DebateGate

Anyone who has been through a breakup, like a divorce or the dissolution of a business partnership, knows they take on a life of their own. There is rarely one thing that sets the relationship off on the path to destruction. It is the accumulation of small things that build to an undefinable point where the relationship shifts from natural cooperation to natural opposition. Actions that used to build cooperation suddenly become points of contention until the two sides realize the relationship must end.

This is the dynamic in which most civic nationalist now find themselves with their old partner the ?founding documents.? For longer than the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, the civic nationalist has looked at his citizenship as defined by the partnership with the founding of America. The Declaration and to a lesser extent the Constitution have been his life partner. These documents and the mythology that has been created around them are what make him whole.

These documents, along with the founding itself, exist within the larger definition of America that the civic nationalist will defend with his life. There is some variation in that some of them still promote the melting pot idea while others are in the creedal camp, but all of them are married to the general concept of America. They will defend America from critics on all sides, mostly from the Right, of course, but they will even make some noises about defending their love from the Left as well.

The problem is America does not love them anymore. Those founding documents, the marriage certificate of the relationship, no longer matter to America. The reason America keeps them locked away and rarely mentions them is they are just not that important because the relationship is not that important. America is ready to move onto to the new vibrant stage of its life. That means leaving behind the old phase, the marriage to the civic nationalists.

Like a jilted lover, the civic nationalists cannot accept it. Here is an example in a legacy publication defending the Declaration. The elevation of the Declaration over the actual founding documents of the country was the result of a prior rough patch in the relationship during the last century. The Caesarism of Roosevelt needed to be addressed, like an infidelity in a relationship. The solution was provided by Harry Jaffe, a second rate scholar who peddled bromides to third rate thinkers.

There was no way to square what the progressives had done in the first half of the twentieth century with the text and spirit of the Constitution. There was no way to challenge them as they controlled the important bits of society. The solution was to embrace a form of Jacobinism. America was now defined, so the theory goes, by the egalitarian spirit of the Declaration. This also allowed them to embrace the tyrant Lincoln as their new Moses.

The new vision of America the civic nationalist created in response to the authoritarianism of the new regime was made to look like tradition by rewriting the founding history. The real founding document was the Declaration. The Constitution was an imperfect compromise to get started. The Civil War was an effort to address the big flaws to bring the document in line with the Declaration. The Gettysburg Address was a restatement of the genuine founding ideal.

This is utter nonsense, but it kept the relationship going. Like the cuckold who convinces himself the wife is taking night classes at the university so she can get a better job once the kids are in school, the civic nationalists occupied themselves with the Lincoln fantasy. Meanwhile, the America they loved was getting busy with every left-wing fad that came out of the academy. She was no longer even trying to pretend that she cared about the relationship with the civic nationalists.

There are some civic nationalists who see the problem. They hope to refashion the relationship around something they call common good conservatism, which creates an open marriage between themselves and the Constitution. America can still carry on with the latest thing, as long as it does not threaten the marriage. The common good civic nationalists will step in to enforce discipline when needed. They imagine the cuckold finally gaining the courage to call his wife home.

In fairness, there are some within the civic nationalist space who sense that the relationship is over and it is time to move on. They mostly focus on the old originalism idea embraced by the legal wing of civic nationalism. Originalism seeks to elevate the text of the Constitution over legal aspirations to the contrary. The problem is they are left to defend a document that was flawed from the start and has been butchered by previous efforts to minimize it.

The hard cold truth is that the America the civic nationalists claim to love is not around anymore and she is never coming back. In fact, she never really existed. It was a creation of the last century. The America of the founding died at Gettysburg and was buried in Reconstruction. It took two wars in the 20th century to create a replacement, which maintained the trappings of the original, but was fundamentally different from the republic fashioned by the Founders.

The crisis of the present is not over the strains in the old relationship with the America imagined by the civic nationalists. It is the result of the America formed in the 20th century having no rationale in the 21st century. The America of the civic nationalist is dust in a grave, left untended in the 19th century. Not only is she never coming back, but she also cannot be replaced with anything similar. Like the cuckold whose wife has left for good, the civic nationalists need to move on with their lives.

Whatever comes next is going to be fashioned by those who close the door on the past and accept the present, along with what future can be made of it. There are lessons to be gleaned from America?s past. There are lessons to be gleaned from the Franco-Prussian War and Revolutions of 1848. Those lessons only matter if they are put to use understanding the present in order to create a future. That future is not going to include the founding documents moldering away in a museum.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=28151

Thanksgiving is considered the most American of holidays, as it is nothing like the typical holiday celebrated in the West. It has rather specific origins located in the founding of the country. Those origins are complete nonsense, of course, but that?s often the case with cultural traditions. Even so, since Lincoln imposed the holiday on the conquered nations of America, Thanksgiving has been the quintessential American holiday and probably most people?s favorite time of year.

