In "Harrison Bergeron," Kurt Vonnegut imagines a world in the not-too-distant future in which all Americans are finally equal: the intelligent are fitted with distracting radio transmitters so they cannot think deeply; athletes and dancers are required to wear weights to handicap any performance; everyone who is beautiful is masked.

Who would have guessed that something like the nightmarish egalitarianism Vonnegut describes would be implemented in the United States Army?  

Stars and Stripes:

CAMP ZAMA, Japan – The Army is ordering its hardened combat veterans to wear fake breasts and empathy bellies so they can better understand how pregnant soldiers feel during physical training.

This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers.

Army enlisted leaders all over the world are being ordered to take the Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training Exercise Leaders Course, or PPPT, according to U.S. Army Medical Activity Japan health promotion educator Jana York.

Developed by the Army in 2008, the course includes aerobics classes, pool sessions and classroom studies on the physiology of pregnant women. The NCOs learn special exercises for pregnant women, who shouldn’t push themselves too hard or participate in high-impact activities such as snowboarding, bungee jumping or horse riding, York said.

Long before the American Empire is ended by a patriotic Old Believers like Ron Paul, it will collapse under the weight of equality.  

In primetime sitcoms and dramas, the viewer is transported to a world of Black doctors and judges and brave district attorneys battling neo-Nazis. In sports, racial reality is laid bare. This is especially true in African-dominated football and basketball. In so much of the discussion of each, race lies just below the surface—and thus is unmentionable—whether regarding the various criminal outrages of star athletes or the styles of play that has emerged after de-segregation.

“Linsanity,” the now ubiquitous pun on the name of New York Knick’s Jeremy Lin, has brought such sentiments to the surface. Lin, the man—an un-drafted, previously unknown point guard from Harvard—has certainly earned his moment in the spotlight with his fine play. But as with Tibow-mania, “Linsanity” the phenomenon derives from the fact that Jeremey is a good, clean golden boy playing in a league for dumb, tattooed thugs. The Onion got to the essence of this with its headline, “Knicks Trade Jeremy Lin For Selfish Asshole Who Plays Knicks-Style Basketball”—as a particularly unpleasant commentator noted, “New Yorkers deserve a player who reflects their values.”

Knicks Trade Jeremy Lin For Selfish Asshole Who Plays Knicks-Style Basketball

This weekend, Saturday Night Live got at two things that are true—first, a certain tacitly accepted hierarchy of victimhood, in which Blacks have favored status over Asians on the suffering totem; secondly, the willingness of Whites to sell out another White, if he should happen to step out of line with regard to “tolerance,” in order to gain social status over him.

Of course, the joke’s on SNL, as we actually have “progressed” to the point that a harmless—and likely unintentional!—quip about Asians has become a firing offense.

Imagine the time, patience, and planning it would take to create a larger-than-life mural using Rubik's Cubes. Now imagine all of this energy used to create art that memorializes a race-hustling fraud who has become a symbol of Western Dispossession.   

Who else but SWiPLs would undertake such a project? Who else but SWiPLs would create gargantuanist public art by using an ironic reference to their '80s childhoods?

After the Revolution, we must create a Theme Park of Liberalism, in which onlookers can stand agape before monstrous curiosities such as the Rubik's Cube MLK.  

As the West disintegrates, its frenzy of self-affirmation becomes more grandiose and grotesque. Our elites, the manufacturers of what passes for culture, arrange mass rites that attest to their greatness and benevolence. The people stand in awe, and just as critically, they are entertained. Nowhere in the United States is this more evident than at the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is not simply a profit bonanza for casinos and network television or mere proletarian distraction; it embodies a potent means of social control. Played in the first week of February, the National Football League’s championship game sets the tone for advertising and entertainment in the coming year. It is also a useful platform to propagandize and condition a population of 300 million. America clearly enjoys its indoctrination, as all too many revel in this spectacle’s base nature. People who have not the slightest interest in football will excitedly gather around billboard-sized TV screens to watch the unveiling of a new commercial for erectile dysfunction pills.

Many watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials. And from a social observer’s point of view, the ads are more important than the big game in revealing social mood and national character. The Super Bowl is the most watched event on television, and among the lower classes, its popularity is likely close to universal. In most cases, this results in the most vulgar, insulting, and stupid advertising imaginable...

