Tag: Alt-Right

If You Have Any Interest in the Dissident Right and What They Believe Read This.

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Awhile back I linked to a post by Michael Anton in which he reviewed a self-published book called Bronze Age Mindset.  Well the author of that book was given a chance to address the content of the post over at Claremont’s American Mind webpage.  I’ve linked to it below.  If you are at all interested in the dissident community that was the on-line heart of Donald Trump’s support in 2016 then you may find this article very informative.  I did.  The pseudonymous author (Bronze Age Pervert) is extremely persuasive in laying out his case for the need, or rather, the unavoidable certainty of the collapse of the current liberal worldview.  Highly recommended read.

 

America’s Delusional Elite Is Done

 

 

Michael Anton Analyzes Bronze Age Mindset

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Michael Anton is an interesting character.  Having been Publius Decius Mus of Flight 93 Election fame I like to see what he has to say.  Here he receives a copy of Bronze Age Mindset from Curtis Yarvin ( also known as Mencius Moldbug) and actually manages to read it through.  Read his reaction.

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/are-the-kids-altright/

Apparently the unneutered millennial men are pretty pissed off about the world we are handing over to them.  Can’t say that I blame them.  This place is pretty awful.

Now I guess I have to try reading it.  Is there no end?

 

photog’s August 2019 Guide to Right-Wing Dynamics

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For those of you out there who already know the ins and outs of the Right-Wing ecosystem this post won’t provide any new information except inasmuch as it provides my slant on it.  For everybody else this may provide some insights into what the various groups believe and how they relate to each other.

Over the course of several years, my understanding of the relationship between the various components of the Right-Wing has become somewhat better.  Back in 2016 the term Alt-Right was bandied about by the Media to describe almost anyone to the right of Jeb Bush and John McCain.  And for Leftists that hasn’t changed.  They use the term as a club to attack anyone who appears to be a threat to their political dominance.  But for those on the Right there is plenty of confusion about the various groups and their defining ideologies.  And that’s to be expected because actually most people aren’t really sure which group, they themselves belong to or if they even fit comfortably into one of the boxes that have simple labels.  Terms like Dissident Right and White Nationalism sound strange and threatening to regular people who have always just heard labels like Democrat and Republican or Liberal and Conservative.  But it is important to know who’s out there and what they believe and how they influence the larger community of people who don’t believe in the Left-Wing narrative.

As ever, the largest and the least self-aware component of the Non-Left-Wing are the NORMIES.  They are regular schlubs who go to work and raise their kids and pay their taxes and think of themselves as regular Americans who aren’t ideological.  They probably think that Mitt Romney must be pretty conservative because he’s a Mormon and because he said he was “extremely conservative” back when he was running for president in 2012.  Basically, these folks are so busy trying to live their lives that they aren’t even aware that the country has drifted enormously to the left over the course of their adult lives.  And when they do realize what has happened a lot of them are so apathetic that if asked whether it is even possible to reverse the changes that have taken place, they’d say no.  Some of these people are unreachable.  They are largely inert and the most you can hope for is that they’ll drift to the right if the country moves in that direction.  But they are also the target group for recruitment by the next two groups.

Next up are the AWAKENED NORMIES.  I fall into this class.  These are the normies who looked up one day and realized that the country had been taken over by Anti-Americans with the willing participation of the establishment Republicans and that there existed a Rebellion that was actively resisting this Anti-American establishment.  These are the people who jumped on board the Trump band wagon when it became clear that he was the only candidate who wouldn’t just give us more of the same Leftist result that we had been seeing from every politician after Ronald Reagan.  Most of these awakened normies are civic nationalists who trusted in the tenets that were espoused in school and in the media when we were kids back a generation ago and thought that what needed to be done was return to the old ways of looking at things and everything else would straighten itself out.  Now they realize that the only way to fight identity politics is with identity politics.  It has been made painfully clear to us that we have been made the fall guys for the rest of America and the only way we are going to succeed is to level the playing field.  We’ll have to stand up for our own rights because no one else, including our so-called representatives, is willing to.

Beyond the awakened are the RADICALIZED.  There are several groups in this category.  These folks have decided that the United States is broken and can’t be fixed.  Among these folks are groups that describe themselves as Dissident Right, Alt-Right, White Nationalists and other things.  Many of these folks espouse a belief called human biodiversity.  According to this way of looking at things, racial differences in intelligence will preclude the United States from functioning as it has in the past once the fraction of the population descended from Europeans falls below some unspecified point.  In addition, they feel that once political control no longer resides among the European descendants the identity politics practiced by the Democrat party will make life for the European descendants intolerable.

