At some point I need to read Curtis Yarvin’s latest missive The Clear Pill but it’s hard for me to muster enough intellectual energy to digest his dense, turgid prose. My last effort was all the way back in July 2013. But I came across something this morning that inspired a simpler exposition of Moldbug’s central thesis: that a quasi-religious group exercises power among an array of institutions which he calls the Cathedral.

The Democratic primary campaigns are in full swing and one of the candidates, Amy Klobuchar, is as of the time of this writing still in the race, despite polling at only two to five percent. This video of her from July 2019 popped up in my Twitter timeline today.

Looking at Senator Klobuchar, I see she’s an ethical, intelligent person whose family justifiably loves her. She’s very popular in the thinly-populated state of Minnesota. She’s also short and matronly and has the charisma and perspective of a career corporate lawyer and bureaucrat, which is to say she’s a formalist. She would be equally comfortable as a school principal or HR manager. There is nothing wrong with being any of these things, but they don’t make good Emperors. She does not look or act like a Chief Executive and Commander in Chief of the most powerful, diverse country on Earth. Gravitas really is important, particularly to the cheering throngs and to the men with guns who are the only reasons government officials have any status whatsoever.

Looking at the Democratic candidates, I’d say the only one with command presence is Tulsi Gabbard, who of course is hated by the Democrat constituencies and denounced as Other-phobic, a literal Russian agent and, sub silentio, an attractive female heterosexual.

Any way, back on topic. Why are people like the short, matronly Amy Klobuchar or senile (yes, he really is going senile) Joe Biden or goofy homosexual Pete Buttigieg (here he is trying to figure out how to drink beer from a bottle) serious candidates for President? Why do they participate in these silly, micro-level rituals more suited to mayor of a small town?

And the Moldbuggian answer is:

Because it no longer matters who is President. The President is only the nominal sovereign. Obama was perfect as a nominal sovereign. The greedy, unhealthy Hillary Clinton would have been a good nominal sovereign.

Actual sovereignty is exercised by the Cathedral, that is, the judicial branch, the bureaucracy and the mass media/academy/trans-national corporations. (The U.S. legislative branch no longer exercises actual sovereignty; instead, they’re the world’s greatest investigative body). Trump had the effrontery to act like an actual sovereign, which is why the Cathedral’s hitting him with Russiagate and Ukrainegate.

Speaking of matters Slavic, Gorbachev was a nominal sovereign. Poor, doomed Yeltsin was a nominal sovereign. Putin is an actual sovereign, and he had to do a lot of ugly things to get there so he could reverse cratering Russian TFR and restore Orthodox Christian primacy in the public square.

Empires need their Sullas, and Trump could have been one but he really is a child of the halcyon 1980’s, and power is just too diffused, the American constituencies are too diverse and the system is just too corrupt at this point. But you should still vote for him in 2020 to get cultural and political space when an actual Sulla shows up.

Once upon a time Italian-Americans, seeking cachet and respectability in their new country, lobbied President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a national holiday honoring that storied and intrepid Italian, Cristoforo Columbo, the man who opened the Americas to European exploration.

Not so fast, bigots.

On Monday in the nation’s capital, there is no Columbus Day. The D.C. Council voted to replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day in a temporary move that it hopes to make permanent. Several other places across the United States have also made the switch in a growing movement to end the celebration of the Italian explorer in favor of honoring Indigenous communities and their resiliency in the face of violence by European explorers like Christopher Columbus.

Baley Champagne is responsible for that change in her home state of Louisiana. The tribal citizen of the United Houma Nation petitioned the governor, John Bel Edwards, to change the day. He did, along with several other states this year.

“It’s become a trend,” Champagne said. “It’s about celebrating people instead of thinking about somebody who actually caused genocide on a population or tried to cause the genocide of an entire population. By bringing Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’re bringing awareness that we’re not going to allow someone like that to be glorified into a hero, because of the hurt that he caused to Indigenous people of America.”

It is long past time for these paroxysms of guilt over events that happened before anyone alive was born to end. Is there any historical or hypothetical scenario under which the hunter-gatherers aren’t conquered by the farmers?

What if the hunter-gatherers are allowed their wild lands and tribal laws? How long before the young people discover video games and air conditioning and attractive non-hunter-gatherers their own age?

I’m as big a champion of blut und boden as anybody but here in actual human history, mankind is one wave after another, taking over. Traditionally, this meant the complete extermination of the conquered’s Y-chromosomal line. If you don’t hold, someone else will take. The rule of law doesn’t arise until the farmers show up and take the hunter-gatherers’ land and stake out the property lines.

In modern, thoroughly conquered Oregon, the Yakama and Lummi nations are demanding that the US remove three hydroelectric dams to restore fishing rights pursuant to an 1855 treaty.