In the past two years, though, I’ve been more impressed by the Chrysler corporation’s serious, filmic dramatizations. Instead of avoiding the stigma of Detroit—and, more subtly, the 2008-09 bailouts—Chrysler has dared to embrace it. The company  depicts itself and its city as having “almost lost everything” and “been to hell and back,” and thus more rough and tough and experienced in the ways of the world than those pretty boys in Stuttgart and Tokyo. Chrysler is attempting the ultimate “soft sell”—the name of the company and its products go unmentioned—while everyone else does the most egregious “hard sell.”

Hard—Buy this compact Fiat, you wimpy Beta, and maybe it will have pity sex with you.

Soft—We are all Detroit now.

Last year, Chrysler presented something like Detroit qua “Negro Fascism”—certainly a gutsy play for luxury-car buyers! This time around, Clint Eastwood was hired as the narrator, and he didn’t disappoint, putting on a gruff and leathery persona that might intimidate Dirty Harry. Ironically, the sell was even softer.

All across the nation today, 17 and 18-year-old males will be signing and faxing in their letter of intent to play college football. Tuition, books, room and board, a food stipend, and unbelievable exposure to big-time alumni connections for future job prospects accompany each scholarship.

That chance to compete for a starting spot right away; the chance to shine and win a Heisman Trophy; the chance to wear the coolest, flashest uniform and be seen on ESPN, ultimately having the opportunity to make it to the NFL. For two-to-three years prior, the best high school football players have received hundreds of letters from some of the top college football programs detailing why they should consider playing at Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma. 

They have received phone call after phone call; text after text; and in-house visits from coaches and recruiters representing these schools, not to mention the on-campus visits with all expenses paid by the school in attempts to entice these talented athletes to spend four years (at least, hypothetically) representing the university or college on the gridiron.

Big money is devoted to recruiting: in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the University of Tennessee spent an average of $1.15 million a year on recruiting from 2005 – 2008. The return on investment hasn’t exactly panned out, unless you count a high arrest rate as a some kind of off-the-field victory. And a pitiful graduation rate—well, unless you include White players—for those highly sought after, Black recruits, the majority of who have no business attending the university save for their perceived athletic superiority.

Thus far, one writer has documented the insanity surrounding the recruiting business. In Meat Market, Bruce Feldman shows us the insane lengths that the football coaches at the University of Mississippi will go in trying to secure the top high-school (or junior-college) talent in America.

The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence and degeneration so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

"Booty Wave," sung by the fictional artist "K'ronica," is a satirical take on contemporary pop music, a genre which, The Onion reports--channelling STIHIE, no doubt!--likely signals the downfall of civilization.  

The following is an actual, non-parodic product of America's popular music industry--"Stupid Hoe," sung by Trinidadian immigrant Nicki Minaj.  

We seem to have passed some kind of Rubicon, when "Booty Wave" has more redeemable qualities--and is far closer to something one might call "music"--than the creations it is meant to lampoon.       

Kerry Bolton
Revolution from Above
London: Arktos Media, 2011

The popular imagination conceives Marxism and capitalism as opposing forces, imagining that—obviously—Marxists want the capitalists’ money and capitalists do not want Marxists to take it from them.

Kerry Bolton’s Revolution from Above disproves this notion.

As it turns out, and as many readers probably already know, the Marxist revolutions in the East succeeded in many places thanks to the ample funds supplied to them—consciously and voluntarily—by finance-capitalists in the West.

With access to all the money they could wish for and more, the finance-capitalists in Bolton’s narrative were, and are, primarily motivated by a desire for power, and their ultimate aim was not even more money per se, but the enduring ability to shape the world to their convenience, which translates into a collectivised planet of producers and consumers.

Marxism was useful in as much as it was a materialistic ideology that destroyed traditional structures and values and turned citizens into secular, deracinated wage slaves, irrespective of race, gender, age, creed, disability, or sexual orientation.

Capitalism was useful in as much as it made money the measure of all things and created a consumer culture that ultimately turned citizens into debt slaves, also irrespective of race, gender, and so on.

In this manner, Marxism and capitalism were seen as complementary, as well as a method of pacifying the citizenry: too busy labouring in the factory or in the cubicle, and too befuddled by daydreams of shopping and entertainment during their free time, the citizens of this global order, fearful of losing their jobs and not being able to buy things or satisfy their creditors, are left with little inclination to, or energy for, rebellion.