In general, these radicalized folks assume that trying to continue on in the old way is futile and what needs to be done first is bring the European descended population together into an identity group that can coordinate its efforts to protect its interests.  Where these groups differ is what is seen by each as the end state of this strategy.

The Alt-Right and other White Nationalists envision some white ethno-state occupying some proportion of the present geographical territory of the United States alongside other successor states populated by the other ethnic groups.

The Dissident Right seems to contain more moderate individuals who envision the outcome involving various state governments adopting laws that diverge from the current Leftist trajectory.  For instance, some of the more conservative southern states are already challenging the Roe v. Wade orthodoxy by passing abortion restrictions that eventually will be challenged by federal courts.  What the Dissident Right foresees is the day when a state government will ignore the decision of a Federal or Supreme Court decision that it feels is intolerable. At that point the idea is that ignoring the Federal decision will trigger the beginning of a loosening of the United States.  And in a way we are already seeing this.  Federal law prohibits the ownership or use of marijuana.  But several states have legalized it.  And the example of Sanctuary Cities flouting the action of federal ICE enforcement is especially flagrant.  With these precedents it becomes easier to imagine the federal government ignoring challenges from the Right at the state or regional level if they institute policies that are popular in those places.

What I’ve left out of this spectrum are groups like Neoconservatives, libertarians and establishment Republicans who have no interest in what I would call the normal social issues.  None of these groups care a whit if progressives want to put three-year-olds in gender reassignment programs or allow post birth abortion as the law of the land.  If any of these groups ever agree with the agenda of the actual Right-Wing it will be, as in the words of the fictional person disclaimer, “purely coincidental.”

As stated above I fall into the middle group.  I’m in between the sleepwalkers and the bomb-throwers.  I am aware of both and I am formulating here how I interact with each of them.  First of all, the thing to know about the normies is they can’t teach you much.  They’re like your younger siblings.  You’ve been where they are now but they don’t know what you know.  The ZMan (a bad thinker in the Dissident Right) makes the analogy of a river.  Those who have crossed over know both sides but those who haven’t only know their side.  Getting them to cross over is the challenge.  Of course, his river leads to the Dissident Right.  I’m just talking about what is needed to wake up the sleepwalkers.  But it’s still a transition.  It requires them to discover that something that they thought was true is false.  For me it was learning that the Republican establishment was the controlled opposition.  That in exchange for the perks of office they would put up a sham resistance to the Progressives but always lose.  As has been often pointed out they are the Washington Generals of American politics.  So that is the primary mission for the awakened; to rouse the sleepwalkers.  Because in a democracy numbers are everything and the sleepwalkers are where the numbers are.  So with the normies you look to open their eyes to something that will shock them out of their coma.  Show them something like the “evolving” conservative opinion on illegal immigration.  That should do it.

But what is our relationship with the radicalized groups?  Well, it is varied.  For those who are already foaming at the mouth and beating the drum for fire fights in the street I believe the correct stance is to keep your distance.  As has been noted elsewhere, often the most extreme groups are really mostly FBI agents looking for fools to show themselves as madmen.  But by the same token it’s not my job to police these groups.  Let the Left own that.  Punching right is a slippery slope.

For the less extreme groups it’s extremely useful to see what they have to say.  Often much of what they believe is quite true and in fact these groups were the first to notice and figure out the tactics and goals of the Left and their stooges in the Republican establishment.  Typically, with these groups it’s the conclusions they draw for how all this will end up that are the points of disagreement with the awakened civic nationalists.  From my point of view, they’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water and have gone too far.  So, reading their essays is usually a case of nodding in agreement for the first two thirds of the document and then grimacing when it gets to the bitter end.  But reading that two thirds is very valuable.  For instance, you don’t have to be hoping to divvy up the United States into bite sized chunks to realize that the way to address the anti-white rhetoric of the Progressives is to get these people being libeled to band together and use their clout to put a stop to these attacks.  The Dissident Right is known for the motto “You’re not going to vote your way out of this.”  But if you look at the fragmentation on the Left it isn’t far-fetched to imagine that coalitions can be built to make common cause against lots of Leftist policies that are extremely unpopular.  More than anything it’s a matter of awareness of how gaslighting by the Left and their allies in the controlled opposition has been used to cow the normies over things like illegal immigration, job outsourcing and LGBTQ issues.  When you stop assuming it’s a lost cause you have a chance to win.

So, my policy is to read the more moderate radicals and glean what they know but withhold judgement on their conclusions.  After all, if they’re right then all that they say will come to pass.  And knowing the why and how will leave me in a position to respond to the situation.  But if the awakened population is able to assert themselves to the point where society returns to the normal behaviors that we expect in the United States then that would certainly be a better outcome in my opinion.