The origins of the holiday may be nonsense and the reason we have it may be less than noble, but a time to count your blessings is a good thing. It is made more important in an age in which the ruling class is trying hard to destroy the social capital that is an essential part of human society. When everything is transactional and artificial, having a few days in which you are supposed to think the exact opposite looks a lot like leaving the back door of the Death Star open.

That may be especially true this year. According to current polling, more than half of American adults think the recent election was rigged. No one has asked, but there is a good bet that most of those people think the mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley were in on the caper. In other words, most adults right now have lost trust in the controlling institutions of our society. A holiday in which we are encouraged to think about what really matters could not come at a better time.

Of course, this year has seen our rulers go mad with power and inflict all sorts of indignities upon us. There are the absurd lock downs and costume requirements related to the Covid panic. In the states where the tyrants have arbitrarily banned the sale of alcohol and installed snitch lines for people to rat out their neighbors for enjoying themselves, this will be a special time of year. A few days to think about all of this is just what the doctor ordered.

For those in areas where the Left?s street thugs have been running wild for most of the year, something similar is at work. The point of civilized society is to provide leisure time, when you can enjoy the simple pleasures with those you love. That is a sharp contrast to what the wreckers who bankroll the street mobs think. Over turkey tomorrow, a lot of people are going to think about what those oligarchs are really trying to take from us with their street thugs and gangsters.

Most important, of course, those engaged in the fight against the gathering darkness will be fortified by a few days of good food, good friends and time with family. While the forces of darkness are driven by avatars of the promised land and envy at what they can never attain, the dissident it driven by the thoughts of home, community and the daily struggle to make those things possible. For the dissident right, this is the best holiday of the year, even more so in the current crisis.

The challenge, of course, will be the spiteful mutants who will try to wreck the good times with their politics. The wine aunt who wants to gloat about the election, the unstable uncle who thinks Hitler is hiding under his bed and the young person whose mind has been poisoned by the system will all think this is their time to be the wrecker they imagine themselves to be. Dissidents everywhere will have to find a way to deal with these people, but this is the nature of the struggle.

Probably the most important thing to take away from this year, the thing to contemplate over the next few days, is the fact that we are on the cusp of a new age. Those promises from the ruling class puppets, like the Pretender Biden, to ?build back better? should not worry anyone, as these people are parasites. They are wreckers, unwittingly clearing a path for what comes next. Someone will build back better, but it comes after the reckoning that awaits every radical wrecker.

It may feel like a small consolation, but Thanksgiving has always been about looking forward, as much as looking back. You take the time to count your blessings and enjoy what you have, family, friends, your health and so on, but it is also about giving thanks for being in the great struggle of life. Whether it is carving a new society out of the wilderness or preserving the seeds of civilization in the great storms of the present, Thanksgiving is mostly about the promise of better days.

That is the thing that should keep the dissident going. The rage the other side has for what is good in life is rooted, to a great degree, in their fear of tomorrow. They know they are ?always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction. As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next.? This is the source of their rage. They know they stand upon the slippery stones of radicalism, while we stand on the firm ground of truth.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=21929

The Left Won?t Stop At Alex Jones. The Slippery Slope Is Real, And We?re On It
They do not want to compete in a marketplace of ideas. Their goal is to silence dissenting voices.

Jesse Kelly
Ever watch ?The Dick Van Dyke Show?? My folks used to put it on the TV for me when I was a kid. It was good comedy and harmless fun. What you may not have noticed about the show was the two main characters (a married couple) slept in SEPARATE beds in the same room. Obviously not an accurate portrayal of most marriages, the exception being Anthony Weiner?s, but in the early 1960s anything more than that would have been deemed inappropriate for public consumption. When public views on morality started shifting later that decade and television shows started getting a little more risqu?, there were immediate cries that this would be a slippery slope. There were concerns that allowing even the slightest moral degradation of Hollywood would inevitably end in Caligula-style debauchery.

The people who warned of this slippery slope were laughed off. But today, ?Sex and the City plays on regular cable with brief interruptions so Cialis can run commercials. So, about that slippery slope ?

Sorry to disappoint you modern day Puritans, but this is not an article about the Sodom and Gomorrah Sunday night TV lineup and your potential for turning into a pillar of salt. It is about the tendency of some men to deny the existence of a ravenous left and their insistence that the slippery slope is something of a myth. It is anything but a myth. The slippery slope is how the left imprints their agenda into our culture. They know many on the right have little stomach for a fight about the ridiculousness of separate marriage beds. They know once they get momentum you?ll one day have to explain to your six-year-old what ?dominatrix? means.

