I am very fortunate to have Twilight Patriot (links below) reviewing The Toll of Fortune, not only because you will enjoy and appreciate his Substack but also because his review really scrutinizes the novel from themes to details.

Twilight Patriot

Book Review: The Toll of Fortune

For a little more than a year, I have been in the habit of reviewing works of fiction by right-leaning authors who are sympathetic to the worldview of Twilight Patriot. It was my friend Alexander Macris, from Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, who helped me get this started: Alex has always admired right-wingers who push back on left-wing cultural domin…

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a month ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · Twilight Patriot

Twilight Patriot

Thoughts of a patriot brought up to love his heritage, with eyes open wide enough to see the coming nightfall.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter everyone could feel the coming sea-change. Unshackled by the hall-monitor class, anti-Regime viewpoints were finally permitted without sanction or threat. During the ‘before times’, vermiform Leftists chided us with the “it’s a private company” taunt. “Go form your own mass-scale social media platform, since you love capitalism so much!” While this wasn’t a very clever taunt it also missed the mark on several counts, not the least of which: our economic system resembles nothing close to capitalism.

This particular brand of Leftwing thinking was as disingenuous as it was ignorant of how markets achxtually work. The barriers to entry for building a new ‘Twitter’ are huge1, but if your paid protests are funded by billionaire-NGOs it’s easy to mistake delusion for reality.

Still, there was a powerful lesson in this: the Left may think they’re winning on account of their moral preening, but it’s their financial backing that keeps them afloat. The Right has a huge, organic base of intelligent populist supporters. Our problem isn’t authenticity or even unity. It’s cold, hard cash.2

That money is the biggest issue (“Democracy” being a sham bought and paid for by special interests) is not novel. However, it used to be that those special interests threw a bone to “the People”, obtaining a baseline of popular support for the laws they paid Congress to pass. Now they don’t even do that. Unless regime change happens spontaneously we need a more calculated approach. Chimping-out and howling into the echo-chamber is not an efficient policy-lever. We need our own organizations, networks and donors.

It took tens of billions of dollars for Elon Musk to turn the Maoist parrot-cage of Twitter into X, and X has made many things possible. That was just the first step, more work is needed. Right now we are voices without action, organization or legal protection. Money is the missing catalyst. Now, let’s say for a minute we had a billionaire on our side, one willing to invest in a program of works, what would they be and how much would it cost?

Without further ado, here are the projects that would give Rightwing interests the most sustainable advantage in terms of soft power and culture.

A National Convention Center

A place for real life gathering and America First advocacy

Cost: $100M (to start)

Why:

The value of real and personal interaction is one hundred times more lasting and impactful than anything online. This doesn’t diminish the connections we’ve made here, but real trust is created between live humans. Regimes detest it for this reason.

Anyone who has tried to organize IRL meetings has usually found the gates closed both metaphorically and physically. Private venues regularly capitulate to pressure by special interests and even public venues, that have an obligation to allow First Amendment activity, will terminate events when the Left uses violence. Even if you overcome the Heckler’s Veto, or corporate ignominy, you still face hostile local politicians - those most pliable to Leftist pressure - who will revoke permits.

Requirements:

First, this must be a single major center with several internal venues of different size and type. It needs a mega auditorium/floor for mass gatherings, several large auditoria for speakers and smaller convention-style break-out rooms. It needs large outdoor open spaces as well as cloistered areas conducive to smaller interactions. It should be able to accommodate very large and very small gatherings.

Second, it has to be in a town where the local pols support the purpose (not just the revenue add) of the center. This ‘limits’ the center to Red, exurban areas, thus providing cheap land as well as room for suppletive businesses (hotels, restaurants, entertainment) that cater to the venue-goers.

In order to co-opt city politicians - being pettiest and most corrupt kind - the municipality must already have a substantial base of America First citizens who are sufficiently active at the political level to ensure politicians reflect the will of their voters (a big ask, I know).

This logic also extends to the local police force. Police forces generally apply the law as instructed by city politicians - hence the crime and dysfunction in most cities. The local police force must be both supportive politically of the center and have its members based locally or from nearby deep Red jurisdictions. If this involves “influencing” said politicians in the same way that NGOs and ethnic voting blocks have done for decades in Blue cities, then fine. Boomers will hate this because it is a tacit admission Democracy™ isn’t the Spielberg movie they’ve been programmed to believe in. This venue won’t be for them.

Third, the venue should be run by a trust that is explicitly committed to hearing all views on the Right. Sadly this requirement is usually a third rail for most donors because it means, well, all views. This includes:

• Views that are hostile to the foreign powers that interfere with our government;

• Views opposed to forever wars;

• Views that are hostile to the corporations poisoning the population and food supply;

• Views opposed to inundating the country with cheap labor.

This rules out most donors on the “Right” but it is a necessary price to pay. Others will have to come forward or be discovered.

This venue cannot exclude speakers and public demonstrations that oppose Israel or India, yet that doesn’t mean opening the doors to the ‘Jewish Space Laser’ retards, Epstein monologuists and other deranged types. How will this be managed? Something called common fucking sense.

This venue will be a center for genuine, rational debate on the Right. If hawkish foreign policy types wish to debate anti-forever-war types that’s a good thing. It’s the making of arguments in bad faith, or at the behest of vested interests, that’s bad. No viewpoint is ever fully detached from moneyed interests (after all this is an appeal for money), but if those advocating at the venue don’t have an organic base then their access will be limited. Such a constraint rules out the Lindsay Graham and Cato Institute types as much as it rules out the MTG and Nick Fuentes types. Again, this will require aggressive common sense (along with zero tolerance for bullshit) to be written into the constating documents of the trust.

Fourth, while the functional aspects of the center are needed to get started, the ultimate goal should be an aesthetically pleasing structure with beautiful grounds. It cannot look like some brutalist, post-modern monstrosity or a low-rent mega-church whale-wash. The edifice itself requires craftsmanship and this might takes decades to complete. That’s okay. A multi-decade project will symbolize the continued need to keep the spirit of freedom, liberty and (most importantly) America First alive and growing.

What it will do:

I’ve already mentioned the main purpose is to provide an uncancelable venue for speakers, demonstrations, protests and advocacy. More than that it will provide the appearance of credibility. This is one of the main reason Rightwing viewpoints are deplatformed - the MSM/donor class know that even giving attention to an issue legitimizes it. If normgroids see or hear something from an official channel it triggers their Authority Bias and normalizes said viewpoint. Hence the media blackout surrounding every atrocity committed by third world antagonists - Iryna Zarutska Austin Metcalfe Henry Novak the Belfast Decapitation being only the most recent example.

Eventually the MSM will be forced to take note of events that take place here, even if it’s only to denounce them. The Left will become enraged that the Right has an unobstructable platform, but they will be impotent to stop it - the usual pressure points being ineffective. Moreover it will be on private property that is exclusively automobile-accessible. Leftists will have little opportunity to perform reprisal protests3 and if they do they will encounter private and public security that isn’t beholden to a Star Wars-named police chief.

It will also create a growing physical space for Rightwing interests. Businesses, hotels and communities will crop up around it to service the flux of visitors. These businesses - dependent on our type of people - will be exempt from pressure by leftist parasites. You can imagine them trying to pressure a large national chain like McDonalds to close shop there. It will be a win-win for us: either McDonalds ignores the pressure, weakening the left’s grip on corporations, or they fold, draw criticism (and a boycott?) from the Right and open up space for another company to gain a front row advantage to loyal customers.

Additionally, businesses who reject the pressure-group mafia may find it’s a good place to set-up shop and eventually grow, even nationally. It may even engender a community of more like-minded families who wish to live somewhere that centers on patriotic values. The possibilities are endless in terms of what sort of example such a community - anchored on freedom of association and speech - will create.

This center may also provide the seed for future constitutional “conversations”. I’ve long thought the idea of a new constitutional convention - featuring non-corporate interests - could be extremely influential in setting the tone for political discourse. It’s clear that Blue states are wedded to the policy of voter importation and replacement, with every concomitant vice and crime. Should influential names on the Right discuss a new Union of States committed to law, order and America First values? If so, where would they do that? This center provides a solution.

Lastly the center will serve as a symbol of defiance to the corporatization of political interests. We all know Congress now merely represents corporate interests (here I use the expansive definition of ‘corporate’, including NGOs, foundations, 501(c)(3)s, unions, etc). Surely corporate voices will be heard, but they will have to live and die by the merit of their argument, not the size of their wallet.4 It is already known that our views are legitimate by their nature, but creating an alternate source of authority for that legitimacy is what’s needed.

A National Legal Foundation

Lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers. Starting with a national foundation with a 20- year charter and endowment.

Cost: $200M

Why:

We’ve all heard the online claims that our current predicament “has no political solution”. Politics has been hopelessly corrupted by the “donor class” and we are “not voting our way out of this”. These claims have a lot of truth. With each new nationwide injunction this seems equally true about the Law. However we haven’t really been fighting back on that front. In fairness fighting back has a high barrier to entry, one that Leftists have abused with their enormous monetary/organizational advantage.

We see our constitutionally protected rights abused every day by State authorities and their paramilitary client-groups. We know such abuses are unconstitutional. Boomers believe that all such constitutional violations are self-correcting - witness the endless hagiography over Civil Rights. If we just wait a little bit longer there’ll be some big reckoning. Accelerationists adhere to this same logic: goad the left into some unspeakable act of violence and then finally the silent majority will rise up. Boomers are delusional about the efficiency of the corrective feedback loop, and accelerationists still labor in a world where the MSM doesn’t attenuate anti-liberal narratives.

State infringements on your rights aren’t corrected based on how egregious the violation is. They are corrected after long campaigns by well-connected lawyers, who coordinate cases through the various appellate courts until SCOTUS is forced to add it to their docket. None of this is spontaneous or accompanied by the crescendo-ing trumpets of a John Williams soundtrack.

Thus we need our own multi-purpose, national legal foundation with the single goal of thwarting leftist-motivated State actors from breaching, denying, obviating and chipping away at our rights.

Requirements:

Lawyers, lawyers and lawyers: The foundation of the Foundation [sorry] would be a retinue of highly experienced constitutional litigators. These are litigators with years of experience arguing before appellate panels. They don’t just “know” the Law, they know the judges, how they think and what arguments are likely to work. The Law is not some value-neutral, merit-only arbitration mechanism. Critical Legal Theory is correct that it’s “what the judge had for breakfast”, or more accurately “what party the judge donates to”. Our lawyers will never convince Justice Jumanji-Jackson that the Bill of Rights exists to protect citizens (and not State bureaucrats), but experienced benchers of the appellate courts know what to say (and what not to say) to convince centrist and right-leaning judges. These attorneys would form a permanent legal team, similar to a law firm, that would serve as an executive committee for allocating legal resources.5

1-800-GET-LIBZ: The next step is to create a national hotline that can easily be accessed by citizens 24 hours a day and provide (1) exigent legal advice; and (2) connection to longer-term assistance. We see the rights of citizens trampled every day by Regime actors and their stooges (blue city police, bureaucrats, DMW Sheniquaz, etc). These apparatchiks are patently overstepping their statutory and constitutional limits, but with no legal repercussions why would they stop?

This is a key Leftist strategy undermining our rights: continue poking little holes until the dam breaks. We need a means to mass-scale citizen resistance within the bounds of the law, and that starts with this hotline. Trained staff will provide non-legal advice about what a citizen should do when confronted by potentially illegal/unconstitutional state action and then create a reference for further review by Foundation attorneys. As these sorts of violations are now a daily occurrence it will be straight-forward for Foundation legal analysts to notice patterns and organize optimal ways to confront them, including class aggregation. It’s one thing for, say, Seattle police to prioritize the rights of Antifa to violently disburse peaceful Christian protests. It would be another thing for them to defend against a class action brought by multiple litigants across Washington State.

Moreover, the success of this tactic will create precedents for mass civil disobedience similar to the “Civil Rights” movement. We’ve been psyop’d into believing the CVM won because they were on the “right side of history.” Lol, lmao even. They won because they organized legally at every level of the Regime’s structure. Most people never learned that the NAACP operated essentially as a law firm, finding volunteers to violate state and city laws and then challenging them again and again until they found a sympathetic judge.6

The national hotline will have several other self-perpetuating benefits. It will create a huge class of potential clients for right-leaning attorneys. While the hotline’s first line of defense will be as a clearinghouse of information for those afflicted by State overreach, it won’t litigate every case. That doesn’t mean that each victim can’t obtain relief - the hotline will also connect those citizens with potential counsel. The purpose of the hotline isn’t to create a new form of institutional dependence, but to offer legal pathways to challenge State tyranny. If it helps citizens, deters constitutional interference and provides employment for right-leaning lawyers it is a win-win-win. Not all types State interference will require the same type or magnitude of response. Connecting the hotline to a clearinghouse and counsel will solve this problem.

Operating as a clearinghouse, it will allow it’s executive committee of high-end legal talent to examine trends and look for weak points in State-applications of tyranny. Just as the NAACP saw where southern states were most vulnerable to federal overreach, this Foundation will optimize those strategies to target which federal, state and municipal laws are most likely to overruled.

Get Out of Jail Free: It must also include a national bailment organization for those on the Right improperly arrested for civil disobedience. This organization would provide bail, court representation and legal advice, much like the Left already does for people who commit felony assault and destruction of federal property.

Fight Fire with Organization: The Left has NGOs that study where/who they should attack; plan transportation to and from the event; provide necessary accessories (food, water, barriers, etc…) needed for “protesting” (also giving the protesters plausible deniability); provide free lawyers (in the unlikely event they’re arrested); and fund the election campaign of the judge who will let them off scot-free. All we see is the dust-up on the street, meanwhile there’s a well-funded, end-to-end infrastructure operation behind it. Why is the Right not doing the same?

We must create a grassroots army of based young men and women willing to be the foot soldiers on the ground causing disturbances (within the bounds of 1A) directed at Leftists. There will be no blocking streets, no damage to private property and (gasp) no felony assaults. However there might be civil disobedience against Leftist idols and artwork, mulching of slop-fiction and propaganda, and of course flag burning - with so many flags to choose from!7

It will provide the organization, funding and compensation needed to create, grow and protect the volunteers from the inevitable assault they will face from Deep State reprisals. It will also be served by the legal Foundation, not just in trial court matters, but also to fight the ensuing legal attacks by Blue states and cities AND pursue defamation actions when they are eventually smeared by the MSM. Lastly it will serve as a stark symbol of generational outrage, sending a message to the octogenarian “No Kings” losers that their time is up.

What it will do:

Besides the essentials listed above this Foundation will serve several other functions:

• Create a Judicial Review NGO called Project Accountability that seeks out and helps victims of radical/leftist judges by filing judicial complaints with the proper oversight agency. This may sound pointless. The legal profession is a guild that circles the wagons at the slightest suggestion of wrong-doing, a fortiori judges. However this project will enable the scaling-up of complaints across the nation, build a database thereon and draw publicity. Whether or not the complaints have the desired material effect they will still be publicly recorded and archived. The goal isn’t to build a bazooka, but to fire a thousand poisoned darts. This will expose the worst judicial abusers and force some to resign while others will be legally scrutinized - something judges hate. For most it will be a warning pour encourager les autres. People are already clamoring for this:

• Provide jobs and internships to young lawyers/law school students in order to build a pipeline of future patriotic attorneys to defend citizens’ rights as well as populating a pool of appropriate candidates for judicial appointment in the right political environment.

• With the valuable information provided by the hotline the Foundation can embark on Project Discourse which will be a coordinated campaign to litigate hate speech laws across a variety of states as a violation of the First Amendment. The coordination will ensure that only the most amenable test cases are advanced while it seeks out the most sympathetic forums. The ultimate goal will be a SCOTUS review and rejection of such laws.

• A plenary committee will establish a National Statutory Advisory Council to propose and draft propositional legislation (and State constitutional amendments) for Red State fast-tracking. The focus of the laws will be:

  • Reasserting ‘law & order’ in criminal sentencing, reintroducing capital punishment, eliminating appeals and other legal ‘tricks’ to delay the death penalty and introducing alternative penal policies - including corporal punishment. This will poke holes in the Left’s hold over 8th Amendment interpretation and open another front that they will be forced to allocate litigation resources to;

  • Banning ‘gentle policing’ and enabling police to subdue criminal behavior by inserting rebuttal presumptions or “deeming” language into criminal statutes;

  • Undoing and attacking disparate impact laws, regulations and especially policies (public or private). While disparate impact and Griggs are likely to be weakened by SCOTUS very soon these anticipatory laws will be right on time for that new regime. One of the first steps here will be strict fitness requirements for police officers - including all senior ranking staff - thereby reversing the feminization of police forces;

  • Requiring laborious financial and organization disclosures for Leftwing NGOs to operate within the State;

  • This list is potentially endless, please add in the comments...

• The Foundation will eventually (1) build its own law school wherein rigorous interpretations of statute and the Constitution will be taught and where emphasis will be placed on rights advocacy for citizens; and (2) fund a lobbying arm for the creation of an alternate law school accreditation organization. Thus (2) proactively solves the problem when the DEI-addled ABA attempts to prevent accreditation of (1).

• Lastly, the Foundation will create a PAC that identifies and strategically spends money to elect judges who support the rule of law and who eschew critical theory and its retarded bastards. Another objective of this PAC will be to counter the election of Soros or NGO-selected DAs. The PAC will also function as a lobbying arm to “convince” GOP senators to approve the right judges (and reject Leftist ones - something you would think they would be capable of on their own but aren’t). This PAC would also primary any senators that fail in this modest task.

These are ambitious goals, but remember the Left already does all of these things thanks to billionaire benefactors.8

A National, Private Endowment for Right-Wing Arts & Entertainment.

A cultural irredentism fund is needed to retake Western Civilization from its custodial harpies.

Cost: $200M

Why:

Tell a lie for long enough and people will believe it: ‘there is no Right-Wing art’, ‘The Right can’t do art’. Meanwhile, Leftists think a banana, duck-taped to a wall is art while a concrete block is architecture. The result: contemporary art is rejected by most as ‘ugly’, conveniently allowing the Left to look down their noses at the non-experts untutored in the appreciation of garbage. As I pointed out in another post, they don’t care that it’s garbage, they don’t care that it loses money. Losing money is the purpose if it satisfies the definition of a humiliation ritual.9

The “Right can’t do art” taunt can be rejected as an Argument from Ignorance fallacy. Still, the left has it backwards: ALL ART IS INHERENTLY RIGHT-WING. Only intellectual hubris induces an ‘artist’ to think they’ve created something sui generis. Humans have been producing art and telling stories for tens of thousands of years. Nothing is new. Of course how your art says what’s-been-said-before can be new, which is where the Right comes in.

Requirements:

The main function would be disbursement of grants to recipients. A steering committee with rotating members would decide on candidates and each rotation could select its own criteria (subject to the requirement that the creators and their works are based). Typical grant sizes would be in the $5,000-$10,000 range, keeping the stakes reasonably low to minimize gaming, and maximize the number of recipients. Multiple or successive awards to good artists would be possible. The endowment would retain a small percentage of back-end receipts, the proceeds of which would be reinvested back into the Endowment’s main disbursement fund. Committee members would draw no salaries or honoria.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. We tried putting the Right in charge of art back in the 80s/90s and all we got was Sinatra concerts in the White House and “Explicit Lyrics” labels on CDs. But none of this was Rightwing or art. That was either an exercise in corporate-flavored nostalgia or Left-coded schoolmarmism. This is not an argument in favor of specific types/genres of art (though some will be excluded for their deification of ugliness, technical retardation or anti-Western premises), but a call to make beautiful and authentic pieces that speak to our cause.

What it would do:

Such an endowment would have two targets: emerging media and existing media.

Emerging media, like AI video, would target creators seeking to supplant Hollywood and other MSM entertainment products. The goal (at first) won’t necessarily be to create an end-to-end feature film. At this stage there is still plenty of groundwork to be laid before a convincing, narrative-based feature could be produced. Investing in start-ups (and their creators) that produce the building blocks therefor is an essential first step. The emerging media arm would invest along conventional means, through equity stakes or even contingent capital. This arm would start with a broad strategic vision of what’s required to obviate Hollywood and ultimately drive its obsolescence, both in terms of production and the dissemination/monetization of content.

The existing media arm would focus primarily on print by establishing a imprint for the publication of fiction (there’s plenty of existing non-fiction outlets for the Right). It would be broad-based fiction, so there’d be no particular focus on any one genre, and it would equally focus on both new authors and existing ones - especially where the latter have been “cancelled”.

More important than the mere establishment of a printing house is the marketing and publicity aspects. Any author worth his/her salt knows that if a publisher can’t get people to read your book then they are useless. Nowadays every other aspect of publishing can be outsourced, and while publicity can be outsourced too this is at least the one area where we should be able to leverage resources more profitable ways.10

To the Artist, the Prize

The grant-based existing-media arm would also provide awards for conventional artists (paint & paper, sculpture) as well as architecture. The main vehicle of publicity/proselytization would be contests with non-trivial prize money and multiple awards. The themes would be traditional and any artist could participate, though the judges would give low marks to the splatter-on-canvas crowd. Most libtards would likely refuse to participate because “resist”. But if they did, and if they produced worthy art, it would be a win/win. Either they’d produce something cool, get ostracized from their milieu and be notorious for helping “Rightwing art” or they’d produce the same shit that we’re used to, and be made an example of. In fact, the contests could be a great vehicle for a public critiquing of Leftwing art for its technical deficiency and soullessness - something we need more of. Many so-called libtard artists are very poor and will betray their ideology for money and recognition. This is an unexamined weak spot.11

Total Bill (to start): $500M

Adding together the three figures, the total works out to a modest half-billion dollars. This is a drop in the bucket for most mega-billionaires. To be sure this tally would grow, but an initial investment is needed. Income strategies can be developed once these projects are off the ground that would help grow and sustain the fund.

These three projects form the basis of a within-the-rules playbook for fighting back. Fund, organize and build. They rely on in-person coordination, specialized countervailance and a slow-burn cultural reconquista to build the right kind of institutions in order to prevail in the long term. Other tactics will still be required. This merely forms the “carrot” part of the approach. The Regime’s modus operandi will always be to subsidize third world pets as their paramilitaries, while denying economic resources and legal recourse to natives. These projects will form the foundation of our last, best hope to use soft power against the Regime, and thwart its inevitable counter-measures.

Should we give up discussions of other means to reassert power and civil society? No, of course not. These things are not mutually exclusive and we should be proposing a full court press of conventional and ‘historical’ solutions to today’s easily avoidable problems.

The Left casts spells, making it seem like their paramilitary activities and institutional capture are organic, inevitable and self-sustaining. The reality is they are a well-funded, machine organized and built over generations with the purpose of destroying existence beyond recognition and repurposing it to their matrix. Their “progress” is adventitious and dependent on swindling the productive classes into oblivion. But they have shown us one way to fight back. With money, this is just the beginning.

If you enjoyed this post please consider subscribing (free or otherwise), but if you’d really like to help consider reading my novel The Toll of Fortune, available on Amazon and elsewhere. You can find out more about it here.

A long time ago, in “New Right” years, I worked at the very beating heart of capitalism: the trading floor. Not just any trading floor, the corporate bond trading floor of asset management giant BlackRock. Unlike the stock market, which is a distraction for boomer dads, the bond market is where real shit goes down. This is where America’s companies (medium or large) return every week to beg asset managers and pension funds for money. Conning those institutions into believing the money will be spent wisely is the job of investment bankers and syndication teams. Trading the aftermath of said delusion was what I did.

