Many of you heard my recent conversation about immigration policy, and a few of the comments afterward made me realize that I should have provided more context for the discussion.
Immigration lawyer here. I think one of the defining characteristics of this age is an inability to separate policy goals from personal moral sentiments. It’s gotten so bad that we end up relying for civil order just on the inertia of laws and policies made in the past. Take asylum law as an example. The definition of a “refugee” is very specific. It covers, for example, a fear of returning to your country because of persecution based on your political affiliation. However, most of our asylum applicants are fleeing gangs in Central America or are women from the same region fleeing domestic abuse. And the gangs are real, and they’re scary, and the domestic abuse is often horrific. But it doesn’t meet the current laws. And we lawyers and advocates and judges who are liberal-leaning can shake our heads and shrug and say, “What can you do? The law is the law. Damn that law.” But as far as I know, nobody has ever proposed changing it. If we did change it, basically every person in Mexico and Central America would qualify for asylum. And nobody seems to want that. Trump says out loud he doesn’t want it, to boos and jeers. Biden, to crickets, works out complicated deals where Mexico detains migrants on their side of the border where they then die in horrific fires. We’ve become profoundly dishonest with ourselves about what we want and what is good for us as a people. Nobody out there, at least in my community, is having any kind of rational discussion about what we want out of our asylum program, or what our goals are for our H1B program (which we use to import most of our engineers, doctors, and tech workers), who stands to benefit and who stands to lose. What are the implications for our democracy and sense of nationalism? How do we square that with our economic wants? Who do we want here? Skilled? Unskilled? Christian? Hindu? Very conservative Venezuelans? Very liberal Europeans? How do we balance labor with personal pity? Nobody is talking about it. And not talking is making us dumber. We’re like medieval peasants seeking shelter in a building made by some past civilization that we no longer know how to repair or engineer.
There's something that Americans who haven't had experience of living in a poor third-world country for at least a little bit of time do not understand: that poor people aren't a species, but a very diverse group who have very diverse viewpoints about themselves. When I lived in a South Asian country I came to understand that many extremely poor people had middle-class values and aspirations for themeslves, and many others didn't.
We should want, here, to accept for permanent immigration status those people whose values make them good candidates for successful assimilation because they have a strong sense of themselves as sharing *our* basic values, regardless of the specifics of their cultures.
But of course the second and subsequent generations may betray that expectation. But if you fail to even attempt to choose wisely, you will end up with a very bad result.
Unfortunately, the people tasked with enforcing the conveyance of our values have lost faith in those values, and would actually prefer to replace them with other values [which are known to produce 2nd & 3rd world outcomes).
There is also a cruelty to taking a country's best and most ambitious. I'm Canadian and our whole economic strategy now is to bring in a million immigrants per year to prop up our insane housing bubble and take a share of our debt.
We then hollow out other regions. My wife is Punjabi and two-thirds of young people in that state now leave the country, many to Canada, leaving the more reactionary and less educated. It's sad.
You say "We then hollow out other regions," emphasizing the blame on the countries accepting immigrants. But wouldn't it be more accurate to say something like, "their home countries PUSH the motivated and intelligent out of their countries"? If those countries adopted a more capitalistic system that rewards hard work and motivation, then the motivated wouldn't feel compelled to seek greener pastures, right?
I mean, you aren't wrong, although India is pretty capitalist. It just has major issues with kin-based corruption and a lot of the young, educated and capable who would traditionally be there reforming are skipping country and bringing their families with them (which is why there is no coherent alternative to the BJP).
It's nice getting to claim the cream of their crop (sounds gross to say it like that), but we are leaving India in a situation where they will become increasingly more theocratic and less liberal (which creates problems for us, because we want to keep as aligned with them as possible against the authoritarian regimes).
Those regions aren't hollowed out. Immigrants from South Asia maintain a connection to their home countries now; use the prosperity they achieve in the US and Canada to build homes and improve the lives of extended families.
To some degree, yes, but you can't lose two-thirds of your young people and maintain a functioning culture. The money sent back can keep the lights on, but there's a reason this is occurring alongside a massive spike in crime and drug use in Punjab. Lots of them also bring their parents and families as soon as they can.
The biggest issue for India as a while is that it already has major problems with kin-based corruption. A lot of the young and energetic who would traditionally be there combatting this corruption have simply given up and left the country. That's why no coherent answer to the BJP seems to be appearing, and one-party rule is strangling their democratic institutions with journalists and academics legitimately fearing being killed for criticizing those in power.
The pace of change and globalization has put a lot of countries on edge, but India's status as a liberal democracy is definitely in question.
You don't see 2/3 of young people leaving unless they already see no future in staying.
Regarding "maintaining culture", Ireland lost a massive portion of its populace to emigration during the potato famine. I haven't seen a demographic breakdown, but I'm certain the emigrants skewed heavily towards the young. I wouldn't be surprised at all if 2/3 of the young people left, yet Irish culture is still a thing.
Perhaps it wasn't a "functioning culture" in the 1840s. I don't feel qualified to have an opinion on that.
India was never a liberal democracy. That's a fiction.
India is a conglomeration of different cultures, religions, languages etc. etc. etc. forced into pretending they've made one big well-functioning nation. Such artificial constructs always depend--as did, for example, Yugoslavia--on a really tough authoritarian leader with the means--good and not so good--of holding things together. You've got to crush dissent, which always turns out poorly on the individual human level.
Yes and no. India got rid of the main fissure (Hindu vs Muslim) during partition. Hindus make up 80 percent of the population and the rest are fairly spread throughout India, so that it is mostly a case of a secure Hindu majority feeling comfortable granting rights to minority groups they don't really fear. That wasn't the case with Yugoslavia. India also has lots of cultures, but none are particularly favoured, and although there are lots of languages, the Brits left English as a universal language between them. Indians as a whole have a pretty strong identity of being Indians.
They also haven't really relied on a strong authoritarian leader to hold together until now. There have been occasions involving Sikh separatists that needed to be put down with military force and periods where conflict broke out between the religious groups and local state actors sided with one or the other, but these were not really the norm and the national government usually legitimately tried to protect the minorities.
It's possible the Hindu nationalism of the BJP may result in some of the northern states that have more Sikhs and Muslims split off further, but Indians know they are in a tough part of the globe and being part of a larger power helps protect them from China and Pakistan (which had previously been very hard on the Muslims in Bangladesh).
There are still plenty of formerly East Pakistani refugees living in stateless misery in India.
Twenty percent of the population is a very large number of people in India, and Hindu/Muslim tensions break out all the time. The fragile position of Pakistani Hindus and Sikhs (not to even mention Pakistani Christians) is always an opportunity for reciprocal violence in India. Kashmir is still an unresolved problem.
Indians and Pakistanis living in the West remain overwhelmingly conservative; well-educated modern girls born in the US, Canada and the UK are still being sent "home" for bridegrooms.
Both India and Pakistan continue to tap dance with China as tensions wax and wane.
This is indeed basically the (excellent) tl;dr of what likely requires a book (the "good news" I guess is that this will always be something that consumes American thought, so you've got time).
The thing about immigration that is so goddamn frustrating is that it's obviously a political issue, but it's the politics that poison it. It's always struck me as someone who is emotionally obligated to be in favor of immigration--because of my partner and her family being not just immigrants, but immigrants who have by probably every measure increased the value of our culture in their own small ways, far more than I ever will (i.e. the real American dream)--as a ridiculous thing for us to moralize about through partisan lenses. Either immigration provides a net positive or a net negative, and it seems to me, after watching the debate be had multiple times really as long as I can remember, there's never a clear answer because of the aforementioned scale you discussed.