Bolton explains how the finance-capitalist oligarchy is the entity that truly runs our affairs, rather than the national governments. The latter are either financially dependent, or in partnership, with the financiers and the central bankers.

To illustrate this dependency he documents the United States’ government relationship with the Bolsheviks in Russia during the revolution, not to mention the similarity in their goals despite superficial appearances to the contrary and despite alarm or opposition from further down the hierarchy. Bolton shows how genuinely anti-communist efforts were frustrated during the Cold War. And he shows that the close relationship with communist regimes ended when Stalin decided to pursue his own agenda.

The book then goes on to describe the various mechanisms of plutocratic domination. Bolton documents the involvement of a network of prominent, immensely rich, tax-exempt, so-called ‘philanthropic’ organisations in funding subversive movements and think tanks. Marxism has already been mentioned, but it seems these foundations were also interested in promoting feminism and the student revolts of 1968.

Feminism was sold to women as a movement of emancipation. Bolton argues, and documents, that its funders’ real aim was to end women’s independence (from the bankers) and prevent the unregulated education of children: by turning women into wage-slaves they would become dependent on an entity controlled by the plutocrats, double the tax-base, double the size of the market, and create the need for children’s education to be controlled by the government—an entity that is, in turn, controlled by the plutocrats. Betty Friedan, who founded the second wave of feminism with her book The Feminine Mystique, and Gloria Steinem are named as having received avalanches of funding from ‘philanthropic’ foundations.

With regards to the university student revolts of 1968, the book highlights the irony of how, without the activists knowing it, they were backed by the same establishment they thought to be opposing. These students were but ‘useful idiots’ in a covert strategy of subversion and social engineering.

The subversion does not end there, for the plutocracy has global reach and is as actively engaged in global planning today as it ever was. Revolution from Above inevitably deals with George Soros’ involvement in the overthrow of governments or regimes not to his liking. According to Bolton’s account, the reader can take it for granted that any of the velvet or ‘colour revolutions’ we have seen in recent years have been funded in some way or another by George Soros through his extended network of instruments. ‘Regime-changes’ in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine (orange revolution), Kyrgyszstan (pink revolution), Tunisia (jasmine revolution), Egypt (white revolution), Lybia (red, green, black revolution), and Iran (green revolution) were not the result of spontaneous uprisings. Anti-government parties, think tanks, media, campaigns, demonstrations, and even training courses for political agitation—all and in all cases received vast funding from finance-capitalism overseas, not from local collections of petty sums.

In other words, many a modern revolution has not come from below, but from above. And in the context of governments being in a dependent relationship to the stratospherical plutocracy, this aggregates into a pincer strategy, with pressure coming secretly from above and from below, with the pressure from below—however spontaneous and ‘messy’ it may seem when it hits the headlines—being the result of years of careful planning, financing, and preparation by overseas elites.

The reader must ask himself how it is that whenever we see one of these ‘colour revolutions’ somehow someone is able, almost overnight, to overwhelm the streets with a tsunami of well designed, professionally printed, and colour-coordinated merchandise: flags, scarves, placards, posters, leaflets, balloons, headbands, t-shirts, face-paint, you name it, it all seems very slick, aesthetically consistent, and fashion-conscious for uprisings that are supposedly spontaneous demonstrations of popular rage.

Overall Bolton crams in an enormous mass of information within 250 pages. The lists of names and figures—and some of the sums involved are truly staggering—are endless, and the persistent torrent of footnotes considerably expand on parts of the main narrative. The plutocrats’ web of influence and deceit is immensely complicated, not only as a structure but also as a process, since it thrives in double meaning, double think, and ambiguity. Those interested in a detailed knowledge of the machinations behind current and recent events, or even twentieth-century political history, would do well to read this book more than once—at least if they have ambitions of explaining it all to an educable third party.

One aspect of Bolton’s narrative that seems quite amazing is the superficially inoffensive tone of some of the enemy quotes provided. Were it not because Bolton’s findings flow in the same direction as other books uncovering the machinations of the oligarchs and their partners in Western governments, or because the answer to cui bono is provided unequivocally by the unfolding of current and historical events, it would be easy to think that the statements quoted came from deluded idealists. It may be that some truly believe in the goodness of their cause, yet such selfless altruism is hard to believe given the known absence of ethics among our current elite of super-financiers—the banking system they engineered, not to mention many of the opaque financial instruments we have come to known through the still unfolding financial crisis in the West, is a deception designed to obscure a practice of legalised theft.

