Tag: The New Right

Kevin McCarthy Struggling to Find Enough Votes to Become Speaker of the House

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Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to assemble the 218 votes he needs to become Speaker of the House in January.  The usual suspects in the GOP establishment are wringing their hands and warning that to resist McCarthy’s accession to the Speaker’s gavel would be madness.  Some representatives who despise McCarthy have floated Steve Scalise’s name.

Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) said, “Steve Scalise is a good friend of mine, but he himself and many others have said they’re supporting McCarthy and will continue to support McCarthy. Again, there is no Plan B here. The plan is to get him elected as speaker. At the end of the day — we could be there two, three days — it doesn’t really matter. The majority of the conference understands that without him, we wouldn’t even be having this debate.”

That may be, but apparently McCarthy is worried and so he is making concessions to his opponents.

“The embattled California Republican is offering a congressional rule change that would make it easier to remove a House speaker in exchange for his ascension to the post. McCarthy’s offer would lower the threshold required for a motion to vacate the chair — a parliamentary gambit that forces a vote on retaining the speaker.

“Currently, because of rules change pushed through by Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi, only a member of the House leadership can offer a motion to vacate. Conservative House Republicans are pushing for that standard to be repealed, allowing any one member to force a vote on the speaker at any time.”

Well, well, well.  Some of the new congressmen don’t want the establishment hack to sell out their constituents.  If you ask me that’s pretty damn good.  It may not accomplish a thing but it restores faith that not every last politician in Washington is a fink.

Look, McCarthy will end up the Speaker and he will cut the usual deals with the Democrats that sell us out and make him a zillionaire.  But the fact that some of the reps are even trying to get some leverage over their future boss is a minor miracle from my point of view.

It at least shows that there’s an awareness of what the voters think of McCarthy and so these reps are at least trying to show that they’ll do more than just stand by and let the Uniparty sell us out according to standard operating procedure.

This is hardly a stunning victory.  It’s not even a feel-good story.  Let’s call this a tiny first step in the right direction.  But it’s a nice sequel to the ejection of Liz Cheney and most of the other Never-Trump impeachment traitors.  Let’s just call it a little creative schadenfreude.

Friday Happenings and a Hint from the Z Man

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A marvelous morning.  After a lot of rain and cool weather over the last two day the sun has broken through and the temperature is supposed to be skirting with eighty.  The pool guys are here today and will open it up and treat it.  Right now, it’s a rich color that I’m told is green and I’m guessing those guys will have an awful lot of vacuuming to do.

Camera Girl has finally found some butternut squash seedling for her garden and I’m continuing with my program of chopping down and uprooting invasive trees like Russian Olive and Ailanthus that spring up everywhere.  Now that my great experiment with the fence support has panned out, I’ll buy a few more supports and strengthen the posts.  That will give me the chance to decide on the “final solution.”  I’ve been thinking about metal posts but that’s a big effort and as usual my laziness weighs in against it.

As is my routine on Friday mornings I listened to the Z Man’s podcast.  I heard a sort of throwaway line that he is having a essay of his posted at American Greatness.  That I think is a significant moment.  I’ve been wondering how much farther the coalescence would move between the Dissident Right and the MAGA Right.  Previously I observed paleoconservative Paul Gottfried as a link between the two sides.  Gottfried writes on American Greatness and the American Mind and has had the Z Man appear on his podcasts.  With the Z Man writing at American Greatness, I think we see the next step in the mainstreaming of dissident ideas and thinkers.  And that’s all to the good.

The opposite reaction to this rapprochement is comments that Z Man says he’s been getting from some of his more strident readers claiming he has been toning down his rhetoric on hot-button topics like immigration and race realism.  My guess is that with his growing reach into more moderate audiences he’s recognized the desirability of softening his language to avoid scaring off the squeamish.  And once again, that’s all to the good.  Truly hateful rhetoric just for the sake of hatefulness doesn’t help anyone, especially those on the Right attempting to build coalitions.

I look forward to the day when Nick Fuentes, the Z Man and other dissidents can show up on Tucker Carlson’s show and sit down with more moderate types like Michael Anton and the people over at Claremont.  Both sides would benefit enormously by the chance to speak openly and honestly with each other.  At some point it might be possible for the agenda of an energized MAGA coalition to even get the dissidents to climb down off the ledge and rejoin the rest of the Right.

