Race Politics Ends When We Don't Care

Today is Martin Luther King Day and a holiday in the United States. Rev. King is famous for leading non-violent protests against racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s. It is said that he got his inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent opposition to the British in India.

Now comes multiracial Ryan Bomberger to celebrate the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.

A hard-fought Dream has become a reality here in America. The codified systemic racism heralded as “heritage” met its demise because good people—both black and white—refused to stand by and do nothing.

But actually, it should be added, the non-violence concept only works against governments that already accept your premise. The ruling class in liberal America believed back in 1960 in ending racial discrimination. The Brits in India, from just after the "Indian Mutiny" in 1857, knew they would have to get out of India. Just not yet, old chap.

In the years after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s concerns about racism declined, according to Bomberger. But not any more.

From the mid 1970s through 2014 (except during the early 90’s Rodney King riots) 2-4% of Americans cited racism as the most important problem facing our country. It wasn’t until Obama’s second term when it jumped to 13% and 18% after the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Following a bumpy decline, it spiked again to 19% in 2020 under Trump as the rhetoric of Critical Race Theory spread like wildfire, sparking the very bitterness and hatred MLK denounced. 

So what is going on? Is racism increasing as a problem, or is it something else?

My belief is that it is "something else."  And that something else is the need of every politician or political party to have an enemy. It was such a glorious experience for liberals to fight the racist Jim Crow enemy in the 1960s, and it felt so good, that our liberal friends just cannot let go.

The over-under politics of the present day requires an enemy. Back in the day it was capitalism, employers, "robber barons," "malefactors of great wealth" who were pressing down upon the brow of labor. Capitalism, employers, bankers, exploiters were the enemy, and the Democratic Party would save the workers from their malevolence.

The Narrative, of course, to this very day is that but for beneficial legislation -- including wage and hour laws, unions, and government education -- the worker would still be exploited and poverty-stricken. I deny it. I say that the worker would be much better off today if the government weren't taking 35 percent of GDP and redistributing through a gubmint loot and plunder operation. But I could be wrong.

The Narrative today is that but for liberals and progressives the "oppressed peoples" would be as poor and helpless as blacks were in the South during the rule of Jim Crow.

Could that be true? The original Jim Crow was a cultural and political regime that deliberately discriminated against blacks. And there were laws to make sure that discrimination was the order of the day.

But today, our laws say that it is illegal to discriminate against blacks. And the whole of the ruling class is united to stop any re-emergence of a Jim Crow culture. And big corporations are along for the ride.

Yet the dreaded "white oppressors" are everywhere?

Actually, I'd say that 2014 mentioned by Bomberger is a tell. See, the first thing that happened after Barack Obama got elected as the First Black President in 2008 was that Republicans won 64 seats in the 2010 midterms. 

How could such a thing happen? President Obama was the liberal dream come true: I remember my university faculty wife friend expressing her emotional delight in that event at lunch in December 2008. A new era had dawned, so how come the Republicans won back 64 seats in the first midterm after Obama's election? There was only one possibility: racism, flat-out white racism.

It was after that that Democrats started with the race crisis in even -- i.e. election -- years. George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in 2012. Michael Brown was shot by a cop in 2014. George Floyd died under restraint while resisting arrest in 2020.

You might call these incidents merely lower-class small-time criminal blacks getting their comeuppance. Or you might call them representative of systemic racism in the United States. I don't know; more research is needed.

But Democrats and their pals in the media have built a huge narrative on the assumption that these events are examples of "systemic racism" arising out of a culture of "white supremacy" and executed by "white oppressors."

Only, of course the white ruling class of the United States is composed of liberals, progressives, lefties who have been spending the last generation or two doing a Gramscian "march through the institutions" and purging anyone that wasn't a card-carrying lefty. Eevil conservatives need not apply.

So what gives? in my narrative our liberal and lefty friends are finding that they are coming to the end of the era in which there is even a tenuous argument about helpless victims discriminated against by powerful right-wing whites. I dare say they were honestly shocked in 2010 when, instead of confirming the glorious new era of Barack Obama's First Black Presidency the American people voted against pedal-to-the-metal liberal agenda including Obamacare. But they couldn't admit that the world had moved on. And that Americans didn't really want huge new gubmint programs.

And like a businessman facing bankruptcy, they started to cheat, with fake racist incidents blown up into narratives of systemic racism.

There's another aspect to this. Liberals, lefties, and Democrats have spent the last 50 years insisting to black voters that, but for them, Americans would turn back the clock and institute Jim Crow 2.0. You can see how easily this narrative -- any narrative -- can work when you note how eagerly our liberal friends all drank the COVID KoolAid and bought the narrative of the moment on how to fight COVID, again and again. In other words, humans are tribal and they believe the narrative that their tribal leaders communicate to them. Doesn't matter how educated or racist they are. People are groupish and they believe the narrative. They believe the narrative up until the moment that it becomes inescapable that they have been roundly lied to. And sometimes even past that moment, because to abandon the narrative, the saving faith that defines their lives, is unthinkable.

My analysis of the liberal/progressive era involves what I call Little Darlings. Liberals operate their over-under politics by adopting and protecting a class of voters that they encourage to believe are hopelessly oppressed by "the system" and that but for liberal power would be ground into dust. And so these groups become virtual mistresses, serfs, of the ruling class.

But then the ruling class tires of their Little Darlings and leaves them in the lurch, as Democrats did for the white working class after 1965, and as, someday, they will leave blacks in the lurch.

I think the over-under politics with its necessary helpless Little Darlings is a monstrous injustice, for it encourages lower class people to stay as lower class, deriving their life and means of support on government loot and plunder and not from developing middle-class skills and culture. And when I get to set the Next Narrative I will create a politics where upper-class educated white liberals are the enemy, and are to blame for everything that went wrong in the last century.

Wouldn't that be fun! Actually, not really. I don't feel that liberals are evil, just fools and knaves.  They do need to be brought down a peg or two -- in their own best interest, you understand. But not made into enemies.

The Unbearable Whiteness of "The Nutcracker"

I was to a live performance of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker on Sunday and, of course, the lead child actors were black. And there were a couple of blacks in the corps de ballet.

But, sensitized as I am to all matters racial and cultural, I gotta say: The Nutcracker is as white as white can be. The first act takes place at a Christmas party in a very haute bourgeois household. And the girls get nice dollies as presents and the boys get to act like boys, playing at soldiers, and ambushing the girls as they play with their dollies.

Then, in the second act, we get a prime example of Edward Said's Orientalism, or non-European as exotic. Strictly speaking, we are talking about various sweets in the Land of the Sweets. So there is Spanish Chocolate, Arabian Coffee, Chinese Tea, Russian Candy Cane. Then Mother Ginger and Marzipan.

Yes, but whatabout South Asian Spice, and African fruits? How come they don't get a dance? Raciss!

The other takeaway for me, now I am so sensitized to everything, is that ballet, at its high noon with the classic Tchaikovsky ballets, is nothing but a display of the female form. The pas de deux seems to be designed to show off the prima ballerina's legs. The corps de ballet is a throng of pubescent girls fluttering around. The tutu is, again, displaying the legs of the female dancer.

And so on.

So I went and looked up ballet at La Wik. It started in the courts of the Italian Renaissance, featuring noble amateur dancers, and then spread to France with Catherine de Medici. It reached its peak under Louis XIV with a formal court ballet with a court ballet master and the five positions. Then it declined after 1830 in France until revived by the Russians. I seem to remember reading that in Paris, the ballet dancers of the Paris Opera were "available" to the various rich patrons.

I was reading about how San Francisco's Great Dickens Christmas Fair has descended into racial madness. It seems that some nice black ladies got involved and then brought their race politics with them. They want racial quotas for everything except that BIPOC characters can only be represented by BIPOC people.

I dare say that the same thing will soon apply to ballet and the Xmas Nutcrackers that are featured every Christmas in all our major cities.

It's amusing, really. Because ballet is such a whitey-white thing (as is Dickens). Everyone wants in on the white things, and then they want to bring their anti-white racism with them.

If I may be permitted to extend the dance metaphor just one step more...

Don't you realize you wokies and BIPOCs and all the ships at sea? You are not dancing to your own authentic dance tradition. You are dancing like marionettes, and ruling-class educated white liberals are pulling the strings.

And as I say with my Little Darlings notion, One Fine Day you will wake up and find the bed empty, because your ruling class Sugar Daddy has found a new Little Darling to pamper and exploit.

Learning from the Astor Place Riot

Wat? What in the world was the Astor Place Riot of 1849? I'm glad you asked.

I only learned about the Astor Place Riot in New York City a couple of days ago while reading Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro, a Columbia English professor.