During that time I saw industry after industry fall prey to the ZIRP1 mindset that if revenues were down, instead of correcting course and trying to earn money again, they could just borrow. Since I’d been educated as a financial “engineer” this was supposed make sense for me. Financial Engineering is a quasi-demonic discipline that arose out of the sheer greed of grad schools to charge exorbitant tuition and feed said graduates to financial intermediaries. Those intermediaries (banks, investment managers, hedge funds) would then eagerly to cater to the corporate desire to borrow instead of earn by means of said ‘engineering’. The whole system is like a dog stopping to chase its tail only so it can eat its own barf.

However, instead of growing numb at the sight of investment managers heedlessly gobbling up multi-billion dollar debt issuances I grew suspicious. AT&T and Verizon were constantly issuing new bonds by the tens of billions, but no national fiber-optic network was built and 5G was offshored to CCP-run Huawei. Same with biotech companies, who were simply borrowing tens of billions and buying competitors instead of innovating their own pipelines. Where were the “science and research jobs” that the Hal Holbrook’s venerable character chided Bud Fox about in Wall Street?

It didn’t take long to see where the money was going: stock buybacks, C-suite payroll, buyout funds and, of course, refinancing older debt at lower rates. The economy be damned if it didn’t grow! Still, I maintained, these companies must be turning a profit, they’re still here after all?

It was around then that a friend of mine, who works as a senior creative in one of the entertainment industries, told me capitalism was dead. Take the movie industry, he said, they were already producing flop after flop, insensitive to the lack of popularity of each feature. There seemed to be no end in sight. This was where I interrupted to lecture him that “once they’d lost enough money they would learn their lesson. That’s how capitalism works.” Cause would beget effect and sooner or later these errant studios would get shut down, hallowed stars snuffed out and powerful execs turned out onto Skid Row. It would all happen any time now I assured him.

I disagreed with my friend for quite a while until I saw more and more of what capitalism couldn’t explain right there on the trading floor. Indeed, Hollywood was the merely most truant cases of the inversion of Marshall Field’s aphorism. In this case the customer was most certainly always wrong. It’s one thing for a pharma giant to buy out a smaller competitor, cannibalize their drug pipeline and live off it for a few more years, but movies flop and leave huge holes in studio budgets. More than a few of those and you’re out of business. And if I’ve learned anything about the movie business from Entourage, it’s that movie execs hate losing money!

Surely this was true 60 years ago, but since the 80s studios have been owned by media conglomerates. This means that a company like Disney can lose money on its movies and still tell the shareholders to fuck off as long as its other business channel (theme parks, cruises) are profitable. Throw in a cable sports channel for fun and movies can lose money for a long time before analysts detect a hit on the consolidated balance sheet. And even if the conglomerate is losing money it can just borrow, like I’d been seeing day after day.

Finally it hit me. These companies could keep on losing money for a long time before market raptors would descend.2 They could keep selling the customers slop that they didn’t want until the customers vanished. They could even keep telling the customer that he was wrong without much apparent consequence. None of it mattered anymore because these companies could simply substitute revenues with borrowed money. Capitalism truly was dead.

The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle

Which brings us belatedly to Christopher Nolan and the latest round of “woke hasn’t been put away”. Now, I honestly don’t know any serious commentator on the Right who believed it had been put away, but here we are feigning surprise at Nolan’s Shodyssey and nailing the appropriate proscriptions to the Senate door.

The Shodyssey apparently has a production budget of $250M so as long as it returns that much at the box office it’s hardly the woke albatross we’ve made it out to be, right?

Wrong, on at two counts. First, that’s just the production budget which is “somewhat” low because Nolan is a parsimonious director. There won’t be months of post-production, just the inflated figures paid out to the Hollywood A-listers enlisted to give Homer’s epic a edge against such high-brow generational competition as Skibidi and 6-7. The “low” estimate for production isn’t what will kill this purported blockbuster, it’s the marketing budget.

Marketing budgets are kept under wraps by the studios for very good reason - they tell you how hard a time the studio is having convincing people that a 3 hr lecture on transphobia will be entertaining. In this case it hasn’t been going well.

While some folks have hinted at a marketing budget of $100M, many (anonymous) industry insiders use a 2.5x factor as a more reasonable estimate. That would bring the budget to $625M+$250M = $875M, of which almost all is allocated to bloated “star” salaries and marketing. All of which tells us the obvious: the natural audience for this fare is violently disinterested and ignoring every attempt by the industry to hook them on what will be another hot-loaf of garbage. They’re not wrong:

And this:

This is Instagram folks! This is supposed to be a safe place to market Hollywood’s wokest abominations like She Hulk and Woman King and receive a ticker-tape parade of praise for how “brave” the casting choice was, or how “timely” a reminder it is that slavery is bad. Moreover, this kind of ratioing is everywhere on these ostensibly Industry-friendly platforms.

This brings me to the second count of why the bad economics of the film are even worse. Let’s say the all-in budget is just shy of $1B. Anything short of $1B globally is just breaking even, not a success. It needs at least $1.5B to be credibly viewed as a success. Back in the day the studio could at least console itself with a lifetime of DVD sales and merchandising to feel better the morning after a box office flop. But the economics are different today. Universal is releasing the Shodyssey, which is owned by NBC, which is owned by Comcast. That means that after it limps out of the box office it will get premium billing on streaming giant Peacock, lol. After which it will be shunted to Netflix (where it’s sure to boost subscriptions) and then to whatever other third rate streaming packages exist like Sling, Pluto, Tubi until finally it reaches DirecTV like some tragic foster child.

Given the antagonistic state of the target audience and the high threshold of economic success, it makes you wonder what sane capitalist executive at Universal thought that greenlighting this would be a good idea? A trick question, because neither Universal nor any other media/entertainment company in business today employ any capitalists. They know this movie is likely going to underperform (at best) - a sin that an 80s studio exec would have been fired for. They don’t care.

Making money is not the point. It hasn’t been the point in the entertainment industry for many years. In fact, losing money is the point. While the studios won’t make any money for their armchair owners, the HR harridans in charge will still self-congratulate with every Variety or New York Times review that glazes it as “a compelling display of Black power” or a “splashy popcorn movie with a social conscience”.3

Losing money and producing flops is what makes Hollywood great these days (according to Hollywood) because it’s about the message. This is what happens when you put the ‘People Not Profits’ people in charge. And if that message falls on deaf ears, does it make a sound? Again, that question isn’t constructive and doesn’t align with company values. Moving on.

If it seems that modern corporations (and especially those involved in the monetizing and popularizing of cultural preferences) are completely disinterested in turning a profit you would be correct. So what is their purpose? Have they really coopted the greatest culture-propagating engine in history into irrelevance? No, of course not.

It’s far worse than just that.

The purpose is to humiliate the audience, which surely consists mostly of straight white men, but there are plenty of others (dis?)affected by the cooption to boot. The industry knows their message is not popular, but their trust in academic credentialing tells them that this is achtxually a sign that they’re on the “right side” of history. Thus losing money isn’t just okay, it’s a moral imperative. The customer isn’t just wrong, he’s a stupid piece of shit, ex-boyfriend who listens to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. In other words he’s a “bad human being”. Gasp.

You see, they’re like saviors for our entire civilization. Every bit as heroic as John Brown or Martin Luther King Jr., they will usher in a messianic world where - surprise - they, themselves, will be the elect decision-makers. Each retconning of a fan-favorite IP, each re-booting of a beloved classic, brings us closer to that Kingdom!

However far ‘effect’ has been distanced from ‘cause’ (thanks to financial engineering and free money) the reckoning fast approaches. The hostility to the film’s culturally and historically meretricious casting and production values will be the desired effect. No one cares anymore what Hollywood produces. AI content may be hoovering up farmland with data centers but it will also supplant Hollywood’s (and the entire entertainment Industry’s) primacy as purveyors of culture. What will there be left for them to purvey once all else is taken from them? I’m not sure. I’m only certain they won’t ask the customer.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider getting a copy of my novel, The Toll of Fortune, available on Amazon and elsewhere. You can find out more about it here.

Can the soul be extinguished? Are some cultural forces structurally purposed to crush the soul? Can the soul be restored? History may have answered these questions in the negative, despite the dominant discourse steering us away from its uncomfortable conclusions. This essay, however, reconsiders these impolitic conclusions from the lens of prehistory and reveals how preternatural, meta-cultural forces explain the historical trajectory of Man’s soul and how it’s integrally connected with our current civilizational malaise.

This trajectory is relevant today as State power grows to levels that only a Sumerian God-King could have dreamed of. The ultimate power, the power to enslave not just the body but the mind rests just over the digital horizon. The Panopticon State needs only a cyberpunk One Ring to cover the world in a permanent Pitești Prison, and if the State has the ability to reach our thoughts, why not grasp for the soul as well. After all, what’s a Hell for?

We have been here before. Mass forced labor - the essence of slavery - began with the invention of agriculture in the Neolithic period. The State - founded on that labor’s surplus - came a few thousand years later with it’s own upgrades in degradation. Five thousand years ago the hard-labor economy permeated Europe and the State’s first roots strangled the natural political rights of men, anastomosing from its source in Sumer. Life was bleak and the future seemed bleaker still. It was then that a group of marginal pastoralists from the Pontic Steppe launched onto the world stage, trampling the roots of incipient Statism and emancipating the souls of the bound.

Five Grains and Seven Millennia Ago…

To fully appreciate how Indo-European culture brought about a revolution let’s back up a bit and consider the dawn-time of the soul: the Paleolithic rise of Man. The Hunter-Gatherer’s life was no paradise. He was constantly at the mercy of the elements and the migrating herds, hunted by Neanderthals (for a time) and still at war with his fellow man when resources were scarce. But let’s face it: the life of the wild hunter was vastly preferable to the drudgery that came with agriculture.

Around 9000 BC some Hunter-Gatherers (HGs) in the Middle East started settling down. Within a couple millennia most HGs in that region had exchanged hunting for the trophic reliability of agriculture. The subsequent invention of pottery also meant that food could be securely stored for times of scarcity or transportation. However, this security came with a steep cost.

I’m only being slightly glib when I say this was Man’s first Faustian bargain. Certainly farmers weren’t mere prisoners on their land - they still hunted and fished. Increasingly though they abandoned the hunt, as ungulate domestication made protein easily accessible. Eventually the skill was lost altogether. What replaced it was repetitive, back-breaking labor, all day, month and year. Agricultural Man became a drone of the field. Agriculturalists soon discovered they hadn’t just bound themselves to the land but also the succeeding generations.

Labor must have been arduous as productivity was low. The Agriculturalist might toil from dawn until dusk with the only reward being a bowl of barley porridge. It got much worse. The bargain for food “security” was no guarantee. Neolithic farmers practiced subsistence agriculture (as most farmers did until the early Modern Era) and were at the mercy of Nature’s vicissitudes. Unstable climate was no friend to the HGs either but to the incipient farmers it was the hand of death1. They were now completely dependent on grain harvesting and animal domestication. If the climate worsened then reduced harvests simply meant dying. Migrating to better farmland was still possible, but having lost the ability to hunt it was a gambit. Besides, by the mid-Fifth Millennium BC there was little unoccupied farmland.

To make matters worse many farmers domesticated just five types of grain as their main staples. Certainly their diets were supplemented with some animal protein, but beyond that there was little diversity. Given the primitive state of agriculture it created a huge health challenge.

Consider for a moment the bread aisle of your local supermarket. In almost every case, you’ll see an arsenal of fortifying agents (niacin, iron, calcium, thiamine, riboflavin, folic acid, whey) along with an alien bestiary of other chemicals. During WWII it was decided that the foregoing supplements should be added to flour to make up for its paucity of nutrients. Many grains, though calorically dense, are notoriously low in vitamins and minerals. Requiring these additions to flour and milk seemed like the sensible thing to do for a population reeling from the Great Depression.

The first Agriculturalists in Europe and West Asia lived off of emmer, einkorn, barley, rye or millet almost exclusively. Compounding the lack of nutrients, millet actually contains abundant anti-nutrients in the form of phytic acid, which inhibits the uptake of vitamins. These wheat grains were selected over the millennia for their durability in semi-arid regions like Mesopotamia - taking the high calorie count as an acceptable trade-off - but in the end it was a Devil’s bargain with an increasingly low return.

One can easily imagine how this cycle might play out. Over the centuries inevitable droughts and famines would progressively push some farmers to destitution. The survivors would seek new farmlands but eventually these were maxed out or taken. Those farming communities untouched by drought would then be confronted by those migrating drought victims, who might offer their labor in exchange for food. The natives would keep the lion’s share for themselves as their prerogative and the migrants, grateful at first for their lives, accept less. Inevitably the migrants become resentful, fueling strife. At some point tensions reach a boiling point and the newcomers would be beaten down. Eventually any difference between their station as migrant laborers and slaves dissolves.

It’s possible that the migrants might win out in a few lucky cases, but given their reduced share of the calorie-count this is less likely. Thus a class of permanent slaves is created out of the migrants while the natives become the master class. What was supposed to be a respite from the constant struggle of hunting now morphed into a novel social compact between new types of humans: slave and master.

Was slavery only an innovation of the Neolithic? Didn’t HGs also have slaves?

While the capacity, or desire, to control another human is universal, enslavement before sedentism was very challenging. HGs live in small bands and confining more than a few slaves would be difficult. Hunter-Gatherers, not being accustomed to labor, also make poor slaves. They can and would flee without systematic confinement and unlike farmers the wilderness is their natural habitat.2

With his in mind it’s easy to see how scattered, peaceful farming communities could coagulate into clusters of hierarchical slave-owning hell-holes. For predatorily-inclined masters it would be all too tempting to take this process to the next level. Moving from incidental slave-ownership to outright coercion of nearby vulnerable communities would have been the next stage evolution. Within a few centuries whole populations would have transformed from communal land-labor to chattel slavery, hopelessly toiling until death. This is what happened in many parts of Mesopotamia where indenture to a tiny fraction of masters/owners became the norm. Meanwhile, just below the masters a cohort of specialized laborers entrenched themselves as overseers, priests and clerks forming the new “elites”. Never forget that this is what historians and academics have traditionally called the “birth” of civilization.

La Mort Dans L’ Ame

The Mesopotamian model was not the only way that former HGs lost their freedom (and soul) to perpetual toil. The Neolithic Agriculturalists of nearby Anatolia (called the ANFs) might have been less geographically constrained - by 4400BC they’d settled effectively all of Europe - but they left none of their propensity for confinement behind. No longer able to hunt (in a continent of virgin forest), they would have been effectively quarantined to pockets of land suitable to their limited form of agriculture.

Whether because of their new reality, convenience or tradition most early Neolithic farming communities lived in a single, giant house - called a longhouse. These were dark, dank and disgusting domiciles where several extended families dwelt. There was no privacy. Everything was everyone’s business and no one escaped the watchful eye of the longhouse elders. Longhouses had no windows for light, no chimneys to channel smoke and obviously no running water or sanitation. In fact one of the main reasons we know so much about Neolithic life is from archaeological excavations of the “middens” surrounding the dwellings. Garbage was heaped on a pile not far from the house. There animal remains, rotting food, excrement and other detritus would putrefy within wafting-distance. Naturally this bred pestilence and vermin proliferated.

Whereas the remains of HGs are rarely found with evidence of disease, farmers’ remains often show signs of the usual suspects: cholera, typhoid fever and dysentery. The confined, unaerated longhouse would have been an incubator for these. Throw in domesticated animals and the potential for zoonotic plagues turns the longhouse into a veritable petri dish of contagion. Life expectancies dropped, infant mortality rose and quality of life disintegrated.

Yet the farmers continued to multiply at a prodigious rate compared to HGs. I won’t go into the details of why that was, but suffice to say that the constant mobility of nomadic life is not conducive to high fertility. Sedentism, even with higher mortality, is.

Crowded, dark, dirty and sickly. This would have been the dominant lifeway of the Early European Farmers (EEFs). Surely the farmers would have spent their time outdoors then? Perhaps, but this was Europe, not Anatolia. The weather is not as clement, the winters can be brutal by comparison and one would not want to venture too far from the settlement. The arable valleys were theirs for grazing or farming but the woods and hills still belonged to the hunter-gatherers. Taller, stronger and healthier than the Agriculturalist newcomers, the HGs were at best strange-looking traders, at worst foreign giants or monsters.

While we’ll never know what life was really like, when you look at early proto-farming communities such as Çatalhöyük you get a sense. Narrow rooms with low ceilings and no light. Smoke obscuring crimson images of dangerous beasts set in massive relief against walls the color of bone. Dominating all of it was a corpulent matriarch-goddess, featuring the same cretinized features of the Venus of Willendorf. The all-seeing All-Mother, ready to judge and devour her kin.

Of course this is just one impression. Perhaps the menacing “Venus” figure is there to hand out hugs and the hadal depictions of horned, slavering beasts were just the equivalent of a hunting manual. The EEFs were not the same people as their ancestors at Çatalhöyük but the essence of their lifeways remained eerily similar: close-quarter living with little fresh air or light; a meagre and monotonous diet low in nutrients; Incessant manual labor surrounded by filth; and all under the watchful eye of ubiquitous female deities and figurines.

The Power of Risk

In the course of a thousand years the Early European Farmers had spread from the Bosporus to the British Isles. Reproducing their package of brutish longhouse living and matriarchal worship wherever they went, they pushed their way of life to the ends of the Earth. By the mid-5th Millennium BC they’d reached land’s end throughout all Europe, save the vast, remote wildernesses of the interior. It was into this Hobbesian diaspora that the Yamnaya (the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European) burst around the close of the 4th Millennium BC. The contrast could not have been more jarring. Used to wide open spaces, the Yamnaya would have found (literally) small men tending to gardens and worshipping pyknic figurines in the reek of a dim longhouse. The Yamnaya moved fast and broke things.

The farmers may have lived nasty lives but as long as the weather cooperated there was usually food to sustain them. In fact it’s only with large agricultural bounties that EEFs like the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture could have sustained multiple settlements in the thousands. Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate as the 4th Millennium BC moved into it’s second half: it grew cold and it grew dry (in eastern Europe). Add to this a nutrient-impoverished diet and a cloistered way of life and we get a pretty vivid picture the people the Yamnaya encountered.

Where the long winters and drought killed off the EEFs it had a surprisingly different effect on the Yamnaya - pastoralists of the steppe. With the onset of colder/dryer weather they too stared down starvation - foraging as they were in the sheltered valleys of the west Eurasian plains. In this moment of bad fortune they made what was anthropologically a ‘Hail Mary pass’. Surrounded on all sides by the endless waste of grass they took their horses and their cattle and gambled on the barely-known.

The gamble paid off. Horses (unlike other ungulates) will screef away the snow to get to the grass underneath - enabling them to survive winter on the plains. The Yamnaya’s ancestors had survived off horse meat for hundreds of years, so this made the plains viable habitat year-round. Cattle required transhumant migration across multiple ranges through the growing season, so as long as winter foraging was possible herds survived. They were already familiar with the wagon and over the centuries had made continual improvements thereto.3 At first they adapted to the steppes. Then they thrived.

Their gambit successful, they unleashed the power of risk. Raising cattle was difficult enough, so they began rustling too. This risky endeavor involved sneaking up on an unsuspecting neighbor or tribe and making off with their herd. Naturally they had to be prepared for violence and the defender usually had an advantage. So they took another risk.

Somewhere on the range a patient Yamnaya warrior found a lost foal, unafraid of humans and tractably smitten to follow its new herd alpha (or so one possible scenario goes). As the foal became a mare the warrior attempted to mount the animal (as friends had tried and failed in the past - some to their demise). This time the mare accepted the warrior on its back without much complaint. This clever Yamnaya realized that if he bred the friendly beast there would be mares and stallions socialized to humans like this one. Repeating this process, breeding only the tractable ones, and drawing in other horses deemed suitably docile, they domesticated the horse and changed the course of history.

Mounted warfare was still thousands of years away, but being able to travel by horse reduced the vast plains from featureless wastes to a network of roads. Not only could neighboring herds be approached with near secrecy for cattle-rustling, but atop horses they could range their herds further and faster than ever imagined. Distances once thought inconceivable could be conquered in a season. Herds need not trample the same overrun fodder when fresh browse was now within reach. With luck an enterprising young man could take several dozen head, venture into the deep unknown and return a generation later with thousands of cattle at his back and a large family to boot.

Even more revolutionary, enemy tribes could be surprised in the middle of the night for a quick smash-and-grab. Powerful foes miles away could be approached without warning, slaughtered in their sleep and the Yamnaya warriors could abscond just as fleetingly. It was the discovery of stealth as much as the discovery of wealth. One small step into an risk-based lifestyle had become one giant leap forward for technology, prosperity and a hinterland culture destined for greatness. Spurred on by their good fortune and sacrifice (many must have died in the attempt) they set their sights on the west, the lands of that hapless human domesticate: the Agriculturalist EEF.

The Plutonic and the Uranic

The Early European Farmer lived under conditions that the Indo-European found abhorrent: a complete lack of freedom, never a moment alone or beyond the watchful eye of the Den Mother; squalid living conditions contaminated with a growing roster of diseases; adulation of female idols and a bias for the persistence of a communal “family” - over the “natural”, nuclear family. It should come as no surprise that our notion of “natural” is largely drawn from these steppe herders who viewed their own lifeways (primacy of kinship, honor culture, cattle rustling, hereditary wealth accumulation, risk-taking) as a quasi-theurgical cultural package - not surprising given how successful it had been. In a few centuries they’d gone from marginal foragers to masters of their lands, while the peoples of Europe eked out an ever more marginal existence at the fringes of survival. A few centuries later those riders would be masters of Europe.

In Mesopotamia those clusters of hierarchical farming societies had metastasized into full-on slave societies. The surpluses of unfree labor brought many riches to the elites, including the features of urban life: permanent architecture (to honor the Gods, of course), resplendent art and raiment (again, all to honor those Gods) and a division of labor that favored resource allocation to an ever-growing caste of priests, palace retinues and rent-seekers (obviously, to honor the…).

The Mesopotamian Urbanite lived an even more abysmal existence than his distant EEF cousin. While contact between steppe pastoralist and Mesopotamian would have been infrequent, it’s worth noting that both cultures began their rise at approximately the same time.4 Mesopotamian Urbanites labored at the whim of the urban ruler - often a “God-King” - whether in the fields or the city. Examining the sociology of the more distant Sumerians is not my intent here (I wish to focus on Europe), but it’s very telling that after Semitic civilization (ie. the Akkadian, Ugaritic, etc) replaced Sumer the word they adopted for “ruler” was borrowed from their former overlords’ lexicon, a cognate of Sumerian for “owner” or “master”.

The Urbanite had once farmed the land like the EEF, but after many cycles of feast and famine had found himself indebted beyond his ability to pay. Gradually the wealthy courtiers of the God-King assumed those debts in exchange for ever more privative forms of bondage until they were slaves in all but name. If the European farmer’s life was tedious drudgery, the Mesopotamian lived in soul-crushing hopelessness. This was no coincidence or side-effect. This was the purpose of that particular human lifeway, begun in the Neolithic, that impounds the body and asphyxiates the soul so it may never again threaten those holding absolute social and political power.

