Luke Ford

I first encountered Z-Man in the comments section of Steve Sailer’s blog. Z-Man has been blogging for five years. He has a right-wing commonsense approach a few steps beyond conservatism. He appeared on the Daily Shoah May 18.

MP3.

Z-Man blogs July 8:

A couple of years ago, John Derbyshire, in one of his podcasts, talked about the sexual aspect of what ails the West. He referenced this comment to Steve Sailer, in one of Sailer’s blog posts. No doubt others have noted that women in the West seem to be the driving force behind things like immigration. The angle is always that the women are ascendant, because the men have grown soft. As Derb talked about in that podcast, the girls are inviting in the swarthy foreigners, because they are dissatisfied with their men.

That is appealing to men, especially older men, as older men are always sure that the younger generation is soft. When I was a boy, my grandfather would say, “In my day it was iron men and wooden ships. Now, it is iron ships and wooden men.” I’m an old man, but not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail. It was just his way of saying that his generation was tough, while the younger generation was soft. The thing is though, this assumes that only men have changed, while women are just responding to this change.

Maybe a better way of thinking about the sexual aspect of our cultural crisis is that both men and women are haunted by different specters. For instance, our women are growing increasingly deranged, not because men are wimps, but because the traditional sex roles no longer exist. This leaves them as free radicals, with the wacky fads out of feminism and gender studies, orbiting them like unpaired electrons. Put a different way, women are like bees without a hive. Without the normal social stimulants, they become erratic.

Here’s a good example. This women is not satisfied being an angry lesbian. She has been a public nuisance for a long time, ranting and raving about homosexual causes. Self-identified lesbians are 1.3% of the population, according to the CDC. That’s a small club, but not select enough, so she is now claiming her son is transgender, which is not even a real thing. Like so many of our women, this woman is in a race to the most bizarre and deranged position imaginable. It’s the need for attention, applied to inappropriate things.

The male side of this coin features a nostalgia for a lost future. It is a form of romanticism, where men imagine a past that led to a different present. All of those decisions by prior generations, have led to a present where there is no point to being man, because there is no role for being a man. The only place where men are needed is the military, but even there, the multicultural nags are working to ruin things. It’s not a longing for the past, but a longing for a different past that resulted in a more fulfilling and meaningful present.

If you look at the various sub-groups within the Dissident Right, they are almost exclusively male. The alt-right certainly has a strong romantic streak. Their embrace of the fascist aesthetic was always based on an imaginary version of history. The PUA guys go the other way, embracing a cynical and callous view of women as nothing more than a game to be won. It is an absurd version of the alpha male. Even guys into alt-lite stuff like Patriot Prayer or the Proud Boys are trying to create a space for men to be men.

The result of all this is men and women are rocketing off in different directions, seeking something that fills the void left by traditional sex roles. The trouble is, the current culture views traditional sex roles as toxic. That not only directs the search for biological fulfillment toward the wrong answers, it makes the right answer the polar opposite of what is acceptable. The result of this is blue-haired feminists screaming into the teeth of reality and the cartoonish primal scream of the Bronze Age Mindset.

Z-Man writes May 19, 2018:

On Friday. I went into the lair of the most vile, racist hate filled monsters to ever crawl this earth. That would be The Daily Shoah. When you get around these people, what’s most disconcerting is that they are genuinely nice and honest. Our rulers put so much energy into demonizing dissenters, it is easy to forget that even the most fringe partisans are just decent people with different ideas about the world. Usually, the ideas that come to shape the future start out on the fringe, so it worth engaging with them.

As far as the show itself, it was fun. Mike and Sven are very nice people and extremely generous with guests they have on their show. Unlike the mass media, they don’t see their guests as furniture they can abuse for the amusement of the braying mules in the audience. My only regret is not having used my podcasting setup to do the show. I used my laptop because I could not get Skype working on the other machine. Skype is crappy software and on my laptop the sound quality is terrible, but it came out good enough.