The federal income tax was established in 1913. (The government has not always stolen a cut of your paycheck before you get it.) There were warnings then about where that kind of sticky-fingers governing would end. The rates were 1 percent. Today the rates are almost 40 percent. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt was pushing for Social Security and folks on the right were warning of socialism. Social Security was then intended to be a temporary relief program. Today it?s a permanent retirement program for many and it?s also 14 percent of our $21,000,000,000,000 debt. Yesterday conservatives were warning about the left?s takeover of public schools and where it would lead. Today students are taught the evil of Trump?s immigration policies and football coaches lose their jobs if they pray on the field with their teams.

Many on the left and the right gave a loud cheer last week when Alex Jones was banished from Facebook. Twitter later suspended him. While it is not surprising to see the jackals on the left cheer at the burning of books, one would hope folks on the right would look in the mirror and realize their time is coming soon. The leftists will not stop (and did not stop) at nutty Alex Jones, because they do not think you are much different from him. You rightly think your belief in immigration enforcement is much different than his disgusting conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook. But you must understand the left thinks you are both equally vile. They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they?re coming for you.

But we didn?t get a unified message of support from the pinky-out people on the right. We were scolded for defending Jones. They sang so sweetly into the left?s ears: ?Alex Jones is icky. And there is no slippery slope. And you should frankly be censored anyway, if you don?t at least have a Master?s degree.?

The same people who ceded control of public education, the federal bureaucracy, the media, movies, and music to the left have once again found another hill not worth dying on. ?It?s only social media,? they say. Yeah, fear not. Around 2.5 billion people use Facebook and Twitter. What?s the worst that can happen if we just let the left have them?

While this denial of the slippery slope is frustrating, it is also understandable if you understand the nature of man. Very few people in this world actually enjoy fighting. It is much easier on the mind to just avoid a fight. That is why so many on the right ignore the obvious truths staring them in the face. ?It?s only Alex Jones? is not necessarily something they believe to be true.

?It?s only Alex Jones? is a comforting blanket. It?s the child who closes his eyes and covers his ears in the na?ve hope that the monster disappears if you can?t see or hear him. But the monster does NOT disappear. And it is most definitely NOT just Jones. Yesterday it was Jones. Today, YouTube censored human vanilla Dennis Prager. Tomorrow, there may be a knock on YOUR door.

Freedom is not something you acquire by practicing it. You don?t one day wake up and decide you are free. Freedom is something tangible and it requires the cooperation of others. If others will not give you that cooperation, you have to take it from them. We need to stop whistling past the graveyard and realize the left is seeking total victory. They do not want to compete in a marketplace of ideas. Their goal is to silence dissenting voices.

Look down at where you?re standing at this very moment. That is where you draw your line in the sand. Do not give them another inch.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/23/the-left-wont-stop-at-alex-jones-we-are-sliding-down-a-slippery-slope/#.W4AuXDj60Qw.facebook

The un-Americans

One of the things that has always been true about America is that you never question someone?s patriotism unless you have very strong evidence. Part of this is due to the immigrant back story of most Americans, but a bigger part is the fragmented nature of the country. Patriotism is the glue that holds the American Nations together. Different groups from different regions stick together because of a common national creed. This also works across class lines. The rich, the middle and the poor are equally patriotic.

One result of this has been a desire by leaders to not look like fops. Politicians, business men, even generals, have always done the every-man act in order to seem like one of the folks.We don?t have a hereditary class, but we do have rich people. Rather than a rigid class system, the rich make sure to let the lower classes know they have the same duty to the country as everyone else. This soul and soil nationalism, rather than blood and soil, is what binds the social classes and the regional cultures together. At least it used too.

That?s certainly not the way things are now. Our cultural and political leaders go out of their way to signal their hostility to the lower classes. In fact, it has become so common for our betters to sneer at us, they are competing with one another to prove just how much they hate Americans. Of course, they mean white Americans. The swarthy recent imports are the best, but the old stock, well, they are the worst, according to the people claiming to represent us. It really is remarkable just how much they detest us.

A commenter on Steve Sailer?s blog asked, in response to this David Brooks column, ?Has there ever been another time in American history when American elites felt this comfortable expressing such open contempt and hatred for their fellow citizens?? It is a good question. Certainly elites from some sections have hated the people of other sections. Virginia gentry, prior to the Civil War, thought the goobers from West Virginia were worst than Indians. New Englanders hate the South. Everyone hates Cleveland.

What we?re seeing today is different. It is a public hatred directed at the fundamental nature of America, and by extension, Americans. Here?s an example from Bill Kristol in response to an immigration segment on Fox News. What Kristol is arguing is that Americans, as in current citizens, have no right to discuss immigration policy. It is immoral for us to say anything about it. On the other hand, non-Americans, people not currently citizens, have a moral duty to cross the border and settle in your neighborhood.