This soul-destroying lifeway is not necessarily coextensive with a particular philosophy, culture or religion (though some come very close, cough cough…) so it would be inaccurate to use any extant labels. Instead we need new referents, shorn of political baggage to refer to such lifeways. These are the lifeways that institutionalize bludgery and rent-seeking, justifying it with rhetoric as righteous as it is specious; the cultures that manufacture consensus through insinuation and ostracization instead of deliberation and franchise; the practices that penalize risk-taking and enforce “safety”; the religions that demand submission of the body and coercion of the conscience; the belief-systems that reduce politics to meaningless performance and decision-making to formal ritual; and those epistemologies that imbricate causation beneath layers of unctuous explanations and excuses. All of these lifeways (or cultures, practices, religions, belief-systems, epistemologies, etc), have as their ultimate telos the crushing of the soul and deprivation of human spirit. I call them the Plutonic.

Technocratic urban dystopia is the epitome of this lifeway and it’s no coincidence that the first Agriculturalist-to-Urbanite “civilizations” evolved directly in that direction. No matter in which historical period it manifests, it always involves the death of the individual, distinction, reason and reality (other than to coopt the definitions thereof to preserve the ruling class).

On the one hand the Plutonic is mostly entropic. It’s professed goals are to make everything equal and featureless. However it is entropy in the hands of humans. There it takes on an especially evil dimension. Humans are naturally hierarchical and in the quest to erase all difference human elites will nonetheless preserve their own differences (of status and resource allocation), impoverishing the vast majority even more than entropic forces alone are capable of. In this sense it is not strictly entropic, as such a system would gravitate to a homogenous attractor, like equal poverty. In a strictly entropic system even the ruling class would eventually be impoverished and shorn of power. Thus a distinguishing feature of a Plutonic system is that the ruling class always pays lip service to righteous concepts (like “equality”) while extracting ever more resources to maintain their status. The Plutonic is therefore the apotheosis of hypocrisy.

This variation from pure entropy exposes a susceptibility of Plutonic systems. The energy required to sustain the ruling class cannot be exhumed from the corpse of the body politic. Once that body is exsanguinated the elite must devour itself. Thus the Plutonic consumes its own in a spiral of internecine purges. In theory this ought to destroy the very elite responsible for such evil. In reality this process can take centuries where no exogenous shocks disrupt its devolution. Moreover, some exogenous forces may act to provide material sustenance for a decaying elite. History is replete with such examples.5

There’s no need to generalize the Plutonic to any single culture/religion/belief-system. You can already see for yourself its manifestations infecting our institutions, if not at the very heart of certain creeds and secular cultures. It is more than just a ‘Death Cult’. It is a death cult masquerading as soothing self-flattery in order to dull the natural reaction of men to fight or flee. It is a religion of submission that may publicly eschew its most incriminating doctrines with lip-service to ‘tolerance’ or ‘compassion’ or whatever preposterous lie credentialed credulity will swallow. It is worse than death, as death almost always creates new life. The Plutonic will preserve itself in a state of putrefaction longer than the memories of most men.

Contrast this with the lifeways introduced by the Indo-Europeans. Through good fortune and self-sacrifice they evolved a system that embodies the opposite of the Plutonic. Theirs prioritized leadership and distinction. They elevated risk-taking per se and invented a system of reputational legacy (the heroic story) to preserve the lessons of those who embodied it6. They institutionalized systems of honor and liability justified by common-sense and self-evident truth. They practiced religions that elevated sacrifice above obedience and emphasized conformity only with the natural order of things. They constituted political systems that comingled participatory consent with executive impetus. And they did so with an understanding that cause begets effect. They collectively understood that sooner or later there was a “bill to pay” and burdening future generations with that debt was an unconscionable wrong. For these reasons I call this system the Uranic, after Ouranos the Olympian God of the Heavens.

Uranic systems are highly extropic - that is, they reduce entropy and create spontaneous ‘hierarchical order’ when given the chance. Chance (not randomness) is at the heart of the Uranic. It offers up opportunity though man must be capable of realizing and exploiting it to fully manifest its potential. Apologists for the Plutonic will say that the Uranic “tempts” its adherents to ruin with lucrative windfalls, guaranteeing nothing in return. Though a mischaracterization of the Uranic, it is true that many outcomes are negative - it is not for the faint of heart. Its outcomes will always be unequal and sometimes wildly so.

That’s why it also has an integrated system of communal anamnesis: story-telling. It offers adherents a shot at greatness and longevity through cultural memory and expression. Those who live by its whims are heralded as heroes, their deeds recalled to memory and sung here on Earth long after they are gone. Either your risks will result in material prosperity or with a collective legacy. Glory lives on.

Beowulf summarizes this philosophy best when he rallies Hrothgar to take on Grendel:

For every one of us, living in this world

means waiting for our end. Let whoever can

win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,

that will be his best and only bulwark.

This is not elegy. This is what men like Beowulf, and all his fathers, believed. Thus present acts of bravery are married to the promise of glory in a never-ending struggle to wrest legacy from oblivion. To the Indo-Europeans a warrior (the pinnacle of the risk-taking archetype) never dies so long as future warriors extol his exploits. Many examples of this exist in the Indo-European literary pantheon. Take stanza 77 of the Hávamál (fittingly from the part called “Gestaþáttr” - the guest’s section):

Deyr fé,

deyja frændr,

deyr sjalfr it sama;

ek veit einn,

at aldri deyr:

dómr um dauðan hvern.

Which I’ve liberally translated with poetic élan here:

Cattle? They die.
Your kindred friends? They die too.
And You?
You’ll die all the same.

Yet one thing that never dies
Still I can name:
The fate condign the glorious dead,
Each man bestowed his fame!

It’s worth contrasting this with the ontological disposition of Agriculturalist/Urbanist cultures (ie. those descended from the Sumerian and Proto-Semitic tradition) from Psalm 103:15-16.

As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

Once you are dead you are gone and not only will others not remember you, but you have even been materially erased from your native homeland. I can’t think of a more telling contrast in eschatological emphasis.7 In fact the Yamnaya were early and frequent adopters of burying important men (the greatest and most successful risk-takers?) in giant mounds, visible from miles across the steppe and ages across time.8

Our Indo-European forebears wielded language both as a weapon to assimilate conquered cultures and as a shield to preserve their traditions, especially the tradition of glory as a reward for risk-taking. How else have the epic poem, the troubadour’s romance, the swashbuckling-adventure tale, and the blockbuster movie endured and proliferated over millennia? What other way would the Uranic promise of eternal glory be kept without words and voice? No other “Meta-Culture” has continued to put as much emphasis on its oral and literary traditions… and there’s a reason for that.

Sympathy for the Devil

If you take the soul’s existence for granted then it ought to be uncontroversial that how one lives one’s life has a determinative impact thereon. The notion that profitless labor and abject servitude denigrates the soul finds at least superficial agreement across the political and historical spectrum. Thus we are confronted with the stark teleological divergence between the two meta-cultural systems: the Uranic and Plutonic. One offers risk, guarantees nothing in return, but rewards heroes and opportunists with either material wealth or eternal remembrance. The other system offers no risk and guarantees security (abstract or tangible) but the only eternality it offers is beyond the reach of this life (and, coincidentally, its scrutiny).9 Thus men either undertake vainly to be like Gods or exchange their souls for daily bread at the longhouse door.

The Plutonic guarantee of security (food/housing/protection) requires the exchange of personal freedom, which in turn deprecates the soul. The greater the promise of security the greater the deprivation of freedom and the more laborious the prestations, with commensurate psychical degradation until reduction to slavery erodes all pretense to a bargain at all.

The Uranic system creates a different bargain. It offers no security, let alone any guarantees of it. Instead it offers a chance at great prosperity on a sliding scale: taking big risks could yield big rewards (though death is more likely). The reward for taking small risks is nothing, thus the man who risks nothing assumes the same animastic station as his Plutonic counterpart. The Uranic, however, does not deprive its adherents of freedom. Unlike the Plutonic where one is in debt (for security, food, etc), the Uranic man remains free to bind himself in accordance with his own will in order to take the risks he so chooses. Therein lies the dilemma. It is your choice to indenture yourself, remembering that no choice is created equal. Your constraints are merely the natural order of things: business relations, friends, family, the supernatural powers beyond reckoning. Obviously great risks require great deeds, which will almost certainly constrain you - either through the undertaking of great labors or in opportunity costs. But a constraint owing to choice is hardly a privation in the nature of oppression, just as no one consoles the Plutonic slave that ‘working hard is its own reward’.

The Uranic does make one representation that you could characterize as a conditional promise: your legacy. It’s conditioned not on the will of the Gods but on fellow humans. The conditions precedent here are that (1) your deeds aspire to some form of worthiness in your fellows’ eyes; and that (2) there are a sufficient number of such fellows to perpetuate your memory. The Uranic is thus a nexus of bargains and obligations upon the undertaker and also upon his confraternals. Any civilization that upholds the Uranic system is thus a pact between living men to aspire to greatness through daring enterprise and between generations to venerate such aspirations. If either defaults the entire system collapses, like we are witnessing today.

With the Plutonic bargain, in its purest form, there’s no selling only part of your freedom (at least not in practice) because the Plutonic man has no bargaining power. Think of the Mesopotamian farmer fleeing his drought-ridden lands for new ones. When he comes upon the next fertile valley, already filled with prosperous farmers, he has no leverage to dictate terms. Either he becomes their laborer or dies of starvation. Gradually the more prosperous farmers became the masters and eventually the God-Kings.

The Uranic bargain, in its purest form, does not embody “giving up” freedom. If the Uranic man parts with some degree of it, it is voluntary. He bargains in exchange for some anticipated return, though no man has infinite freedom to bargain. Natural Law also circumscribes many exchanges, for example a son may be required to unconditionally obey his father, but the father must also teach him to be a man and so on - thus it is a moral covenant based in Natural Law.

In most other cases though he may bargain away some of his freedom, binding himself by oath. Or he may effectively bargain it away by undertaking certain deeds. If he succeeds he can thank his own ingenuity, as long as he also gives Fortune its due. If he loses his gambit he still dies knowing this brethren will remember his deeds (if they were worthy), or at the very least his soul will receive its toast each time his fellows ritualize deeds of derring-do. He has found Beowulf’s bulwark where not even the grass remembers the Plutonic man’s footsteps.

A Race of People For Whom Psycholysis is of no Use Whatsoever

So it was when the Yamnaya burst out from the steppes to rescue the soul of man from the smothering embrace of meta-cultural Plutonism. The Yamnaya swept over the decaying settlements of EEFs one after another. This wasn’t a case of superior weaponry or greater numbers. In fact the EEFs were technologically superior in many ways with more access to metal than the Yamnaya. Their settlements were generally better defended, some evening sporting defensive bawns or mounds of earth. Their numbers would have still been substantial (if not overwhelmingly large in some cases).

Still they fell. This was because the EEFs were Plutonic creatures in the late-stage of decline. Ritualizing in their longhouses, enfeebled by disease and malnutrition, and beholden to their emasculating Earth Mother worship, it’s hard to picture them offering a successful resistance. One can imagine their elite coming up with every excuse imaginable for their defeat - save self-responsibility. One can also imagine the more truculent EEFs witnessing this invasion as a form of salvation. Some may have even been grateful to the steppe warriors for burning it to the ground. No more living in the smoky dinge of the longhouse. No more kowtowing to the Den-Mother or other superannuated elders. For those types this would have felt like liberation, a resurrection of the soul after millennia of humiliating infantilization.

The longhouse system of central provisioning of material, spiritual and moral sustenance has only one evolutionary end: Mesopotamian-style Urbanism. This is not to say that all lifeways evolve ineluctably towards the squalid tyranny of Uruk or the soulless utopia of Jodorowsky’s City-Shaft. Nor is staging a steppe pastoralist intervention the only way to prevent that destiny. For example, there were HG societies that overcame the EEFs, though this was rare. Most HGs also did not adopt the Agriculturalist lifestyle for obvious reasons.10

Ultimately though the HG lifeways gave way to the Agriculturalist ones. The attraction of Plutonic urbanism and its gateway drug, the longhouse, operated with both carrot and stick. On the one hand it offered tantalizing material abundance (how does the Yanomami warrior resume his ancient lifeways when presented with unlimited porn, Big Macs and vapes?). With the other hand it wielded its stick: farmers easily out-populated HGs over time and reduced those at the margins to debt peonage and bondage. Once the process was complete it had dissolved the soul of men and converted the dynamism of free labor into the internally irresistible prerogatives of a sclerotic elite. I call this psycholysis. Eventually elites’ wealth extraction produces social contraction as the foundation of the pyramid crumbles. This begets further intra-elite competition (usually through purges). The bottom classes are usually too weak of mind, body or soul to effectively overthrow their masters and the end is only propagated by an exogenous shock - such as a usurpation of elite roles by stronger outsiders. Readers of Peter Turchin will recognize this motif.

The Indo-Europeans were such outsiders. Their consciousness was sensitive to the landscape of fortune: like a compass needle it always pointed towards the greatest opportunity. This is hardly surprising given the many generations our ancestors spent on the steppe seeking wealth and reputation. Their subsequent history of seafaring only steepened this mimetic gradient. For much of history the world was one big frontier to explore. As much as the unknown caused fear among EEFs, it was coveted by the Indo-Europeans. The unknown brought the potential of a large windfall, even if most forays ended in death. That desire for aggrandizement, whether through wealth, glory or power, comes dyed in the wool for people of Indo-European ancestry. It is as natural as the shining sky.

Yet as I wrote in “No Country For Old Europe” once there are no more lands to conquer, once there is no longer a frontier, it’s only a matter of time until the Plutonic re-emerges as the dominant lifeway. Plutonic civilization needed only the elimination of conveniently accessible frontiers to spread the shadow of risk-aversion across Western civilization. There are still frontiers on Earth (the Antarctic, the Arctic, the deep oceans, etc) but incentives have been reoriented away from risk-taking to resource “management”. Instead of adventurers forming joint-stock companies to discover the limits of our planet, we have feminized boards of directors and consultancies deferring to committees, expert assessments and white papers. Capital is allocated to share-buybacks and competitor acquisition, rather than exploiting those frontiers. Product pipelines are purchased instead of novelty grown in-house. And all under the scolding eye of “regulators”, as eager to stifle fortune-seeking with transaction costs as they are to smother that impulse with low interest rates and easy money. It’s no coincidence that the monetary expansion we’ve seen in our lifetime was both a Plutonic wealth transfer from the productive populations to the elites and a de facto default on our civilizational obligations. In a world without frontiers Robert Frost was wrong, the world will end in ice.

Some also say the world will end in Space though, that the “final frontier” is Spengler’s Aenean destiny awaiting us. Thus we should not fear the Plutonic capture of the soil because they can’t take the sky from us. There is surely some truth to this. Perhaps shedding the weighty coil of a home-planet’s gravity well is a meta-cultural litmus test for any species. Fail that and civilization probably circles the drain for posterity, somewhere between mouse utopia and an Eloi/Morlock dynamic. Escape the well and a myriad of new frontiers opens up.

However with a galaxy of possible rewards the price is an austere one. There is no more inhospitable and unforgiving a “terrain” for humans than Space. Our horse-riding ancestors made the leap onto a “desert” of grass, but outer space makes the steppe look like the Garden of Eden. Our ancestors had horses and cattle that could feed in that so-called “desert”. The future Indo-European man will have to find a commensurate resource to sustain him. But this time the reward will be a chance at everlasting glory writ large, a chance to dominate the Heavens and become the very Gods their ancestors once worshipped. Even if we fail to grasp that Godly station it is the reach that will grant us immortality.

Violence is the answer. Might does create right.

This was the world of the Indo-Europeans (in fact they shared those views with almost every through history - even now).

Where did they draw the line? What did those things even mean to our ancestors?

I talk about how the original eco-system of risk-taking, violence and the Indo-Europeans in my interview on Anarchinomicon with CatGirl Kulak.

Anarchonomicon

Ep25 The Toll of Fortune w/ A. J. R. Klopp

The Ancient Aryans…

Listen now

6 months ago · 14 likes · 3 comments · Kulak

There’s been an uptick interest my novel The Toll of Fortune thanks to and his recent review (link a few para below). The comments have been as diverse as John’s questions and I thought a few short articles might highlight some of the researched features integral to the novel’s look and feel.

I’m a huge stickler for historical verisimilitude. For example, I’m a big fan of medieval-era period TV/film. Shows like The Last Kingdom do an excellent job of relaying the spirit of Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful text onto the screen, and they do so partly by ensuring the viewer feels like they’re in early 9th century “England”. The costume details, the wood-working, the collateral mannerisms of extras, the unspoken mediation of superior/inferior roles, the ethnic make-up, non-anachronistic references to historical figures, the technology all contribute. I had to turn off my TV and launch my remote at the screen when I watched Netflix’s Vikings. I saw women of the Jarl’s court dressed in 13th century dresses (to say nothing of the botched historical references). Disgusting, I thought.1

Now, you don’t have to have the same visceral reaction as me in order to sympathize, but this is one of the reasons I did a lot of research to get the 34th century BC right. Needless to say there’s plenty of uncertainty about that time. I doubt an archaeology Ph.D. will call out something in my book by saying, “that adze is totally 32nd century BC technology you dope!” Radio-carbon dating (and other techniques) aren’t that precise.

But there’s still a fine line in one sense since I wanted to imbue the story with elements of wonder (call it fantasy or magic, I don’t care) that included some material or technological elements that were exceptional. In other words, to a certain extent I pushed the envelope by including a few things that were extemporaneous, but not anachronistic: the fine line being, “is it plausible”?

In this mini-article I’ll briefly talk about weaponry in The Toll of Fortune and their world in 3309BC.

Postcards From Barsoom

The Toll of Fortune

John Carter: I’ve thought for a long time that the Aryan period between the upper neolithic and the bronze age (I really hate the term ‘Proto-Indo-European’) is fertile ground for historical fiction and fantasy. Most fantasy novels take place in a vaguely Medieval, Tolkienesque setting, which gives a lot of th…

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9 months ago · 138 likes · 92 comments · John Carter

Mettle > Metal

Look up the 34th century BC and most sources will start talking about the Bronze Age. This is an illusory generalization. Any reference to a canonical “Age” needs to be tempered by a reference to location. After all, if one geographic area contains no bronze in that time period can it still be Bronze Age simply because the region next door is bronzed to the hilt?

My answer is: it’s irrelevant. The only thing that matters is, “what did people there use then?”

Fortunately this question is very well answered by the archaeological record of weapon artifacts, and the answer is overwhelmingly non-metallic! To be honest this was sort of disappointing to me when I set out the write. I wanted a “Bronze Age” story with swords and, well, bronze. I soon realized that this was neither an impediment to my “look and feel” philosophy nor to the story. Quite the opposite, in fact. The exceptionalism of metal weapons would make the right things stand out.

There certainly were metal objects in the region of western Ukraine and Moldova in 3309BC, they were just few and small. The best way to understand this is to understand that metallurgy back then was concentrated further west in the Balkan mountains (where it had prospered on and off for the previous two millennia!). In fact, by the 34th century BC European metallurgy was likely past it’s (first) peak. There are arguments for and against this temporary “fallow” period, but a good illustration is the Varna Culture from the mouth of the Danube (in what’s now Bulgaria). They prospered a thousand years before the events in my book and were known for elaborate gold artifacts in the graves of their kings. By the time of the Yamnaya there’s not much gold found.

So what was there? Yamnaya graves yield up metal artifacts, but far more non-metal ones. Very common are things like copper beads and very basic forms of metallurgy. Now, there certainly are metal implements. We see axe hoards of axe heads, like these below:

While these are roughly contemporary with the book, this hoard was discovered in Bulgaria, ie. not in the Yamnaya homeland further east. As the diagram at this article’s opening shows, metal implements came to the Yamnaya from agriculturalist societies to the west.

We also need to take a skeptical view here. We don’t know who’s hoard this is. Were they autochtonous Early European Farmers (EEF) - who’d already farmed small plots for 2,500 years? Were these the spoils of a Yamnaya warlord who assembled them from multiple EEF holdings, hoarding them like a bank deposit? Moreover, they don’t look conducive to warfare, at least not exclusively. Not to say wielding one of these while under attack wouldn’t have the desired outcome… but it’s hard to imaging these being taken into battle - especially when these cultures already had their own tradition of stone weaponry.

The poverty of metal artifacts contrasts with the abundance of stone ones - especially where weapons are concerned. This makes sense for a variety of reasons beyond the obvious issue distance from the sources of metallurgical prowess.

Where you find metal artifacts you find that (1) it’s usually copper not bronze; and (2) they’re from the late Yamnaya period, like the image above, dated to 2930BC. You see this a lot with the archaeology of the area, the abundance of copper or bronze post-dates much of the Yamnaya period. Here are two great (and recent) papers showing recent finds, including compositional analysis. The dates are well into the 3rd Millennium BC.

Keep in mind that the Yamnaya would have been used to stone tools and weapons. More importantly, why would they switch? It’s not obvious that early copper tools (like axes and adzes) made better weapons. Surely copper has some advantages for specific tools. The adze, for example, would be good for planing wood, hacking branches, etc. Flint and its rarer cousin obsidian were better for cutting straight lines, especially in flesh or hide. But it’s not clear that using a (scarce) copper-tanged adze to hack at your enemy’s head would have a superior outcome than the stone (abundant) axe your ancestors had been using for thousands of years.

Adze, Axes and Halberds… Oh My!

So far I’ve done nothing but disappoint. I’ve told you that no only are we not really in the Bronze Age but we’re barely even using metal in weaponry. What gives! While I’ve kept this close to the historical record for the sake of realism, if you’ve read the book (or John’s interview) you know that’s not the full story.

The archaeological record is, of course, never complete and man can still dream. If my heroes were going to be swinging stone maces, and gushing in awe over the odd copper axe, then I needed something exceptional to fill the role of a “Godly” weapon. This is where the halberd comes in. Here I’m not referring to the late Medieval weapon of the same name.

Unfortunately archaeologists were not in an creative mood when they started finding bronze age “halberds” and gave them the same name as a completely different Medieval weapon. Nonetheless the halberd would have presented two innovations for the Copper Age: (1) the metal blade hafted to the rod would have been useful for striking in ways that hitherto hadn’t been possible (or dreamed of); and (2) it was a metal tool specifically designed to be a weapon. The halberd has no practical use (like axes or adzes). It was purely for whacking some scumbag in his skull. Note also the club-like ball at the base. Another useful addition. By the time the Bronze Age was in full swing in Central and Western Europe (2000-1500BC) halberds were all the rage. It’s possible some were even up to 4ft long!

But doesn’t this contradict my earlier thesis about only using contemporary weapons? Not at all. As this recent paper points out, halberds were likely in use in mid-4th Millennium BC Italy. This makes them present but very exceptional - the perfect kind of weapon for a “God”. Needless to say my own version of the halberd (the Hammer of Heaven) is structurally different - half hammer, half halberd - with a head made entirely of some very special metal.2

Crossing Swords - A Preview

For those of you still disappointed in the menu of available weapons in this still-quite-primitive time, alas there is hope!

