyone connected by blood. On the other hand, my Greek friend that was born into a village on a Greek hillside, talks endlessly of this cousin or that uncle or that grandparent.

So, in my view, all politics is based on a narrative of imagined kindred. It could be a clan which assumes that various groups of kindred are related by blood, and probably they are. But then we get to princely states where everyone is related by their loyalty to the prince. And then to the nation, which is a glorious story of blood and land. Or, if it is the United States it is the glory of its ideas, that all men are created equal and are delighted to live in a land ruled by laws and not by men.

Now our global overlords -- the "laptop whites" -- of which the Zman talks of the "internationalism of Western ruling elites" have a narrative of globalism, of "international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state." So, they have a narrative of internationalism, and political and administrative institutions to go with it.

I say, with my Three Peoples theory that the tribe of the "laptop whites" is the community of all educated and credentialed people all over the world; the tribe of the middle class is the nation; and the tribe of the lower class is race or ethnic origin, or class. My Three Peoples theory is one of a number of Three Layer theories.

So it doesn't matter what the narrative is. The middle class will create and recreate a narrative of nation, that the nation in which they live is the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, as middle-class people get super-educated then they tend to adhere to the "laptop white" narrative of globalism and the over/under politics of Allyism and declare war on the middle class using the lower class as their street army.

Of course, all narratives tend to be forged in the furnace of war, when the Founding leaders construct a narrative to inspire their followers with a sense of belonging to a sacred "band of brothers." So, we should expect that the leaders of the middle class in the current Cold Civil War would be constructing a new narrative of nation. Which is exactly what Donald Trump was doing in the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Whether this new national narrative succeeds depends, of course, on whether the middle class can win the Cold Civil War that the educated class of "laptop whites" is conducting against it.

Rittenhouse Case Principals: White Working Class Meltdown

Like you I had not read much about the details of the Rittenhouse case. I knew that Kyle Rittenhouse had driven across state lines to Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was trying to protect businesses from looters. And that he shot some rioters while retreating.

What I did not know it that the whole affair shines a spotlight on the collapse of the white working class.

I learned that Kyle's parents were divorced, with his mother living just across state lines from Kenosha. I learned that Kyle's father lived in Kenosha, had been a machinist but had got in trouble with drugs.

Kyle Rittenhouse is the terminus child of the hollowing-out of the American rust belt. A young white teenager from a broken home, raised by a struggling single mother. His father, according to reports, is a former machinist who was swept away into the Sackler-fed opioid crisis.

I learned that the rioters that interacted with Kyle were also white, and were not exactly exemplary young men. The three men that Rittenhouse shot were Gaige Grosskreutz, Joseph Roseenbaum, and Anthony Huber.

Says Andy Ngo:

Gaige Grosskreutz, the person armed w/a pistol who went after Rittenhouse & was shot in arm, says he’s a @ACLU legal observer. He has a long criminal history that includes a gun-related conviction.

Says Michelle Mark:

[Josesph] Rosenbaum spent roughly 15 years in prison in his early adulthood, according to Arizona prison records. Court documents showed that Rosenbaum was accused of sexually abusing five pre-teen boys in 2002, was indicted on 11 counts of child molestation, and eventually pleaded guilty to two amended counts of sexual conduct with a minor.  

The jury heard only select details about Rosenbaum's mental state before the shootings. Rosenbaum had been released from the hospital just hours before the Kenosha shootings, where he had been under psychiatric care following a suicide attempt.

Also:

[Anthony] Huber pleaded guilty in 2013 to two felony counts of strangulation and suffocation, and false imprisonment, court records showed. According to a criminal complaint, Rittenhouse's defense attorneys cited without the jury present, Huber had pulled a knife on his brother and grandmother, and choked his brother amid an argument about housecleaning.

These are all white guys, in case you didn't know.

In connection with Kyle Rittenhouse's father, I was reading a piece about America's drug problem:

According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control published this week, more than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in the 12 months between April 2020 an April 2021.

In a country with a population of 330 million that is 30 per 100,000. The homicide rate, by the way was 7.8 per 100,000 in 2020.

And the drug problem is getting worse, because fentanyl and P2P are much stronger and easier to produce than before.

Today’s battle is against two synthetic drugs: one that kills with terrifying ease, another that creates zombified and desperate addicts almost overnight. 

Today, fentanyl is responsible for the majority of drug deaths in America. In tiny doses it gives users a high that resembles the blissed-out pain relief delivered by heroin or prescription pills. But it is far stronger and more deadly. In anything other than those microscopic quantities, it will kill you. The other drug central to the latest phase of the addiction crisis is methamphetamine, in particular a kind cooked up using a method known as P2P, which uses phenyl-2-propanone...

Our blindness to the potency of modern drugs also means we have ignored the spillover effects of addiction. The proliferation of homeless encampments in American communities of all sizes, [writer Sam] Quinones argues, is first and foremost a consequence of the new meth:  

We lordly educated class, with our credentials, our corporate or government jobs, our healthy families, we have no idea about life for the Other Half.

Hey, there's a poll out today, reported by Steve Cortes.

On the Economy, Biden has a 1% surplus approval [50% to 49%] from white college grads, and a stunning -54% deficit [20% to 74%] among [white] working-class.

Well, yeah. Because the educated got through the COVID crisis working at home and Zooming meetings. The working class lost their jobs, the dumb deplorables, the bitter clingers. 

As Gaetano Mosca writes in The Ruling Class, a competent ruling class makes sure to recruit from the lower classes. For various reasons, including a circulation of elites.

The thing to remember about government and politics is that the ruling class lives for its own power and conceit. The rest of the country is of interest only to the extent that it can be organized and bribed to support the ruling class or used as an enemy for the ruling class to fight.

UPDATE: Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts. Thank you, ordinary American jurors. We wouldn't be America without you.

The Next Three Years...

Here's a fearless prediction. The next three years will be the most consequential, politically, in my lifetime. And probably yours.

Let's start with Point One, in a New Criterion piece by Conrad Black.

The United States was at a unique political crossroads when a man who had never served in any public office nor held a high military command, elected or unelected, astounded the country by winning the presidency—the only such candidate to do so, ever—on a campaign to reverse bipartisan agreed policy and to reorient or dismiss almost the entire community of senior government personnel.

Do you see the staggering implications of Donald Trump's achievement in 2016? "Never served in any public office." But he won the presidency.

Obviously, such an event means that something is wrong with the rulers of America. Because the voters don't do things like that in normal times. Andrew Jackson got elected president without serving in a previous political office. But he won the Battle of New Orleans. Abraham Lincoln became president at a time of national crisis. But he had served in the Illinois state legislature and the US House of Representatives. Franklin Roosevelt became president at the bottom of the Great Depression. But he had been state senator, assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York. Dwight Eisenhower never served in political office before being elected president. But he was the general that invaded Europe in World War II. Etcetera.

