Dear Angry White Men

Niko Shimada is right. Angry white men are right to be angry. But let's be angry at the right targets. While I can't say for sure, Niko doesn't seem to be taking us down a productive path here, though I could be wrong and hope I am. Perhaps it would be useful to break this tweet down and look at it in more detail.

"The media despises and belittles you."

Definitely. Hatred of white males is rife in the media. The more important question here is: why? (((Easy answers))) are attractive because they're, well, easy. Blaming some or another group of others comes naturally to us. We're hardwired for tribalism. But ease sacrifices accuracy in cases such as this. Sometimes the real enemy isn't some or another group of others from a foreign land, but rather our own elites - the people we naturally view as beautiful and even heroic - who are much more the real threat, and the situation much more complicated than reactionary conspiracy theorists who lay it all at the feet of "cultural Marxism" would have us believe.

Let's take a closer look.

The most crucial thing to understand about media is how it really works. This is best outlined by Noam Chomsky in his seminal work, Manufacturing Consent - two and three quarter hours of solid red pill - real red pill, if you're ever of the mind to invest the time - wherein he describes media as corporations whose real purpose is to sell audiences to other corporations. In short, it profits through advertising, and it attracts advertisers by offering them large and/or prosperous consumer bases.

So what does this have to do with white male bashing in the media?  If media needs to attract advertisers, it needs a relatively prosperous consumer base. This usually entails an educated consumer base, since education and income levels correlate.  It should be no secret by now that feminist theory and critical race theory, attributing oppression and inequality to racial and gender identity exclusively, have a considerable presence on college campuses.

So called "social justice" and identity politics are a safe, nerfed form of radical deconstruction and protest culture. Engaging in them allows otherwise privileged students to feel as though they're progressive, edgy, subversive, challenging oppressive power structures and on the right side of history. It also gives them an acceptable target on which to project any guilt they may feel over their very real privilege, given that they're able to attend elite post secondary institutions and the numerous benefits this entails, have access to influential media sources and so on. All of this without ever actually posing a real challenge to the real corporate and state power that really calls the shots, to the detriment of most. Were you in a seat of corporate power, what more could you want?

The narrative that white males have gotten where they are entirely off of sexism, racism and oppression is necessary to uphold because it helps make neoliberal economic policies that have devastated the white male working class more palatable. It eases the conscience of the political class. No need to look at who the real beneficiaries of deindustrialization and global capitalism have been, since those who've suffered from it deserve it because colonialism, patriarchy and white male privilege.

Not to say that racism, sexism, colonialism and patriarchy are not now (to some extent) and have not in history been very real evils, worthy of criticism, condemnation and opposition. But let's be honest here, that's not what this vain, pseudo leftism is really about. If these "woke" corporations such as Gillette Razors really cared about the well being of women and people of color, they'd start by looking at the wages and conditions in their 3rd world manufacturing facilities. The pseudo leftism so beloved by academia, Hollywood and Silicon Valley ends rather abruptly where corporate and state power begins.

Plus, white men do not help themselves by consistently being the most conservative, pro-corporate voting block when broken down by race and gender. Look at any internet libertarian, mad as hell about taxes and the "gibmedat" attitude of those stupid liberals and it's usually, though not always, a white male.

But then, what has the left offered him in return? The so called left abandoned the working class long ago. Looking at the US Democrats, this beginning even in Kennedy and Johnson's time and being more or less complete by the presidency of Bill Clinton. So when given a choice between a center right that pretends to sympathize with them, and a center "left" that openly scapegoats them, can white males really be blamed for opting for the former?

Plus, it's worth noting too that most domestic, consumer spending in the 1st world is controlled by women, though the precise figures vary. Some estimates are that women control or strongly influence over 80% of non-business consumer spending. This figure is not universally agreed on, however. But there's no question that the purchasing power is there. Moreover, women constitute a higher percentage of college graduates overall than men.  Most crucially, women are vastly more likely to be activist consumers, display a willingness to organize and participate in boycotts, liaise effectively with corporate media structures and criticize the media, all for its portrayal of their gender and concern, or lack thereof, for women's issues.

So why not pander to the vanity of this group and contrast them favorably against an inferior male of the species? Especially if this can be effectively disguised as social justice and female empowerment, offering up "thoughtful" criticism of "toxic masculinity" or the like? All for their own good, of course. Plus demonizing men makes them less attractive as partners for women, and we all know what happens when men and women get together: love, marriage and the baby carriage, as the child's jump rope chant goes. And from there maternity leave, prenatal health care, K-12 education, dependents to cover with expensive health plans, and so on. All very expensive. Better to outsource our reproduction to the 3rd world in the form of mass immigration. We outsource most everything else these days, so why not that?

Women are more valuable as workers and consumers than as wives and mothers, and since we can't fire them for hooking up with men anymore like we could in the bad old days of early capitalism, better to disincentive all of this heterosexual liasing as heterosexist, objectification and harassment. Men who protest can be dismissed as hypersensitive (even though lacking in sensitivity is precisely what is highlighted in these criticisms of masculinity - but then you don't need logic or consistency because the media won't scrutinize your claims when feminism is your marketing gimmick) or reactionary cranks, yesterday's men and so on. Who cares about them, right?

"Corporations seek to feminize and pacify you."

No argument here. But again, it's worth asking why?

Capital has been seeking to subdue labor since it first emerged out of the middle ages as a power unto itself. So it should not surprise us that a pacified work force is exactly what they want. Wages, benefits and amenities to improve working conditions tend to fall under the 'expenses' section of your average income statement. Since net income equals revenue minus expense, there's a powerful incentive to keep these figures as low as possible.

Historically, this was done in a rather messy and heavy handed way. If the workers got uppity, just send in the Pinkertons, the National Guard or maybe even the Ku Klux Klan to bust some skulls. Prior to Roosevelt's 1935 signing of the National Labor Relations Act, it was not uncommon for labor disputes in the US to result in an actual body count, almost always consisting of labor, not capital. Worker's rights were never genuinely accepted by the US policy making elite, and the presidency of Ronald Reagan is known for being an era of renewed hostility to labour. The 1981 firing of striking PATCO workers was merely the beginning.

This era of mass media presents both new challenges and new opportunities. New challenges in that violent union busting or even scabbing out striking workers poses a significant public relations problem. New opportunities in that mass media can be used to keep workers pacified in other ways. Union suppression and union avoidance is now much more psychological and relational, basically taking on the characteristics of a public relations campaign, although threatening to close the doors and relocate if workers do not accept rock bottom wages and remain non union is always an option, if you have the capital to pull it off.

Of course, you can go the Koch Bro's route and fund media and outreach projects that frame capitalist productive relations along libertarian and conservative lines. This has worked quite well in the internet age, and many young white men trade fast and free in Friedmanite talking points, and are quite understandably icy on working class identity and solidarity. Except when it can be used to attack feminism, of course.

A more subtle technique, alluded to above, is to reframe public conversations about inequality, power and privilege. Again, cast these as race or gender issues. Redefine power dynamics in the workplace, especially in the post me too and time's up era, along gender as opposed to class lines. Better yet to get your work force to internalize guilt-inducing narratives surrounding power and privilege. A white male working class that has been effectively neutered by internalized white male guilt delivered by incessant intersectional feminist propaganda is likely to lack the spirit needed to fight for their interests in the economic sphere. I mean, if you already feel that you have too much because what you already have is the result of unearned white male privilege, how motivated will you be to go on strike for improved wages and conditions?  The deconstruction of western patriarchal culture undertaken by the postmodern left may well have undermined religious and national loyalties, but in doing so has undermined class consciousness as well. Last I heard, white male workers have no need to unionize, since they already have white male privilege, and so would be taking union protection away from more marginalized people by doing so.

Sigh. Yeah.

Moreover, a left wing preoccupied with racial and gender identity politics will care a lot less about class and economic issues and lend less support to working class political and workplace efforts. If all else fails, dismiss working class leftism as "Bernie bros" "brocialists" or "class reductionists" or something like that.

In any event, most politics aimed at working class white males will not be friendly to their political or economic interests in the long term. Besides demonizing immigrants and feminism, these kinds of reactionaries are also anti-union and favor leaving all to the wolves of the free market, often equating anti-white and anti-male politics with socialism and Marxism. The "globalism" they so love to deride is a corporately driven phenomena, motivated by profit and was criticized first by organized labor, who rightly saw the threat it posed not only to the working class, but to the economic and ultimately the social fabric of the nations who so eagerly embraced it back in the 1990s.