Kristol is hardly alone. It is not strictly a Jewish thing either. Lyndsey Graham is not Jewish, as far as anyone knows. He no longer thinks America should exist. He denies that the current citizens have any right to exist whatsoever. Granted, he is a shrieking hysteric, prone to hyperbole, but there?s only one way to interpret what he is saying. Being an American is no longer permissible. In fact, the underlying rationale of the open borders side is that the current Americans are just no good and need to be replaced.

Now, this turn in elite opinion has been a long time coming. In the Clinton years, suddenly comfortable Boomers started buying McMansions and pretending they were too good for the hoi polloi in flyover country. Progressive politics moved away from the bread and butter economic issues and onto esoteric identity politics. This snottiness was most apparent when the Left went to war on WalMart. Once Progressives stopped pretending to like normal Americans, the so-called Conservatives joined them.

Elites have always had a disdain for the lower classes. This has been true at all times and all places. Elites have also always had a duty to look out for the interests of the lower classes. The ruling class may not have liked the people over whom they ruled, but they were duty bound to look out for them and keep their opinions to themselves. What?s happening in modern America is the ruling class is rejecting their duty to their fellow citizen, because they have contempt for the very notion that we are their fellow citizens.

There really is no example from history where the ruling class revolted and declared war on its subjects. That?s where we are today in America. When Trump gave his State of the Union, most of the people in the building hated him because he holds onto the old fashioned belief that the American government should serve the American people. As far as they are concerned, he?s not just a class traitor, he is insane. After all, why would anyone think the people in charge have any responsibility to the rabble?

It used to be that ?un-American? meant counter to the American system and the American creed.The people charged with policing that were the people in charge. Today, being un-American is a badge of honor for the people in charge. A US Congressman actually fled the building when the crowd started in with a patriotic chant during Trump?s address to Congress. You can be sure he was the toast of the city, a hero to his coevals in the political class. Bizarre as it sounds, America is a country now ruled by un-Americans.

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=12704

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn8JEMKhWIA

The curious rise of the 'white left' as a Chinese internet insult

Meet the Chinese netizens who combine a hatred for the 'white left with a love of US president Donald Trump.

If you look at any thread about Trump, Islam or immigration on a Chinese social media platform these days, it's impossible to avoid encountering the term baizuo, or literally, the 'white left'. It first emerged about two years ago, and yet has quickly become one of the most popular derogatory descriptions for Chinese netizens to discredit their opponents in online debates.

So what does 'white left' mean in the Chinese context, and what's behind the rise of its (negative) popularity' It might not be an easy task to define the term, for as a social media buzzword and very often an instrument for ad hominem attack, it could mean different things for different people. A thread on 'why well-educated elites in the west are seen as na've 'white left' in China' on Zhihu, a question-and-answer website said to have a high percentage of active users who are professionals and intellectuals, might serve as a starting point.

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the 'white left'. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who 'only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment' and 'have no sense of real problems in the real world'; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to 'satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority'; they are 'obsessed with political correctness' to the extent that they 'tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism'; they believe in the welfare state that 'benefits only the idle and the free riders'; they are the 'ignorant and arrogant westerners' who 'pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours'.     

Apart from some anti-hegemonic sentiments, the connotations of 'white left' in the Chinese context clearly resemble terms such as 'regressive liberals' or 'libtards' in the United States. In a way the demonization of the 'white left' in Chinese social media may also reflect the resurgence of right-wing populism globally.   

However, Chinese netizens' fierce attacks against the 'white left' seem curiously devoid of experiential motivation, since all these problems that conservatives in the west are concerned about ' immigration, multiculturalism, minority rights, and affirmative actions ' are largely unknown to Chinese society. This is not to say that discrimination against women and ethnic, religious and sexual minorities do not exist in China. They are no less serious or structural here than in any other societies. But cultural and identity politics has never gained much salience as political issues under an authoritarian regime, although feminist activists have received increased attention recently. Overall, there has been 'too little', rather than 'too much' political correctness as perceived by conservatives in the west.   

Chinese netizens' fierce attacks against the 'white left' seem curiously devoid of experiential motivation.

In fact, heated discussions about baizuo on Chinese social media websites rarely make reference to domestic issues, except for occasionally and unsurprisingly insulting Chinese Muslims for being 'unintegrated' or 'complicit in the spread of Islam extremism'. The stigmatization of the 'white left' is driven first and foremost by Chinese netizens' understanding of 'western' problems. It is a symptom and weakness of the Other.

