"It was fun while it lasted"

From the Z Man:

I’ll head off to vote for the last time in my life tomorrow and I will vote for Trump, even though he has no chance to win my state. It will be the last time we have a chance to vote for someone that is not a nut or a grifter. If Clinton wins, she will amnesty 50 million foreign peasants, creating something close to a one party nation as a result. America will rocket along toward becoming Brazil, if we’re lucky. The crazy bitch could very well start a war with Russia or the Chinese and that could finish us all off.

It was fun while it lasted.

I actually hadn't voted since 1991 when contemplating the choice between old fossil Bob Dole (and his repugnant wife, Nurse Ratched) and Slick Willie, who actually ended up governing as a centrist thanks to a hostile, activist Republican Congress. But in the current year, I registered to vote, and voted for Trump in the Republican primary for reasons I've previously expounded. Trump is the last stand: political and cultural breathing space for America's founding stock, who are the only people who give a shit about things like limited government and property rights.

I started this blog in May 2009 after converting to Orthodox Christianity, and ever since I have been fascinated by the parallels between Orthodoxy and the American State: vibrant institutions with stellar credentials, now struggling to interpret their own founding charters and define themselves in the present milieu. America: a Proposition country, now filling up with Tribal peoples, unable to concede that in fact all men are not created equal. Orthodoxy: awkwardly backflipping around its clearly nationalistic tendencies, even as its growth is concentrated in the Anglosphere's secular democratic States.

Most Americans, like most Orthodox, seem unable to comprehend that the world has changed and the analytical tools they used to understand the world no longer apply. America is no longer a cozy redoubt of English settlers steeped in Blackstone, Locke, and Hume with limitless frontier to the West. Orthodoxy is no longer the binding creed of multicultural Empire, presided over by a despotic Emperor endowed with the Mandate of Heaven.

We are all in uncharted territory. Happily, over the past few months, I am in contact with more people--young, male--who perceive the same problem: things are no longer as they were, and where do we go from here.

John Coffman
Trifon
Dean Abbot
Mark Citadel

That unprecedented episode in human rule popularly titled the Age Of Reason is drawing to a close, and something is going to replace it, and it could be better for you or worse for you depending on your identity. And all the copies of the Constitution and Federalist Papers won't stop it, not that, again, anybody outside a few aging white people cares about them or reads them.

The Age of Ideology is over.

We are reaching levels of awesomeness we didn't previously think possible.

The next great Recession looms. Queen Hill may win, and promptly enact a dry-foot/dry-foot immigration policy for all the new Democrats from the Third World. Exotic strains of tuberculosis, pneumococcus may yet ravage us. But at this time and this place, in the Capitol of Capital, Nassim Taleb and Mark Rippetoe are going out for lunch, and we have a glimpse of the world when adults are in charge.

The Hard Hat Riot

At 7:30 am on May 8, [1970], several hundred anti-war protesters (most of them high school and college students) began holding a memorial at Broad and Wall Streets for the four dead students at Kent State. By late morning, the protesters—now numbering more than a thousand—had moved to the steps of Federal Hall, gathering in front of the statue of George Washington which tops the steps. The protesters demanded an end to the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, the release of political prisoners in the United States, and an end to military-related research on all university campuses.

At five minutes to noon, about 200 construction workers converged on the student rally at Federal Hall from four directions. Nearly all the construction workers carried American flags and signs that read "All the way, USA" and "America, Love it or Leave it". Their numbers may have been doubled by others who had joined them as they marched toward Federal Hall. A thin and inadequate line of police, who were largely sympathetic to the hardhats' position, formed to separate the construction workers from the anti-war protesters. At first, the construction workers only pushed but did not break through the police line. After two minutes, however, the hardhats broke through the police line and began chasing students through the streets. The workers chose those with the longest hair and beat them with their hard hats and other weapons, including clubs and steel-toe boots. Onlookers reported that the police stood by and did nothing.

Some of the construction workers and counter-protesters moved across City Hall Park toward City Hall. They mounted the steps, planted their flags at the top of the steps, then attempted to gain entrance. Police on duty at City Hall initially barred them, but soon the mob pushed past. A few workers entered the building. A postal worker rushed onto the roof of City Hall and raised the American flag there to full mast. When city workers lowered the flag back down to half-mast, a large number of construction workers stormed past the police. Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio, fearing the building would be overrun by the mob, ordered city workers to raise the flag back to full mast.