Finally, while I do disagree with a lot of feminist deconstructions of masculinity, we would do well to ask ourselves how good this go-it-alone tough guy mindset has really been for us. Machismo and right wing politics have a long history of being in alignment with one another. Unions, social welfare and regulations are for wusses. Real men, with barrel chests and square jaws, don't complain or whine, they roll up their sleeves and power through anything and everything, all by themselves, long as it takes. Gee, I wonder who the long term beneficiaries of that end up being in a capitalist economy?  Oh well, just ball up your fists and punch anyone who asks questions like that.

"Immigrants seek to disempower you, rape your women and murder you."

Now come on. Really? I'd say this is true of a small portion of the immigrant population. But the general sentiment here is just silly. And on top of that, it's mean spirited and distracts, perhaps intentionally, from the real issues.

I'm no fan of open door immigration and am no opponent of "borders." Don't misunderstand me here.  Some militants will exploit loopholes in the refugee system, and the grooming gangs in Europe are not exactly a secret now, and failing to vet immigrants for things like membership in militant organizations for fear of looking "racist" is definitely an act of political irresponsibility. But is it reasonable to think that most immigrants are coming to the west with the intent of destroying our culture and raping our women?

I mean, fair's fair here. If it's wrong to hold all males collectively responsible for the crimes perpetuated by some men against women, as reactionaries and "red pill" types rightly assert, why is it okay to then do precisely this to Muslim, minority and immigrant communities? If it's okay to profile people, it's okay to profile everybody. If it isn't okay, it's not okay to profile anybody. Of course, progressives merely reverse this mistake when they cry racism against protests over grooming gangs, but then attribute rape to a culture of toxic masculinity and privilege which benefits all men, and therefore render all men morally culpable. Double standards are fine because power plus prejudice, apparently.

Realistically, most immigrants come to the west for a better life. Why might that be? Notice that no one asks why they're migrating in the first place? It couldn't be because neoliberal austerity measures imposed on the third world by the globalists stymie economic development in the global south and farm them for cheap exports to be consumed in the west and the profits hoarded by global multinationals? Couldn't be that, could it? It couldn't be because neoconservative foreign policies topple governments not friendly to the aforementioned neoliberal austerity measures, and reduce targeted nations into rubble heaps and war zones? Could it be that also, maybe?

Never! They're coming to the west to burn our churches and rape our women! Yeah, has to be! I read it on 4chan, I heard it on a redpill YouTube channel, and they're never wrong!

"Your leaders want another war for Israel"

I really, really hope this is rooted in a reasoned criticism of Israeli foreign policy and valid concerns over the strength of pro Israeli lobbies in Washington, and not just a stupid anti-semetic dog whistle. Because when reasoned analysis of complicated geopolitical situations that take into account a bevy of historical, economic, religious, ethnic, military and cultural factors runs up against baseless and long debunked conspiracy theories, we all know that people are reasonable and appreciate a factual analysis, right? I mean, we know that people will also take energy politics and the petrodollar into account when looking at western middle east foreign policy, right? Right?

Nah! Our leaders want more war for Israel in the middle east because Elders of Zion. You know, the same Elders of Zion who want the very same Muslims they want our aid in fighting against in the middle east to flood our own nations and convert our populations to Islam because they just hate white people that much. Or something. Who needs logic when you have a good, old fashioned conspiracy theory to make you feel self righteous about being victimized and persecuted!

"Billionaires give your jobs to machines"

Yes they do. And why might they do this, I wonder? And what should we do about that? Increased education and job training? A guaranteed income or maybe even a job guarantee? A sovereign wealth fund, to enable western governments and peoples to share in some of the profits so generated by these newly automated industries? Hell, dare I say it ... nationalize industry and/or place it under some form of worker's or social control? You know, seize the means of production and all that?

Never! That stuff is all communism, and if that's what you want, soy boy, how about moving to Venezuela! Those billionaires legitimately earned all of that money. Every cent of it. Workers should consider themselves lucky they had their overpaid jobs in places like Walmart and Amazon to begin with! Jeff Bezos and the Waltons would not have been successful had then not been both geniuses and saints, and they and they alone deserve every last cent earned by their respective corporate empires, because nobody else did anything at all to contribute to or enable their success. That'll trigger the libtard snowflakes!

So what we really need to do is show these feminists, immigrants, cultural Marxists, liberals and George Soros - who somehow isn't like other billionaires because he apparently hates white people and the west because reasons - who's boss and elect a strong, traditionalist right wing government. Who can then deregulate these automated megacorporations, and give their c-suite executives lavish tax cuts while they're at it. So that they can, in turn, off-shore more industry to further increase their profits, because capitalism and that will somehow make the west great again. Or something.

So I'm going to be serious and honest now. White men, you have every right to be angry. Your leaders have betrayed you. Absolutely they have. But let's be angry at the right people here. While you don't have to tolerate white bashing and male bashing from the pseudo left, and you have been tolerating far too much of that for far too long now, please don't see women, immigrants and minorities as your true enemy. Their anger at white males is likewise engineered and misguided, and by the same people as the people who betrayed you. Surely by now you know who they are, right? At least let's be clear about (((who they are not)))

Perhaps one day, angry women and minorities and angry white men can come to realize that they stand to gain way more together than by flying at one another's throats in a contrived, for profit culture war, and eventually create a world where we all have a good deal less to be angry about.

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Authoritarian Leftism

For some, the idea of an authoritarian left is a contradiction in terms. Authoritarianism is the province of the right, and can only ever be so. Even if the left does become violent, doing so while resisting power is fundamentally different than doing so while abusing power.

The idea of the authoritarian personality was first proposed in a 1950 book of the same name, by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley. Some of those names may be familiar to you, and are associated with the dreaded Frankfurt School and all of the western civilization hating cultural Marxism long associated with it.

It is from this work that the widely spread F Scale came to prominence. The F Scale is a survey (take the test here) intended to measure one's propensity to fascistic sympathies, and consists of the following metrics:

• Conventionalism: A disposition to favoring established middle class values.
• Authoritarian Submission: A propensity to obey superiors without question, and to demand the same from subordinates.
• Authoritarian Aggression: A desire to punish those who violate group norms and conventional values.
• Anti-Intraception: A hostility towards an introverted disposition and self reflection, feeding into a valuation of action for its own sake.
• Superstition and Stereotypy: Belief in non-rational concepts, and to think of people in rigid, categorical terms.
• Power and Toughness: A "might makes right" kind of attitude and disdain for softer, tender sentiments and emotion.
• Destructiveness and Cynicism: A deep seated nihilism and lack of concern for the welfare of others, coming out in a propensity towards high risk adventures such as war making.
• Projectivity: The authoritarian projects these flaws and failings onto hated out groups.
• Sex: A great fear of sexual pleasure and intimacy, at least for its own sake. Sex is politicized in the authoritarian mind.

The Authoritarian Personality has a long history of criticism for rooting its analysis in the ideological biases of its authors, some of whom were, as previously mentioned, Frankfurt School Marxists. It was well and good to tie a propensity to fascism to a repressive personality type, supposedly rooted in abusively authoritarian family structures. But how did this explain what we were discovering then, and had known for some time even, that Stalin's USSR was not preferable to fascist Europe as far as authoritarianism was concerned? Moreover, Mao Zedong in China was about to embark on a new phase of leftist repression. 

One could easily suggest that the western world at that time had only known right wing authoritarianism. Russia and China were distant lands with foreign cultures and histories, and perhaps Frankfurt intellectuals could be forgiven for not viewing leftist authoritarianism in a comparable light. Similar claims would emerge out of the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s, wherein the forces of repression and censorship came mainly from right wing evangelical groups. 

Such dismissals reveal a deep hypocrisy in the leftist intellectual establishment in the west. If they are to idealize foreign cultures and hold them up as superior examples to the west, let them at least understand those cultures and their histories.

Feel the Democracy

Never the less, some elements of the F Scale do not lend themselves to a measure of left wing authoritarianism. After all, conventionality is a value completely at odds with leftism, especially today. Doesn't the left oppose stereotypical views of outgroups? Isn't the left much more tolerant of people's sexual proclivities? Isn't the left more self aware and self critical by its very nature?

One look at college SJWs should answer those questions. It should be clear by now that there is a new authoritarianism of the left. To measure it, the F Scale may have to be modified somewhat, though.

• In place of conventionalism, I'd offer up a kind of mandated subversiveness, especially when subversiveness becomes less about challenging actual power structures and more about policing personal values, beliefs and relationships. Political correctness finds its roots here - the mandating of the use of language that supposedly challenges preconceived notions of power and privilege. Even when much more, well, conventional structures of authority are used to enforce this supposed subversiveness. Silicon Valley oligopolies firing employees who challenge postmodern narratives about the social construction of gender would be an example

• Authoritarian submissiveness: We've seen the prevalence of standpoint theory, which asserts a sort of exceptional basis for truth claims made by those with marginalized identities. This drives the propensity to handwave debate in favor of insistence that "privileged" people simply remain silent and obey. The infamous progressive stack is a manifestation of this. A marginalized identitfy becomes an infallible claim on truth - provided the party line is being espoused, of course.