Love him or hate him, Douglas Murray made a very compelling and impassioned plea in a debate once back around 2015 about the need not to stop refugees piling into Europe (a place geographically, culturally, and yes, ethnically, far more homogeneous than the United States), but to slow it down. I said then and I maintain now that we can't use Europe as a barometer for most of the things that we seem to use it for here (e.g. health care, maternity/paternity leave, etc, as well as immigration and demographics), but I got the sense that what he was saying was that no one can just let demographics change THAT rapidly without having some very unpleasant downstream effects that will only be made worse if we moralize about why we should or shouldn't be doing this (and we did indeed see those effects, producing the vile mass assaults on women in Germany on NYE 2015-2016). If you claim that letting immigrants of a completely different culture and language arrive that quickly and inorganically (at least without some sort of plan to house them and then integrate them gradually and gracefully into a brand new culture) is a moral imperative, and something the cultures with the horrible stain of colonialism and racism on their hands are OBLIGATED to do, then the unaddressed trade-offs will be catastrophic and the only natural response for a lot of preexisting citizens will be to regress into nativist paranoia. And understandable as that might be, given the circumstances, we know that it's an objectively heinous way to look at your fellow man. And conversely, if one goes into the immigration argument already armed with moralizing platitudes about purity and ethnic taint, then, well, the nativist paranoia is already in place and is making the argument for the moralizers of the other position. This is why, to use your words, practicality is simply the only way to look at this issue if you're serious about it. And so many people preoccupied with the issue clearly aren't.
And indeed in the end, it didn't matter, because Douglas Murray's plea was deemed racist and intolerant because he expressed mere skepticism of the methodology being employed (or rather, NOT being employed; it was like a fire hose with no one manning it). However, he (like you) knew his history and understood that rapid demographic shifts, especially in places undergoing anti-establishment strains of populism and political divisiveness, are probably one of the best ways to, if you'll pardon the inevitable pun, Balkanize your nation. Obviously, this has been where my own head has been at for...at this point three or so years of research, but there is no other place in 20th century history that provides terrifyingly valuable lessons for how ugly things COULD get in the United States than what's now called the Yugosphere. The methodology of violent radicals these days (spree shooters, assassination attempts like on Kavanaugh, etc) seems more akin to the Troubles in Ireland than anything else, and I cringe saying this, but I hope that's where it stays. If we go down the path of ethnically defining ideological systems (as the Serbs did with Catholics and Muslims, and the Croats did with Orthodox folks, for example), we are done. There's no other way to put it: done. Because you do not come back from that; it's never clean and the hate it engenders lasts far longer than America has even existed.
Anyway. Good post. Looking forward to the book. Because...c'mon man: we know you have it in you.
Well said Alex (big fan btw). Can you point me towards any good books or podcasts on the Yugoslav wars? It's something I want to learn more about but the way it is remembered (or ignored) in our popular conscience doesn't give me much hope for a no BS telling of it.
One thing I would say that makes that example different to the US is there is a deeper history between the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians than there is in the US.
Also thanks for listening man! Glad to hear you enjoy the work. Fingers crossed the thing I’m doing manages to provide at least a decent general overview of Yugoslavia. I probably won’t be able to avoid revisiting it in the future, especially the Tito years and the collapse in the 90s.
Oh I've embarrassed Darryl enough on that score. But yeah all those guys have influenced me, both in style but especially in their thinking. Fingers crossed Sam comes back one day. His voice in our space is very missed. I'm planning to give his 1877 strikes and Pinkerton ep's relistens alongside Whose America.
The podcast I’ve been listening to as a supplement to my research is the History of Yugoslavia, and while that seems to have gone on hiatus for now, it’s a good general primer up until 1941; good for context. In terms of books, I’ve been using the 1999 edition of Misha Glenny’s The Balkans (but he has a newer edition that goes to 2012), which is also good stuff. I haven’t actually studied anything post-Tito--my gig has been basically the Kingdom years of 1918-1941 and the Nazi partition of 1941-1945--but Glenny also has a book called The Fall or Yugoslavia and I can attest to his quality as a historian/writer; another one I’ve seen recommended is The Collapse of Yugoslavia by Alastair Finlan. And while the stuff I’ve been reading is less recent it’s by no means less relevant; there’s actually an excellent book called Balkan Genocides by Paul Mojzes. And if you want a contemporaneous (from around 1937) western perspective, you can’t go wrong with the MASSIVE Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West; limitations and all, it’s fucking VIVID and brings the region under the Prince regent Paul to life (plus the edition I have has an excellent forward written by Christopher Hitchens). There’s a lot of more granular stuff I’ve been using but I can’t recommend these books enough.
It's not specifically about the Yugoslav wars, but a book I found to be very helpful in trying to understand the immensely complex history of the region, is one called 'The Balkans' by Mark Mazower. It's about twenty years ago since I read it, but I remember it as a very well written and enjoyable read. In fact, I might even dig it out and read it again!
One other thing that needs to be taken into account for the grand trends to make any sense - the middle-class-dominated bourgeois America of the inter- and post-war years is a historical aberration. For most of America's history it has had a political and social culture much more in common with those of current third-world countries than the Norman Rockwell-ified images of our parents and grandparent's days that have come down to us.
- Political corruption was common, including violence. (Pitched gun battles over rival stuffed ballot boxes in Huey Long's New Orleans. The various Bourbon/Redeemer machines in the South, and the urban ethnic machines in the Northern cities.)
- So was intercommunal violence. (Ku Kluxers, obviously, but also anti-Chinese mobbing on the West Coast, anti-Catholic agitation in the North-East, anti-German laws during the World Wars, and whatever the hell was going on with all the Mormons getting shot and burned out of most of the midwest en route to Utah.)
The thing that let America prosper anyway was the availability of open space to develop into, such that those displaced by corruption or violence could always find somewhere new to start doing their own thing away from most everyone else. (I know, this is just the Frederick Jackson Turner thesis, but it does have explanatory power).
Now, obviously, we don't have that pressure valve anymore. We've stopped being a settler-colonial society, and started being much more like the old countries of Europe, with settled populations, entrenched elites, and complex interplays between state, capital, and knowledge-making functions. If we're going to find a way forward we need to stop thinking of ourselves in terms of what America was - it isn't that anymore, and can't be made that. Instead, we need to draw lessons from things like what America is morphing into.
For my part, I'm trying to hoover up every book on the Habsburg and Holy Roman Empires I can get my hands on.
Good post. After WW2, the whole world accept America was in ruins, and needed American labor, resources, and credit to rebuild itself. At our peak, 30% of the world’s harvested resources came to America. That is really a once-in-a-millennium economic aberration and we are now returning back toward the historical norm. We and all of the developed world have mature, post-industrial economies, and the fact that our top elites are talking about things like universal basic income is a hint that we’re not going back to every solid man expecting a solid job.
Is the argument that it's impossible for a continent-scale nation to arrange its economy in such a way that instead of overconsuming and exporting its resources, it focused on careful stewardship of both its natural and human capital? Because it seems like that should be do-able, and it seems like that is exactly what a hereditary monarch would do.
Yes, but democracy, with it's by-construction 100 IQ, is like living under the perpetual rule of that spoiled or mentally unwell son. I love how we moderns know so much more than all the humans who lived before us.
Ha! Well. I love to read what I can but the audio versions sure help. Thank you so much for fighting the good fight. I’m sure many like me are emboldened with the information and example you provide.
The stone cold reality is that much behavior and culture is more than nurture, it is biological and downstream of epigenetic events. It is possible to change this hard wiring, but that would require sustained actions that no one has the stomach for. If you import enough Haitians, you will get Haiti.
Very strong executive moves will be required, on the same level as Andrew Jackson, to begin deportation and stripping of "birthright" citizenship. But this is the same prerequisite to change anything of consequence in the current system.
Very much enjoyed this and I am wondering if you might be able to elaborate on a few key points. During your immigration discussion you mentioned all we can do is “prepare to survive in the world that’s coming”.