Then, after Donald Trump got elected the Democrats and the media hounded him every moment he was in office and beat him in 2020 under conditions that, while not exactly "stealing the election" certainly gave rise to understandable suspicion among his supporters. OK. So the combined efforts of the Democrats and the media and the Zuck bucks and the BLM/AntiFa riots and the "mean tweets" combined to defeat President Trump.

But obviously, that's all ancient history, what with the singular incompetence of President Biden, the absurd spending agenda of the Progressives, the rising inflation, the problems on the COVID vaccination front, the anti-CRT movement among parents of school children, and the recent off-off-year elections.

The reason I say that the next three years will be consequential is that I believe that our ruling class will make several efforts to head the organic movement of the Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class off at the pass.

I suspect there will be a number of ugly incidents in the next three years as the ruling class and Democrats and media and the NGO activism community get more and more desperate, as they see their power slipping away.

They may succeed, but my guess is that they won't. Why? Because I don't think they are very bright. And I don't think they are ruthless enough and courageous enough to behave like a Lenin or a Hitler.

And the basic problem is that the American people are going to be hurting economically for the next three years. We are going to have inflation, number one. Then the Fed is going to have to jack up interest rates, and that will hurt the housing market and all the people with mortgages and very little equity. Then there is going to be a recession, maybe before 2024. Ordinary Americans hate it when gas prices go up. They hate it when food prices go up. They are terrified when their mortgages go "under water." And when they lose their jobs...

So we are looking for a real wipeout for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. And then we are looking for the mother of all Time for a Change elections in 2024.

That's the overview. But in the details and the day-to-day events it's going to get ugly. You can see that with Democrats already blaming oil companies for the increase in gasoline prices. It looks to me as though oil production is having a problem returning to its 2019 high after the sharp drop in production at the beginning of he COVID crisis, and things will repair themselves soon. But you don't clamp down on pipeline construction and oil exploration before everything gets back to normal.

You see, a competent government, whatever its ideological framework, needs to keep the lights on, keep the oil flowing, keep people content in their homes, their jobs, their hopes. And, with its appetite for reelection, a new administration makes sure to take all the tough decisions right away so that in four years, when it is time for reelection, the economy looks great and Americans are optimistic about the future.

I would say that an administration that fails on these real simple responsibilities does not deserve the confidence of the voters and does not get it.

But you never know.

A Short Discourse on Vigilantism. While We Wait.

As we wait for the jury to decide the fate of vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, let's talk about vigilantism, dear liberals.

Because, as with most things, I suspect that your literally know nothing when it comes to vigilantism, except of course that it is always and everywhere racist because lynchings of Negroes in the South.

I last wrote about vigilantism back in July 2021, descanting upon the "real simple" fact that if you "defund the police" you get vigilantism.

The classic case of vigilantism is San Francisco in 1856 in the middle of the Gold Rush of the '49ers. The population of San Francisco had exploded from about 500 to 20,000 and the police were overwhelmed. So leading citizens formed a Committee of Vigilance, and got banker William T. Sherman to help out. Sherman had gone to West Point and served in the US Army until 1853.

That's what citizens do when the po-lice can't or won't do its job.

As I re-read my July piece I was surprised that I had also written about a recent vigilante incident in South Africa arising out of riots and looting that were clearly started by real insurrectionists. It started on a Monday with 

small groups of saboteurs entered the malls... [then] literally tens of thousands of otherwise quite ordinary, peaceful people poured into the malls on foot and by car and completed the looting and firing of the shops. 

Then the vigilantes kicked in.

My community’s Whatsapp groups and local news channels kept pace with the mayhem and at mid-afternoon on Monday the expected call went out for all armed citizens to gather at designated points... The State had gone AWOL.

Within 24 hours, a functioning operational command had been set up, barricades were erected at six access points and stickers issued to emergency workers to speed progress. 

Whoa. I mean whoa. Did you read about this, all you liberals, lefties and all the ships at sea? Because this could easily happen here. The men of America would just love the chance to swing into action and Whatsapp and reestablish the peace that the government is supposed to provide, but increasingly doesn't. Because racism, or police brutality or whatever.

I would say that if this happens, you lefties are done. Toast. History. So, if you want to remain the noble and educated ruling class that is master of all it surveys I suggest that you reverse course on "defund the police" and put the po-lice back to work.

Kyle Rittenhouse, that Dov Fischer calls "a bit of a fool," was just doing what comes naturally to every young primate male. His job, his only job, is to protect the territory of the primate band from enemies. By the way, it sounds like Kyle is a German American. Did you know that in World War II it was reckoned that a German soldier was worth up to two US soldiers? Part of that is that German society is a high-trust society as indicated in Trust by Francis Fukuyama.

And the more that you lefties trash the police and the military and make the men that protect us into scapegoats the more that young men will instinctively start to form themselves into vigilante groups to keep the peace.

Scapegoating the Unvaccinated

The wolves are after Dennis Prager. He made a comparison between the scapegoating of gays around the time of the AIDS epidemic with the current scapegoating of the unvaccinated at the present moment. His unforgivable crime is that he noted that the ruling class came out and protected gays from being the pariahs to blame for it all. But today, of course, the ruling class is all-in on blaming the unvaxxed. Said he:

During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, who were the vast majority of the people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable.

Only, of course, IT WAS gays that were to blame. It was their unprotected anal sex that was the prime vector of AIDS.

But hey, gays are the Little Darlings of the ruling class, so don't you dare blame them, bigot.

But the scapegoat is as old as humanity. René Girard is the chap that has done most to point this out in his Violence and the Sacred. And I have been writing about this since 2008. My first scapegoating article was about blaming bankers for the Crash of 2008.

But this week I have been reading Girard's The Scapegoat. Which is more of the same, but more focused. And what I am getting is that, when a human community experiences a disaster that it can't explain then it unites and turns on some convenient scapegoat. He uses the example of the Black Death, in which about one third of humans in Europe died.

We now think we know what the Black Death was all about. It was a disease that originated in the port of Kaffa in the Crimea and was transmitted by rats. But people back then didn't know that. So they blamed the Jews for poisoning the water.

You can see that when any disaster occurs the cause is, at least initially, uncertain. So it is natural and physical to, e.g., blame gays for AIDS. But fortunately there was St. Fauci at hand who said that "AIDS may be transmittable through casual household contact." Blessed be his name.

We have a similar situation with COVID. We have a vaccine that is turning out to be rather less effective than originally promised by the ruling class. We really don't know why. Looks like "Houston we have a problem." So what is the obvious thing for politicians to do? Find a scapegoat.

Now, the art of scapegoating is to find some small minority, such as Jews or gays, without good contacts in the ruling class, and blame it all on them. You accuse them of being ignorant or malevolent, and whip up the mob to deal with them. And now we have Twitter mobs that can be mobilized in a moment.

Girard points out that "mob" and "mobilize" come from the same Latin "mobile."

