It’s time to put some of the myths of the fourth estate to rest. Reporters are spies. They are not neutral political actors.

An FBI administrator, Mark Felt, transferred the critical information relating to the Watergate scandal to Woodward and Bernstein, who were only acting as intermediaries for the damaging material.

Journalistic cover is frequently used by all international governments because it tends to provide access and mobility to notable figures. Journalistic visas can make it easier for such people to cross borders. Especially in a time of shrinking foreign bureau budgets, international correspondents often have to lean on the informational resources of foreign embassies more and more — much like spies.

In a non-democratic political order, the notion of reporter as spy, whether public or private, is less objectionable, because they have no sacred political mission that they are supposed to be attending to, no public-minded purpose. They can work to inform or misinform, pushing events this way and that way, with no expectation on the part of the readership (no matter how small or large) of objectivity, which is an absurd notion in any case.

Once you accept the mental model of reporter-as-spook, purported misbehavior on the part of said reporters becomes much less upsetting. If you accept that the reporter is just an unpaid (and sometimes a paid) intelligence stringer, you can stop getting so upset and whiny when they do their job of promoting the mission of their handling agency.

In the case of reporters like Judith Miller, she just did her job as a CIA stringer. That her reporting did some damage to the reputation of the New York Times is less relevant than that she succeeded in fulfilling the CIA’s mission at the time, which was to furnish the Bush administration with a usable casus belli to justify the planned Iraq invasion. Her behavior is only upsetting if you have some sort of expectation for reporters to be honest informers of the ‘public.’

In the case of someone like Ezra Klein, he was simply doing his job promoting the full socialization of the medical industry, to facilitate the passage and implementation of the legislation in question. If he lied and fudged some numbers, he was just doing his job, which does not include telling the truth. He would be performing his job poorly if he were to tell the truth rather than to execute his mission.

Frankly, the notion of ‘public’ only has any value if citizenship is treated as something that is valuable. If anyone with a heartbeat is a citizen with the full rights of a citizen, it should not be a surprise when political authorities treat the informing of the general mass of heartbeat-citizens as a low priority.

The difficulty there, from the perspective of intelligence work, is that using reportorial cover ceases to be effective when people anticipate it, or otherwise assume that it’s being used. Once this happens, especially if that method of cover is abused too frequently, foreign powers will simply expel your journalists on the assumption that they are spies. This can also happen to diplomats if diplomatic cover is abused too brazenly.

As in the case of Pravda, the domestic citizens can also just stop believing everything they read, which happens when the work is sloppily done.

From a formalist perspective, journalists and spies should have a similar job title, because their effective job descriptions are similar. If you realize, for yourself, that the job of the reporter is to serve as the eyes and tongues of the state, their behavior will be far less bothersome to you on an emotional level. Of course they will write and speak as they do — they are simply doing their jobs, according to the nature of the state which they serve.

[ED: Listen to a reading of this essay by playing the embedded video above.] 

Why have America’s leading organs of influence decided to demonize white, Christian men as the most uniquely evil group in the history of the world? Why is it necessary for students, especially of that ethnic group, to unpack their invisible knapsacks?

The answer is that these men are routinely targeted for politically-empowered looting, usually by their own wives, with the assistance of the state. This looting would not be morally palatable without a pervasive myth of uniquely white male evil. It would otherwise trip the moral alarms that might otherwise come up when dissolving a family for personal gain.

The growth in anti-white-male op-eds in influential magazines makes more sense when you look at the real lives of middle class men, which are often marked by either divorce or threatened divorce, which typically involves an enormous transfer of valuable assets from the man to his ex-wife. This expropriation would have been regarded as execrable even just 50 years ago, but with the assistance of a powerful guilt-myth, it goes down much easier.

The pre-existing myth can be used by lawyers and others to sway judges to the favor of their clients. If white men are assumed to be uniquely wicked, it becomes easier to weave their reported actions (whether true or false) into a legal case against that man, and then to use that case to deprive him of his children, assets, and honor.

The irony here is that men like Teddy Roosevelt, the founder of the Progressive party, were imperialistic white supremacists. However, this was within the framework of the ‘white man’s burden’ of uplifting the other races of the world. This part has stayed within the Progressive platform, and arguably the supremacy plank has stayed also, but in the form of creating a uniquely flagellating class, trained into self-loathing. The tragicomic part of this is that the successful uplift of African-Americans that TR brags about as a unique American success has been reversed by future more aggressively progressive policies.

