Selective Singlethink

This is a montage (by my understanding not comprehensive) of the media badgering Trump during the election campaign to disavow David Duke*, and Trump routinely doing so. Supposedly these are news organizations, which means they should strive to provide their audiences with new information. Yet they convey zero new information when they ask him if he disavows Duke 25 years after he first did so, and a day after he most recently did so. Trump disavows Duke and doesn't care for his support. That's the story. By bringing the subject up constantly the outlets are seeking to psychologically condition their audience. By forcing Trump to constantly talk about Duke, they're are training people to subconsciously associate him with Duke. Not only that, but the insinuation is always what about Duke, why have you failed to disavow? The audience is left with the impression that Trump has hesitated to disavow America's favorite bogeyman, even though he hasn't. This is how they were able to build the belief that Trump is a white supremacist, even though Trump has never said anything remotely to that effect, and his immigration policy was largely indistinguishable from that of Democrats during the Clinton administration.

Now we see they are similarly pushing the notion that Trump is "embracing neo-nazis." Despite the fact that he specifically denounced white supremacists and neo-nazis by name, the narrative is that Trump needs to be impeached for publicly supporting them. They've justified this narrative because Trump also denounced left-wing violence. The message from the left would seem to be: if you question our violence you are a nazi. At any rate, I've had success quoting Trump's statement on facebook, often baiting with something like, "this is what Trump should have said."

No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws. We all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.

Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans. We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our creator, we are equal under the law and we are equal under our constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry, strike at the very core of America.

This tends to garner positive feedback. People heap on praise on it and they agree that's what should have been said, and even ask why Trump didn't say that. I then inform them that it is actually Trump's statement, from the same news conference in which they say he embraced neo-nazis. What do you think their reaction would be? Something like, "Wow, maybe I was wrong about Trump on this issue. Thanks for sharing the source so I could directly analyze the comments for myself rather than relying on the media spin." Lol. Sorry for the camp humor, just trying to lighten the mood. While we would never expect to hear that, we would expect responses of the type, "well sure his speechwriters wrote that but we know what he really thinks" (the Trump-is-a-racist-no-matter-what-he-says-and-does fallacy), or "by calling out Antifa he's supporting fascism" (a childish black-white stance on morality, as well as high gullibility to marketing). Which of those responses do you suppose I see the most?

Actually I get no responses at all. None. By my little trick I've forced the person to realize that their own impartial judgment of Trump's statement flies in direct contrast with their strong opinions on it. And because they didn't recognize the quote, I can assume that they didn't know what Trump actually said at all. Why don't they comment? Because they don't know what to say? Because they're embarassed and bail out of the convo asap? Maybe, but my experience with debating liberals online is that they usually have something to say and they don't get too embarrassed by logical contradictions.

The reason they don't comment is they would have to admit they had read it. By saying anything at all, or even so much as giving a reaction, they admit that they are now aware of the contradiction. By not commenting, they can pretend they didn't read it at all. They never saw it; it never happened. They can continue to believe that Trump issued a pro-nazi statement, just as they believe he didn't disavow David Duke. This is what brainwashing looks like. I think Orwell got it a little wrong. He said the characters in 1984 displayed doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in their mind at the same time. Or, as I think of it, an immunity to cognitive dissonance. But did they really? When they switch from we're at war with EastAsia to we've never been at war with EastAsia, they aren't really holding two contradictory ideas in their minds at all. No, they just flush the first out entirely, and convince themselves it never happened. It's not doublethink, it's selective singlethink. It's not an immunity to cognitive dissonance, otherwise they'd have no problem responding to my posts. It's just extreme confirmation bias, where contradictions to bias are rendered invisible no matter how prominently they are presented. Are you scared about the future yet? I am.

It's probably all gloom & doom from here on out, but that doesn't mean we can't have a little fun with it. What ridiculous things can you get them to pretend doesn't exist so they don't disturb their established biases? Make it a game. Be creative. Then we'll get together and share selective singlethink war stories over beers sometime before The Purge begins.