The lessons are clear: firstly, modern ‘colour revolutions’ are not instigated by public desires for more democratic or liberal governance, but by private desires for increased global power and control; secondly, subversive movements can be given a name and a face—a name and a face averse that hides behind generic institutional names and orchestrates world events at the end of a complex money trail; and thirdly, the those seeking fundamental change should first become proficient capitalists or learn how to gain access to them. These are all obvious, of course, but Revolution from Above is less about teaching those lessons than about documenting how the world is run, by whom, and for what purpose. In other words, this is material with which to back up assertions likely to be challenged by, or in front of, the unaware. Sober and factual in tone, it is also good gift material for those who may benefit from a bit of education.

If Der Stürmer were still around today, and it held a contest for the funniest, most outlandish parody of Jewish paranoia, the paper's readers would, no doubt, blush at the idea of writing something that resembles Lee Siegel's deconstruction of Mitt Romney's "meticulously cultivated whiteness."  

January 14, 2012

What’s Race Got to Do With It?

By LEE SIEGEL

Jon Moe/Associated PressMitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, with his extended family in 2007.

He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like “oh gosh” with Stepford bonhomie. He has mastered Benjamin Franklin’s honesty as the “best policy”: a practiced insincerity, an instant sunniness that, though evidently inauthentic, provides a bland bass note that keeps everyone calm. This is the bygone world of Babbitt, of small-town Rotarians. [ . . . ] 

He knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president. I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist. But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate. For these sudden outsiders, Mitt Romney is the conventional man with the outsider faith — an apocalyptic pragmatist — who will wrest the country back from the unconventional man with the intolerable outsider color.

Note that the Romney family photo is included to evoke horror and loathing amongst New York Times readers. Displaying remarkable restrainght, Siegel refrained from associating Romney with the John Birch Society and George Wallace until paragraph seven. Subtle.         

It's worth pointing out that Romney "got jiggy with it" back in 2007, to no effect. It seems that in 2012, he's just going to be himself.

Not to sound paranoid . . .  but do you ever get the sense that there are people out there who despise all forms of White identity, even the most benign, Romney-ish variety?

I only have a few more months to speak as a "youth" before I turn thirty. After that point, I'll be on the other side of the looking glass, lavishing praise on "the future of our movement" while my mind and body decline into senescent irrelevance. Okay, not really. I'll surely get old, of course. But I consider the artificial delineation of people into chronological identity groups to be one of the less obvious, more insidious ways that Modernity has undermined our worldview and crippled us as a people.

Our society's one in which we attend school in chronologically defined "classes", relocate to special age-delimited dorms when we come of age, and get carted away to grimy nursing homes to hide our suffering and death from our more youthful family members. Even our churches, those supposed outposts of tradition, segregate youths into special "youth groups" that deliver a more hip, modern, and casual relationship with a less judgmental God than our parents worship.

I do spend my money on different things now than I did when I was a teenager, and my spending habits will evolve in predictable ways as I age. To the marketplace, my age is much more relevant than my race, my ethnicity, my religion, my politics, or my personality. Personally, I resent being defined by my age—even while it remains flattering. It seems to me that people who wouldn't dare define themselves by their ancestors or ethnicity are quick to carry on at length about their "generation", reveling in generational identity cues in the same way healthy human beings would revel in the identity cues of their families, communities, and congregations.

I watched My So-Called Life when it originally aired on MTV, and will always have a special place in my heart for Claire Danes. I listened to Pretty Hate Machine with headphones on, played Nirvana Unplugged in my bedroom while writing bad poetry, and (with the notable exception of the notoriously difficult Lost Levels) have played and won every major Mario Bros. title. To some extent, those things do define me. But I would prefer to be defined by the family and community I'm from. My late grandfather never watched MTV and my father imbibed a different decade's pop culture, but I cling to the belief that I'm more similar in more important ways to them than I am to random cohorts in my age demographic.

Based on what the media had told me all my life about my coevals, I had always assumed I was entirely out of step with my generation. But a funny thing happened on the way to the new world order: part of my generation started speaking for itself. Part of my generation has left the establishment speechless by rallying in support of Ron Paul. The septuagenarian contrarian has managed to leapfrog the Baby Boomer generation altogether to forge a fanatical majority of young conservatives without any of the puerile pandering to "Young Republicans" that the GOP establishment has been floundering at for years.