• Authoritarian aggression: Antifa is the most glaring example, but we see a strong predisposition to punish and hurt, rather than engage in dialogue with ideological rivals among certain kinds of leftists. Deplatforming is an obvious example. As are drives to get people fired from their jobs, artistic or cultural projects associated with "problematic" people cancelled or taken off the market, banning from social media and so forth. 

• Anti-Intraception is a bit more complicated. Authoritarian leftist spaces are somewhat notorious for "self criticism" - which seems like a kind of intraception that is not only encouraged, but mandatory. However, this is never to be done with the intent of holding the movement, its leaders and ideology to any sort of account. Rather, the activist is charged with reflecting on their own ideological shortcomings, meaning failure to adequately align with the correct line. This is a deeply authoritarian maneuver in that it is meant to insure in-group loyalty. Action for its own sake comes out in an idealization of protest and civil disobedience. The use of these kinds of militant tactics against relatively powerless rather than powerful targets - conservative students on college campuses, for example, or with the backing rather than in the face of the power of the state is a definite exercise in authoritarian power.

• The left is less prone to superstition than the right overall, but they do indulge in a heavily mythologized world view. In place of God or natural racial supremacy, the left substitutes most famously the historical dialectic marching, however slowly and frustratingly, to the ultimate end of a classless society. Since the reemergence of romanticism with the new left, an idealization of nature, goddess centric forms of spirituailty and an idealization of foreign religions has also emerged with it. This drives a tendency to paper over or ignore the obvious problems in those cultures and religious systems, either in the name of multicultural tolerance, or due to claims that western imperialism are ultimately to blame or are guilty of greater evils. 

• As for stereotyping, the notion that white males are privileged and powerful by default should qualify. Interactions with intersectional leftists make clear that people are merely the sum of their identities and the political weights and values attached to those identities as far as they're concerned. This kind of dehumanization is foundational to authoritarianism, and creates the impression that these kinds of leftists are awash in dogmas that choke off spontaneous and natural human interaction. 

• Power and toughness: We see this in the disdain that the feminized left of our time has for marginalized and alienated men, incels in particular. Not to condone the glaring pathologies of incel ideology, but the feminist disdain for those males who have lost the darwinian competition for status and resources is fairly obvious. Obvious too is their gloating despite for the social decline of the white male overall, even where it is shown that this decline occurred as a result of a global neoliberalism that no one on the left has any business defending. Additionally, a real machismo permeates even many feminist spaces, where non feminist men are ridiculed for "not getting laid" and male feminists in particular present their views with macho bravado. Which goes beyond irony to feed into ...

• Destructiveness, Cynicism and Projectivity: I hate to get anecdotal and psychological here, but such is the kind of territory we're entering here. This deals more with the conflicted internal psyche of the authoritarian, driving a sort of "death instinct" leading to destructive behavior. The authoritarian left is infamous for "eating their own", as it were. When male feminists get outed for engaging in sexually predatory behavior, I wonder if their professed feminism isn't an attempt to quell a guilty conscience? Does the white male guilt lead to a lot of self sabotaging, self destructive kinds of behaviors? There've been times when some or another radical activist's conduct was so cringy and outlandish that I wondered if there wasn't a barely repressed desire to be "put in their place" so to speak. A widespread theory in "redpill" communities online is that feminism is a kind of "shit test" aimed at men as a whole. Such ideas are difficult to prove, but equally difficult not to at least consider when seeing authoritarians at their most irrational.

• Sex. This ties into the previous point. The Frankfurt scholar's ideas are rooted in a Freudian notion that authoritarian rigidity is rooted in a kind of defense mechanism against feared and forbidden sexual instincts. The left is commonly associated with a more relaxed attitude on sexual matters, but there's clearly exceptions to this rule. So called anti-sex, or sex-negative feminism is an obvious case in point. The quickness with which cries of objectification and sexism are raised in any discussion of attraction and desire, especially on part of men towards women, suggests a discomfort with the deeper and more personal aspects of sexuality that belies the clinical objectivity and emphasis on transaction and negotiation of boundaries which define the "progressive" approach to sex. While they pay lip service to women making choices for themselves and their own pleasure, there's a thinly veiled preference for non-sexuality between the sexes that permeates left wing spaces. 

It could be objected by the radical leftist that methods deemed "authoritarian" are necessary to adequately challenge oppressive social norms and dominant power structures. Leftists have a long history of defending repressive or even violent measures carried out by their own - going back at least as far as Lenin's ideas of "kvo kovo" - meaning "who-whom." Who benefits? Repressive actions that favored the Soviet State were justified, necessary even, in a way that were morally reprehensible when carried out by conservative or reactionary authoritarians.

Similar lines of reasoning appear in Herbert Marcuse's concept of "repressive tolerance", in definitions of racism and sexism as "prejudice plus power" that render it impossible for women and minorities to be racist or sexist, and in the "standpoint theories" that lend an air of infallibility to the perspectives of the marginalized and oppressed - as long as they don't align with their oppressors, of course. 

Maybe so. But a crucial test here has to be the question of just how powerful the targets of leftist wrath and ire really are. In a sense, this holds them to their own moral standards. A civil disobedience campaign carried out against the state to protest persecution of minorities or an unjust war is a very different matter than campaigns of harassment and intimidation carried out against mere citizens who've somehow or another transgressed the boundaries of what's politically correct. One of these is punching up, the other punching down, to borrow their own phraseology. 

A defining characteristic of authoritarianism is that it punches down. Authoritarians don't look for fair fights, and they certainly don't challenge injustice when it comes down from on-high. Left wing authoritarians are no different. What they do differently is manipulate ideology to tell themselves that the victims of authoritarian aggression coming from the left are really the unjust beneficiaries of power and privilege, however striking the evidence to the contrary may be. 

The kulaks in the USSR were the ur-example, and the bloodiest instance of this seen thus far, but the dynamic whereby non-feminist academics and media personalities get drummed out of their jobs for uttering politically incorrect views is essentially the same. So too is violence carried out against unpopular speakers on college campuses, particularly if its with the tacit approval of the college's faculty and administrative structure. A strike, boycott or a protest against a corporation engaging in bad business practices does not qualify, however. Nor does a protest against a powerful and corrupt political figure, or the bringing to justice of anyone whose abused their power or violated somebody's rights. But justice always entails due process. Authoritarian leftists are open about their disdain for due process. If any kind of civil right or civil liberty is denounced as a mere tool for the oppressors to carry on dominating the weak and marginalized, good chance you're dealing with an authoritarian leftist.

An individual or group rendered powerless by a shifting power dynamic still getting treated as if they were the beneficiaries of unjust preference, and that being used as a legitimizing pretense to crack down on them. That's the defining characteristic of the very real and very dangerous phenomenon of authoritarian leftism.

Read about how intersectional feminism is an authoritarian system of power serving elite interests.

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Ignorance of Capitalism Also Risks “Absolute Catastrophe”

Articles like this - written by Paul Joseph Watson quoting Jordan Peterson, are why I've lost much sympathy for these fuzzy-vaguely right leaning Intellectual Dark Web types - the ones who simply shill for rightist ideas, at any rate. I never agreed with them on most substantial issues, but I sympathized with the push to diversify the ideological landscape, at least in mainstream media and academia. And of course, who could like the SJWs these days? Arrogant, dogmatic and narrow minded. I sympathized as much with anger towards them in 2016 as I did with anger against the Christian right in 2006.

Then as now, I also temper that anger with a warning: Don't lose sight of the bigger picture, and don't adopt your enemy's bad habits. Because if you do, you won't be truly victorious even if you do win in the short term political sense. That's how the SJWs happened, and that seems to be happening with the "cultural libertarians" as well.

PJW's article is a complete mess. Its only saving grace is its brevity. Yet it manages to contain everything I've come to dislike about the current crop of online reactionary anti-SJW thinkers. Indeed, as far as ideology goes, they're scarcely preferable to the SJWs at all any more. There is, thus far, no accompanying authoritarian drive for censorship, but the self awareness now seems to be so lacking that I can't help but wonder if even that isn't just a matter of time.

Watson reports:

During an event hosted by The Heritage Foundation this week, the clinical psychologist and best-selling author said that millennials are embracing far-left ideology because they weren’t taught about its disastrous outcomes at school. 