*Aside: who the fuck is David Duke anyway? I venture onto some pretty far-right forums and I've never seen a reference to Duke. I don't know anything he's ever said or his stance on any issue. Does anyone? The most I know is that he was once a high-ranking clan member, but is no longer a member. Which can't be so terrible in itself, given the praise Democrats threw onto Robert Byrd. Previous Klan membership is not enough, so why is Duke given an evildoer level on par with Satan himself? Something else that has been noticed: Twitter has been purging alt right accounts feverishly, especially since Charlottesville, and virtually no one is verified. Yet Duke, the paragon of evil, maintains a verified account. (Twitter says 49K followers. I wonder how many are just reporters waiting for Duke to say something racist so they can beat the crowd in demanding that Trump disavow the latest outrage). If Duke is a hate peddler, and Twitter is banning hate speech, then why is his account up still? The answer must be that either Duke doesn't actually say anything bad enough to be considered hate speech, or he does but they don't want to banish their bogeyman and lose a convenient weapon of psychological association with evil.

Unfazed by recent favorable press, Antifa resumes savage public behavior

This weekend there was a massive protest of a small free-speech event in Boston by the Democrat's (and Mitt Romney's) favorite communist political action group, Antifa. As always the anti-democratic action was justified by calling the other side nazis. (In a previous era in MA they would have been called witches.) Official Boston Antifa Twitter called for the removal of classical liberals and supporters of the US Constitution. (Which is sedition under US code, where you at Sessions?) Police went to Twitter to kindly ask Antifa heroes against fascism to please stop throwing bottles of urine at them. When reached for comment, Arnold Schwarzenegger stated, "it's okay for Antifa to throw rocks and bottles of piss at cops and classical liberals."

Boston's own mayor thanked protesters for standing up to white supremacy. For a while the only defense against the white supremacy label has been to be non-white, and now even that is not a valid defense! What is an Indian that liberals don't like? A white supremacist. What's a flamboyant gay Jew arguing against feminism? A nazi.

Conservative political action needs to look like this. Make them protest the most ridiculous things. Right-wing extremists should temper their personas or stay home, or be sent home. At this point I assume anyone trying to organize right-wing events like what was seen in Charlottesville are saboteurs who should be blacklisted. There does, at least, seem to be a silver lining to it; it has fueled despicable behavior from the left. The didn't gain a PR victory in Charlottesville by peaceful action or providing sober commentary on the right's use of universally despised symbols. They did so by being violent and crude. That behavior has been reinforced and they are now out there damaging themselves. The goal for dealing with Antifa should be to find ways to reinforce their bad behavior that are not huge PR disasters for the right.

Democracy's Demographic Demonry

Here at the Emergent Sea we're into omni-nationalism. (How is that for positive labeling, rayme4raw?) That means nationalism for everyone. Every nation gets a home and practices self-determination. People might quibble over what a nation is, but usually that's only people who aren't operating in good faith. We intuitively know one when we see it. A nation is a people united by a unique ethnicity, culture, history, and language. We understand the difference between a Mexican and an America and an Inuit. Liberals think an American is anyone who currently resides on American soil, but they are experts in contradicting common sense.

Self-determination means a nation self-regulates. They decide how the nation will live and what to do with the land on which they find themselves. There is also the notion of reciprocity. The Turks may self-determine they need to invade Elbonia for more resources, but then that sort of denies the Elbonians of their right to their own self-determination. Nations can determine to be ruled if they like. It sounds unlikely, but then it happens. Look at Puerto Rico, the American territory with only a very minor independence movement. They are a different nation that Americans, yet choose to be governed by Americans anyway.

While it's never really stated, nations have a duty to preserve themselves. Before we lived in the crazy times such a concept didn't need to be stated. It was just the natural way. Now that we're in crazy times, it's still not stated because that would be racist, somehow. The people of a nation have a culture, language, ethnicity, and some land that were given to them by their forebearers, and they should preserve their heritage and pass it on. Of course, we can't compel a nation to preserve themselves. If they seek to destroy their own nation there isn't much we can do. Nations should engage in self-preservation, but we can't really make them.

There seem to be about three ways that nations can die: conquest, outcompetition, and democracy. Conquest we understand pretty easily. If the Turks sweep in and kill every last Elbonian, then Elbonia ceases to be a nation, relegated to the history books, which we mostly be full of lies. Outcompetition death is slowly ceding ground to a more powerful neighbor until there's not much left to call a nation. This was largely the case with Amerindians. They were not killed off so much as they were pushed into the margins. The final way to kill a nation is through democracy.