By now hopefully you can understand why the sword didn’t come until later. Seeing the scarcity of metal - even in societies with metallurgical traditions - building a weapon longer than an arm composed almost entirely out of metal was a tall order. Only after the Bell Beaker Period and what I term the Bronze Rush did these types of weapons become common (well, at least among the warrior elite).3 You can certainly ask, “Why couldn’t they have made swords - copper is actually quite plentiful!” This is true but copper makes a shitty blade. It can’t hold an edge very well. There’s a reason we use it for its ductility. Surely there were naturally occurring copper-arsenide bronzes smelted among the first examples of metallurgy, but the craft was not so sophisticated then to really grasp what they were making. Moreover arsenide bronze, while stronger than copper, still can’t hold a candle to tin bronze.

That being said, in 1983 an incredible discovery was made at a site in eastern Anatolia near the Euphrates River. Nine weapons were found, made of bronze, bearing all the elements of swords and dating to the mid-4th Millennium BC!

It’s necessary to stress the exceptionalism of this find. No other swords have been discovered in Europe or the Near East from this period, or for the next 1500 years of the archaeological record! Without spoiling too much I’ll end by mentioning that these swords and the world that created them will feature prominently in the coming sequel to The Toll of Fortune.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next mini-article where I’ll discuss longhouse societies and farming.

You can get a copy of my novel, The Toll of Fortune: An Indo-European Origin Saga, at Amazon. Don’t worry that it says “Temporarily Out of Stock”. It will be restocked very soon!

In Behavioral Economics or Game Theory there’s this thing called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If you’re painfully aware of this Dilemma please bear with me and the following description. Basically two conspirators are sequestered in separate interrogation rooms and the D.A. tells each one in turn that if they snitch they’ll get a reduced sentence, but if they play hard-ball they’ll go to trial and the D.A. will ask for the maximum sentence (though there’s some small probability of acquittal). The D.A. also tells each prisoner there’s only room for one deal, so it’s first come, first serve. If prisoner 1 accepts the plea deal, prisoner 2 will almost certainly get convicted and it’s off to prison for him. The probabilities of acquittal, terms of the plea deal, and so on, are all variables that make the prisoners more or less likely to snitch or stonewall the D.A.

This isn’t just an academic thought-experiment, it has analogies to all kinds of situations in politics and business. It’s one of the more famous idealized human behavioral “experiments” and if you’re like most people I haven’t told you anything new.

But what about an inverse sort of problem? In the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) the prisoner is incentivized by the setup to be the first to squeal (depending on the factors). What about situations where the system is set up to disincentivize you to be the first? This is called the Trust Game, or as I call it, the ‘You First’ Game. More concretely this is a situation where you definitely don’t want to be the first person to try something because (unlike the PD where there’s only guaranteed benefit for the first-mover) there’s only benefit in mutual action - and even then it’s not guaranteed.

If something is starting to sound familiar perhaps it’s because you’ve seen this dilemma quite frequently if you’re on X/Twitter. We’re both bombarded by posts calling for violent reprisals against some on the Left while counter-signalers reprimand the do-nothing reprisalists for idle talk and moral cowardice.

If we’re to start a revolution, if we’re to throw away our careers, families, material comfort then “YOU FIRST!” they’ll say. “I’ll just wait here on the sidelines until the risk to me and mine is lower.”

In the age of the Deep State, and where Intelligence Community efforts are clandestinely directed at Americans, the wages of such dissent are prison time. Of course, notions of the Deep State and CIA surveillance might be dismissed by Normies (and J6 actually was a collective action - chilling even the most courageous of dissenter), yet the conundrum remains. He who sticks his neck out first risks it being cut off. It’s a herd instinct, built for survival even though humans aren’t herd animals. Perhaps it’s evolutionary cynicism: we aren’t so stupid as to be the first (and only) to take the plunge into shark infested waters.

I’m not interested in discussing the justifications for violence (you can do that yourself) but for a while now the Right has been suffocating under an impotent discourse of “I dare you to/we need to…” vs. “You first!” with no end in sight. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to surmise that agents provocateurs on the Left and Fake Right (are they different?) have an interest in egging on anyone who might actually dare to be first - better to make an example of! Under a Rule of Law system, he who draws first blood gets crucified.

Too bad we don’t live under such a system. If we did the Left wouldn’t be able to encourage its own paramilitaries to violence and semi-violence. Antifa janissaries would be cowed into retreat, NGO-paid protesters would fold at the sight of ICE and we wouldn’t have senior State representatives saying this:

While I’m sure that these upstanding members of the Federal legislature, “elected” by who knows who and designated as the permanent bureaucracy’s representatives, are merely exercising their First Amendment rights (with no intention of fomenting a coup) the form and substance of their missive was unmistakable:

Well, golly-gee how beneficent of Ares to bestow upon his martial order the “right” to “refuse” an “illegal” order! I’m sure this makes a lot of sense if your commander orders you to, say, erect a concentration camp on the Upper East Side and “commit genocide”. Sounds pretty illegal to me. Except, of course, no commanding officer (even in Nazi Germany) was that stupid. Illegal orders are much more nuanced. Anyone who’s worked in corporate America (or on a Wall Street trading desk). Naturally this puts a soldier in a dilemma of their own: if you refuse then you better be damn sure that your refusal will pass muster with a Court Martial! As Chris Bray points out, this doesn’t happen that often … because it doesn’t happen that often. This isn’t just because it would force every soldier to be their own legal counsel. Unless an entire battalion followed along it would be career suicide (and worse). Of course if an entire battalion identically stood up and refused an order it might send a political message - not to say individuals wouldn’t be singled out pour encourager les autres.

Okay, but they’re also saying something else:

Whoa! Wait. What? That’s right, these aren’t marching suggestions… they’re marching orders - fiat law by Democratic legislators. Now every soldier, service-member, officer, “and the intelligence community” have a positive obligation to act as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and decide for themselves, every time they receive an order, if it’s legal or not. Of course since I’ve never served in the Armed Forces I’m sure they only get like one or two orders per career, right? Well, anyway, they’re not asking any more.

Nonetheless this is quite a dilemma for any “service” member, which includes the brave men and women in the Central Intelligence Agency, wink-wink. It means that you have to play ‘You First’ Game, whether you like it or not. Which, again, begs the question, why are Leftists (as in this video) unafraid to ask this of service-men, who’s job is to (just like them, if you believe their breathless cheerleading) “uphold” the “constitution” not second-guess it and judge it’s application for themselves.

Ah. I see. Now I get it. Leftists know that they can signal to their paramilitaries that in the very unlikely event they’d let you get court-martialed (or worse) you won’t have to face repercussions. Scouts honor. You sentences will be commuted, pardons will be granted. Hell, the autopen is primed already.

Now harken this back to what the Right faces.

Of course there are hundreds of similar examples. Thousands, really.

Trump could level the playing field, of course, by using an autopen of his own, but then we’d be “just like them… gasp”. He could enact pardons for all those who expressed support of his populist, “America First” priorities. This would send a very strong message to the hesitant that someone might have their backs too. Sadly we live in a land of glass houses where one side doesn’t want to cast stones, while the other has gathered a pile of rocks.

I don’t know what’s worse. The fact this is already happening or the fact that “ostensible” conservatives think that fighting without a blind-fold and straight-jacket is a bad thing.1 Either way it’s a recipe for defeat (unless you’re talking about the war for donor cash).

Compounding this problem is the fact that many Federal Court judges don’t even bother to pay the remotest lip-service to the rule of law. TDS has taken hold and legal arguments have been substituted with “because reasons”. To be fair, this sort of mush-brained, non-rigorous argumentation arose from the matrix of “legal scholarship” - also patient zero of “Critical Theory”. But if you’re a dissident on the Right and want to take the plunge towards activism you can’t expect a fair shake in a court of first instance (ie. trial court).

So back to the question of what do you do if you feel your country is being pulled out from under you by “other side”, without the slightest pretense of hiding it. Of course in this case the “other side” also happens to control nearly every societal institution. You want to do something. You want to stand up for your rights and exercise them within the well-known bounds of how they’ve been understood for a long time. You also know that if you engage in some form of activism you better either be rich and lawyer up (still no guarantee) or be part of a large group (also no guarantee, but at least better odds). All of which means if you want to take action you better be prepared for prison.

For most of polite society this isn’t an option. People with families and careers (ie. most of us wage slaves) are effectively foresworn from being on the vanguard . So it’s hopeless right? One giant fucking blackpill.

Not quite.

There are two reasons. First, you don’t need to lawyer-up in the age of ChatGPT, in fact lawyers are almost obsolete now when it comes to providing legal advice. As a former attorney I’ve even done some work training AI on legal matters and let me tell you, if you have a legal question the AI answer will be almost totally accurate.2 You now have at your disposal cutting-edge $1000/hr legal counsel. You don’t need to have the resources of Joel Salatin to confront “the authorities”, you just need a pair of balls. For decades professional protesters like Antifa and BLM have had the advantage of legal counsel paid for by billionaires to compensate for their testicular paucity. Now this professional/resourece asymmetry is eroding and the Right ought to take advantage of it and level the playing field.

The second reason is that the playing field is changing on it’s own, and not necessarily to the Left’s advantage. As demonstrated by the not-so-subtle dog whistling of Intelligence Community’s representatives in Congress, the pump is being primed on their end too. The invocation of such shibboleths as “we’ve got your back” is a direct call to action for someone on their side to take the first step. If their jaded rhetoric can convince even one rogue agent, trantifa cell or flag officer to be that first mover then maybe the cascade will start. If not, they still have their jobs and gold-plated pensions (bereft of insider-trading bans!).

This push changes everything. Now there are two competing groups playing the Trust Game and that radically changes the pay-off calculus. Think about it in the limit that more and more competing groups would join the fray (realistically there will probably only be two or three groups ever competing). The more groups, the more you’d expect the barrier to the pay-off to drop because there’s now a fear that some other group will beat you to the punch. In other words, sure you might risk going to prison by being the “first”, but with other groups playing the odds are now higher your complement from the opposing side will “go first”, eliciting the cascade and winning the spoils for their side. Better reconsider your reticence of going first!

This will slowly evolve to become a competition to be the first, and then reach a tipping point. This dynamic favors the Right because there are more organic actors willing to make sacrifices. If they see more players about to enter the game then the trade-off between the motivation to act and the sacrifice for doing so becomes smaller. Think of it like heating up wax: it’s solid at room temperature but heat it up and it will start to run. Heat it up enough and will spontaneously combust. By having the Left push their partisans into the game they’re adding heat.

The Democrats’ strategy is the opposite. There is little they can do to motivate their demoralized base more than they already have. Meanwhile centrists and normies are starting to pay attention to their lack of humanity and fleeing the party.

Orange Man Bad Theory and TDS are deployed in constant crisis mode. If even Trump’s most tedious statement is a new “threat to democracy” then everything is. They are a chorus all singing the same shrill note at terminal volume. All they can do is lower the barrier itself - something only possible if you control all the organs of the State, hence the ham-fisted “wink, wink” that they’ll “have” your back.

I know this isn’t quite the slam-dunk you were hoping for. I think some of the voices calling for courage still harp on the right prognosis, one that is not yet within reach for most. I’m not a professional game theorist (see here for someone who actually is) so there are likely further complications to consider. The issue of Escalation Dominance also factors in, and here the Left has a big proximate advantage (though they’re at a disadvantage at the highest levels: SCOTUS and POTUS). But the addition of Leftist “You Firsters” into the arena actually bodes well for the endgame. Fear not and stay tuned.

A.J.R. Klopp

Cats, Les Miserables, The Mouse Trap, Phantom of the Opera, The Republican Party.

These five theatrical productions have many things in common. They rely on cloying sentimentality to draw their audiences; Their serial longevity is based on crass commercial calculation, rather than the cultural zeitgeist in which they were planted; There’s more than a shred of triteness to them. But one of them is still the odd one out. Unlike the others nobody likes the Republican Party. The time has finally come for us to acknowledge what we’ve know for a long time. The Republican Party is dead. Yawn.

Cue the protests of cadre ghouls, bow-tied “experts”, PR svengalis, K-Street annelids and every other political penangolan that oozes along the corridors of power. Yawn.

This isn’t just the diagnosis of some extremely-online, esoteric thinker1. This is on-the-ground political fact. Witness the latest demonstration of this hard truth and pay attention, because it illustrates the one sine qua non for a living, breathing political organization:

• Members of New York branch of the “Young Republicans” communicated in chats using all manner of racist, sexist and homophobic slurs. Yes, all the big bombs were dropped.

• In a staggering act of bad faith, some disaffected member of said group tag-teamed with Politico to blow it wide open.

• Leftist talking heads and online gooners exploded in a Nilotic deluge of crocodile tears. Fake conservatives took the bait, inducing a Tawaf against the one Kaaba they share with Democrats: the “ism”

• Then something happened the Establishment Right did not expect. In a breath-taking act of political virility, Chad-in-Chief J.D. Vance doused the social media monster (and its critics) with the rhetorical-equivalent of fire retardant: “boys will be boys, retard.”

It was one of the more entertaining episodes of online cat-and-mouse in recent memory, but it evinced the widening schism between groups on the Right.

As GOP politicians (especially senators) trampled each other like soccer hooligans to to denounce the wrong-thinkers, their penultimate leader grabbed hold of the temple pillars and gave them a premonitory shake. If the heir apparent to the GOP crown can boldly gainsay his most powerful magnates, in defense of the rank and file (without the usual retraction or mitigation), then you do not have a party. There is no such thing as “Republican”.

There. Take a breath, you can stop the charade. It’s not longer necessary to keep up the pretense.

Take But Degree Away…

The Republican Party was sprung from the vacuum left by the demise of President Jackson’s political experiment of the 1820s. His Democratic Party - having forsaken its populist beginnings for infinite Irish immigrants - hemorrhaged support nationwide as it clung to slavery2. The Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party but not the way Lincoln “Project” hypocrites pretend. While the new party did attract the support of abolitionist radicals, most the party elite were quite conservative. Of course war conserves so little, just as it transmogrifies even the most risible reprobate into a gilded saint. Thus terrorists like John Brown were canonized while martyrs like Lincoln were deified in the new Republican order.

Buoyed by a generation of pension-dependent Civil War veterans the Republican Party welded itself to America’s (geographically concentrated) capital owners and held on to the presidency until WWI with only one exception. Then like all parties, they got too high on their own success and split, leaving Woodrow Wilson (the Solon of the Deep State) to canter up the middle to victory. Wilson set the stage for State interventionism and it’s been a back-footed game against the forces of appropriation and pandering ever since.

A few notables attempted to dismantle the Deep State and its permanent managerial caste. Nixon tried admirably but got busted for doing what all politicians have done since the beginning of time. Reagan bent the knee to Congressional Leftists in order to “defeat communism” abroad, leaving it hale at home - ironically entrenching a permanent parasite class of lobbyists. When top-spook Bush I was crowned in 1988 there was a sense of relief among the inattentive - Dukakis was a Big Government liberal after all. But by the time the recession of the early 90s struck conservatives realized they’d been duped. Perot offered an alternative but stumbled on his own rough edges allowing Clinton to lube his way to the Oval Office on a promise to “feel our pain”. Bush II was an even more enthusiastic Deep Stater than Woodrow Wilson could have dreamed. The State - and it’s infinite ability to finance its own bloat - was simply too much for any politician to resist, a chimeric carrot and stick forever corrupting the nature of mankind.

The only cure for this malaise is the most vitriolic tonic of the body politic - a solution that dissolves political parties into their constituent elements. It is the aqua fortis that ushered Jackson to power, the elixir that elites and intellectual-zealots constantly warn us about. It is populism. The old order will be pushed aside and a new one put in its place. Or so the theory goes.

Untune that String…

Despite Trump’s improbable rise - worthy of an Aristophean drama - this is only the end of the beginning. Woke has not been “put away.” The Uniparty stands before us emaciated and bereft of every virtue, but they still stand. Push it in the right spot and surely it will topple?

But who should do the pushing? The Republican Party knows they are too unpopular among both rank and file and the general public to apply that nudge, and unpopularity notwithstanding, they are too cowardly to even try.

They’ve tried desperately to adapt, as any Borg entity would. Charlie Kirk’s body wasn’t even cold before they conceived, gestated and vivisected a homunculus “destined” to replace him (complete with private jet Instagram reels to reel in the brotards). Brilyn (yes, that’s his given name ) Hollyhand (yes, sigh, that is his surname) was wheeled out within hours of Kirk’s assassination, including suitably gushing blurbs advertising him as the man-child to lead the Right into the future. Others abound as well. These incarnations of the artificial Right have glommed on to Charlie’s memory, trotting it around in a politicized Weekend At Bernie’s.

It took the online Right only a second to strip these avatars down to their infernal cores. Take Brilyn, for example. In addition to his demonic summoning, he’s being bankrolled by daddy - a multi-millionaire grifter who struck it rich as a Section 8 slumlord.

They’ll try anything. And why would they? For the Establishment Right it’s about the money, not the political power, which they fumbled years ago.

The most important takeaway of the post-Reagan GOP is that it never was a political party. An agglomeration of special interest groups, lobbyists, defense contractors, Wall Street CEOs… yes. Just not a party. A party needs a grassroots. It needs people who feel convicted enough that they’ll brush off their kid’s little league game to canvass the neighborhood for votes. The GOP hasn’t had anything like this for years.

Sure, the Christian Conservatives were manhandled into fulfilling this function for a while. And for a while it worked. Recalling the evangelical origins of abolitionism, they were told that abortion equals slavery and thus ending it was a moral imperative. Abortion eventually morphed into Pro Life Inc. as anti-abortion stances became political losers, which only accelerated the bleed of grassroots support. By the time Trump came along there were effectively no more grassroots Republicans. What did the party even stand for anymore? Better Forever Wars? Lower taxes for your employer’s relocation to Guangzhou? Binders full of women?

The first cry leveled by the Establishment Right at this new movement was that it’s populist - a criticism that only showed their true colors. No one cares if it’s populist - how is that even a criticism? We certainly don’t mind. In any event the time for populism has come as only a populist uprising can thwart the Deep State and its various appendages.

The subtext behind their J’accuse is that populism is both undemocratic and inconsistent with a constitutional republic. Whether this is true or not is a question for philosophers and historians - and since the professional academic class has abandoned these questions to obsess over systemic racism/transphobia, the New Right has filled the gap and provided a far more rigorous analysis. Their answer: since we have neither of those forms of government, what does it even matter?

The New Right’s willingness to reconsider “settled” questions of politics and philosophy; to engage in vigorous debate, instead of nodding consent in lecture halls; to re-reify sacred, immemorial values of masculinity, conservation and faith… this is what defines the New Right. It is both populist foot-slogger and elitist intellectual, and it doesn’t care if your feelings get hurt. No wonder the Establishment is freaking out.

And Hark, What Discord Follows

The result has been near constant infighting among the Right. Not only has the RINO/National Review crowd taken to bashing “radicals”, conflict has exploded between the New Right’s most ardent members. October 7th unleashed a fury of fissures, and while not all takes were made in good faith, there was room for disagreement across the spectrum. The whole Pagan/Christian divide is another sensitive area of discourse. Even uncontroversial takes have been ratioed - their original poster shredded by keyboard warriors they once considered compatriots.

Some have lamented this breakdown of unity, suggesting it’s a sign of weakness that the Left will use to supplex us into submission. Others note it was only natural we’d start tearing ourselves apart once the Lefties left for their own echo-chamber. Both are likely correct, yet the New Right thinkers that I know view it more as a sign of good health. We allow debate. We encourage it. Do some egos get bruised? Surely. But it’s sticks and stones. New Righters will stick to their guns, and then move on to the next debate. Compare this to fake conservatives who resort to “denounce, deny and apologize” any time controversy strikes. They have the same victimhood complex as the Left. They proclaim the same moral self-righteousness as the Left. They have the same deference to the donor class as the Left. Anyone seeing a pattern here?

Alternately they’ll whine that if we don’t follow their lead the Left will win and ruin everything - not realizing what time it is. Of course they refuse to follow us because… ‘principles’, the same losing principles that exile us further and further from actual power. It’s almost like they don’t know what actual power looks like, or don’t care. And why would they?

The ‘principles’ they’re referring to are ostensibly Christian ones - just not the ones the nation was founded on. The spur of moral supremacy that drives them is the same that drove the Puritans to kill their Quaker neighbors; the abolitionists to destroy the South; the Northeastern Liberals to corrupt the Constitution under LBJ; and the GOP to stick to litmus tests on abortion. It’s also the very same impulse that drives Progressives in their quest remake America as a State-controlled favela. The United States was founded on a plethora of Christian values, but the only ones that seem to have survived 20th century materialism and cynicism are the very worst, Puritanical instincts.

Those wailing that we must all band together, no matter the cost, don’t just have weaker arguments. They fail to understand both the animus of the New Right and the nature of the errors of the past century. Appeasement did not work - it got us to where we are. There can be no middle ground on certain fundamental issues. What’s different today is that the New Right now clearly sees those issues and how they’re delineated. The Fake Right thinks it’s 1996, and the litmus tests are still abortion, school prayer and swearing in cartoons.

Fake conservatives worry about these new delineations because they will be on the outside. They fear they will be exiled… just as they have exiled real conservatives since Pat Buchanan. Thus these types paint themselves as moderates and vow to never unite with ‘radicals’ as a matter of principle when it’s really just sour grapes. That’s fine, let them flap in the wind. Let them enjoy the wilderness or start writing for The Bulwark - they can pretend it was always their dream.

Witness Ben Shapiro’s latest act of duplicity:

Since every single word above is verifiably false we can safely stow Ben with the other Neocon stuffed-animals… in garage with the other nursery toys. The Right has grown up, palaver of this sort will no longer be tolerated and in many ways the delineation is just a bullshit detector. We’re not going back.

Back-pedaling now would not only be cowardly, it would be suicidal. The Republican Party is merely a shell company for its benefactors. It is the apogee of cynical instrumentalism - which is why some of the bigger social media accounts have been swindled into doing its bidding with secret cash payments. The Left understood this form of influence years ago as their government-funded donor class embraced its extremist wing. This is why the Establishment Right and their podcast lackeys gainsay us at every move, still believing they have the power to correct our thoughts. This is why they’ve pulled out the “big guns” - labelling the New Right as “radicals”, “extremists” and (wait for it) “Nazis”. This is also why they won’t win. It’s an old playbook. We don’t care about their boomer labels, and no, failure to apologize won’t lose us elections.

Them winning and us winning are two different things, so what would be the point of “unifying” at all costs? Unifying means capitulating on all our definitional issues while they will pay lip-service on a few points. In exchange we’ll get a pat on the head and “membership” to the donor club. This is, of course, a bluff. They have it backwards. Money follows power, not the other way around.

Moreover, when we’re talking about issues that test the pith and marrow of political belief then “tearing ourselves apart” isn’t pointless ostracizing it’s essential discrimination3. Immigration is one these fault lines that separate the wheat from the chaff and this kind of political threshing ends up being more illuminating than disuniting.

James Lindsay stands out as a cautionary tale here, though others come to mind. On the surface he might appear to an outsider as part of the New Right, what with his breathless suffixing of “anti-communist” in his bio. He even wrote a book about how Marxists took over the West’s education system! Since then he’s taken so many opportunities to out himself as a tone-deaf midwit that he can no longer be taken seriously. See below for only a recent example:

These are same the ass-clowns saying we should bow out and let them carry the standard. Typical of such histrionic dilletantes, they get so wrapped up in the emotionalism of their own appeal they contradict themselves in the same breath. As with Lindsay, they sometimes have large platforms - something that can only be accounted for by support from the Establishment Right’s donors. Again, what they fail to understand about the New Right is that while they’re playing for the spoils of the Party-Donor Complex we’re playing to save and restore the nation and civilization.