Can you elaborate on what exactly you think the world is that is coming? Your debate partners took for granted that losing a white majority in the US is a negative without going into exactly why. If you could elaborate, even briefly it would be hugely appreciated!
As a borderline middleclass person from a relatively rich country (Norway) that bought into the globalization idea I feel like I'm stuck in a scissor grip. On one hand are the poorest but plentiful people of the world, on the other hand are the richest and most influential people of the world. I compete with the former for jobs and living space while I compete with the latter in the market of buying property and starting business. The squeeze is becoming tighter every year and I feel quite stuck.
I agree with your sentiment that I'd love for the good hearted migrants to thrive, but what is the actual cost of accepting so many of them? In recent years American style racial rhetoric has been gaining ground in the media, and people are given a bigger bludgeon here in the form of hate speech laws and certain groups being a protected class.
People are flowing in way faster than they are assimilating and the native population is forced to adapt to the newcomers more than ever before. Even in the event that mass deportation was on the political table I doubt it would be enforced. Currently medical professionals are refusing to age verify undocumented refugees/asylum seekers/migrants, so how can we expect enforcers to use violence to force women, children, and men to the airport?
Worse yet, imagine a scenario where we take ALL the "good" people in, but leave ALL the "bad" people. Those bad people would still start families and distill the values and social conditions that make their countries bad places to live in the first place.
It is a very complicated issue, and I wish there were easy solutions for it. For the time being I'm at a loss.
It isn't very complicated. You put you, your family, your town and your country before anyone else. Your ancestors survived the aeons for you to inherit your homeland. Your first obligations are to you and your people. It isn't any more difficult than that.
It is nigh impossible to immigrate into the Amish community, but I think it is time to do so. Immigration is one of many concerns for the coming failure of the system. Welcome aboard Darryl Yoder. 😁
I agree with your point that it essentially a moot point now. The same is true in my country, though the situation is a little different as "we" colonised the countries a lot of these people come from, and "we" didn't forcibly import slaves.
While the shifting demographic that is clearly being deliberately engineered raises issues, it doesn't have to be how Dems will would have us believe. I keep saying this but it's not whites keeping Texas red, it's the conservative Latinos keeping it red despite the illiberal woke leftoid whites.
Republicans need to embrace this.growing demographic as it ought to be their natural home, but the GOP are corrupt cowards and are still salty the Dems stole their country club demographic from under them.
I have lived in South America for years, and so many South Americans express sadness that the US is exporting woke culture across their continent. They would love to go to America and vote pro-American values, but the pro-American side is keeping them out.
Woke culture is individualism turned up to 11 dressed up as collectivism. Give people a million identities and you give them a million products to buy to express those identities. You get to pretend your part of some bigger movement without doing any of the actual work and people are more than happy to sell you that illusion any way they can. Used to be an American or a southerner or a German American or a union man or a veteran. All pretty broad groups, now they've vivisected society and carved it up into pieces that I don't believe can be reattached to each other. Solving woke culture would require solving unrestrained marketing by our corporate oligarchy and that's something that we have no capacity for in our "democracy" (or "republic" depending on the particular delusion you hold onto).
I could be wrong here, but don't see woke culture as something that needs to be solved, necessarily. I see it as a phase that just needs to run it's course. (Are we on the Right just as to blame for keeping it alive by talking so much about it? Maybe. I remember Eminem took shots at Donald Trump, and Trump never said a word back to him. Eminem didn't say anything afterwards, that I'm aware of) Something so irrational can't withstand reality for too long. (Just like the hippies of the 60s raised the Reagan voters of the 80s)
And you say that woke culture is individualism turned up to 11, but that hasn't been my experience with it. I've noticed that you're only allowed to identify as things that the woke culture deem inferior (trans, animals, a healthy fat person, black, etc... [it's a whole different conversation, but I have no doubt the Left considers non-whites inferior]). Any deviation from their dogmas is met with pure rage, so I'm not convinced that woke culture is individualistic. But tell me if I'm looking at this incorrectly
I think the counter would be that ignoring these people until recently is what allowed them to take over every institution and introduce a fledgling police state to protect their power and impose their ideology. The defensive line conservatives are currently trying to hold is whether teachers should be able to show our 2nd graders pornography, or whether doctors should be removing the genitals of little children, should give you pretty good idea of how much ground was given up without a fight while we were ignoring them.
I see what you mean. If the Left took the approach I suggested in my first response, then they wouldn't have as much institutional power. You obviously have to really fight (if that's even the correct word to use) to make it even a consideration that kids should be taught pornographic material or that gender can magically change depending on how you feel. Imagine the rationality that would still exist if the Right didn't take the approach I suggested.
I would consider plenty of the in tribe signals of the current counterculture to be just as woke but in a complete different direction. I don't see a meaningful difference in someone with a pride flag on their Subaru or a Daniel Defense sticker or thin blue line sticker on their truck. I would call "woke" simply in tribe signalling for the vanguard of our current dominant culture, the counterculture has its own version. There are no natural constituencies being formed here on either side of this, if every ideology can be made into its own identity that's a very powerful tool for control. "Woke" itself has become a identity to rally against.
Maybe I'm not stating it correctly. I don't think there is an underlying dogma to wokeness. Dogma would require some kind of stability. There is none. The trans phenomenon is a great example. This is a demographic that basically didn't exist a decade ago. Now it's taking oxygen from what previously were liberal issues of women's empowerment and homosexual rights and subsuming both with obvious contradictions to nearly everyone's lived experience. It's delusional assuming there's going to be some mass intersectional movement based on this at the ballot box. Corporations are happy to sell you crap to this effect just like they're happy to sell shirts with crosses and veterans graves on it. Politicians are happy because wearing these impotent individual identities checks boxes that require no actual work to maintain the illusion of. There's plenty of them on the right too, Lindsey Graham still exists somehow.
I believe the entire, unintentional (hopefully) point of all this is to perpetute the neoliberal economic world order the west continues to utilize. If you need any better example of this I can't point to a better one then the most radical elected Congressmen of the squad failing to even get a floor vote on Medicare for all. Not even a vote under a wholly demonrat controlled government. Another more recent one was the Dems siding with the establishment republicans to stop the railway workers strike. The tranny flag wavers can tell about fascism all they want but when we actually have a government cow towing to shareholder interests against the workers and people of this country they can't identify what's right before their faces.
I've probably done a complete shit job at explaining my point but I feel this stuff is all flash and no cash when it comes to actually exacting meaningful reforms in any direction. There's always another shiny bobble for the vanguard left to latch on to and the vanguard right to be mad about. The trans are going to be really salty when they switch to group marriages or zoophilia or whatever nonsense is coming next.
"we" didn't forcibly import slaves. The "we" that involves "me" weren't even alive then. My ancestors were farming in Scandinavia until after the Civil War, when they came to North America fleeing potato blight induced starvation. So leave the "we" out of this. There is no "we" here.
First, you make an excellent point about a perfect storm brewing. Combine a blasé national reaction to exploding violent crime, a bloated welfare state, inconceivable debt and deficit spending, the petrodollar on the rocks amid the backdrop of a 'speed wobbling' monetary policy, incompatible and mutually hostile foreign cultures, elite discouragement against assimilation, elite encouragement of hostility toward the incumbent culture, collapse in institutional trust, 10s of millions of low/no skilled workers, capital's dwindling reliance on this low/no skill labor (your point about FB's market cap), and what do you get? You get perhaps 20 million underemployed marauders, with less compunction than you about using violence to get what they want (or about waste dumping, or drunk driving, or fleeing scenes of accidents), and who know there is neither the capacity nor the appetite for policing the separating of native-borns from their stuff. We could someday be looking up at South Africa.