Rioting construction workers also attacked buildings near City Hall; most were of Irish Catholic extraction and some ripped the Red Cross and Episcopal Church flags down from a flagpole at nearby Trinity Church. One group invaded two nearby Pace University buildings, smashing lobby windows with clubs and crowbars and beating up students. More than 70 people were injured, including four policemen. Most of the injured required hospital treatment. Six people were arrested.

Via Wikipedia.

The Hard Hat Riot represented the fundamental break in the Democratic party from class politics to identity politics, currently epitomized by Hillary Clinton's statement:

"Not everything is about an economic theory, right?” Clinton said, kicking off a long, interactive riff with the crowd at a union hall this afternoon.

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow—and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will—would that end racism?”

“No!” the audience yelled back.

Clinton continued to list scenarios, asking: “Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”

(via AlterNet).

The white working class, which is well represented in the ranks of combat infantry, has a strong patriotic and masculine streak, so when the Democratic Party decided to focus on identity and social justice instead of economic class and labor dynamics, they naturally had to distance themselves from those uncouth Hard Hats. The white working class subsequently elected Ronald Reagan by large electoral majorities.

Forty-six years later, a similar realignment occurs on the Republican side, as prominent conservatives urge their fellows not to vote for Donald Trump.

By way of contrast, here is a typical image from Googling "Trump voters". I doubt they contribute to the American Enterprise Institute or read the Weekly Standard.

The conservatives accuse Trump and his base of "racism," "sexism," "xenophobia," and even "fascism" (an incoherent use of the term). Trump's voters enthusiastically cheer his "America first" foreign policy, a Wall on the southern border, and a ban on Muslim hijrah. As the primary results demonstrated, more of the Republican base agreed with Trump than with any other approved McCandidate. Tax rates and Original Intent don't seem to figure much in their hierarchy of wants.

The opposition to this populist revolt is like nothing I have seen in my life. All of media, government, business, academe, and the think tank archipelago have declared war on Trump. He is attacked without respite, with the Republican establishment and its donors in the vanguard.

This is the second, seismic political re-alignment in my lifetime. As it turns out, people care less about marginal tax rates and whatever it is the 14th Amendment does not empower government to protect, and more about things like the national character, and the endless wars they are tasked with fighting and financing. They don't want a carried interest exemption; they want a country to call their own, and a strongman who'll keep out their enemies. Any of the Establishment's pre-vetted candidates could have promised that, but they didn't. Trump did, and that's why he's the one running for President.

And this brings up another eye-opening phenomenon: the ideological conservatives' effortless adoption of the tactics, terminology, and moral framework of the Left to attack Trump and his voters. And if conservatives adopt the tactics, terminology, and moral framework of the Left, then aren't they really the Left, with the same Progressivist, universalist worldview as their Trotskyite brothers-in-arms?

Conservatism is about conserving a people or it is about nothing, pure and simple.

The Gay, Feminist, Democratic, Rainbow Warrior Army

Via Ad Orientem

Marine Corps enlisted and officer training is to be fully gender integrated with gender-neutral occupational titles. Same with the Navy, which will no longer have "corpsmen" but, presumably, "corpspersons." All restrictions on homosexuals and transsexuals serving openly are to be lifted. Don't Ask, Don't Tell has been officially replaced with Never Shut Up.

This will probably have less impact on US tactical capability than we think. The Special Forces and mercenary companies will continue to be mostly lean, mean white males as the regular forces become a gay, female pageant. Presumably, even the Bolsheviks know that you still need hard men with problematic attitudes around if you need to kill people and break things.

The Left continues its rampage through the institutions. Being the Left, of course, they never stop until somebody or until circumstances stop them. And, to mount a particular hobby horse, ideological conservatism simply lacks the tools to oppose the Long March. I can hear the dialectic already: "How can you POSSIBLY deny opportunities for advancement to this brave homosexual/transgendered/female veteran? HAVE YOU NO SHAME SIR?"