The term first became influential amidst the European refugee crisis, and Angela Merkel was the first western politician to be labelled as a baizuo for her open-door refugee policy. Hungary, on the other hand, was praised by Chinese netizens for its hard line on refugees, if not for its authoritarian leader. Around the same time another derogatory name that was often used alongside baizuo was shengmu ' literally the 'holy mother' ' which according to its users refers to those who are 'overemotional', 'hypocritical' and 'have too much empathy'. The criticisms of baizuo and shengmu soon became an online smear campaign targeted at not only public figures such as J. K. Rowling and Emma Watson, but also volunteers, social workers and all other ordinary citizens, whether in Europe or China, who express any sympathy with international refugees.

In May 2016, Amnesty International published their survey results indicating that the most welcoming country for refugees was China. Leaving the reliability of its sample and methodology aside, this finding was not at all taken as a compliment in the Chinese media. Global Times conducted their own online survey in response to Amnesty's claim, and the results were quite the opposite: 90.3% said 'no' to the question 'would you accept refugees in your own household'' and 79.6% said 'no' to the question 'would you accept refugees in your city, or would you like to be neighbours with refugees''. Ironically, Amnesty's portrayal of China as a welcoming country for displaced people was even read by some netizens as part of a foreign conspiracy, intended to pressure the Chinese government to accept more refugees. A senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences commented that this survey was 'weird' and seemed to 'incite citizens against the government'.   

The anti-baizuo discourse in Chinese social media gained stronger momentum during the US presidential election campaign. If criticisms of the 'white left' in the context of the refugee crisis were mainly about disapproval of 'moralist humanitarianism' mixed with Islamophobia, they became politically more elaborate as Chinese critics of the 'white left' discovered Donald J. Trump, whom they both identify with and take inspirations from. Following the debates in the US, a number of other issues such as welfare reforms, affirmative action and minority rights were introduced into online discussions on the 'white left'. Baizuo critics now began to identify Obama and Clinton as the new epitome of the 'white left', despite the fact that they were neither particularly humanitarian nor particularly kind to migrants. Trump was taken as the champion of everything the 'white left' were against, and baizuo critics naturally became his enthusiastic supporters. 

To be sure, and fortunately, not all in Chinese cyberspace talk about the 'white left' in a derogatory way, just as not all appreciate the views and style of Trump. Rao Yi, a renowned neurobiologist and public intellectual, was one of the few to publically criticize the demonization of baizuo and Chinese netizens' support for Trump on television. His statement stirred up a great deal of controversy online. An overwhelming majority of Zhihu users thought that Rao had only proved that he was typical of the 'white left': biased, elitist, ignorant of social reality and constantly applying double standards. 

What are the possible explanations of the prevailing hostility to the 'white left' in Chinese social media' Only a fraction of the arguments can be considered interests-based, and they are made by established and newly arrived overseas Chinese in Europe and North America. Many students and job-seekers in Europe, for example, argue that it is simply unfair that they 'have to work so hard to stay, whereas these refugees can simply come and claim asylum'. More or less established Chinese immigrants in the United States often make the case that affirmative action policies put Chinese-Americans in a disadvantageous position, and 'Chinese should not pay the price for the wrongs white Americans have done'. It isn't the place to analyse the pitfalls of these claims here; my focus is rather on why mainland Chinese people adopt such a strong and emotionally charged view on issues they do not have direct experience with. The following ideological, instead of interest-based factors might be at play in both domestic and international contexts.       

From a domestic perspective, the proliferation of anti-baizuo sentiment is clearly in line with the dominance of a kind of brutal, demoralized pragmatism in post-socialist China. Many of the attacks on the welfare state and the idea that states have obligations towards international refugees appeal to the same social Darwinist logic of 'survival of the fittest'. It is assumed that individuals should take responsibility for their own misery, whether it is war or poverty, and should not be helped by others. The rationale goes hand in hand with the view that inequality is inevitable in a market-economy-cum-Hobbesian-society. Although economic disparity in China has been worsening in recent years, sociologist Yu Xie found that most Chinese people regard it as an inevitable consequence of economic growth, and that inequality is unlikely to give rise to political or social unrest.

Pragmatism with an emphasis on self-responsibility seems to be the ideology of our post-ideological times. It is, in UK prime minister Theresa May's words, 'living within our means'. This is combined with a general indifference towards race issues, or even worth, with certain social Darwinist beliefs that some races are superior to others, leading many mainland Chinese netizens to dismiss struggles against structural discriminations as na've, pretentious or demanding undeserved privileges.

Seen from the perspective of international relations, the anti-baizuo discourse can be understood as part of what William A. Callahan calls 'negative soft power', that is, constructing the Chinese self through 'the deliberate creation and then exclusion' of Others as 'barbarians' or otherwise inferior. Criticisms of the 'white left' against the background of the European refugee crisis fit especially well with the 'rising China' versus 'Europe in decline' narrative. According to Baidu Trends, one of the most related keywords to baizuo was huimie: 'to destroy'. Articles with titles such as 'the white left are destroying Europe' were widely circulated.

