Guest Post by The Zman
Back in the 1980’s, when I was a young man, being a young conservative was the best of times because it felt like the war had turned. The enemy’s lines had broken and we were on our way to a great final victory over the forces of darkness. Every right-wing hack in America had a laundry list of things that had to be done, once the battle was over and our tropaion was placed on the battlefield. First the military would be rebuilt, then we would win the Cold War and then we would roll back the welfare state. Party time.
Young people can be forgiven for getting ahead of themselves, but there were plenty of old coots talking about the triumph of conservatism in the 80’s. Even though Reagan did nothing to tame the welfare state or even slow its growth, it felt like we were still on the right side of history. Once the Soviets cracked, it just seemed like a matter of when, not if, the great return to normalcy would happen. Of course, that did not happen. The Left regrouped and the Right sold all of us out for cushy jobs in Washington.
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That’s the first bit of advice I offer to the alt-right. Trust no one. In the Reagan Revolution, it was impossible to tell the grifters from the committed. Lots of people attached themselves to conservatism, as writers, thinkers and commentators, simply because there was money in it. The term “Conservative Inc.” did not exist in the 80’s, but the idea of it sure did. Just ask Charles Krauthammer. He was a liberal speech writer for Walter Mondale and then he changed teams, because there was more money in being a right-winger.
Related to this is the recent Milo flap, where he was cut down by previous statements he made in one of his “look at me I’m outrageous” performances. He was ever so close to finally getting onto the big stage, making it to the show, but now he has been sent down to the minors and his career is in doubt. The people in charge of the stage have strict rules about who gets on and what they say while on the stage. You either submit to these rules or they toss you from the stage.
Conservatives in the 80’s made this blunder. They truly thought they would be accepted into the club if the public embraced them. The people in charge don’t give a damn about the public’s opinion. They care about controlling the message and the media stage is the platform from which the message is broadcast. If you want onto the stage, it means signing a blood oath to promote the message and there is no room for compromise. There are two sides in this, pick one and live with the choice.
That’s why it is important to no-platform the people in charge. It would glorious if all Trump voters dropped their cable sub this month, but that’s not happening. People like their entertainments. What you can do is build your own media platforms by relentlessly supporting the new ones coming on-line now. Gab is becoming a useful platform that is beyond the control of the Cloud People. Vox Day is starting a news service designed to curate news stories in a way that undermines the media model. .
Supporting the media that supports you means looking for a friendly source before going to the mainstream source. It also means the leaders and big shots of the movement need to stay the hell off the mainstream platforms. Milo doing Maher did everything for Maher and nothing for Milo. Anyone who tries to get onto the big stage and mix it up with the mainstream media should be suspect. It is the Golden Rule, the man with the gold makes the rules and in media, it is the man who owns the stage who makes the rules.
The big lesson from the Reagan Revolution is that optimism is easily used as a weapon against the optimistic. All the “Morning in America” bullshit in the 80’s fooled a lot of people into thinking the fight was over and the results were a foregone conclusion. Young people were convinced they had been born into the springtime of a cultural revolution, when in fact they had been born into the early winter of a declining civilization. Instead of being clear eyed about what was possible, people got caught up in the excitement of the times.
It will never be morning in America. The alt-right will never amount to anything unless it maintains a clear eyed view of its own position. It was a failure to grasp the reality of our age that allowed a legion of hustlers to rush in and turn the conservative movement into Conservative Inc. We live in an age where charlatans take advantage of fools, while pedants lecture the critics on matters of style. There’s no sweeping this away in order to start fresh. The question of the modern age is how will the story end.
Finally, the key to lasting success for any mass movement is to take over the institutions that can be re-purposed and destroy those that cannot. The institutions of society are the high ground of every civilization. The Left co-opted the schools, government, media and finance. They obliterated religion, local institutions and, to a great degree, the family. The grand success of this weird religion offers a lesson for the alt-right. It’s not enough to fight and build alternative institutions. You have to begin to infiltrate the exiting ones.
The Masons, for example, are constantly advertising for members. That’s the sort of opportunity a young a vibrant Left would have infiltrated and re-purposed. The point is to organize a million Jacobin societies by taking over what has been abandoned and infiltrating what is not well guarded. The demolition of twitter is a great example of how to destroy an organization by turning its rules into a weapon. Twitter is now now the dying brand of vinegar drinking prudes. That’s the lesson. If you cannot own it, destroy it.