The conservative--the espouser of meritocracy, equality before the law, and support for the politically popular military--can only gulp back his words and cast desperately for another line to draw in the sand. The military is of course an inherently masculine institution for which women are biologically and temperamentally unsuited, and the introduction of sexual marketplace dynamics into such a rigidly hierarchical organization is disastrous. But any general who raises these perfectly historical, realistic and grounded arguments will have his career ruined.

The Right is hoisted on its own petard. If indeed all men are "created equal," then by God they are, and biological and social reality be damned. If we're a Proposition Nation, and a Propositional American says, "Give me your tired, your poor," then tired and poor we shall have.

A dedication to conserving the existence and well-being of a discrete people in their geographic redoubt elides these ideological conundrums completely, but conservatives are trapped by their own universalist rhetoric.

Yea verily, doth this AltRight appear most unseemly

Panic.

FIRST, an apology, or rather a regret: The Economist would prefer not to advertise the rantings of racists and cranks. Unfortunately, and somewhat astonishingly, the Alt-Right—the misleading name for a ragtag but consistently repulsive movement that hitherto has flourished only on the internet—has insinuated itself, unignorably, into American politics. That grim achievement points to the reverse sway now held by the margins, of both ideology and the media, over the mainstream. It also reflects the indiscriminate cynicism of Donald Trump’s campaign.

Much of the Alt-Right’s output will seem indecipherably weird to those unfamiliar with the darker penumbras of popular culture. It has its own iconography and vernacular, derived from message boards, video games and pornography. Its signature insult is “cuckservative”, directed at Republicans supposedly emasculated by liberalism and money. Its favourite avatar is Pepe the frog, a cartoon-strip creature co-opted into offensive scenarios; one Pepe image was reposted this week by Donald Trump junior and Roger Stone, a leading Trumpista, the latest example of the candidate’s supporters, and the man himself, circulating the Alt-Right’s memes and hoax statistics.

Truth. Beauty. Goodness.

I'm literally weeping with joy and gratitude right now.

Seriously, if you believe in America as an integral nation with distinctive interests, you only have one choice.

Oh, right—there’s that other issue. The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes. Their reasons vary somewhat. The Left and the Democrats seek ringers to form a permanent electoral majority. They, or many of them, also believe the academic-intellectual lie that America’s inherently racist and evil nature can be expiated only through ever greater “diversity.” The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor. It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige. The Republicans and the “conservatives”? Both of course desperately want absolution from the charge of “racism.” For the latter, this at least makes some sense. No Washington General can take the court—much less cash his check—with that epithet dancing over his head like some Satanic Spirit. But for the former, this priestly grace comes at the direct expense of their worldly interests. Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their “natural conservatism” at the ballot box? It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn’t stop the Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!

This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.

The Flight 93 Election.

This pseudonymous essay is rumored to have been written by Christopher Caldwell. The author has said the pseudonym is to protect him not from the Left, but from erstwhile conservatives.

He penned a response to the predictable pointing and spluttering by ideological conservatives.

A point from the earlier essay is worth repeating. Conservatives have shouted since the beginning of Trump’s improbable rise: He’s not one of us! He is not conservative! And, indeed, in many ways, Trump is downright liberal. You might think that would make him more acceptable to the Left. But no. As “compassionate conservatism” did nothing to blunt leftist hatred of George W. Bush, neither do Trump’s quasi-liberal economic positions. In fact, they hate Trump much more. Trump is not conservative enough for the conservatives but way too conservative for the Left, yet somehow they find common cause. Earlier I posited that the reason is Trump’s position on immigration. Let me add two others.

The first is simply that Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Which points to the far more important reason. I urge readers to go back through John Marini’s argument, to which I cannot do anything close to full justice. Suffice to say here, the current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify Marini (and Aristotle), the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.

Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.

To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.

If the Constitution has any force or meaning, then “We the People” get to decide not merely who gets to run the administrative state—which, whatever the outcome, will always continue on the same path—more fundamentally, we get to decide what policies we want and which we don’t. Apparently, to the whole Left and much of the Right, this stance is immoderate and dangerous. The people who make that charge claim to do so in defense of Constitutional principle. I can’t square that circle. Can you?

(To those tempted to accuse me of advocating a crude majoritarianism, I refer you to what I said above and will say below on the proper, Constitutional operation of the United States government as originally designed and improved by the pre-Progressive Amendments.)