How could it be that a subset of the population raised on an exclusive diet of self-esteem boosting happy talk, big government propaganda, and multicult mythologizing is turning en masse to an old White guy who's closer to John Birch than Jon Stewart? Libby Copeland, one of the feminists in Slate's menstrual hut, is trying to dismiss this phenomenon with a confused theory that Ron Paul's message attracts young men because they're politically unrefined rubes who gravitate to simplistic ideas.

The notion that this year’s election is a choice between freedom (in the form of Paul) and tyranny (in the form of any other candidate) encapsulates Paul’s grand appeal to men in their late teens and 20s: He traffics in absolutes. Political scientists point out that age and newness to politics predispose young voters to a less nuanced view of the political world. They’re less likely to take the long view, less likely to have patience, less likely to spin out the implications of their political theories.

Do any political scientists subscribe to my hypothesis that young women's disproportionate support of Barack Obama in the previous election was due to the vapors? Of course not. These "scientists" who peddle broad and disparaging gender stereotypes only do so in the anti-male direction. The political scientist in question, Peter Levine, is the author of "Young, Black, and Voting", "The Civic Engagement of Young Immigrants: Why Does it Matter?", and an amateurish novel in which his protagonist outwits nefarious Nazi scientists. He is a veritable caricature of Prof. Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique, and the notion that he's willing or able to objectively judge the voting, mating, or migratory habits of his historical nemeses—White males—is laughable.

Libby Copeland paradoxically condemns Dr. Paul's popularity and growing support base as mere branding because—wait for it . . .—he insists that his supporters immerse themselves in an extensive reading list of political and economic theory!

Unlike supporters of, say, Obama or Mitt Romney, Paul supporters tend to talk about an absolute truth, one that others would see, too, if they could just be persuaded to read certain materials. Among them: Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. These, of course, come from Paul, who gives an exhaustive list of recommendations at the back of what he calls his “manifesto.” [. . .] To the extent that voters try to communicate who they are through their candidate affiliation, Fairleigh Dickinson’s Cassino believes that what Paul offers more than any other Republican candidate is compelling branding.

Ron Paul is the anti-branding candidate, having actually made a point to eschew opportunities to deliver catchy sound bites and slick branding in favor of long-winded diatribes and relentless grassroots hustling.

“The Ron Paul brand is actually relatively intellectual,” Cassino says. It’s “A brand that’s about, ‘I’m smarter than you are.’ . . . ‘All the politicians are telling you one thing but I know better.’ ” This is the brand for those who feel different, who see themselves as a little bit brainier and more marginalized than everyone else. “If you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, this is your political movement,” Cassino says.

Oh, snap! Copeland's article is one big desperate attempt to drag Ron Paul down to the same level as the majority of mainstream politicians from both the left and right. 'Sure, he seems intellectual, but that's empty posturing and it's really about subcultural status cues!' Frankly, it smacks of projection. By attempting to imagine what could possibly compel somebody to vote for somebody as extreme as Ron Paul, they betray a bit too much about what compels them to behave as they do. Ron Paul's supporter's aren't vapid hipsters self-consciously preening their political perspectives to achieve the adulation of their peers. They're men of my generation who are calling "bullshit" on the triumphalism and happy talk the Baby Boomer generation wallows in.

Men of my generation do share a thing or two in common due to our collective experiences. We were subjected for the first half of our lives to a school system that bloated our self-esteem with unwarranted praise and inflated our optimism with empty promises. Then the twin towers imploded on us. Then one sector of the economy after another imploded on us while our experts and educators insisted that everything was hopeful and changing for the better. More than anything, we've been longing for somebody on the national stage to level with us about how bad we suck, how disastrously off-course we've gone as a society and a nation, and how hope and change can only be had in exchange for deep and painful sacrifices and a radical realignment of priorities.

As a Radical Traditionalist, I reject Ron Paul's libertarian ideology as a misguided doubling down on the very mercantile morality that got us into this mess in the first place. I disagree with Ron Paul and his supporters on the scope and nature of the problem, but he has--more than anybody else on the national stage--embodied the deep visceral reaction to decades of pandering and pampering we've endured while it all falls apart around us. He has managed to become the voice of my generation because he's the last of a dying breed of men who roamed this country before this dark age of impenetrable arrogance, pandering to demographic focus groups, and all the happy talk. Our support for Ron Paul is the predictable "blowback" from decades of insufferable and irresponsible happy talk.