The real problem is what we might term free-domain democracy, where headcounts are all that matters, and people are free to move around however they want. It's always been remarkable to me that I can move to any state, to any city, and to any neighborhood, and the people already living there have zero input into having me as their new neighbor. I'm not sure which part is more dangerous, the free-domain attribute or democracy itself, but combined they are a nation-grinding machine. Let's look at some examples.

First we might look at western countries like America and France. These are nations with very strong identities, yet are being diluted by immigration (free-domain aspect). It would be one thing if the French maintained full control of France but, because of democracy, the French nation loses control of France with each immigrant that enters. France becomes less and less interested in preserving the French nation as it becomes less French. And soon France just won't be very French at all. We can see that if a democratic nation loses vigor in preserving itself, it sets down on a slippery path to doom from which it cannot recover. Not without jettisoning democracy, at least.

Another example is Tibet, which is a nation but no longer a country, having been annexed by China. The Chinese have done what they can to control Tibet demographically, by dumping ethnic Chinese into the region and encouraging the Tibetans to water themselves down through intermarriage. This may be a boon to China's empirical stability, but is a threat to humanity. The uniqueness of the Tibetan people should be preserved. China is not a democracy but the effect is the same. If they can crowd out the Tibetans as much as possible, they can more easily justify polices that are friendly to the Chinese at the expense of the Tibetans.

The final example is Hawaii. Hawaii is only 10% Hawaiian. When they were annexed by the US in 1898 they were 20% Hawaiian. Just a few decades before that they were 97% Hawaiian. The largest ethnic group in Hawaii today is Japanese, followed by whites. The Japanese are there largely because US businesses dominated the islands and recruited Japanese laborers as plantation workers. The Hawaiians were outnumbered before 1898 but still ruled the islands through their monarchy. It's pretty appalling really. The Americans drastically altered the islands' demographics, then forced democracy on them, meaning the Hawaiians lost control of their own lands. They are so hopelessly outnumbered today that there's no chance of Hawaiians regaining control of their islands. They are doomed to forever be a minority in their own land.

The most amazing thing about this is that liberals, who hate whites and shriek oppression constantly, don't say much about Hawaii. I'm sure they do some, but not loud enough that it ever really reaches me in the midwest. Yet here is a pretty clear example of the things they rail against. Why don't they decry the demographic destruction of Hawaii? Perhaps because Hawaii is something like a dream scenario for them, where no one is the majority.

We might say the Hawaii isn't unique, just a special case of the Amerindians displaced by whites. However, whites didn't so much displace them as had them displaced by a 3rd party. Hawaii might be more similar to southern colonies like Mississippi, where Amerindians were replaced with blacks. This is in contrast to the northern colonies, where they built European states populated mainly by Europeans. In the north they were building a civilization. In Hawaii and Mississippi they were profiteering; taking land from one group and labor from another and reaping the profits. Displacing the natives to build great cities and states is at least more justifiable than than short-term business gains. And the results show. Mississippi is the poorest state in the union and Hawaii the most liberal. We are paying now for the near-sightedness of many of our forebearers, and, had they practiced omni-nationalism, we'd be in a much better situation today. Violating omni-nationalism is, in the long-term, a losing bet. There's actually a fourth way nations die. Nations that engage in imperialism often end up destroying themselves.

Courage, the Anti Anxiety

"I have anxiety." It's a common phrase you hear today. People are fairly open about it, even talking openly about their medication and whatnot. Leftists display psychological conditions (typically undiagnosed) on their social media profiles as if they are badges of honor, which always include some form of anxiety, PTSD, or similar.

Saying you have anxiety is something like saying you have feet. Anxiety is a normal functioning of the brain to protect us from situations we aren't prepared to handle. When I was a child I told my mother that I wished I didn't feel pain. She replied that there are people in the world who actually don't feel pain, and their lives are not so easy. For one, they must constantly monitor themselves for injuries that could lead to life-threatening infections. It became clear that pain served a vital function after all. As a parent now, I've watched as pain provided a feedback for my daughter to learn to walk and function in the world safely.

Anxiety seems to work in a similar fashion. It keeps us from situations that could cause us harm. We understand what it means when people say they have anxiety: they have too much anxiety; they feel anxiety when they really shouldn't. It's rightfully an undesirable psychological condition. It exists on a spectrum, but too many treat it like a binary condition. To them, anxiety is a disease, like cancer or hemophilia, and you have it or you don't. And I suspect many use it as a handicap, as an excuse for lack of achievement, success, or whatever. It's yet another form of oppression.