“People are unbelievably ignorant of history,” said Peterson. “What young people know about 20th-century history is nonexistent, especially about the history of the radical left. How would you know? They are never taught about it so why would they be concerned about it?”

Observe firstly that in other contexts, Jordan Peterson has repeatedly denied being a rightist partisan. Yet here he's quoted as addressing the Heritage Foundation - a right leaning think tank last time I checked, repeating oft-heard talking points on the evils of socialism. Not that Stalinist communism is a good system, mind you, but I'd find Peterson's shtick of not being a right winger a bit more convincing if this was a takedown of laissez faire capitalism delivered to a genuinely centrist audience, since that's what we in the west have actually been living under and suffering under for the last half century now. Not socialism.

A warning that people could turn to revolutionary socialism if the extreme inequalities in capitalism are not addressed as they were via Roosevelt's New Deal could be issued, and that would be a good reason to undertake a new new deal, but that's not what we have here. Just talking points that I could copy and paste from nearly any right wing internet source.

Yet here we see an ongoing preoccupation with the dangers posed by socialism and equality of outcome. Not massive inequality, which is much closer to be beast we quarrel with these days. Wealth inequality in the US has never been greater than it is now. I'll sympathize more with the destructive potential of equality of outcome - which I don't honestly doubt - when that's the destructive potential we're actually really staring down the barrel of.

PJW continues:

He also explained that the simplistic socialist notion of caring for as many people as possible was very alluring for people who had an emotional view of humanity. 

Young people are “emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism, say, or the left, because it draws its fundamental motivational source from a kind of primary compassion, and that is always there in human beings,” said Peterson.

Seriously? And people are not also emotionally drawn to classical mythology or biblical narratives? The kind Peterson specializes in teaching to his audiences? There's no emotional appeal there? There's no emotional appeal in right wing politics? There's no emotional appeal in alpha male hero worship, which we're being asked by the right to engage in, so as to look the other way as far as massive wealth inequality and abuses of power are concerned?

I'll grant the idea that the left should rely a bit less on emotional appeal and also be prepared to back itself up with, for lack of better terms, facts and logic, is one I think they'd do well to heed. The left has ceded too much to the right over the years to let them have facts and logic also. The tendency of a feminized left to rely on moral outrage to emotionally extort agreement from audiences has been catastrophic for progressives over the last several years. It's fed directly into the perception of the left as a cult of self righteousness and moral supremacy that's turned out to be a gold mine for reactionaries of all stripes.

Having said that, just why is it wrong to have an emotionally derived desire to care for the downtrodden and less fortunate in any event? Why are such sentiments bad? Were I Peterson, I'd be much more concerned with the lack of empathy for the poor and sick that I often see in right of center online spaces. Yes, social justice activism on the far left can drive self righteousness and dogmatism. But that's not what's being critiqued here.

This is exactly the kind of Petersonian double talk that David Pakman does such a good job of taking down here, where Pakman critiques an address delivered by Peterson at Liberty University, founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell to teach fundamentalist biblical ideas. Because I suppose those are the kinds of hosts you have when you're totally not a right winger:

I find it quite astounding that Peterson's attacks on the "postmodern left's" lack of respect and value for free speech gains applause in a "college" established by none other than Reverend Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority were calling for all kinds of censorship, ranging from metal music to table top role playing games and porn to anything deemed not sufficiently "Godly" back in the 1980s.

Is this what the anti-SJW free speech cultural libertarians have sunk to? The same whose criticisms of the regressive left not so long ago centered around just how like the religious right it was? Down the memory hole with that, I guess. We were never at war with Eurasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia, by the sounds of things.

It's especially galling for Jordan Peterson to be this dumb. He's not an unintelligent man, when he's in his element, which is Jungian psychology and comparative mythology. Unless, of course, that's the plan here. Is a man whose area of expertise is the study of heroic mythology not creating a mythos of his own, with which to bind and cement the loyalty of a fan base?

From PJW's article:

Peterson also blamed the “unholy marriage of the postmodern nihilism with this Marxist utopian notion” for the breakdown in social and family unity, a process which has produced an “absolute catastrophe”

The foundation of every mythologized belief system is the creation of a bad guy. For the SJWs, it's the white male patriarchy. And for Peterson, it's "postmodern Marxism." Which are not complex philosophical views with deep and nuanced, sometimes flawed and sometimes insightful observations and theories, but rather simply EVIL! They hate the west and capitalism and success because ... well, because reasons. Or something. The same reasons that SJWs assert that conservatives and Trumpians just hate hate HATE black people and women. Because reasons.

And the reasons are that political mythologies begin with a villain. A dastardly "them" for "us" to fight if we're to be the heroes that our mythical systems cast us as. Every ideological system, my own included, does this.

It's unfortunate that a man of Peterson's true intellectual caliber has chosen to go down the path he has, and I honestly wonder if he's not taking Koch Bro's cash at this point? After all, it did more or less the same thing to Dave Rubin - turn him into a pseudo libertarian right wing shill who gets notoriously evasive and vague when his alleged "centrism" gets called out. Not that the left is without flaws or undeserving of criticism mind you, but as David Pakman puts it, don't say you're not a rightist when you are one.

What I try to do differently, what I urge those who follow me on social media to do differently is to base my political mythology in the material realities of today's world. While I wouldn't argue with Peterson in that Soviet communism was terrible, I'd also urge everyone to look deeper at where the appeal of revolutionary socialism might come from in this day and age. Why might millennials have a better view of socialism than of capitalism? Hmm ... I just don't know! What could it be?

Maybe it's growing up after the great recession? Maybe seeing the banks get bailed out while main street continues to languish? Maybe seeing a long term trend towards stagnant wages and structural unemployment alongside ever skyrocketing profits for a tiny few? Maybe not having health insurance, paying exorbitant prices for pharmaceuticals and premiums for health plans with high deductibles and co-pays to boot? Or being put in serious financial jeopardy by a $500 car repair bill, something that would merely be an inconvenience for someone like myself?

Maybe it's the fact that there's never money for college or basic infrastructure but always money for wars and high income tax cuts? Maybe seeing the benefits of trickle down economics not trickle down for year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation? Maybe it's knowing that they'll be damn lucky to even have a shot at working their way out of a cubicle and into a job with a median income, benefits and some semblance of job stability?

Could it be that?

NO! It's "Ignorance of history!" Which isn't entirely wrong, mind you. Plus, let's not pretend that a lot of anti-Trump hysteria coming from the mainstream left hasn't been prone to excess and hyperbole, to put it mildly. However, it's also ignorance of history when politicians and pundits don't look back on periods of economic downturn and instability - the great depression for instance, and witness an accompanying rise in interest in fascism and socialism. Even though the economy has improved somewhat since the great recession, the damage has been done.

What the hell did these online reactionaries think was going to happen? Not so long ago, after Trump won the White House, it was all the rage to attribute the Democrat's loss to how out of touch they were with the people they were supposed to be representing. About how stupid it was for dumb leftists to beat unemployed white males over the head with vague academic notions of power, privilege and patriarchy. And rightly so.

But too little time has passed for the right wing of the intellectual dark web to get a pass on making their own version of the exact same mistake. Lecturing millennials with limited job prospects, crushing student debt loads and who've seen every form of preferential treatment extended to the wealthy and corporations on the evils of socialism is, if anything, even stupider than lecturing the same for being privileged white males. Damn, you'd almost think the reactionary right and the regressive left were two sides of the same stupid coin, or something.

Who knows, maybe they are.

In the mean time, maybe the rooms that most need to be cleaned are in the White House, in Congress and the countless offices of defense industry contractors and corporate lobbyists in Washington DC. The dragon of chaos that threatens our culture is that of unregulated predatory global capitalism. It uses threats of investment strike and capital flight as its fiery breath, to extort tax free wealth and rock-bottom wages from the polity. And quite effectively. The handful of billionaires who own most of America's wealth have accumulated a hoard that would put even Smaug's piles of gold to shame.

Sooner or later, someone's going to have to slay that dragon. If a relatively reasonable and pragmatic social democrat steps into Bard the Bowman's role and takes up that black arrow in the near future, a bona-fide revolutionary socialist won't be the one to do it in another generation or two, or else the current oligarchical capitalism ends up going full iron heel, and democracy is ultimately and finally sacrificed on the altar of capital.

Absolute catastrophe indeed.

Also, view: The Problem with Jordan Peterson, also by David Pakman. A thoughtful and nuanced criticism, not an SJW smear comparing Peterson to Hitler, or the like.

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The Architect's Chamber

Why I Returned to the Left Years After Getting "Redpilled"


It's not uncommon these days to hear of people getting frustrated with the left and embracing conservatism. The whole #walkaway campaign, which trended in 2018 leading up to the mid term elections, were exemplary of this.