I'd say that the unvaxxed are a good, but not ideal, scapegoat to blame for the continuance of the COVID epidemic. In fact, blaming the unvaxxed may turn out to be a strategic error, for a variety of reasons, from the fact that the unvaxxed are not a helpless marginalized minority to the uncertainty about the ultimate effectiveness of COVID immunity from vaccination versus immunity from actually contracting the disease and surviving.

I get why the Biden administration went all-in on vaccination and mandating vaccination through OSHA. And a political leader needs to appear to be leading us -- for the men -- and protecting us -- for the women.

Reality is that politicians can't really do that much to help us on anything. But we don't want to hear that, especially when people are dying: "if we can just save one life!"

Of course, scapegoating the unvaxxed is just one of the scapegoating operations that our liberal friends in the ruling class are conducting right now. The most obvious one is blaming the problems of blacks on "white supremacists" and "white oppressors." Otherwise, how could it be that blacks lag in almost all the good things and lead in all the bad things like murder? It could not be -- it could not be -- that the problems of blacks all lead back to liberal programs like welfare and Affirmative Action / Diversity / Equity.

Actually, that's a good point. It cannot be, it can never be that the ruling class is to blame, because we rulers are the good guys, the educated evolved people who care. It must be some racist / deplorable / bitter clinger that's to blame.

Of course, the opposite is true.

I say that almost always, every ruling class in history Makes Things Worse. And do you know why? It is because government is force, and "Justice is the Absence of Force." (I just thought of that in the middle of last night). So you can't really do anything useful with government except defend the borders from the invaders. Everything else that government does Makes Things Worse. Even when there's a hurricane the Cajun Navy is out well before the gubmint folks. 

Men Say "Lead Me"; Women Say "Protect Me"

My constant challenge is to follow the maxim of Einstein: make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. If Einstein is too hoity-toity for you, there is good old Sen. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate begging his wife to make the number of Communists in the State Department "real simple."

How to make politics as simple as possible -- after Nazi Carl Schmitt's notion that the political is the friend / enemy distinction. Or, if you want it "real simple" Curtis Yarvin's maxim that "there is no politics without an enemy."

But, of course it isn't quite that simple. Because of the difference between honor among men and honor among women and my maxims that "women expect to be protected" and "men know they are expendable."

So I say that politics reduces to men saying "lead me to fight the enemy" and women saying "protect me from the enemy."  And that is all.

Now, I am not saying this just to be pompous and knowledgeable. I am saying this on the off-chance that some aspiring politician will read it and use it as his "real simple" guide to getting elected and rising through the ranks to the very pinnacle of politics.

Don't forget, Mr. Aspiring Politician, that when you are appealing to men, you are pressing the button that triggers the "lead me" instinct. And when you are appealing to women, you are pressing the button that triggers the "protect me" instinct.

Now, how you combine the two is frankly beyond me, because I am not a practical politician or a noble aide or a rising staffer.

Of course, whenever you are appealing to men with the "lead me" line or to women with the "protect me" line any practical politician has to think about what to do when the wind changes.

For instance, with regard to the current COVID matter, what should the noble President Biden do which presses the "lead me" button for men?

I tell you what I think. I think that the president declares victory and hands out medals to all the "heroes" and "essential workers" of which we've heard tell. The current policy of mandating vaccinations for a vaccine that is not very effective is not "lead me." It is dumb.

So that takes care of men. Whatabout women?

Actually, I think the women side of this is more tricky. Because right now we are heading like an express train towards the moment where women realize -- and tell each other -- that they have been conned; that all the masks and lockdowns and vaccinations and boosters and vaxx mandates did not protect them.

And women don't like men cheating on them.

Hey there President Biden, Ron Klain and all the ships at sea! You don't want to get to the point where the women of America sit down at coffee and say to each other "I can't believe the president did that."

Because the next thing they will say to each other is "I'm so exhausted with all this."

And let me tell you, Joey and Ronnie, you don't want to be anywhere in the United States when the women of America start telling each other that they are "exhausted" by COVID.

So what to do? Hey you guys are the political professionals. You know what to do.

Still want my advice, geniuses? OK here it is.

You declare that America is now safe. You declare that because of President Biden's leadership that hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved, which would never have happened on President Trump's watch, because mean tweets. You congratulate Commissioner Fauci and Keystone Kop Kamala for their magnificent leadership. You condemn the anti-vaxxers to bottomless perdition because, but for them, we wold have been safe months ago.

But, but! Suppose we get another surge of cases with a new variant? No problem, the MSM will know what to do and condemn all reports of new cases as "disinformation." And Social Media will properly and responsibly cancel all vile racist-sexist-homophobic "disinformation" as violent extremism.

No, don't thank me for getting you out of a jam, Joey and Ronnie. I'm a patriotic American and I love my country and I believe in helping my country even -- especially -- when it is led by morons in "The Autumn of the Liberal Ages."

The Next Organic Movement on the Right

Our lefty friends like to think that their "activism" is all organic, the voice of the oppressed rising up from the wastelands of eternal oppression. But, in fact, the story of lefty politics of the last two hundred years is always top-down. It always involves well-born educated youth deciding what is best for the lower classes and then beating up on the middle class in order to prove that the middle class was beating up on the poor.

In fact, the only time the middle class beats up on the poor is when the poor start striking and food-rioting during some economic downturn, usually involving post-war deflation.

Of course, the lefty activism gig started out as a pretty cool concept, because the lower classes were easily the most numerous, and he that could lead them could easily overcome the less numerous middle class if it came to a battle. Mostly, however, the middle class was willing to help the lower class with free education and various pro-worker handouts.

But now, of course, we have the educated class on the last legs of the good old over-under political formula, and the only problem is that the ordinary middle class of yeomen and commoners is the biggest sector of society. And the middle class doesn't like being the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with the noble plans of the ruling educated class.

The thing about the middle class is that it is the responsible class. If there is a job to do, then the middle class does not wait for a leader. It organizes itself. It starts businesses; it runs clubs. Back in the day every middle class family belonged to some fraternal association or mutual-aid society.

So when the Tea Party emerged in 2009-10, it was par for the course. We'd elected our First Black President: been there, done that. Now let's push back on the uber-progressive big spending plans of the hoity-toity educated-class progressives.

Famously, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the Tea Party of being AstroTurf, a fake movement gussied up by conservative billionaires.

To give Our Nance her due, the billionaires did get involved. But it was after the ordinary Tea Partiers got the whole thing going.

Now, we can say that it was Trump that got the Trump Train going. Only, I'd say, the GOP voters were clearly waiting for him. We were for Ted Cruz until it appeared that Donald Trump would be Ted Cruz on steroids.

What surprised me during the Trump era is how much the Trump voters self-organized to show their support for him, in Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades, with flags and paraphernalia bought on the Internet. I once witnessed a Trump Car Parade at at La Conner, Washington, which is a town about 90 minutes drive out of Seattle where ladies like to go for lunch and a bit of shopping. The cars in the parade were mostly driven by white ladies of a certain age.