One must also wonder what is so “immoderate” about Trump’s program. As noted, it’s to the left of the last several decades of Republican-conservative orthodoxy. “Moderate” in the modern political (as opposed to the Aristotelean) sense tends to be synonymous with “centrist.” By that definition, Trump is a moderate. That’s why National Review and the rest of the conservatives came out of the gate so strongly against him. I admit that, not all that long ago, I probably would have too. But I have come to see conservatism in a different light. To oversimplify (again), the only “eternal principle” is the good. What, specifically, is good in a political context varies with the times and with circumstance, as does how best to achieve the good in a given context. The good is not tax rates or free trade. Those aren’t even principles. In the American political context, the good is the well-being of the physical America and its people, well-being defined (in terms that reflect both Aristotle and the American Founding) as their “safety and happiness.” That’s what conservatism should be working to conserve.

Restatement On Flight 93.

The Age of Ideology is over.

An Anarcho-Capitalist Proposal

Clayton County Jury Awards $10M To Murder Victim

A Clayton County jury delivered a post-apportionment award of $10 million to the family of a man murdered by unknown assailants at a Forest Park apartment complex last year, earning praise from plaintiffs' attorney Jeff Shiver for putting aside the fact that the dead man's widow was a Mexican national and spoke no English.

"I'm encouraged that jurors are looking past someone's last name, the language they speak or the color of their skin to see that all lives have intrinsic value," said Shiver, whose team included Shiver & Hamilton partner Alan Hamilton and associate Daniel Beer, and Darren Summerville and Mecca Anderson of the Summerville Firm.

The jurors were not told that the dead man, Florencio Perez-Hernandez, had been in the country illegally, Shiver said. His widow obtained a visa to attend the trial, leaving their three children in Mexico, but had to return before its conclusion, he said.
The defendants, the apartments' corporate owner and management company, offered to settle the case for $1 million a few weeks before trial, Shiver said, after turning down a $7 million plaintiffs' offer last October.

Because of that, the plaintiffs' lawyers will also seek attorney fees through Georgia's offer of judgment statute, under which a party that declines a settlement offer, then loses at trial by at least 25 percent more than the rejected offer, can be ordered to pay the winning party's fees accrued from the date of the offer, he said.
The defense team included Weinberg, Wheeler, Hudgins, Gunn & Dial partners Earl "Billy" Gunn and David Matthews, and associate George Green Jr.

"I can't say I'm surprised with the verdict," said Gunn. "I am surprised and unhappy with dollar amount awarded, although I had a jury that worked diligently."

"I expect us to pursue post-judgment relief," Gunn said.

The case is the second one pitting Shiver Hamilton and Gunn's firm stemming from a murder at the Bradford Ridge Apartments. In 2013, 13-year-old Steven Diaz was shot and killed there, resulting in a confidential settlement last year.

Asked why the first settled while the second went to trial, the lawyers said another insurer handled the first case.
"Different insurer, different philosophy," said Gunn. "I told Jeff, 'that first settlement spoiled you.' I was wrong."
The just-concluded trial involved the Jan. 24, 2015, murder of Perez-Hernandez, 33, who had left the apartment complex to go to a nearby convenience store with a friend, Emmanuel Perez-Lopez.

As they returned, according to Shiver and court filings, three men asked them for cigarettes; upon being told they had none, someone hit Perez-Lopez in the head with an unknown object, and he passed out.

When he came to, Perez-Lopez returned to the apartment and told others there about the attack, and they went in search of their friend. They found him dead from a gunshot wound in the apartments' parking lot, 50 to 100 feet from where he and Perez-Lopez had been accosted.

Clayton County, Georgia was the setting for Margaret Mitchell's great circa bellum novel Gone With The Wind. Much of the 1977 film Smokey And The Bandit was shot there, back when we used to look like this.

Rest assured my friends, all those days are indeed "gone with the wind."

2000 census
lAs of the 2010 United States Census, there were 259,424 people residing in the county. 66.1% were Black or African American, 18.9% White, 5.0% Asian, 0.4% Native American, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 7.1% from some other race and 2.5% from two or more races. 13.7% were Hispanic or Latino (of any race).