Absolutely.
Very insightful.
Good advice.
Be suspicious when the “mainstream” comes calling for your comments. Years ago when I started writing libertarian trash for a Canadian audience and getting published I started to get phone calls from interesting places. It started with a radio interview with a major news network in the region. The interview started oddly, I felt like I was being herded so I panicked and changed the topic right out of the gate. I didn’t know it at the time but it was the right thing to do. The interview ended up going my direction instead of his, I got some positive feedback from listeners and was never asked back again.
A few months later when the CBC came knocking for me to do a TV program with them I politely declined. I’d learned my lesson the first go around. The MSM doesn’t want your opinion. They want you to fill in the edges of their narrative and if you aren’t aware of what’s going on it can bite you in the ass.
Send this to the favorite Trump team members who appear on MSM platfoorms so eagerly.
FM, I’m an occasional visitor/commenter here and I find you highly insightful. Given your moniker I assumed you to be American but based on this comment I now presume you to be a fellow Canadian. How refreshing to know there are still sane, similar-minded individuals up here.
Whenever a Republican starts waxing about Reagan you know he’s full of shit. I’m talking to you Paul Ryan & Ted Cruz. Reagan was 30 years and 30 million illegals ago. He’s ancient fucken history – from a time when Republicans won California, for fuck’s sake. Might as well harken back to McKinley.
For me Reagan was the last President that brought a bit of respect to the office. He was witty,charming and had a mean counter punch. That being said he did one thing and that was to out spend the Soviets into oblivion. That’s it. He raised taxes,made 3 million or more illegals legal ( even though he as warned it was a bad idea) and as repeated before did little in the way of gooberment reform.
The Republican’ts prior to Obozo increased spending at at higher rate as a percentage of GDP than the Demorats
As a rich man once told me…we don’t care who gets elected…we own both sides. As thus, for all politicians, it’s about getting rich. No one leaves CONgress poor.
The best both sides can do it’s wait until the appointed time when TSHTF ( finally) and then duke it out to see which form of gooberment emerges from the ashes,I’m betting on Socialism for most of the country…The South excluded .
Greetings,
You can give Reagan credit for a lot of things but he didn’t “spend” the Soviets to oblivion. That narrative just isn’t true. See, unlike the United States, the Soviet Union operated on 5 year plans. Those plans established the budget for the Soviet military going forward the next 5 years. Now, the Soviets had one opportunity to raise spending during the Reagan years and DIDN’T do so. This was because Russia’s top scientists told the Kremlin that Reagan’s Star Wars was nothing but hype and didn’t work and not to fall for it.
The only people spending themselves into oblivion is the United States.
Good advice. Yes, (((hustlers))) and CIA front men like Buckley took over the conservative movement. The Alt-right has prevented that so far by being a decentralized movement without leaders, although it does have self appointed spokesmen, whom we are free to ignore or disagree with…The best thing going for us, however, is history. As crisis approaches, nationalism becomes much stronger, because more people are forced to confront the truth that globalism is simply robbery of the public by the billionaires and their helpers.
I respect the advice, but at this point, things have gone organic. Human intervention will now be as Nature requires, not self-directed. Once things spin into the closing cycle its all deck chair arrangements on the Titanic.
Having Milo ever appear as a voice of the right/alt-right/trad/conservative movement was so ill-advised I cannot even begin to get my head wrapped around it.
What a completely predictable outcome that was.
Hardscrabble, can you explain what you mean?
Without (((Milo))) conservatism would have remained RINOs, voters dying out demographically while leaders selling out as stated by the author. Politicuans who are nothing but reluctant progressives. As the article points out, reagan and the last 30 yrs have had zero victories for social conservatives , maybe some for the fiscal conservatives during their terms. All their energy spent on trying to make an abortion slightly inconvenient, amounting to a distraction issue is all I can see.
It is because they went along with the globalist agenda and cultural marxism that it was necessary for a gay to be able to speak up. He automatically holds some rank to progressives, not summarily dismissed as an angry/bitter/insecure/threatened/white male. There were many straight men and women saying similar things, but they were a fringe with mostly closet supporters.