Second, it was frustrating that your guests failed to acknowledge:
(a) Any young person with family roots here going back 50+ years will be a stranger in their own land, IN THEIR LIFETIMES. This is not a worst case scenario - it's an inevitability. You can't stop it. You won't. We're already halfway there.
(b) Per point (a), the window is already closed. But even if it weren't, there is ZERO political will to close the gates and mass-deport, and that will be truer every year as the provenance of the average American becomes more exotic.
One guest kept saying something like, "this is our house, and WE decide the rules." Talk about missing the point: it's increasingly NOT your house to decide the rules. To the extent that it is, your elected leaders are *running* from that sentiment. Tweeting about how things *ought* to be is less than a zero.
Your other guest was hung up on how there are still things that can be done - which is different from saying we can reverse the trend. Yes, crewmembers could have frantically bailed water out of the Titanic one teaspoon at a time, and it would have made them feel like they were doing something, but that's not the same as fixing the problem.
As for the window being closed: possibly. A much smaller federal govt with far fewer resources managed to deport millions of people back to Mexico in the early 20th century.
Throw in monetary incentives for self-deportation - and you might have a winner. Throw in some er...extrajudical fed-posty incentives, and you might enhance the the push-pull dynamic. Throw in retroactive revocation of anchor-baby citizenship. Not implying that any of the above is without moral costs, or that it is desirable , or probable, or that it's plausible in our current political paradigm - or even within our current system. The obstacles are of course the cheap labor lobby , the antiwhite lobby, and the dem-vote lobby (they buy votes with your tax money, genius!)
I agree DC. Immigration is a settled issue. We owe it to our new neighbors to help them understand and embrace our constitutional values. This is the issue that is not settled. The fact is they came here expecting as much. We must come together and rally around the flag. It’s the only way forward.
The problem is that in a democracy the lowest hanging political fruit is exploiting group differences and intensifying polarization. This is especially true when ethnic and class differences often track with each other.
This is the point that needs further emphasis and elaboration. Intuitively, it seems that all of these different groups could figure out how to be happily themselves, alongside one another, if the ring of power was out of reach...
The other problem is that we didn't just import a bunch of poor people to harvest crops. We imported an entirely new elite class with entirely different values, who never had any intention of assimilating beyond surficial appearance. I've been in the tech industry for 25 years and watched this all happen in real time. The "values" we're supposed to transmit are now shared by a minority of this country's occupants.
That's only true when numerically-viable coalitions can be built out of those group differences. Things break down a bit under conditions of either very low turnout (as in CA local elections, where any organization that can reliably turn out even comparatively-small numbers of voters can wield extremely disproportionate power) or very high turnout (where the game shifts to manipulating the Overton Window).
But if we did that how would the media make money, how would social media drive engagement, how would the non profits profit, how would the politicians get elected.
I agree completely. With that said, I’m old enough to remember when what seemed like everyone, “rallied around the flag”, on certain issues. We could agree to disagree but we loved our country and what it stood for. The dreamer in me believes a strong majority of our country, new and old citizens alike, also believes the US is inherently a “good” country and would be willing to “die on that hill”. The cynic in me believes our government and MSM are rotten to the core and we’re all fucked.
I'd like to agree for the most part. I believe we are going through the natural cycles of empire. I just hope we make it out the other side. We can look at history for guides, but I think we are in uncharted territory with globalization, internet/AI, and doomsday weapons.
Bad times make strong men doesn't guarantee strong men making good times.
That was a great podcast. I think your guest who honed in on sovereignty and the one who, rightly I think, is concerned about a South Africa scenario were on point. While we have been groveling and apologizing; being, "compassionate", and concerned for everyone else, we have been replaced and dispossessed of our homeland and country. Game theory shows that people who pursue a group strategy will annihilate those who pursue an individualist strategy.
Given that heritage Americans, people of European/Christian descent, are the only people in post-America who do not hold a group identity, nor pursue an explicit group interest, we are up for a bad time. We are also the one group who must not hold a group identity. In fact, we live in an environment where it is perfectly acceptable to call for, "abolishing whiteness", and any call for white people organizing to pursue our common group interest is killed through social ostricization. I think we all can see what, "diversity", really means. To see how acceptable talk of our dispossession is, see Paul Krugman's 2018 video where he psychopathically says white working class people will have no more power and them protesting it is a problem. Or, see Barbara Spectre's similar proclamation for European dispossession. YouTube has of course taken them down, but you can find them on other channels.
This issue is not immigration. It was and is white, Europid and civilizational replacement through mass immigration. It was planned and it was explicit. In 2001 one of the biggest groups/proponents of mass immigration published a paper assessing mass immigration and what it meant for a particular demographic. It was written by Stephen Steinlight. The paper never mentions heritage Americans - not once. We were never taken into consideration. It behooves all of us to read this paper. We've been living in oblivion while other factions are planning, reassessing and planning still more as the situation progresses: https://cis.org/Report/Jewish-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography
The paper does mention how one group is going to approach the situation. Here is a snippet:
"For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas."
22 years have elapsed since then. We still haven't taken stock of the situation, organized in our interest and laid down a plan that will help us confront being a despised minority in our own homeland. It is time we do it. Other groups are a century into self organizing. We are late to the game. We know the theory. The fire beneath the kettle gets more fuel and oxygen by the day.
I first pondered The Great Replacement a year ago. It was a shocking wake up call - particularly as a committed, color blind individualist. I'll tackle it in a more comprehensive way in the coming months. We need to understand what it is, and have a plan to deal with it. https://periheliuslux.substack.com/p/is-the-great-replacement-real
The most shocking line in the podcast was that the number one group of kids put on puberty blockers are the children of Immigrants.
I think about how Malcolm X’ strict sanctions against extramarital sex and drug use compare with what went on in the 70’s with rampant drug use and sex in the ‘civil rights’ movement and what Jack Mueller says above about immigrants assimilating too well. I think there is some truth to this.
From what i see from my time in the northeast and the south is that immigrants that have a strong community are generally socially conservative, while those without become deracinated -- our countries fresh generation of red guards. Their ethnic identity has been supplanted with the simulacrum of an ethnic identity which is in fact just left wing activism
Just pissing in the wind here, but maybe balkanization is not as bad of an outcome as Xi’s security state. Any group that disrupts monoculture of the left via traditional ways of life is a potential ally. I know in my personal experience, i have a much easier time relating to immigrants than i do with middle and upper class wokies.
Excellent piece. Not sure if you've read this DC but this is a terrifying, sobering and at times comical read about what happens to an advanced society when the people who built it are replaced by those who don't share their values and despise their culture.
An orgy of racial grievance, violence, societal decay and corruption.
Glad you put this out. I prefer audio but I read this whole thing. Thanks DC for putting the effort into making your points as clear as possible. I do not have Twitter because I do not want my soul sucked out , but I can imagine the guff you would receive by saying or “tweeting” that immigration issue is settled!
The big question I am always concerned about is , can our economy , as it stands , survive the pressures that will be and already are being put upon it from mass unchecked immigration ? I see a major financial collapse on the horizon unless austerity measures are imposed on the middle class...and even that may be futile. ( I think I’m ready to be assimilated by the Borg!)