Did you know that about the only entertainment in 1850 America was the playhouse? And that all classes went? And that the Big Thing was Shakespeare, which all classes enjoyed. For instance, did you know that California gold miners liked to recite Shakespeare of an evening?

And the leading actors of the day were rock stars. And they had feuds with each other.

In the case of the Astor Place Riot there was a Brit actor and a Yank actor. La Wik:

Its ostensible genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known American actors of that time, and William Charles Macready, a similarly notable English actor, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

Macready's  Brit Macbeth was a mincing take. Forrest's All-American Macbeth was a rough tough hombre. Here's is La Wik's intro on the riot:

The Astor Place Riot occurred on May 10, 1849, at the now-demolished Astor Opera House in Manhattan and left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured. It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances in Manhattan, which generally pitted immigrants and nativists against each other, or together against the wealthy who controlled the city's police and the state militia.

I get the impression, from La Wik and from Shapiro, that riots were a pretty normal feature of urban life in the 19th century.

But now I will get to the point.

The point is that, reading about New York City in the mid 19th century it seems pretty clear to me that it has a two-class politics. There was the lower-class, part native-born Americans -- e.g. "nativists"-- and part immigrant Irish and Germans. And then there was the middle and upper class.

Whereas in our time we have the over/under politics of the educated Gentry, with the educated elite successfully selling the lower class with the idea that they are their "allies." In its crudest form this over/under political formula is the Allyship notion of the Allies sticking up for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors.

And it made me think that maybe the staged riots of the present day, sponsored by the ruling class, are better than the unstaged, visceral riots of the 19th century.

In other words, I am saying that the "mostly peaceful protests" that are carried out by well-born products of our glorious universities should be regarded in the same light as the bear-baiting of olden times: boys will be boys and men like a bit of rough trade.

But when you have the nativist lower class and the immigrant lower class combining into a deadly riot -- ostensibly about Shakespeare but really as a way of thumbing their noses at the ruling class -- well, I think that I prefer the modern three-class culture and politics where the upper class struts and frets pompously and conceitedly around acting as though they were the best thing in the world for the oppressed peoples instead of a bunch of idiots that Literally Know Nothing and are Making Things Worse.

And really, what this country needs is a responsible and patriotic ordinary middle class sensibly organized into a nationalist and patriotic party of the middle class that sensibly balances the political scales against the poseurs of the educated upper class. And, needless to say, it is a middle class that gradually enrolls members of the lower class into the national community of the middle class as soon as they are ready to shed their subordinate status as victims and become ordinary responsible One Hundred Percent Americans.

So what I am saying is that we should not grumble about the vile and unjust gentry class that has split this country apart and Made Things Worse. We should go forward with joy and with a spring in our step, luxuriating in the glory of the America we know and love and the possibility of what America might become after the inevitable humiliation and defeat of the delta-minus morons that currently rule us.

We should laugh and sing at our liberal friends, pat them on the head and tell them that they can't help it, having been Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls that learned to hate and to fear as they were carefully taught from year to year in their dear little ear.

And every now and then we should speak to the Little Darlings of the liberals, the "oppressed peoples" of which you've heard tell. And we should ask them whether the liberals are really helping them, or whether they are Making Things Worse.

See, getting the Little Darlings to grow up into One Hundred Percent Americans takes time. Look at the white working class: the liberals abandoned them after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it has taken them fifty years to take down the FDR pictures on the wall and start organizing Trump Car Parades.

Why should it take blacks any longer to realize that they have been had?

Or ordinary women to realize that have been bamboozled into supporting the agenda of upper-class women snobs?

I think we can see that Hispanics are naturally moving out of the Democratic orbit as they move into the middle class.

But whatabout gays? And trans? And they/them? Well, they are all educated class twerps: we don't need to worry about them.

By the way, I was to a dinner with the neighborhood liberals lately, and boy, do they hate Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida.

And who, you may ask, taught my liberal neighbors to hate and to fear Ron DeSantis? I couldn't possibly say.

Exploiting the Power of Sacrilege

Here's a thought, from the notorious David Cole. He says that there is nothing more powerful than the sense of the sacred and defending the sacred from the profaners.

“Something sacred to you—the thing that is the very core of your identity—is being profaned and disrespected by people who value their ‘free speech’ rights over your right to protect what is hallowed. Your identity commands you to take up arms.”

Case in point, the Mohammed cartoons. You can bomb the heck out of Muslims, and meh. But draw a cartoon and the whole Muslim world explodes.

A white guy in France or the U.K. can say, “I support bombing Syrians,” and he’ll be fine. But if he draws Mohammed, some individual Muslim, acting on conditioning rather than direct orders, will murder him (or try to). 

So then Cole turns to another sacred totem: black skin in America.

Black Americans have the highest levels of self-esteem of any racial or ethnic group in the country, yet arguably (on average) they have the fewest accomplishments to back up that narcissism. What a perfect group for leftist “imams” to target with the message that it’s your skin that’s sacred. Your holy skin makes you valuable, not your accomplishments. Those who speak disrespectfully of that skin are blasphemers; it’s your duty to eradicate them. 

Earlier in the piece, Cole goes into the story of the radicalization of blacks at his high school, Alexander Hamilton High School in Manhattan. All it took was a lefty activist group, African American Parent Coalition for Education Equity (AAPCEE), funded by white educated-class foundations:

AAPCEE operated under the umbrella of a well-heeled organization called “Communities for Educational Equity,” which was funded by the James Irvine Foundation and (since the early 2000s) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

With the help of white money and black radicals the whole black majority at Hamilton High got radicalized.

Course, it didn't do the blacks any good in the long term. Hamilton High is now majority Hispanic and

Blacks barely count anymore, surrounded as they are by Latinos who don’t give two shits about their “sacredness.”  

 But there's a missing link in Daivd Cole's narrative. The global left-liberal elite.

If it weren't for the global left-liberal elite and their liberal activist groups (read lefty racist hate groups) -- because Islamophobia, darling -- nobody would give a hoot about Muslims killing cartoonists. Put 'em in jail and hang 'em high: that's what would happen.

And the same thing with sacred black skin. If it weren't for liberals -- because racism, darling -- the cops would simply arrest the perps, and the schools would tell the AAPCEEs and the BLMs and the Antifas to go pound sand.

So that's why I say that we should never talk about liberal activist groups. That's a lie. We are talking about lefty racist hate groups, straight up. Left liberal racists get their jollies by encouraging small groups to feel their innocence and sacredness and victimhood. Until the the left-liberal global elite of racist haters tires of the victim group du jour.

And we should always refer to all liberal groups, from the ACLU to the SPLC as lefty racist hate groups. Because  that's what they are.

Lower Class Lives on Gubmint Checks

I suppose that I knew this all along, but it's still shocking. According Richard Shinder, commenting on a piece by Phil Gramm and John Early in the Wall Street Journal, the point isn't that inequality isn't as bad as our liberal friends like to lecture us. Hey, if you don't take gubmint payments into account, of course inequality looks bad. But he takes Gramm and Early to task for this:

Left largely unremarked upon in their essay are the costs and consequences of both current and prospective redistributive policies, other than observing a collapsing labor-force participation rate among lower-income households and that the percentage of income attributable to government payments among the bottom quintile of U.S. households now exceeds 90 percent.

Yikes.

Of course, that chimes in with Charles Murray in Coming Apart. In the bottom 35 percent of Americans, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. 

As I was returning home from coffee this morning I passed by a house still with its Biden/Harris yard-sign displayed. Only this sign had stuff like Truth Peace Kindness on it.

I thought to myself: you liberal gentry living in swank houses one block from Green Lake in Seattle have No Idea.

The fact that the bottom 20 percent of Americans get 90 percent of their income from gubmint is Your Fault, liberals. Oh, it's happened for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the gubmint programs that you have passed over the years. Because You Cared.

The situation, I suggest, is the same as the end of the feudal age when, according to Marx,

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

And the reason, I found out, was because the nationalization of armies by the absolute monarchs meant that the feudal lords didn't need to keep extra hands around in case they needed to go to war on the lord next door.

Look, nothing to see here. All ruling classes use their feudal retainers to support their power plays. If the lower quintile is useful as a vote bank, or useful as street fighters or as the army's cannon fodder, then the ruling class will support the lower class. If the world changes, well then those chappies are going to be "eating the paint off the walls" as they said in Russia right after the end of the Soviet Union.

That's why I say: don't be a Little Darling of the ruling class. Right now they say they looove you. And so they do. But next week? Reasons of state will govern, and if reasons of state say that the old white working class ain't what it used to be, then it's Coi-t'ns (That's "curtains" in standard English) to the white working class. As Bugs Bunny used to say.