The flagellating guilt complex is seen as furthering the international-uplift mission, but the Christian aspect has, in large part, been bumped off. The humility before God has become humility before the diversity instructor. The Fall from Eden has become the fall from a murky fall from racial grace. The space in life that would have been allocated towards the worship of God has instead been allocated to the hatred of the White race, although this co-exists simultaneously with a proclamation that race is a social construct that has no bearing on anything temporal.

Without Satan and the demons as scapegoats, White men and their pallor do a great job as stand-ins as the source of the world’s great historical and contemporary evils. The narratives catalog all the purportedly unique historical crimes of the White devil, and then close with some argument to seize the assets of that class, often combined with a demand for the denigration of that entire category of person.

It is not entirely useful to make the comparison to Nazis and their assignment of anti-Jewish math problems and the like in schools, because this program of retaliation is seen as a corrective for those sorts of things, in the same way that the Nuremberg trials were one-sided against the Axis, while ignoring the pervasive and open attacks on civilians by the Allies, in which civilian body counts were seen as success indicators.

It might be funny to bring up the Turks and how they got rid of the Armenians, but most people are unfamiliar with that, and in any case, unlike in the 16th and 17th century, ‘Turk’ is not a byword for ‘bad person’ — ‘White’ is. That is the cultural context in which the educated American classes are operating in. Reforming the image of the Kulak is not easy when every day, all the educated people learn that to hate the Kulak is to get in good with the authorities.

So, what is a Kulak to do? For one, you should take the language denigrating your ethnic group seriously, because calls for asset seizures are always presages to calls of physical liquidation. Once your liquid assets are seized, it is necessary to take your tough-to-move assets, and when you have nothing left to give, you are useful either as a slave or as a dead body.

If the moral trend can be reversed, by openly contradicting the story of [insert group here]’s perfidy, then good on you, but typically, once a state has begun the scapegoating process, it finds itself unable to back down from it — it has to see it to its logical conclusion. Physical resistance usually never occurs, because actors within states only begin these sorts of widespread demonization programs if there is unlikely to be any real physical resistance to it.

Similarly, whining slogans about ‘white genocide’ are meaningless when that sounds like a great idea to the people who want to expropriate you. The guilt-narrative is that White Christians are uniquely responsible for the post-1945 crime of genocide, and that retaliation is more than fair play. That chatter only works if they are actually amenable to that moral argument, and in fact, they think it would be a great thing, and have indeed cheered on such operations in countries like Rhodesia and South Africa.

Memorializing the Communist leader Mandela is practically mandatory in the US, just as veneration of various Communist revolutionaries was mandatory in the USSR.

No one cares — that, in fact, only enhances the support for the policy on the opposing side. In the same way that telling Turks that they are naughty for getting rid of the Armenians, the left just grins and laughs when you tell them that they are doing what they want to do, what they plan to do, what they are openly proud of talking about doing.

The cheeky proposal is to make like previously successful mass-exiles and to negotiate deportation between the state that wishes to get rid of the host population, and a state that could make use of it. The exile of the Huguenots from France to other Protestant countries throughout Europe is a good example of this sort of relatively peaceful ethno-religious cleansing. The more serious proposal is to break up the United States, due to incompatible moral visions of society among the differing members.

In this way, you could separate the states between those that believe Whites are demons whose sin requires punishment on this Earth, and those who believe that Whites are men to be judged by God and perhaps by other men when the time calls for it.

Much like Stalin rewarded journalists and minor authors with high prizes for authoring tracts against the Kulaks, our contemporary authorities award such prizes for demonizing our Kulaks. None of this will make much sense without a good understanding of the greatest, most terrible man of the 20th century, and this biography is a wonderful place to start.

Being able to credibly threaten this would be the only thing that could even begin to derail the de-Kulakization program in place. Once the authorities can no longer promise worthwhile prizes and status in return for mouthing words of hatred towards the White devil, the words will stop being spoken with nearly as much authentic fervor.

We should learn from history that negotiation with the terror is not possible — that is the road to the fate of men like the Girondists, moderates exterminated by the Jacobins. Taking the symbolic meaning of language seriously is important, because people must use strong symbols to arrange any project, either great or terrible.

When the left says that they want to expropriate you (and later kill you) in increasingly less subtle terms, they are being entirely serious, and the dumbest mistake to make is to treat it as idle talk. They mean what they say. They will do what they say as soon as they have the political will and the numbers to execute it. That could be a long time, but it might not be, either.

Also, to think that you can deflect the hatred towards some other subclass of Kulak is folly, because you’re next, even if that succeeds.

In the contemporary sense, just as historically, the way to avoid the de-Kulakization is to re-align yourself with the state and against the Kulaks. If you could credibly be mistaken for a Kulak, you instead loudly proclaim how much you hate Kulaks, and how willing you are to assist in their expropriation.