Now, of course, we have the organic, er, Let's Go Brandon chants at college football games and NASCAR races, to the consternation of the Best and Brightest.

And we have the parents showing up at school-board meetings and objecting to lefty indoctrination and CRT curricula. And, we find out, school boards are maintaining personal databanks on the parent "activists."

Actually, I feel sorry for the school-board chappies. They did not imagine they would be getting into a political hurricane. They are ordinary folks that are frightened by the fierce winds of real politics.

Listen, I just have a feeling that you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Do I know what will be coming up in 2022, the inflation midterm? No, I don't. But I bet you a nickel that some sort of organic movement emerges that has nothing to do with the official GOP or right-wing billionaires.

And as for 2024! You know what I think. I think that 2024 will be the presidential election for the ages. But I have no idea how or why. Because whatever it is, it will be organic, emerging unbidden from the great American middle class.

And, as usual, the ruling class and the media and the Twitterati and the rest of the Cathedral won't have a clue.

Hey Ron (Klain) We're Not in Kansas Anymore

 Yesterday, Ron Klain, Biden's White House Chief of Staff, blamed Trump for the inflation mess. Said he

President Joe Biden’s administration “inherited a mess from Donald Trump.”

Well, Ron. That means that the smart guys knew from January 20 that your No.1 job would be to get the economy back on track. So how come you didn't have policy ready to go on Day One that would have prevented the present inflation and supply-chain crisis?

And, trust me on this, you don't get the economy on track with mega-spending bills handing out loot and plunder to your supporters. So what do you tell Nicolle Wallace?

So I think we voted for saying on Tuesday was you know what, not enough yet, and we need to do more, and that’s what we’re doing. again, starting next Monday, signing the infrastructure bill, working with the House to pass the Build Back Better Plan which will help bring down inflation, bring down the cost of living, bring down people’s expenses. 

I hope you don't really think that, Ron. I hope you are not really that dumb, and that you are just filling media space with empty rhetoric.

Because, let me tell you Ron Klain. If you don't get inflation under control by tomorrow, and you don't get normal economic growth re-established by the day after tomorrow, then the mid-terms will look like a demolition derby for Democrats.

And that will just be the start.

And you should know that, Ron Klain. You should know that the job of the President and his staff is to keep all the loot and plunder down to a dull roar, because loot and plunder -- amazingly! -- is a net minus to the economy. Of course it is, because instead of the market working its magic, we have dull political supporters getting money for nothing.

If you only had a brain, you should know that President Trump applied just about all the "stimulus" the economy could handle back in 2020.

You would know that the Republican governors that ended lockdowns reopened their economies to the universal disapprobation of ruling-class elitists everywhere made the right decision and the Democrat governors that maintained economic restrictions made the wrong decision, and the quicker that the Biden administration corrects this error the better for Democrats.

If you only had a heart you would know that the lockdowns and restrictions have caused untold social and psychic damage on ordinary Americans -- and especially marginalized Americans, the women and minorities hardest hit -- so you would have been working like mad to end the lockdown hysteria that you guys pushed in 2020 in an effort to hurt Trump.

If you only had the nerve you and the president would be out there cooling the jets of your activists and supporters to allow you to get the economy back on track before handing out the loot.

But I get it, Ron Klain. You Democrats do not represent what we might call "market-facing" Americans, the people that need the economy to work every day in order to buy their groceries and make their house payments.

You Democrats represent on the one hand the Cathedral of secular clerics and other credentialed people in education and media and activism who do not make their income from offering goods and services on the market. And on the other hand your represent people that just get entitlement handouts. And throw in salaried tech workers in Big Tech and nice liberal women in corporate HR and you guys are saddled with supporters that really don't know how the world works outside their privileged precincts.

I'd say that's a problem, both for you and for America.

You know what I think, Ron? I think that we ain't seen nothing yet. I think that in the next couple of years we are going to see an organic movement of Americans that will make the Tea Party look like a tea party, that will make the Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades look like kiddie parties. I think we will see organic shouts in stadiums that will make the Let's Go Brandon chants of the present year as feeble chirpings.

Yes, I dare say you should get on the phone to Attorney General Merrick Garland and sicc the FBI on these new organic popular upwellings. Except, of course, that we really don't yet know how they will appear and how they will evolve. That's because politics on the right is not fake AstroTurf politics financed by George Soros and the Tides Foundation that are nod-nod-wink-wink sort-of encouraged by the ruling class. They are organic, upwellings from the great human ocean of America.

But by all means, Ron, send the FBI to my place to interview me. Show the world that you have hair on your chest. I'll put the coffee on.

Biden's Dems: Evil Geniuses or Stupid Idiots?

The question that has to occur to an average racist-sexist-homophobe like me is whether our Democratic and progressive friends are executing on a strategic plan for the ages, or merely stumbling from one stupidity to another?

For instance, Scott McKay shows us a Soviet defector that was part of the four-step Soviet plan to destroy America, with

Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, Normalization.

Yuri Bezmenov defected to Canada in 1984. And the Soviet Union "normalized" in 1989.

And of course there are other lefty plans to abolish America, from the Frankfurt School's critical theory that replaced the workers at the point of the revolutionary spear with women and minorities. And "the long march through the institutions" from Gramsci. And there is the Cloward-Piven strategy. And Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. 

Sometimes I wonder if these are brilliant strategies or Baldrick's Cunning Plans.

On the other hand you have to wonder whether there is anyone at home in the White House as the Biden administration seems to be on automatic with all the various activist groups pursuing their sacred narratives at full-speed ahead without anyone in charge telling the crazier ones to cool their jets.

And, is there nobody in charge saying that, look, we needed to have taken action on inflation on the first day of the new administration to make sure that everything would be coming up roses in May 2024?

I suppose the most obvious middle ground is to assume that the ranks of the Democrats are full of people that are good at getting re-elected, but not much more. That would concur with Joseph Schumpeter's line that it is amazing that politicians can govern at all, since their profession is getting elected.

Of course, there is the bigger question that hovers over the entire progressive project of the last two centuries. After you geniuses have created the perfect state that integrates religion, politics, and economics into one perfectly oiled and lubricated totality, then what?

Epecially, geniuses, when you consider that every lefty state since the French Revolution has been an economic disaster. Oh, and the butcher's bill.

Oh, I know. But this time!

Then there is Donald Trump. He got elected by appealing directly to the ordinary middle-class Commoner, with tax cuts, a frank appeal to nationalism -- the polite word is "patriotism" -- and policies to raise wages with import tariffs and immigration restrictions.

Now comes Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, and my liberal neighbors already hate him. He gave a speech on October 23 at the Claremont Institute. Said he:

Over the last year and a half, we’ve stood up to entrenched bureaucrats and the partisan corporate press to keep Florida open and to protect individual Floridians’ right to work to own and operate their own businesses and to make sure that every single child had the right to be in school in person. We don’t lock people down in the state of Florida, we lift people up.