Immigration lawyer here. I think one of the defining characteristics of this age is an inability to separate policy goals from personal moral sentiments. It’s gotten so bad that we end up relying for civil order just on the inertia of laws and policies made in the past. Take asylum law as an example. The definition of a “refugee” is very specific. It covers, for example, a fear of returning to your country because of persecution based on your political affiliation. However, most of our asylum applicants are fleeing gangs in Central America or are women from the same region fleeing domestic abuse. And the gangs are real, and they’re scary, and the domestic abuse is often horrific. But it doesn’t meet the current laws. And we lawyers and advocates and judges who are liberal-leaning can shake our heads and shrug and say, “What can you do? The law is the law. Damn that law.” But as far as I know, nobody has ever proposed changing it. If we did change it, basically every person in Mexico and Central America would qualify for asylum. And nobody seems to want that. Trump says out loud he doesn’t want it, to boos and jeers. Biden, to crickets, works out complicated deals where Mexico detains migrants on their side of the border where they then die in horrific fires. We’ve become profoundly dishonest with ourselves about what we want and what is good for us as a people. Nobody out there, at least in my community, is having any kind of rational discussion about what we want out of our asylum program, or what our goals are for our H1B program (which we use to import most of our engineers, doctors, and tech workers), who stands to benefit and who stands to lose. What are the implications for our democracy and sense of nationalism? How do we square that with our economic wants? Who do we want here? Skilled? Unskilled? Christian? Hindu? Very conservative Venezuelans? Very liberal Europeans? How do we balance labor with personal pity? Nobody is talking about it. And not talking is making us dumber. We’re like medieval peasants seeking shelter in a building made by some past civilization that we no longer know how to repair or engineer.
Excellent as always.
There's something that Americans who haven't had experience of living in a poor third-world country for at least a little bit of time do not understand: that poor people aren't a species, but a very diverse group who have very diverse viewpoints about themselves. When I lived in a South Asian country I came to understand that many extremely poor people had middle-class values and aspirations for themeslves, and many others didn't.
We should want, here, to accept for permanent immigration status those people whose values make them good candidates for successful assimilation because they have a strong sense of themselves as sharing *our* basic values, regardless of the specifics of their cultures.
But of course the second and subsequent generations may betray that expectation. But if you fail to even attempt to choose wisely, you will end up with a very bad result.
Unfortunately, the people tasked with enforcing the conveyance of our values have lost faith in those values, and would actually prefer to replace them with other values [which are known to produce 2nd & 3rd world outcomes).
There is also a cruelty to taking a country's best and most ambitious. I'm Canadian and our whole economic strategy now is to bring in a million immigrants per year to prop up our insane housing bubble and take a share of our debt.
We then hollow out other regions. My wife is Punjabi and two-thirds of young people in that state now leave the country, many to Canada, leaving the more reactionary and less educated. It's sad.
You say "We then hollow out other regions," emphasizing the blame on the countries accepting immigrants. But wouldn't it be more accurate to say something like, "their home countries PUSH the motivated and intelligent out of their countries"? If those countries adopted a more capitalistic system that rewards hard work and motivation, then the motivated wouldn't feel compelled to seek greener pastures, right?
I mean, you aren't wrong, although India is pretty capitalist. It just has major issues with kin-based corruption and a lot of the young, educated and capable who would traditionally be there reforming are skipping country and bringing their families with them (which is why there is no coherent alternative to the BJP).
It's nice getting to claim the cream of their crop (sounds gross to say it like that), but we are leaving India in a situation where they will become increasingly more theocratic and less liberal (which creates problems for us, because we want to keep as aligned with them as possible against the authoritarian regimes).
Those regions aren't hollowed out. Immigrants from South Asia maintain a connection to their home countries now; use the prosperity they achieve in the US and Canada to build homes and improve the lives of extended families.
To some degree, yes, but you can't lose two-thirds of your young people and maintain a functioning culture. The money sent back can keep the lights on, but there's a reason this is occurring alongside a massive spike in crime and drug use in Punjab. Lots of them also bring their parents and families as soon as they can.
The biggest issue for India as a while is that it already has major problems with kin-based corruption. A lot of the young and energetic who would traditionally be there combatting this corruption have simply given up and left the country. That's why no coherent answer to the BJP seems to be appearing, and one-party rule is strangling their democratic institutions with journalists and academics legitimately fearing being killed for criticizing those in power.
The pace of change and globalization has put a lot of countries on edge, but India's status as a liberal democracy is definitely in question.
You don't see 2/3 of young people leaving unless they already see no future in staying.
Regarding "maintaining culture", Ireland lost a massive portion of its populace to emigration during the potato famine. I haven't seen a demographic breakdown, but I'm certain the emigrants skewed heavily towards the young. I wouldn't be surprised at all if 2/3 of the young people left, yet Irish culture is still a thing.
Perhaps it wasn't a "functioning culture" in the 1840s. I don't feel qualified to have an opinion on that.
India was never a liberal democracy. That's a fiction.
India is a conglomeration of different cultures, religions, languages etc. etc. etc. forced into pretending they've made one big well-functioning nation. Such artificial constructs always depend--as did, for example, Yugoslavia--on a really tough authoritarian leader with the means--good and not so good--of holding things together. You've got to crush dissent, which always turns out poorly on the individual human level.
Yes and no. India got rid of the main fissure (Hindu vs Muslim) during partition. Hindus make up 80 percent of the population and the rest are fairly spread throughout India, so that it is mostly a case of a secure Hindu majority feeling comfortable granting rights to minority groups they don't really fear. That wasn't the case with Yugoslavia. India also has lots of cultures, but none are particularly favoured, and although there are lots of languages, the Brits left English as a universal language between them. Indians as a whole have a pretty strong identity of being Indians.
They also haven't really relied on a strong authoritarian leader to hold together until now. There have been occasions involving Sikh separatists that needed to be put down with military force and periods where conflict broke out between the religious groups and local state actors sided with one or the other, but these were not really the norm and the national government usually legitimately tried to protect the minorities.
It's possible the Hindu nationalism of the BJP may result in some of the northern states that have more Sikhs and Muslims split off further, but Indians know they are in a tough part of the globe and being part of a larger power helps protect them from China and Pakistan (which had previously been very hard on the Muslims in Bangladesh).
There are still plenty of formerly East Pakistani refugees living in stateless misery in India.
Twenty percent of the population is a very large number of people in India, and Hindu/Muslim tensions break out all the time. The fragile position of Pakistani Hindus and Sikhs (not to even mention Pakistani Christians) is always an opportunity for reciprocal violence in India. Kashmir is still an unresolved problem.
Indians and Pakistanis living in the West remain overwhelmingly conservative; well-educated modern girls born in the US, Canada and the UK are still being sent "home" for bridegrooms.
Both India and Pakistan continue to tap dance with China as tensions wax and wane.
This is indeed basically the (excellent) tl;dr of what likely requires a book (the "good news" I guess is that this will always be something that consumes American thought, so you've got time).
The thing about immigration that is so goddamn frustrating is that it's obviously a political issue, but it's the politics that poison it. It's always struck me as someone who is emotionally obligated to be in favor of immigration--because of my partner and her family being not just immigrants, but immigrants who have by probably every measure increased the value of our culture in their own small ways, far more than I ever will (i.e. the real American dream)--as a ridiculous thing for us to moralize about through partisan lenses. Either immigration provides a net positive or a net negative, and it seems to me, after watching the debate be had multiple times really as long as I can remember, there's never a clear answer because of the aforementioned scale you discussed.
Love him or hate him, Douglas Murray made a very compelling and impassioned plea in a debate once back around 2015 about the need not to stop refugees piling into Europe (a place geographically, culturally, and yes, ethnically, far more homogeneous than the United States), but to slow it down. I said then and I maintain now that we can't use Europe as a barometer for most of the things that we seem to use it for here (e.g. health care, maternity/paternity leave, etc, as well as immigration and demographics), but I got the sense that what he was saying was that no one can just let demographics change THAT rapidly without having some very unpleasant downstream effects that will only be made worse if we moralize about why we should or shouldn't be doing this (and we did indeed see those effects, producing the vile mass assaults on women in Germany on NYE 2015-2016). If you claim that letting immigrants of a completely different culture and language arrive that quickly and inorganically (at least without some sort of plan to house them and then integrate them gradually and gracefully into a brand new culture) is a moral imperative, and something the cultures with the horrible stain of colonialism and racism on their hands are OBLIGATED to do, then the unaddressed trade-offs will be catastrophic and the only natural response for a lot of preexisting citizens will be to regress into nativist paranoia. And understandable as that might be, given the circumstances, we know that it's an objectively heinous way to look at your fellow man. And conversely, if one goes into the immigration argument already armed with moralizing platitudes about purity and ethnic taint, then, well, the nativist paranoia is already in place and is making the argument for the moralizers of the other position. This is why, to use your words, practicality is simply the only way to look at this issue if you're serious about it. And so many people preoccupied with the issue clearly aren't.