It would be one thing for multi-millionaire podcast impresarios like Dillon to stick to their self-righteous spiel. At least I could respect him as a hustler - a sort of less-entertaining Jim Baker. But when they lecture us on the morality of our positions while they cling to the same impotent marching orders that reek of the Left’s containment strategy, you know he’s not just a phony but a false prophet.

Turn Back, Dull Earth, And Find Thy Centre Out

Like all dissimulation, calls for “moderation” have a kernel apparent truth. Commonly discussed New Right talking points, like Churchill’s antagonism towards peace with Hitler or repealing the Civil Rights Act, inspire existential panic among the Establishment Right. They’re so accustomed to having issues framed by the Left that seeing them in another context causes their notochords to involute. They will forever be their handmaidens.

Of course their fears are prima facie valid. Look at the state of public education and historical knowledge. Take the history of John Brown as an example. It’s not just radical Leftists who view him as a hero, center-right brotards do too. The same male crowd that laughs at the pronoun brigade also gets their history from Spielberg movies or Wikipedia, so why are we surprised? Witness this latest manifestation:

Von was the same trucker hat-wearing space cadet that helped Trump win. The same cohort that watches Von idolizes StoolSample Sports™ for its pedestrian humor and rizz-reels, and gets their information about science and politics from Joe Rogan. These weekend warrior Rightists may be smart or dumb, but their votes in future elections will be instrumental in not only preventing Democrats from flexing the iron grip of the Deep State but also in cleansing the Republican Party of neo-Puritans like Dillon and Berry.

The Establishment Right fears that the New Right will alienate voters, driving them into the arms of Leftist “populists” like AOC or Bernie Sanders. From their perspective political maneuvering and advertising must ape whatever Democrats do. They have no concept that the landscape has been irrevocably changed. They worry about how they’ll cover when a newspaper headline distorts New Right positions, not realizing the medium has no reach beyond an ossified arm of the electorate that thinks Kamala ran a perfect campaign.

They fail to realize that the vast majority of voters do NOT pay attention to politics until a few weeks before a major election. Normies are too busy working, paying taxes, taking their kids to school and just getting by to notice. Moreover, the marquée issues of civil rights, freedom of speech, racism, etc, have no noticeable impact on their lives.4 They view this as “a question for the philosophers” and tune out whenever debates get too heavy. It’s the same reason writers like Yarvin don’t gain much purchase with a broader audience, but others like Raw Egg Nationalist do. This fact might ruffle some egos among the New Right, but it shouldn’t. Everyone has their part to play - something I’ll follow up on at the end.

Even if emolliating our stances actually did win over such voters (there have been no cases in recent history suggesting it does)5 the current Republican Party has absolutely zero chance of capturing them. In an age of AI-everything there’s only one currency of political value: authenticity. The old Republican Party hasn’t had any for two generations. Say what you want about the group chat people but they have authenticity. Whether you take what they said seriously or not, you know what they really think - something no one in the Republican Party has done since Eisenhower.

In fact I would’ve gone a step further than Vance. Whether these chats were puerile fancy or not these were private chats among like-minded individuals. There is no moral basis for criticizing private expressions of private people. And yes, if Jay Jones was a private individual - not running for public office - I wouldn’t care who he wants to kill. To throw one back at the libtards: why are you SO interested in what people are saying in private? Of course we know the answer. Progressives want to live in a world where thoughts are criminal and where even a whim of a political enemy is subject to State scrutiny.

This is why it’s fair to call these fakers, as Will Tanner does, the Catamite Right. The acme of their aspiration is a job with a donor corporation as a perpetual sock-puppet. For these people there IS no America worth saving, only a culture-neutral social-ladder that must be climbed. Even catamites have the moral high-ground here.

Forget the Deficit Gap, it’s the Authenticity Gap

Fakeness was rarely a concern for our ancestors. Aside from a few prescient industrial revolution-era jeremiads most thinking on this topic didn’t arise until after the invention of mass media and mass advertisement. The Hippie Movement exuded buzz-words about “the Man” and his “big corporations” but as these black-soled degenerates morphed into the boomer elite their moral authority evaporated.

The revolt against inauthenticity gathered steam in 80s and reached an apogee with the Grunge Movement and the birth of the Internet but declined thereafter. With the restoration of the House of Bush we were told in a folksy drawl that mindless consumerism was the best defense against terrorism. Once the Supreme Court said money was speech a few years later it formalized the corruption of authenticity that we’d already known to be true.

The descent into fakeness could fill multiple monographs, so I won’t dwell on too many of the causes - such complex cultural phenomena are usually emergent anyway. It’s a relevant issue because it explains so much of Trump’s rise, the fall of major parties and the decline of trust of societal institutions. It’s also an important barometer for predicting what pitch will succeed with the voters going forward and which ones - no matter how much money is plowed into advertising - will flop. Unlike the Boomer generation that gobbled up mainstream slop, today’s hyper-online keyboard warriors are ruthlessly efficient at filtering out even the most blithely inauthentic media.

Thus no discussion of authenticity (or its paucity) is complete without mentioning the Feminization of institutions. Helen Andrews has written and spoken on this topic recently, as has John Carter. Feminized discourse thrives on inauthenticity. It is pro forma speech at its finest where each word is contrived to produce as little offense or controversy among the largest set of (powerful) people. It is the epitome of ceremonial politics where decisions are a foregone conclusion, decided by the powerful behind closed doors with a nod. Discussion is ritualized for the sake of optics. In Feminized discourse nothing is a surprise and all outcomes are fore-ordained.

This kabuki theatre is repeated from the smallest scales (work meetings, corporate townhalls) to the largest (the national political process) and it has permeated all of society. Have a conversation with a mainstream zoomer and you’ll feel like you just met with HR. We’ve seen it invade and then consume the Republican Party too - witness the perfunctory groveling over the group chat “offenses”.

Fake Rightists like Dillon and other neo-televangelists embody the Great Feminization. Their perpetual calls for turning the other cheek is either a low-IQ pastiche of Christianity (like Instawhores with “Romans 11:18” in their bio) or a cynical attempt at containment. Either way their emasculative hand-sitting (with enemies at the gate, and all) is a pretty lame strategy. To try and bully allies into conformity smacks of Feminization. All they had to do was say nothing.

It’s even worse for the Democrats though. Whether from those ensconced in Congress (Schumer, Pelosi, etc) or those still outside (Mamdami), there is no speech that is not entirely prevaricated, no statement that isn’t exempt from cant, no utterance or gesture that isn’t completely calculated for meretricious effect. They will denounce Trump for the most oblique and trifling sins in the same hour that they commit even greater sins themselves.

In fact, the fake group chat scandal (and the refusal by the New Right to take the bait) was brought into greater relief by an actually egregious scandal involving the Virginia Democrats’ candidate for Attorney-General, wherein he called for the murder of his opponents’ children. Note that he (and Deep State priestess Abigail Spanberger) are very likely to win. Jay Jones’ fake apology was precisely the penance required for this particular sin, thus an indulgence was offered and absolution granted. He’s performed the necessary ablutions so he’s no longer guilty in their eyes (if he ever was).

Such formal self-flagellation might have worked once but no one thinks that way anymore. This was the old media way of thinking, which was passive and operated in a vacuum as Auðmundr points out in his inaugural Substack essay. While there are still too many normies inhabiting this ecosystem to ignore, sufficient numbers have exited and broken the trance. Pro forma apologies are viewed not only as disingenuous, they are counter-signals to veracity and authenticity - a social media Mark of the Beast, if you will.

Humorously, that’s where the comparisons of the Left to the Late Medieval Church end. The latter at least had an epistemic worldview informed by reason - even if it was only used to count the number of angels on a pinhead. The Left, as we know, is informed by nothing.

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

At a certain point (reached long ago) the Left reached the bottom of the authenticity barrel where every statement must be discounted 100%. The Bismarckian adage about believing only those things that have been denied becomes uniformly true. This is because those on the Left (Democrats, Marxists, Progressives, Activists, Antifa) believe in nothing. Bennett’s Phylactery actually deals with this in their latest Substack post (here) Their consciences have been relentlessly cohobated by political alchemists into a state of perfect pliability, able to hold any position with the slightest propaganda effort. Contradictions are simply irrelevant to them, they are right because it feels right (at that time) to say whatever it is they said. It’s the apotheosis of subjectivity and the death of reason - the victory of wishful, ephemeral thinking over everything else. To quote John Carter, they are no longer sapient.

Take the myth of color blindness. Other than the true kool-aid-gulpers no one believes in it - certainly not Normies. Progressives might sound like they believe it. They might put on a good show to look and act like they believe it. But these are just dancing shadows of the mind - taking whatever contorted shape their Regime masters tell them. Ditto for sex differences. In fact the true conformists in this case are almost exclusively liberal women who hold to this fantasy precisely because repeating the ceremonial mantra is point. Any reason offered in “support” of an argument is a sufficient one. This is true a fortiori when the Left is defending something unjustifiable or illogical by definition like tolerance for child rape by foreigners or Gays for Palestine.

So here we are, at the end of the modern Party System, where the GOP is a warmed-over cadaver and the Democrats are just an organism whose purpose has been coopted by a foreign host - like those zombie ants. This is also the reason why gerrymandering has reappeared as an issue for both parties as they scramble to redraw the maps and mortgage whatever credibility they have left for a few more votes.

For the Left the credibility gap is irrelevant though. Just as their voters have no compunctions about Jay Jones’ desire to kill his opponents’ children (or the moral contradiction of the asymmetrical outrage in a role-reversal scenario) they will readily manipulate voter roles, throw away ballots, burn ballot boxes, harvest votes from the mentally incapacitated and infirm and manufacture election night surprises. They are morally superior, though. They’ve been told as much by their college professors, whose own moral superiority came self-proclaimed - a sort of pharisaical ouroboros, feeding itself by swallowing its own tail. It is perhaps understandable why the Dillons and Lindsays would rather take the easy way out and just proclaim their moral superiority - as if electoral victories will simply follow naturally from that.

The New Right doesn’t control enough NGOs or government departments or media outlets to make any of that happen even if they wanted to. It needs to win votes the old fashioned way, just on a slanted playing field. And the Fake Right wants us to play with blindfolds and straight-jackets. Thanks, we’ll pass.

This is also why the bluster from Blue State governors is simply hot air. Their capture of the court system isn’t sufficiently hermetic to allow them act with complete impunity. Thus their comments about precluding federal officers from enforcing the law in their realms are posturing for the next election. When that election comes they’ll gee their rhetoric back to the center, or at least cast a purple hue over it. The MSM will run cover for them just as it’s always done.

Sadly the Party system, even if in it’s Cerebral Palsy phase, can’t be eradicated as there’s too much money tied to the brands. As Yarvin said, “Republican” is just a label, but there’s a lot of money in that label. Thus the political game will become a cage match to the death since allowing the sanctimonious Fake Right and boomercons (who have no stake in anything save the paper-money bubble) to win means the same as allowing the Left to win.

Fighting the Culture War With Culture

There’s a big irony in much of the foregoing. For a generation we’ve been accused of being the aggressors in the Culture War, yet conservatives have almost zero influence on cultural institutions. Naturally it makes sense for the Left to accuse the Right of one more thing that it’s doing itself. But we’ve allowed them to perpetuate the lie that culture is Left-coded by nature. The images of the Bohemian painter, the Beatnik poet and the puffy-pantalooned director have all saturated our consciousness. Yet these are recent innovations. Conservatives can’t make art, they say, because they’re too busy banning gay books and censoring rappers. They forget to inform you that it was internet-inventor Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, who led this charge in the 80s. They omit the central role of the Great Feminization - emasculating and transifying video games and TV. And strangely, they also leave out the fact that art was a conservative undertaking for all of history until a variety of low-talent movements popped up around the time of Bolshevism.

Paralleling the history of art and politics is far beyond the scope of essay, however art and culture are extremely important if we are to win in the long run. Even the Brotards vote more on culture than they do on politics. They get their politics (and history) from culture. Building an entirely new ecosystem is thus the most critical aspect to winning the movement and replacing the stale detritus from the Republican Party. Besides, money might follow power, but power follows culture.

All of this means two things: (1) we must become culture creators; and (2) we must actively cross promote each other. Culture creation can take on many forms. I won’t even dunk on TikTok here because everyone (and every media) has their part to play. We’ve excelled at creating a diverse intellectual culture drawing on history and philosophy. Now it’s time to move that into the artistic phase. We used to have books, movies, TV and music that were Right-coded even if the creators were Leftists. For what it’s worth, Right-wing artistic culture isn’t Christian Rock - which looks and feels as artistically bereft as its secular counterparts (that’s on purpose, of course).

Leftists simply don’t understand that every story that’s worth telling has been told before… what they’re peddling simply aren’t stories, they’re just plangent recapitulations of someone’s miserable existence compressed into a lecture. No wonder the film/tv industry is losing money. A Right-wing artistic culture celebrates the timeless themes that inspired our ancestors to build the greatest civilizations ever. It tells the same stories that have been told a million times before, but in a contemporary context and in light of the current struggle against the stifling forces of Leftist conformity.

I’ve tried to start something along these lines with my novel The Toll of Fortune: An Indo-European Origin Saga, which will eventually become part of a longer series (hence the name “The Thirteen Fathers”). These novels will explore the genesis of Indo-European myths that have influenced all successor cultures and languages (including those no longer extant), covering issues relevant for us today like the conflict between the masculine and feminine, the adventurous and sedentary, the nature of ruling and its legitimacy, the ethics of genocide and most importantly the primacy of glory and legacy.

I’m far from alone in this quest either. Others like Hans Schantz have stepped up by aggregating and promoting “based” books. Passage Press also offers an outlet for based literature, though they’ve yet to move beyond the anthology stage6 and Imperium Press also publishes some fiction as well. The Manosphere abounds with other based authors and by simply canvassing the issues of Man’s World Magazine you’ll find many budding authors.

But we need more than that… much more. We need to build an ecosystem and that takes capital. As it stands right-wing billionaires (to the extent they actually exist) have offered almost nothing. There are rumors that Peter Thiel helped Passage Press get started but the rumored sum is piddly compared to the billions spent each year by mainstream media conglomerates. The page-to-production-to-screen pipeline has to be re-created (and reinvented). New loci of production need to be established to break the monopoly of Hollywood. This is a task for billionaires and there is ripe fruit hanging - it’s just not low hanging. The amount of capital to be invested is high, as is the level of risk. But the rewards aren’t just a massive share of the entertainment audience that’s been made permanently homeless, it’s also a chance to build a legacy as a savior of Western civilization.

Authenticity will come through culture, not through politics. The Republican Party might be a moribund carcass but America’s political vacuum means that the two party system will probably be around for a while. Like the work of Dr. Frankenstein, revivifying a dead political party can be both terrifying and gratifying. One thing is certain, only a pitch that reflects authentic beliefs, motivated only by a manifested desire to restore American power to glory, will succeed. This task will continue to be daunting, but have faith in one thing: no other political movement (Leftism or the Establishment Right) can aspire to authenticity. The future will be real.

If you’ve read this far I’d like to thank you. If you’d like to support the restoration of masculine literature consider reading my novel, now restocked on Amazon here.

It’s been just two days since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and the Left wasted no time in showing its true colors. The reels and posts of progressives cheering and celebrating the patent murder of a right-wing pro-free-speech advocate have been dissected and denounced by right-wing influencers in a stentorian eruption of anger. The mainstream media (relieved that the awkward conversation about Iryna Zarutzka’s equally cold-blooded murder has been eclipsed - for now) have piled on with their own dissimulation about Charlie: Charlie the homophobe, Charlie the racist, Charlie killed by one of his own. While some of the more prominent Leftist voices are being reprimanded for their sanguine schadenfreude, many on the Left still feel this is an actual victory for “their side.” It is not, and many of the reasons it is not will surprise you.

On X you’ll see the the Right expose Leftist callow- and callous-ness where the 24 hour news-cycle used to cover this outrage. You’d be forgiven for thinking that we are alone with our anger and rage in the war against this dehumanizing enemy. But you’d be wrong. Something else is happened off X (and the other echo-chamber BlueSky). A normie revolt is brewing against the Left among the least likely participants in the political arena.

@_hausofherIm very disappointed in them #charliekirk #democrat #liberal #conservative #politics

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If you’re like me you probably think that the Left either celebrates murder or merely issues pro forma lip service while latently agreeing with their more extreme co-partisans… and that’s more true than ever. But what we haven’t taken into account - what we NEED to take into account - is an army of centrists or apolitical “normies” who are finally waking up to what we’ve known all along: the Left is the unreasoning side of extremists.

@know_ledge_speaksRIP CHARLIE KIRK!! #viral #fyp #foryoupage #charliekirk #stoptheviolence😩

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The day after Kirk’s assassination my wife texted me. She doesn’t follow politics particularly closely, and uses different social media than me. So I was in for a bit of a shock when she started telling and showing me what was going on over at TikTok. Her timeline was being flooded - not by a chorus-line of Liberal dances macabres over Charlie’s murder - but by the opposite. Watch this:

@rosey.raeMore to come. Rest in Peace Charlie Kirk 🕊️

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Instead of the usual deluge of user confessions and fake word-of-mouth product endorsements it was videos of people - especially people of color - denouncing progressives, liberals and, wait for it, the Democrats for just about every crime of intolerance under the Sun. Initially I was extremely skeptical, after all TikTok is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Anything appearing therein must be viewed as propaganda in favor thereof. However after seeing many such videos I’m now convinced that users have gone off the deep end and shattered the TikTok algorithm (my wife purposely refrains from “liking” anything on her explorer page to avoid the curse of the algorithm’s filters).

@piffpetersonjeffrey starr on charlie kirk live

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Just think about it: TikTok’s (aka. the CCP’s) part in all this - if anything - should be to foment escalation and civil conflict. Yet reels are popping up denouncing Kirk’s assassination (okay, fine), denouncing the intolerance at hearing others’ opinions (that’s better), and denouncing the Left and the Democrats for normalizing this (FINALLY!).

@athomewithalexandriaRest in Peace Charlie Kirk 🕊️❤️#jesusisking #politics #revival

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Maybe the CCP is playing some advanced 5D, underwater, chess game here but I really don’t think so. The mood is too volatile for clever gambits to work. Besides it’s an easy play right now to simply let the algorithm enrage the masses and drive strife. Moreover, my wife’s timeline (or whatever it’s called on TikTok) is hardly a bastion of political posturing - so this isn’t just selection bias. Sasha Stone has just made a similar observation.

@kartelonair#fyp @Charlie Kirk #liberaltears #tiktok #demons #tiktok #sadeperkins #racism

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What’s even more incredible is that these voices coming out against the display of Leftist political violence represent the very constituencies that the Democrats consider their base. What’s amazing to me isn’t that a handful of influencers who “look like” left-leaning pols are speaking out against Charlie’s assassination… it’s that ANY of them are. Clearly our political compasses have been so warped by the echo-chamber that we’re failing to notice as True North starts shifting back to its original position. The Overton Window has stopped moving and momentum has shifted back.

@philip.martin10#fyp

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Normies, apoliticals, centrists and moderates are disgusted, angered and horrified. The uncensored unaliving of Kirk, hemorrhaging blood while simply attempting to engage in heated debate, has outraged an unexpected group of people in an unexpected direction. What seems to be outraging them most is the realization (yes, they are confessing to “just waking up” about this) that the Left and their Democratic Party sponsors stand for the proposition that disagreement will met with murder. Meanwhile the attempts to smear Charlie as a White Supremacist, homophobe, etc have all been instantly debunked simply by showing him do what he did best: engaging people in debate!

@jojotefrThis is my last political post. RIP Charlie Kirk, while I did not agree with your views on a lot of things, you still deserved to be heard and understood regardless of what you stood for. This is unacceptable behavior. #charliekirk #rip #liberal #quit #jojotefr

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Of course maybe if I hadn’t spent all my time on X this might not come as a surprise. But here we are:

@patriot.porch @patriot.porch ♬ original sound - Patriot Porch

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Now, a cynic might counter with any number of blackpills, not the least of which would be “containment”. Maybe TikTok’s evil CCP masters are simply stroking their Fu-Manchu mustaches and showing America’s less-political social media users this side of the reaction, to make the Left appear more moderate than it is. And if you’re on the hard right, dug in onX like a tick, that might make you feel validated. But to anyone else, especially the apolitical, that is manifestly not the reaction that will be elicited. Instead, for what I believe might be the first time, such users are seeing influencers use their clout to rebel against the dominant means of forming opinion.

@danielspeaksupRest Easy Charlie🇺🇸❤️ #Charliekirk #fyp

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Where before they were saturated with blue-haired they/thems waxing hysteric over dead-naming or fat-shaming, they’re now injecting an aural antidote directly into their brains. They’re seeing representatives of “oppressed” communities now talking like they’re NOT oppressed… and they’re pissed… pissed that discourse has been allowed to gravitate so languidly to the Left’s orbit that disagreement is now justification for murder. Moreover the posters making these videos are doing so against the prevailing norms of TikTok and with great risk to their own clout/reputation. They will lose followers, and they don’t care.

@darrylsmith4523#fyp #unity #maga #republicansoftiktok #trumpsupporters we MAKING. AMERICA. GREAT. AGAIN

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So, feel free to keep blackpilling, feel free to keep the exposing Leftist ghouls for celebrating murder, and feel free to pressure the Trump Administration to bring the full force of the law down on the perpetrating entities (Antifa, NGOs, universities) - I know I will be. But after you watch these videos you cannot say we are alone here. Even if you feel your worldview is sufficiently different from those posting these videos, you can’t claim that the Turning Point, that Charlie’s murder has instigated, will be undertaken by the Right alone. It will truly be a populist revolt.

@ba90655Never be silenced #charliekirk #usa #jesuslovesyou #fuckwhatyouthink

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Last week I had the honor to appear on Will Tanner’s podcast again on The American Tribune to discuss the (over) financialization of the American economy. You can listen to the interview at the link below:

American Tribune

You can also read our JOINT ESSAY on the same topic here: Financialization

Many years ago, there was an article in The Atlantic about the privatization of Social Security. This was during the height of Bush II’s reign, during which such free-market absolutist ideas were in vogue, and The Atlantic’s jeremiad was sounding the alarm. If Social Security were “privatized,” then no one would be able to gainsay the stock market ever again, it claimed In the mind of fin de siècle liberal commentators, politicians would be forced to refrain from censuring even the most sanguine of market antics so as not to rock the Social Security boat – after all who would want to get blamed for crashing the nation’s retirement savings? They feared an army of cheerleaders, plungers, and boosters would emerge from their anthills under Wall Street and Capitol Hill, throwing forth a chorus extolling every advantage of equity investing while turning a blind eye to scams and hustles.

Thank God that never came to pass.

All elite institutions have now adopted an attitude of approbatory bias towards any aspect of our financially saturated economic system. Take Elizabeth Warren. For all her lip service about fighting Wall Street (and the Democratic majorities during Biden’s reign), she took nary a single action to reduce the power of financial institutions. Hell, Congress still hasn’t passed an insider trading ban – something that should be a sine qua non of legislative accountability. Thus, we’ve arrived at the exact point of political paralysis that The Atlantic feared without firing a single shot at Social Security. Worse still, the current docility towards the purveyors of financialization has bipartisan support – if only latently.