In an academic-style essay that was retweeted more than 7000 times on Weibo, a user named 'fantasy lover Mr. Liu' 'reviewed' European philosophy from Voltaire and Marx to Adorno and Foucault, concluding that the 'white left' as a 'spiritual epidemic' is on its way to self-destruction. He then stated that Trump's win was only 'a small victory over this spiritual epidemic of humankind', but 'western civilization is still far from its self-redemption'. However ridiculous it may appear, the post is illustrative of how a demonized Other is projected onto seemingly objective or academic criticisms of the 'white left'. Ultimately, the more the 'white left' ' whatever it means ' represent the fatal weakness of democracy, the more institutional and normative security the Chinese regime enjoys. The grassroots campaign against the 'white left' thus echoes the officially-sanctioned campaign against 'universal values', providing a negative evidence for the superiority of the Chinese self.

Finally, it should to be noted that the internet in China is subject to strict censorship. The Chinese government has been known to hire a large number of 'internet commentators' to fabricate social media posts. According to recent research conducted by scholars at Harvard University, 29% of such posts they investigated fell into the category of 'taunting of foreign countries'. It is nonetheless impossible to know whether these accused posts are indeed written by government employees. Similarly, it is hard to tell whether some of the criticisms of baizuo are coming from fabricated commentators-for-hire. However, given the strict censorship regime, criticizing democratic values such as pluralism, tolerance, and solidarity is certainly one of the safest 'critical' opinions ordinary citizens can express online. 


https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/chenchen-zhang/curious-rise-of-white-left-as-chinese-internet-insult

Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is reportedly a reader of neoreactionary political theory. A tour through the pro-authoritarian philosophy gaining visibility on the right.

Rosie GrayFeb 10, 2017
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been in contact via intermediaries with Curtis Yarvin, Politico Magazine reported this week. Yarvin, a software engineer and blogger, writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. His anti-egalitarian arguments have formed the basis for a movement called ?neoreaction.?

The main thrust of Yarvin?s thinking is that democracy is a bust; rule by the people doesn?t work, and doesn?t lead to good governance. He has described it as an ?ineffective and destructive? form of government, which he associates with ?war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.? Yarvin?s ideas, along with those of the English philosopher Nick Land, have provided a structure of political theory for parts of the white-nationalist movement calling itself the alt-right. The alt-right can be seen as a political movement; neoreaction, which adherents refer to as NRx, is a philosophy. At the core of that philosophy is a rejection of democracy and an embrace of autocratic rule.

The fact that Bannon reportedly reads and has been in contact with Yarvin is another sign of the extent to which the Trump era has brought previously fringe right-wing ideologies into the spotlight. It has brought new energy into a right that is questioning and actively trying to dismantle existing orthodoxies?even ones as foundational as democracy. The alt-right, at this point, is well-known, while NRx has remained obscure. But with one of the top people in the White House paying attention, it seems unlikely to remain obscure for long.

Yarvin?s posts on history, race, and governance are written in a style that is detached and edgy, to say the least. ?What's so bad about the Nazis?? he asked in a blog post in 2008, writing, ?we are taught that the Nazis were bad because they committed mass murder, to wit, the Holocaust. On the other hand... (a): none of the parties fighting against the Nazis, including us, seems to have given much of a damn about the Jews or the Holocaust. (b): one of the parties on our side was the Soviet Union, whose record of mass murder was known at the time and was at least as awful as the Nazis'.?

?It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,? Yarvin wrote in 2007. In a 2009 post about the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle?s defense of slavery, he argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others.

Yarvin?s blog has been mostly inactive since 2014. He now is focusing on a startup, Urbit, whose investors reportedly include Paypal co-founder and Trump backer Peter Thiel. (Thiel has himself questioned some of the fundamentals of American politics, writing in 2009, ?I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.?) 

For a group of people whose writings tend towards the verbose, neoreactionaries don?t show much interest in talking to reporters. Yarvin declined to cooperate when I reached out to ask about his alleged contact with Bannon, instead choosing to try to troll me into believing a Twitter user called @BronzeAgePerv is his contact with the White House.

?Think you should speak directly to my WH cutout / cell leader,? Yarvin said in an email. ?I've never met him and don't know his identity, we just DM on Twitter.  He's said to be ?very close? to Bannon. There are several levels, but most people just start out with his public persona.? @BronzeAgePerv?s avatar is of a muscular, shirtless man and his account?s biography reads: ?Steppe barbarian. Nationalist, Fascist, Nudist Bodybuilder! Purification of world. Revolt of the damned. Destruction of the cities!?

