All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
One of our friends here informed me that a new post has appeared on the ZMan’s site.
Someone must have been given access to the ZMan’s content and he is posting some of the content that wasn’t previously free (ZMan referred to it as “behind the green door”).
Well, it’s new to me so I will have to check the site from time to time to see if there will be recurring new stuff.
I think the ZMan always linked to Fairytale of New York by the Pogues every Christmas. And being a native New Yorker I have a certain nostalgia for the city from the time before it died.
And since this is the first Christmas since the ZMan died I thought I’d post something to remind me of his site.
Merry Christmas to ZMan wherever heaven for the dissident right might be.
I clicked on the link to the ZMan’s website to check out whether anymore comments appeared on the his last post and found the above copied error message from his webhosting service.
So that’s that. It finalizes a sort of empty place in my internet routine that is now reinforced by corporate schedules. A bank account is emptied, a bill isn’t paid and a website disappears. And the world moves on. I guess we all leave a small footprint when all is said and done.
Hail, hail and farewell.
I have returned from the Great White North! I had a quick get-together with the Coffee Walk Brotherhood. Much booze was imbibed and many cigars were smoked (not by me) and much wet wood was forced to burn using mass quantities of medium length hydrocarbons. It was a great success with midnight bull sessions and even some very good guitar and singing from the two musicians in the gang.
It ended off with a hearty breakfast while the television aired Caddyshack in all its 1970s glory (“Yo, Lama, how ‘bout somethin’ for the effort?”). So, after a total of about eight hours of driving I return to the Compound a tired but spiritually enhanced individual after communing, consulting and otherwise hobnobbing with my fellow wizards.
Unfortunately for me I have two very long days Monday and Tuesday so my output will still be constrained but on the positive side I finished my initial re=read of my book and found some clarity for my march to completion and publishing (yaaay!). Anyway, here I go.
So, the dissident right community has had an outpouring of grief over the passing of the ZMan. I’m interested to see if his readers find a way to keep their community intact.
I saw that the Supreme Court provided some relief to the Trump administration on the endless lower court injunctions against his immigration and other efforts. I haven’t had a chance to read much on the details but supposedly it will now require class-action law suits to allow these judges to foul up the works. Maybe this will slow down the interference somewhat. But we’ll have to see. And I saw the good news that SCOTUS ruled that parents of school children can opt out of public-school LGBTQ indoctrination classes and “learning materials.” Good for them. It’s part and parcel with the first amendment and freedom of religion. Hopefully this can be built upon to rein in the blue states.
As for the Israeli/Iran war it looks like Trump may have been able to thread the needle and tamp down the fires. Anyway, let’s hope so. Maybe this will force him to end our support for that other war that’s raging out of control. But I’m not holding my breath.
And finally, here we are almost halfway through Donald Trump’s first year in his last term and it seems he’s starting to make a dent in the “resistance.” I think it is now apparent that ignoring the Left’s whining and temper tantrums and just going forward with his priorities (like deporting illegal aliens and forcing changes in the trade imbalance and off-shoring of jobs) is a winning strategy both objectively and optically. Keep it up Mr. Trump!
So here I am at the brink of July but my calendar is cluttered with annoying responsibilities in the short term. Hopefully by Wednesday the clouds will have parted and serenity and summertime relaxation will be reestablished. But regardless, we must soldier on. Okay, I’m halfway back to normalcy and the universe hasn’t exploded around me so I’ll call it a win and move on. Next!!!
I have a long trip tomorrow morning and I wasn’t sure I would post tonight but the ZMan’s death seems to require a post. And interestingly, yesterday my mind was on mortality. Just a coincidence but a strange one nonetheless.
I guess I’m looking to process the news a little bit to make it feel less strange. From what I remember, he was in his late fifties. I knew he wanted to lose a few pounds and was happy that the yard work around a rural property afforded him the excuse to do more manual labor. I guess with all the excess mortality after the COVID debacle he may be another victim of our regime’s ill-conceived and incompetently handled bioweapons program in China. I think everyone’s vitality has taken at least some damage from the spike protein saturating our environment. So maybe that is the primary cause of the ZMan’s untimely death. Or maybe he had an underlying condition that he did or didn’t know about. I’m guessing I’ll never know any more about it. So, let’s put aside his surprise death.
What about his work? I’ve been reading and (later) listening to the ZMan’s content for about ten years. I was already reading material from various “alt-right” sources and ran into some of his posts as links from other sources. And right away I could tell that his insights and his thought patterns were head and shoulders above most of the blogs I was then reading. Eventually he became my primary source, not for political news but rather for reaction to the news and for his take on what were the motivations for the actions that were going on in the world around us.
And I found his insights very useful. He could fit the events into a framework that accounted for the various factions and their agendas; the radical Left, the managerial state, the establishment Republicans, the Neocons, the rank-and-file Democrats and all the rest of the clown parade. He could lay out their machinations and even predict their feuds and friendships. And he did it in an entertaining and polished manner. And his Friday podcast added in the benefit of his suave speaking voice that I playfully referred to as the “Voice of Saruman.” Yes, the ZMan was a quality resource.
Now as much as I respected and agreed with much of his analysis of the political goings on in Washington and elsewhere, I had and have a very different political ideology from the ZMan. At heart I’m just a red-pilled civic nationalist and ZMan was a full-fledged member of the dissident right. What that means was that although I agreed with his diagnosis of our ills I disagreed with his prescription for a cure. I wanted to eliminate things like affirmative action and illegal immigration and restore an America that had existed before the Johnson New Society. I wanted the government to leave people alone to decide how they wanted to live their lives and let the government be a color-blind referee that only stepped in when a race war or something equally insane appeared in the streets.