This is an easy idea to sympathize with, and the stories are remarkably similar. Someone grows frustrated with the cringy protest culture and attendant narcissistic LARPy behavior so prevalent in left activist communities and they decide they've had enough of it. Worse still are the very real stories of abuse and rampant sociopathology within tight knit activist communities, of which the late Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle is such an archetypal example. It's hard to remain sympathetic to the left when professional activists a-la Black Lives Matter and Antifa reduce all politics to civil disobedience and treat absolutely every engagement they have with other people and society as a whole as if it were a direct action campaign.

Today their names are legion: Dave Rubin, Laci Green, Candace Owens, to name a few who saw the light on the right and embraced conservatism or libertarianism as if it were the new religion.

And it's not new - many prominent early neoconservatives were disillusioned leftists. Ronald Reagan once famously declared that he did not leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left him. Reagan Democrats were a segment of blue collar workers in rust belt states who shifted their allegiance to the G.O.P in the late 70s and through the 80s, resulting in Reagan's victories and an overall shift to the right in the political climate in that era. Many of these blue collar Democrats grew frustrated with the excessive anti-Americanism of the new Left and the excesses of far left groups like the Weather Underground.

Sound familiar?

It should. Make America Great Again was actually one of Reagan's campaign slogans, and there were widespread fears with Reagan then as with Trump now that he'd usher in an era of right wing authoritarianism. The religious right of Jerry Falwell stirred as many liberal fears then as the nationalist populism of Steve Bannon stirred much more recently. Swap out the new left for social justice warriors and the Weathermen with Antifa, and it becomes very apparent that though history may not repeat precisely - nobody would have accused Reagan of colluding with the Soviets, after all - it rhymes pretty damn well some times.

I understand why progressives lose faith and abandon the cause because I've been there. For me, it happened in the summer of 1998 after reading Warren Farrell's brilliant take down of feminism, The Myth of Male Power. In case you're not familiar with it, Farrell's work takes apart the idea that men have conspired to make everything so wonderful for themselves at women's expense, and asserts that the lot of most men throughout history has been powerlessness and disposability. Feminist claims to powerlessness and marginalization are contrasted with the realities of very real influence in corporate, academic and government bureaucracies in ways that should be familiar to any fan of much more recent figures such as Jordan Peterson or Sargon of Akkad.

Here's a thing about belief systems: once you lose faith in one part of it, the rest naturally and easily follows. At first I read more criticisms of feminism by authors like Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Daphne Patai. But from there I became what every alarmist Guardian article tries warning us about - reading Dinesh D'Sousa and Charles Murray on race issues and Robert Bork, among others, on the degeneration of society more generally. I'm sure I'd have been over the moon with Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern had they been going concerns back in those days. Jordan Peterson would have really struck a chord with me, back in the early 2000s when I gave up drinking via the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program. A short time after that, returning to college to major in business saw me devour the theories of Ayn Rand, Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman.

Quite a jump for someone who'd been an avid Marxist and subscriber to communist newsletters only a few years previously.

And this a year before the Wachowskis - they were brothers back then - ever introduced any of us to the concept of what the red pill actually was. There was no 4chan or reddit back then. No manosphere, no YouTube and Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug were years away from blogging ideas that would appear so quaint and familiar to me when I finally did see them, much more recently. Hans Herman Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society was still a few years away likewise. Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out had I known about these thinkers?

I'd spent long conversations with coworkers who were deeply influenced by David Irving and the Institute for Historical Review. This was in the late 1990s, and while the likes of David Duke and Jared Taylor were even then trying to give white supremacy a postmodern makeover, Richard Spencer and 4chan were still years out. While reconciling with Hitler, antisemetic conspiracy theories and white supremacy never interested me, such ideas didn't offend me as they would have a few short years prior either, and I saw in them a kind of kindred spirit to my own disillusionment and turn against leftist identity politics. I saw nothing wrong with engaging them honestly and fairly, leastwise.

As such, the current propensity to see leftists as self righteous, closed minded zealots wasn't exactly news to me come 2014, when such observations finally became mainstream. When the name and concept of the SJW became mainstream by the mid 2010s, I was that irritating fellow who was telling everyone "I told you so" and "this is what I've been saying for years now."  In 2010 I stumbled upon a blog smaller then than this one is now, called Alternative Right, but by then it was too late.

Because by then, I'd seen through neoreaction as well. Not quite as dramatically as my loss of faith in postmodern college leftism, but every bit as substantially. The right wing was a scam. That'd become abundantly clear to me, beginning in the mid 2000s.

Why such a dramatic transformation a second time? Why return to the left when I'd abandoned it so thoroughly the first time?

Many catalysts. Perhaps the biggest one was that upon my graduation from college, I landed a job not in the corporate sector - which wouldn't touch a blue collar pleb like me no matter how educated I was - but in the unionized public sector. Being hired into a union that was seriously discussing job action caused a lot of what I thought I'd forgotten and left behind to come back. I faced the reality that my return to college after quitting drinking was owed as much to subsidized higher education and the subsidized cooperative housing I lived in as it had to any change of character by a means of a "higher power." The reality is that even if everyone had the most sterling, sober and Godly character and entrepreneurial spirit you could ever pray for, not to mention the cleanest rooms, there's only so much room in the corporate boardrooms of the nation, and sooner or later the well being of the rest of us has to become a material consideration.

While the right loves to dabble in "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" rhetoric, the ladders that did extend my way all came from the left. The lifelines that allowed the poor and destitute to rise into the middle class all had one name: Social Democracy. From there, it was simply a matter of going from denial into acceptance.

If Warren Farrell's Myth of Male Power was what red-pilled me, then reading Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America could be compared to the Architect's Chamber in the next movie, where Neo discovers that the cause he'd been working for and his own messianic role in that cause was every bit as much a part of the system of control he was fighting against as the machines and simulated reality were.

Western Civilization is in peril and privatization is your plan to save it?
You really are a special kind of dumb, aren't you?

In What's the Matter With Kansas are some passages that outline with poetic elegance precisely why the right can never deliver on its promises to restore personal and societal greatness and virtue. Frank put into words the doubts and frustrations I'd had been nursing about right wing thought into a single paragraph:

"The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."

Here's another:

"There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place...."

None of this way of looking at things was new. Karl Marx, so loathed by the paleocons and neoreactionaries, actually did a better job of explaining cultural and societal degeneration than anyone on the right ever could have, because he wasn't afraid to call out their own sacred cows. From the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation."

In short, untrammeled capitalism and its constant revolutionizing of production does more than any other force to destroy the western civilization, Christian religion, the nuclear family and other social structures that good or bad, the reactionaries have devoted themselves to.

As such, I now shake my head when I see the devotees of Warren Farrell and Paul Elam become apologists for laissez faire capitalism, the economic system that sees so many men chewed up and spat out, injured and even killed on the job per year. When I see these same conservative men vote for war mongering right wing governments that in turn send so many young men home in body bags. When I see paranoid conspiracy theorists stockpile guns for use against tyrannical government - and then go vote for governments that roll back civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. When I see the opponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism calling for more, rather than less capitalism, and later wonder why they are indeed going through a "great replacement" at the hands of globalists? Could it be because 3rd world and migrant labour is cheaper? No, couldn't be!

I shake my head when I see reactionaries lament being banned from social media platforms that are owned by the very corporations they want to deregulate and give tax cuts to. When they grumble about liberal media and Hollywood "degeneracy" without considering that media and film production companies are corporations that are doing exactly what these same rightists insist corporations do: Prioritize the bottom line and maximize shareholder value, and so respond to market signals and seek to expand their markets by catering to untapped demographics, like women, minorities and foreign countries. When anti-feminists come out as pro capitalist and then wonder why society comes to value women more as workers and consumers, as competitors with men and careerists, not as wives and mothers.

Of course, I have not lost my disdain for those elements of "leftism" that do warrant it. College SJWs and much of the online activist community in particular. Mark Fisher's attack on the Vampire Castle should resonate with all of us. Real advocates of social justice would do well to consider that whichever marginalized people they've chosen to champion won't get liberation from the boardrooms and corporate media of the nation either.

However, for reasons best explained above, I see capitalism as part of the problem, not part of the solution. If SJWs promote a world view that defines privilege entirely in terms of race and gender rather than in terms of economics, and lays the very real problems suffered by women and people of color entirely at the feet of white males, we might want to ask ourselves who really benefits from that? Why would corporately owned media find such a world view agreeable? Why are elite colleges so much more rife with "social justice" fanaticism than colleges still accessible to the working and middle classes?

