J.D. Vance In Munich: A Lesson To Elites

And: Is Civil War Coming To Britain? Plus, Who Believes In UFOs?

February 18, 2024. American dude hangs in Munich on a Sunday afternoon

Nearly one year ago, I met my friend at a table streetside at Andechser am Dom, a restaurant in the heart of Munich, for beer and conversation. I chose the place because it was close to where we were both staying, and because Andechs beer, brewed by monks, is my favorite in the world. Cool, said he. And so we met.

We had had dinner the night before. My friend, J.D., skipped out a dinner at the event he was in town attending — the Munich Security Conference, the annual gathering of military heavyweights that bills itself as the “world’s leading forum” to discuss security policy. What was the point, he had told me? He was a first-term US Senator from Ohio who was getting cold-shouldered by the Good and the Great at the conference. Why? His views on the Ukraine War — that continuing to back Ukraine with an open checkbook was not in America’s interests, and that the US should push for a peace settlement — offended almost everyone there. They treated him like he stunk up the room with his absurd and immoral views.

Screw ‘em, he thought. You people won’t talk to me? I’ll go to dinner with my expat American friend instead. And so we did. The next afternoon, we got together again at the Andechser, across from the Frauenkirche, for a final meal. I remember talking with him about Hungary, and the real situation in Europe, and how Hungary takes it on the chin from the same transatlantic elites that were snubbing him — and for many of the same reasons. They think they know better, and that they don’t have to listen to anyone who disagrees, or respect any opinion that doesn’t conform to their out-of-touch view of the world. I invited him to come to Budapest and see for himself what populist conservative nationalist government is like. US conservatives have a lot to learn from what Viktor Orban has figured out about progressive illiberalism and how to fight it.

Then we talked on the record. Here’s a link to the European Conservative interview I did with him at that table. Excerpts:

You are one of the U.S. Senate’s leading skeptics of further aid to Ukraine. Does the Munich Security Conference feel like hostile territory?

I certainly feel like I’m in a hostile territory, I think there is a very broad consensus that the West should be funneling as many resources and weapons to create as possible. And I feel like I’m the only guy sort of shouting in the wilderness saying, ‘What’s the strategy here? What’s the endgame? How do you get out of this conflict without completely destroying the country of Ukraine—demographically, infrastructurally, economically?”

And unfortunately, I think that the participants in the conference are, by and large, so wrapped up in an anti-Putin mindset, that they can’t think rationally about the strategy and the conflict. It’s fine to not like Putin, I don’t like Putin. But that’s not a foreign policy vision.

More:

Volodymyr Zelinsky said at the Munich Security Conference, “May our world based on rules never become the world of yesterday” But the Russians have a strong case that the West broke its word on NATO expansion. Plus, if you talk to Hungarian conservatives, and Polish conservative living under the new, EU-backed government of Donald Tusk, they will tell you that the rules are whatever favors the policy interests of Washington and Brussels. Are they wrong?

No, I don’t think they are wrong. In fact, there’s a complete lack of self-awareness among the Western establishment on this point. Their efforts to turn whatever they happen to believe into the only morally upstanding and morally correct viewpoint is really insulting to everyone’s intelligence.

You know, the EU has kept billions of dollars of promised aid away from Hungary, because of its views on Ukraine. It captured billions of dollars of promised aid from a previous government in Poland, because of the conservative Polish government’s views. That’s not a rules-based order. That’s Europe, from Brussels and Berlin, imposing liberal imperialistic views on the rest of the continent. If you want to have a rules-based international order, you shouldn’t penalize Poland or Hungary for having politics that are different from Brussels—but that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. So I think it’s completely absurd on its face.

A lot of Americans really mistrust the so-called rules-based international order, because it hasn’t been good for a lot of American citizens. It’s been really good if you’re the sort of person who comes to the Munich Security Conference every year. But if you’re an American whose town was destroyed, because the factory that sustained that town was moved to China as part of the rules based international order—well, you’re not inclined to spend tax dollars and want to defend that order in 2024.

And:

There has been talk that you might be on the shortlist to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. If he asked, would you serve?

