The Great Awakening

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.

 

Tucker Carlson and the Red Pill

I was listening to the Z-Man’s Friday morning podcast this morning.  It’s on the Ancient Greeks and since that is something that I’m more than somewhat steeped in it was quite a lot of fun to listen to.  Lots of good comparisons between Ancient Athens and the United States.  What was topical was at minute 56 of the podcast he mentions that broadcast that Tucker Carlson did recently.  I linked to it a couple of days ago and said it sounded like Tucker was running for President.  What the Z-Man said was that it sounded like Carlson was reading aloud some of the dissident right posts that he and the other writers have been putting out for six or more years.

What this reminds me of is Vox Day’s constant refrain that “the Alt-Right is inevitable.”  Well, I don’t know if the Alt-Right or the Dissident Right’s agenda is inevitable but what seems to inevitable is that a very good chunk of the American Nation is waking up to the fact that they’ve been putting their faith in men who really couldn’t care less if they lived or died.  In fact, it appears they’d prefer it if we just up and died as quickly as possible.  Call it the shifting Overton window or the red-pilling of the normies or whatever you like but if a Cloud Dweller like Tucker Carlson is coming around to the nitty gritty of where we’re headed then it won’t be long before even the most brain-dead denizen of Squaresville, USA will be waking up to the realization that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney do not mean them well.

What I’m curious about is what will be the next big step change.  In the same way as Blue States practice civil disobedience such as Sanctuary Cities, will Red States start protecting their citizens against national policies that they object to?  For instance, if companies like Master Card and Google continue de-platforming conservatives could state attorneys general begin legal proceedings against these companies to force them to relent?  Maybe they’ll prosecute the local universities that indoctrinate kids and strip them of their legal rights.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s next.  But it does appear that dissident ideas are getting mainstreamed at least to some extent.  Reading about the Baltimore lawyer who is suing the Southern Poverty Law Center and attempting to have their tax-free status revoked for using illegal tactics to get him fired from the Baltimore City government sounds like maybe a first step to addressing the radical de-platforming.  Hearing this week that Master Card may be joining forces with the crowd-funding companies to deny access to e-commerce to conservatives sounds like some kind of Maoist or Stalinist internal exile tactic.  At lest in the gulag they fed you once in a while.  In our cashless society, denial of access to a credit card is tantamount to being an exile from modern life.

And this all points to the paradox of how I feel about the current situation.  A few years ago, I didn’t know just how bad it really was but I was almost in depression because I couldn’t understand why we kept losing when we seemed to have the upper hand.  Now I realize just how bad it is and that most of our “leaders” aren’t really trying to help us and yet I’m actually strangely optimistic.  I feel like knowing the problem makes it possible for me to take some actions and improve how I live my life.

Will the unrest on the right reach critical mass?  It’s hard to say but I’m interested to see what Tucker Carlson ends up doing in the next year or two.  He’s a popular journalist and could do a lot to persuade people.  Stay tuned.

18DEC2018 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Death of the Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/17/death-of-the-weekly-standard-signals-rebirth-of-the-right/

Chris Buskirk runs the American Greatness website.  Chris is a civic nationalist who believes in restoring the American project.  But in his post, he sounds a lot like the folks in the dissident right:

“But the Bushes killed the Reagan legacy and rather than capitalizing on his victories abroad to achieve his goals at home, they instead embraced the social democratic impulse that replaces core human institutions like the family and the church with the government. This was the point at which institutional conservatism lost its way and slowly became a shadow of the progressive Left—following always just a few paces behind wherever it led.”

That line about “following always just a few paces behind wherever it led,” could have been in a post by Vox Day or the Z-Man.  To my mind, the information that has been percolating around the dissident right has finally become completely mainstreamed.  That is very good news.  I tell some of my friends who get discouraged that knowing the truth about the Fake Right is more important news than anything else.  The sucker punches we took from the Fake Right did more damage than the direct attacks from the Left.  Uniting the people on the right will make us much stronger whereas having false friends among the rich and powerful is an enormous negative.

Onward and upward.

 

The Legacy of the Alt-Right

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.

Roseanne Barr Loses Her ABC Sitcom for Insulting Valerie Jarrett – The Left Loses Its Mind

I read the Hollywood Reporter article

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/roseanne-canceled-at-abc-racist-tweet-1115412

It said Barr tweeted, “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

The article continued, ‘Barr subsequently apologized: “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”’

Wow, I was wrong about Barr she is a badass.  And it’s cost her big time.  Hey maybe Fox can let her have a show on Friday night after Tim Allen’s show.

But doesn’t this make you think that there’s something in the air.  Even Progressives like Roseanne Barr are fed up with the Narrative.  Even they’re sick of having to toe a line they don’t respect.  Roseanne may walk all this back and pay some price involving selling out blue collar people and she might even get back in the good graces (though I doubt it).  But something is definitely starting to happen.  Cracks in the dam?  We’ll see.  But the Overton Window is definitely on the move and ultimately all this goes back to Donald Trump.

A Different Kind of Red Shift

A couple of day ago I linked to a post on American Greatness by Angelo Codevilla https://amgreatness.com/2018/04/13/living-with-politics-as-war/ .  I’d like to elaborate a little what I think is interesting about this article.  Vox Day has often said (and I paraphrase)  that the Alt-Right (or Dissident Right or whatever else you call it) will have arrived when the normies have shifted so far to the right that their views can only be distinguished from the Alt-Right by tactics and not by what they believe are the facts on the ground.

Well, I think I’m seeing that happen in real time.  Codevilla is a mainstream academic figure and not an Alt-Right provocateur.  Reading his description of where the country now is and what to do about it is to realize that the idea of going back to a consensus society is effectively dead.  The only question between the normal traditionalists and the Alt-Right is whether we just set up separate shops under the nominally United States or fight a civil war to establish borders between enemy states.  That is remarkable.  It should be disquieting for me but it isn’t.  I still think it will be a bloodless divorce but either way I think we should get on with it.

Codevilla goes through the various arenas where Leftist coercion is the most egregious (schools and colleges, corporate blackmail and de-platforming) and suggests that federal coercion will be less effective than it was formerly and that state legislatures may ignore federal precepts and just go their own way as they have lately on drug enforcement.  Whether he is correct about the federal government giving up on some of its control of local behavior isn’t clear to me but I do think that push back from the right is likely to increase in strength in the future.

So Vox is fond of saying, and I quote, “The Alt-Right is inevitable.”  Depending on how you want to define the Alt-Right we may be seeing proof of his statement.  And if that means the vast majority of non-leftists waking up to the necessity of casting off the oppression of the Left then I am 100% on-board.  Long live the Revolution.  Off with their heads (or at least throw the bums out).

 

[socialpoll id=”2497288″]