I abandoned the left because I became convinced that it was hostile to whites, males, Christians and western civilization in general. I later abandoned the right for the exact same reasons. I don't condone the left's cultural masochism and hold it to criticism. But the right presents a much greater threat to "the west" than any but the most stupid extreme left ever will.

The left has irritating and self absorbed postmodern college professors and student activists who will chant slogans against western civilization and pull down statues of "problematic" historical figures. The right has cynical politicians who'll oversee the export of industry and capital out of western nations. The left will import huge numbers of 3rd world people, some of whom don't like us very much. The right will engage in the kind of "regime change" and parasitic global capitalism that causes massive population destabilization in the 3rd world that drives them not to like us, but come here in droves anyway, in the first place. The left may hold the Christian churches to a criticism they're reluctant to subject Islam to. The right will mix religion with business and politics in precisely the way the gospels warned against, that truly undermines the moral credibility of the Christian churches and leaves them bereft of defenders. At the fringes, the right will even idealize Hitler: a man who loved the white race so much he started a war that left tens of millions of them dead, the European nations in ruins and their overseas empires financially untenable.

With friends like these ...

The left is deeply flawed, and would do well to engage in a lot less grandstanding and a lot more self reflection. They can't profess to represent "the people" when they refuse to engage people in honest dialogue. But make no mistake, a right wing that endeavors to preserve the culture, values and identity of the west while privatizing, deregulating and outsourcing its financial and industrial infrastructure will never offer anything better.

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An Alt Left Trichotomy

My observation of people drawn to alternative politics is that they're guided by certain categories of philosophical passions. Plus, people seem to like to be categorized according to their political thought, as discussions of the political spectrum evidence. For those on the reactionary right, they have their own trifecta of constituent philosophical pillars: Theonomists, ethno-nationalists and techno-commercialists. Or fundamentalist theocracy, racist fascism and sweatshop capitalism, were we to be honest. If I were at all serious about creating a truly resilient society worth preserving, I'd say none of the above, thank you.

In alternative and dissident left circles, I've noticed a roughly comparable trichotomy, based on the what seem to be three core political passions. The names I've given them are my own, and I think that they best encapsulate the core principles driving each of them. These are, in no particular order:

• Enlightenment Rationalism: This correlates to the classical liberal tendency. It is most concerned with individual rights, limited scope and power of government, an elevation of reason, rationality, skepticism and the scientific method and is opposed to collectivism and is put off by dogmatism and fanaticism. 
• Cultural Communitarianism: This correlates to the classical conservative tendency, and its presence on the alt-left is what makes it the alt-left, and not the mainstream left. It is concerned with ideas, relationships and institutions that foster social stability and cohesion. This is the soft spot many of us have for religion, tradition, family, nationalism and the like.
• Materialist Political Economy: This correlates to the classical socialist tendency. Without it, we'd be paleoconservatives, libertarians and neoreactionaries. It sounds Marxist, and certainly can be, but doesn't have to be, but it rejects neoliberal capitalism. It's concerned with social regulation or ownership in part or in whole of the means of production, with workers rights and social welfare, as well as with a view of society that emphasizes class antagonisms and structural social injustice. And yes, it does pay attention to marginalized people and victims of discrimination also, and as well it should.

What is crucial is a comprehensive theory of liberation, which classical liberals, libertarians, reactionaries, socialists or social justice warriors have all thus far failed to deliver. This is because the main camps in our current political divide tend to consist of, at most, two of the three core political passions. One tends to be disdained all together. This leads to problems, and to backlash from people who rightly value whichever core passion is disdained by whatever movement or ideology is under consideration. 

Focus exclusively on enlightenment rationalism, and one loses sight of the fact that the individual is nested in and sustained by a network of broader social structures and traditions that enable him to function most effectively. It also ignores the positions that individuals occupy within power hierarchies, how these hierarchies themselves operate and how these factors can determine an individual's propensity to success. 

Enlightenment rationalism not tempered by cultural communitarianism and materialist political economic considerations becomes a recipe for a Dickensian hell of dark Satanic mills, sweat labor, horrendous wealth inequality, a get ahead by any means necessary kind of mindset, so probably a lot of crime, antisocial behavior and deviancy also. In the end, this kind of society fails even in its core mission of upholding the individual. Individuals can't thrive in this kind of environment.

Focus exclusively on cultural communitarianism and become a fascist or a theocrat. It's not just that individual rights are trampled, it's that individuals are not free to think and act as they will within mutually beneficial relationships and exchanges. This leads to economic, technological and societal stagnation. It also doesn't care for the rank injustices and flagrant cronyism and rent-seeking that can become embedded in ossified traditional social structures. Abuses of the marginalized at the hands of the privileged simply become accepted and commonplace. 

Cultural communitarianism not tempered by enlightenment rationalism and materialist economic considerations causes the society that embraces it to descend into a dark age wherein new ideas and different kinds of people are eschewed, and dogmatism and a cult like atmosphere runs rampant. The rights of individuals are trampled and the rankest of injustices are tolerated, so long as the supremacist patriarchs at the top are the beneficiaries. In the end, this kind of society does not uphold its best traditions and ideals. Healthy and functional social norms break down.

Focus exclusively on materialist political economy and the politburo and the gulag sooner or later are what you end up with. Ideological systems that categorize some groups as oppressors and other groups as victims become deterministic. Individuals who thrive and succeed are assumed to be doing so at the expense of some minority or impoverished group and punished accordingly. Institutions and relationships that fulfill vital social and cultural functions are denounced as being exploitative or discriminatory in some way or another. 

Materialist political economism not tempered by enlightenment rationalism and cultural communitarianism begins to stagnate, due to a lack of incentive to excel, produce or stand out in any way. These societies also become increasingly dysfunctional socially, as relationships and social norms of all kinds are denounced and attacked as being oppressive somehow. In the end, this society becomes stratified in its own cruel way, and the elites who lord power - oblivious to the irony of their so doing - perpetuate the worst systemic abuses against the most vulnerable members of the society, rationalized on the grounds that it is their victims are "oppressors" or "privileged."

So you can see now that a good society doesn't arise out of rejecting either liberty, equality or social order. People love to adopt political labels, it seems, and to clash with those who adopt rival types of labels. While that is tempting and amusing, it will also lead to a failure to achieve a comprehensive theory of liberation. That isn't easy to do, since it involves reconciling sets of ideas with natural tension between them. 

Minimize enlightenment rationalism, and you end up with the kinds of collectivst dystopias science fiction writers so enjoy to depict. Mussolini was probably the main theoretician of this kind of social order. It didn't turn out too well, if I recall. Less perhaps need be said here. The history of totalitarianism speaks for itself.

Minimize cultural communitarianism, and you're in the realm of the contemporary progressive.  These are the sorts of people who don't grasp why despite gaining more freedoms and liberties, or more equal rights, more equity, more representation in the media and so on, why people are getting more rather than less angsty. People have in inborn need to belong to something bigger than themselves, something with lasting worth or significance outside wealth accumulation. Families, nations, religions, shared systems of mythology and meaning - this is what the cultural communitarian tendency deals in. Moreover, if ignored, cultural communitarianism's own concerns will bleed into the ideologies of the enlightenment rationalists and the materialist economists, and so libertarianism and social justice alike take on increasingly romantic and religious qualities.

Minimize materialist economism and the concern for social justice, and you're in the realm of the contemporary conservative, and of reaction in its various forms. These kinds of people don't grasp why the bulk of the population doesn't heed their ongoing prattling about the supremacy of western civilization or of free markets. And that's because they're blind to how systems of power operate, how they perpetuate themselves at the expense of an underclass, which people quite understandably don't want to be a part of. 

Sure, your free market capitalism creates a lot of wealth, but the bulk of the population doesn't want to slave away in sweat shops for a living, and be reduced to begging in the streets should they lose even that. It will fail due to its mistaken belief that personal and cultural greatness are the sole causes of success, and that rent seeking, various bad business practices and surplus value production have nothing at all to do with it.

Sure, western civilization has done great things, but women, ethnic minorities and others don't want to be subordinates in a patriarchal social order. Tiresome as SocJus dogma can get at times, I can't say I blame them. And on a related note, who decides who the master race and the one true religion turn out to be? What if it isn't 4chan or a reactionary blogosphere that decides this, and it ends up being the black Hebrew Israelites, Wahhabi Islamists or Dianic Wiccans who end up calling the shots? Not so good then, isn't it, Mr. western civilization uber-alles?