And indeed in the end, it didn't matter, because Douglas Murray's plea was deemed racist and intolerant because he expressed mere skepticism of the methodology being employed (or rather, NOT being employed; it was like a fire hose with no one manning it). However, he (like you) knew his history and understood that rapid demographic shifts, especially in places undergoing anti-establishment strains of populism and political divisiveness, are probably one of the best ways to, if you'll pardon the inevitable pun, Balkanize your nation. Obviously, this has been where my own head has been at for...at this point three or so years of research, but there is no other place in 20th century history that provides terrifyingly valuable lessons for how ugly things COULD get in the United States than what's now called the Yugosphere. The methodology of violent radicals these days (spree shooters, assassination attempts like on Kavanaugh, etc) seems more akin to the Troubles in Ireland than anything else, and I cringe saying this, but I hope that's where it stays. If we go down the path of ethnically defining ideological systems (as the Serbs did with Catholics and Muslims, and the Croats did with Orthodox folks, for example), we are done. There's no other way to put it: done. Because you do not come back from that; it's never clean and the hate it engenders lasts far longer than America has even existed.
Anyway. Good post. Looking forward to the book. Because...c'mon man: we know you have it in you.
Well said Alex (big fan btw). Can you point me towards any good books or podcasts on the Yugoslav wars? It's something I want to learn more about but the way it is remembered (or ignored) in our popular conscience doesn't give me much hope for a no BS telling of it.
One thing I would say that makes that example different to the US is there is a deeper history between the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians than there is in the US.
Also thanks for listening man! Glad to hear you enjoy the work. Fingers crossed the thing I’m doing manages to provide at least a decent general overview of Yugoslavia. I probably won’t be able to avoid revisiting it in the future, especially the Tito years and the collapse in the 90s.
No need to thank me. Thank you for the quality content. Appreciate the detailed response to the Yugo stuff too.
If anyone you should thank Darryl. My path went something like Daniele - Darryl - CJ - you and Sam from inward empire
Oh I've embarrassed Darryl enough on that score. But yeah all those guys have influenced me, both in style but especially in their thinking. Fingers crossed Sam comes back one day. His voice in our space is very missed. I'm planning to give his 1877 strikes and Pinkerton ep's relistens alongside Whose America.
Easy to understand why, they're all great at what they do. Good idea, those episodes are very useful companion episodes to Whose America!
The podcast I’ve been listening to as a supplement to my research is the History of Yugoslavia, and while that seems to have gone on hiatus for now, it’s a good general primer up until 1941; good for context. In terms of books, I’ve been using the 1999 edition of Misha Glenny’s The Balkans (but he has a newer edition that goes to 2012), which is also good stuff. I haven’t actually studied anything post-Tito--my gig has been basically the Kingdom years of 1918-1941 and the Nazi partition of 1941-1945--but Glenny also has a book called The Fall or Yugoslavia and I can attest to his quality as a historian/writer; another one I’ve seen recommended is The Collapse of Yugoslavia by Alastair Finlan. And while the stuff I’ve been reading is less recent it’s by no means less relevant; there’s actually an excellent book called Balkan Genocides by Paul Mojzes. And if you want a contemporaneous (from around 1937) western perspective, you can’t go wrong with the MASSIVE Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West; limitations and all, it’s fucking VIVID and brings the region under the Prince regent Paul to life (plus the edition I have has an excellent forward written by Christopher Hitchens). There’s a lot of more granular stuff I’ve been using but I can’t recommend these books enough.
It's not specifically about the Yugoslav wars, but a book I found to be very helpful in trying to understand the immensely complex history of the region, is one called 'The Balkans' by Mark Mazower. It's about twenty years ago since I read it, but I remember it as a very well written and enjoyable read. In fact, I might even dig it out and read it again!
Thanks Mark, looks interesting!
Somehow I never came across this one, but I'll definitely have to check this one out as well.
One other thing that needs to be taken into account for the grand trends to make any sense - the middle-class-dominated bourgeois America of the inter- and post-war years is a historical aberration. For most of America's history it has had a political and social culture much more in common with those of current third-world countries than the Norman Rockwell-ified images of our parents and grandparent's days that have come down to us.
- Political corruption was common, including violence. (Pitched gun battles over rival stuffed ballot boxes in Huey Long's New Orleans. The various Bourbon/Redeemer machines in the South, and the urban ethnic machines in the Northern cities.)
- So was intercommunal violence. (Ku Kluxers, obviously, but also anti-Chinese mobbing on the West Coast, anti-Catholic agitation in the North-East, anti-German laws during the World Wars, and whatever the hell was going on with all the Mormons getting shot and burned out of most of the midwest en route to Utah.)
The thing that let America prosper anyway was the availability of open space to develop into, such that those displaced by corruption or violence could always find somewhere new to start doing their own thing away from most everyone else. (I know, this is just the Frederick Jackson Turner thesis, but it does have explanatory power).
Now, obviously, we don't have that pressure valve anymore. We've stopped being a settler-colonial society, and started being much more like the old countries of Europe, with settled populations, entrenched elites, and complex interplays between state, capital, and knowledge-making functions. If we're going to find a way forward we need to stop thinking of ourselves in terms of what America was - it isn't that anymore, and can't be made that. Instead, we need to draw lessons from things like what America is morphing into.
For my part, I'm trying to hoover up every book on the Habsburg and Holy Roman Empires I can get my hands on.
Good post. After WW2, the whole world accept America was in ruins, and needed American labor, resources, and credit to rebuild itself. At our peak, 30% of the world’s harvested resources came to America. That is really a once-in-a-millennium economic aberration and we are now returning back toward the historical norm. We and all of the developed world have mature, post-industrial economies, and the fact that our top elites are talking about things like universal basic income is a hint that we’re not going back to every solid man expecting a solid job.
This comic sums it up the best:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-old-days
Is the argument that it's impossible for a continent-scale nation to arrange its economy in such a way that instead of overconsuming and exporting its resources, it focused on careful stewardship of both its natural and human capital? Because it seems like that should be do-able, and it seems like that is exactly what a hereditary monarch would do.
There's no better government that a benign dictator and no worse government than that dictator's spoiled or mentally unwell son.
Thank you for focusing on the least consequential part of my comment and ignoring the main point, reply guy.
Yes, but democracy, with it's by-construction 100 IQ, is like living under the perpetual rule of that spoiled or mentally unwell son. I love how we moderns know so much more than all the humans who lived before us.
Willl this be coming to us in the dulcet tones of DC? Keep up the hard work. You mean a lot to many.
Oh right, I actually owe you guys two also versions. I’m slacking.
Ha! Well. I love to read what I can but the audio versions sure help. Thank you so much for fighting the good fight. I’m sure many like me are emboldened with the information and example you provide.
The stone cold reality is that much behavior and culture is more than nurture, it is biological and downstream of epigenetic events. It is possible to change this hard wiring, but that would require sustained actions that no one has the stomach for. If you import enough Haitians, you will get Haiti.
Very strong executive moves will be required, on the same level as Andrew Jackson, to begin deportation and stripping of "birthright" citizenship. But this is the same prerequisite to change anything of consequence in the current system.
Hey Darryl,
Very much enjoyed this and I am wondering if you might be able to elaborate on a few key points. During your immigration discussion you mentioned all we can do is “prepare to survive in the world that’s coming”.