Most people are over-anxious these days, for lots of valid reasons. We all wish were less so, a little more calm, a little more cool and collected. I would advise that the last thing people should internalize is I have anxiety. To do so is to work from a position of defeat. A better mindset is I need to develop more courage. Work towards a positive goal, rather than thinking yourself fundamentally flawed. Courage is the ability to overcome anxious self-doubt and act in accordance with one's values and intellect, rather than to react to one's uncontrollable emotions. Courage enables us to exercise our full capacities as human beings. Giving in to fear despite our better judgment reverts us to a more animal-like mode of existence.

The core thing to know about anxiety is that you can't reason your way out of it. (Anyone who experiences public speaking anxiety, as I do, understands this.) The amygdala is the brain structure that triggers anxiety. It exists in a deeper, older portion of the primal human brain, and it doesn't care much what the cerebral cortex tells it. The amygdala is just a pattern-matching function. It scans the environment and, if it finds great uncertainty or matches it to previous situations where harm occurred, it triggers the anxiety state. You can't tell it what to do. You can only update its historical data records. It's no different than training a dog. You can't tell the dog what to do, only train it through an ample amount of positive and negative reinforcement in a regimen of gradually increasing difficulty. We take the same approach to learning to play basketball or guitar. We know in our head what good music sounds like, or what a basketball player should be doing, but we can't talk ourselves into a great shooting technique. We must train ourselves through repetition.

Anxiety is just psychological pain, and it drives people to avoidance behavior (to the point of safe spaces being implemented in many of our educational and corporate institutions). The same can be said of exercise. Lifting weights is difficult and painful. Squats are tortuous, in my opinion. Successful athletes learn to appreciate the burn, because they know that's where the improvement occurs, and they seek it out consistently. They also learn not to push too hard, otherwise they will overly exhaust or injure themselves.

The amygdala is entirely analogous. Anxiety is the burn. The brain hack is to learn to appreciate the burn because it is making you stronger. If instead of avoiding anxiety you seek it out, you'll find that it will take increasingly stressful situations to feel the same anxiety. Speaking to an audience of two used to make you anxious; now it takes five. And then ten. And so on.

There is no way to cure anxiety but to enter the stressful situation and demonstrate to your amygdala that everything is fine, and to do that routinely. The only way to do so is to muster up some good old fashioned courage. Not once, but routinely. Make courage a lifestyle decision and in six months you'll be amazed at how much more enjoyable life is.

RE: Facing the Coming Government Shutdown

Some commentary on Brett Stevens's recent post, Facing the Coming Government Shutdown.

[A] currency backed by debt is not as valuable as one backed by industry or other actual value.

Why would that be so? I suspect he may be violating The Compounding Debt Fallacy, an extremely common misunderstanding I see from smart people on the right. Why is a debt (i.e. contract) backed system lower in value than, say, a shiny-metal backed currency? And how do you back a currency by industry? The value of the debt backed currency derives from the US government's authority to enforce legal contracts.

He quotes from the Washington Post:

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, argues in a new report that once you take these kinds of tax breaks into account, the U.S. actually devotes far more resources than many other countries to “social spending” — spending on pensions, health care, family support, unemployment, housing assistance, and similar benefits meant to help people out in hard times. And, compared with most advanced countries, the U.S. gets far less bang for its buck in terms of health outcomes and equality.

…The U.S. offers huge amounts of what Kirkegaard calls “tax breaks for social purposes,” including the Earned Income Tax Credit, tax-exempt pension contributions, and new tax breaks for Americans to buy health insurance. In contrast, many European governments give services or cash benefits directly to their citizens, but then take some of that money back by taxing those cash benefits, or the person’s spending more generally.

…Once you add in that private social spending and the effect of taxes, it changes the ranking entirely. Now the U.S. devotes more to social spending than Sweden, the U.K., Germany, and Denmark – actually, every other advanced country except France.

This is a subject that was discussed on this blog in January in the proposition for an Energy Backed Currency. In EBC, the government controls spending but income comes in solely through energy sales, removing their ability to tinker on that end. Currently the fiscal policy is like a ship with rudders at each end. The actions at one end can be negated by actions at the other and they can do sneaky things like redistributing wealth at the taxation end but calling it okay because they didn't increase spending.