Even if it were true that wealth and power stemmed entirely from moral character, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The upper class, be it in a government bureaucracy, a military junta, a feudal aristocracy or among corporate CEOs can be expected to act in their own immediate class interests, not in accordance to some abstract notion of loyalty to the white race, western culture or Christian morality. Doubly so if no mechanisms to hold leaders accountable exist. Autocratic social systems have a remarkable tendency to enrich their elites at the expense of their host populations, and since they've been allowed to accumulate vast amounts of wealth and power, their capacity to do harm is truly vast.

To assume they'd do otherwise is breathtakingly naive. Not that they'd achieve desirable results if racism and/or religious fundamentalism were what they were truly aiming for in any event. Either way, dictatorship and concentration of productive resources are the greatest threats the west faces. They're what got us here, they won't save us. 

Finally, the right can't seem to realize why it ultimately loses every significant political and social conflict it engages in, given enough time. This is because they've blinded themselves to how power is institutionalized and concentrated. Be a good person and you'll achieve great things, and so rich and powerful people must be good, talented and fair-minded. Or so they tell themselves and others when justifying existing levels of wealth inequality and hierarchy.  So this leaves them incapable of explaining ideological feminism's ascendancy in Hollywood, academia and much mainstream media. What they can't explain or understand adequately, they can't effectively fight against. So the ultimate irony is that in their ongoing denial of social injustice, they've now all but guaranteed that they will be the victims of it - radical libertarian and traditionalist voices getting shut down on social media being a classic case in point. 

These three supraordinate political tendencies are not easy to reconcile with one another. Achieving social equality jeopardizes individual rights and long term cultural and social viability. Achieving individual rights jeopardizes social equality and social stability. Achieving social order through a unicultural identity jeopardizes the human flourishing on an individual level and threatens to lock in unjust social orders based on inherited privilege. 

 A conservative culture devoted to strong social norms will fail if it exports its industry. A progressive culture devoted to social equality will fail if it doesn't have functional and sustainable cultural norms - if it eschews having families in favor of some or another flavor-of-the-month sexual deviancy. And both will fail if they don't allow for individual freedom to question the party line, just as a libertarian society won't be free if its full of poverty, alienation and social deviancy. 

Yet as we've seen, each needs some elements of the others to achieve its better goals. We can't be led to believe they're incompatible.

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The Attacks

I don't know what the answer is to the kind of tragedy and horror seen today in New Zealand is, though I've done my best to be and provide some thing of an antidote. But I know damn well what it isn't.

It isn't to step up calls for censorship of the internet. As we all should have seen following the 9/11 terror attacks, the powers that be love to exploit horrific events in order to consolidate their own power. Make no mistake, an internet policed for "hate speech" will likewise be policed for serious criticism and dissent against harmful policy.

It isn't to engage in the mudslinging over who the worse terrorists are: Jihadists or Nazis. Let's agree that they're both abhorrent, and it's logical to assume that each will be more murderous where they have a demographic advantage. Middle America isn't going to see a preponderance of Jihadist suicide bombings, and the Middle East isn't going to see very many alt-right nutjobs shooting up Mosques.

I can't help but wonder if this terrorist shooter had been in Palestine instead of Christchurch, would he have been ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas or something similar? As Eric Hoffer so brilliantly observed, true believers are of a similar sort of nature, however different their beliefs may actually be. Here the similarities are remarkable: young men frustrated by a lack of career and relationship options being exploited and lied to by the elites in their homelands, and so opened to being exploited and lied to by toxic ideologues.

As for the ideologies themselves, they are alike as potently toxic mixes of religious fundamentalism, bizarre conspiracy theories, atavistic tribalism and the most black hearted hatred and bigotry you'd ever cringe were you to be exposed to it. Note the rank antisemitism in both cases. Note also the retrograde and extreme machismo in their constructions and ideas of masculinity and disdain for gender equality and sexual liberty. Having said that, I do agree that the cultural left takes things too far the other way - into a disdain for men and masculinity, which doesn't help. In fact, it hurts. It fuels the underlying sexual anxieties that typify this type of radicalized young man. Feminist pontificating isn't the answer either.

But also, even the worst alt-right and Jihadist nonsense also confronts us with the sins and failings of a globalist imperialist order that has no qualms sacrificing, or at least abandoning, the lives of the kinds of young men who end up radicalized. Among many other lives. While Jihadist terrorism and Neo-Nazism are unequivocally indefensible as belief systems in and of themselves, perhaps there really are underlying factors in what makes these belief systems attractive to certain types of people that are harder to simply dismiss. And maybe they have some legitimate grievances, were they to turn their anger in the right direction and express it in less brutal ways. The right cringes when the left suggests an element of legitimate protest mixed in with militant religious or ideological fervor in the actions of Jihadist terrorists. The left cringes when the same is said of the alt-right. Of course, whatever grievances you may have are lost when you resort to the murder of innocent civilians in the name of whatever cause you happen to espouse.

Which leads me to what I do think the answer is. Not a magic bullet solution, of course. But the best that one person can do in the face of such reckless hate. Against bad ideas that lead to such senseless and tragic slaughter. And that's to use such resources as one has to articulate better ideas. If the perpetrator of this terrible shooting can be said to represent the alternative right, and he most certainly can, then what would its diametric opposite look like?

That's a work in progress, and you can be rest assured that myself and my associates won't be stopping any time soon, and I hope that followers of this blog and its various social media platforms won't either.

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Socialists: Deplorables of the Left

Prior to Trump's election, we were all warned to fear the "basket of deplorables" that constituted a hefty portion of Trump's electoral base: racists, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes and Islamophobes. I think there might have been some transphobes in there too. You get the picture. Trump was an evil fascist bogeyman who was going to destroy all things good in America if the ruling DNC regime were removed from power. So not surprisingly, a frustrated electorate removed them from power. Shocker.

Two years on, Trumpenreich has not materialized. Muslims and Latinos have not been rounded up and deported. Blacks and whites are not being forced into separate amenities. Women have not been relegated to the status of either marthas, econowives or, of course, handmaids. Worker's rights are getting trampled, but that's par for the course Stateside. Nothing new there.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. Increasingly, millennials are growing frustrated with their economic lot in post great-recession America, and more and more of them are expressing their dissent via an ideological outlook that one doesn't typically associate with the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Socialism.

That's right. Socialism is on the march in the good old U.S of A, of all places. And now the shoe of political moral panic is on the other foot. Now, the deplorables come from the left, and the red flag is the their banner. While CNN not so long ago tried to paint Trump up as a goose-stepping ultra nationalist, they're now asserting that Bernie Sanders once favored the wholesale nationalization of American industry. Self described socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is daily lampooned by conservative social media as a kind of leftist equivalent to Sarah Palin. Indeed, they both used the term "death panels" unironically. However, only one did so accurately.

My hope would be that anyone smart enough to roll their eyes at the idea of Trump being literally Hitler would also be smart enough to react the same way at the thought of Chairman and General Secretary Bernie Sanders becoming President of the Supreme Soviet of the American Socialist Republic, and immediately kicking off agricultural collectivization, anti-religious campaigns, and the pouring of legions of blue haired red guards into the country side to hound God fearing, gun toting red state, white skin, blue collar Americans as if they were the kulaks of the 21st century.

Because if you think anything like that is going to happen, you've lost the right to ridicule "THE RESISTANCE" for its propensity to hyperbole and overdramatization.

Yet despite all this, it's not just the right that's gotten in on this new red scare that's swept social media in the last year or so. The classy classical liberal minded blog Areo, which typically engages the noble cause of attacking campus social justice culture from the left, has recently published a piece by one Aaron Tao, urging us to "Listen to Immigrants Who Have Lived Under Socialism." Tao cites his own parents, who grew up in Maoist China, a Romanian student whose parents grew up under Ceaușescu, a student who recently left Maduro's Venezuela, as well as anti-socialist commentator and author Jordan Peterson.  All remind us of the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism.

They are not wrong. I'm not unfamiliar with the Black Book of Communism, as a matter of fact. It proudly adorns my shelf.  Yet I can't help but think that this is precisely the problem with Tao's article. It's attacking something with arguably even fewer supporters than Hitler and the Nazis have. Bad as they are, and as anyone who's ever delt with leftbook can tell you, they are insufferably bad, there just aren't that many tankies in the USA. Tao even admits that:

"For the purposes of this article, I will use the Library of Economics and Liberty’s definition of socialism: “a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.” This is synonymous with communism. The end goal of socialism is to abolish private property, free markets, exchange, prices and profits, and substitute collective ownership and decision-making to determine the allocation of resources."

I wholeheartedly support Tao's opposition to this political and economic system. And so too would Bernie Sanders. Why? The reason for this is that rhetoric aside, Bernie Sanders is a social democrat, not a Marxian communist. Big difference between the two, and it's past time the specter of communism was exorcised from the fevered nightmares of reactionaries and libertarians the nation over for once and for all.