Look, I know that last statement sounds like happy-happy talk but I think there’s more than just unbridled enthusiasm at work here.  The overreach of the Left has done them serious damage.  Damage on a scale we haven’t seen since the American electorate booted Jimmy Carter out of the White House and spawned the Reagan ‘80s.  I think it would be extremely valuable to have some voices from the Dissident Right in the mix when we start talking about agendas.  Obviously not everybody on the fringe is safe to have mixing with us normies.  But the more sober-minded and thoughtful individuals like Z Man have a lot to say about where the Right has gone wrong so many times before.  I welcome the idea that he is making the effort to talk to the moderates.

So, this is an interesting morning.  Summer returns to the Compound and interesting happenings are afoot on the Right.  All to the Good.

The Z-Man Catalogs the Groups That Make Up the Right

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In his post today the Z-Man breaks down the “tribes” that make up the Right Wing by what they espouse.

  1. Gentry Conservatives
  2. Normies or Civic Nationalists
  3. Disgruntled Right
  4. Religious/Traditionalists
  5. Revanchist Right
  6. Dissident Right

These various groups are defined by the Z-Man based on the perspective they bring to the question of what should be done about our current mess.  His take on this is that the dissidents are the only ones that have a point of view that allows them to escape from the trap that he defines as liberal democracy.

I think it’s a good article to read to see which group you think you belong to.  And to see how or if you disagree with the Z-Man’s take.  As always he brings up good points.  But is his the only point of view that can beat the Left?

We Are the Real Resistance

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I was talking to a friend about the current state of affairs and he asked me if so and so was to the left or the right of me and I reflexively said no one was to the right of me.  As soon as I said that I realized I wasn’t even sure what that currently means.  But I did feel it necessary to clarify my remark.  I said that I was and am a civic nationalist but that I no longer believe that the Left can be dealt with as a part of America.  I said that they must be dealt with as an outside enemy and that their use of identity politics means that we are forced to use identity politics right back at them.  And I added further that I wasn’t sure that we would ever return to a united state but might be forced to stagger along, at each other’s throats until one side convincingly destroys the other.

Saying this out loud to someone else had the effect of crystalizing some of the things I had been thinking about recently.  For the last three and a half years the Left has called itself the resistance.  And they have made it their mission to gum up the works for all of us and try to increase the misery factor for the whole country.  Their whole effort is to worsen life for their enemies even if that requires their lives to suffer in some way.  And especially in the last six months they’ve done just that.  And that got me thinking.  If somehow, they are able to get Joe Biden into the White House in January then the roles will be reversed and I will be a part of the resistance.  It will be my job to find fault with everything the Left does and look for ways to discredit their every action.  But more importantly, I will be looking to build things of my own that don’t depend on or benefit the institutions and allies of the Left.  And on a grander scale that is what everyone on the New Right will be doing.  We will have to solve the problem of the hostile Silicon Valley gatekeepers one way or another and we will have to court the business of the 40% of the population that are on our side and take that business away from our enemies.  And doing that will also force the rest of the corporations that currently cater to the dictates of the woke to realize that there is a price for belittling almost half of your customers if they are given a choice to buy from people who don’t hate them.

All this is true.  But it is also true that even if President Trump is re-elected, we are still the resistance.  The Left owns so much of the world we live in that whether we think of it in these terms or not we are the permanent resistance because they already own everything but our souls.  But luckily, it’s pretty hard to repossess a soul.  I’m not saying they aren’t working on it just that we’ve got some time to gather our courage to start fighting back.  Lots of folks on the Right like to compare our struggle to the 800-year Spanish Reconquest of their country from the Moors, the Reconquista.  I guess the good news is that if we fight hard, I don’t think it’ll take more than a single century to win.  The bad news is that religious fervor is in pretty short supply in today’s world.  But that can change too.  We are the descendants of a civilization that produced some of the most amazing philosophical, spiritual, scientific, military and artistic creations.  A culture that produced Aristotle, Alexander, Mozart, Napoleon and Newton should be able to outthink screaming blue-haired cat ladies and outfight umbrella brandishing vegan twig boys.

So, the point of this post is just to say, don’t wait for the election to start making a difference.  Start helping our side in every way you can.  And don’t be elated if we win the election or dejected if we lose.  This is the long war.  It will go on as long as you live so don’t hold your breath waiting for it to be over.

Live your life to the fullest.  Work around the Left wherever you have to and win as many small victories as you can by enjoying the things that they are too stupid to enjoy themselves.  Family, religion, manhood, womanhood, tradition, sports, culture.  All the things they are against and seek to destroy.  Celebrate all these things in your family and your friends and in a wider group that we can build ourselves.  And make an effort to support anyone on our side who has a product or service that you can purchase.  Buy American, Real American.