Of course I would think seriously about it. I think he’s clearly the best choice to be the next president. And as I’ve said, I wanted to help him as much as possible. That said, I really like being a senator. I want to make a pretty big impact doing what I do. Despite the media reports, I’ve never spoken with Donald Trump about becoming his vice president. My basic attitude towards this is, it’s probably media speculation, and he probably won’t ask me. If he does ask me, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Well, he came to that bridge, and he crossed it, and today, Vice President J.D. Vance is set to address the same crowd that gave him a cold shoulder one year ago. Last night he talked to the Wall Street Journal about it:

Vance is scheduled to speak Friday at the Munich Security Conference, a gathering of global leaders to discuss shared threats. He said he intends to tell allied European leaders that they are stifling free speech and democracy by not working with populist parties.

European officials jostling to secure bilateral meetings with Vance hoped that the first top-level visit from the Trump administration would initiate a new level of cooperation with the U.S. at a time of global turmoil, and would offer details on the plan to end the war in Ukraine.

Instead, Vance said he would tell leaders that Europe must embrace the rise of antiestablishment politics, stop mass migration and curb progressive policies. He said he would call for a return of traditional values and ending migrant crime.

“It’s really about censorship and about migration, about this fear that President Trump and I have, that European leaders are kind of terrified of their own people,” Vance said. He said he would urge German politicians to work with all parties including the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party.

Well, well, well. Ain’t that something! The junior American politician that they all disdained for his anti-establishment views is, one year later, more or less going to stand there and dictate terms to the same people who once snubbed him. Moral of the story: When you are in the Inner Ring, you’d better be nice to the hillbillies and other folks you won’t let in. You never know when and under what conditions you will see them next. God bless America, God bless it’s awesome vice president, and God bless the memory of the pistol-packing, chain-smoking Mamaw who raised that boy.

Civil War In Britain?

Listen to this genuinely shocking podcast by Louise Perry, who is one of the most interesting writers and podcasters in Britain today. She interviews David Betz, a professor of war studies at King’s College, London. The topic: “The Coming Civil War In Britain.” Betz’s academic specialty is the way societies tear themselves apart, and put themselves back together. I strongly urge you to give it a listen, even if you aren’t British, because the conditions Prof. Betz talks about are present in most Western countries. I’m going to summarize his main points:

1. Civil war will not look like the American Civil War, with two armies faced off in conventional combat. Instead, it will be disorganized terrorist actions aimed at causing social collapse.

2. People who believe that we are too old, too rich, and too fat to have a civil war are wrong. They suffer from “normalcy bias”. This particularly effects ruling elites, whose sense of the state of the country is far removed from its reality.

3. Multiculturalism has deeply fractured and polarized British society. Aside from ethnic and religious division, Britain today is far less connected to the shared myths that made it well-governed and relatively peaceful in the past.

4. The UK economy is structurally weak, and on a steep downward trajectory, with no plausible rescue at the current moment, owing to its financialization.

5. Britain today suffers from individual and group acts (e.g., terrorism, Pakistani Muslim rape gangs) that exacerbate the existing divisions. The rape gangs, in particular, undermine the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of many people, who perceive that the establishment allowed them to continue.

6. When you have a previous dominant population living through a loss of power and position — like white Britons are today — you have an explosive situation.

7. If and when it kicks off, UK civil war is not likely to be organized, but will instead be a “volcanic” eruption from fed-up people.

8. It is very, very easy to cause mass disruption without much effort, or material. Plus, key parts of the infrastructure needed to ensure the smooth functioning of daily life (e.g., gas plants) are unguarded.

9. The problems did not start with the current UK Labour government, but the Starmer government is “hapless” in its dealings with problems destroying the people’s trust in the state (e.g., mass migration), and in fact is making things worse through wokeness, a politicized judiciary, two-tier policing and the like. That is to say, it is actively pursuing policies that undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

10. The ruling class’s idea that they can suppress people’s knowledge of these things by clamping down on social media is ludicrous. You can’t stop people from learning of and commenting on these events, and of the incompetence of the governing class in the face of economic pain and social breakdown.

11. The coming civil war will likely break along rural vs. urban lines. It wouldn’t take many rural people to cause catastrophic failures and chaos in cities by striking facilities, mostly located in the countryside, that cities need to function.

12. The UK establishment — politicians, judges, media, academics — are self-deluded about their own position, and the state of the country. “Normalcy bias.”

13. The most talented and capable young Britons have lost faith in their country’s future, and are now trying to emigrate. Trouble is, there really isn’t anywhere to escape to, as most Western countries are in the same position.

