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October 2009
IndyStar Invades Your Bar
The Indianapolis Star published an opinion in its Sunday edition entitled "Arguments against ban go up in smoke". Predictably, the cosmopolitan cabal that claims to speak for us comes out against traditional Hoosier customs and traditions. Under the guise of health, safety, and "the children", our overlords in the government and the media are turning the screws on the relatively harmless practice of smoking cigarettes in bars, bowling alleys, and casinos.
Of course smoking is harmful to the person doing it, but that's his or her business. It can also be unpleasant and even unhealthy to be around people who are smoking. I'm not going to rehash the tired argument over the impact of second-hand smoke or what economic impact this or that policy may have. It's about identity, class, and control - not science and safety.
What do bars, bowling alleys, and casinos all have in common? They're the kind of place regular working class Hoosiers congregate. They're the kind of place journalists and liberal politicians are prone to avoid. They're places where children are either uncommon or disallowed. They're places where factory workers go to unwind after earning a living working with their hands. The insecure social climbers in their cubicles couldn't imagine smoking or be caught dead around the "Jerry Springer crowd". Renew your IndyStar subscription, pay taxes on your pathetic wages, pay the absurdly high tax on your cigarettes, and go smoke them in a closet.
You would almost think from all of their bloviating about public health that they actually gave a tinker's dam about our health and safety. They don't, of course. They're for the free trade policies and open borders that force us to compete for ever more degrading and dangerous jobs - jobs which more and more frequently lack the most basic healthcare coverage. As is implied toward the end of the article, the real issue is about conveying the right image to their international friends and business partners.
Drinking coffee contributes to road rage, coffee pots cost millions annually by catching buildings on fire, and caffeine has been shown to stunt the growth of children. One could just as easily throw together some statistics-on-demand to demonstrate that coffee is generally costly, unhealthy, and can even cause severe burns. But that's their habit, their flavored coffee beverages are their drug of choice. Good luck with that one.
Hoosiers don't need to defend their habit of smoking in bars. They shouldn't bother putting together spreadsheets and graphs to make their case or carry on about liberty. All of this "debate" is a smokescreen. We're up against the universities, the lobbyists, the media, and the politicians. We can't win by playing their game. They'll continue pushing us out of more of the places that belong to us until we recognize that they're working to marginalize, manipulate, exploit, and insult us. As long as we continue to accept the illusion that they're speaking for us or doing what's best for us, we'll continue being pushed around.
Afghanistan: What's the Plan?
I'm a traditional conservative with a preference for small government, a commitment to balanced budgets, and a disinterest in being the world police. People like myself spent several years out in the political wilderness, being unwelcome inside the GOP's "big tent". From what I can gather, the tent is only big so it can fit a handful of swollen egos and bags of special interest gold. For much of this decade, the Republican Party has essentially been the War Party, foisting these unnecessary and unpopular wars to the forefront of their agenda.
At the height of the stupidity, National Review even came out and declared that we were outright unpatriotic. Tellingly, the Republican National Convention of 2008 welcomed Joe Lieberman as a speaker and didn't welcome Ron Paul at all. Joe is an advocate of abortion, big government, gun control, amnesty, and affirmative action. But he's a war hawk. Ron Paul has the conservative position on each of those issues. But he's a dove.
The election of 2008 was a blistering condemnation of the GOP's decade of being liberals who want to invade Middle Eastern countries, culminating in the the repudiation of its avatar - John McCain. Ron Paul suggested in a recent podcast that we "old right" conservatives need to become active in the anti-war movement. I decided to take him up on it this weekend and do something that I should have done a long time ago. I attended a peace rally.
I followed the breadcrumb trail of "Obama/Biden" campaign signs to a gathering of a couple dozen people around a Black man in a very dapper hat. His speech was calm and the crowd had a melancholy mood, nothing like the collage of angry hippies that I know from the History Channel specials. This is because they were saddened, not angry.
Their political messiah is a warmonger.
The next speaker was an older White guy who wasn't wearing any hat at all. He tried to thread the needle. He tried to frame the issue as one of Obama having yet to fulfill his promise, of patiently waiting on a comrade to get the job done. But I remember the campaign and I remember the promises. He promised to very gradually refocus from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan, instigating an evolutionary shift in Middle Eastern military policy - not a disengagement. This was, in a bit of a deviation from his modus operandi, a case of Obama actually doing what he said he was going to do.
The protest signs, if they deserve to be called that, very frequently worked to mash up the awkward peace issue with the more politically pertinent healthcare issue. While that may have been a crowd pleaser, it ruined any pretense of non-partisanship. Of course, after all these years without a single conservative ally bothering to participate, I can't really blame them for giving up.
The event was depressing on several levels. It's sad to watch all of these people struggling to keep their faith in a leader who is turning his back on them. It's sad to watch what happens to political movements when corporations, special interest groups, and media outlets forsake them. But most of all, I think it's sad that these sad little events are as much as the American people can muster when tricked into the loss of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars by agents of a foreign government.