Milo even advised in an AMA on reddit, for guys asking advice not to out themselves as anti feminist or mens rights in their work place, because it is career suicide. He said wait, he was winning, and the tide was turning. That was about 3 yrs ago, before Trump ran anyway. I hadnt heard of him before that. Now, after he built up Breitbart the silent majority is speaking up and not so careful to avoid being labelled anything un PC.
All nationalists such as Trump, Farage, Le Pen and Wilders have only focussed on immigration but not cultural marxism side of globalist agenda. Trump just set an example of not being ashamed to be a normal male, after the usual shouting misogyny silence and shame ploy failed. Hanson in Australia is now speaking on reform in that direction also, after listening to the people, wants to tackle family court and child support, stating that the massive male suicude rate is directly linked.
The current controversy is just more of the same. Hes antisemitic but jewish, homophobic but gay, racist but sucks black dongs, and now the victim of a pedophile priest but promoting pedofilia.
The Pharisees wanted a messiah preaching war not peace, but without him and his followers there would be no Israel. Maybe theres a lesson in that for the alt-right purists.
Hershel, thanks for asking.
Milo is a deeply troubled man and in a position to cause an enormous amount of damage to an emerging movement. Anyone with two eyeballs and a heartbeat could see that- he’s flamboyant and outrageous for the sake of drawing attention to himself, not for his steadfast belief in a traditional, reality-based political movement. In fact, his life is anything but conservative and it flies in the face of everything he allegedly represents. Did he bring attention to it and to people unaware of its existence? I’m sure he did and he may have even played a role in the election of Trump although there’s certainly no proof of that, more of a hunch. But the fact remains that by allowing someone as deeply flawed as Milo to get anywhere near the position of prominence he played when he flat out rejected the label of Alt-Right was dumbfounding. Whatever good he may have done is far more than outweighed by the damage and it was all easily predictable. When someone tells you that they are a dangerous faggot and then goes on to behave like one, you should take them at their word.
The truth is I feel sorrow for him-he was victimized by pederasts (what he was talking about was not pedophilia, but pederasty, two different dysfunctions that have lost their distinction in our increasingly unhinged and happy-with-it world), turned into a walking time-bomb and then set lose. Clearly, he is intelligent and he certainly understands social media in a way that even the creators of it haven’t got a grip on. He could have been a key advisor had stable people with equal levels of talent been in his place, but people actually believed that by having a protected minority in their ranks they had armor plated their movement when history clearly shows that the Left swim in a sea of hypocrisy. Lena Dunham has confessed to actual pedophilia in her biography and her show is still on HBO, did everyone forget that? Does the name Roman Polanski ring any bells? If you are a believer in the Narrative you can do no wrong, if you reject it you can do no right.
Putting him out there, holding him up as a representative of saving Western Civilization (or whatever this is called these days) was such a massive tactical error it is impossible to underestimate it. Now there’s a huge schism within the emergent movement, I can almost guarantee you that his next emergence on the scene (and a guy like that is not going to go quietly into the night) will be his “re-birth” and “awakening” to the Progressive movement- he will do his auto-da-fe’ and be welcomed with open arms into the other camp where he will be given ten times the coverage and be used with equal effectiveness to tear apart whatever he may have done previously.
So that’s my Milo take.
The other part of what I was saying is that we have moved into herd territory with our particular junction in history. Individuals will play smaller roles moving forward and most of what will start to occur will be based on collective behaviors and things will very likely get very ugly, bigly.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Milo was critical to Trumps win. He peeled off voters from the gay, the universities and the online community that the Republicans had written off. The left had deluded themselves into thinking the election was in the bag and profoundly underestimated the Milo effect and the effect of the new and the alt-right so they didn’t do a background investigation of him till it was too late. After he trolled the libs into burning down the center of progressivism, Berkeley, they had to act on him.
Milo’s downfall was of his own doing. He was reckless and incoherent on a subject that wasn’t funny at all, child molestation. He may, or may not, land on his feet. But his damage to the left is huge. Trump is the president for the next four years and he was a big part of it. Time after time, when Trump screwed up and was down big in the polls and all the mainstream republicans had written him off, Milo ( and the alt-right) never waivered.