Right now, I read, the Biden administration is pushing its big $2 trillion infrastructure bill to Congress -- to "rebuild infrastructure and reshape the economy." Except that half of it seems to be simple redistributive payments, that's not actually going to build anything. Well, of course, because the Democrats are an over-under coalition, with Jobs for Gentry and Checks for the "oppressed peoples." And "reshape the economy?" Oy, I don't like the sound of that. I'll bet it really means "wreck the economy." As in Oops...

That is the game that the left has been playing for the last century, to use the poor as a political weapon, and buy their loyalty with loot and plunder from taxing the productive sector.

And lots of nice liberal ladies are persuaded that this loot and plunder operation is the very essence of justice and peace and kindness. And they will continue to believe what they have been carefully taught right up until the moment that the poor are reduced to eating the paint off the walls.

I tell you what I think Our Great Challenge for the next 20 years will be.

No, it will not be Climate Change. It will not be Systemic Racism. It will simply be getting the bottom 20 percent back into the workaday economy, back to work, back to marriage and children and trying to rise out of the lower class into the competent middle class.

And that ain't simple.

Google's Little Race Problem

Google is in the wokey headlights just now because it doesn't think that the graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) meet its exacting standards. Paul Mirengoff has the whole procedure.

See, Google has ranked colleges as follows: "elite," followed by "tier 1" and "tier 2." But HBCUs don't make the cut for "tier 2." So they are ranked as "long tail."

Racist! Google is racist!

Now I have a classification system for liberal bad behavior: Left's Conceits, Left's Crimes, Left's Errors. Well, why not? And I think that this siti-yation -- as they say in Treasure Island -- contains all three. And I'm not sure that this doesn't always apply.

Left's Errors aspect: Back in the Sixties, a second after the Civil Rights Act was passed, liberals decided that merely criminalizing racial discrimination wasn't enough. That was their first mistake. Why? Simply because it is one thing to judge that, say, having a whites-only fountain is discrimination; it is another to say that, because a particular corporation does not have a racial makeup that matches the racial proportions in the community, this represents discrimination.

Left's Conceits aspect: The second problem is to imagine that we evolved and educated liberals could, with politics and government, right the wrongs of yesteryear with top-down liberal-led programs of racial discrimination that we call quotas, or affirmative action, or diversity, or allyism, or fighting "systemic racism." It is a conceit, often found around ruling classes, that any political program it advances will achieve the results expected. Unfortunately there is Science™ that shows that this is not so. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even La Wik recognizes the Law of Unintended Consequences as a Thing.

Left's Crimes aspect: As the Paul Mirengoff article articulates, the whole quota/affirmative action thing has seriously hurt Blacks. it goes like this:

1. "Elite" universities tend to recruit black students with qualifications somewhat below the white and Asian students -- good but not great credentials -- in order to meet their racist diversity goals.
2. "Tier 1" and "tier 2" universities are forced to accept "mediocre black students" to meet their racist diversity goals.
3. "Long tail" universities like "HBCUs are left to select from a pool of applicants with credentials insufficient to warrant admission to good non-HBCUs even with the benefit of racial preferences.

"Expert agree" that the mismatching of black applicants to university results in lower overall achievements for blacks. Google finds that “HBCU computer science students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures.”

I think that the "mismatching" problem is a crime. But that's just me.

Of course, this also comes under my Little Darlings problem. When you accept the overlordship of the ruling class, and become its Little Darlings, as "the workers" once did, and then women and minorities and now LGBT+, you will thrive under the sponsorship of the ruling class until the day that you are no longer politically useful. Then, like the soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army that invaded Russia, you will be left by the roadside, probably to die of hunger and disease, certainly of despair.

And it is notable, I would say, that the abandoned Little Darlings don't really ever cotton to the reason for their despair.

Do the white working class today blame the 19th century reformers for their plight? Or FDR for eight years of top-down failure in the Great Depression? Or the compulsory unionism that made US steelworkers and autoworkers uncompetitive with the world market in the 1970s?

Anyway, it hardly matters. The damage is already done. As I say, the only question in the aftermath of lefty conceits, crimes, and errors is the size of the butcher's bill.

Will it be a butcher's bill on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao, or simply the abandoned folks "dying of despair" in rural America?

We can only hope.

The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint

Yesterday I had a brainwave while categorizing a bunch of blog posts into my Culture of Innocence category.

I said to myself: but aren't helpless victims and innocent virgins and Little Darlings and women resisting the public square with their "safetyism" all the same?

They are all humans in the pre-responsibility culture. They are Adam and Eve before that nasty serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted the innocent Eve into tasting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

So let's rehearse all this:

Three Peoples: The People of the Subordinate Self are people that attach themselves to a lord -- a feudal lord or a political boss -- and they are saying, thanks very much but responsibility is not for me. Of course, the Subordinate has no problem complaining if his loving lord goofs up and fails to protect him.

Little Darlings: If you are a Little Darling of the ruling class, given loot and plunder in return for your vote, you are like the rich man's mistress. One fine day, when your prettiness is not quite what it was, your Sugar Daddy will dump you for a newer model. In politics this is the fate of the white working class. I say that it will also be the fate of the feminists as the ruling class favors transgenders over whiny women. And blacks too as the ruling class pivots to illegal immigrants.

Women in the Public Square: I maintain that women don't want to be responsible people in the public square. That is what #MeToo and "safetyism" is about. Women expect to be protected, and rightly so. But that means that women are never going to accept the proposition of the public square, that you take the good with the bad, the ups with the downs. The very difference between the male Culture of Courage and the female Culture of Chastity that issues from the different conceptions of honor experienced by each sex mandates this. Women are not into courage. Their job is to stay alive and keep the kids alive. That does not include dying in a Forlorn Hope after King Henry V bellows "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Culture of Innocence: I maintain that it is the natural and physical imperative for small minorities to develop a culture of innocence. Small minorities always feel embattled and vulnerable. They never know when they will need to join together as one to defend themselves from the cold cruel world outside. To maintain the necessary unity the small minority has to develop a culture of innocence, that all the world is against us and the only way we can survive is if we all hang together. And when did we do anything to deserve this? Obviously in our own time this Culture of Innocence is most obvious in Jews and Blacks. But I believe that all ethnic immigrants to the United States have gone through this stage. We will probably see it grab hold of the white commoners in the next few years as the implacable acts of the educated elite make life more precarious for them.

 Notice that this Culture of Innocence is mandatory for anyone fighting a war. The leader must unite the country to fight the war if he is to have a hope of winning and he always does this by representing the enemy as a guilty monster and we the people as innocents. If the leader fails to unite his people in this declaration of innocence then he will fail to mobilize the necessary will to win. In fact, if you are the anti-war party you will always try to insist that, hey, we aren't so great. Whatabout such and such... Our liberal friends did a bang-up job on this front during the Vietnam War and also in the the Iraq War after a decent interval to mourn the dead of the 9/11 attacks.

I say that the beginning of wisdom is to get beyond the Culture of Innocence. And that is the meaning of the Garden of Eden story. Once Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge she was no longer an innocent, and Adam and Eve had to leave the pre-conscious Paradise and "eat the herb of the field" and "eat bread." Sounds like the Dawn of Agriculture.

Then there is the human guilt from putting Christ on the Cross. Admitting guilt and getting beyond the Culture of Innocence is the beginning of responsibility, admitting that you are not perfect, and that, here and there, you may have done things of which you are ashamed, and for which you are sorry.

Notice that our liberal friends have a peculiar version of this with their BLM signs and their #WeBelieve yardsigns and their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. They are saying "we are the good guys" because we help oppressed peoples and the other guys are the haters. There is not a whisper of doubt, that we think that, on the margin, we are doing the right thing, but you never know. No. We activists are the good guys, and don't you forget it.

To live successfully in the city you have to get rid of all this innocence. You have to accept personal responsibility for your life and surrender to the will of the market. If something goes wrong you pick yourself up and get back in the game. There is a big upside to this: you get to be a happy camper. You ditch the Culture of Complaint for the Culture of Courage and Responsibility. Even if it's not always your fault.

"Secret Garden" and Multiculti

For some reason yesterday I needed to re-read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. But I couldn't find a copy in the house. So I looked online for the movies. There are many, including the 1993 version with Maggie Smith as the housekeeper Mrs. Medlock. There is a 2020 version with the Yorkshire lad Dickon played by a POC. And there is a "steampunk" 2017 version that turns the whole thing into a post environmental apocalypse.

But the original novel was about the tricky issue of the children of Brits in India. The girl heroine, Mary Lennox, is the child of Brits that died of cholera. Mary knew nothing of her parents, being raised by "native" servants. Mary ends up at her hunchback uncle's place, Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors.

Misselthwaite is a morgue, because the uncle, Mr. Craven (!), is still in a depression over the death of his wife, and ignores his bedridden son. Because. 