In addition, the more we are in debt, the less stable we are as an investment, which makes companies and other countries value our currency lower than it could be.

Why should we worry about being a foreign investment? When foreign countries invest in America, they own a part of us. We lose a part of our sovereignty. America is rich enough that it isn't starving for foreign investments. And why would we want other countries to value our currency? Driving up the dollar hurts our manufacturing and other export sectors, furthering the state of America as a nation that doesn't make things, and is forgetting how to make things. Foreign entities acquiring our currency is the same as us acquiring debt. How does, say, China, acquire dollars? They trade real value for them, in the form of goods and services. At any time, China can use its dollars to extract real wealth back out of America. Thus we are in debt to whoever holds our currency, and have lost some of our sovereignty.

This leaves the US with two grim choices, which Trump is brave enough to take on where no other American politicians will:

1. Default and lose currency value, or
2. Cut social programs and pay off the debt

Our present path leads to the first option. At some point, we will simply have borrowed too much. The experts will tell us that since our debt service is still under 10% of the budget, we are doing fine, but the real effects will be secondary. Our currency will lose value, we will lose prestige, and our government will be manipulated by foreign debtors.

The first option is indeed the only real option. US debt is sure to implode at some point. In addition to this, the vast sums of US currency in foreign exchange reserves means that, if there is ever a run on the dollar, foreign entities will unload their dollars as fast as possible, sucking wealth back out of the US. The only way to prevent that scenario will be for the US to debase the dollar, and to do so while we're strong enough, militarily, to get away with it. The causal chain of currency devalued $$\rightarrow$$ manipulated by foreign debtors is not sound. No, devaluing the currency will be the only way to reduce manipulation by foreign debtors.

From here out Steven's transitions from economics to a political discussion.

For those on the Alt Right, a transition to minimal American government — funding military and infrastructure alone, and leaving everything else to the states — would be an optimal scenario. With the fall of entitlements, diversity also will fall, and with that, the economic model of the circular Ponzi scheme will fail. At that point, the US will politically fragment as it already has socially.

Agreed, this is the ideal outcome, and one in which we might even get some help from some on the left, as long as they don't think we're agreeing with them on anything.

I read Brett Stevens almost daily. My biggest gripe is that he writes so much it is hard to keep up with it (not the worst gripe in the world, to be sure), but when you see these kinds of economic fallacies mixed in you have to wonder what else is askew. The bigger point here is that even the smartest guys out there misspeak about the economy. If you, the reader, understand the criticisms made here and start seeing them for yourself in the wild, then you understand economic reality better than the vast majority of Americans, which is knowledge that may one day work well in your favor.

Label Warfare

If Alex Jones ever got anything right it was in calling his organization Infowars. We are in the midst of a heated information war. Ideally this would be a battle of ideas, but in practice it is a war of labels. Each side seeks to assign labels in such a way as to display moral superiority to the other. Some labels are apt and defensible, while others are outright farcical. Labels are deployed as weapons, and some become rendered useless in battle and must be replaced.

Generally the left is more active in this domain than the right, but also less effective. They must rely on weaponized labeling as they tend to fare poorly in the marketplace of ideas. Their ideas are easy to repudiate, and they aren't very good at arguing to begin with, because they haven't really had to. The liberal narrative has been the unofficial state religion for some time now, and they been able to get away saturation and shaming rather than engaging in logic.

We see that the left constantly has to rebrand themselves as their self ascribed labels become burdensome. Sometimes the labels are degraded by the right, but more often they are soiled by the left's own behaviors. A few years ago liberal became something of a dirty word, thanks to constant attack from conservative radio. So liberals started calling themselves progressives. Progressive had a positive connotation, and depicted their push forward in their linear worldview. It's an excellent label, but they've ruined it. Progressive is the term used by 3rd wave feminists, intersectionality psuedo-intellectuals, and street-brawling anarchists. Most people these days associate progressives with radical communist revolutionaries. It's interesting watching some on the left call themselves progressives to avoid the negative stigma of the term liberal created by conservatives, while many moderates seek to assure us they are liberals, to avoid the negative stigma given to the term progressives gave to their own term. They are in a position of defining themselves by what they are not. The Z Man has written extensively on the dangers of negative identity, or defining oneself on what they are not, in posts such as The Anti-Man.