Can you elaborate on what exactly you think the world is that is coming? Your debate partners took for granted that losing a white majority in the US is a negative without going into exactly why. If you could elaborate, even briefly it would be hugely appreciated!
Thanks again
It's all in here:
https://thepsmiths.substack.com/p/review-south-africas-brave-new-world
As a borderline middleclass person from a relatively rich country (Norway) that bought into the globalization idea I feel like I'm stuck in a scissor grip. On one hand are the poorest but plentiful people of the world, on the other hand are the richest and most influential people of the world. I compete with the former for jobs and living space while I compete with the latter in the market of buying property and starting business. The squeeze is becoming tighter every year and I feel quite stuck.
I agree with your sentiment that I'd love for the good hearted migrants to thrive, but what is the actual cost of accepting so many of them? In recent years American style racial rhetoric has been gaining ground in the media, and people are given a bigger bludgeon here in the form of hate speech laws and certain groups being a protected class.
People are flowing in way faster than they are assimilating and the native population is forced to adapt to the newcomers more than ever before. Even in the event that mass deportation was on the political table I doubt it would be enforced. Currently medical professionals are refusing to age verify undocumented refugees/asylum seekers/migrants, so how can we expect enforcers to use violence to force women, children, and men to the airport?
Worse yet, imagine a scenario where we take ALL the "good" people in, but leave ALL the "bad" people. Those bad people would still start families and distill the values and social conditions that make their countries bad places to live in the first place.
It is a very complicated issue, and I wish there were easy solutions for it. For the time being I'm at a loss.
It isn't very complicated. You put you, your family, your town and your country before anyone else. Your ancestors survived the aeons for you to inherit your homeland. Your first obligations are to you and your people. It isn't any more difficult than that.
It is nigh impossible to immigrate into the Amish community, but I think it is time to do so. Immigration is one of many concerns for the coming failure of the system. Welcome aboard Darryl Yoder. 😁
I agree with your point that it essentially a moot point now. The same is true in my country, though the situation is a little different as "we" colonised the countries a lot of these people come from, and "we" didn't forcibly import slaves.
While the shifting demographic that is clearly being deliberately engineered raises issues, it doesn't have to be how Dems will would have us believe. I keep saying this but it's not whites keeping Texas red, it's the conservative Latinos keeping it red despite the illiberal woke leftoid whites.
Republicans need to embrace this.growing demographic as it ought to be their natural home, but the GOP are corrupt cowards and are still salty the Dems stole their country club demographic from under them.
That last bit about the GOP being salty is so dead on
I have lived in South America for years, and so many South Americans express sadness that the US is exporting woke culture across their continent. They would love to go to America and vote pro-American values, but the pro-American side is keeping them out.
Woke culture is individualism turned up to 11 dressed up as collectivism. Give people a million identities and you give them a million products to buy to express those identities. You get to pretend your part of some bigger movement without doing any of the actual work and people are more than happy to sell you that illusion any way they can. Used to be an American or a southerner or a German American or a union man or a veteran. All pretty broad groups, now they've vivisected society and carved it up into pieces that I don't believe can be reattached to each other. Solving woke culture would require solving unrestrained marketing by our corporate oligarchy and that's something that we have no capacity for in our "democracy" (or "republic" depending on the particular delusion you hold onto).
I could be wrong here, but don't see woke culture as something that needs to be solved, necessarily. I see it as a phase that just needs to run it's course. (Are we on the Right just as to blame for keeping it alive by talking so much about it? Maybe. I remember Eminem took shots at Donald Trump, and Trump never said a word back to him. Eminem didn't say anything afterwards, that I'm aware of) Something so irrational can't withstand reality for too long. (Just like the hippies of the 60s raised the Reagan voters of the 80s)
And you say that woke culture is individualism turned up to 11, but that hasn't been my experience with it. I've noticed that you're only allowed to identify as things that the woke culture deem inferior (trans, animals, a healthy fat person, black, etc... [it's a whole different conversation, but I have no doubt the Left considers non-whites inferior]). Any deviation from their dogmas is met with pure rage, so I'm not convinced that woke culture is individualistic. But tell me if I'm looking at this incorrectly
I think the counter would be that ignoring these people until recently is what allowed them to take over every institution and introduce a fledgling police state to protect their power and impose their ideology. The defensive line conservatives are currently trying to hold is whether teachers should be able to show our 2nd graders pornography, or whether doctors should be removing the genitals of little children, should give you pretty good idea of how much ground was given up without a fight while we were ignoring them.
I see what you mean. If the Left took the approach I suggested in my first response, then they wouldn't have as much institutional power. You obviously have to really fight (if that's even the correct word to use) to make it even a consideration that kids should be taught pornographic material or that gender can magically change depending on how you feel. Imagine the rationality that would still exist if the Right didn't take the approach I suggested.
I would consider plenty of the in tribe signals of the current counterculture to be just as woke but in a complete different direction. I don't see a meaningful difference in someone with a pride flag on their Subaru or a Daniel Defense sticker or thin blue line sticker on their truck. I would call "woke" simply in tribe signalling for the vanguard of our current dominant culture, the counterculture has its own version. There are no natural constituencies being formed here on either side of this, if every ideology can be made into its own identity that's a very powerful tool for control. "Woke" itself has become a identity to rally against.
Maybe I'm not stating it correctly. I don't think there is an underlying dogma to wokeness. Dogma would require some kind of stability. There is none. The trans phenomenon is a great example. This is a demographic that basically didn't exist a decade ago. Now it's taking oxygen from what previously were liberal issues of women's empowerment and homosexual rights and subsuming both with obvious contradictions to nearly everyone's lived experience. It's delusional assuming there's going to be some mass intersectional movement based on this at the ballot box. Corporations are happy to sell you crap to this effect just like they're happy to sell shirts with crosses and veterans graves on it. Politicians are happy because wearing these impotent individual identities checks boxes that require no actual work to maintain the illusion of. There's plenty of them on the right too, Lindsey Graham still exists somehow.
I believe the entire, unintentional (hopefully) point of all this is to perpetute the neoliberal economic world order the west continues to utilize. If you need any better example of this I can't point to a better one then the most radical elected Congressmen of the squad failing to even get a floor vote on Medicare for all. Not even a vote under a wholly demonrat controlled government. Another more recent one was the Dems siding with the establishment republicans to stop the railway workers strike. The tranny flag wavers can tell about fascism all they want but when we actually have a government cow towing to shareholder interests against the workers and people of this country they can't identify what's right before their faces.
I've probably done a complete shit job at explaining my point but I feel this stuff is all flash and no cash when it comes to actually exacting meaningful reforms in any direction. There's always another shiny bobble for the vanguard left to latch on to and the vanguard right to be mad about. The trans are going to be really salty when they switch to group marriages or zoophilia or whatever nonsense is coming next.
Also, you're factually incorrect:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/texas/party-affiliation#racial-and-ethnic-composition
"we" didn't forcibly import slaves. The "we" that involves "me" weren't even alive then. My ancestors were farming in Scandinavia until after the Civil War, when they came to North America fleeing potato blight induced starvation. So leave the "we" out of this. There is no "we" here.
First, you make an excellent point about a perfect storm brewing. Combine a blasé national reaction to exploding violent crime, a bloated welfare state, inconceivable debt and deficit spending, the petrodollar on the rocks amid the backdrop of a 'speed wobbling' monetary policy, incompatible and mutually hostile foreign cultures, elite discouragement against assimilation, elite encouragement of hostility toward the incumbent culture, collapse in institutional trust, 10s of millions of low/no skilled workers, capital's dwindling reliance on this low/no skill labor (your point about FB's market cap), and what do you get? You get perhaps 20 million underemployed marauders, with less compunction than you about using violence to get what they want (or about waste dumping, or drunk driving, or fleeing scenes of accidents), and who know there is neither the capacity nor the appetite for policing the separating of native-borns from their stuff. We could someday be looking up at South Africa.