And he's just getting started. He mentions:

• Eisenhower's farewell address, where he warns not just about the military-industrial complex but the science research complex.
• Florida has more people than New York State, but New York's state budget is twice Florida's.
• In September, the US added 194,000 jobs, of which Florida added 84,500. 
• He's banned sanctuary cities, protected women's sports and whacked Big Tech censorship.
• He called out the National Guard to discourage BLM and AntiFa.
• He's banned Critical Race Theory in Florida's schools.

And so on.

I'd say that someone at DeSantis HQ has been doing a little strategic thinking, about what the ordinary Commoners of America want and deserve.

You know, I'm really a pretty snooty guy, with educated ideas and thoughts that I think are up in the stratosphere. But I think that politicians should be thinking much more about the ordinary Commoners and their ordinary lives. And ease up on bribing their pet victims and spreading loot and plunder to their financial supporters.

Because when gubmint spending is north of 40 percent of GDP, that means that about half of the economy is decided not by negotiation and market transaction but by government force.

So, if you are OK with that, and even want a trillion or two more in additional gubmint spending, I am right here to say: really? So you are down with government forcing ordinary people to spend half of their income on government projects? Or even more? I can't believe you think that.

I don't think that government as half the economy is a good idea. Not in the short term, not in the medium term, and certainly not in the long term.

But what do I know.

The Age of Liberal Grift

The German-American writer Eric Hoffer famously wrote in his 1967 book of essays The Temper of Our Time in a chapter titled "The Negro Revolution" the following:

Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation [my italics]. Unlike those anywhere else, the masses in America have never despaired of the present and are not willing to sacrifice it for a new life and a new world. In this, the American Negro, despite his handicaps, does not differ fundamentally from his fellow Americans.

Hoffer, the longshoreman, writes this after discussing Negroes and whites in the laboring classes and his life laboring in the fields and as a longshoreman alongside blacks, and he writes

My kind of people does not feel that the world owes us anything, or that we owe anybody -- white, black, or yellow -- a damn thing.

Now, let us take off from Hoffer and note that the educated class's advocacy for various groups over the past century or so has been exactly as Hoffer describes it. In other words, whatever might be the origin of the labor movement or the civil rights movement -- or the feminist movement or the LGBT movement or the environmental movement -- all of them became, and remain, rackets, and rackets that primarily benefit not the workers and the "Negroes" but the ruling-class satraps that run the rackets. And what is today's "woke-ism" if not a cult?

So let us say that everything that our liberal friends support today is a racket: a grift.

Let us say that a genuine mass movement would issue from some existential despair about the present, and a conviction that normal life and normal politics cannot change anything.

Hey, I know a place where that happened: in post-WWI Germany, humiliated and plundered by the Treaty of Versailles. So millions of Germans felt they had nothing left to lose; and in the chaos in the aftermath of the 1929 Crash they abandoned the normal day-to-day and enlisted in the paramilitary formations of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler.

Note that all respectable people agree that the rise of Nazism was the worst thing ever. But it occurred because of the utter stupidity of ruling classes all over, from Germany to Austria to France to Britain to the USA.

Everything that our liberal friends do is a fake facsimile of revolution, a political play where young elitists strut and fret their hour upon the stage acting out a fantasy of revolution and activism, a fantasy of helping the helpless victims of oppression.

And so I say it is time to declare the present age An Age of Liberal Grift, a cynical elite exploitation of ordinary people, their work, their hopes, and their lives, and to baldly state that almost all the works of government boil down to some grift or other that helps create and sustain power for the liberal ruling class.

If it is climate change, it is a liberal grift. If it is systemic racism it is a liberal grift. If it is CRT in the schools it is a liberal grift. If it is Tesla electric automobiles it is a liberal grift. If it is infrastructure spending it is a liberal grift. If it is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion it is a liberal grift. If it is vaccine mandates it is a liberal grift for health administrators. If it is a payout to illegal immigrant families separated at the border is is a liberal grift. If it is green energy it is a liberal grift. If it is university research grants it is a liberal grift.

Hey, even Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon gets it. She tells Brian Stelter, in the aftermath of the Virginia governor election that

We are hiding the total dispossession of the working class of all races by focusing on a very highly specialized academic language around race[.]

Hey, this is not hard. There is a tendency for any ruling class towards naked self-dealing and hiding it in the decent drapery of patriotism or wisdom or protecting the country. 

The difference between a good ruling class and a bad ruling class is that a good ruling class keeps its self-dealing -- its grift -- down to a dull roar, and it knows that its continuance as a ruling class depends on keeping the plebs from getting desperate.

It Cannot Be That...

The thing to remember about, e.g., systemic racism, is that it issues from a saving faith in our liberal friends that all the gubmint programs they have advocated in the last century are the best possible programs which will result in the best and most equal and equitable society ever.

It cannot be -- it cannot be -- that all the programs and all the politics have actually Made Things Worse. And it cannot be that the Democrats' current agenda, fighting climate change and systemic racism is going to Make Things Even Worse.

Situation One: Your liberal friend plays the Race Card.

We can see this with the the notion that GOP Lt. Gov. elect Winsome Sears is a "black mouth" for "white supremacist practices." Of course. Because it cannot be -- it cannot be -- that liberal race politics amounts to vile racism, straight up, and liberal race politics Makes Things Worse, worse for blacks, who are coddled as Little Darlings of the ruling class instead of being encouraged to make their way into the mainstream of ordinary American Yeomen and Commoners.

But what do you do when someone accuses you of being a racist? Obviously there are four responses:

The Nice Liberal Lady response: I can't believe you said that. After all, the Civil Rights Act was passed half a century ago. And if there is any racial disparity left the clearly it is the fault of civil-rights administrators, directors of diversity equality and inclusion who are just not up to the mark when it comes to eliminating systemic racism. What do you recommend, in the face of this failure?

The medium response: You know, Bob, I didn't think you were that sort of a guy. I'm disappointed in you.

The Sophisticated Intellectual Response: Gosh, Travis, I didn't think you were that sort of a guy. After all, as Hegel says, the Thing is the Same as its Opposite, so really, an Anti-Racist is the same as a Racist, a rather nasty piece of work that is all obsessed with race.

The Culture of Insult response: Hey, pal. You know what kind of a guy plays the race card like that? Yeah, you guessed right: only a complete A**hole. Welcome to the club.

Situation Two: Your liberal friend complains about the white working class, as a Trump voter, or a Let's Go Brandon chanter, or as uneducated, or a deplorable, or a bitter clinger.

But what do you do when someone sneers at the white working class?

The Nice Liberal Lady response: I can't believe you said that. Especially as the experts agree that the white working class has been dying of despair ever since the government offshored its well-paid union jobs in the Seventies and instituted racial quotas for police and firemen jobs. I'm really surprised you would say that.

