American Mind: Retrieving Greatness for a Digital Age

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

James Poulos:

“Today’s remarkably deep and swiftly expanding debate on the Right is caused by the rise of digital technology to a formative position in our psychological and social life. Already, the perceptions and sensibilities of Americans have been reshaped so profoundly by our new digital environment that critiques of mainstream conservatism which could not gain traction just a few years ago now command the initiative.

These developments are at the leading edge of a wholesale transformation of Western politics. “So much of what holds the identity of the ruling class together,” I explained in my essay introducing The American Mind, is “the product of its rise to power in a shared context that digital technology is destroying.” …

What else can explain ruling-class convictions that journalists who communicate securely and confidentially are saving democracy, while citizens who do so are destroying it? That ordinary Americans cannot be trusted to use their own smartphones, but meritocrats forced to kneel before the altar of post-gender gnosticism and the throne of egregore occultism must alone be trusted to determine which memes are good and which evil?

Making a detective’s investigation into the strange mystery of the West’s recent and unfolding “metaphysical crisis” leads us to conclude that the sudden triumph of digital technology has caused people to perceive that the mode of rule constructed around them is ineffective, counterproductive, illegitimate, and obsolete …

That’s why, on the scatterplot of the 2016 electorate now making the rounds online, the upper left quadrant, economically “left” and socially “right,” is full of people, while the bottom right quadrant, economically “right” and socially “left,” is about as empty as an abandoned cruise ship. Of course, the point of the matrix is that these labels themselves no longer make the sense they did in pre-digital times. That elite, confronting the “unthinkable,” responds by doubling down on its abstractions, and insisting that only the adoption of its ethics can save the world. Established intellectuals demand a return to a power that has lost its potency, and a time that isn’t coming back. “

Basically, I agree with the big picture that James Poulos is painting here. American culture used to be highly local. The mass media used to be highly decentralized. The “mainstream” was divided into regional cultures rather than the 24/7/365 cable news cycle. In the Jim Crow South, few people read any of the national magazines like Newsweek or U.S. News and World Report and most Southerners got their news from the editors of local newspapers who supported the Southern way of life.

Everything began to rapidly change in the late 20th century. The United States became a global empire after the Second World War which made segregation a point of international conflict in the Cold War. The rise of radio, film and television and the consolidation of newspapers into conglomerates concentrated the power of the mass media in the hands of a tiny elite in New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, DC for a generation. It is would be an understatement to say that the “electric-age ruling class” smashed and reprogrammed our culture. Suddenly, the “mainstream” was created (SPOILER: it did not exist before the 1950s) and being considered legitimate or having authority came to be associated with being on television. This “electric age” elite which grew accustomed to lording it over not only the American Heartland, but the entire Western world had the power to control and shape the narrative.

As the mainstream media was consolidating and moving toward the apex of its power and influence around the time of Watergate, the interstate transportation system was being created. The bulldozer was transforming the landscape of the South to create the Sunbelt economy. Millions of Southerners moved off the farm between the 1940s and 1960s into the South’s new urban centers like Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte. Florida went from being the smallest Southern state to one of the biggest after the invention of the air conditioner. In the span of a generation, the South became urban and industrialized and the Jim Crow system was shattered by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

I’m using the South as an example to illustrate the big picture, but what went on here in the late 20th century with the Boomer generation happened nationwide. Millions of people were on the move. The country became unsettled and grew more and more deracinated over time. The consumer culture created by late capitalism invaded the family and millions of women entered the workforce. Eventually, the country began to grow ever more atomized, angry and alienated and after the rise of the internet and digital technology in the 1990s and 2000s the rebellion began against the “electronic age” elite which preferred to keep things that way: fat, dumb and content to consume the latest X Men movie.

Who is this elite though?

James Poulos studiously dodges the question. It will suffice to say that the South ruled the Union until the War Between the States. As Southerners lost power within the Union in the 1850s, we developed a stinging critique of Northern liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. After the defeat of the Confederacy though, the South was crushed and reduced to colonial status and was really never heard from again. Lincoln and his successors remade the Union in the image of the Yankee.