Second, it was frustrating that your guests failed to acknowledge:
(a) Any young person with family roots here going back 50+ years will be a stranger in their own land, IN THEIR LIFETIMES. This is not a worst case scenario - it's an inevitability. You can't stop it. You won't. We're already halfway there.
(b) Per point (a), the window is already closed. But even if it weren't, there is ZERO political will to close the gates and mass-deport, and that will be truer every year as the provenance of the average American becomes more exotic.
One guest kept saying something like, "this is our house, and WE decide the rules." Talk about missing the point: it's increasingly NOT your house to decide the rules. To the extent that it is, your elected leaders are *running* from that sentiment. Tweeting about how things *ought* to be is less than a zero.
Your other guest was hung up on how there are still things that can be done - which is different from saying we can reverse the trend. Yes, crewmembers could have frantically bailed water out of the Titanic one teaspoon at a time, and it would have made them feel like they were doing something, but that's not the same as fixing the problem.
Good Post.
As for the window being closed: possibly. A much smaller federal govt with far fewer resources managed to deport millions of people back to Mexico in the early 20th century.
Throw in monetary incentives for self-deportation - and you might have a winner. Throw in some er...extrajudical fed-posty incentives, and you might enhance the the push-pull dynamic. Throw in retroactive revocation of anchor-baby citizenship. Not implying that any of the above is without moral costs, or that it is desirable , or probable, or that it's plausible in our current political paradigm - or even within our current system. The obstacles are of course the cheap labor lobby , the antiwhite lobby, and the dem-vote lobby (they buy votes with your tax money, genius!)
I agree DC. Immigration is a settled issue. We owe it to our new neighbors to help them understand and embrace our constitutional values. This is the issue that is not settled. The fact is they came here expecting as much. We must come together and rally around the flag. It’s the only way forward.
The problem is that in a democracy the lowest hanging political fruit is exploiting group differences and intensifying polarization. This is especially true when ethnic and class differences often track with each other.
This is the point that needs further emphasis and elaboration. Intuitively, it seems that all of these different groups could figure out how to be happily themselves, alongside one another, if the ring of power was out of reach...
We had a name for multicultural societies in the past: empires.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/How+immigration+destroyed+Rome.+Oxford+historian+Peter+Heather+has...-a0141907543
The other problem is that we didn't just import a bunch of poor people to harvest crops. We imported an entirely new elite class with entirely different values, who never had any intention of assimilating beyond surficial appearance. I've been in the tech industry for 25 years and watched this all happen in real time. The "values" we're supposed to transmit are now shared by a minority of this country's occupants.
That's only true when numerically-viable coalitions can be built out of those group differences. Things break down a bit under conditions of either very low turnout (as in CA local elections, where any organization that can reliably turn out even comparatively-small numbers of voters can wield extremely disproportionate power) or very high turnout (where the game shifts to manipulating the Overton Window).
But if we did that how would the media make money, how would social media drive engagement, how would the non profits profit, how would the politicians get elected.
Unity doesn't sell.
I agree completely. With that said, I’m old enough to remember when what seemed like everyone, “rallied around the flag”, on certain issues. We could agree to disagree but we loved our country and what it stood for. The dreamer in me believes a strong majority of our country, new and old citizens alike, also believes the US is inherently a “good” country and would be willing to “die on that hill”. The cynic in me believes our government and MSM are rotten to the core and we’re all fucked.
I'd like to agree for the most part. I believe we are going through the natural cycles of empire. I just hope we make it out the other side. We can look at history for guides, but I think we are in uncharted territory with globalization, internet/AI, and doomsday weapons.
Bad times make strong men doesn't guarantee strong men making good times.
That was a great podcast. I think your guest who honed in on sovereignty and the one who, rightly I think, is concerned about a South Africa scenario were on point. While we have been groveling and apologizing; being, "compassionate", and concerned for everyone else, we have been replaced and dispossessed of our homeland and country. Game theory shows that people who pursue a group strategy will annihilate those who pursue an individualist strategy.
Given that heritage Americans, people of European/Christian descent, are the only people in post-America who do not hold a group identity, nor pursue an explicit group interest, we are up for a bad time. We are also the one group who must not hold a group identity. In fact, we live in an environment where it is perfectly acceptable to call for, "abolishing whiteness", and any call for white people organizing to pursue our common group interest is killed through social ostricization. I think we all can see what, "diversity", really means. To see how acceptable talk of our dispossession is, see Paul Krugman's 2018 video where he psychopathically says white working class people will have no more power and them protesting it is a problem. Or, see Barbara Spectre's similar proclamation for European dispossession. YouTube has of course taken them down, but you can find them on other channels.
This issue is not immigration. It was and is white, Europid and civilizational replacement through mass immigration. It was planned and it was explicit. In 2001 one of the biggest groups/proponents of mass immigration published a paper assessing mass immigration and what it meant for a particular demographic. It was written by Stephen Steinlight. The paper never mentions heritage Americans - not once. We were never taken into consideration. It behooves all of us to read this paper. We've been living in oblivion while other factions are planning, reassessing and planning still more as the situation progresses: https://cis.org/Report/Jewish-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography
The paper does mention how one group is going to approach the situation. Here is a snippet:
"For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas."
22 years have elapsed since then. We still haven't taken stock of the situation, organized in our interest and laid down a plan that will help us confront being a despised minority in our own homeland. It is time we do it. Other groups are a century into self organizing. We are late to the game. We know the theory. The fire beneath the kettle gets more fuel and oxygen by the day.
I first pondered The Great Replacement a year ago. It was a shocking wake up call - particularly as a committed, color blind individualist. I'll tackle it in a more comprehensive way in the coming months. We need to understand what it is, and have a plan to deal with it. https://periheliuslux.substack.com/p/is-the-great-replacement-real
The most shocking line in the podcast was that the number one group of kids put on puberty blockers are the children of Immigrants.
I think about how Malcolm X’ strict sanctions against extramarital sex and drug use compare with what went on in the 70’s with rampant drug use and sex in the ‘civil rights’ movement and what Jack Mueller says above about immigrants assimilating too well. I think there is some truth to this.
From what i see from my time in the northeast and the south is that immigrants that have a strong community are generally socially conservative, while those without become deracinated -- our countries fresh generation of red guards. Their ethnic identity has been supplanted with the simulacrum of an ethnic identity which is in fact just left wing activism
Just pissing in the wind here, but maybe balkanization is not as bad of an outcome as Xi’s security state. Any group that disrupts monoculture of the left via traditional ways of life is a potential ally. I know in my personal experience, i have a much easier time relating to immigrants than i do with middle and upper class wokies.
Excellent piece. Not sure if you've read this DC but this is a terrifying, sobering and at times comical read about what happens to an advanced society when the people who built it are replaced by those who don't share their values and despise their culture.
An orgy of racial grievance, violence, societal decay and corruption.
https://thepsmiths.substack.com/p/review-south-africas-brave-new-world
A cautionary tale for America
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Play third world games, win third world prizes. Pretty simple. Unless you're an American.
I’d wager America, as well as other countries in the west, are in the playing phase. Prize giving night should happen around the 2030’s.
Glad you put this out. I prefer audio but I read this whole thing. Thanks DC for putting the effort into making your points as clear as possible. I do not have Twitter because I do not want my soul sucked out , but I can imagine the guff you would receive by saying or “tweeting” that immigration issue is settled!
The big question I am always concerned about is , can our economy , as it stands , survive the pressures that will be and already are being put upon it from mass unchecked immigration ? I see a major financial collapse on the horizon unless austerity measures are imposed on the middle class...and even that may be futile. ( I think I’m ready to be assimilated by the Borg!)