After all the fact that human beings are not identical individuals either in intelligence or any other characteristic is pretty obvious.  And even if some groups differ markedly from others that is no reason to assume that they can’t each cooperate in a heterogeneous society.  After all I’m no super genius but I can work with people who are both smarter and dumber than I am.  From my experience what needs to stop is the Leftist practice of trying to blame every difference in outcomes on racism or sexism or any other -ism they care to invent.  If a 4’ 11” woman can’t carry an eighty-pound pack of critical gear during the training exercises for the Navy Seals the solution isn’t to drop the requirement down to ten pounds so that she can qualify.  That’s the madness that has gotten us here.  But neither do I think that fixing this requires the balkanization of the United States.  It requires some honesty, courage and the willingness to say no to the insane and their dishonest enablers.

So that’s the latest installment in my voyage through the stormy seas of non-Leftist thought.  As ever, it’s confusing, aggravating and uncertain but without a doubt we’ve made significant progress in the last three years.  More and more people know Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney work for the Progressives and Donald Trump saved them from a fate worse than death, Hillary.  Long live the revolution and keep the faith baby.

 

The Great Awakening

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In a recent post I stated that back in 2015 the Alt-Right/Dissident Right (or whatever your favorite term is) predicted that the identitarian politics and globalist economic policies of the Left would push the civic nationalists over the edge and radicalize them into their own identitarian group.  In that post I called it the Great Awakening.

The term Great Awakening is actually a description for several religious revivals that occurred in British North America and later in the United States between the 1730s and the late 1800s.  I am stealing the term to use for a completely different phenomenon.

What I am talking about is the phenomenon of normal apolitical Americans waking up to the fact that the Left has been systematically destroying this country for the last fifty years.  And that they’ve been doing it with the tacit approval of most of the Republican hierarchy for most of that time.  When I say the Left I am including the progressives that make up the Media, Academia, the various bureaucracies at the state and federal level that lately are being called the Deep State and all the other entrenched organizations that have been pushing a radical agenda that works for the destruction of the family and traditional life in general.

Up until recently, most normal people assumed that the way to resist these progressive institutions was to vote for the Republicans at the state and federal level and support their efforts to preserve traditional values and cultural norms.  But the Great Awakening was catalyzed by the spectacle of the 2016 election in which the mask finally dropped and we saw the republicans for what they really were.  They were the gate keepers for the Democrats.  They ensured that no matter who was elected the progressive agenda would continue unabated.  During that election Donald Trump called out all of the republican presidential candidates and exposed them for their weakness and lack of courage.  He identified illegal immigration as the weapon being used to destroy America and said he wasn’t afraid to fight against it.  And when the Republican voters threw him their support, the Republican Establishment showed their true colors and became the Never Trump movement and declared that they’d rather elect Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.

But even after voting for Donald Trump many Americans didn’t recognize the fact that they were personally the target of the progressive agenda.  Even after eight years of Barack Obama and all the hate and lies that attended his “fundamental transformation of America,” these sleepwalkers assumed that nothing could or should be done to change the trajectory of the culture.

Luckily for us there are two things happening to wake these sleepwalkers up.  The first is the President.  President Trump makes it a part of his duties to call out the progressive fanatics.  His bombastic style is an effective means for exposing the ugliness and stupidity of these people.

The other thing that is waking the sleepwalkers up is the acceleration of the Leftist agenda.  We now have immigrant congresswomen from the Middle East openly spouting anti-American and antisemitic sentiments openly.  And not being censured by their Democrat leaders.

And we also now have the transgender phenomenon on full display.  We have high school girls who’ve worked and trained to become competitive athletes being forced to compete against essentially men.  The dispiriting result of such an unfair practice is opening eyes even among communities that normally would have nothing to do with traditional groups.  A schism is opening up in the so-called LGBTQ community between lesbians and transgender supporters over the primacy of biological identity.

All these increasingly strident and unappealing spectacles are waking up normal Americans to the reality that the country is being hijacked by a concerted effort to undermine the normal way of life that makes life worth living.

So, what makes me think things are changing?  Look at the intersection of the two factors I mentioned above.  When AOC’s “Squad” started dumping on America, President Trump told them to go back to their dysfunctional craphole homes and fix them up before they complain about America.  And when the Media breathlessly interviewed Republican women expecting them to condemn the President they didn’t.  A few years ago, they would have.  But defending the Squad is a bridge too far.  Most Americans have had enough of strident leftists.  And this week when President Trump went after Representative Elijah Cummings for his inaccurate statements about the ICE border station and told him to spend more time improving the conditions in his own Baltimore congressional district most Republicans may have been uncomfortable but they could see the relevance of the comparison.