The medium response: Oh come on, Bob. Hey I remember a time when good liberals like you loooved the white working class. What happened to that Bob?

The Sophisticated Intellectual Response: Gosh, Travis, I didn't think you had bought into the Narrative like that. Come on now. What do you expect people to do when the plant closes and the jobs that sustained families for generations just go pouf! And it's not as if this is the first time. What about the Long Depression of the 1870s, when the crash of 1873 put millions out of work, and put millions of farmers on the Great Plains underwater on their mortgages. And whatbout the Great Depression, when even the Great FDR could do nothing for the Forgotten Man until he started cranking the economy up for World War II. I could go on, Travis, but I think an educated man like you would get it.

The Culture of Insult response: Hey, pal. You know what kind of a guy dumps on the working class like that. Yeah, you got it. Only a guy that Literally Knows Nothing. You and all the twentysomething journalism grads.

Situation Three: Your liberal friend is all-in on masks, and mandatory vaccination, and vaccination passports.

What do you do when someone sneers at the anti-vaxxers?

The Nice Liberal Lady response. Evelyn. You know I can't believe you said that. For people like us, the COVID crisis has almost been like a vacation: working from home, Zooming meetings. But think about being an essential worker, where you are much more at risk from infection. Or a worker in the hospitality industry, where you you have been out of a job for months and months and never know next what the regulations will be. I really feel for people like that. And you can't really expect them to understand the science like people like us. Uneduacted people have always wondered about the rulers, and whether they really have the interests of ordinary people at heart. And then, of course many of the people not getting vaxxed are Black and minorities. And who can blame them after the Blacks that were misled in the Tuskegee syphilis study back in the day and were left untreated.

The medium response. Oh come on, Bob. I remember when your Irene was all worked up about the measles vaccine. How come you guys are both completely down for this one?

The Sophisticated Intellectual Response. Yes, Travis, you've got a point there. The ignorance of the ordinary American voter is a national scandal. But then, you have to give them a bit of slack. After all, spokesmen like Dr. Fauci haven't exactly been founts of wisdom and consistency. The story keeps changing, and you know, from your understanding of persuasion techniques, that consistency and track record are important in securing and maintaining trust. I wonder if we can't do better with the messaging on this. Of course, first there was Trump, and who could trust him? But I'd say that President Biden isn't exactly Snow White either.

The Culture of Insult response: Hey, pal. How in the heck can you expect ordinary Americans to trust you guys when you keep changing the rules? And the rules always seem to benefit wokey guys like you?

Situation Four: Your liberal friend doesn't think that schools are teaching Critical Race Theory.

What do you do about someone that calls parents protesting at their local school board "violent extremists."

The Nice Liberal Lady response. Joan, I can't believe you said that. I talked to my friend Sharon yesterday and she told me about what she had been watching her kids' Zoom classes. Of course, racism and sexism is a real problem, but I really wonder about this 1619 Project. Even The New York Times has revised its take on the idea of the founding of the United States as a slave society. 

The medium response: Oh come on, Bob. First we are told that BLM and AntiFa are nothing but mostly peaceful protesters when they burn down business in Minneapolis and attack the federal court-house in Portland, Oregon. And then we are supposed to believe that a plumber that gets a bit excited about his daughter being assaulted in the school restroom is a violent extremist? I thought you were better than that, Bob,

The Sophisticated Intellectual Response: Yes, I agree, Selwyn. Those parents really don't know much. And there is no question that the problem of Black underperformance in our nation's schools is a real problem and needs to be tackled with a sophisticated and multi-pronged approach. But I really think that we need to keep the activists and the crazy lefties on a fairly short rein. They do tend to get a bit over-enthusiastic about things. I mean. Let's not pretend that we can explain everything in society through the lens of racism. We are better than that.

Culture of Insult response. Hey, pal. I'd like to know how you'd react if they sent a bunch of right-wing crazies and KKK hoodies into your kids' school and started selling them on QAnon conspiracy theories. You'd wouldn't like it, would you.

Situation Five: Your liberal friend supports the Democratic spending agenda for a radical expansion of the entitlement state and fighting climate change.

What do you do with someone that's all in on the Progressive Agenda of Build Back Better?

The Nice Liberal Lady response: I can't believe you said that. I talked to Sophie and she said that her financial advisor said that the additional spending will cause serious inflation that will affect her financial wellbeing negatively and perhaps seriously delay retirement for many people without a guaranteed pension. And, of course, minorities and women will be hardest hit by the inflation.

The medium response: Of course, everyone knows that we need to make college more affordable and prepare for the energy transition. But it seems to me that this is going to benefit special interests and benefit big universities without really helping ordinary people. And meanwhile, how are people going to make ends meet if gasoline and gas for heating goes up 50 or 100 percent?

The Sophisticated Intellectual Response: Here's the problem, Jonathan. It's all very well to get tackle climate change. But should we really be making a one-way bet when the climate models really are not tracking with the change in global temperatures? Yes, electric cars are probably a good thing, but should we really be subsidizing a guy like Elon Musk and buying all the rare-earth metals from China, given the environmental impacts from the mining and the pollution that is already seriously impacting rural life in the areas impacted by rare-earth mining? Now, of course we should make college for affordable and institute parental leave and pre-K. But is this the way to do it, by ramming through a multi-trillion dollar package in a 50-50 Congress? Moderate Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, a generation ago, that when you want to pass big programs you need to pass them 70-30 in the Senate, so that there is a general consensus behind the reform. Does it really help matters to push these partisan measures that do not have bipartisan support?

Culture of Insult response: Hey pal. You really think that ramming a controversial bill pushed by crazies like Jayapal and the Squad is going to work? If you do, I gotta bridge to sell you.

I could go on. But you get the point.

And we deplorables all need to be better at communication. And effective communication depends on knowing who you are talking to and adjusting your message so that they will listen, and maybe even accept your message.

All Ruling Classes are Conceited

One of the fallouts from the current electoral fallout is this: what in the world did our Democratic friends expect? How could they not have seen this coming from miles away? 

I mean, come on. The welfare state had gone about as far as it can go decades ago. And you guys want to pile on with pre-K and free college and I know not what right now in 2021?

The answer is, of course, that all ruling classes are like this. They go on doing what they do until, as per Wiley E. Coyote, they suddenly see nothing below them but disaster.

It's a conceit, that's what it is, the conceit that we are the good people, the smart people, the evolved people, the knowledgeable people,we courtiers in our magnificent silken court apparel.

Earth to rulers: that's not how the world works. The world is not the glorious reign of the Sun King in whose shining light the world is reflected. The world is an emergent phenomenon, constantly adapting out of apparent chaos into an order that is always dissolving back into chaos.

If you think you have got it all figured out, I got one thing to tell you. No you don't, and if you don't find that out this year, then wait until next year.

Here's how the world works. Today, it looks like things are pretty good. But tomorrow the world changes and you'd better be ready to adapt.