The Yankee elite had a great run which lasted from the time of Lincoln to around the JFK presidency in 1960. It was JFK who redefined America as a “nation of immigrants” in a 1958 book that he penned for the ADL. The Yankee system of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism ultimately proved to be their own undoing because the the East, the Midwest and the West, but not the South which was dirt poor until the 1950s, was flooded with millions of European immigrants. The North became ethnically and religiously diverse in a way that bypassed the Anglo-Protestant South.

By the mid-20th century, Jewish immigrants had became wealthy enough to challenge the Northern WASPs for political and cultural supremacy in the United States. They allied themselves with other insurgent groups like Irish Catholics and blacks in the Democratic Party. After the Second World War, the meritocratic system was adopted and the floodgates to the American elite were opened and the Jews poured in en masse into the Ivy League universities and rose to the top of the American social and economic pyramid where they have been entrenched in power ever since.

The United States is currently ruled by an aging, hostile Jewish elite that is afraid of the declining, alienated and increasingly resentful White majority in Middle America. We’re also now brimming with racial minorities like AOC and Ilhan Omar who were imported as an insurance policy against a revival of Nazism and who have been taught since birth to resent the White majority. Digital technology has broken the ability of the Jewish elite to bamboozle the masses with the television. It turns out that being glued to Jewish-controlled television channels and entertained by Jewish-produced Hollywood blockbuster movies was passing a phase of history. As James Poulos notes, all the great questions like “who are we” and “who am I” for White people can no longer be repressed. He carefully avoids saying that only White people are forbidden from asking and answering questions like that these days.

What’s going to happen when the Jewish elite comes crashing down? It doesn’t have the wealth, numbers or the technology to maintain its cultural and political hegemony forever. It was a lot easier to rule a fat and happy country with three television networks that was 80% White than a poor and angry one with the internet that is 50% White. I think it could go a number of ways. It could be a hard landing and a very nasty scenario in the context of the mass unemployment of the next twenty years which will be generated by automation. Alternatively, I can imagine a scenario in which White people are allowed to reassert their own identity and reconnect with their heritage and it turns out to be a soft landing because everyone will be much richer in the future and no one will work anymore because our robotic slaves will basically be providing for all our needs. In such a world, the racial and cultural powderkeg could be mysteriously defused because artificial intelligence will become the new source of anxiety.

I believe it will be in the best interest of everyone to avoid the RAHOWA, to ease the Jews out of power and to deal with this massive economic change caused by the rise of the robots. The 20th century was horrifying and devastating for Europeans and I would rather not repeat that mistake. Instead of doing that, we should be creating the world of the Jetsons so that everyone can enjoy a life of luxury and leisure, but this honestly all depends on how our existing elite prefers to go out.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

14 Comments

  1. The South ruled America because slavery made them richer than everyone else. The Yankee ruled the USA because they were first into the industrial age, and their machines made them richer than the slavers. The Jews ruled the West because they were first to get control of mass media and they never let it go. They are trying to do it again with social media but whites invented new tech like Peer to Peer, that makes big money investors irrelevant. The white man’s last invention will be AI. Who ever controls it will shape the galaxy.

  2. If dissenting opinion gets driven underground, as is already happening, that will make opposition to the authoritarians in charge more radicalized. To not pacify the resistance to their tyranny, through material gains like UBI, will bring on more desperate actions from those who resist TPTB. The kakistocracy is lighting a powderkeg right underneath their own foundation.

  3. We tried to get the establishment to stop mass immigration and build a wall. They said no. We tried to get the establishment to support free speech on social media. They said no. Do you think they are going to let dirty working class people have a slice of what they see as their pie? It will be the same answer.

    Civil war won’t start because boomers or zoomers on VNN or 4Chan shoot up some nobodies in nursing homes. It will start for the same reasons as the last one. When whites realize the Republican Party is no longer electable, and the non-white party taxes them into oblivion.

    The irony is you want to avoid war, but you are accelerating the conditions that will bring it about – that being the end of the Republican Party. Sooner or later the party will die due to its own greed and foolishness, the sooner the better IMO.