The worm has turned.  The Overton Window has shifted radically and the truth can now finally set you free.  President Trump has made it thinkable to call the Leftists on their lies and people are starting to do it.  And that neutralizes a big part of the scam that they’ve used on the right for the last fifty years.  And that will cause the whole thing to accelerate even more.

And that’s what I call the Great Awakening.  We’re waking up and finding out that the Emperor has no clothes and we don’t have to pretend anymore.  That doesn’t mean we automatically win.  We may find out that we’re outnumbered.  The awakening isn’t an end it’s a beginning.  We still need to figure out how we get what we want.  We’ll have to find out who we can work with and who we can’t.  But at least we’re awake.

 

Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 2

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Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 1

At the end of the first part of this post I said I’d look a little more closely at the specifics of the Dissident Right’s logic and compare it to my own way of looking at where we are.

First off let’s acknowledge something that we cannot afford to forget.  The Dissident Right (or Alt-Right if you prefer) was the only group who both knew what was going wrong in this country and weren’t afraid to say it out loud.  They recognized that the Left was in control of all the levers of power and the Establishment Republicans had no intention of changing the results of the Left’s program.

The Dissident Right explained exactly how the schools and colleges proselytized the children and how the Media, the Democrats, Big Business and the Courts twisted every part of society until nothing remains of the normal world of just a few years ago.  And as proven, the Establishment Republicans use the anger this generates to get themselves re-elected.  But once in office they can be depended on to never actually reverse any of this destruction and instead just talk about how dead set they are against whatever the next outrage is.  And when that outrage becomes law they just move along to the next.

And the Dissident Right identified the fact that both Parties and Big Business were determined to use immigration, both legal and illegal, as a means to swamp out the votes of the citizens of the United States as a way to eliminate all resistance to their agenda.  It was plain during the 2016 election that none of the Republicans, no matter how “conservative” he was, would say a word against illegal immigration for fear of being called a racist.

And the Dissident Right was the only group that supported Trump.  Everyone else either said he was a joke or abhorred him for being a vulgarian.

So, as I said above, ignoring the Dissident Right means ignoring the only group that knew how we were losing the Country to the Left and how we could stop them from doing it.  Clearly what they say has to be carefully considered.

But you might say, why not just jump on their band wagon?  For me, that is a disturbing choice.  The Dissident Right is comprised of people who believe that differences in race and even ethnicity prevent a heterogeneous state like the present United States from living in harmony.  They believe that the future will be a fractious hodge-podge of identity groups that, led by the trouble-makers on the Left, will spend all their time pursuing imaginary grievances against the European Americans that they’ve been told are holding them back from being happy.

The Dissident Right points to affirmative action discrimination and the destruction of the family and the LGBTQ lawfare warriors and de-platforming of people on the right and say we are already there and that once we are a majority-minority-nation, things will only get much worse.

Accepting this hypothesis as true is not something I would do unless forced by irrefutable evidence.  But having it espoused by people who have been right about things that the majority were wrong about means I have to find reasonable arguments for why the Dissident Right is mistaken in their conclusions.

Instead of going through a bunch of cases and subsets of categories I’ll sum up the problem we’re experiencing by saying that in the 1960s when the economy was very strong the leaders of the Democrat party saw that they no longer had an unbeatable coalition of disaffected voters like they had in the 1930s and 1940s.  They decided to follow the Marxist playbook and weaken their enemies by sowing as much division as they could.  They espoused abortion as a way to destroy the family and they sponsored all the grievance movements to further fracture the country.  They infested the schools and steadily eroded intellectual life until even the sciences were politicized and distracted from their primary functions.  And they enshrined massive immigration both legal and illegal.

But even when all this was going on it was still possible for a conservative leader like Ronald Reagan to rally the Right.  And when that happened, the country was able to see itself as one people.  It was only when we were led by people who believed in the propaganda of the Left that everything has fallen completely apart.  Basically, since 1988 (thirty years) we have been living under the rule of the Left and their Globalist Echoes on the Fake Right.  Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama allowed every outrage of the Left to happen to us with either enthusiasm or feigned reluctance.

This track record is why I think that the Dissident Right may be mistaken in the irreversibility of the changes we are experiencing.  In just two years President Trump has installed a whole generation of federal judges who will begin the process of reversing the damage done by the rogue judiciary.  Without Justice Kennedy it’s possible that the SCOTUS will reverse the decisions that found a constitutional mandate for abortion and gay marriage and affirmative action.  Those types of actions would change the world we live in.  Once those injustices are addressed people would see the world much differently.