I didn't stay long. There didn't seem to be a point to it all. Nobody on the main street could even see that they were holding an event. Practically nobody except those who are participants in Leftist organizations like The Green Party even knew that the event would be taking place. It felt sort of like a solemn religious ritual, a rain dance for the media gods that they've lost favor with. There were some actual veterans there, standing up for their battle buddies overseas. There were some friendly people there. But there was absolutely no plan.
Operation: Can you hear us now?
I briefly attended a healthcare protest in Indianapolis yesterday that appeared to have about fifty attendees. Ironically, I had missed the email notice about this rally and had actually gone downtown to attend and report on a peace rally that was taking place. As I was driving back to Carmel to attend the Dan Burton town hall meeting, I saw several women walking along Meridian St with protest signs tucked under their arms.
I followed them to the the protest which was taking place along Meridian St and out in front of a local television station. While I'm still learning the basics, it appeared to be a well-organized and well-attended operation - especially considering that it was orchestrated by the Tea Party folks and not by the GOP machine or the special interest groups.
They were protesting the biased media coverage of the healthcare issue and probably had a point, given that even their rather large protest right outside of the television studio went unreported. Tellingly, a much smaller group had gathered outside of Evan Bayh's office to accuse him of selling out on healthcare reform for failing to fall in line with the liberal agenda - and received a nice news story: Bayh's motive on healthcare questioned.
From a tactical standpoint, the main problem I saw is that the event failed to create its own media. Portable cameras are cheap, websites are cheaper, and youtube accounts are free. We can't expect to use guilt or shame to cause our opponents in the media to offer us exposure. We have to take a pro-active stance. We have to foster our own independent media and work to assure that the time and effort of the volunteers who came out and protested for hours is leveraged to the fullest possible extent.
A Question of Style
Successful communication with the target audience is crucial for the success of any movement. As many who are rediscovering the art of the job interview should know, non-verbal communication is key. Even the most qualified and articulate candidate for a job will be turned away if he's wearing a threadbare t-shirt with a picture of Bob Marley on it. Appearances and first impressions are very important. If the White Nationalist movement (or a progressive cadre within the movement) can arrive at a general appearance which sends the right message to our target audience, then we'll have a major stumbling block out of our way.
But who is our target audience and what is our message? Our target audience is traditional White Americans, young adult men and women who are strongly identified with implicit Whiteness. They often go to a more traditional church, focus very strongly on their natural roles within the family, respect social protocol, and retain a strong nostalgia for America's Golden Age.
America's Golden Age, in the eyes of most reachable White Americans, is the fifties. The media has labored to depict it as a dark age of Red Scare
Our implied message needs to be one of restoration, of restoring that Golden Age. Our style of dress should communicate that. We need to dress nicely, in suits and ties, and wear hats which were popular in the fifties. This will not only inspire our potential allies, it may even ennervate our enemies.
The hit movie The Matrix is a landmark piece of postmodern mythology that frames the struggle between tradition and the revolution from the perspective of our opponents. A multiracial band of rebels are out to take down the "matrix", a virtual reality that humanity is trapped in by robots. The bad guys, expressionless agents, are perhaps the nearest thing to a depiction of how White people appear to people who don't like White people. These sharply dressed agents, quintessential Men in Black with atypically pale skin, are the abstract personification of our culture, of implicit Whiteness, of how White Nationalists should appear to both our friends and our enemies.
While nazis and klansmen in their respective costumes certainly serve as bogeymen for the enemy, they're also bogeymen for our potential allies. Both movements were restorationist in nature, but neither attempted to restore what our target audience wishes to restore. Contemporary groups that dress in nazi and klan costumes threaten to drag America into periods of German and Southern history that nobody wants. Arguing within our movement over whether the National Socialists or Southern aristocrats have been fairly treated by history is a dangerous distraction from our cause that leads us right where our opponents seek to take us: into anachronism, irrelevance, and infamy.
No style is completely immune to the media's methodical efforts to associate it with all things bad, but this style would be perhaps the most resistant. There are just too many pictures of grandpa tucked in old drawers, too many classic movies, and too many associations with competence and formality for White Americans.
Simply wearing black dress slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie would convey the competence, seriousness, and traditional mindset that we're aiming for, but accessories are necessary to differentiate ourselves from a Mormon missionary or a man on his way to a job interview. I believe that the primary accessory for associating ourselves with America's Golden Age is the hat.
I prefer the fedora.
This is a movement, not a cult. I'm not proposing that we wear a specific uniform. Any style of hat and professional attire which was popular before America went into a tailspin will convey the message. The general point is to reinforce an association between ourselves and better days. It only makes sense that we dress in a manner reminiscent of an era in which America was generally safe, prosperous, and White.
Jared Taylor: The Silent Catastrophe
Articles by Jared Taylor are islands of courage and clarity in an ocean of conservative cowardice and confusion. His recent article at TakiMag, The Silent Catastrophe, explains more in one paragraph than mere mortals can accomplish in an entire book. For example...
The Census Bureau tells us that if immigration continues at its current rate of nearly two million people a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child population in just 14 years—in 2023—and will become a minority of the working population just 16 years later. The greatest increase will be in Hispanics, who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks, doing little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school, and are the group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning to warn that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced by poorly educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the last several hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could go into a tailspin.
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