Tear the treaties up. The Yakama and Lummi tribes aren’t valid nation-states. Neither are any of the other 573 indigenous tribes. Disburse the trusts to the current members and dissolve the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Amish and Hasidim transmit their heritage under the umbrella of their host State; the Natives can do the same.

This gives me an excuse to talk about Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who peddled the lie that her alleged white-Indian parents had to elope in disgrace. Ironically, despite being born and raised in heavily-Native American Oklahoma, Warren has a completely unremarkable amount of Native American genetics. She’s whiter than me. She may be whiter than George Plimpton.

The most famous Oklahoman ever, Will Rogers, was of approximately one-fourth Cherokee genetics, born to mixed-Cherokee parents who didn’t have to elope. (Read the Wikipedia entry; Will Rogers was an amazing American).

The truth of things is that Americans have always enthusiastically seized on any possibility of indigenous ancestry. It’s a romantic notion from a long ways back, establishing your bona fides as a Son of the Soil. Elizabeth Warren is old enough to recall Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree (1959).

The design of the Oklahoma State Flag was chosen in a contest sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1912.

This particular manifestation of political correctness is all part of the larger Flight From White, as everybody rushes to escape the ancestral taint of whiteness.

Once upon a time, believe it or not, there was a Fight To Be White.

* * * *

The Anglos and their European cousins are history’s winners so far. They established a very pleasant and well-ordered geographic redoubt in the Americas. (If you don’t believe me go to Lebanon, like I did, and survey the public commons and talk to the Lebanese about their elite political and financial classes). If this were still a serious country, everybody would be working to establish their modern American bona fides, not indulging in silly distractions like Indigenous People’s Day.

This time for Beirut, Lebanon, earlier this month. American Sun has published my travelogue, and you can read it here.

Once upon a time, the national government was (relatively) limited. If States didn’t want women to vote, that was that. The only remedy was to get a super-majority of the States to amend the federal constitution in accordance with its terms. Nobody thought for a minute that the Supreme Court could judicially declare that restricting the franchise to adult males was a violation of the federal constitution.

Wars required legislative enactment. The Marine Corps was America’s expeditionary  force–an arcane branch of the Navy–to be dispatched to protect U.S. foreign interests and high seas navigation. If you wanted to send the military somewhere, there had to be a war. (Read the Wikipedia entries for the First and Second Barbary Wars to get a sense of the Founding generations’ scrupulous adherence to enumerated powers, and even to post-Westphalian international law).

As recently as the 1930’s, a whole class of criminals exploited the fact that individual States administered their discrete criminal codes in a far-flung, libertarian country.  The official response to these criminals, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in particular, was downright anarchic: a posse of six lawmen from Louisiana and Texas persuaded a family friend to wait by the side of the road near the gang’s designated safe house, and when Bonnie and Clyde showed up, they executed them.

There was no official inquiry, no protests, no lawsuits. Six public employees just used their imprimatur to kill members of a rising American outlaw class. Simpler times.

Compare that world of ordered chaos to the current anarcho-tyrannical, managerial state. Government and its media handmaidens manufacture and manage crises to maintain control. Congress no longer governs the country via legislation; we have all the laws we need, after all. Most legislation is just enhancement of existing bureaucratic powers and tax favors. The judiciary obligingly handles all the important domestic issues (abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, civil rights) leaving Congress free to act as the World’s Greatest Investigative Body and run for reelection. The Executive branch dispatches troops wherever it wants and tells Congress to fund them.

Like the private sector, America’s public sector waxes fat off unprecedented prosperity. Liberals tell me Blumpf is finished over a telephone call with the Ukrainian president and a whistleblower within that august protector of republican virtues, the CIA. The transcript of the call is here. This is all political theater.

Speaking of the CIA, remember when they looked like this?

Now they look like this.

I don’t think the CIA does any actual field work anymore. I think they just hire gay Mormons and perimenopausal women to look at satellite photos and conduct clandestine communications with journalists, politicians, and high net-worth individuals for “intelligence.” Then they pretend to do “analysis” at their computers.

Prepare yourselves. It will all be over soon.

(Inspired by an iSteve comment).

P.S. I rag on the career bureaucracy a lot, but you still see remnants of the hyper-competent Mandarin class.

The Acting AG Whittaker Group Glare:

The Bill Barr Bodyman Glance, and Bill Barr Torquing Double-Take:

The Geoffrey Cox Stentorian Harangue:

I sympathize with the old bolshevik. Billionaires are anti-democratic. They can nullify the votes of 63 million mere citizens with a few phone calls; they can get all sorts of tax breaks from local governments by putting the location of their corporate headquarters in play; hence my argument that we should just give them the government. Precisely because of their venal influence, there is no way they are letting this old fool anywhere near the Presidency.