So, though I hope to read of his imprisonment sometime in the future I’ll paraphrase (grammatically) the words of Peter Strzok to his adulterous whore Lisa Page, “Vive la resistance.”

Say Rather, We Aren’t Going to Just Vote Our Way Out of This

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There is a well-known saying on the Dissident Right, “We aren’t going to vote our way out of this.”  This is based on a combination of two facts.

  • No matter how many times we won the Presidency and Congress by voting in GOP Establishment losers, nothing ever got better.
  • Changing demographics will eventually produce a permanent Democrat majority.

And in a lot of ways they are right.  The Republicans have been an unmitigated disaster at least as far back as George Bush the Elder.  No matter where in the government we elect them to they immediately become liberals.  Every Supreme Court that we supposedly dominate pushes the culture farther and farther to the left.  This point has been undeniable up until the election of President Trump.  Of course, you could also make the point that he isn’t really a Republican but either way he’s the first Republican in decades who actually has made a dent in the culture war.

As for the demographics, they have a point there too.  Non-white voters typically vote in higher numbers for Democrats than for Republicans and in a decade or so white Americans will cease to be a majority of the American population.

For me this means that just voting is not going to win the culture war.  But just saying we can’t vote our way out and doing nothing is foolish.  We need to find such men as Donald Trump who want to restore the culture to the things that we actually want.  Whether we can elect them or not is to be seen.  And it is not certain that we cannot form alliances of various ethnicities.  Forging a coalition based on common interests with anyone of any background who wants to have membership in the middle class seems a much better fit than the current confederation of the outraged that the Left has cobbled together based on the myth of the evil white supremacist monsters that somehow is holding back the other more virtuous people of America.

And sometimes it will mean forming alliances based on common enemies.  So, for instance, if both whites and Asians are discriminated against in school admission then it would be natural for them to form common cause to elect politicians who want to eliminate affirmative action in school and employment.  Or how about recruiting women who have seen their daughters displaced on sports teams by men in sun dresses.  Peeling women off the intersectional bandwagon would be a real coup.

But all of these considerations will follow only if we get our act together.  The important project is to kill the Left’s propaganda campaign against normal America.  Fighting back against Antifa and BLM and pushing back against all aspects of the progressive assault is possible, popular and critical to winning back our rights.  And to accomplish those things not only requires us to vote, it also requires us to organize politically.  It means we’ll have to get off our butts and find out if there is a Republican party organization in your area and whether any of the members are actually on the Right.  And if they’re not, try to organize like minded folks to pick someone who is and run him for some low-level post, state rep or dog catcher or whatever.  And if worst comes to worst run for the office yourself.  And it means we have to find out about the higher echelons of the party and support good men and work against the rinos.

So, getting back to the original idea, it’s true that we can’t get out of the hole we’re in if all we do is vote.  But the simple truth is that for decades all we thought we had to do was vote.  We were blind and the people we thought were on our side weren’t.  But that’s hardly a reason to say it can’t be done.  If we actually try, we may fail.  But if we do nothing we certainly will fail.  So, go down swinging.  Do something.  Who knows, you might surprise yourself and actually win!

How Will the Deplorables Get Organized?

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In an earlier post I talked about the Great Awakening on the Right.  And every day makes that claim more obvious.  The old way of framing the agenda on the Right and those that championed that mindset are becoming less and less relevant.  Fewer people even care to argue with these yesterday men anymore and are abandoning their sites and publications for more relevant sites.

All of that is clear.  What isn’t clear is what comes next.  The New Right is anything but monolithic, in point of fact it’s like a boiling pot.

I struggled to come up with a witty analogy for what the current situation could be described as.  Here is an idea.  Let’s say that Cold War Conservatism was like a tool that was cast from various metals to form an alloy.  Anti-Communists, Social Conservatives and Fiscal Conservatives would be examples of some of those components.  During the Cold War it more or less held together and to some extent it served its purpose.  But because of the preferences of the metallurgist who formulated the alloy it included some materials that didn’t actually alloy very well but ended up as unassimilated lumps which made them weak spots in the structure.  These weak spots would be the Neo-Cons and the Limousine Republicans.  And he also left out some materials that would have made the alloy stronger or more useful but he didn’t care for their source.  This would equate to when the Paleo-Cons like Buchanan were ejected twenty years ago.