14. Should the masses realize that their smartphones, porn, video games, etc., are drugging them into passivity, and put them down — they’re going to be enraged.

15. The situation is now “too far gone”; there isn’t much the government can do to stop it. Betz expects things to kick off within five years. “How many more child murders can the country handle before it loses it?”

16. The best the state can do now is come up with a plan to mitigate the damages, including make provision for the continuation of government services regionally, and protect important cultural artefacts.

17. What can individuals do? Be healthy and fit. Prepare yourself psychologically for the possibility of civil war. Consider moving out of the cities now, or at least arrange a place in the country to escape to, if possible. Most of all: get to know your neighbors now. They will be your only defense once the police are gone.

18. You aren’t crazy or bad to be thinking and talking about this stuff now. Don’t let them shame you over your perfectly legitimate concerns.

In 2023, Betz published an article in Military Studies Magazine, titled “Civil War Comes To The West”. I won’t quote it at length here, because the main points I’ve already cited from his Louise Perry interview. But do read it, because in the piece, Betz elaborates. For example:

Consider the striking findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer over the last twenty years. ‘Distrust’, it concluded recently, ‘is now society’s default emotion.’ The situation in America, as shown in related research is acutely bad. As of 2019, even before the contested Biden election and the Covid-epidemic, 68 per cent of Americans agreed it was urgently necessary to repair levels of ‘confidence’ in society in government, with half averring that a ‘cultural sickness’ is what fading trust represented.

In sociological terms, what this collapse of trust reflects is a plunge in the stock of ‘social capital’, which is both a kind of ‘superglue’, a factor of societal cohesion, as well as a ‘lubricant’ that allows otherwise disparate groups in society to get along.[viii] That it is in decline is disputed by no one, and neither is anyone seriously unclear on the unhappy consequences.

More:

In terms of economic financialization, debt issuance, and consumption, the West has reached the end of the line, which means that a gigantic gap in expectation of well-being is opening. If there is one other thing that the literature on revolution agrees upon it is that expectation gaps are dangerous. Again, simply put, a time-honoured means of controlling the rise of incipient mobs is the provision by the ruling powers of ‘bread and circuses’, in other words basic consumption and cheap entertainment—the efficacy of both of which is rapidly attenuating in the present day.

To conclude this section, it can be said that a generation ago all Western countries could still be described as to a large degree cohesive nations, each with a greater or lesser sense of common identity and heritage. By contrast, all now are incohesive political entities, jigsaw puzzles of competing identity-based tribes, living in large part in virtually segregated ‘communities’ competing over diminishing societal resources increasingly obviously and violently. Moreover, their economies are mired in a structural malaise leading, inevitably in the view of several knowledgeable observers to systemic collapse.

Betz says that the triumph of identity politics throughout the West is a leading factor in bringing about civil war:

Identity politics may be defined as politics in which people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. It is overtly post-national. It is this above all that makes civil conflict in the West not merely likely but practically inevitable, in my view.

The peculiarity of contemporary Western multiculturalism, relative to examples of other heterogenous societies, is threefold. Firstly, it is in the ‘sweet spot’ with respect to theories of civil war causation, specifically the supposed problem of coordination costs is diminished in a situation where White majorities (trending rapidly toward large minority status in some cases) live alongside multiple smaller minorities.

Secondly, thus far what has been practiced is a sort of ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ in which in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity—notably in voting—are acceptable for all groups except Whites for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order.

Thirdly, because of the above what has emerged is a perception that the status quo is invidiously unbalanced, which provides an argument for revolt on the part of the White majority (or large minority) that is rooted in stirring language of justice. From a strategic communications perspective, a morally inflected narrative which has a clearly articulated grievance, a plausible and urgent remedy, and a receptive conscience community is powerful.

‘Great Replacement’ theory is an expression of this narrative. ‘Downgrading’ is the term by which it is described in civil war theory. It refers to the perception of a dominant group that what is occurring to them is,

…a situation of status reversal, not just political defeat. Dominant groups go from a situation where, one moment, they get to decide whose language is spoken, whose laws are enforced, and whose culture is revered, to a situation where they do not.

The elites have demonized Renaud Camus, the (left-wing, gay, atheist) intellectual who came up with the Great Replacement concept, and have grotesquely mischaracterized it in popular discourse as some sort of racist fantasy. It is not! Read this English-language translation of some of Camus’s essays. It describes our reality — the one the ruling class prefers that we not notice. Not sure if it’s paywalled, but the US academic Nathan Pinkoski’s essay on Camus is well worth reading.