Thanks, Milo. And good luck.
Rainman……
I don’t mean to piss on your parade, Rainy, but I said some days ago that the left is alive with the sound of scandal. Perhaps it is of their own doing, Trump is this big target and the left has got this huge hard-on for him.
We will continue to see attacks on his politics and businesses. Hillary and Obama have gone whole hog to defeat his brand; assaulting Twitter, Ivanka, Breitbart (Milo and ads) and anybody even remotely associated with the asshole.
You might say Nixon was beloved by comparison. This is Washington at its finest. They don’t do shit but they know how to stage a mesmerizing shit-show.
There are several ways to deflect the coming storm, one is to start a war, another is to stage a high profile sideshow like the Simpson murder trial.
The leftists will attempt to contain the Repukes until they can take control of Congress in the midterm elections.
Trump would do well to remove their favorite electioneering tool; immigration, however the tards will shoot themselves in the dick by refusing to support any such practical move by Trump.
Obama deported many illegals before he pretended to see the light and began to ease on illegal immigration. His plan was to appear soft on illegals, all the while gearing up for a second round of mass deportations. The mechanisms for mass deportations were already being cranked up before the election. Immigration is but a tool used to manipulate voters on either side of the issue. The Democrats had this wonderful plan to play good cop/bad cop and monopolize the immigration issue.
Trumpy grabbed the ball from them and ran with it. He scared the tard states with the story of an invasion of criminal Mexicans bent on rape and robbery. That will make it hard for him to sell an amnesty later. He will forever gift the immigration football to the Democrats.
It will be ironic to see the man who prides himself in being an uber-negotiator have his hands tied by the tards who fancy themselves the new whiggers-in-charge just like the blacks imagined they were the niggers-in-charge when Obama was in office.
“There are several ways to deflect the coming storm, one is to start a war, another is to stage a high profile sideshow like the Simpson murder trial.”
How about this: using evidence recovered from Anthony Weiner’s laptop, Hillary’s Email server, Podesta’s Wikileak emails, and whatever foreign sources are verifiable, start a trial of ALL PROVABLE PEDERASTS IN WASHINGTON, D.C., NYC, and all other cities both East and West Coast: show HOW MANY and HOW HIGHLY PLACED the networks are, who participates, who provides the kids (from what sources) and what happened to them when the sick bastards are through with them. HOLD PUBLIC EXECUTIONS for all found guilty, in short order; demonstrate no tolerance for this depravity in any degree.
Then publicly praise the #Pizzagate investigators, the police and FBI who helped, those who prosecuted and convicted the perps, and those who publicized the depths of the depravity. The evil freaks will lose their wealth, positions and lives if convicted, and the spoils go to help heal and compensate the victims.
Milo could be ignored, a victim or a publicizer, his choice. The circus goes away once all provable evildoers are convicted, and better things are done subsequently.
When the Russians built up a gigantic debt to support a huge Army & Navy, missile tests, and invasions here & there it was called being socialist, or big-C Communist. When the Reagan built up a gigantic debt to support a huge Army & Navy, also had missile tests, and invasions here & there it was called being big-C Conservative.
Different big-C words, but zero difference in actual behavior.
Similar rows of tanks and planes too, some with a red star, some with with a white star.
Has anyone yet heard a plan for paying off the debts and deficits we’ve been building for 30 years ?
How about this for a plan pull our troops out of Germany bring them back home and put them on our southern border. Repeal 1965 immigration act. Eliminate all money paid to any Illegal, put a one hundred dollar tax on any money order going into Mexico,[if these hard working fuckers making 12 dollars an hour have money to send back, then they can help pay for their kids edjamacashun and health care. Any one over 65 nothing changes,anyone under 65 gets the chance to opt out of all this bullshit. Last but not least repudiate the debt to the Rothschild federal reserve, and go back to a gold standard, we would have to show our gold which may or may not still be here. I know these are simple solutions to complex problems, and we will take a huge hit. We should have taken it inn 2000 or even in2007
but we kicked the can down the road. Next time we might not have that luxury. Seems to me that the first country or block of countries that do this will be on top for the foreseeable future.