The conceit of today's educated ruling class is that the neo-feudal government structures built up over the last century are magnificent temples that will last for a thousand years.

I suppose that's the conceit of every temple-building ruling class down the ages. I suppose that's the conceit of every plutocrat that ever built a weekend cottage at Newport, Rhode Island.

I suppose that's the conceit of every corporation in the Dow Jones Industrials index. Only, the average corporation spends about 20 years at the top, and then declines and disappears, merged into another corporation, it it's lucky.

Here's the problem with the magnificent temples of the welfare state. They are soon going to crumble and fall.They are already crumbling, only nobody wants to admit it. If the ruling class had known what it was doing it would have designed repair and renewal right in from the beginning.

If it cared about the people it would have put in serious reforms two decades ago. Oh yeah, remember how the Republicans went in to talk to Bill Clinton about a reform of Social Security around 1997. Just hours before the Lewinsky scandal put Bill Clinton in survival mode.

But, of course, the programs were not really designed for long-term use. They were just designed to win an election: 1936 in the case of Social Security and I know not what in the case of Medicare.

And so, in the end, every program eats the budget and can never be reformed, can never be reduced.

Because hell hath no fury like a beneficiary scorned.

And then, when the whole temple crumbles and the roof collapses onto the floor in some earthquake, the people starve and the rulers retire to their patrimonial estates.

If they are lucky.

Of course, maybe our educated ruling class will recover itself and nobly rule for another generation, or another 50 years. Or not.

After Trump, DeSantis?

 We all know -- or at least know that we have been firmly told -- that women just don't like Donald Trump's alpha-male behavior. The mean tweets, an ordinary manifestation of the male Culture of Insult, is just too exhausting.

But, of course, women expect to be protected. So if they determine, two by two in their Kaffee Klatsch meetings of the women's global conspiracy, that President Biden doesn't protect them, then I fearlessly predict that they will have nothing to say about a mean-tweeting Trump in 2024.

But whatabout Ron DeSantis? My liberal neighbors already hate him, so there's that. So the only question is whether they and their liberal friends are going to be hating him as much as they hated Donald Trump. I guess we need to keep track of this by polling the nation's mental-health professionals for an upsurge in CNN/MSNBC-watcher pre-traumatic stress syndrome in the months and years ahead.

(By the way, whatabout the mental health of disappointed Trump supporters? Does nobody in the mental health community care about them? Or are Trumpists merely sub-human deplorables that don't come to the notice of fully-qualified mental health professionals?)

But I have this weird feeling that, with regard to Trump, we are been-there-done-that. As I look back to the early presidential debates of 2016, when I was a Cruz supporter, there is no doubt that Donald Trump, by rolling over all the rules about being a "nice Republican," really gave me a buzz. He showed us all what could be done in the public square. The US political world will never be the same.

Now I think that Ron DeSantis is shaping up as Donald Trump without the mean tweets. Yesterday he was featured mentioning the "Brandon administration.¨ It was clearly fully planned and worked out, and he talked several minutes about the Let's Go Brandon phenomenon, explaining its origin for anyone that didn't know. And boy, did his audience absolutely loooove it.

See, I think that Let's Go Brandon is absolute political gold. First of all, it avoids straight up vulgarity, so the women of the world don't need to be offended. In fact, I suspect that the phrase rather neatly appeals to women, because it is indirect. It makes the point, but it stays "nice."

And I'd say that, overall, Ron DeSantis passes on the "likability" front.

Let's put it another way. Donald Trump was the guy that helped us storm the barricades of the Deep State back in the day; he was the leader of the Forlorn Hope, crashing through a breach in the walls of the ruling class.

But now, I suspect, we don't need a rough tough leader that stakes everything on "once more unto the breach." We need a nice affable guy with a will of iron that will outthink and outflank and outstrategize our dear liberal friends.

Is Ron DeSantis that man? Who knows? That's why we have campaigns.

But I tell you this. When I experience Ron DeSantis I experience a guy trying to look around the corner and think where he needs to be tomorrow or next month. I think that his COVID strategy is pure gold, and the Democratic Party strategy of lockdowns and masks and vax mandates will eventually crash and burn. I think that any sensible politician with a strategic mind is thinking about where we end up in a year or so. Whereas I think that the Dems are merely reacting and pandering to the women that expect to be protected.

Earth to Democrats. When women expect to be protected they have no idea how. They just want to be told by a Maaan that everything is under control.

Here's the problem with the Dem lack-of-strategy. If and when it turns out that the reactive lockdown-mask-vax policy was a stupid mistake, the women of America are not going to say, well, at least his heart was in the right place. They are just going to feel that the Democrats did not protect them and look for another protector.

Men, Women, Politics, and the Public Square

According to one of the exit polls last night, the voters that moved most towards the Republicans from Democrats was white women.

Which means, I suppose, that while women don't like mean tweets, they really don't like men in the women's bathroom.

I suppose that this is the reason why, they say, the most important thing in a political candidate is "likability." Kennedy was likable, Nixon was not.

Guess what kind of voter thinks that likability is important.

Or let's get back to my pal Nazi Carl Schmitt who says that politics about the friend / enemy distinction. But I prefer Curtis Yarvin who makes it real simple and says: "There is no politics without an enemy."

See, in my belief system women don't have "enemies;" they only have women that they don't talk to, of whom they have said "I can't believe she said that."

Put it another way: in the Carl Schmitt friend / enemy distinction the point about the enemy is the possibility of "conflict," or violence, or killing. In the "conflicts" that women have the most extreme result is really no more than "never talking to her again." Obviously, in the male case, fisticuffs, or worse, is always a possibility. Anyway, in the US, male murder offenders outnumbered female offenders by about 7 to 1.  And if you factor in that blacks are 55 percent of murder offenders, then how many white women murderers does that leave you?

What I mean is that, if politics is about the enemy, and for white women the enemy is almost certainly no more than that woman down the street that she is not talking to, then politics is really a guy thing. Because the enemy is almost certainly male, and only the guys are going to put it to a fight.

That's why women hate the mean tweets.

Mean tweets are a part of the male Culture of Insult, which we may consider a polite form of dueling, or a civilized form of conflict. We modern men trade insults instead of fists. It's a guy thing. But for women mean tweets don't make sense: "I can't believe he would tweet that."

When women don't like something they complain; when men don't like something they trade insults: thus the women's Culture of Complaint and the men's Culture of Insult.

But when prices are spiraling into the stratosphere and grocery-store shelves are empty, and little Susie is getting attacked in the school bathroom, that's different, because all of a sudden the protected world in which a woman can go about her vital day-to-day business is no longer protected.

I say that "women expect to be protected" and when they discover that the current protector isn't protecting them, then they go get another protector. So if the gubmint isn't providing a safe neighborhood and a functioning economy, and safe schools for little Susie, then women start talking to the neighbor women and pretty soon they all come to the conclusion that they are all going to vote for the other guy.

But it's worse than that.