When this tool began to crumble it no longer served its purpose so the owner has gone to another metallurgist and asked him to recast the tool.  Well, waste not want not.  So, the metallurgist took the scrap left from the old tool and broke it up and discarded the lumps that hadn’t alloyed previously and threw the rest in the crucible and melted it down and then added some of those previously excluded materials to the melt.  This molten metal is currently mostly just potential.  It has no known properties yet.  Soon it has to be cast and cooled and tested to find out if it’s any better than the alloy before.

Okay, enough poetry.  My point, right now we’ve decided that Conservative Inc. is broken.  We’ve taken a sledge hammer to it and now we’re taking the good-looking chunks and throwing them into the melting pot and chucking clinkers like JEB! and Mitt and Bill Kristol and George Will into the slag heap.  We’re also adding in some nationalism and some pro-normal-American identity politics into the mix.  And right now, we have a molten mass that has no known properties, just potential.  But soon it will coalesce into something.  Now someone has to build the mold to cast it into a usable tool.

So, four hundred words into this word goulash I’m getting to my point.  What’s next?  What will this new thing look like?

First of all, I don’t think it will become a new political party to challenge the Republicans at the polls.  Splitting the non-progressive vote is suicide.  I think we continue to take over the Republican party.  Most (but not all) of the truly hard core RINOs have done us the favor of retiring or switching sides.  Without a doubt there are plenty of grifters still in Congress and the government in general just looking for the paycheck and the perks.  But that’s not something that will ever change.  But when the wind shifts our way these vampires will at least rubber stamp what the majority of the party endorses in order to keep their meal ticket punched.

But there has to be some organization to allow for the debate and consensus building that goes along with a movement.  The old right had the GOP Establishment and the think tanks and the media entities like the National Review and the Weekly Standard to debate and communicate policy.  We have none of that.  We have blogs and a few mainstream media voices (Rush or Tucker) and then nothing.  Some of these sources will expand.  Some of the mainstream media (maybe Fox, maybe not) will jump on the bandwagon.  But is a political organization necessary?  Everyone remembers the fiasco of the Tea Party.  The last thing people want is a raft of grifters sucking up funds and side-railing actual results.  But how does any organizing get done?  How do decisions and policy get decided?  It doesn’t seem that everything can be done informally.

My guess is an umbrella organization could provide a way for local groups and single-issue groups to coalesce around a common platform. A consensus could be reached that allows politicians and activists to know what the deplorables are thinking.  But how to get something like that going?  A few ways occur to me:

  • A social media site can provide functionality for the organization and communication needed to negotiate some kind of a policy platform.
  • One of the existing think tanks can sponsor a convention either actual or virtual for the deplorables to attend and coalesce around. I’ve liked some of the people who have come out of Claremont Institute.  Maybe that is a possibility.
  • The Republicans might finally wake up and realize that they are throwing away the golden opportunity to represent their natural constituency. If they would analyze how and why President Trump was able to wash away their whole field of candidates and the Democrats, they would see that he threw in his lot with the normal people and rebelled against his own class.  If the Republicans had the courage to follow his lead they would be rewarded with loyal voters.
  • Finally, President Trump may have to do it himself. His own structure to organize the deplorables on a permanent basis would be another workable option.

I’ve said that it needs to be done but I’m not trying to kid anyone into thinking it will be easy.  When I said that the New Right is like a boiling pot I wasn’t kidding.  Chaos and kinetic energy are the only rules and there is absolutely no consensus between the various groups that make it up.  They range from radical separatists who are busy storing ammo for the shooting war, to Tea Party civic nationalists who can’t figure out why John McCain didn’t get elected in 2008, to religious businessmen who want the government to stop persecuting them for their beliefs, to Rust Belt forgotten men who want to stop the globalists from putting the last nail into their economic coffins.  Herding cats would be a cakewalk in comparison.  But it will need to be done if we hope to avoid being back at the mercy of the Stupid Party.

It will be interesting to see if someone steps up to get the ball rolling.  I’d volunteer myself but the day job keeps me pretty busy.  But it’s an enormous opportunity for a savvy operator.  I’m undecided whether it will be a silicon-valley type, or a media operator, or a venture capitalist, or another entrepreneur like Trump.  Or maybe it will be one of the Dissident Visionaries who first recognized that the GOP Establishment were actually the Washington Generals.

But if it doesn’t happen, we could end up with the next generation of the Bush clan being foisted on us as the future of the right wing.  Anyone old enough knows that’s how we got into this mess in the first place, GHW Bush telling us he was a conservative.  If that happens, we run the risk of this whole project ending up on the slag heap.  Total failure.