Quotulatiousness

February 17, 2026

The three core false claims of wokeness

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lorenzo Warby analyzes the three claims that underpin the intellectual structure of all the sub-categories derived from Critical Theory:

Universities across Anglo-America, and across the West more broadly, have become increasingly dominated by a Critical Theory magisterium: a teaching authority that claims ultimate or trumping moral authority. This magisterium is based on Critical Theory and its derivatives — Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Settler-Colonial Theory, and so on: which constitutes the Critical Social Justice matrix.

This magisterium has come to increasingly dominate academe for a range of reasons. It generates intolerant zealots, so benefits from the dynamics of an intolerant minority.

It offers a powerful shared status game — affirm beliefs X, Y, Z and that makes you A Good Person. This status game spreads a supporting censorious intolerance, for if affirming beliefs X, Y, Z and makes you A Good Person, then denying X, Y, or Z makes you A Bad Person.

This justifies shaming and shunning anyone who denies X, Y, Z, because they are Bad People and its shows your commitment to what makes someone A Good Person. It shows commitment to the shared status game. This status game generates moralised cognitive assets, and you protect the value of those assets by participating in — or at least going along with — the shaming and the shunning.

The status game generates moral projects that the central administrations of universities can use to expand their authority, range of action, and so resources. An opportunity they have enthusiastically embraced. An opportunity that corporate, non-profit and government bureaucracies have also enthusiastically embraced.

The emotions this status game attaches to those moralised cognitive assets — care, compassion, concern for the marginalised, if you affirm those beliefs, the opposite if you deny them — also plays into fears about threatening emotions (and safety through norm conformity) which are much stronger among men than women. Women are thus systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than men.

It is an exaggeration to claim that “wokery” is just the consequence of feminisation of institutions and occupations. It is, however, true that what works for — what is emotionally resonant in — increasingly feminised institutions and occupations has been selected for.

Source: data taken from this paper.

But the Critical Theory magisterium has expanded across academe — and beyond — due to the nature of its three foundational claims:

  • A blank slate view of human nature.
  • A view of social dynamics as dominated by conflict.
  • An activist relationship with information: that the trumping purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it.

The blank slate view of human nature — not merely that we are not born without inborn ideas, but that everything that forms us is social — means that any level of social transformation that can be conceived is attainable. Provided enough social power can be assembled—to move human action, speech and thought in the correct direction—the socially-transformative society free of oppression and alienation can be created.

The grander the conceived purpose, the more energising and motivating it is. But also the more it rhetorically trumps anyone who is willing to “settle” for less than complete human liberation. This then feeds back into energising and motivating, as it provides an endless sense of being moral trumps.

A recurring version of such blank slate claims is that our “true” nature has been obscured or repressed by oppressive forces. This might be the alienation via private property (Marx) or by patriarchy, or white supremacy, or heteronormativity or whatever.

The most dramatic statement of the “repressed true nature” claim is also the earliest, in the first sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s The Social Contract (1762):

    Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. (l’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.)

The view that oppressive forces are blocking our true nature goes naturally with the claim that social dynamics are dominated by conflict. This dominated-by-conflict claim was classically stated by Marx and Engels as the first sentence of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

    The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

If conflict dominates social dynamics, then the prosecution of such conflict so as to achieve human liberation becomes the ultimate moral good. Coordinating the fighters for human liberation becomes a moral urgency. To prosecute that struggle becomes the most important thing one can do.

Both of these claims naturally lead to, and gain strength from the claim, that the morally trumping thing to do with information is to prosecute the struggle for human liberation. Marx famously said:

    The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis Eleven, 1845.

Max Horkheimer, in his seminal essay Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) tells us that:

    Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built. Critical thought has a concept of man as in conflict with himself until this opposition is removed. If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual’s life down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goes on in the society.

Critical Theory is activist Theory, aimed at human liberation from the unwanted constraints of existing society and epitomises the activist relationship with information. All scholarship is trumped by this aim and so the most authoritative scholarship is that which is most committed to this aim.

Source. Notice the delusional claim of the first listed article. The intrusion of such updated Lysenkoism into contemporary science and medicine is even more rampant with matters Trans.

February 1, 2026

QotD: Don’t bother accusing progressives of hypocrisy … that’s a “category error”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We have to start, I think, by rejecting the Donatist heresy. As usual I’m framing this discussion in Catholic terms because it’s easier to mesh up the discussion with Escriva that way, but you don’t have to be a theologian to see that Clown World has given itself entirely over to a version of Donatism:

    Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.

Donatists Democrats are the real racists, amirite? In Clown World, hypocrisy is a category error:

    Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles. According to British political philosopher David Runciman, “Other kinds of hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks, claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold”. American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is “the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit”.

The underlying assumption here is that there exists a standard outside of oneself. What SJW believes that? If you want a learned citation for it, get our main man Marcus Aurelius back up in here: Of each particular thing ask, what is it in itself? What is its nature?1

SJWs are nihilists. Hypocrisy requires an external standard, and they don’t have one. All they have is their self — which they hate, and long to extinguish, along with everything else that reminds them of their hated, hateful self. Their every thought, word, and deed aims only at that — extinction — whether they recognize it or not.