The left rebrands any of their pet projects that become soiled. They frame illegal aliens as undocumented immigrants. The right has made the obvious rebuttals, calling shoplifters undocumented purchasers and so on. Negroes became colored and then black and then African-Americans and then black again. Now many say "people of color" which is just another way of saying colored. The left has had a lot of success dubbing the economic refugees storming Europe as refugees, making it nearly impossible to turn them back as the preferred label portrays them as victims who face certain death in their home countries. (Never mind that it's all young men who have left the rest behind.) They have also managed to label any identity they dislike (white, male, straight, Christian, etc) as privileged. While it hasn't garnered mainstream adoption like some other terms, it has given them an easy way to dismiss anyone they want.

The left engages in what I would call loose labels, or labels they can ascribe to themselves that apply to nearly everyone. Recently I heard a musician say he was a feminist because as a father/son/brother he could not allow his daughter/mother/sister to be degraded. Well that's a hell of a loose definition. Who wants to see their mother, daughter, or sister degraded? Feminists defend their position by pretending the definition is something that has universal approval. This musician practices up to 17 hours a day and is fairly successful. I wonder if he supports the notion that a bunch of the money he makes be taken and given to a mediocre female musician who practices an hour a day. Because that's what feminists actually want to do. And they also have a tendency to degrade themselves in public. He should just raise his daughters not to be feminists.

More often than not their labels fail. They can't call themselves Marxists anymore, or Communists, even though that's what they are. Cultural Marxist is considered a pejorative, as is their own invented phrase "social justice warrior." While Bernie was big they defended the term social democrat, not knowing, it would seem, the original name of the Russian Communist Party. [The Russian communists also rose to power through label warfare. Bolshevik just means majority in Russian. The battle between the Bolshevik and Mensheviks was over before it started.] The left has become exceptionally bad at labeling their opponents as of late, resorting to the worst names that practitioners of the progressive cult can imagine: racist, sexist, Nazi, anti-semitic, Nazi, and a whole slew of hate-based terms. These terms mostly only serve to radicalize themselves, which probably doesn't bode well for their long-term success.

The right doesn't engage so much in labels but doesn't fail as much either. Mostly it's enough just to call the leftists whatever they call themselves, and they will generate the negative connotations for us. We spend more time deconstructing and sabotaging their labels than we do creating our own. One area where the right really hit a home run was in the term Pro-Life. This has been almost impossible for the left to counter, and is a powerful tool in rallying Christian votes. The countering Pro-Choice label just doesn't have the same gusto. During last year's March for Life in Washington DC that news orgs were using the term anti-abortion instead of pro-life. By choosing to use a negative definition for the marchers rather than their own term for themselves, the enormous bias of the media was revealed, showing the power of the label.

One conservative label that has acquired a negative connotation is neocon. But then again, neocon was never really a conservative label at all. It was the label that imperialists gave themselves to get conservative votes, and was ruined by their failed foreign interventionism. Other negative terms have come from the right itself, by calling liberals posing as conservatives RINOs and cuckservatives.

All this brings us to the alt-right. It was a label given to conservatives who wished to separate themselves from the establishment right; from the neocons and the corporate globalists and the National Review. It was dangerously close to a negative identity to begin with. It was also an abused term. The left found the most radical component of the alt-right and used that to try to attack Trump with. (Hillary's anti-alt-right speech wondrously backfired.) It's worrisome now that the term has finally become a burden, and was done so by members of the alt-right in Charlottesville. While the left instigated the violence, the world now associates the alt-right with yokels popping off Nazi salutes. The brand is all but ruined. We find ourselves in the position of having to rebrand, just like the left always has to do. What can we say, that the Nazi saluters aren't alt-right? They certainly fit the definition of non-establishment right-wingers. So now we're forced to do what we should have been doing already: providing positive identity labels of what we are, rather than negative labels of what we are not.

The Futility of Right-Wing Political Activism

The big news this weekend seems to have been the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. The major story is an incident that a right-wing activist ran his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. The narrative, of course, is that this was a deliberate attack. If so, there is not much to say about the media's rampant hypocrisy, as they've already been expertly skewered by Ann Coulter. However, this case isn't even equivalent to the incidents of Islamic attacks she compares to because it appears that the driver was under attack first (there is a video showing his car hit with a baseball bat before he accelerates into the crowd). It seems that the driver is likely to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter at worst, a far cry from the pre-meditated mass murders carried out by "Allahu Ackbar" chanting Islamists.

