Chucking Pebbles

Last week I was listening to the Friday morning Power Hour podcast that the ZMan produces.  And during the discussion he mentioned that he was surprised when a particular civ-nat pundit who was usually very mainstream normie-con started exhibiting a lot of the talking points that the ZMan associated with the dissident right perspective.  I don’t think ZMan was very specific about the exact context and exactly how far to the right this fellow had gone, but I guess the change from the pundit’s usual rhetoric to this new point of view was sufficiently great to merit surprise.

I found this interesting.  Usually, ZMan is extremely dismissive of civnattery.  He finds their points of view hopelessly naïve and foolish.  So, his surprise caught my attention.  Now what exactly the details of this change were, I can’t say.  But what I assume was that this pundit started using the vocabulary of the dissident right.  Maybe he used a term like anti-white racism or just anti-white as a description of someone on the Left or some policy.  Something like that might surprise coming from someone who has up until now avoided racialist terminology.  Maybe it was a comment about the dishonesty of the establishment Republicans and their phony struggle against the Left’s policies.  Or maybe it was an opinion against the war in Ukraine.  But whatever it was it’s part of a trend that is no longer possible to ignore.  The normies, a lot of them, are waking up.

I have a theory about why the Dissident Right has been at the cutting edge of the awakening on the Right.  I think many on the dissident Right have their roots in the blue-collar working class.  And that is the segment of White America that was impacted first by the policies and prejudices that the Left and their minions installed during the last fifty years.  It was the working class that had a ringside seat for the Great Society upheavals with welfare culture destroying the schools and neighborhoods that they inhabited.  And it was the working class that were the first and hardest hit by the off-shoring that went hand in hand with the globalization program of the Left.

And so, the most discerning of the working class were able to express the things they saw and they became the vanguard of the Dissident Right.  But now that the whole program of the Left has emerged the white-collar workers and the entrepreneurial community have been impacted and now the intelligentsia.  Even leftist journalists can see what’s happening and recognize the Orwellian nature of what’s going on.  In that environment it makes sense that even the blindest of normie-con pundits would stumble onto the truth.

Now the funny thing is that even tripping over facts doesn’t mean that unanimity will break out between the Dissident Right and the people to their immediate left.  The folks on the Dissident Right talk about a river that they cross that separates them from the rest of the Right.  And that difference has more to do with their beliefs about the incompatibility of different ethnicities and races of people.  And they see this as part and parcel of the problems that are afflicting this country.  And they don’t believe that the possibility exists for different types of people to live together under one set of laws even if it were fairly enforced.

Currently the dissidents and those on the other side of the river just shout back and forth at each other and shake their fists because it’s an academic question.  The administrative state, since the 1960s, has used things like affirmative action and other forms of discrimination to stir up animosity between various communities.  It’s currently illegal to hire people based only on their individual talents.  A quota must be filled regardless of whether qualified applicants can be found based on race and gender.  If this ever gets fixed then we could find out if the Dissident Right is correct in their belief that different people can’t coexist amicably.  Until then it’s just speculation and we can stay on separate sides of the river pointing at each other and maybe chucking pebbles across from time to time.