The final thing that I need to address is the Race Realism that the Dissident Right says will prevent the United States from existing in harmony.  They claim that both differences in behavior and feelings of separateness will forever keep different races and ethnicities from living peacefully together.  My experience with diversity is a product of growing up and living in New York City in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.  Believe me when I tell you that things were very far from harmonious in the “glorious mosaic” that existed in that era.  There was a separate neighborhood every ten to fifteen blocks and mostly the ethnic and racial groups didn’t happily mingle or even interact.  There were riots and even several large areas of the city burned down.  Crime was rampant and the subways were very dangerous as were the parks and other empty areas.  Of course, the Democrats were always stoking the unrest with grievance propaganda.  But then I remember what happened when the city finally had had enough and elected a law and order Republican, Rudy Giuliani.  It got better!  And indeed, the people of all races and ethnicities felt more united and less angry when a sensible government started enforcing the law and holding everyone accountable.

I won’t claim that there aren’t differences between people.  In fact, I’ll go one step further and says we’re all different from each other.  Every family has a smarter kid and a tougher kid and a kid who doesn’t follow the rules.  But if one kid does better in school you can’t hold him back to make the less smart kid feel better about himself.  And as every parent knows, the best way to keep the peace in a family is to come up with reasonable rules and make sure that everyone follows them.  It’s only when you see someone else getting away with something, you’re not allowed to that trouble begins.

So, this is getting overly long.  My way of thinking about this is that if we can elect non-leftists who want to restore normalcy to the country, we can do it.  Maybe it won’t happen.  But just saying it’s impossible doesn’t appeal to me, at least not yet.  President Trump has given me hope that it can be done.  Let’s see if he can do it before we throw in the towel.

Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 1

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One of the most troubling aspects of the America we now live in is the racial animosity exhibited almost universally across the whole spectrum of political ideologies.  Of course, the Marxists and their descendants, the Progressives, have perfected it into a weapon that they use to inflame hatred against Americans of European Descent or as we used to call them Americans.  But the fallout of this multi-generational strategy is that their opponents, especially on the very farthest edges of the Right Wing are learning to use this same tactic in reverse.  A whole generation of Alt-Right and Dissident Right ideologues are focusing on racial identity politics and the tactics of racial polarization to the exclusion of almost anything else.  In fact, this idea that racial identity will trump all other ways of uniting and dividing people has actually made headway among formerly “color-blind” conservatives.  My read on this is that rather than any effective proselytizing by the Dissident Right, the real catalyst for this transformation was the racial animus and partisanship demonstrated by the Obama Administration during the Black Lives Matter and other teachable moments that our “Dear Leader” talked down to us about.

In that sense I somewhat understand the depth of the hatred that has developed along the racial divide.  The behavior by the Justice Department in fueling these fake police incidents was outrageous and did enormous harm by throwing fuel on the already hot flashpoints that exist in the crime ridden ghettos where the police are just about all that stands between poor people and the law of the jungle.

But what it has turned into on the Dissident Right is a conviction that civic life and law and order cannot transcend differences between people of different races and ethnicities.  The more thoughtful voices in that community do not contend that we are headed for some kind of civil war or balkanization of the United States.  They talk more about individual states ignoring laws that they do not agree with and going their own way on these things.  In fact, this is not that different from what California and some other places have already done on immigration law with their so-called sanctuary cities.

What this all amounts to is the Dissident Right declaring that the Progressives have outmaneuvered the Right by increasing legal and illegal immigration to the point that they will have a permanent dominance over electoral power and will use it to create a permanent grievance machine to disenfranchise Americans of European Descent by punitive means such as affirmative action and other discriminatory policies.

Are they right?

I prefer to think that they’re not.  My read on this is that the situation has been exacerbated by Republican “leaders” who actually seem to buy into the fairness of minority identity politics out of some kind of ancestral guilt or because they see electoral advantage in joining the progressives.  The proof of this can be seen in the success of a civic nationalist like Trump who isn’t guilted into kowtowing to illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist.  Once you disarm the Progressives of that weapon you find out that the majority of Americans, even in Blue States, want immigration laws to be obeyed.

I contend if the Right forcefully advocates for full enforcement of immigration laws and the elimination of reverse discrimination policies by the government and other entities, it will go a long way toward lowering tensions between the various groups living in the United States and will allow people to start thinking of each other as neighbors and not potential enemies.