This week in Europe, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unnerved NATO allies in part by saying that the days of the United States paying for Europe’s defense are coming to an end. America has to shore up its own borders, he said, and pivot towards China. This is what Europe faces now:

European countries have been able to afford their generous welfare states because they have been able to count on America defending them. This could not possibly have gone on forever, and now it’s coming to an end — not a sudden end, but an end. European voters are going to have to face stark guns-or-butter choices. They’re doing this in a time when most European economies are weak, and in which most western European nations (not Central European ones!) are badly divided because of mass migration and multiculturalism. Just yesterday, just over one week before German elections, another Islamic asylum seeker drove a car into a crowd there. Think about this as you ponder David Betz’s forecast.

Listening to the Perry interview with Betz, I realized that Donald Trump really is our only hope for avoiding the same fate. As jarring as his shock therapy is for the country, if he weren’t there tearing down the structures and policies that have dragged us into decline — the same things that Prof. Betz identified, and which were advanced by the Democratic Party and the GOP alike (or at best not effectively opposed).

‘Who Wants To Believe In UFOs?’

Here is Clare Coffey, writing in the science journal The New Atlantis, about the two fundamental types of people who are interested in UFOs: explorers and esotericists. Excerpts:

The explorers are the people whose picture of UFOs and their place in the cosmos is basically congruent with a good science fiction yarn. Their vision of flying saucers and gray aliens on stainless steel tables in top-secret labs dominated popular culture for about the first fifty years of UFO presence in it: E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Men in Black, Independence Day, Lilo and Stitch. In the explorer framework, aliens are other rational biological forms anchored to another place in the universe, who, with the help of unimaginably advanced technology, are for their own reasons surreptitiously visiting our planet. In this framework, all the purported deceptions, all the layers of security clearances, all the years of confusion stem from obvious political imperatives. Earthly governments need to manage a potential biohazard, avoid mass panic, and corner the technological benefits for themselves while also coordinating with other governments.

Explorers are becoming passé, she says. What’s up with the esotericists? More:

Esotericists are UFO enthusiasts who believe that UFOs, rather than the emissaries of the new world beyond the great ocean of space, are manifestations of parts of our world that are hidden to us. UFOs might be relict Atlanteans in undersea bases. They might be the inhabitants of an interior Earth less solid and lifeless than we posit. They may be interdimensional beings only intermittently manifesting in corporeal form. They may be time travelers from the future, or the past. They may be fairies or angels. They may be the star people of myth and oral histories, not traveling from their own civilization via unimaginably advanced technologies, but part of and overseeing our own history in ways we have forgotten, appearing and disappearing by a type of motion that is more truly alien to us than a spaceship could ever be. Most importantly, they are not over there as with the explorers, but in here — part of our world, but qualitatively different rather than quantitatively removed.

Or, she writes, they might be the Biblical Nephilim. There are factions within these factions, in Coffey’s model:

Both explorers and esotericists have negating modes: those who accept the premise that something fishy is going on, but who reject the proposed payoff. The negating explorers are the people who believe the UFOs are nothing more than a massive psyop: still conspiratorial, still political–technological in framework, but deflationary as to new interstellar possibilities. The negating esotericists, on the other hand, track with other esotericists in their relation to materialism and the constraints of secular academic public reason — but the negating esotericists eschew materialism in favor of an order that both transcends the natural world and interacts with it in ways that are by this point mostly pretty legible.

I can’t possibly to justice to the intricacy of Coffey’s discussion of the theories of these various factions and how they interact. But the real meat of the essay is Coffey’s discussion of how the entire discussion of UFOs (whatever they ultimately are) cannot be reconciled with our disenchanted modern model of reality:

The disinformation-non-enjoyer needs UFOs to be, not merely irrelevant, but illusory. They must be covered with contempt, not merely approached with caution or detachment. Anything else compromises the sense of a socially shared, collectively agreed-upon, long-familiar universe. By anointing science as more than a legitimate form of inquiry into the visible world, as the inquiry whose methods both fully reveal and define the extent of its reality, we have as a culture perhaps bought ourselves a unique sense of stability and permanence in our collective representations. We may not feel at home in the world, but we have felt at home in our model of the world for a long time. The disinformation-non-enjoyer, usually someone invested in stability, authority, education — none of them bad things — responds to the rumor of the UFO not as an oddity, but as a threat.