The ZMan believed it was impossible to re-establish that kind of America. What exactly he believed was the radical solution to the dysfunctional condition of the United States he never explicitly revealed. On a number of occasions, he did state that a civil war wasn’t in the cards. I assumed he believed that a negotiated settlement that produced some number of successor states, one of which would be more pleasing to the dissident right, was the desired outcome. Well, I guess I’ll never know for sure now. But obviously we differed quite strongly on political ideology and for this reason I never commented on his site. After all, I was obviously not the target audience. As much as I admired his abilities as an essayist and a student of political history my positions on these matters would only lead to me being hounded off the site. And what fun would that be for me?
So, I read his content and linked to the essays that I found especially convincing or entertaining and time passed. I remember when he had that dustup with Michael Anton and that seemed to confirm that moderates would not be dealt with moderately. And although I said at the time that everyone is allowed to decide who is and isn’t their enemies, I had no desire to be in that position. So I lurked and enjoyed his work when it agreed with my views and ignored what did not.
But I will say I’m very sad to hear of his death. He seemed to be a genuinely good fellow. If I were on a train or plane with him and all we discussed was New England weather, Thucydides and the antics of Donald Trump I think we could have had a very enjoyable discussion.
And I’m going to miss his Friday Power Hour podcast. I looked forward to it every week and he provided entertainment and matters to contemplate, on a very consistent basis. And I always did hope that if Trump and his confederates had ever managed to “fix” the country and get back our rights maybe the ZMan would call a truce with the civic nationalists.
But now we’ll never know. Rest in peace, ZMan. You were an American original.
Probably the most eloquent and witty voice on the Dissident Right is no more. Reports on X by authoritative sources say that the ZMan passed away last night of “natural causes.”
Of course, his most skeptical fans will wonder if the cause was completely natural. But I will certainly miss his writing and podcasts. He had one of the greatest speaking voices on the conservative side of the aisle (or “great divide” as he called it). And his knowledge of political and sociological affairs was impressive.
Although I differed from him on some of the conclusions he drew from his facts I had to admit he was well versed on the mechanisms that had created the dysfunction that he reported on in his posts.
He has a legion of devoted readers who commented religiously on his site and who will be hard pressed to find a new home to replace his haven.
Rest in peace ZMan.
Update:
Comment by ArthurinCali:
Sad news, especially how sudden it was. Zman was one of the inspirations to me to try my hand at writing. His analysis and podcast will be greatly missed by many of us.
What the ZMan calls the Blob is the halo of NGOs and other organizations that surround and feed off of government entities like the USAID that dole out the taxpayer money for their friends and fellow travelers.
He gives an illuminating example of a woman who fails her way up the ladder of NGO perfidy switching from Middle Eastern influence peddler to immigrant enabler with a stop over in the middle as part of the Biden administration. It’s inspirational!
I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven’t been rejected yet. But I found out it takes up to a month to get a letter after submission so I might not know anything for quite a while. Well, patience is a virtue.
I listened to the ZMan’s Friday podcast today. It was on US Foreign Policy and he was making a distinction of a realistic foreign policy (meaning in the interest of Americans) versus one based on some kind of moralistic crusade like “making the world safe for democracy.” I guess this was a discussion sparked by Trump’s recent foreign policy statements that centered around the self-interest of the United States. It was interesting and hearkened back to Woodrow Wilson and his attempt to restructure Europe in his image of what modern countries should look like, namely, the United States, which sounded a lot like every neo-con secretary of state for the last thirty years.
And all of that was good stuff. But the end of the show was a discussion of Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War.” And that always holds my interest. It’s uncanny how the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC can reverberate down the millennia and ring warning bells over today’s headlines. He reviewed Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Melian Dialog and showed how these stances mirror the foreign policy reality and the attendant justification that we see today from an imperial state. All very relevant and instructive for anyone looking at our relationship to Europe and its relationship with Russia. I commend the ZMan for his use of this timeless lesson from history.
What it reminded me of was that other bit from Thucydides work, namely his chronicle of the Civil War in Corcyra. Here the Athenians and the Spartans encouraged the aristocrats and the peasants in Corcyra to back respectively the Spartan (aristocratic) form of government or the Athenian (democratic) form of government in Corcyra. And eventually the familiar escalation into class warfare reached the heights of insanity where even blood relation wasn’t enough to save someone from partisan hatred and murder.
“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.”
It seems I trot out Corcyra every seven or eight years whether I need to or not. The last time was October of 2017. And since then, we’ve had the January 6th “insurrection” and Merrick Garland’s crusade to jail unarmed people who trespassed in order to protest in a public building. It’s hardly Corcyra where at the end of the revolution people were dragged out of a temple and butchered in the street by their fellow “citizens.”
But it’s good to remember how all these things degenerate when people’s rights start getting trampled in the name of revolutionary fervor. That’s why I’m glad that freedom of speech and the other freedoms seem to be making a comeback around here. I think they do more to restrain government and make life in this country worth living. Well, that enough.
I listened to ZMan’s podcast this week. He compares America to a corporation and Trump is the hostile takeover artist trying to fix a failing company.
Pretty good listen.