Am I right?  I can’t claim I’m sure.  I think the next few years will be indicative of whether the Dissident Right is correct or whether there’s still time to fix the mess we’re in.  And believe me, I don’t minimize how bad things have become.  On the worst days, I shake my head and look at maps to see where I can move to that will allow me to stave off the worst of it for a little longer.

In the second part of this I’ll look a little more closely at the specifics of the Dissident Right’s logic and compare it to my own way of looking at where we are.

Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 2

What’s Right

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(My Understanding of the Current Composition of Non-Leftist America)

This is an update to my earlier column back in November 2017 “Defining the Space Between NeverTrump and the Alt-Right,”  that appeared on the American Greatness website.  At the time I declared that I was a red-pilled normie.  Of course, I was quickly corrected by someone surely far to my right with the news that there are many red pills and I had a ways to go.

Here we are another eighteen months later (more or less) and my learning curve has flattened out a little and I have a better understanding of the nuances and distinctions on the non-left half of the socio-political spectrum.  And the world has changed a great deal too.

Back in 2017 the NeverTrumpers were still in the ascendancy in Washington.  Paul Ryan was still the Speaker of the House and the National Review and the Weekly Standard were still considered conservative magazines by some Republicans.  Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham were still more likely to side with Chuck Schumer than President Trump on any particular issue of the day.  And every fresh rumor from the leakers on the Mueller investigation was trumpeted on the front page of the Times and Post as if impeachment and conviction were only hours away.  How the mighty have fallen.

The point to all this is that the categories of the Non-Left have not changed much over time but the sizes of these constituencies have shifted radically.  Let’s start with the left most extreme edge of the Non-Left.  Here are the liberal civic nationalists or “Centrists.”  These are the swing voters that can vote Democrat or Republican depending on circumstances and really don’t have much claim to be grouped with conservatives.  They are socially liberal and fiscally pretty liberal too.  But to the extent that they can vote Republican they are Non-Left.  This is a fairly large group of people in the Mid-West and probably a large number of them would be capable of voting for Joe Biden or President Trump in 2020 depending on circumstances.  But considering the changes in the economy and the news (like the conclusion to the Mueller investigation) it seems likely that President Trump’s rising popularity probably stems from the changes in opinion of this group.  So, to the extent that they are shifting rightwards let’s say that this constituency is growing.

Next to the Centrists moving rightwards are the so-called “Establishment Republicans.”  Here are the business people who expect the Republican party to stand for capitalism, low taxes and fiscal restraint.  This is the JEB! crowd.  They trooped over to the NeverTrump movement en masse as soon as they found out that Trump didn’t think globalization was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  This group doesn’t shrink or grow.  It’s a population that inhabits the same stratum with the elite Left.  In fact, they’re the same people.  They’re just a little less strident in their social opinions.  But they have moved away from their virulent anti-Trump positions as of late and at this point, they’re more neutral in their attitudes about the President.  Personally, they still despise him but on a practical basis they concede that they may have to deal with him for another term and they are trying to figure out how best to take advantage of that.  An exception to this trend is the Neo-Cons.  These War-Hawks are now synonymous with the NeverTrumpers.  Bill Kristol and Max Boot are the most virulent of the bunch but as a group they have drifted so far from even the remaining Establishment Republicans that they are now essentially Leftists.

The next big class of people are the Conservative Civic Nationalists.  This is the bulk of the Non-Left.  These are the normal people who have always believed in God and Country and that America was the land of freedom, opportunity and fairness.  They believed that all Americans were lucky to be living in the greatest country on God’s green earth.  They believed that the rule of law under the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights is what made this the closest thing to heaven on earth and anyone living here should be supremely grateful to the Founding Fathers for inventing it and his own ancestors for coming here.  This is the group that has had the biggest change occur in the last couple of years.  But to define the change let’s break this group into two sub-divisions.  Let’s call them Sleepwalkers and the Red-Pilled.  Back in the early 2000s all the Civic Nationalists (including myself) were Sleepwalkers.  We believed that the Bush family was conservative.  W told us he was a religious conservative.  We thought he meant that he believed in the social conservative beliefs.  We thought he would defend and protect the traditional values that formed the basis of the support that allowed him to send millions of young men half way around the world to primitive lands where they would put their bodies in harms way to fight his wars.