I got a bunch of responses via e-mail. All of them fall into a number of categories. One group wondered why I would go on a show run by anti-Semites, given that I am not an anti-Semite. My view is antisemitism is just an opinion, with the same moral currency as tastes in ice cream. Here’s how I like to explain it. Imagine you move to a new town and learn that one new neighbor is an anti-Semite. Then you learn that another neighbor is a Methamphetamine cooker. Only a liar or a lunatic cares more about the anti-Semite.

More important, the open exchange of ideas and opinions is a base line requirement for a civilized white society. Like any marketplace, the marketplace of ideas does not always produce optimum results. That’s an argument against democracy, not a reason to suppress heretical opinion. In time, bad ideas fail while good ideas eventually succeed, which is the foundation of popular government. That means engaging all comers, as long as they are honest and willing to debate in good faith. It can also be a lot of fun.

Another category of response was to ask why I don’t do more of these things. One main reason is time. My day job, life, the blog and the podcast fill up the dance card. I’m also not a fan of the “blood sports” model that is most popular. Some are OK, but most degenerate quickly into the typical internet purse fight. They should call these things “bum fights” because it’s usually two poorly trained and equipped debaters desperately trying to land a hay-maker. The Daily Shoah format is more to my liking as it fits the medium.

Of course, there were people wondering if Mike Enoch had red-pilled me on the JQ. I’ve come to hate that expression, to be perfectly honest. It implies a soteriological awareness that is only achieved through devotional study. I know the arguments around the JQ as well as anyone can know them. I’ve read the source material and listened to the proselytizers. I’ve done the math. The facts are what they are and there’s no denying Jews wield an enormous amount of influence, in absolute and relative terms.

Z-Man writes March 18, 2018:

I’ve been asked a number of times about my thoughts on the paper produced by someone calling himself Nathan Cofans, examining Kevin McDonald’s theories on Jewish exceptionalism. I had skimmed it prior to last week’s epistle to the anti-Semites and gave a good read the other day, with the idea of treating it as a serious set of arguments. Going back and re-reading it, I kept thinking that it was not produced with the goal of expanding the stock of human knowledge or with the goal of shedding light on McDonald’s claims.

Instead, I kept getting the image of the abbot, marshaling his monks to craft the latest defense of the faith and the realm. I was never a big Moldbug fan, but he picked a good word when describing the prevailing orthodoxy as a “cathedral.” It’s not so much that it is an accurate label, but that it conjures the right sort of image. The people in charge of us, have a set of beliefs that serve as a secular religion, justifying their actions and their position. They respond to challenges the same way the Church responded to heretics.

The two people behind this orchestrated campaign to denounce the heretic McDonald and his followers, are a member of the clerisy and a novice. Jonathan Anomaly is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. His novice, Nathan Cofnas, is a graduate student at Oxford. They have collaborated on this article at Quillette, which is mostly a way to promote this long critique of Kevin McDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique, which has become the textbook of modern anti-Semites.

The reason for describing Anomaly and Cofnas this way is for accuracy. If you work in the academy, you must defend the orthodoxy. In the West, particularly America, universities are theological centers, more like madrassas than places for open debate. If an academic starts talking frankly about observable reality, especially when it comes to the human sciences, they are either committing career suicide, headed for retirement or having a breakdown. Honesty gets even the best scholars hurled into the void.

Cofnas is working his fingers bloody promoting his paper on social media, even getting into slap fights with defenders of McDonald. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is clearly an elaborate effort to counter-signal the alt-right. He has written for legacy-right outfits like The Weekly Standard and National Review, so it is safe to assume he is hostile to modern right-wing movements. Again, there is nothing wrong with it, but it means we should not treat his paper as anything other than polemic on behalf of his team.

Now, I’ve already said I am a skeptic of Kevin McDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy. It could be brilliant, but it could be nonsense too. In the human sciences, it is a good idea to be cautious of bespoke theories that define one very narrow set of observations. A million years ago, John Derbyshire hit the nail on the head when he wrote that “There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.” It’s intelligent design, except the Jews themselves were the designers. That strikes me as implausible.

Z-Man writes Aug. 29, 2017:

Someone contacted me the other day saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure about these things. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It’s not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They don’t recruit so they don’t attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There’s another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I’ve had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I’m not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It’s hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They’ll worry about discipline later.

There’s another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It’s not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.