?I know nothing about BAP personally, except that he lifts.  DM him. He may not give you any info but he always responds,? Yarvin said. ?Apparently there's a big underground movement of right-wing bodybuilders -- thousands.  Their plan is to surface spectacularly this April, in a choreographed flash demo on the Mall.  They'll be totally nude, but wearing MAGA hats.  Goal is to intimidate Congress with pure masculine show of youth, energy.  Trump is said to know, will coordinate with powerful EOs?? Yarvin denied to Vox that he has been in any contact with Bannon.

?Appreciate the message,? came the response from the Hestia Society, which is one of the newer NRx hubs. ?Unfortunately, we prefer not to do interviews. Neoreaction.net might have more of what you're looking for.?

?Thanks for the email,? wrote Hadley Bishop, the editor of Social Matter, another node of NRx online thinking. ?Social Matter does not give interviews. We?ve said everything we would like to say at neoreaction.net.?

?No,? said Nick Steves, the pseudonym used by one NRxer well-known within the movement. ?It will only lend false credence to the misleading facts and outright errors you will inevitably print irrespective of my involvement.?

Asked what he thought I would print, Steves explained that ?115 IQ people are not generally well equipped to summarize 160 IQ people? and that only one journalist, Vox?s Dylan Matthews, had ?come close to permitting NRx to speak for itself.?

?You DO understand that, by the NRx view, journos occupy a major seat of power, viz. manufacturers of consent, in the current structure,? Steves said. ?Thus you see why you are the enemy. No hard feelings of course. I'm sure you're a very nice person. But politics is war by other means, and war is, by definition, existential.? (Steves has written a ?code of conduct? for neoreactionaries that includes the rule, ?Don?t talk to the press about Neoreaction.?)

So, on to neoreaction.net, which states up front that ?Neoreaction is a political worldview and intellectual movement based largely on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug.?

The worldview espouses an explicitly authoritarian idea, a rejection of the post-Enlightenment vision of a world that is continually improving as it becomes more democratic. Per the website?s authors:

The core of our problem is that there is no one with the secure authority to fix things. The core of our solution is to find a man, and put him in charge, with a real chain of command, and a clear ownership structure.

Real leadership would undertake a proper corporate restructuring of USG: Pardon and retire all employees of the old regime; formalize obligations as simple financial instruments; nationalize and restructure the banks, media, and universities; and begin the long slow process of organic cultural recovery from centuries of dysfunction.

Who will be the leaders? Well:

The only viable path to restoration of competent government is the simple and hard way:

Become worthy.

Accept power.

Rule.

Neoreaction?s touchstones include the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, a key progenitor of the ?Great Man? theory of history; the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, a central influence on the American libertarian movement; and Bertrand de Jouvenel, a 1930s-era French political theorist.

Neoreaction is an ideology obsessed with both the mechanics of power and autocratic governance, and with aesthetics. Some neoreactionaries have a Tumblr devoted to their aesthetic vision, called Post-Anathema. The images tend to be futurist and hyper-masculine; soldiers with guns, tanks, spaceships, Greek gods. Cathedrals, too, a seeming reference to the Catholic traditionalist strain of the movement (?CRx?) and which, intentionally or not, calls to mind Moldbug?s use of ?the Cathedral? to denote the elite academic and media establishment.

If it?s a little in the weeds compared to the by-now-familiar alt-right aesthetic?Pepe the frog, fashy haircuts, and the like?that?s on purpose. Neoreaction is explicitly and purposefully opaque, and has no interest in appealing to a wider audience. This puts it at odds with some of the alt-right or ?new right? leaders who seek to take their ideas mainstream.

?NRx was a prophetic warning about the rise of the Alt-Right,? said Nick Land, the English philosopher whose Dark Enlightenment series is considered a foundational neoreactionary text. ?As a populist, and in significant ways anti-capitalist movement, the Alt-Right is a very different beast to NRx.?

?The Alt-Right, I guess, is a 'movement'??NRx isn't,? Land said in an email when asked about how influential NRx is at this point. ?As far as influence is concerned, it's still probably a little early to tell. I think it's fair to say that early signs are surprisingly NRx-positive. That's to say, the libertarian themes of the administration (de-regulation, appointments that "question the very existence of their own departments ...) are far stronger than might have been expected from the Trump election platform. Also, Steven [sic] Bannon is looking far less of an Alt-Right sympathizer than had been suggested (?Judeao-Christian? is a term that gives them the hives, even if his defense of Capitalism is far more hedged than NRx ex-libertarian types would see as ideal).?

Land says Bannon has never reached out to him. ?I have no reason to think he is familiar with my work.?

Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, a site which under his tenure wrote indignantly about Yarvin being barred from a programming conference, didn?t respond to requests for comment. Of course, his reported contact with Moldbug isn?t the only sign of his radical vision; in public statements over the years, he has described a view of a world undergoing nothing less than a clash of civilizations, featuring a struggle between globalism and a downtrodden working class as well as between the Islamic and Western worlds.

The hiring of Michael Anton, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, to serve on the National Security Council staff is another indicator of this White House?s openness to decidedly non-traditional ideas on the right. Anton was recently revealed by The Weekly Standard as the writer behind Publius Decius Mus, the pseudonym Anton used for a widely circulated essay in September titled ?The Flight 93 Election.?

In ?The Flight 93 Election,? Anton compared the American voter?s choice in November 2016 to that of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11. ?2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,? Anton began. ?You may die anyway. You?or the leader of your party?may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.? The essay is a bracing middle finger to conservatism, written with verve, and it inspired a critique on the NRx site Social Matter by the pseudonymous writer PT Carlo, who liked the essay except for one thing. ?The only problem with Decius? radical and brilliant analysis isn?t that its assessment of the situation is incorrect, but that its prescriptions aren?t nearly radical enough,? Carlo wrote. (The reaction among movement conservatives was much less enthusiastic. ?Grotesquely irresponsible,? wrote National Review?s Jonah Goldberg. ?A shoddy straw man,? offered Ben Shapiro.)

Anton, before his unmasking, was identified by The New Yorker as one of the intellectual architects of Trumpism; The Huffington Post on Wednesday highlighted some of his more controversial writings, such as a defense of Charles Lindbergh?s America First Committee as ?unfairly maligned? and an assertion that ?Islam and the modern West are incompatible.? Anton has also argued that diversity is ?a source of weakness, tension and disunion.?

In a way, it is Moldbug who presaged Trump more than anyone else, in his writings defining his ?neo-cameralist? philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia?s ?cameralist? administrative model. In 2007, Moldbug outlined a kind of corporation-state being run as a business: ?To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state's profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.? Moldbug even envisioned a kind of CEO at the top: ?The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading - a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch.?

In Moldbug?s absence, new NRx nodes have sprung up: Hestia, Social Matter, and Thermidor. The post-Moldbug neoreactionaries still draw on his foundational writings, but the movement is morphing and splintering, and characterized by a conflict between nationalists and ?techno-commercialists.? There is, as well, a history of mutual distrust between some alt-right and NRx figures.

?NRx doesn't think the Alt-Right (in America) is very serious. It's an essentially Anti-Anglo-American philosophy, in its (Duginist) core, which puts a firm ceiling on its potential,? Land said. ?But then, the NRx analysis is that the age of the masses is virtually over. Riled-up populist movements are part of what is passing, rather than of what is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.? (By ?Duginist,? Land was referring to the ideas of the controversial Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin.)

Through a friend, I connected with @kantbot2000, a NRx-connected tweeter who was willing to talk over Twitter direct message. (Kant as in Immanuel.)

Kantbot complained that NRx is dead. ?Visit the social matter forums, its an inactive scene,? he said.

?The European New Right stuff that [Alt-Right leader Richard] Spencer peddles is secondary to the impulse given to the altright by Moldbug and the other [techno-commercialists],? Kantbot wrote. ?That impulse stresses good governance over ideological consideration. Good governance perhaps consisting of the dismantling of progressive institutions.?

?Moldbug is still very active,? Kantbot said. ?More so than he lets on.? Kantbot said Moldbug is ?reading comments, lurking.?

Under his real name, Yarvin did a Reddit AMA last year about his start-up Urbit, and addressed his Moldbug writings.

?It's actually quite possible to recognize that human population genetics has a lot of impact on politics and history, and also recognize that human population genetics has nothing at all to do with your individual, personal and professional human relationships. Nor does politics,? Yarvin wrote. He added that he has lots of progressive friends.

?Would anyone care about the 2016 election if Trump weren't running?? Yarvin wrote. ?And Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future. The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.?

Kantbot began as an atheist Democrat, he said, but grew disillusioned.

?The only thing outside of that space is conservatism and right-wing movements,? he said. ?People like moldbug are going beyond that though, opening up possibilities of new cultural spaces that break out of that stagnant pattern, that can synthesize both progressive and conservative views in new ways.?

Kantbot warned that I might also be tempted by ?the forbidden fruit? of these ideas. ?Be careful or you too may be tempted to walk down the dark path of the altright,? he wrote. ?This is what thousands of people are taking to the streets to protest. This is the dark intellectual center.?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/behind-the-internets-dark-anti-democracy-movement/516243/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEQvsK5w-jY