The story is about Mary's personal transformation from a spoiled, angry brat into a savior that saves not only herself, but her uncle and his bedridden son, with the help of the servant Martha and her younger brother Dickon, who is a dab hand at pet animals and anything to do with plants. It is, you may say, completely over the top.

In the 2017 steampunk version I watched, -- not mentioned on La Wik until I fix it -- the uncle owns a big factory that has completely run down after an environmental collapse and the death of the scientist mother, and the bedridden son turns out to be AI, invented by the dead scientist mom. It is a hot mess, but a rather charming hot mess.

The 2020 version features a young man of color as the Yorkshire lad, Dickon. And that got me to thinking.

The whole point of The Secret Garden, in my mind, is the cruel treatment of children by the upper class, whether it is powerful folks in the Empire dumping the kids on the servants, while they pursue their lives of power or self-pity.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling, born in India, who was dropped off at a boarding house in Southsea, Sussex, with his sister Trix just before the parents returned India. Rudyard was five, and Trix was three. Kipling called this the "House of Desolation" writes Jad Adams in Kipling:

The children speculated miserably on why they had been abandoned, unable to understand what had led their parents to leave them to such horrors.

I wonder what Kipling meant in The Jungle Book about an abandoned child brought up by wolves.

So, you can see that children's books -- modern fairy tales, I suppose -- are often about the horrible neglect and cruelty often meted out to children, especially the children of the ruling class.

In The Secret Garden the secret ingredient to redeem Mary's humanity is Dickon, the child of nature. In The Jungle Book the redeemers are wolves!

Hey, isn't raciss to cast Dickon, the child of nature, as a child of color in the 2020 movie? Shouldn't the POC have been Mr. Craven the uncle? Oh no, because the POC can't be the villain.

But, to make the problem bigger, how do we, of western culture, invite the outsiders, which really means Africans, into our culture, without being insulting or patronizing?

For instance, was it insulting to have the black slave Mammy in Gone with the Wind? If the movie were reshot, should Mammy be played by a white bitter-clinger?

Was it patronizing to have the physicist astronomer in Interstellar played by a black? Or is it insulting to American-born blacks that the actor was born Ghanaian?

The point is that literature and the arts -- and especially children's stories -- are about stereotypes, recognizable stereotypes that leap out of ordinary life into the story. It must be so. And for the Jungians among us, we translate "stereotypes" into "archetypes."

If you muddy up the archetypes with ruling-class dictates and quotas and such I do not think you will achieve what you think.

And above all, no group will find its place in modern society as the Little Darlings in the petting zoo of the ruling class. Everyone of us, and every group, has to find their own way and their own niche that plays to their particular cultural heritage and acquired skills.

And here's the danger for America's blacks. The recent importation of millions of East and South Asians means that the old moral narrative of evil whites vs. innocent blacks is going to be replaced by a new narrative, probably along the lines of cultured Asians vs. jumped-up Europeans and primitive Africans.

Or it might be a fight between South Asian Brahmins vs. East Asian Mandarins, with blacks the clients of the Brahmins and whites the clients of the Mandarins.

Either way, our literature and our movies need to be peopled by real archetypes, not blurred and fake ones imposed by an unjust ruling class.

Hey, Black Americans: Grow Up!

We just finished up a year in which the arrest of a black man, who was high on fentanyl and subsequently died, was the usual election-year pretext for a race-card play by the ruling class.

Wags like Steve Sailer are talking about the new Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution:

That's the new Zeroth Amendment: "No Black man need submit to arrest unless He's damn well in the mood to be arrested."

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) August 29, 2020

Because what was really going on with George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, was that they were going to jail if the arrest succeeded.

For some reasons these police killings of black men with criminal records a yard long only get publicized in election years.

Since I get to walk past at least a dozen Black Lives Matter yard-signs up at the top of liberal Phinney Ridge every day, my unconscious mind has been pondering the whole question.

And I have come to realize that the whole race politics thing has nothing to do with blacks, or African Americans, or Blacks. It is all to do with the moral posturing of well-to-do whites.

Since the 18th century.

Back in the 18th century, was the anti-slavery movement, William Wilberforce, proprietor, responding to a slave rebellion? Were there Spartacuses all over leading the slaves in revolt? Er, no. La Wik:

Wilberforce was... the only son of Robert Wilberforce (1728–1768), a wealthy merchant[.]

The family fortune had been made by little Billy's grandfather in the Baltic trade. Our William, who became an evangelical Christian, was what we now call an "activist." Hey, it was no skin off his nose to advocate against the Atlantic slave trade!

Fast forward to 1850 and the United States. Was there a massive slave rebellion that prompted the ruling class to ease off on the slave front? Not at all. It was much more a moral crusade, with Ladies' Anti-Slavery Societies having Frederick Douglass in to talk about the evils of slavery.

Then as now, the ruling class had to have an "Other" to blame for all the sins of the world, and the South would fill the bill. So why not have a jolly old war and teach the South a lesson. After all, the young men of he North were expendable, as the young men of 1917 were expendable, and the young men of 1941. Not to mention the young men sent off to Vietnam to prop up the dominoes, and the young men sent to the Middle East in 2002 to prop up the Saudis.

Yes, but whatabout the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? The fact is that the ruling class was down for the struggle. Dr. King was supported by the Northern elite and nice Jewish boys went down to the South to register voters.

Dr. King based his non-violent movement on the non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi. Which is a "tell."

I now realize, having read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, that the Brits decided pretty soon after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 that they would be handing India over to the Indians. But not yet, old chap, because the natives weren't yet ready for self government. A real imperial empire wouldn't have given Gandhi the time of day. They would have arrested him and disappeared him, and nobody the wiser. Like the Chinese and the Uygurs.

But if the imperial empire is planning to hand India over to the Indians, why, then it makes sense to permit and even encourage a nationalist Indian movement. That way you have a new ruling class ready to take over when the time comes. As it did come after World War II. And it even makes sense to condone a whacko activist like Gandhi with his taste for young women.

If you condone a non-violent activist like Dr. King it yields all kinds of benefits, like the incident at the Edmund Pettus bridge and all those eevil Southern policemen beating up helpless peaceful protesters. OMG, I can't believe they did that! And all those liberal kids going into the South to register voters as Freedom Riders -- with a book and a movie to follow! Weren't they special!

See, my line is that all this had nothing to do with blacks, and everything to do with liberal moral fluffing and preening. And when the votes in Congress were in on the civil rights acts, the northern liberals were almost completely Yea, the Republicans were majority Yea, and only the Southern Democrats voted Nay. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) , the Jewish libertarian Republican, voted Nay, because he thought the bill should just ban gubmint discrimination, and allow private citizens to discriminate to their hearts' content.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recently characterized himself "I am Spartacus." As if. Watch the movie, kiddo! Kirk Douglas, playing a real slave, not a Senator, gets crucified right at the gate of Rome. And, thanks to the movie director, Stanley Kubrick, and leftie scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, ol'Kirk gets to see his kid just before he expires on the cross. There is a line of slaves, crucified, going right down the Appian Way, or whatever. Just to make the point about who is boss in the Roman Empire.

In the American Empire, blacks kept a pretty low profile until after the passage of the civil rights acts. And I don't blame them. Why put yourself on the line when white liberals are going to do the heavy lifting for you? And then when blacks started rioting in 1965 and thereafter, they were helpless victims reacting to 500 years under the yoke. Pity that Detroit is still hollowed out 50 years later.

Looking back at the whole thing, going back to rich kid William Wilberforce, you gotta hand it to our liberal friends. What a ride! What glorious self-congratulation! What moral peacock feathers! What it is to dine out on your moral specialness for 200 years! And no end in sight!

But I have a question for blacks. Is this all there is to Life, the Universe, and Everything? To be the Little Darlings, the political playthings of the ruling class? To be riled up every even year? To get to do a bit of loot and plunder at Target once in a while? To get to be the First Black President just for showing up? To be the first woman black vice-president just for being a politician's moll? To sire 70 percent of your children outside of marriage? To have your young men committing half of the murders in the US?

Because back in the day there were magnificent American blacks. There was Frederick Douglass, who was sent to a slave breaker and broke the breaker! Who escaped, found his love and married her, and worked his way up to luncheon speaker, first hating America and then learning to love it. Or Booker T. Washington, who traveled half way across America, sleeping under the sidewalk, to get himself an education.

Here's the thing. For a young head full of mush it feels kinda cool for the ruling class to give you free dissing privileges. The white working class had it for a while: they could strike and carry on and bankrupt their employers, and who cared. But then the liberals tired of them and left them to die of despair in the most recent half century.