But what, Coffey says, are the esotericists getting out of the UFO story? A few things, but ultimately, she says, they are fed up with the disenchanted machine universe, and want out.

Do please read the whole thing. It’s really thought-provoking.

So, why does your diarist — 90 percent negating esotericist who thinks it’s all ultimately demonic, but 10 percent thinking maybe there's more to it — get out of this story? Even though I write about it a lot, I certainly don’t enjoy it. I wish these things would go away. I don’t need them to re-enchant reality for me — I’m a believing Christian who accepts as given the existence of a spiritual realm interacting with the material one. I believe in miracles, angels, demons, the whole shebang. And I believe that generally is a more truthful model for how reality really works than the disenchanted materialist one. Read Living In Wonder for more.

No, I care about this story because I read it as a harbinger of apocalypse — if not the Apocalypse, then certainly an apocalypse. I believe that these things, whatever they are, are real, and that they are “inter-dimensional” — a word that could mean demons, straight up, or some other sort of entity. Their existence, if proven, would dramatically upend humanity’s understanding of itself and of reality. I have a strong sense that they are part of a coming mass religious deception, one that will have catastrophic real-world effects. I want people, especially my fellow Christians, to pay attention to this thing because it is probably going to be one of the most important things to happen to humanity — and because I think it is fundamentally evil.

Hey, I could be wrong. Nobody really knows, do they? But I’m not wrong about this: these things are not going away. Unless you believe it’s entirely a psyop by the government — a highly implausible claim, though no doubt there has been some psyopping by the state over the decades — the UFO phenomenon is accelerating into public consciousness, because the various encounters people have with them (Navy jet pilots, farmers in fields, an “experiencer” summoning orbs and filming them repeatedly) keep coming out. The US Government keeps drip, drip, dripping credible information, for whatever reasons, good or bad. Whistleblowers who were in a position to know what they were talking about are speaking out more and more.

My point is this: the world is becoming more enchanted. This phenomenon, whatever it ultimately is, is a blowtorch through the bars of the iron cage of rationalism. Again: I can’t tell you what they are. I can only say what I think they are, and that’s all you can do too. What we should be able to agree on — and increasingly, we will — is that Attention Must Be Paid. This phenomenon really is a threat to materialism and strict rationalism. It is also a threat to modern forms of Christianity that have sidelined or denied the weird and the hierophantic.

If you want to read more about this stuff, I recommend starting with Diana Pasulka’s American Cosmic, about the intersection of UFO culture with technology and religion. Also worth reading: the late Evangelical Bible scholar Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm. Journalist Nick Redfern’s Final Events, from 2011, is about a group of government officials and workers who believe UFOs are demonic and who have tried to sabotage projects to engage them. It’s pretty far out there, but it’s uncanny how Redfern wrote 14 years ago about strange things that are now mainstream within UFO/UAP discourse, owing to government disclosure and whistleblower testimony. Jacques Vallée’s 1969 book Passport To Magonia is a canonical text connecting UFO testimonies to myth and folklore. Here is an online version of the Orthodox hieromonk Seraphim Rose’s 1970s classic Orthodoxy And The Religion Of The Future, which contains a section (starting here on page 98) in which Father Seraphim characterized the UFO phenomenon as a clear apocalyptic sign heralding the appearance of the Antichrist.

And for that matter, though it is not really about UFOs (that’s only one chapter), read my book Living In Wonder, which is a kind of guide to a world that is fast re-enchanting, whether we want it to or not. You need to understand these things.

I invite you readers to submit in the comments your recommendations for good books to read to understand the phenomenon.

I wish you all a lovely weekend, and a happy Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate. Today is my 58th birthday. It’s funny, but the older you get, the less these things matter. Life becomes just one damn thing after another. But sometimes, it brings wonderful and surprising things — like the buddy you drank beer with in Bavaria, who was irritated because big shots wouldn’t even talk to a man with his views, returning one year later to the same city, in global triumph, to announce to the same high-and-mighties the coming of a new order in the West. Never quit hoping, y’all.

I leave for the ARC Forum conference in London on Sunday, and will be in the UK all next week, writing from there. Any aspiring British populist politicians want to have a beer with Your Working Boy? Could be that good things happen for you later. Ha!