Here's the difference: Social democrats come to power through the democratic process. They face the voters periodically as democrats and republicans do, and if they lose elections, they step down. They do not aim to seize the means of production wholesale. Typically, the most they end up doing is nationalizing a handful of key industries and essential services. Most of the economy is left in private hands.

Just in case you missed that, let me repeat it: most of the economy is left in private hands. Moreover, successive governments can simply privatize state owned enterprises that are not performing well and might be better run by the private sector.

How do I know this? Outside the United States, social democrats actually win elections and the results are, well, actually quite good more often than not. Some notable examples:

I'm Awesome. Deal with it.

Great Britain, 1945. World War 2 has recently ended and the UK is going to the polls. To the surprise of many, Conservative war hero Winston Churchill loses to Clement Attlee's Labour Party. This ends up resulting in the creation of the UK's National Health Service, as well as nationalization of several industries, making him among the most socialistic of social democrats. Due to his reforms, UK citizens got access to health care, housing and other necessities via an elaborate social welfare system, in the late 40s after the nation had been devastated by the blitz. They live longer and better, which is what conservatives and libertarians go to great lengths to tell us won't happen under socialism. In case you're wondering, Attlee hated communism. In 1951, the UK electorate voted for a Conservative government, Churchill's back in, and Labour stepped down as democratic parties in democratic societies do when they lose. No purges, no famines, no gulags.

Sure, many European social democratic parties had more radical, revolutionary and Marxist origins. But these were abandoned for various reasons, mostly because they were impractical and were achieving terrible results in the USSR and its client states. Sometimes on paper, always in practice, the social democrats were pragmatists and reformers. Perhaps too much so in some cases.

From the 1990s onward, the British Labour Party had, until the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, been existential proof of the falsehood of Conquest's and O'Sullivan's laws mandating an inevitable leftward drift in all non explicitly right wing organizations. Tony Blair's Labour Party was not Attlee's party, that's for certain. And socialist purists derided Attlee in his day in similar terms.

Elsewhere, According to Wikipedia,

"In 1959, the SPD (West German Social Democratic Party) instituted a major policy review with the Godesberg Program. The Godesberg Program eliminated the party's remaining Marxist-aligned policies and the SPD became based upon freiheitlicher Sozialismus (liberal socialism).  With the adoption of the Godsberg Program, the SPD renounced Marxist determinism and classism and replaced it with an ethical socialism based on humanism and emphasized that the party was democratic, pragmatic and reformist."

When social democrat Willy Brandt became West German Chancellor in 1969, he did not initiate a great leap forward or a cultural revolution. Instead, again according to Wikipedia:

According to Helmut Schmidt, Willy Brandt's domestic reform programme had accomplished more than any previous programme for a comparable period. Levels of social expenditure were increased, with more funds allocated towards housing, transportation, schools, and communication, and substantial federal benefits were provided for farmers. Various measures were introduced to extend health care coverage, while federal aid to sports organisations was increased. A number of liberal social reforms were instituted whilst the welfare state was significantly expanded (with total public spending on social programs nearly doubling between 1969 and 1975), with health, housing, and social welfare legislation bringing about welcome improvements, and by the end of the Brandt Chancellorship West Germany had one of the most advanced systems of welfare in the world.

For most of the 20th century, the Swedish social democrats and their Nordic Model were the standard bearers for social democracy, and prior to the party's more recent descent into radical feminist and open borders nonsense, they did quite well. The Scandinavian social democracies, which are not limited to Sweden but also encompass Norway and its brilliant Government Pension Fund, as well as Iceland, Denmark and Finland, consistently score at or near the top of international indices measuring overall prosperity, social equality and yes, political and economic freedom as well.

Far from being communist dungeon-states, these Nordic social democracies are a kind of capitalism that works for everyone, not just a tiny rich few. Imagine that. Even in my own home province of Alberta, Canada, the social democratic government of Premier Rachel Notley (daughter of former party leader Grant Notley) elected in 2015 has, among other things, cut child poverty in half. That's right, they've reduced hunger, not increased it. I thought resentful and peevish socialists were supposed to starve everyone to death because they hate the rich. What does Notley think she's doing? How does that work?

And crucial to all of this, so much so that it bears repeating, is that social democratic parties face the voters in periodic elections, as per the election laws of their respective lands, and step down when they lose. Plus they're constrained by the same constitutional (or comparable) factors that constrain executive and legislative branches of government in all liberal democracies. Were a social democrat to be elected President of the United States, they'd still have an independent congress, an independent judiciary, the constraints imposed by the constitution and the bill of rights and a free press, such as it is, to constrain them. And most significantly of all, an established tradition and history of democracy, which the crumbling monarchies of Russia and China didn't have when their respective communist revolutions took place.

On top of all of this, the reasons for the millennial generation's resurgent interest in socialism is often barely touched upon by anti-socialist commentators. In the Areo article, Tao does admit that

Many millennials lived through the 2007–8 financial crisis and graduated college with uncertain job prospects and crushing student loans. Gen Z (iGen), the newest kids on the block, grew up with smartphones in their pockets before they started high school and “do not remember a time before the internet.” Living in an economically uncertain world, in which anyone with a smartphone can easily document an unjustified police shooting, it is understandable that many young people are drawn towards social justice activism. 

And this is generous, compared to what your average macho reactionary libertarian has to say on the matter. I suppose that a generation faced with dismal work prospects, low wages, poor working conditions, lack of access to affordable health care and a host of other poverty related concerns should just shut up and be a good little peon because some internet tough guy with a lot of yellow and black in his profile pictures figures he's an economics major because he's read a bit of Ayn Rand, possibly Economics in One Lesson, dabbled a bit in the theories of Mises and Friedman, listened to some Jordan Peterson videos and so storms into any online space, invited or not, to sound off about how stupid left of center millennials are and how they're just resentful towards those saintly billionaires, who've acquired every dime they have because they're just so smart and so moral and just. Nothing to do with lopsided tax and trade policy and a broken trade union movement, or anything like that. They're rich because they're virtuous, end of story you commie wimps! Beginning each display of false bravado with "lol", of course.

If your millennial (or any) leftist should walk away from an interaction with this kind of jackass with a newfound appreciation for Antifa, a thought that the SJWs might be on to something (these free market tough guys are always white guys, I hate to say), and a suspicion that a gulag might not be such a bad thing, I increasingly wonder: can you really blame them? It should be noted that I do not regard Aaron Tao as one of these phony tough ancapistani types.

These boors insist that social democracy and Stalinism are indistinguishable, and are no more honest in so doing than your typical smug urban liberal Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart types are when they conflate Trump and Hitler, or when a woman's studies prof suggests that disagreeing with feminism equals misogyny. Which is not honest in the least. In all these cases it's willful dishonesty, contrived to feed red meat to the base, and they damn well know it. This may well suit the interests who benefit from the status quo and frustrate social democratic reform just fine. But it has real consequences for poor and working class Americans of all racial and demographic backgrounds who struggle to acquire basic necessities. It needs to stop.

The facts are plain here: social democracy, while not perfect, works just fine overall. Even in times where the popularity of social democratic parties wane, their core ideas do not. The performance of the Nordic countries proves that. Libertarian neckbeards have been shrieking that the sky is falling on the European welfare state for decades now. The only real concern is actually taking the hysterics seriously and buying into the ideology of neoliberal austerity. The improvements over central planning this results in are marginal.

The more the no-step snake crowd flies into hysterics trying to deny or suppress this, the more alike their SJW cousins they become as far as ideological hysteria is concerned.

Indeed, they've been at the game of baseless political hysteria a lot longer than the SJWs have. Remember the Tea Party? Remember the birthers? Remember Obama somehow managing to be a Muslim, a communist, a Nazi and a liberal all at the same time? It was old hat even then. Newt Gingrich takes that shameless playbook back into the Reagan years.

If they keep it up, they should be no more welcome than grandstanding SJWs in the company of people who want to take political discourse with the intent on solving pressing issues facing the western world at all seriously. With any luck, their shrill hysterics will backfire in like manner to the manner in which the Clinton campaign's fear mongering against the basket of deporables backfired and got Trump elected. A social democratic America can't come soon enough, in my opinion.

Aaron Tao, Jordan Peterson (himself a former social democrat, from Alberta no less) and pundits the nation over are correct to be opposed to authoritarian socialism and authoritarian leftism in general. But they should be assured also. Electing a Bernie Sanders will result in an Attlee, a Brandt or a Notley, not a Mao, a  Ceaușescu or a Maduro. America could do worse. A social democratic USA will result in considerably less poverty, not more.

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