While no sitting member of Congress will challenge the constant crescendo of (nominal) positive market returns, there’s an even more fundamental deal-with-the-devil that no member of the ruling class will condemn. It’s the one thing that unites Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump: interest rates must always be low.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: “Low interest rates are a good thing; they help borrowers and businesses, and thus bring economic growth.” Yet if there’s any one economic factor that has torpedoed America’s fortunes, it’s the persistence of the low interest rates that not only followed the Credit Crisis, but ultimately trace their origin to Federal Reserve machinations that have been ongoing since the mid-90s. That rate environment is a cancer on every institution (even cultural ones) that has metastasized into a malaise crushing our productivity, national interests, and technological progress. If there is one treatment for what ails us, it is this: interest rates must go up.

Even if we dismiss the barrage of howls from the self-interested, we’ll still hear the “average” person squeal: “What about my mortgage payments? What about my home value? What about my investments in the stock market? What about my credit card?”

These are valid arguments, and yet the arguments we will elaborate on are even stronger. These objections won’t be universal either. There will be many readers who might be ambivalent. They have no mortgage, credit card, or Robinhood account – they’ve been sidelined by the 21^st-century economy. These readers will be even more inclined to read what we’re about to write, and even more benefited by the economic change that will come from reversing decades of easy money policy

Money and credit are both manifestations of the same Platonic form: indebtedness. While debt obligations appear to have existed since the Mesolithic Period, their commoditization has developed alongside civilization since lending money at interest was seen as the flip side of generating returns from crop yields in ancient Sumer. More recently, we Americans have been debating interest rates and their “appropriate” levels since the early Republic. In fact, it became the main issue in American politics between 1870 and 1913 (the election of 1896 was devoted almost entirely to this issue).

Back then, it wasn’t interest rates per se that were the basis of the fight, as most consumers had no credit access other than promissory notes between friends, family, and perhaps some local, small merchants. Rather, in the late 19^th century, it was the money supply in the form of gold and silver that served as the basis of the fight. More gold and silver (from the rushes of South Africa, Alaska, California, and Nevada) meant more money circulating in the system, which meant lower interest rates that the market (i.e., banks) could charge.

The situation exploded again when Nixon unmoored the dollar from the price of gold in 1973, and our dollar finally became a fiat currency. The value of the now-fiat dollar now undulated with the vicissitudes of the global markets, but being backed by the taxation power of the biggest economy and secured by the most powerful military, those fluctuations weren’t as severe as they were for most other contemporary fiat currencies. Which still left the question of where to set interest rates.

Under the new system, the Federal Reserve would establish rates – rates that it would charge when it lent to banks. But some machinations were needed. Since the Fed’s job wasn’t to finance banks’ activities, it had to implement its interest rate policies by creating a lending window with a very short term – one night. This might seem inconsequential, but it wasn’t. That overnight rate sits at the foundation of the lending market: if you set an overnight rate at 10% financiers can calculate the rates for all other lending terms. By the time you get to your 30-year mortgage, it will be double that or more.

Paul Volcker did just that in the early 80s to quell inflation, which was raging at the time primarily because of two contributing factors: disproportionate reliance on foreign nations for commodities and Labor’s leverage over wages. After interest rates hit 15%-18%, a massive recession was triggered, finally crushing the inflation beast. But the war on inflation and interest rate fight it spawned had been traumatizing, and so the Reagan Administration and its cronies on Wall Street and in Big Business were determined never to let such a situation again occur.

To prevent such a recurrent crisis, they thought, the economy would need low interest rates indefinitely. Theoretically, this could be accomplished by addressing either of those factors. However, in reality, reducing reliance on foreign nations for commodities would adversely affect the defense industry (fewer fighter jets to fight the Commies) and its well-connected lobbyists, and so was precluded. Moreover, uncoupling our resource sector from foreign dependence would have meant a need for massive domestic capital investments rivaling those seen in the mid-Gilded Age. Without the political will to make such investments, it would fall to the private sector, which needed low interest rates.

Globalization was then conceived to offshore American jobs to Third World countries where wages were virtually zero, and environmental and labor protections were even lower. As a result, the unions would hemorrhage members, and American workers’ leverage at the bargaining table would vanish – taking care of wage inflation. The low-cost (and concomitant low-quality) goods that would flood our markets would then lower price inflation. The American worker might get poorer, but they’d be able to buy more plastic trinkets from Walmart for less…if they somehow kept a job while outsourcing demolished much of the sector that provided reasonably good jobs. Thus, America sold out its workers in terms of wages and plied them with bread (cheap goods) and circuses (reality TV and opioids). That was an intentional result of the globalization system, not an accidental outgrowth of it.

But this new social contract was a one-time gambit. What happens to the next generation when they fail to achieve the kinds of wage gains that their parents obtained?1

At inception, the new system’s relegation of American workers wasn’t front and center. Instead, the markets were captivated by the new dynamic of massive capital flows around the world, and that meant interest rates.

Now, at this point, the Third World manufacturers could have insisted that they get paid in their local currencies – since they have little use for dollars. But this would have been horribly unaccommodating to Wall Street financiers. Besides, few currencies were as stable as the dollar, so why mess with a good thing? Thus, foreign companies and governments suddenly needed a way to make use of their piles of US dollars, which generally meant repatriating them. Wall Street sniffed blood in the water, and was more than pleased to help.

They primarily did so by transmuting those offshore dollars into various domestic financial instruments, primarily USG-backed debt. Since there were so many of those dollars to exchange, our boys told them to just invest them in US Government obligations (Treasury Bills, Notes, and Bonds, as well as the debt of government-sponsored entities like Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac). This is where interest rates come in. Unlike when you go to the bank to beg for a loan, if you have everyone in the world wanting to buy your debt (i.e., loan you money), you can charge the lowest interest rate possible.

This didn’t make the US immune to financial crises, but as asset values fluctuated globally, financial intermediaries produced a host of new products to “deal” with this volatility. As could be expected, they did so for a tremendous price, and so, with the backing of the USG (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton), they became richer than ever. A career on Wall Street, even outside of the old white shoe firms like JP Morgan, became respectable. That trend of newfound respectability continued even after Black Monday fired a warning shot across the bow of financial stability. By the time Clinton fingered his way into office, Wall Street had firmly ingratiated itself among both ruling parties and convinced them to repeal Glass-Steagall.2

If transferring American industrial power to hostile regimes seems like a tough sell, enter the Wall Street salesmen. New “business news” networks were rolled out as the propaganda arm for financial capitalists eager to explain why we needed Globalization. This time, easy money would be paid for not by running our printers, but by forcing “former” enemies to buy our bonds. The political classes would benefit from having an inexhaustible supply of buyers for our debt – money that could fund wars on communism, poverty, terror, and discrimination indefinitely. In fact, the academy even invented a paradigm to give this swindle intellectual heft. They called it Modern Monetary Theory, which said borrowing doesn’t have to be repaid when you’re rich, and thus the Government should indulge its wildest fiscal fantasies on behalf of its donor or client classes.3 Financial gravity, we were told, no longer existed.

The largesse wasn’t even limited to the elites. With banks swimming in freely borrowed money, they could foist all kinds of credit products on consumers – even the ones who could least afford it… especially those ones. And when sober regulators demanded to know how they could absorb the defaults, the banks just muttered a few lines about “providing equal opportunities” and “expanding credit services to the marginalized” to the applause of the very same people who made their careers railing against Capitalism. In any event, rates were low that those “marginalized” people would surely be able to afford the payments.

The inundation of money structurally altered the incentives of Government. For Republicans, it was about rewarding their lobbyists in the defense and pharma industries; for Democrats, it was about expanding the bureaucracy and hiring thousands of incompetent partisans to fill its ranks.

This perverted the incentives even further. Now, Forever Wars were a good thing because… the defense industry. COVID got you down? No worries, $4 trillion to our favorite NGOs and unions ought to help. MMT means it’ll never have to be paid back anyway.

One group that both parties decided needed rewarding was Wall Street. So in 1999, Congress passed, and Bill Clinton signed, the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Now the portal to the world of financial demons had been permanently opened, and all the ghouls poured through. Investment banks had hitherto been required to invest with their partners’ money – limiting the systematic risks of such investments. Now they were free to merge with retail banks, use those banks’ enormous deposit base as leverage, and bet the farm – which they did.

The result was a litany of financial and economic problems, some exploding in our face like the 2008 Credit Crisis, others unfolding like a slow-motion train wreck (the durability crisis in consumer goods comes to mind). All of this was due to low interest rates.

Surely that’s the worst of it, right?

Not even close.

In the aftermath of the Credit Crisis, the Fed lowered its overnight rates but decided to also intervene directly in the market. They did everything they could to create artificial demand for debt, all while their enablers in Congress received their usual lobbying consideration. As public trust in all the foregoing institutions plummeted, the elites spelled out their grand theory: make borrowing costs lower for big corporations, and they will build factories and stores, hiring millions of people. The elites were so good at convincing other elites of this plan that some even started making bets on it. Nassim Taleb, of The Black Swan fame, even went so far as to predict that cataclysmic hyperinflation was about to engulf the US, and he declared how his hedge fund was going to profit from it.

Then nothing happened.

Nothing happened because instead of reinvesting those hundreds of billions of borrowed money (in the form of new bonds underwritten by Wall Street banks) those corporations “sat” on it. The banks simply piled it on their balance sheets so that auditors might overlook all the non-performing loans. Industrial companies, which were supposed to build new stores and hire staff with the largesse they received at the hands of US taxpayers, instead used it to buy back shares (raising executive compensation) and undertake M&As (thereby preventing future competition).

That nationwide 5G network we were supposed to have ten years ago thanks to the hundreds of billions borrowed by AT&T and Verizon? Nah, let the Chinese build it – we’ll use the money to finance a perennial regeneration of iPhones (each less impressive than the last).

Remember when Google said it was going to build a fiber optic cable network for everyone in America? Better to invest in infinite layers of DEI bureaucracy employing otherwise unemployable regime clients, most of them college trained and many of them foreign.

A moonshot for cancer? Better to buy out the pipelines of up-and-coming biotech companies with unproven treatments or focus on the drugs Americans really want, like Ozempic or Vicodin. Cue the Idiocracy scene about hair loss drugs and boner pills.

Perhaps the most tangential, yet impactful, consequence was in culture. Why make movies people want to see, or books they want to read? Instead, they’ve produced some of the most epic flops (both financially and critically) in the industry’s history. Who needs blockbuster profits when you can borrow at 1% to 2%!

With rates so low it’s easy to fudge the numbers in financial statements, and with Wall Street banks both employing the analysts who read those statements and the bankers who market their new bonds, what could go wrong?

***

If low interest rates are the disease then high interest rates are the cure, and like many cures they produce harmful side effects – effects that must be borne if we are to recover. There is no easy way out of this, which is why our endemically and irreversibly corrupt public officials will never agree to it. Nonetheless, it remains the least painful, and only, solution.

While high interest rates sound bad they will actually benefit huge segments of society, particularly the productive ones, in massive ways.

The Winners of High Interest Rates

The working class:

Members of the working class have been progressively squeezed out of the consumer loan markets, leaving only professional usurers - like the Shylocks at Visa - as their source of credit. They’ve also been priced out of the housing markets thanks to the hundred million foreigners that have crowded into our shores. What’s the worst that can happen? If higher rates induce massive defaults on their unsecured debt (like CCs, personal loans) the real losers are the lenders. If it’s secured debt (mortgages, car loans) that defaults then any mass realization attempt by lenders of their security will create a huge populist blowback. What politician is going to defend banks when hard-working Americans are having their houses foreclosed en masse? During the Depression, the answer was penny auctions, where foreclosed upon farms were sold back at auction to their owners for a red cent, as a mob showed up to ensure the bank couldn’t screw over yet another farmer. What might happen to BlackStone functionaries if they tried to reverse that this time? Nothing pleasant, though likely something much deserved.

As for the monied interests? They’ll take something of a haircut on usury-connected assets and so will suffer… for once. Shrug.

Savers:

Much of the reason for the proliferation of increasingly unstable and exotic financial products (especially after 2000) was the low-rate environment. Investors don’t like volatility, of course, but they like it more than low returns, and low rates mean low returns on fixed income assets. As rates go up, investors will reallocate their portfolios to bonds and savings, and this will re-incentivize savings instead of promoting 100% exposure to the endless casino of the stock market and similarly volatile, risky assets.

Critics might argue that if rates in America become excessively higher than elsewhere, it will trigger global capital flows that could prove catastrophic. Perhaps, but this is just all the more reason to deleverage ourselves. China will certainly have problems. As capital flows back to America and the dollar rises, Chinese knick-knacks will become more expensive, and manufacturers will look elsewhere. With the right incentives–such as a McKinley-style tariff regime–those industries can be slowly relocated here, where their biggest market is anyway. Of course, the usual suspects will spill gallons of ink in National Review and Foreign Affairs about how this will involve Government interference in the markets. Gasp. As if the US Government hadn’t already been interfering massively in the markets since the time of Roosevelt, pumping endless trillions into markets to keep the inflated Ponzi scheme going one more round, at an enormous cost to taxpayers. These bad-faith arguments by paid lobbyists and useful idiots can be dismissed. The only people “impoverished” by the return of productive industry and the vast infrastructure that supports it will be the “Expert” class and their hangers-on.

Capitalism:

Remember how all those libertarian free marketers used to squawk about the creative destruction potential of Capitalism? That died with ZIRP.4 Over a decade of artificially low interest rates has spawned entire industries of zombie companies, businesses that are addicted to continued, massive debt flows and terminally unprofitable. These companies are kept alive only by the ability to roll their old debt into new debt (paying Wall Street for the privilege, of course) and stagger on. Whether these companies are formerly cherished brands (Cracker Barrel) or woke behemoths (Bud Light parent Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV), there is only one fate for them under the natural laws of Capitalism, death – a law that’s been put in abeyance by low rates. Demoting shareholder profits to the back burner, these companies have prioritized the creation of vast DEI bureaucracies like HR and marketing, using endless reams of debt to fund their ideological insanity even as shareholder returns and annual profits fall off a cliff.

Only high interest rates can return the capitalistic forces of causation to their natural position; when debt is expensive, they have to either make money or die. Right now they’re doing neither, at great cost to America.

Movie Lovers:

Since about 2014, when Hollywood embraced DEI as an artistic M.O., the quality of entertainment has plummeted. Woke screenwriters have turned every show and movie into a parade of Bioleninist horrors out of a HP Lovecraft story, with the properly far-left message in support of dysgenic policies to boot. Butt turns out the average person doesn’t like being lectured to about how racist they are – who could have predicted that? The result has been staggering losses for the entertainment sector.

Still, the libertarian dimwits argue: if there’s a market for it then it must still be capitalism. Except that there isn’t a market for it, and the only reason these companies haven’t filed for bankruptcy is because most entertainment companies are capitalized as conglomerates – making it easy to hide losses on consolidated financial statements. Disney, Viacom, and Paramount all have multiple channels to insulate themselves from the bad decisions of their studio businesses. Combined with rock-bottom borrowing rates (for them, not you), this means they can ignore the fact their studios and production companies can’t produce a saleable hit. Instead, they blame their audiences for being whichever form of “-ist” seems most likely to deflect attention from their losses.

As a result, these companies are heavily leveraged. With debt levels up to their eyeballs and general bad business practices ruining the other parts of their conglomerates as well, higher rates will make them blink. Surely, they will cannibalize whatever other divisions they can before capitulating, but capitulate they will. They’ll have to. Or they’ll go broke, and free up that creative bandwidth for those who are willing to make proper use of it.

American culture used to be the envy of the world. Now even Americans don’t want it, and the imports made for other big markets like China have become so censored there’s no reason to call it ‘American’. While that is no longer the case, it can be so again. High rates make it impossible for even the large conglomerates to long survive by rolling over their debt, forcing them into either bankruptcy or restructuring that will almost certainly result in the termination of money-losing woke “creatives”. Thus, we might get good movies again…as we did during the high interest rate ‘80s.

The Losers:

Naturally there will be losers, and as already discussed, the monied interests, particularly those who are leveraged or deeply involved in speculation having to do with unproductive “assets” and sectors will be hit hard. We’re not sure that’s a problem, though. In fact there’s likely a great deal of people out there who might view it as a form of poetic justice.

Other “heroes” of the once-capitalist system will also be on the hook:

Private Equity:

We’ve already seen higher bills at the doctor’s office, at restaurants and even veterinarians. We’ve seen Americans’ houses foreclosed only to have them rented back at higher monthly payments. This is all because PE has been looking for places to invest the free money that they get preferential access to. Private equity firms (especially the big ones like Blackstone or Apollo) borrow tens of billions in the bond market which they (or funds subordinate to them, hiding their involvement) use to buy up medium sized businesses, or entire subdivisions of residential homes. They claim they can offer savings through that buzziest of buzzwords: “synergies”.

Of course, what really happens is cost cutting until the customer experience is on par with the Third World and higher prices in order to finance all the debt they’ve layered on the company. This has been a major issue in the medical industry, where hospitals and practices bought by PE funds have much worse patient outcomes and higher costs than those left outside their purview.

With higher rates, that entire business model becomes unprofitable. The debt is too expensive, and prospective investors can stick to established, safer assets (particularly savings) rather than speculating on how high costs can be raised in a given metropolitan HVAC or gastroenterology market.

Venture “Capitalists”:

The Tech Bros and their Venture Capitalist funders who brought us crypto scams, AI porn, mass plagiarism, and endless apps we don’t need will howl when the cheap capital gets cut, for it is their lifeblood.

Of course, many VCs will retort that their funding comes not from debt but from private investors like billionaires and Ivy League endowment funds. This is partly true. Of course, they also receive funding from banks, special purpose funds, and other financial entities – all of whom borrow heavily in the public debt markets and are chased into technology company speculation they don’t understand because of low interest rates on savings/fixed income; when the endowment or pension fund needs to earn 7% a year to pay out as it is supposed to, 2% rates on bonds force it into highly risky, speculative assets that might make up that return gap. So, when the funds and endowments forced into speculation by low rates no longer have a reason to do so, those who profit off their need to speculate will have fewer funding options with higher rates, and the pipeline of oversaturated tech investments will be attenuated.

Cue the complaints that this will “hurt innovation” and drive the “brightest and best” to China. But in what world is this true? All the supposed innovation has scarcely made life better for Americans despite a quarter-century of heavy sales pitches. The lowest-hanging fruit was plucked a decade ago, and any real innovations now will have to be real, not digital. Not to mention the deleterious social and cognitive effects that most social media and AI are having.

Venture Capital and Private Equity do have important corrective functions in a capitalist economy, and some do good work in funding the productive slivers of the economy, but the level of capital allocated to them on account of low interest rates has skewed our lives, on average, for the worse.

The same is equally true for Big Tech. How many products did Apple, Google or Facebook greenlight that were utterly divorced from their economic roles (let alone product channels)? Higher rates will also force CEOs to mark-to-market bad business investments that were justified only by cheap money, and focus, moving forward, on investments that are productive.

Blue States:

Last but most, those parts of the country that have put political patronage (cast as combating “discrimination”) before taxpayer interests for decades will have their day of reckoning.

Most Blue States, particularly the Detroit-style cities within them, are near bankruptcy anyway – supported only by the implicit belief that the Federal Government will have to bail them out.

Higher rates will cause the mother of all fiscal crises, as some will be forced to borrow at junk bond rates while others will have to make cuts to public spending. Many will have to do both just to keep the gears running. Higher rates might help them discount unfunded pension liabilities in some cases, but the immediate cash crisis that will attend the failure to roll old debt (or service new debt) will take center stage.

As the crisis rolls on and the scarcity of monetary resources becomes obvious, political patrons in office will be forced to choose between their Marxist unions/NGO allies and the voters. Since they will likely choose the former, we can expect explosive new political settlements in even the bluest states and counties. One thing is for certain, though: it will get a lot worse for them before it gets better. Municipal debt, state debt, corporate debt, and all the funds and endowments relying on it, are at risk. Blue states will be particularly hard hit given their high levels of indebtedness and low levels of sanity, fiscal or otherwise.

***

Interest rates have been charged throughout history, and public debt – when managed well and domestically owned – has been the backbone of a responsible government and society. Through Globalization, our Elites have shifted that responsibility for a time and fooled themselves into thinking that “everything is different” now. But that time is drawing to a close, and higher rates now will fix many issues – not the least of which is forestalling catastrophe in the offing. The time to choose is fast approaching.

This essay has been written together with Will Tanner, Co-Founder The American Tribune.

Will Tanner on X The American Tribune

Throughout every political outrage since COVID/George Floyd the Left has been ten steps ahead of the Right. Too many explanations have been offered to bother recounting, but they usually gravitate around a cluster of common bugbears: The Republicans are milquetoast conservatives, too endeared to the donor class to care; The Right can’t produce art so we are automatically at a disadvantage in the Culture War; The Left has “marched” through the institutions and captured them, leaving us with no soft power; The Right…

One explanation that rarely surfaces though is the role of billionaires (in which I’m including the even larger cohort of hecto-millionaires for simplicity… why split hairs?) in bank-rolling the activities of the Left. Perhaps the absence of blame is out of deference to men like Elon Musk or Donald Trump… billionaires who might arguably save Western Civilization. Or maybe it’s the sheer difference in bench strength: the Left has far more billionaires despite their protests that they’re the underdog.

Regardless of the reason there is no justification for the absence of Right-wing billionaires to fund our cause. There is more than enough money on the right to be funding every manner of cultural, societal and institutional opposition to everything from the Deep State to Hollywood. So where are the billionaires?

Secrecy and Short-listing

Well, there are billionaires on our side beyond Elon Musk. Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire has been a financial backer of the Manhattan Institute, the publisher of City Journal, and Peter Thiel is rumored to be connected to Passage Press. And let’s not forget… wait, that’s about it.

Not only is this short-list short, but it’s really not that impressive. Singer’s disclosed involvement with the Manhattan Institute is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He’s certainly helped to raise additional funds but that’s all the direct contributions we know of. As for Thiel, his involvement in Passage Press is only a rumor. While this rumor is plausible we simply don’t know the truth, and if his involvement is much more substantial then why the secrecy?

The reality is that there is billionaire involvement in Right-Wing endeavors but it is either small, limited or unnecessarily secretive. Trump is serving a miraculous and incredulous second term, yet the wealthiest potential benefactors of the grassroots are still too timid to un-anon themselves and open their wallets?

Whether it’s the timidity to disclose their participation or the small sums involved, it’s safe to say these billionaires simply don’t take enough risk when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are. This is obviously not a problem for the Left who glory in the irony of George Soros funding almost Marxist cause imaginable – to say nothing of the dozens of other high-profile billionaires and CEOs doing likewise. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Reid Hoffman. Ted Sarandos. Michael Bloomberg. Jeff Bezos. And these are only the most famous examples. There are literally dozens of others, most of whom you’ve never heard of because their meagre fortunes only sit in the low- to mid- ten figures.