And now the ruling class has issued free rioting privileges to the white wokies of AntiFa. What fun!

I'd just like to say to my black friends: why not get your act together before your liberal masters tire of you?

White Privilege vs. Little Darlings

Who should get the COVID vaccinations first? Not White Man, apparently, because white privilege and social justice. I love this bit from The New York Times (H/T Powerline).

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

So we lordly white "allies" -- no "white oppressors" here! -- will put our social-justice thumbs on the scales of racial justice and fix things.

We are seeing a similar dance with regard to appointments to the Biden administration, where pressure groups for people of color are advocating for more of their kind of color.

Yep. I sure would like a bit of the privilege that gets you -- whatever your color or gender -- into the higher ranks of the ruling class where you become a candidate for promotion into the ruling clique. I suspect that one of the qualifications is to have -- let us say -- successfully "harvested" a million votes or so.

For as I say in my Maxims.

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

And it doesn't matter what the game is, whether it is handing out fiefs to loyal barons, or handing out benefits to the workers, or handing out research grants to the scientists, or starting "to level the playing field a bit" in favor of people of color. Government is in the business of loot and plunder, as a reward to its supporters. Period.

Naturally, when governments do this they enlist the assistance of the priests and the moralists, so that it is only fair and just to hand out benefits to the supporters of the ruling class. Hey! "Equality never hurt anyone," as a rich liberal with a house at the top of the hill announces with a hand-painted yard-sign, featuring a clenched BLM fist.

Whatabout my "white privilege?"

Well, my dad's father lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, as the representative of the family firm, and died before World War I. Then his widow and three children got out of Russia in 1918 with nothing but the clothes on their backs. However, the family knew a friend of a friend that got my dad into St. Paul's public school as a charity case. My dad got an engineering degree as an external student while working as an apprentice at a manufacturer. Then he went out to India to design electric power stations and rose to become a top manager at the firm he worked for. But then, of course, came Indian independence, and white guys need not apply. So he came back to England and eventually rose to being a Director at AEI Export Co. And so I got to go to a British public school.

Privilege? Yeah, I'd say, from a family that picked itself up after reverses and made lemons into lemonade and somehow managed to dodge the Bolshevik revolution and two world wars.

Or maybe an Act of God.

But I want to say a word to the "traditionally marginalized" folks that are to be the beneficiaries of the new level playing field. Take your bennies. But then make it on your own.

Why? Why not just connect your electric car to the free charging station forever and enjoy?

Because people that plug into the loot and plunder handed out by the ruling class are what I call "Little Darlings." The ruling class isn't really helping you because it believes in "justice." It is helping you because it wants your vote. The way a rich guy gives presents to his mistress.

And there will come a time when the ruling class does not need your vote any more. The obvious case today is the white working class. Back in the day, the ruling class loooved the working class, and created programs and benefits and wage-and-hour laws to benefit the poor helpless workers. Because social justice and because the bourgeoisie, like the feudal lords of old, had frankly and brutally exploited the subordinate classes. Yeah! Everybody knew that!

But then came 1965 and the civil rights laws and the ruling class decided to buy the votes of privileged white women and blacks. And in due course gays and all "people of color."

And the white working class got cut loose. It started with Affirmative Action; then segued to sneering at the white working class, as in Archie Bunker and All in the Family. Then, in due course, we had Barack Obama speaking to a fundraiser patronizingly about "bitter clingers." Then it was Hillary Clinton's open contempt for her "basket of deplorables." Today? Well, "society is structured in a way that enables [white people] to live longer."

Wait a minute! Just last March I was reading about the white working class "dying of despair." In The New Yorker, so it must be true. So how does that all stitch up?

So my message to the Little Darlings of the ruling class is: grab your goodies while you can. But know this: the day will come when the ruling class no longer needs your votes. And when that day comes you had better be ready to take up the slack and make it on your own, without benefit of government loot.

Because if you don't, you Little Darlings, you will end up like the white working class, that found out one day that those good union jobs at the steelworks were gone; that the police and firemen jobs had to be shared with the "traditionally marginalized," and that the upper-class white women in HR were making them go to critical race theory training. That the rulers didn't care about people like them. Not any more.

But by all means, enjoy your day in the sun.

Reducing Yarvin's Four Strata to Three Layers

Back in the day Curtis Yarvin had a nice sensible Three Layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. But now he has revised it into four strata, as follows:

Across human history we see four different ways of living. Let’s label these varieties of social existence cosmopolitan, traditional, deracinated, and ancestral. For variety, we’ll pair these adjectives with synonymous nouns which almost no one knows: armigers, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons.

Only, then he goes and adds another stratum on the bottom end: the "human rubble of the old regime’s failed experiments." For human rubble, you could also substitute "white trash," which, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, has been a thing in the Anglo-American world for hundreds of years. Back in 1500, the Brits had a law to deal with "vagabonds and beggars." Nothing new on the human rubble front.

Now, by lazzari Yarvin refers to the "name for the Neapolitan underclass in the Bourbon era," and he includes the gang members in this classification. By saying that they are deracinated he means that they are uprooted -- uprooted yeoman that just need to be re-yeomanized. I don't think so. I agree that the lazzari are uprooted, but I don't agree that they were previously yeomen.

By autochthons Yarvin means pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, the "original inhabitants" of a place. They really cannot fit in today's society because they never learned to be bored, boring farmers sitting in one place watching the corn grow. Various commentators have noted that these pre-agricultural people tend to extinction when confronted by the modern world, as in native Americans, Australians aboriginals, and Amazon tribes.

Now I think that Yarvin has muddied the waters with his new strata. I like his armigers, or, as I would prefer, armigeri, just to make it sophisticated and Italian. But I think that yeomen is not a good fit. This is because I feel that to make it in the city you cannot be a yeoman right off the farm. You have to transform yourself into a bourgeois, a burgher, a townie. That's why I like Yarvin's Commoner from his Three Layer theory and my Responsible from my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you look at the heroes of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot novels, these agricultural yeomen had to transform themselves to make it in the new world of the nineteenth century. And they did.

See, I look at the lazzari, the autochthons, and the human rubble as "misfits." They do not fit in the modern world of the city, the employment at will, the hegemony of the market, the need to upgrade skills to keep yourself employable in the city economy. Moreover, they are people that do not really "get" how life operates in the city. They are Subordinate people that expect to live as a subordinate to someone who will make all the decisions and tell them what to do.

There are a ton of people that inhabit this Subordinate realm. The whole arc of labor unions, wage-hour laws, government pension systems and government health care are really manifestations of the fact that a lot of people don't want to be free burghers. They want to be taken care of. The only problem is that, as Yarvin says above, they tend to become "human rubble," the detritus from the latest wizard wheeze dei armigeri. I call them Little Darlings, because their descent is usually assisted by the armigeri enlisting them as special people in their political army, for their votes, and then abandoning them by the side of the road when they are no longer politically useful. As in white working class.

Now we like, with our modern conceit, to sneer at the old world of serfs and slaves. But you tell me what a corporate employee with life-time employment is, other than a serf. You tell me what a welfare recipient is, who goes to the government for money to live on, other than a slave. Oh yes, back in the day you could apply to become a slave to your local feudal lord. Slaves weren't all conquest slaves, or sold to the highest bidder in West African slave ports.

But I think it is nicer to call the misfits, the serfs, the slaves, as Subordinates. They are people that don't have the spirit, the chops, the cultural preparation to be Commoners in the city: not yet, maybe not ever. And that's OK

But let us at least admit that the lazzari, the autochthons, the "human rubble" are all "misfits," people that have not found a place in today's rapidly post-industrializing society.

And, by the way, suppose they never do find a place in today's society. Do we put them all on "reservations" where they can drink themselves to death? Or do we let them molder away in the countryside blacking out with OxyContin, like the white working class that is "dying of despair?"

Or do we make everyone go through post-industrial boot-camp? I mean, if it was copacetic to put a whole generation of young men through boot camp in World War II and then the GI Bill to beat the Nazis and make the kids into good Fifties factory workers and suburbanites, why not do it again?

Only, of course, I wouldn't trust i nostri amati armigeri to do it right. With their record, they would probably create a whole new category of "human rubble."

Examples of Gentry, Commoners, and Victims in Everyday Life

Over at The American Spectator we have two pieces that allow me to interpose my reductive Three Peoples theory (or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory) to explain the world.

First, Tony Woodlief takes out after Vanity Fair writer James Woolcott in "In Praise of Commoners’ Sense — And Against Liberal Elitism." James Woolcott took after the "common sense" of the American people with regard to the China Flu epidemic. In other words, Woolcott goes with the experts on the response to the epidemic.

I realize that Woolcott must live in a different universe than me, because I believe that nobody has had a clue about the epidemic, not experts who have been all over the place, and not Commoners who commonly latch onto whatever meme suits their fancy.