I say there is no need for politics, because there really isn't an "enemy" any more, some Viking band that will sail up the river and kill all the men and take all the grain -- and the silver from the church -- and sell the women into slavery at the main European slave market in Dublin. If you, the Russkies, loot the factories in eastern Germany and take all the machines back to Russia what good does it do you? The Soviet Union still collapses 45 years later.

What? No enemies? No need for politics? Tell me it ain't so!

That's why our liberal friends, who believe in politics like a religion, have to conjure up fake enemies, like the "armed insurrectionists" of January 6, and the violent extremists that are upsetting education bureaucrats at school-board meetings, and the white oppressors that are systematically oppressing oppressed peoples despite the best efforts of the allies. And that is to say nothing of "climate deniers," the foul enemy that is preventing noble ecological heroes from tackling climate change.

But here's the problem. We men, we few, we band of brothers, are programmed to be ready at a moment's notice to jump up and fight the foe. But if there isn't any foe, then what do we do?

The answer is simple. We have to fake it. If you are a liberal you conjure up fake political enemies and mount on your charger and set your wokey lance and charge the enemy oppressor. For everybody else you become a road warrior and battle the other road warriors for market share. Road warriors are guys that create products and services; liberal social justice warriors just divide everyone into battling tribes.

For women? They go to college and decide they want to get into "activism." So they get a job in HR and start forcing CRT on the employees and the kiddies.

This is not that hard.

How Bad Could It Get?

Never mind about who wins the Virginia governor's race today, or CRT in schools. What I want to know, as an old geezer that has to make his RMDs every year, is this.

How much money should I take our of my ETFs to make sure I don't have to sell in a downturn to make my RMD?

Because for an old geezer the worst thing in the world is having to sell equities at the bottom of a bear market.

Here's my point. The result of the disastrous COVID shutdowns and Biden administration money machine is that we are going to have a nasty reckoning, at some point. But how nasty, and when, and for how long?

So I took a look at the Dow Jones history for the last century. Do you know what the worst bear market was? OK, We all know it has to be the great crash from 1929-32. But, as I look at it, the worst period seems to be the bear market from 1966 to 1982. In January 1966 the Dow was at about 8,500. In July 1982 the Dow bottomed out at about 2,275. Take a look.

Let's see, that's a decline of about 73 percent in 17 years. And that doesn't include the effect of inflation, which, you may not remember, reached 10 percent a year in the late 1970s. However, the S&P 500 index was basically flat during that period, from about 100 in March 1966 to 105 in March 1982.

Now, of course, the period from 1965 to 1980 was a period of multiple stupidities, from the Great Society social programs that cranked up gubmint spending to the Vietnam war that cranked up gubmint spending to the wage and price controls of 1971 when President Nixon, the Republican took the US dollar off the gold standard and instituted a wage-price freeze. Then we had the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 that quadrupled the price of Middle East oil and encouraged the government to impose price controls on oil. Then we had the recession of 1974. Then we had the Carter stagflation of 1977-80. President Reagan finally abolished price controls on oil and gasoline in 1981.

Do you see what the period of 1965 to 82 was all about? It was all about politicians being politicians and doing stupid things in response to the effects of their stupid policies. And this went on from the glorious dawn of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in 1965 to Richard Nixon's 1971 ploy to fix the economy in neutral until after the 1972 election to Carter's Keynesian apocalypse in 1977-80.

It took a really dumb B-movie actor to put a stop to it all, and that took a nasty recession that resulted in a 26 member GOP loss in the 1982 midterms.

We are doing the same thing now with Biden's absurd continuation of free money in the COVID crisis to the ridiculous super-expansion of the welfare state with the Build Back Better or "social infrastructure" bill.

You know what? There is bound to be a really nasty market crash / inflation / recession / who-knows-what in the next few years. And the glorious crusade to end global warming as we know it won't help.

(That's why I think that the Dems were fools to jink the 2020 election. Much better to have let Trump deal with the aftermath of Money Printer Go Brrrr. And take the blame.)

But what's a geezer to do to avoid getting demolished in the undertow?

I wonder if all the nice suburban moms that really didn't like Trump's mean tweets will soon be calling for a "strong leader" to protect them from the Biden disaster.

The Four Stages of Women in Modernity

So. Whither women now? Mary Harrington at UnHerd proposes a four-chapter story of women in the last couple of centuries, because now "The sexual revolution has killed feminism."

Chapter One is women on the farm at the beginning of the 19th century.

The typical American matron was a disciplined, skilled, devout individual who worked alongside her husband in a productive household... The patriarchal legal system of ‘coverture’, which subsumed her legal personhood and property into that of her husband, rendered her technically a subordinate class of citizen. It also served to shield her from market pressures.

Chapter Two is women in the industrial city. 

In the new private household, the bourgeois woman was more economically dependent than her agrarian grandmother. Her main activities were the education of children, the management of servants and the consumption of goods produced elsewhere. She may have been more materially comfortable. But this woman had in many respects less agency than her foremothers.

But was this new situation a shelter from the competitive frenzy in the industrial city or a monstrous and patriarchal injustice? Enter the first stage of feminism demanding equal property rights and right to vote.

Chapter Three is post World War II.

Labour-saving devices and booming consumerism have shifted society once again... And for bourgeois twentieth-century housewives, labour-saving devices combined with an increasingly atomised, individualistic social world to trigger a renewed search for agency, this time within the workplace.

Chapter Four is the Sexual Revolution, that imposed "a liberal male-centric understanding of what a person is: a radically separate individual... [and imposed] the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies."

For women to be human on this model, we must have total ownership over all these aspects of our bodies that differ from those of males. Even a conflict between total autonomy and an unborn human life must be resolved for autonomy.

But, she says, "It’s a worldview that believes human freedom necessitates radical unmooring from the givens of our bodies."

So now what? Back to the Future.

What we need to face this challenge is not more freedom. It’s more and better obligations...

To respond, first and foremost we must stop treating the question of family as a women’s issue. It’s a human one. And we need to accept that men and women are equal in dignity and personhood but different in physiology. 

Well, yes. And also different in psychology. In that men are fighters and women are nurturers; that men must go out and provide while women are dealing with the disability of childbearing and the dependent years of children. And the need for children to grow up with a mother and a father, their mother and their father.

And so on.

Which means that all the conceits and the fantasies of the last century or so are heading for the wood-chipper. Item One would be that there is no such thing as "The Independent Woman" of Simone de Beauvoir. Or, for that matter the free-ranging male taking his pleasures where he may.

Because underneath all the sound and fury of patriarchs and freedom from unwanted pregnancy and oppressive sexual mores there is the simple fact of human existence. Like all living things, the only really important thing is to have children and grow them to maturity.

Everything else is just fantasy.

And, by the way, there are also the tens of millions of women who are not in the educated gentry class and whose lives have been wrecked by the fashions and the fads of gentry women and gentry men.

But that is another story.