Instrumentalism vs. Aspirationalism

One of the big problems is that billionaires on the Right aren’t accustomed to thinking of politics beyond its instrumentality. While Left-wing billionaires view private money as a means to alter the entire structure of society, Right-wing billionaires are stuck in the 1980s. They view politically motivated contributions as a means to a specific end. Thus, oil tycoons will call themselves Right-wing, vote for Bush and give money to John Cornyn or Ted Cruz with the goal of getting the House Committee on Drilling in National Parks to pass some arcane regulation that allows fracking on Mount Rushmore. Beyond that they simply don’t care. There’s no money in it for them. Their conservative credentials go no further than regulatory approval or executive fiat. If a project doesn’t bring them a higher internal rate-of-return then fuck it.

To be sure other Right-wing billionaires have contributed much to “the cause” in the form of electoral donations. This makes sense given that limit to their largesse seems to be instrumentalism. But even back in 2016 there were superannuated titans of industry donating to long-shot Donald Trump, without any real hope of seeing a “return” on their investments. Robert Mercer, Co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies (the most successful hedge fund in history) was a major donor. He’s potentially worth a mere $1B and donated $25 million in 2016. I can rhyme-off a few others but what’s the point? Either their net worth is similarly underwhelming, or their donations were. Despite plenty of money being available not one came close to Elon Musk’s financial efforts (directly and indirectly) – and he’s a former liberal.

At this point we’re supposed to accede to the neocon/libertarian argument that our billionaires are “true” capitalists and that blah, blah, blah. Sure, but it’s 2025 now. No need to believe that claptrap and still call yourself Right-wing. If the limit of your creed is simple return on investment, then at best that makes you a politically homeless believer in both-sidism. At worst you’re enabling the Globalist takeover and emaciation of our economy.

Part of the problem is that the billionaires who tend to the Right are generally boomercons. They made their money in legacy industries. The Left’s roster of billionaire contributors is skewed heavily to technology, hedge funds or culture. This puts them at an instant advantage – not necessarily because the amounts of their fortunes are larger, but because they are much more in tune with the zeitgeist.

Having a mega-donor base that’s almost exclusively boomers means not just tone-deafness to the changing reality, but also defeatism. As boomers they fail to comprehend what’s at stake. These are still people that still read National Review and think we should stop everything “until we settle this whole abortion thing.” Aside from the issue of their advanced age, they still think that George Floyd, etc, is just a temporary blip in the historiographer’s radar and if we just wait long enough the grandfather clock in the nursery will magically reset to 1996. We’ll all be able to go back to arguing about violence in cartoons and the correct spelling of “potatoe”. Meanwhile progressives and Marxists have hoovered up every inch of the Elite and left us in the dust.

There’s Only Ever Been One War, and It’s the Culture War

The current movement on the Right is so far beyond them, and appreciates so much more clearly what is at stake, that it’s hard to get their attention, let alone their credulity. We’re talking about killing the oil embargo terrorists, while they’re talking about switching to cars with better mileage. The generational phase shift couldn’t be any larger.

Perhaps in the final analysis the triumphalist malaise that infects their minds really just comes down to creative thinking. The Left realized a long time ago that only by controlling the institutions can you build a utopia. They understood that the public – that is the citizens of the republic – would never countenance their program of deprivation and systematic leveling. They understood that to achieve real and lasting power they needed to bypass the democratic process and forge a new path.

After Goldwater’s defeat the Right abandoned the long march of winning hearts-and-minds and decided to focus on near terms wins. This was based on the backwards assumption by that the working class would remain captive to the Unions and thus never be a natural ally in the coming culture wars. Like a modern-day CEO worried about how next quarter will look to analysts, we’ve seen our stock rise and then fall and now they’ve cut our credit rating.

The Right-wing billionaire thinks of how many new F-35s his $10 million donation to Lindsay Graham will buy him, but doesn’t see the Left spending far less and reaping far more. A perfect example of this is the Climate Action 100+ lobby group that has bullied the largest (private) fund managers in the world to support every regressive scheme from ESG to DEI.[1]

Who or what is Climate Action 100+? Well, they’re a lobbying group that managed to takeover the board of directors of Exxon – one of the biggest oil majors in the world. Then they got them to legally commit to not producing oil, even though that’s, well, their main fucking business.

Forget for a moment this is clear breach of fiduciary duty and corporate statutes – that’s legal nonsense for liberal judges to sort out anyway. The real crime here is that Climate Action 100+, with a few small ($3-5 million) donations from men like Soros, Bezos, etc, were able to pressure the world’s largest asset manager (BlackRock) into replacing enough of the board of Exxon that it committed to zero emissions.[2]

Just think about that. For the low, one-time payment of $3 million dollars you can snuff out oil production of one of the biggest global producers (not to mention to gravy train of “offset” investments that will benefit other far left causes), drive up the price of energy, reduce standards of living, impoverish the working classes, eliminate the middle class, and make the world safe for corporate oligarchy and technocracy. Not a bad return.

Or, think of Soros’ influence on the quality of life (crime, property values, livability) in American cities. His henchmen figured out that as no one votes in District Attorney elections, and all it would take would be a small investment per city ($1 million in some cases) to elect a patsy of their persuasion. San Francisco (my former hometown) was the textbook case. Barely 10,000 people vote for D.A., so dropping $1 million in campaign spending clinched the win. They then parachuted in an unreconstructed Marxist, Cheesa Boudin (the son of convicted murderers), to oversee the destruction of the city. You couldn’t pull a better plot from a 60s superhero serial hack-book if you tried. Sure enough, one by one, America’s cities fell to far leftist D.A.s who stopped prosecuting crimes, gave prolific indulgences to hardened criminals and cried celluloid crocodile tears for every innocent who paid the price.

Troy, Yet Upon His Basis

In both cases Left-wing billionaires have publicly and openly out-bought, out-thought and out-fought a gaggle of octogenarians who they continue to denounce as the real oligarchy that controls the world! Has their victory simply been because they are better marketers than us?

No. Not even fucking close. As Ulysses’ perorated the Greeks, “Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.” They’ve won because almost no one on the Right with money has even begun to fight back. They’re too concerned about how bean-counters will view their investments and how regulators will rule on their projects. If their awareness was any smaller their heads would implode to the size of pea. These are men whose aspirations are as inspiring as a cadaver’s final flatulence

It’s a miracle that Musk wasn’t too fussed about losing billions on Twitter just to maintain free speech, and that’s perhaps all we can ask of him. As for other Right-wing billionaires and hector-millionaires, all I can do is draw your attention back forty years to something called a “commercial” wherein an old lady was once quoted, decrying this pithy demand from her local fast-food joint: “Where’s the beef?!”

[1] The public fund managers needed no bullying. They were at the front of the pack attempting to destroy shareholder and economic value.

[2] In fairness BlackRock at least had the brains to be, initially, reluctant to participate in the scheme. Other mega-asset managers joined up without complaint.

Foreign observers might have been surprised to see a restoration of the very regime that has contributed so much to Canada’s decline, but Canadians and anyone who knows Canada were not. Surely the Conservative Party’s weak-kneed leadership hurt them, but there is effectively no difference between the two parties. Both parties spent the campaign making promises that are impossible to keep, while broadcasting an anodyne mantra of hollow Canadian symbolism. Every party in Canada represents the same globalist status quo and policy slate that infects all Western “democracies.”

Even if the “Conservatives” had won there would have been no significant policy shift. The Federal government would go on being the biggest employer in the land, third world immigrants would continue to get waved-in by the millions, and suppression of speech and thought would continue unabated with the support of all Elite institutions.

The virile instinct in Canada has all but atrophied at the hand of the nagging classes of harridans and “nice lady” conservatives, hen-pecking any errant man into submission with the threat of ostracism. Politicians of every stripe pay homage to the universal Den Mother and her trans/refugee handmaidens. Yet the post-national utopia (of which Canada is a textbook case) is a construct of anti-reality that cannot withstand the forces of causation. So how does Canada persist in this state?

The short answer is that Canada’s (diminishing) prosperity is still underwritten by American generosity – namely the asymmetric advantage the former has in trade and services. The Canadian government can borrow at lower rates than the biggest economy in the world because of preferential access to its capital markets. It can defer military expenditures indefinitely because of US security guarantees. It has a free and permanent put option to sell (many of) its wares to Americans while applying excise taxes on them in return. It is, in effect, a client that consumes the largesse of its benefactor while doing every in its power to thwart its patron’s revival.

Canada is the new Cold War Cuba – a vanguard of gay-race communism at America’s doorstep, showing us a bleak future where the surveillance state maintains the illusion of harmony and prosperity through enforced ignorance. Even modest dissent is cast as extremism and snuffed out with Minority Report-level interference. Meanwhile hordes of the poorest and least assimilable are transplanted to form a permanent client class for the Elites, and provide them with unlimited slave-like labor.

Canada’s example is not unique, it is merely the most successful case and the closest to our doorstep. If Canada is a model to the world of the modern globohomo Uber-State then the maintenance of this illusion, along with the belief in its natural ability to persist, is a monument to the entire progressive enterprise of dehumanization, atomization and State control. For this there is but one cure.

Canada Delenda Est… Canada must be destroyed.

A few qualifications are in order. I am, in fact, both a Canadian citizen and an American citizen and spend significant amounts of time in both countries. Moreover, my invocation of the Catonian philippic is not a call for the actual physical or geographical destruction or dismemberment of the country. No need to plow the land with salt: the invective is metaphorical. Canada’s status as paragon of globalist order must be toppled and the false light that emanates therefrom extinguished. This should be a top priority for the Trump Administration not simply pour encourager les autres but also to send a strong counter-signal: causation is still alive and well.

The foregoing Canadian election shows that regime change is unlikely to occur natively. There are two contributing factors, one cultural one economic, and I have already alluded to them. The cultural revolt needed to overthrow the status quo is a latent force in Canada. We caught of glimpse of such anger with the COVID trucker tevolt. It suffers from a “you first” conundrum (called the Assurance Game in game theory – a sort of inverse Prisoner’s Dilemma) whereby no party wishes to oppose the dominant power without assurances of collective action. Things will have to get a lot worse before Canadians join the fray against tyranny.

But aren’t things already bad? Haven’t we witnessed a deterioration of civic life in the wake of COVID and unlimited immigration? Haven’t home prices already reached escape velocity already? Aren’t Canada’s urban centers already magnets for international organized crime, protected by Liberal politicians and their ethnic enclaves?

The answer is yes, but not for everyone. Boomers still sustain their plush existence – free from the effects of their disastrous embrace of multiculturalism. Favored ethnic client-groups are maintained in a state of “contentment” through the division of spoils to their leaders. The government payroll – the ultimate Rube Goldberg Machine – churns out voters for the Elites (often called the Laurentians) while it transfers huge portions of its income tax to the Provinces in order to pay for the biggest ponzi scheme of all: “free” healthcare.

Which brings us to the second factor, despite a higher Debt-to-GDP ratio and a decade of stagnant per capita GDP growth, interest rates on Canadian government bonds are still lower than their US counterparts – something that, as a bond trader, beggars belief. Consumer debt levels are very high while Canadian industries struggle under the weight of regulation and taxation. In short, Canada’s economy is ripe for falling. What is advertised as a bulwark of democracy is merely a Potemkin village of progressive values, ready to topple like the facades of a Hollywood ghost-town in the wind. Making it fall should be one of the aims of the Trump Administration.

Canada’s position is precarious. Since nothing grows in Canada for 7 months of the year it relies on the US for food, despite having a variety of import tariffs on its own agricultural products. It relies on US capital markets to finance its corporations but prohibits its own banks from US ownership. The US is its biggest trading partner, but the reverse isn’t true. It’s manufacturing sector is almost completely dependent on the trade in automobiles – an arrangement that was established decades ago when the Big Three decided to arbitrage their healthcare liabilities by shipping plant jobs north.

While I would bet that President Trump will strike a deal rather than prolong any hostilities, there are many things that his government could do to bring the Canadian Elites to a reckoning. Make no mistake, the Democrats and other pawns of the globalist movement will fight him tooth and nail. They understand the stakes. If Canada can no longer pay for its massive welfare state and bloated civil service then the entire enterprise will waste away and the world will begin to see that such regimes are not sustainable.

What should Trump do?

Despite being sold on free trade as far back as 1988 there is no such thing in Canada. Any Canadian who has committed the cardinal sin of ordering consumer goods online from America knows this. The government applies an excise tax of around 30% to your package. This means that when the delivery gets to your door your package is held hostage until you pony-up money to release it from customs. No money, no package.

The “Free Trade Agreement” of 1988 really only covered trade in autos and manufactured parts. Since those have enormous capital costs the impact on GDP is huge and optically this makes “Free Trade” look like a huge bonus, if you’re an economist. As for the rest of the economy, there’s little reciprocity – agricultural goods like eggs (and many others) are subject to enormous import tariffs. Instead Canada has a Stalinist marketing-board system that set quotas and severely punishes producers who disobey. This system is in place to protect special interests in certain Provinces that would otherwise consider separating from the Federation.

Reciprocal trade is stymied in other ways through the Investment Canada Act. It prohibits US (and all foreign) investors from owning a controlling stake in industries like financial services, telecom and media. Defenders of this system recently argued that Canada does not prohibit foreign banks from operating but this is a specious argument. Any bank that is attempting to enter a foreign market does so by purchasing a local bank in the target jurisdiction and growing it. In fact that is precisely what Canadian banks did in the US with TD BankNorth and BMO Harris Bank. American banks are not permitted to do likewise in Canada. Ditto for Telecom and media companies.

The result for Canadians is a saturated domestic market with almost no room for growth and where competition is non-existent. It’s comical that the Elites (who, of course, are at the top of the banking, telecom and media industries) fear reciprocity as the “end of world”. Non protected industries like retail have survived and thrived in spite of having to compete with US companies. When Home Depot moved in Canadians did not see the disappearance of Canadian Tire, while both Rona and Home Hardware continue to exist as well.

Trump should begin by imposing fully reciprocal tariffs and competition laws and apply them retroactively. If Canada won’t open its banking sector to US banks then the US should penalize Canadian banks that control American ones. I’d recommend this level of reciprocity for all nations, not just Canada. The Trump Administration could easily lever any of the financial regulatory agencies to apply pressure, like the OCC, FTC, SEC and CFTC. Canadian banks have recently been investigated for money laundering in connection with foreign (read Indian and Chinese) organized crime and this could be an excellent fulcrum for exerting leverage. Simply denying or delaying USD clearing would bring them to their knees in seconds. Alternately, applying massive fines on account of the competitive asymmetry would force them to pay up before they can forum-shop for a Democratic judge to issue a nationwide injunction.

The same logic can be applied to Canada’s protected telecom and media companies. Canadian television and movies (with a few exceptions) are slop, suitable only for nursing homes or loud dental offices. While foreign markets will buy British or occasionally European shows, Canada’s writing and acting talent absconded to Hollywood, leaving only the dregs to produce media that no one will buy. Nonetheless the government’s Canadian content rules (along with the Investment Canada Act) ensure there is maximal employment in an industry that wouldn’t exist without State support. The FCC could make short work of this.

The most drastic option for the Trump Administration is to close the border. This has to be done with a real pretext. However, with the amount of fentanyl crossing the border – and given how porous the border is – this isn’t a high threshold to pass. The odds that illegals or terrorists are not crossing into the US on any given day is low. Homeland Security could easily find some infractions and use them to justify a complete shutdown. Even if a Democratic judge tried to issue a nationwide injunction the Administration should refuse enforcement as it would be quickly rejected on appeal.

The border wouldn’t need to be closed for a long period of time – that would just invite blowback. Instead the border can be closed for 24-hour periods. This can be done iteratively until it creates such a disruption in the regular flow of commerce and tourism so as to permanently restructure economic expectations. American businesses will quickly realize it is not worth the headache of doing business in Canada and will repatriate operations. Canadians will realize if they want to visit a non-frozen part of the world they will have to concede to US demands.

Of course there will be blowback even for short disruptions from Border State politicians – in the pay of corporate interests – who will call for trade to take precedence over American security and long-term prosperity. Ditto for tourist industries reliant on Snowbird travel. These can be easily dismissed by the Administration by calling for America First and “People, not profits.” Yes, irony is delicious.

Lastly, the Administration can sic its agencies on Canadian companies doing business in America, targeting them with regulatory scrutiny or worse. Stable planning is the sine qua non of any firm. Both of these proposals have the advantage of creating precipitous incentives by inducing financial and operational volatility for Canadian businesses. They will lean on their government to strike a deal without hesitation. Remove but stability and, hark, what accord follows.

The goal of the aforementioned policies is to induce a financial and fiscal crisis in Canada and bankrupt the government and Elite institutions. Currently the interest rates on Canadian government bonds are actually less than America’s despite having a higher (current and historical) debt-to-GDP ratio. While this smacks of market manipulation (they wouldn’t… would they?), Canada’s economy and financial sector are on thin ice. Create a liquidity crisis for their banks and the government will have to bail them out, causing rates to rise, defaults to soar, and hens to come home to roost.

Such a financial crisis would not only induce a fiscal crisis for the government but if allowed to persist over several months it would tear apart the fabric of the country itself. This is because Canada has a State-funded healthcare system where the responsibility to pay for it falls to the Provinces. The Provinces cannot carry such an engorged albatross around their neck so they perpetually rely on the Federal government for transfers. When this gravy train ends the entire system will collapse. This nearly happened in the mid 1990s. A severe recession forced the over-levered Federal government to curtail Provincial transfers. Quebec nearly separated and the Western Provinces also engaged in a revolt of their own. Both sides were eventually placated as commodity prices rose in the late 1990s and Federal tax receipts restored the division of spoils. There’s every reason to believe the state of the country is more precarious now and even a slight push might have the desired effect of causing open (non-violent) rebellion among the Provinces.

A fiscal/financial crisis will either be resolved quickly by concession to American demands, or it could take on a life of its own that will only be to Canada’s detriment. While the Laurentian Elites cower in their overpriced enclaves, they will have an uncontainable mutiny on their hands. Unable to fund their ethnic patronage networks, the Elites will be undone and patience among real Canadians will finally reach its long-awaited terminus. The Elites are NOT prepared to counter this level of widespread public outrage. They have no game plan and will make rash judgments that will further alienate them.

This agenda will have its push-back. Canadian banks might try to go to court to enjoin Executive agencies from applying fines or reciprocal competition, but pursuing litigation is lengthy and costly. Such an approach will only lengthen the pain, while allowing the Administration in DC to generate public support in favor of US jobs and fair treatment of US companies. Currently most Americans don’t give a second thought to Canada (and most likely can’t find it on a map) so the likelihood they would come out swinging on behalf of Canuck financial institutions is laughable. Likewise the Democrats, understanding what’s at stake in taking down a neighboring globalist regime, might attempt their own campaign in support of Canada. But they are already so busy protecting criminals nationwide, would they choose to overextend themselves on behalf of Canada’s big banks? Moreover, if the Administration’s trump card is “all Canada has to do is treat us fairly” it’s hard to imagine the Democrats being successful.

Toppling Canada’s anti-Western regime will push the thin edge of the wedge through the door. It will show that governments in support of multiculturalist self-destruction, foreign slave-labor, bloated bureaucracy and regulation, and other perversions of the natural order cannot last. The money has run out. China’s plan of armchair hegemony has been exposed. The Trump Administration, through a concerted and well-conceived plan, could bring reality (and causation) back to the Northern Hemisphere, and signal the same to the world.

The American Tribune

The Yamnaya and the Foundation of Western Civilization with AJR Klopp

In this episode, Will and former bond salesman turned historical fiction author AJR Klopp discuss the Indo-European conquest of what became the West, with a focus on the unique characteristics of the…

Listen now

a year ago · 2 likes · The American Tribune

Last week I had a chance to speak with Will Tanner who runs The American Tribune to discuss the contribution of the Yamnaya Culture and the Indo-Europeans more generally to the founding of Western Civilization.

For 90 minutes we discuss such topics as:

• Who were the Indo-Europeans, were they different from the Aryans?

  • Where did they originate?

  • When they called themselves free men, whom was that in contrast too?

• What were their unique cultural attributes? What were their contributions to pastoralism, militarism, and the mannerbund-led conquest? Was there more than that?

  • Where does the chariot come into play with this? That is a feature of the pop culture image of them, but to what extent is it accurate?

  • You mentioned private property, what are your thoughts on their contributions thereon?

  • Were the mannerbund/koryos traders, raiders or conquerors?

• Where did they conquer? Was this from Ireland to India? Over what time period was this happening?

  • What role did the search of tin and copper play?

• What sort of early European world did they find as they conquered? Was it a hellish landscape like Catalhoyuk or as the longhouse you portray in your book?

  • To what degree were Neolithic societies matriarchal or patriarchal? How did this contrast with them?

• Why were they more successful in creating worlds that were built around their excellence-oriented hierarchy, how did this vary across their domain of influence?

• Did the Yamnaya survive the Bronze Age collapse, and how?

• Did they live on anywhere into modernity?

We also spent some time discussing how Indo-European mythologies influenced the Classical world and how that plays into my novel, The Toll of Fortune (amazon), as well as how Yamnaya archetypes of rulership fed into our notions of monarchy and legitimate authority of rulers.

Read more of The American Tribune below:

The American Tribune

The American Tribune Substack: Covering the Stories the Mainstream Media Won't

You can find Will on Twitter/X at: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1

And you can find me at: https://x.com/ThirteenFathers

A near-dead survivor, from a warband of initiates, limps back to the Great Tent, torn from head to toe. The wisest elder, goes white with fear - the cursed race of the Gods’ First Born children has re-emerged from their frigid tomb to reclaim a world that was once theirs.

Recruiting an outsider named Wolf, the warband regroups and sets out on a doomed passage to the lair of the preternatural hominids who massacred their kin. Wolf and his men rush against time and fate to solve the riddle of their doom and confront primordial demons that never died - only to be thwarted by the enervating seduction of the long-house and its Maven.

They believe their only hope lies in wielding a divine weapon of the ‘Stony Skies’ - the nature of which is as impenetrable to them as the will of their Gods.

THE TOLL OF FORTUNE is an historical retelling of one of the most foundational myths of Indo-European culture: mankind’s attempt to quell the wrath of Chaos. The narrative sweeps across the Neolithic and Copper Age from the Don River to the Danube, and far beyond, invoking the primal rhythms of daily life of the first Indo-European people - cultural and genetic ancestors to nearly half the world’s population. The doomed quest brings us face-to-face with our ancestors in a way that’s both alarmingly familiar and deeply alien.

A PIONEER IN THE GENRE OF PRE-HISTORICAL FICTION, A.J.R.Klopp treads the marches of human memory where historical reality yields to the wisdom and imagination of ancient peoples. It’s evocative style takes the reader to a time when heroes were made, not born; when literature, high fantasy and history were mutually reinforcing; and when readers turned each page with the same excitement as our ancestors listened to the reciting of epic poetry around the fire.

THE TOLL OF FORTUNE is the first book to be published in A.J.R.Klopp’s series The Thirteen Fathers a sequence of stories examining the genesis of myth and its historical origins in Indo-European culture.

The flames aren't even close to contained but what is quickly becoming apparent is the scale of the economic losses. Not only is it pricey LA real estate that's burned, but it's Pacific Palisades... is one of the most expensive zipcodes in the country. A quick look at Zillow shows how expensive these homes are. This is not your average California wildfire, nor your average neighborhood.