Come on, James. Experts have recommended everything from Do Nothing, in Sweden, to allow the disease to work through the population until "herd immunity" is achieved, to total lockdown as practiced in China.

In my expert opinion, I would say that probably seniors should all be locked up and everyone under 60 forced to intermix in all normal ways except late-night parties and infect each other as efficiently as possible so that, in a month or two, herd immunity is achieved and we can let the seniors out of jail.

Also, I would say that any fool can see that President Trump has a political interest in getting the economy back on track as quickly as possible, so as to get re-elected, and the Democrats have a political interest in shutting down the economy as long as possible so they can blame Trump for it. If I can see both ways on this, as a reckless Trump partisan, what does it say about Vanity Fair writer James Woolcott?

What I would expect, using Three Layer theory, is that educated Gentry Vanity Fair writers would likely want to believe the judgments of experts because experts are Gentry like them. And Commoners would likely want to believe in common sense and make some sensible precautions against infection short of destroying the economy. So you tell me which is right.

We have another Three Layer issue in the question of "The Trayvon Hoax: Are Young Blacks Weary of Being ‘Played’?" by Jack Cashill. Young Blacks are encountering Joel Gilbert's film The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America on youTube. And one young Black woman wrote in the comments section "I can't bring myself to press play." Because, of course, it would be a glitch-in-the-Matrix moment for her.

Here we have a conflict between the Victim world where everything is the fault of the white oppressors and the common sense world of the Commoner, where you let the facts fall where they may. Or the members of the jury set aside their tribal loyalties for the evidence presented to them.

In my judgment the vast majority of Blacks are a generation away from becoming Commoners. I base my judgement on the US white working class that was basically abandoned by the Democrats in the Sixties and didn't give up on Democrats until the Trump election of 2016, fifty years later.

Blacks are supposed to have died and gone to Heaven with the election of the First Black President. The fact that they didn't ought to mean something to them. It will, I predict, but not yet.

And I base my judgement on the British working class that voted Labour until the 2019 General Election when the "red wall" fell in the north of England, home of coal mines and steelmaking back in the day. What took you so long, workers?

In other words, once an economic class has identified itself with a particular party it will take a political earthquake to dislodge the relationship. This should not be surprising: humans are groupish, and they substitute groupish loyalty for a serious discussion of the issues. Blacks are very groupish, particularly Black women, as witnessed by their 90 percent vote for Democrats in recent decades. So are feminists, who all vote Democrat even though you could argue that their economic interest does not really lie with Democrats. It's a tribal thing.

Now I argue, with my Little Darlings notion, that any group politically favored by the ruling class is heading for disaster, because politicians don't really care about you, they only care about your vote. And the day will come when they no longer care about your vote, because they found some fresh voter meat. But, as with many women in an "abusive relationship," or any employee in a dead-end job, it is really hard to give up on the benefits of a steady paycheck.

But there is this. I am sorta watching the Democratic Convention this week, and the TV stream is full of helpless women, victims of some health tragedy or spousal abuse who are eternally grateful to Joe Biden or to the Democratic Party for helping and protecting them. Do you see what I see here? I see Victims, that look to a powerful lord to protect them from the tempests of life. And that is what the Democrats are all about. Providing for the Victims.

But when you get to the point that you figure that politicians are in it for themselves, that is when you become a Commoner. 

I am reading an astonishing book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang from The Wall Street Journal. We are talking about teenage girls that leave their rural villages and take the train to the big city like Dongguan or Guangzhou just outside of Hong Kong and get jobs in the most appalling sweatshop factories. But these girls -- teenage girls -- have the most amazing courage and determination. Are they downhearted by their appalling working conditions? No! If they can't take it any more, they don't! They quit, leaving behind unpaid wages and go get another job.

Yes, that's the thing about the migration from the country to the city in China over the last 20-30 years. It is teenagers! With the most amazing courage! And making it, crawling their way up from the assembly line to clerk jobs, or higher. Just on pure determination and grit. And these are teenagers!

Do you see the difference? Here we have uneducated kids from the countryside dropping into the middle of an industrial mega-city, where the bottom factory jobs are all set up so that it always costs you a bundle to quit, or to go to the bathroom, or to take a couple hours off instead of working from 7 am to 10 pm day in day out. And they make it! And in the developed West we have everybody acting like helpless victims expecting the government or the employer to look after them.

It's the difference between Commoner and Victim, between Responsible and Subordinate. And I maintain that you can't begin to thrive in the city until you cast off the shackles of subordination and put on the armor of responsibility.

It's a choice. You can live at the whim of the local boss man. Or live at the whim of the market. You would think that relying on a human lord would be safer, more prudent. But it isn't. Rely instead on your smarts and the sway of the market; that's the way to live.

But it is a hard lesson to learn. Because there are sweet political talkers out there all over that entice you to put your trust in a politician.

Who Said: "Never Trust Experts"

Yeah. Back in the day, there was a politician that said, in a letter to a pal:

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Right first time. It was Lord Salisbury, three times Prime Minister of Britland. And he actually practiced what he preached, because he acted as his own Foreign Secretary and kept the Brit Foreign Office and Sir Humphrey out of the loop.

But, in the end, I am not sure that keeping the striped-pants boys out of the loop was such a good idea. Because, 13 years after Salisbury gave up the premiership to his nephew Arthur Balfour, Britland got into World War I. Idiots. And I think the main reason for that was that Balfour and the striped-pants boys didn't have a clue.

For a start, they entered into an Entente Cordiale with France that Germany interpreted as an aggressive act against the Second Reich. Great going, guys! Generations of British politicians insisted that Britain should not ally with any continental power because the other powers would feel cornered. So the first thing that genius Balfour did was ally with a continental power.

Well, we know all about experts now, don't we, after the glorious success of the Wu Flu epidemic. They really didn't have a clue, and they recommended to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other blue-state governors that they should unload hospitals of recovering Wu Flu patients and send them into nursing homes.

Except that nursing homes have a ton of elderly patients and the recovering Wu Flu patients infected the elderly and as a result about 50 percent of the Wu Flu deaths have been among the elderly nursing home and retirement home community.

Now I know that everyone wants to blame bossy Karen Cuomo for this, but, hey, did Cuomo ever bother to read a word about Lord Salisbury and his advice about experts? Or, for that matter, the wisdom of another 19th century statesman that was probably not an idiot, Otto von Bismarck, the chap that figured out how to unite Germany in three nice little wars instead of one big one? I doubt it.

So Gov. Cuomo was just ignorant, an idiot like most politicians.

Now, of course, I have a deep philosophical system that addresses the Expert Problem. I understand, from reading The Millionaire Next Door and other works that the natural and physical thing for the scions of the educated Gentry is to become Experts, salaried experts in government and tenured experts in universities. It is much easier than a genuine life of creation, as in creating a new business, or even creating a new political party.

The scion of the educated Gentry loads up on university degrees at selective colleges and internships at well-connected institutions and then gets to work in the bureaucracy that supports the ruling class. In the government and in the university. Good work if you can get it.

And it doesn't matter if you make a complete mess of everything and bring the nation to the brink of disaster. You still got your gubmint pension, don't you Peter Strzok? You still got your tenure don't you, Professor Numbskull? Although, I suppose, things could get a little dicey if you once did a comic turn in blackface.

Now, I believe, according to my Four Laws, that administrative government of the experts cannot work because 1) there isn't enough bandwidth, 2) when you regulate business the regulated end up dominating the regulators, and 3) Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them, public school teachers. And that's to say nothing of the First Law, that socialism -- i.e., any gubmint program -- cannot work because it cannot compute prices.

So you should never trust experts because the only thing you should trust is the market and its prices and the fundamental fact of the market that it forces people to act responsibly and trust-worthily. Not because that is good or bad but because if you are not responsible and trustworthy nobody will want to deal with you.

But our liberal friends rather like the experts, and you can see why. First of all, it means jobs for liberals. Secondly, you can appeal to experts as kings once appealed to tame priests and diviners.

Yeah, funny thing how experts so often propose things that give the government more power. I wonder why that is so? And when the Little Darlings of the ruling class want to go out and protest, why, the experts say it is just fine. But it is not fine for ordinary commoners to go out and socially distance on the beach.

Yep. We live in interesting times. But I wouldn't mind if the present moment ends up giving experts a black eye. It might save these United States from civil war and demolition.

The Only Thing That Politics Knows is Loot and Plunder

Back in the riots of the 1960s and 1970s guess what the radicals demanded? Less money on police and more money on school lunches and social services.

So now what do the radicals want? To defund the police and spend the money of social services and minority communities.

What is going on here?