As of the 2000 census, there were 236,517 people, 82,243 households, and 59,214 families residing in the county. The population density was 1,658 people per square mile (640/km²). There were 86,461 housing units at an average density of 606 per square mile (234/km²). The racial makeup of the county was 37.94% White, 51.55% Black or African American, 0.32% Native American, 4.49% Asian, 0.07% Pacific Islander, 3.55% from other races, and 2.08% from two or more races. 7.50% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

Estimated 2006 population is 271,240, with a racial make-up of 20.4% white non-Hispanic, 62.9% African American, 5% Asian, 11.3% Hispanic or Latino, 0.4% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.1% Pacific Islander. 1.5% were reported as multi-racial.

There were 82,243 households out of which 40.70% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 45.70% were married couples living together, 20.30% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28.00% were non-families. 21.80% of all households were made up of individuals and 3.60% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.84 and the average family size was 3.30.

In the county the population was spread out with 30.00% under the age of 18, 10.40% from 18 to 24, 35.40% from 25 to 44, 18.40% from 45 to 64, and 5.90% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 30 years. For every 100 females there were 94.50 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 90.90 males.

The median income for a household in the county was $42,697, and the median income for a family was $46,782. Males had a median income of $32,118 versus $26,926 for females. The per capita income for the county was $18,079. About 8.20% of families and 10.10% of the population were below the poverty line, including 13.20% of those under age 18 and 8.90% of those age 65 or over.

The last quarter-century has seen significant change in the racial composition of the county's population. In 1980, Clayton county's population was 150,357 — 91% white and 9% minority, while in 2006 the population was approximately 271,240 — 20% white and 80% minority.

2010 census

As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 259,424 people, 90,633 households, and 62,389 families residing in the county. The population density was 1,832.5 inhabitants per square mile (707.5/km2). There were 104,705 housing units at an average density of 739.6 per square mile (285.6/km2). The racial makeup of the county was 66.1% black or African American, 18.9% white, 5.0% Asian, 0.4% American Indian, 0.1% Pacific islander, 7.1% from other races, and 2.5% from two or more races. Those of Hispanic or Latino origin made up 13.7% of the population.[14] In terms of ancestry, and 4.9% were American.

Of the 90,633 households, 42.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 36.4% were married couples living together, 25.3% had a female householder with no husband present, 31.2% were non-families, and 25.4% of all households were made up of individuals. The average household size was 2.82 and the average family size was 3.37. The median age was 31.6 years.

The median income for a household in the county was $43,311 and the median income for a family was $48,064. Males had a median income of $36,177 versus $32,460 for females. The per capita income for the county was $18,958. About 13.6% of families and 16.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 24.5% of those under age 18 and 8.8% of those age 65 or over.

In summary, whites are fleeing, vibrancy is moving in, and incomes are stagnant and declining, despite the unmitigated boon of cheap immigrant labor. I know white rednecks who just up and left, dropping their keys off at the bank. Central American stoop laborers, paid in cash, stumbling around drunk, are easy marks for black predators.

The security measures necessary to keep Bradford Ridge Apartments predator-free would likely price the unit costs out of the reach of the late Perez-Hernandez. The tactics necessary to keeping his assailants away would be illegal. This is quintessential anarcho-tyranny: the property owners are placed between the Scylla and Charybdis of pricing out their own customers thereby eliminating their income stream, or assuming the full expense for the general criminality of Clayton County and its dysfunctional demographics, which is frankly uninsurable and impossible.

Let me unpack this a bit more: a Clayton County jury (none of whom, I assure you, were landlords) apportioned practically no fault to the actual trigger-pullers (that's what the "post-apportionment" means) and simply speculated that something could have been done to prevent a group of human predators from preying on their unfortunate marks (machine guns? Ghurkas? a crocodile-filled moat?). Note also the strange tale of the survivor: they hit him over the head, and apparently drag his buddy 50 to 100 feet away where they shoot him, then conveniently disappear, allowing Perez-Lopez to regain consciousness, return to the apartment, then go looking for the decedent whom (hey, presto!) they find shot dead. I'm not an actor on Law & Order, but this story stinks to high heaven.

Which gets me to my Anarcho-Capitalist Proposal: If the costs of general criminal activity in counties are going to be socialized on to the county's property owners, why not just give the property owners the county?