A defense can be mounted in a secure state, but it can’t be  mounted within a state that is entirely oriented against you. Finland withstood the Soviet invasion, but the states which were already in the Soviet orbit left the gates unlocked, and gladly accepted absorption. During the civil war in Spain, towns purged and counter-purged one another until the borders were clear — the secular Bolsheviks versus the Catholic Francoists.

Even then, people caught on the wrong side of the internal border were killed by their friends and neighbors, often with crude farm tools in barbaric rituals.

This even of course has occurred in recent times under American supervision — similar mass-killing of civilians is going on as I write this in Ukraine and New Russia. Ethnic cleansing famously occurred under hapless US supervision in Iraq, amassing an enormous body count. The American press is uniform in either glossing over these murders of civilians or in lauding them as necessary.

It is not so much of a jump to say that the same governing class that did not bat an eye in those wars would not bat an eye to do the same domestically, at least following a crisis of significant magnitude.

It’s not wise to trust in moderate political parties to brake the success of the neo-Jacobin left, because moderate parties are the first ones to go in crisis, under pressure from both sides.

Of course, none of this will make any sense if you are totally unfamiliar with the history of the left, especially in the 20th century. The rhetoric will seem benign because the symbols that they use for certain things are going to appear benign, rather than containing murderous intent. The normalcy that you have experienced for most of your life will be what you expect to experience for the foreseeable future, because you don’t have the records of others stored in your head, warning of such things.

In the same way, when people talk about ‘socialized medicine,’ you are going to have an entirely different emotional reaction to it if you know that Soviet doctors dumped dying patients out in front of hospitals to make their statistics look better than if you are wholly ignorant of that anecdote.

This is why it is often so difficult to make what should be an alarming historical parallel argument with regards to the bloody history of the left — contemporary people have been trained into fearing the ‘Brown scare,’ but not the far more dangerous ‘Red scare.’ They feel calm when they should feel alarm. They dismiss language that they should take seriously until precisely the moment before language commands action.

Hitler, like Napoleon, was often referred to by his social betters as “the little corporal.”

Both of these leaders reaped the discontent with the former leadership class to attempt to right the wrongs caused by them, to popular adulation and acclaim. The collapse of the old order gave them the opportunity that they had hoped for, and they both seized it, taking it all the way to the end.

We know how their stories ended because it’s in the past. But many people in the general opposition to the current world order do not draw the conclusion that popular revolt is not the universal cure for misrule. Popular revolt, the old scholars knew, is more often the preface to an extended period of tyranny and disorder.

The importance of classical learning in such a case helps the natural elites within a country, to the extent that any remain, to make critical decisions which are better informed. In England, after the Civil War, they restored Charles II, despite the misrule of Charles I. Had general opinion been different, Richard Cromwell might have stayed in charge, and the restoration might never have happened. There are certainly many criticisms to bring up with what followed for England, but they at least managed to spend a century or two in charge of most of the known world, which as empires go, is an impressive performance.

Popular revolt seems like it should be a purging action that restores justice and order to a country. It is more often a time of recriminations, violence, and disorder. Given that the Western leadership actively believes in the holy power of populist revolt, it would not be surprising if such a revolt eventually consumes the West once again. This sort of regular auto-cannibalization will keep happening until general opinion within the influential classes of people shifts back towards favoring natural hierarchy over the weight of mass opinion.

In universities, they try to teach people in the liberal arts to do whatever they can to essentially ‘prevent another Hitler,’ at the same time as they affirm the same mass-democratic means that have been routinely annihilating the West since 1789 and even before that time. In Ukraine, the American State Department even funneled support to Ukrainian fighters styling themselves after the Third Reich. So much for all those Hitler specials on the History Channel, not to mention all that sensitivity training that they must have all undergone at the Kennedy School for Government.

That school’s name may have been appropriate, because the War in the Ukraine has been the most humiliating failure of the American secret services since the Bay of Pigs.

Anyway.

Mass opinion favors what is popular now. Rule by aristocracy takes into account what is true, with reference going back even to the distant past. Chesterton described tradition as the “democracy of the dead,” but it is a democracy in which only a handful of people really get much of a vote.

While it is still a competition for the opinions of living people, it is to encourage the living to respect what the dead learned in their short time, rather than to get them to rally-round the latest incarnation of the little corporal. Whipping up high emotions among the ignorant and impressionable is one of the most effective ways to get them all killed. If you care about your people, then you will work to preserve their characters, rather than sacrificing them for nothing.