I will tell you. If you are in politics the only thing you know is loot and plunder. That is what politics is about and what it has always been about since the dawn of dawn raids.

So the politician cannot see further than selling the notion that the other guys are screwing us and now we are going to screw them back.

By the way, in the City of Seattle, for 2017, the last year with data from the Census Bureau, police cost $200 million out of a total $3.75 billion in spending. Guess what the biggest item is? It is $1.1 billion for "Fuel and Energy" which comes mainly from the municipal Seattle City Light. 

Hey, I know wokies! Why not privatize and sell off City Light! Think of the proceeds that you can spend on lefty wish lists! But of course, that would never occur to you.

Back in the Sixties, as now, the residents of the inner cities resented that the rich folks looked down on them.

This has been the story of big city politics since the middle of the 19th century. The Irish were looked down upon as "shanty Irish" until they made their way into the middle class as "lace-curtain Irish." Jews that started immigrating after the 1905 pogroms were considered dumb, until they started knocking on the doors of Harvard, and the gentlemen at Harvard decided that the pushy smart Jewish kids weren't gentlemanly enough. Italians were notorious gangsters, until they got into the middle class and Frank Rizzo became mayor of Philadelphia on a law-and-order platform.

When an ethnic group first arrives in the city it feels like the whole world is out to get it. But then, slowly, inch by inch, it claws its way into the middle class, getting education and skills and learning how to interface and live with the market economy, which doesn't care about your ethnicity, not much, as long as you are trustworthy and deliver.

But there is a way to slow this process down. You can give a group of workers monopoly privileges working in a labor union in a large corporation. Then they'll think it's their bargaining power that has given them prosperity, rather than their skills and the innovation of their employer. You can give them welfare and free lunches and funnel money to them through community activist groups. Then they'll think that political power is the name of the game. And, as happened after the Great Society, the men won't work much and the women won't marry much.

Wrong idea. What gets people to be accepted as ordinary citizens is that they submit to the city's market economy and learn how to wive and thrive according to its rules. Then they find that it doesn't matter who looks down on them. They got their job, they got their family, they got their savings, and they got their respect.

Now, my notion with the Great Reaction is that liberal and lefty politics is a lurch back to the primitive, replacing market trust with fear, law with vengeance, and so on.

And I believe that the left's encouragement of resentment and class politics is one of the great crimes of the age. Because the one thing to learn, when you get to the city, is to forget your tribal resentments and your fear of the tribe next door, but to plunge into the market culture of trust and service.

And I believe, with my Little Darlings theory, that leftist politics is all about leftist power, not about helping the downtrodden. Leftist politics is all about finding the latest oppressed group and enticing that group into political followership with the prospect of loot and plunder. Because lefties understand only political power; they are utterly ignorant of the settled science that shows how and why we live in the Great Enrichment that has raised real per-capita income by 30 times in the last two hundred years.

But, I always say, to make the cultural adjustment to the market economy culture is the hardest thing in the world to do, because humans are programmed to mistrust the tribe next door, because the tribe next door represents a competitor for their food growing territory. Who knew that the way to prosper was to offer your services on the open market and to trust anyone that acts trustworthy?

But alas for the folks in the looted areas, their businesses destroyed, their hopes dashed. Because the lesson of the Sixties Riot era is that the riot areas never come back. See Detroit and Newark.

Riots and Mayhem: Be of Good Cheer

As Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, the normal cycle of a revolution is that the moderates get ejected by the extremists -- because revolution fails to realize the hopes of the extremists -- and then the extremists get ejected by the Thermidorean Reaction. That's because humans can't live forever in the white heat of religious frenzy.

As Festinger et al write in When Prophecy Fails, the failure of the prophecy (in this case abduction of the faithful by UFO aliens) does not end the religious cult that has formed around a religious prophecy. The cultists go for broke when the prophecy fails, looking for ways in which they failed to interpret the prophecy properly. Only later does the prophetic cult disintegrate as members start to fall away.

As Nietzsche writes, particularly in The Will to Power, when a god dies, as in his God is Dead notion, what follows is a period of decadence -- of cultural dying -- followed by nihilism, meaning that people experience life as meaningless, followed by the eternal recurrence, where life seems to be a constant recycling of meaninglessness, as in the movie Groundhog Day. But then a new age dawns with the revaluation of values, where a new god arises to comfort the believers.

As new age philosopher Ken Wilber relates, using his multi-level theory of consciousness, when things fall apart people regress from their current level of consciousness to the next lower level of consciousness. E.g., fascism, where people regress, when things aren't working, from a citizen consciousness appropriate for the city to a tribal consciousness appropriate for a people under siege.

And right now I am reading the classic Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga. It's about the thuggish lords and princes in love with tales of knightly derring do as soldiers for Christ saving damsels in distress. And elaborate court ritual. And the semi-polytheistic cults of the saints. Things weren't working, and people -- that is to say the ruling class -- really didn't have a clue.

Well, imagine you are a good educated Gentry liberal living in a good Gentry liberal city like Minneapolis or Seattle. How is it possible for racist sexist white policemen to be kneeing the necks of helpless victim minorities? It must be a malevolent influence. Maybe white supremacists!

Or, you might ask, how come a 48-year-old career criminal with fentanyl and methamphetamine in his blood gets to cash a fake $20 bill in today's America? What's wrong with us? (Yeah, I know, who's this "us" Kemosabe?)

Or, you might ask, how come that "peaceful protests" attended by earnest young Gentry liberal students become the occasion for organized gangs of looters driving SUVs up to high-end stores selling name-brand luxury goods?

Would you believe me when I say that all this mayhem represents the "failure of prophecy" of the Gentry liberal cult that believes in the saving of society by educated experts and/or activists that will assuredly bend the arc of history towards justice?

That the idea of beneficial legislation handing out loot, first to the working class, then to blacks and minorities -- and even gentry women and gays! -- does not solve any problems? Because the problem of the working class in the 19th century and the former slaves in the 20th century was that they had not yet learned the code of the city, how to become responsible citizens with marketable skills and a reputation for trustworthiness.

That the idea of the administrative and regulatory state, staffed by educated experts in the latest settled science, is a non-starter because life is much more complicated and conditional than is possible for administrative experts to direct from government offices.

That the idea of educated Gentry imposing their woke religious beliefs on the bigoted deplorables and firing them from their jobs for Badthink is a non-starter because, as the Founders declared in their wisdom, there should be no state establishment of religion. Yes, and in our modern era, dear Gentry liberals, that includes so-called "secular religions" like social justice. Do you know why the Founders put the thingy about no establishment of religion into the constitution, liberals? It's because they were still smarting from the religious wars of the 17th century, and figured that the government should confine itself to basic questions of life and death and mayhem in the streets and not arcane questions of morality.

So I am saying that we are in a Reign of Terror and Virtue, rather like the French Revolution, because the arc of history isn't bending fast enough for our liberal masters.

I am saying that liberals are experiencing a "failure of prophecy" right now and are reaching desperately to make the prophecy come true before it crashes to the ground in failure.

I am saying that we are about to experience the moment when the liberal god dies and a period of decadence and nihilism takes over as the former believers blunder around looking for a new god.

I am saying that liberals are going backwards, in a Great Reaction, trying to find meaning in the jumble of archetypes in the basement, now that their exalted higher consciousness seems to be failing them.

I am saying that the liberal Activism Culture is a dead end, because we do not need revolution, or a stage version, because the problem is liberals themselves, not some imagined patriarchy or white supremacy.

I am saying that liberals are leading their helpless victims up a blind canyon and the victims will crash into the canyon wall as other Little Darlings of the liberals have already done.

And the best thing that can happen in America is for liberals to become demoralized by their manifest failures and take their hands off the controls of the ship of state!

And then we can all get back to work and working together and building trust in reciprocal trusting relationships.

The Emperor's New Clothes and Race

One fine day, some kid is going to say it: Mommy! How come the emperor doesn't have any clothes on?

With respect to our ruling class and race.

Well, I am here to tell that kid, wherever he is, why it is that we have this remarkable culture where you are not allowed to say that

1. There has never been a society in history that cared about some ex-slave minority. Not till ours.
2. Without the race, race, race orthodoxy our ruling class and its bribed apologists would have nothing to say and nothing to do.

See, the religion of permanent white guilt and permanent black innocence doesn't do anything for anyone, except the white educated Gentry.

It doesn't do anything for the ordinary middle-class Commoner. He must still go forth and work and strive and wive and thrive, just as he does every other day.

It doesn't do anything for non-white victims, the Clients of the ruling class. They will continue going down the tubes as all Little Darlings of the ruling class do.

But, boy oh boy, it certainly gives our betters a chance to moralize and have a wonderful emotional experience. Did I mention that I was thinking of putting a yard sign out in front of my house with the following motto: "My Social Moralizing Yard Sign?"