LA authorities are saying that at least 10,000 structures have been destroyed so far. Examining the average prices in the neighborhoods affected give a lower estimate of the damages. Naturally the banks have been on top of it. JP Morgan first said claims could reach $10B but quickly revised that to $20B the next day. These are just numbers. What do they mean? Putting this in context:

• The Dixie Fire (largest in CA history), that bankrupted California utility PG&E, caused ~$14.5B.

• Hurricane Katrina caused about ~$41B in insured claims.

So we're already halfway to Katrina and this is just the beginning. Why? The fires are not nearly contained, arson is suspected, water reservoirs are low or non-existent and hydrant pressure is nil, and what’s to stop new fires from forming.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE: AccuWeather (FWIW) is now estimating damage at $150B. Ha.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE II (2/14/25): Now estimating $30B for insurers and $200B in damage.

But it gets much, much worse.

First a little primer on California’s insurance market.

Between 2017 and 2020 there were several major fires, mostly in the north. The problem is that the elite-funded NGOs effectively write policy for the state. Environmental regulations have been rewritten and gamed for their benefit. They make it virtually impossible for PG&E (the utility company in NorCal) to groom forest floors where, after wet years, massive amounts of detritus has grown and dried out - this is the fuel of wildfires as it catalyzes burning of high-branched trees. Without clearing the undergrowth massive fires are destined to happen, and be much more costly. But the environmentalist lobby cannot be gainsaid in Sacramento, so they willfully allow this to happen (I’m sure there’s no desire to create a self-fulfilling prophesy around their Climate Catastrophe incantations).

More, and costlier, fires proliferated. Insurers responded by charging higher and higher premia, and unscrupulous state politicians responded by capping rates. Insurers then stopped writing policies. The state then decreed insurers couldn’t pick and choose who and what to insure. So the insurers simply picked up their bags and left the state. Brinksmanship without foresight is suicide.

This forced the State of California to "reform" it's insurance market. Basically the state created a special fund. The insurers would each contribute to the pot. Claims would be paid out from that pot. And if claims exceeded the cash in the pot, insurers will eat the first billion of that shortfall. Right now there’s a hilarious two-hundred million in the pot!

All (National) Politics is Local

The elephant in the room is demographics. The toasted zipcode not only leans heavily Democratic, but given that this is celebrity ground-zero, it’s gotta account for some serious fundraising cash. State and Federal politicians will be under tremendous pressure to provide taxpayer relief to millionaires and celebrities without making it look like they’re providing taxpayer relief to millionaires and celebrities.

That task will be made even more difficult after thousands regular Angelenos find out that:

1. their claims will get denied,

2. they're underinsured,

3. rebuilding costs far exceed paid claims, and best of all

4. California environmental regulations will cause years of delays before construction.

Under the Biden Administration this wouldn’t have been a problem. President Depends would just shart a few unaudited billions from the Treasury and the bad optics of subsidizing millionaires would be glossed over with grants to trans infants and NGOs. Now they are shit-outta-luck. They may try to play the populist card but that could easily backfire as most of the drivers of points 1 through 4 are the direct result of state policy, not the Feds. Weasel-in-Chief Newsom has his work cut out for him.

And then there’s the issue of finances.

Enter the Bond Markets

First, claims are going to roll in and the insurers will need to start liquidating assets to satisfy those claims. That sounds scary, but not necessarily. They can probably punt on raising the money and avoid a fire sale. What’s more worrisome is if the size of claims becomes big enough that it threatens the financial health of the insurers, and their reinsurers (the companies that insure insurance companies).

A plausible scenario could go like this. Claims exceed certain a threshold, the stock market sells off the affected insurer while the bond markets do the same. Now, insurance companies don’t really care about the stock market - it’s a lottery for the rich. Almost all companies are financed through the debt markets like the corporate bond market. I was a corporate bond trader (at BlackRock and then at a hedge fund) for many years. Insurance companies are constantly borrowing money from the bond market and repaying it. However if claims become less manageable their ability to pay them decreases, and their cost of borrowing rises. Slowly at first, then (when investors wake up) quickly.

Don’t think an insurer can go tits-up? Go read about AIG during the credit crisis.1 What’s more, insurance companies are required, for the most part, to be staid and stolid blue-chip companies. Think button-down shirts and dour-faced adjusters. They’re (mostly) required to have high credit ratings and invest in other A-rated bonds. When they have to divest things can get nasty. But they may be the lucky ones.

It’s the State of California that will likely be on the hook for billions (if not tens of billions). It will need to finance this in the municipal bond market which is already unimpressed with the state's finances. Ratings agencies are already on high alert. And the smart money (ie. hedge funds) will soon be circling - that's how Soros broke the Bank of England.

And beware unintended consequences...

Mercury's equity is way down but it's a small fry. So far the big boys are only down slightly (not good) and their bond spreads up slightly (also, not good).

But lest we forget, the Panic of 1907 was partly created by another California fire, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, as British insurers repatriated gold from NY banks to pay out claims.

And as for the future of insurance in California... given the lawless condition of the state and the likelihood of arson and looting... say goodbye to that too.

The tedious controversy over when George R. R. Martin’s next iteration of A Song of Ice and Fire will be released meowed to life the other day as it was reported that the hirsute author might never finish his series. A collective yawn went up to heaven from more than just his fans. Martin’s delay at completing his signature series has been a well-known feature of his writing dating back to the 1990s, that his followers excuse by either telling us how busy he (is counting his millions) or that it’s just a case of overachiever perfectionism.

No serious reader of fiction or fantasy buys this. Martin’s corpus is already a bloated saga still accruing characters and plot lines like a tractor wheel run amok through a garbage dump. What started out as a crisp tale of intrigue, forbidden romance and high politics devolved decades ago in to uneditable slop, bereft of narrative momentum. Thankfully for Martin (and his bank account) D.B. Weiss and David Benioff came to the rescue, resuscitating the swelling monstrosity with A-list British acting talent and top-notch direction from HBO’s Golden Age. It is no small irony that once the showrunners had trimmed the fat, and ran out of narratigve steam the show imploded like a jellyfish on the beach.

Martin’s writing has lately been criticized by thinkers on the Right for its postmodernism and lack of traditional heroic tropes. Naturally it’s been praised on the Left for precisely the same qualities. Martin’s world is a place where men are craven, greedy, lustful or cruel. Even the strongest among them, the hapless Starks, fail due to an implausible lack of guile (which is implicitly explained away as the fault of having too much honor). The only men who seem capable of successfully pursuing ‘the good’ are eunuchs and imps. The women, on the other hand, are resolute in conviction, capable of surviving outlandish odds, and abnormally strong with stomachs of steel. Even the really evil female leads receive the author’s approbation for their decisiveness and the ability to follow through in killing their enemies.

Of course none of this makes for boring story-telling or characters. In fact a whole new generation of writers have become inured to the blossoming cottage industry of “morally grey” characters, as if they were the first to invent the trope.

But the fact that Martin’s saga is incomplete (and likely to remain that way - let alone attain levels of fan satisfaction matched by the first books) remains a stubborn eyesore on an otherwise enjoyable literary landscape. It’s quite likely that, having tossed the traditional structures overboard Martin has killed the albatross and Poseidon’s revenge shall foreclose the possibility of this narrative ever reaching shore. Ever thus to postmodernist writers…

To me, though, Game of Thrones (whether the early books or the first seasons of the series) still remains one of the biggest Red Pill events in my memory. While other events like COVID, the George Floyd Riots, etc, rank high, I cannot forget how much my worldview changed after watching that first season. Martin’s creation of an anti-heroic world, where greatness and honor fail almost by definition, while a kakistocracy of flatterers and foreigners fail upward until reaching the highest echelons, filled me with revulsive dread. It also finally yanked away the veil of ignorance. In other ways the structure of his world is classic red-pilling: the White Walkers representing the coming, stifling Longhouse that will freeze Western civilization into a Fukuyamian ‘End of History’ sedentism, the Starks representing the captured institutions existing to thwart the latter’s advance but ultimately in denial and toothless, the Lannister’s unscrupulous selfishness looting the state like contemporary globalist CEOs and military elite. Martin’s world may be a tapestry of literary loose ends, incapable of sewing together a fitting ending, but it was a salient, poetic adaptation of the late empire political condition we now find ourselves in.

I doubt a grand political message was Martin’s intent. It’s more likely he was overly fond of his characters’ world and flaws as a departure from more traditional storytelling – after all, what creator doesn’t want to break the mold and innovate. But his work is oozing with so much pathetic irony that any reader wishing to read more into it must come away cognizant that the medium is the message here. For any red-blooded man or woman that message seemed pretty clear.

If the “right” takeaway from Game of Thrones is that girls make strong rulers and the only good men are obedient manservants and castrati, my read was that global politics is still filled with intractably tyrannical regimes and cultures – Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ notwithstanding – and the only solution is to abandon the gormless ‘Save the World’ sloganeering of late 20^th century Globalization and circle our wagons: Winter IS coming. The enemy is within the gates and he is both domestic and foreign. The anodyne retort of elites is not just self-serving: it’s self-denial. And as John of Salisbury once said, “Who is more contemptible than he who scorns knowledge of himself.” These people are mentally fastened to their experts’ platitudes and credentials, having lived their lives and careers in the salad days of Pax Americana… days unlikely to come again for centuries. The system works because everything did work for them. After congratulating themselves with a round of “new normal” declamations they’ll retreat to their defined-benefits pensions and fade away into smugness, leaving us to deal with a historical course-correction of epochal significance.

We’ve all heard the experiment of the slowly boiling frog. It’s been retold ad nauseum to the point that it has assumed parabolic status. It doesn’t matter that the frog in the experiments actually does jump out, or that humans won’t. All that matters is that, to Boomers like Martin, the postwar optimum is considered the sine qua non proof of that parable. And all that means to readers like me is that every single lesson taught and proselytized by Boomers for the past 70 years needs to be trampled and burned without remorse before it’s too late.

There is no new normal, this time is not different. There is only the emergent phenomenon of historical dynamics churning and cycling new rhymes. Martin once echoed this rhythm, and regardless of his intent his books pricked this frog to jump the beaker. No wonder he’s pissed.

[Note: this essay was originally published in Man’s World Magazine Online]

In the 1960s Duke Power had problem. For years it had systematically discriminated against its black employees, refusing to promote them beyond manual labor. As views on race and discrimination changed Duke realized its policy was outdated and would soon be illegal under the coming Civil Rights Act. They recognized it was time to change and abandoned their overtly discriminatory policy. To smooth the process of promoting without racial qualifications Duke instituted tests to identify suitable candidates for promotion. What Duke didn’t realize was that its good faith attempt to end unjustifiable discrimination would fall afoul the Supreme Court’s drive at social engineering and unleash a torrent of unlimited liability.

No legal doctrine has had a more significant impact on the future of our nation than the invention of Disparate Impact from US Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971). Like a demonic conjuring, this ruling opened a portal to a universe of unrigorous legal reasoning and agenda-pushing, leading to a suite of stultifying regulations that has crippled our ability to correct course from the social and political morass in which we now find ourselves.

Given how entwined Disparate Impact has become in the structure of our laws we forget that it was just an invention, conjured as a ‘test’ by the Supreme Court.[1] High courts sometimes craft tests as interpretive guidance for lower courts – especially where such interpretation is problematic or convoluted. After the Second World War the Supreme Court became more concerned with determining whether laws (Federal and State) contravened the Bill of Rights in a substantive sense, and where they found such contravention they struck them down. Since these findings invariably vitiated the legislature’s prerogative, the Court began devising “tests” to rationalize their interference. Whether such judicial interference is a good or bad thing is not the aim here (it’s a double-edged sword that is also preventing California from banning satire).

In this case the Disparate Impact test was created to determine whether discrimination had occurred within the meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The fact that a test was needed suggests Congress passed the law without a full examination of its implications. It is no coincidence that this sort of legislating-by-exigency smacks of siege-mentality desperation if not overt patronage.

Since mine own doors refuse to entertain me, I'll knock elsewhere

What is Disparate Impact and why has it become so odious? When a law adversely impacts a protected class of people in a disproportionate manner, compared to the unprotected, it is said to have a disparate impact. How “disproportionate” can that impact be? Courts have arbitrarily determined that an impact of 80% or less constitutes prima facie discrimination.[2] So if you’re hiring less than 4 blacks for every 5 whites (from similarly sized applicant pools), you’re in trouble.

Now, to be fair, prior to 1964 Duke Power had used explicitly discriminatory criteria to prevent blacks from promotion. But both the trial court and the court of appeal affirmed that Duke had abandoned those practices and averred that no discriminatory purpose was at work behind the new tests. Duke’s reformed attitude wasn’t good enough for the Supreme Court though.

The Court, under Chief Justice Warren Burger, was perhaps the most liberal court in existence. It included such left-wing luminaries such as Justice William Douglas (hastily appointed by F.D.R. as the second youngest-ever justice after his failed court-packing attempt). Douglas had supported individual rights against the State early in his career, but his support of Maoist China had now made him a target of impeachment threats by House Minority leader Gerald Ford. Justice Blackmun, another uber-liberal, was a turncoat appointed by Nixon (Thurgood Marshall had at least been appointed by a Democrat). Even Burger, a Republican, skewed hard to the left by the 1970s.

With the high-handed tone of moral superiority – typical of a Minnesota liberal – Burger delivered the opinion of a unanimous court. In fact his willingness to politicize the Court was apparent from his first invective:

“The objective of Congress in the enactment of Title VII is plain from the language of the statute. It was to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifiable group of white employees over other employees. Under the Act, practices, procedures, or tests neutral on their face, and even neutral in terms of intent, cannot be maintained if they operate to "freeze" the status quo of prior discriminatory employment practices.”

This is legal sophistry at its worst. He constructs the straw-man of “neutral intention” and then knocks him down with a non sequitur denunciation of ‘freezing the status quo’. But no party ever argued that the status quo ought to be frozen, and a discriminatory test or practice – neutral in intent – can be maintained if it meets any of the exemptions Congress included. Freezing the status quo is an as irrelevant as it is obfuscatory.

The Act contains so many exemptions that allow for discrimination that his argument is almost moot. There are exemptions for national security; exemptions for members of the Communist Party; and most importantly exemptions for the unqualified:

SEC. 2000e-2. [Section 703]

Notwithstanding any other provision of this subchapter, (1) it shall not be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to hire… on the basis of his religion, sex, or national origin in those certain instances where religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise [emphasis added].

But Burger was intent on leaving his mark on the nation so he squared the circle. Inserting himself into the legislature’s mouth he declared: “The Act proscribes not only overt discrimination, but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation” and then reached for the Aesopian Fox & Stork parable to make his case.

The very heart of his argument is atrophied. Intentional discrimination (of protected classes) might be illegal, but discrimination in operation certainly is permitted in many cases. Moreover the parabolic reference is uncanny given its literal implications. He would seem to imply that policies affecting people of biologically different abilities ought to be deemed discriminatory regardless of how they work in operation. In other words, if the Fox can’t drink from the tall jug (as the Stork does) then providing him with a bowl is insufficient, he gets a jug too and society be damned with the consequences!

Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of Law

When I was a law student one of my professors referred to the Common Law as Dog Law.[3] When you yell at your dog for sitting on the couch you can’t really blame him for breaking your rules – he didn’t know the couch was off limits until you yelled at him. While somewhat obtuse, it has a ring of truth: sometimes a Common Law judge will create a new precedent and effectively sanction behavior that was hitherto permitted. Griggs was Dog Law par excellence.

This was most outrageously demonstrated in the Court’s re-evaluation of the facts – something that high courts generally avoid.[4] In Griggs it re-examined Duke Power’s use of general intelligence tests despite both trial and the Appeals courts having rejected the plaintiffs’ claims that those tests were either intentionally or “operationally” discriminatory. Under the Civil Rights Act a workplace test must be “reasonably related” to the performance of the job in question. This is a matter of fact for the trial court to determine, not the nation’s highest court. But Burger, aroused by judicial activism, tossed this convention aside:

“On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job performance ability. Rather, a vice-president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company's judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the workforce.”

The headline reasoning given is that no “meaningful study” was conducted, leaving open the question of who (i.e. which expert) decides what “meaningful” means and how they ought to determine it. Generally courts avoid travelling along the path where experts tread, but Burger shreds this notion by creating the Disparate Impact test as a de facto law that then requires expert involvement. The finding of discrimination now rests upon a judge’s determination of “meaningful” – a finding that heralds a new cottage industry of highly-paid intermediaries. The portal opened, its door shattered, the incentives were now aligned for self-interested parties to squeeze through.

Since disparity is the ubiquitous – perhaps fundamental – condition of the Universe, Griggs set in motion a negative feedback loop where employers, paranoid of liability arising from any difference, simply opted not to notice performance or test for it. Trial lawyers may have been the first to pass through the portal but employers soon realized there was an even more powerful demon: bad PR. Grifting employees could win simply by bringing accusations of discrimination, which of course they did. For most employers this meant two things: (1) avoid hiring people in protected categories; and (2) avoid any tests or measures of competence as a means of performance evaluation, especially for promotion. It’s hard to imagine a worse lose-lose for society.

The rational response to Griggs might have been for employers to introduce tests that were more targeted and could be justified in court. But that never occurred because testing is both resource and time intensive. No company wants to take such a risk only to have a judge declare their efforts were not ‘meaningful’ long after millions had been spent on implementation. Off the couch, dog!

The tail now wags the dog

For a time society shrugged. “The really important jobs will still have tests”, normies comforted themselves. And it did take a while for the testing infrastructure to decline into obsolescence. But here we are today where the FAA now mandates “personality tests” for air traffic controllers to avoid causing a disparate impact on minority applicants – even though this type of discrimination is explicitly permitted by law. Social engineering can now justify the a priori abandonment of standards and then be excused with the (false) presumption that raising them would be illegal under judge-made law.

Progressives now tasted blood. Infected by mission creep - the palsy of all moral crusades - they pushed the boundaries of Disparate Impact long after their victory. In 2005 the Supreme Court expanded Disparate Impact to age discrimination under the relevant statute. And in 2015 it ruled that Disparate Impact was a sufficient standard to prove discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. Moreover, the acceptance of this standard induced dozens of states to adopt similar provisions in many areas of state law. Disparate Impact now enlarged the portal sufficiently for the unholiest of unholies, Substantive Equality (that is the equality of outcomes) to attempt a pass.

Substantive Equality is the most meretricious of lies. It is a perversion of the most universal truth – the Second Law of Thermodynamics – a masquerade of Late Imperial abundance performed with the plangency of motherly affectation. No sensible person thinks that equality of outcomes is feasible let alone desirable. Its provenance is the false abundance mindset of the effete, but its target quickly becomes everybody else.

One problem with Substantive Equality, though, is that it’s manifestly unconstitutional. Even the drafters of the Civil Rights Act (as amended in 1991) understood this:

(2) Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to-

(D) authorize or permit the denial to any person of the due process of law required by the Constitution.

This is a strange provision in some ways since any act of Congress is subject to constitutional muster under things like due process. Yet the law’s drafters felt it sufficiently import to explicitly remind the public that it is not above the Constitution. The Court even said as much in Washington v. Davis (1979). The fact that this didn’t stop states and cities from enacting a myriad of anti-discrimination laws, embedded with Disparate Impact, showed that the Substantive Equality mindset had taken over.

Progressives know that Substantive Equality isn’t workable. For every ‘remedy’ to discrimination there will always be another group that will suffer reverse discrimination. The goal is thus to mobilize politically up-and-coming groups that appear discriminated against, and then direct the reciprocal discrimination against politically marginalized groups.

Lately the Court has pushed back against the tide. In Ricci v. DiStefano (2009) the Court ruled discrimination against non-blacks by the New Haven Fire Department was illegal. But unfortunately the Court took the more restrained approach, saying the Fire Department hadn’t used the proper tests, instead of ruling it was an unconstitutional violation of due process. But a final confrontation is looming.

Employment is a provision of a livelihood to the employed. To most it is the ultimate resource. Thus the Civil Rights Act must be understood as a resource reallocation exercise. Capitalist employers, however, seek to optimize their opportunity set by creating a virtually infinite number of dimensions upon which to discriminate and attain that optimum. When you introduce a legal requirement to avoid disparate impacts (let alone produce equal outcomes) creating an environment where no one else is discriminated becomes unavoidable. Thus both Disparate Impact and Substantive Equality foreclose ever reaching that optimum.

This is the worst of all worlds. Employers now must make decisions based on trade-offs in a negative-sum game. The winning group is the one that can best game the system and discrimination becomes entrenched on the basis of capricious factors like “who controls HR” and “who has the most social media clout.”

Substantive Equality: The Final Frontier

What devils are in store for us with Substantive Equality? Here the leftward slant of Wikipedia is revealingly useful for their clear-throated advocacy of lunacy.

The first is redistribution, not just of private property, but of social status. The former type of redistribution is difficult to do without mass uprisings, but the latter is an easier subterfuge. Affirmative Action is one example of this and even with its high court defeat the Left has simply ignored this ruling and conceals redistribution in an endless game of policy wack-a-mole.

The second is recognition, that is the creation and imposition of new social classes that will prepare the majority for minority rule. To pave the way for this inversion the public must be gaslit into believing falsehoods until they become numb. Witness the COVID’s Disinformation Governance Board as a trial balloon for this.

The third is participation, that is the creation of positive duties on the rest of society to ensure that state-sponsored client groups are protected at your cost by amplifying their political power beyond anything rational. The concomitant distortion of representative democracy is every bit as frightening as it sounds.

Finally is transformation. Progressives know that discrimination (that is the act of choice) cannot be eliminated through equal treatment. Only by coercing thought itself can it be vanquished. In this vision everything must be transformed in favor of the new agenda, in a sort of socialist Genesis Project:

McCoy: …what if this thing were used where life already exists?

Spock: It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix.

McCoy: Its "new matrix"? Do you have any idea what you're saying?

The most pernicious aspect of this agenda is the subjugation of causation. Notice that nowhere in the analysis of Disparate Impact does anyone ask why outcomes differ. As Thomas Sowell argued in Discrimination and Disparities, differing outcomes are usually not the product of discrimination, even if innate differences are the product of biology. Thus Substantive Equality is attempting to “remedy” a problem whose cause is something totally different. This sounds more like the antonym of “remedy.”

Disparate Impact’s principal contribution to legal theory has been to demote (if not obviate) the role of causation in considerations of liability. Causation is then replaced by its much less rigorous (and much more politically tractable) cousin, correlation, and politically-driven judges have become slap-happy applying this standard in their sotto voce quest to redistribute national income to preferred groups.

As long as causation is sidelined in favor of loosely-correlated ‘impact’, and as long as redistribution under the aegis of Disparate Impact is meted out by political appointees, this travesty will go on fomenting a system of judicial arbitrariness that the Founders intended to prevent, entangling the taxpayer with unlimited economic and social liabilities that will be impossible to reverse.

[1] The “test” of Disparate Impact was eventually codified in the Civil Rights Act but only in 1991. The original Act had no such test.

[2] The arbitrariness is further compounded by the reliance on paid experts to arrive at these figures. The judges’ pretense to deference comes in the form of transferring their prerogative to so-called experts in the name of professional humility.

[3] We were required to study both the Common and the Civil Law traditions. This professor’s bias was certainly showing.

[4] A good rule of thumb is that three-quarters of appeals turn on errors of fact made by the trial court, while the remaining quarter turn on errors made in the application of the law. A fortiori for high court appeals.