But the more we defended W, the more he embraced the programs and policies that exposed his constituency to impoverishment through globalist financial policies and replacement by illegal migration.  By the time the Bushes had come to publicly embrace the Clintons and the Obamas it was becoming plain to a small part of the Civic Nationalists that we were being played.  This group decamped and became the Dissident Right (some called themselves the Alt-Right).  Others were just confused and demoralized that all the loyalty and sacrifice that went into the Afghan and Iraq Wars was completely lost on the Neo-Cons and the Republican Establishment.  But during the run up to the 2016 election the information that the Dissident Right had decoded started becoming disseminated and a small group of the Civic Nationalists became “red-pilled.”  They realized that if Jeb Bush was the Republican candidate there was no hope of turning around the Anti-American program that Obama had started.  In fact, none of the candidates, even ones who believed in the conservative agenda could stand up to the combination of Left-Wing journalism and their own fears of being called racists if they dared campaign against globalism and replacement migration.  No one except Trump.  And as these red-pilled normies saw the lengths to which the Establishment Republicans and the Left would go in order to defeat Trump they became convinced that the only way to save the country was to destroy the old order.  Business as usual would mean the end of our republic as we knew it.

And here is the other big change that has been happening for the last year and a half.  The ratio of the Red-Pilled to the Sleepwalkers has been growing.  My information is based on the acquaintances I have who have shifted over that time.  It is a steady trend and it only goes in one direction.  This shift isn’t too important short term because even the Sleepwalkers have accepted Trump and will support him in 2020 but the importance of the Red-Pilled contingent lies in the post-Trump era.  The Red-Pilled are far less likely than their Sleepwalking brethren of being fooled again, no more Bushes for them.

To the right of the Red-Pilled Normies lies the Dissident Right.  These are the people that are so disillusioned with America that they feel that the only way for them to live free is for the United States to be divided between the Left and the Right.  To a large extent these folks feel that racial differences and resentment will prevent the various ethnic populations from living in harmony.  They believe that the Left’s use of identity politics will spread to the white population and will splinter the unity of the American nation into racial components that will want to separate to provide each group freedom from oppression by the other groups.

The Dissident Right is a disturbing group to follow.  Their theory paints a bleak picture of human nature and the future they predict doesn’t hold much hope for a happy place where America is now.  But one thing that cannot be denied is that they understand the Left and how it has been dominating the world for about a century.  They understand the psychological and sociological tactics and strategies that the Left has been successfully using to destroy almost every facet of life that we held dear.  They’ve destroyed the laws, education, corporations, social institutions, churches, the family, sex roles and now they are even redefining what it means biologically to be a man or a woman.  They can predict what the Left will say and do and they can define tactics that will work against these people.  That’s pretty hard to argue with.

For myself, I tend to agree with what they say is wrong with our society.  But I presume that if the practices are changed then the result will change too.  For instance, I think that the anti-male, anti-normal and anti-white rhetoric and governmental policies that the Left has enshrined and which breed animosity between people can be eliminated.  Once these things are removed the reasons for resentments will be eliminated too.  But I also will admit that I can’t be 100% sure that they are wrong.  After all they have seen things when others didn’t.  For me the jury is out on their predictions.  But I hold onto my civic nationalist beliefs.

So that’s what I see to the right of the Left.  The biggest chunk is still the Civic Nationalists and, in that chunk, the Red-Pilled Normies are growing and the Sleepwalkers are slowly waking up.  The Centrist are on our side at the moment but as always, they blow with the wind.  The Establishment Republicans are useless and in it for themselves but they’ll go along if a strong man drags them by their purse strings.  The Neo-cons have returned to the Left where they belonged.  And finally, the Dissident Right is the Angry Cynic who sees the Con-Man on the Left shaking down the Idealists and warns the rest of us to prepare for a fight.

The Falling Down Revolt

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The Revolt on the Right is actually a civil rights movement.  Nobody frames it that way because the revolt is of the people that every other civil rights movement in this country has been framing as their oppressor.  This is the civil rights movement that at its core is straight white men.  That is the one identity that has no value in the victim identity rating system.  Or rather the value is negative infinity.  If you possess the three identity components of male white and straight then you can be passed over for a college spot, a scholarship, for a job, for a promotion, for an award and everyone will say it was the right decision even if you were objectively more qualified.

Now I said it was just straight white men who make up the core of the movement but it is becoming clearer that identity politics can affect other people too.  Recent investigations into Ivy League admissions show that Harvard has a policy to limit Asian American applicants even if they are demonstrably more qualified than some of their other favored minority applicants.  And the state of women’s sports is beginning to feel the impact of what having actual women compete against so called trans-gender women will mean.  Pretty soon the actual women will be completely crowded out of the winner’s circle.

And look at the recent cases of minorities running afoul of the royal flush of identity politics, the LGBTQ hand.  Normally being a black man is a pretty strong position when navigating the Hollywood landscape but Kevin Hart saw this credential trumped when he was hounded out of his Academy Awards hosting gig for having said uncomplimentary things about homosexuality in a tweet a number of years ago.  And as the final one-upsmanship situation a lesbian recently was shunned by the LGBTQ community for asking the question “How are trans-women different from men?”