See, the problem with a modern capitalist free market economy and free society is that it really doesn't require a magnificent ruling class, the heroic helmsman lashed to the wheel steering us all to safety through the storm.

Yeah, remember when they called Mao ZeDong the "Great Helmsman?" That's the fantasy of every lefty AntiFa basement-dweller. To be the great helmsman saving society from a fate worse than death. It could be the fate worse than death of racism, or climate change. Doesn't really matter.

That's why a common-or-garden novel virus epidemic has to be turned into a national crisis with politicians directing traffic while experts grind the data through their computer models and examine the entrails.

That's why the cruel inattention of a policeman arresting a drugged-up criminal has to be gussied up into a national crisis with weeping women and angry bomb-throwers, featuring that First Sacrament of the modern age, the "peaceful protest." And already several people, including policemen, have been sacrificed upon the Altar of Peaceful Protest.

Well, I have already ventilated for years about the left's fake Activism Culture, how it represents a replay of the medieval romance of robber barons -- the original robber barons -- as chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche. Hey, the barons liked to be serenaded by minstrels when dining and drinking and partying in their medieval castles. And they rather liked the idea of themselves as peerless knights riding their palfreys to the assistance of damsels in distress. Who wouldn't?

Likewise our modern scions of the ruling class like to think of themselves a revolutionaries activist-ing to the assistance of diverse helpless victims. It gives them a reason to get up in the morning.

Also, activism is much easier than real creative work. See, activism is not measuring by its results, but by its effect. Does it get on TV? Are the helpless victims mobilized to peaceful protest? The results are another matter, way downstream, and nobody really checks it out. But real creative work is hard, and will probably end in failure, whether in business, in the arts, or in politics.

You see that even in Les Mis where the dumb young well-born activist, Marius, wounded on the barricades of Paris, gets rescued by the reformed convict, Jean Valjean. And why does he do it? Because Valjean's adopted daughter, Cosette, is in love with the guy. Go figure.

Hey, you kids! Don't you realize that the emperor, our Gentry ruling class, is naked? Don't you realize that everything they have taught you, in school and college, is rubbish? That Activism is a crock? That racism is a crock? That peaceful protest is a lie? That government is a weight around our necks?

Then why don't you do something about it?

It starts with naively asking Mommy why the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

But What Is Fascism, Really?

As with most things, our lefty friends have completely emptied the word "fascism" of meaning, except as a pejorative. (Boy, they certainly are the world champs when it comes to pejoratives!)

But what is fascism, really, and who is a fascist?

First of all, I would say that AntiFa is not fascist. Do you know why? Because up to now AntiFa has enjoyed a "nod nod, wink wink" relationship with the ruling class. AntiFa has been useful to the ruling class because AntiFa acts as its bully boys breaking up the peaceful assemblies of Commoners petitioning for a redress of grievances. When AntiFa intervenes, as in Charlottesville in 2017, the ruling class gets to blame the "white nationalists" for the violence. What's not to like?

But now Trump has blown the whistle on AntiFa. It will be interesting to see what comes of that.

Also, I would say that government control or partnership is not fascism. Nor is gubmint health care, nor the regulatory state, nor mass transit. Why? Because all those activities operate under the benevolent eye of the normal ruling class and benefit the usual suspects.

The point about Italy's fascists and Germany's Nazis is that they were genuine populist rebellions. And Mussolini and Hitler were nobodies. They both realized that class conflict as a basis of politics was a dead letter, or at least far inferior to the nation as a basis for politics. Boy, were they right!

But as they climbed to power the various interests climbed aboard the fascist train. And the various interests, from the old aristocracy to various advocates for free stuff, were able to persuade the fascists to hand out some of the free stuff to them.

The flaw at the heart of fascism and Nazism is the reversion to the old truth of the homeland being the source of food. Mussolini called it a spazio vitale or "vital space," and Hitler spoke of Lebensraum. Understandable, because up until the day before yesterday land was life, the food-growing land that fed its people.

It is normal, when things go wrong, to lurch back to the past for inspiration.

Except that in the industrial era, everything is for sale. You don't need your own food-growing land. Lebensraum needs to be reduced to a nostalgic dream, not an actual reality. Ships sail the world with grain, and really it is better to be making cars and computers than growing food. Unless there is a war!

And in the industrial era war, in the old way of loot and plunder and slaves that fed the Roman Empire, doesn't work. Because now wealth is "intangible capital" or the ideas and techniques of how to make a car or design a chip. If you roll over your neighbor state and kill all the men and rape all the women what have you got?

So in the fascist era after World War I you had the failure of the old regimes that killed off a generation of young men in a fruitless war, and failure to rebuild afterwards. Into that gap sprang the former corporals Mussolini and Hitler. Only their ideas were just as clueless as those of the discredited pre-war elites, and they in their turn led their peoples to disaster in yet another war.

The ruling class that inherited the developed world after World War II determined that fascism and Nazism and agressive nationalism should never rear their ugly heads again. But what political principle should they substitute in its place? Fortunately Stalin provided the answer. The rulers would be the Free World fighting against the Communist Menace.

But what should we do after the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union? The answer of the educated ruling class was globalism, in which the educated elite would administer the world. But there had to be some kind of domestic politics in the nation state before they were subsumed into supranational entities like the European Union. You can see that intersectional politics with all kinds of helpless minority classes would fit the bill, and provide the means of dividing and mobilizing voters at election time. Meanwhile the ruling class could rule, above the fray of the intersectional battlefield, while their woke battalions kept the plebs safely divided.

Is it fair to say that this ruling paradigm has reached its sell-by date? It had a point in the advocacy for the working class, except that its program actually imprisoned the working class in union jobs that looted corporations and killed them. And it had a point in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, outlawing discrimination by race. 

And then, in 2008, the US repaid the debt of slavery by electing an African American to be president. Been there, done that.

The problem with a top-down, activists-only politics, is that it misses the point of politics, which is not to afford lordly rulers and eager activists their chance to bend the arc of history towards justice -- as defined by them and their lackeys in the universities and media.

The purpose of politics is to afford the people a chance to choose the people that will rule over them and also to permit a discovery process by which the inevitable injustices of the world bubble out into the public square. For it makes sense that the rulers and their bribed apologists in the media, the deep state, and the universities are not going to be that sensitive to the unjust effects of their noble rule.

And in recent years there have been various failures and blindnesses in the ruling class and their bribed apologists, such as the Iraq War going beyond merely punishing the Afghans for allowing the 9/11 terrorists safe haven in Afghanistan, and the once-in-a-generation financial crash of 2008 caused by the mortages-for-deadbeats policy forced upon us by our rulers. Oh, and the underhanded Obamacare to inch us towards a government healthcare system.

So you would expect that in time political movements would emerge to give voice to injustices perceived by various subordinate groups in society. These movements might be sponsored by the ruling class or they might not.

Now it is my belief, on my Little Darlings notion, that today we have three groups, at least, suffering from the injustices forced upon them by a proud and foolish ruling class. We have the white working class, abandoned by the rulers in the 1960s, the blacks, led into the wilderness of government dependence and quotas, and women, led into the barren waste of careers far away from their natural instinct to bear children and run the neighborhood.

Of course, these groups know that something is wrong. But that is all. I don't think it is patronizing to say that people petitioning for a redress of grievances may not have a clue what the real problem is. And this is the more understandable when you remember that we are living in a world completely changed from the world inhabited by our ancestors even 500 years ago. So we are programmed for a world completely different from the one we inhabit.

Now there are two ways to present your grievances to the rulers. One is to form a spontaneous movement -- like the Tea Party that nobody saw coming. The other is to work under the ruling class in a ruling-class sponsored movement, like Black Lives Matter or the Women's March.

If you go the Tea Party route you will be called fascists and Nazis. Why? Because our rulers have learned to call any movement that they do not control "fascist." And they are right: Mussolini and Hitler led movements from below that were not sponsored by the rulers. Not good.

If you go the Black Lives Matter route then your movement will be subsumed into the ruling-class's agenda.

Either way, you may still end in disaster, because while it is easy to point to a problem it is not so easy to propose a good solution.

If the populist rebellion ends in disaster, then the fault is fascism and the latest incarnation of Hitler. If the ruling-class reform ends in disaster, well, they did their best, and the problem is white supremacists and toxic masculinity.

But if the populist rebellion is co-opted by a Trump, then what? Well, then the ruling class and their bribed apologists all combine to hobble the guy; that goes without saying.

But suppose the Trump guy actually has a good plan? Well, the jury is still out on that. Meanwhile, the safe thing to do is to call him a fascist. That way your women friends won't be murmuring behind your back: "I can't believe she..."