The rest of the rally is somewhat as predicted. Right-wing marchers were forced to get permits; Antifa and their ilk did not need permits to counter protest. Police did not protect the permitted activists from lefty violence, yet the right-wingers took 100% of the blame when they returned the violence or acted in self-defense. Any moral infraction by a right-winger was broadcast at full signal strength and decreed as representative of the whole group. Any moral infraction by a lefty was ignored as much as possible and characterized as an isolated incident committed by someone not really affiliated with the larger group. In short, street activism is a domain that fully and completely favors the left.

Which brings up the obvious question: why even bother with it? What exactly is the goal here? I nearly wrote against the Unite the Right March last week, because I didn't see the point. But it seemed harmless, at least, so I left it alone. Well, it's not harmless. Every other time these people organize, the alt-right spends weeks in damage control. Unite the Right as a public demonstration theme was doomed to failure. Because, guess what, there are Nazis on the right. Maybe they're not real Nazis, maybe they're just being edgy carrying a swastika flag, but in either case, those are some of the people we are supposed to be uniting with. If you have 10,000 right-wing demonstrators and one of them has a Nazi flag, what do you have? 10,000 Nazi militants, at least in the eyes of the public. Any why shouldn't that be the case? If the alt-right is okay with marching with a Nazi flag, or kids throwing out "Roman" salutes, then they will be identified with that symbolism.

The unwanted symbolism is being associated with the alt-right because no one is following the advice given in To Save the Alt Right, Punch Right. What is the point of having Richard Spencer or Baked Alaska on board if all they do is cause us trouble? We'd be better off without them. Punch right. What is the point of having supporters so dedicated they'll risk personal injury to march in the streets of Charlottesville Virginia, but they only serve to give the left a concrete instantiation on which to focus their abundant hate? We'd be better off without them. Punch right. This is the reason why Milo refused to be designated as a leader of the alt-right. (Well one of several). Giving them something concrete gives them an attack surface. It violates the principle of assume formlessness. And it violates the principles recommended on this blog in The Resolution of Ideology. These people think that if they take the full-spectrum ideological signal and make it public enough, they will win the war of ideas. They are seriously misguided, and leaders of the alt-right are not doing enough to keep these amateurs in check.

Marchers do nothing to advance our interests. Perhaps they fuel energy within the movement, but are these really the people we want to be highly energized? What moderate ever realized the failures of progressivism because they saw some flag-waving white trash walking through the streets? They are not helping us at all. In fact, the people who are helping us are mostly mainstream persuaders. Rush Limbaugh does more for us than these marchers could ever do. Having conservatism associated with Nazi salutes and vehicular manslaughter makes it impossible for them to continue their work. Everyone is now playing defense, instead of what we have been doing, slowly turning the tide in the marketplace of ideas and reclaiming the cultural institutions.

Worst of all, these activities feel like the things the lefties do, which means they must be wrong somehow since liberals are always wrong about everything. Liberals organize protests and complain in the streets. Conservatives go to work and raise families. Marches are shows of force. They are the democratic equivalent of military processions. In more autocratic regimes, the military is marched through town to say look how strong your rulers are; don't even think about rebelling. Similarly, political movements put on marches to show how strong they are, how many votes they command. A march makes sense from a position of strength.

The alt-right does not operate from a position of strength. It is an upstart political movement, even if conservatism is nothing new. It is an insurgency. It needs to start thinking like one. Successful insurgencies do not parade through town when they are outgunned. They would get demolished in the war of bullets, just as the Unite the Right marchers are now being trounced in the war of propaganda. I may start a series on successful insurgencies and how they might correlate to the arena of public opinion, as that seems to be a discussion that is either not being had or is being ignored.

In the meantime, the major takeaway should be this. One of the core principles of the alt-right is the existence of a natural human hierarchy, in opposition to the left's notion of "equity" (i.e. communism). If the alt-right practiced what it preached, none of this would have ever been an issue. No one affiliated with the march would have been permitted to don Nazi garb or flash Roman salutes, at the direction of wiser leaders-in-charge. Actually, the march would have been nixed altogether, because it was stupid in principle. If the alt-right can't even implement a functional hierarchy in its own ranks, how can it ever hope to do so in a largely hostile society? They need to get their house in order and very quick-like. The movement has nearly been destroyed for failing to practice what it preaches.