    • I think your comments are spot-on @ jj. I have to deal these poc at the elbow-to-elbow level; and I can tell you , a peaceful resolution to the rise of AI and the decline of the White majority is pure fantasy.

  4. If you think a high tech future with robots and space travel is inevitable, watch this video. Civilizations have been at the height of their powers and lost it all within 100 years. This guy is a leading programmer in his field and sees signs of collapse everywhere. Nothing in tech seems to work 100% and the industry doesn’t care about fixing it. It is a third world mindset – people just accept that nothing works properly.

      • “Not inevitable.”

        It is in brown countries.

        You have no idea how bad it is. 99.5% of professionals can’t maintain what they are using to build the software they sell. If you tell them this they don’t care and even if they did care, they wouldn’t have the brains to do anyting about it anyway.

        Its sad watching an obviously intelligent guy like the one in the above video try to solve a problem like the cyclic collapse of civilizations, without taking race into account. Its like watching a blind guy try to navigate a room where all his furniture has been switched around.

        Third world countries are the way they are, because the people in them don’t care if the service is poor. Its not just low IQ, its that they eally don’t care. This is the third world mindset he is up against in that video.

        “It is a better scenario than the RAHOWA though.”

        You must be joking. 5-8 billion on the planet and people forgetting how to maintain computers won’t cause wars? Do you realize how much high tech has to do with keeping all those people from starvation?

      • “It is a better scenario than the RAHOWA though.”

        Not if that is the Will of God, however. Sometimes, war is the ONLY solution.
        Brad, I do believe you are afraid of dying. And it’s coloring your entire Weltanschauung.

        I refer you to A great Celtic bard, who wrote:

        “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
        Who never to himself hath said,
        This is my own, my native land!
        Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
        As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
        From wandering on a foreign strand!
        If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
        For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
        High though his titles, proud his name,
        Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
        Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
        The wretch, concentred all in self,
        Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
        And, doubly dying, shall go down
        To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
        Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.”

  5. I am honestly baffled that someone who is quite well read can believe the jews took over the US as late as the 1950s. Does the Federal Reserve Act from 1913 ring a bell? So your view must be wrong.

    But I believe that one has to go further back to come to a realistic picture, And I make this bold statement: The jews were always the hidden power which shaped the destiny of the New World. In Colonial America they were a force through England. The East India Company was always run by jews. After 1776 the jews were in control of the South and the North through freemasonry which was always a tool of jewry.

    Read Sombarts “Jews and Capitalism” to get an detailed understanding of the eminent role of jews in the US from the beginning.

    https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/sombart/jews.pdf

    What all you believers in a WASP control of the US at some point in the history of the US cannot explain is that the alleged revolutionary power shift must have taken place without a trace of violence and without even much vocal dissent. Is that even remotely plausible?

    • The takeover happened between the 1920s and 1950s.

      As for the Federal Reserve, it wasn’t simply a Jewish conspiracy. There was a huge demand in the credit and cash starved South and West to inflate the money supply and go off the gold standard which had enriched the East. Jews lost major battles like the one over the Immigration Act of 1924 and it wasn’t until the late 1930s that scales began to tip. You could say though that Jews were becoming ever wealthier and more influential though from the time of Brandeis forward.

      • Warburg was the central figure of the Federal Reserve Act which gave jews unlimited power. And this power showed during the peace treaty of Versailles a few years later. The American delegation (as the delegations of the other big Entente powers) was full of jews who shaped the destiny of the world there. I don’t have to remind you the role Mandel House and Samuel Brandeis played behind the curtains of the Wilson administration.

        So your view of a jewish takeover after the First World War is not correct but I think it would be a superficial view to say the takeover took place in late 19th century. There was never a takeover because the jews were always in charge in the New World. Only this view (which can be fleshed out with details of course) can explain that there never was a explicit power struggle between WASPs and jews.

        • Jewish power was on the rise in the time of Woodrow Wilson, but it was hardly ascendant. The impetus for the Federal Reserve was the monetary problems of the South and the West after the War Between the States. Southerners wanted to inflate the money supply and it worked and life got better.

    • “most Southerners got their news from the editors of local newspapers who supported the Southern way of life.”

      I remember that still being the case in the mid 1970’s.

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