But what is happening is an awakening to the fact that straight white men and to various degrees other groups are being discriminated against in the name of fairness.  And there isn’t a bit of fairness about it.  For decades the people of this country were told that each new identity group needed to be given special consideration to make up for the disparities in wealth or power or acceptance in order to bring the country together.  But rather than make the country more united it only stoked resentment and provided an industry in government oversight into every aspect of our lives.  School, college, work, housing, social organizations, sports and every business and profession became the target for relentless harassment and micromanagement.  At this point we’ve reached the point where freedom of religion has been trampled on to the extent that a wedding cake baker is hounded out of his own business to satisfy the spite of truly evil individuals.

I think Donald Trump’s campaign may be looked back at as the match that set off the powder keg.  Awareness of the situation is growing and more and more regular people are recognizing that they are being abused by a system that’s rigged against them and isn’t fair.  And they’re starting to realize that they don’t have to take it anymore.

To the mainstream media and the democrats this isn’t a civil rights movement.  To them it’s just racist people showing their lack of compassion.  But I think it is exactly the civil rights movement needed to bring back into balance the rights of the only people allowed to be trampled on by the identity politics cabal.

The real problem is what to call this movement.  All kinds of labels have been circulated.  The logic of it is basically Anti-Anti-White.  Now, that is a terrible name but the sense of it is there.  This is a revolt against reverse discrimination.  This is a reaction to the tyranny of the affirmative action regime.  This is a push for freedom from the thought police.  If I was looking for a symbol that represents the spirit of who is behind this movement, I would take the character in the movie “Falling Down.”  A schlub who has been trying to play by the rules all his life and finds that the game is rigged against him.

How about the Falling Down Revolt?

Hat’s Off to Vox Day For the Funniest Link of the Day

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Dinesh D’Souza nails this one and juxtaposing Bill Kristol’s rejoinder is all that’s needed to freeze in time the current state of  Conservative Inc.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/12/everyone-is-over-bill-kristol-and.html

Let’s hope it’s a “teachable moment” for all involved, including me.  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

The Legacy of the Alt-Right

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Much digital ink has been spent burying the spectre of the Alt-Right.  Probably most of this is butt-covering going on trying to assure the powers that be that the individual in question is NOT of the Alt-Right and therefore not deserving of de-platforming.

Along with this interment is the surprising fact that most people (including myself) are not entirely sure what the definition and origins of the Alt-Right precisely are.  I know that depending on the exact capitalization and hyphenation of the name it can be the Richard Spencer coined term for the white identitarian group that he belongs to.  Other versions of this and similar expressions like Dissident Right have different emphases and appeal to different points of view.

But whatever names and whatever divisions these groups make between each other (and they certainly do that), one thing is undeniable.  These were the groups that identified the real problems afflicting the United States and they were the ones who backed Donald Trump before anyone else even thought he was serious.  Whatever else they are wrong about they were right about those things.  To deny that is to deny the truth.

And the other thing that needs to be said and that is the central point of this post is that they along with President Trump are responsible for moving the Overton Window to the point where even the normies like me have heard the details of what the Alt-Right knew and have incorporated it into our world view.  No one bothers to even dispute the platitudes of the Establishment GOP when they’re mouthed.  We might give a sarcastic snort and then close the link and go to some useful website where actual thinking is going on.  The Alt-Right and Donald Trump truly revealed why the right always lost.  It was because our supposed leaders didn’t want to win.  They just wanted the job of losing.

Now, all of this is old hat.  We all know all of this.  But it was hammered home to me when I was perusing an article in American Greatness by Christopher Roach entitled “The Radicalism of Conservatism, Inc.”  Now it’s a very good article and it delves into the history of how the establishment right became so wrong on how to win.  But reading the description of how Trump deconstructed the “illegal immigration is an act of love,” and describing establishment conservatives by saying, “that they function chiefly as the palace guard for yesterday’s liberalism” could have come directly out of a ZMan post from a year ago.  What that tells me is the knowledge that the Alt-Right pioneered has been successfully dispersed into the bloodstream of the conservative body politic (if I may mangle a metaphor that far).

Whatever agreements or disagreements we may have with either the tactics or the substance of what the Alt-Right believes we have to acknowledge that they have red-pilled a significant part of the normie right.  And that is without a doubt an enormous achievement.  Without them maybe Clinton beats Trump and with a solid liberal majority on the Supreme Court we might now be watching as the First and Second Amendments were being effectively chloroformed.