In practice, then, SJW “hypocrisy” is a tool, a tactic — a really valuable one. They want to kick down some pillar of ambient civilization. And they’ve got all the time in the world to do it, because while they’re just getting on with it, their putative “opponents” are shrieking about hypocrisy! Often with some blather about “Chesterton’s Fence” or similar for good measure.

That’s Donatism, PoMo version. “If you’re going to tear down the fence, first you must explain how it got there, and what it was supposed to do, and then what you’ll be replacing it with.” No. Category error. They don’t care. They have never cared. The fence isn’t the point. Neither is the fence’s replacement, or whatever might be behind the fence, or anything else. They’ve never given any of that a second’s thought, because destruction is the point.

It’s the only point. Always. They have no other.

Thus we must reject Donatism. It doesn’t matter how flawed your “priest” is. The work is bigger than the man. The work transcends the man.

Severian, “The Way, Chapter 2: Guidance”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-01.

  1. A PoMo in joke. That’s not Aurelius, it’s Hannibal Lecter. But it’s an accurate paraphrase of Aurelius. Can you believe there was once a time when a bestselling thriller could make an allusion to Marcus Aurelius a small but important plot point? That time was 1988, for the record.

January 26, 2026

QotD: Twitter isn’t life … it’s far more important than that

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Progressives] did it in two stages. First, they convinced us that process and outcome are the same thing … and when the chips are down, process is better than outcome. Everyone knows the old saying “Those who can’t do, teach”. It was originally coined to make fun of this tendency, but look how that worked out. At the conceptual level, the Left wins because they make moral arguments, but at the practical level, how do they win?

Because they talk. Constantly. They never, ever shut up. Most Leftists in my life — and in yours too, I guarantee — never do anything. We all know that the Left take zero interest in their communities. They don’t donate to charity. Let’s say one of those late April blizzards hits and their driveway is snowed in. While everyone else is breaking out the shovels one last time, the Leftist’s natural impulse is to jump on Twitter and start petitioning Congress for some giant, trillion-dollar snow removal bill. It has to have set-asides for Diversity quotas, of course, and isn’t the word “removal” triggering? And so forth, until the snow melts. Hey, problem solved!

I’m kidding, but I’m not joking. Leftists are process people par excellence. Even Stalin won that way, 99% of the time — even though he could have had the entire Politburo shot with a snap of his fingers, he got his way by grinding them down, meeting after meeting after endless meeting. Yes, eventually someone has to actually do something, but that someone isn’t going to be them; it’ll be some toady somewhere, who is only working as hard as he has to in order to get promoted up the totem pole, so that he’s the one in meeting after endless meeting, forever discussing, never doing.

This reaches its apotheosis (apocolocyntosis!) in Twitter, and do you see what I mean? For the Left, tweeting about something is exactly the same as, if not better than, actually doing anything about it. Look around: we’re about to get into WWIII because of this. And speaking of missiles flying, we’ve all remarked on the Left’s signature “fire and forget” policy approach. To them, words are magic — healthcare, for instance, is now Affordable. How can it not be? It says “Affordable Care Act“, right there in the title! Don’t start in with your facts and figures, please — it’s Affordable, damn it! What part of “Affordable Care Act” don’t you understand?

He who talks the loudest and longest, therefore, is the purest.

Combine that with the second step for maximum effect: Emotional incontinence. Just as talking is the same as (better than!) doing, so emotion equals competence. She who feeeeeeels the strongest about an issue wins. This, too, has been obvious for a long time, so much so that Jonah Goldberg, of all people, had a good bit on it back when he was still somewhat convincingly playing a conservative. He joked about how stupid it was to be preoccupied with caring in practical life. Who would you rather have cut that tumor out, your best buddy — who really, really, really cares — or a brain surgeon? Even an utterly dispassionate one, to whom you are nothing more than a slab of meat?

Again, and always: see Twitter. Maximum talk, maximum hysteria, always. I’m belaboring this because in our tabloid-culture society, the identification is complete: The all-talk hysteric is the brahmin; screaming about how much you care just IS morality. Never mind that your caring affects nothing in the best case scenario; worst case it ends up killing people (e.g. the Blue Checkmarks tweeting us into WWIII).

Severian, “Intro to The Way“, Founding Questions, 2022-04-17.

January 3, 2026

QotD: “Fumbling towards bicameralism”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Fumbling towards bicameralism” also seems to explain one of the Left’s other signature pathologies: Their ability to “lie” to themselves, and I’m going to have to stop putting stuff in quotation marks lest I destroy my keyboard, but here again “lie” is far too weak a word. Leftist self-deception is so total, we unicameral folks can’t grasp it. They know, right? On some deep down fundamental level? If only because it’s impossible — damn it, impossible — that they don’t know. How can they keep fucking up so egregiously, in exactly the same way, every single goddamn time, and learn nothing?

And yet, “self-deception” shouldn’t be possible. How can you lie to your self? It raises all kinds of heavy epistemological issues, explored in a fun little book called Self-Deception by philosopher Herbert Fingarette. As I recall (it has been years since I’ve read it), Fingarette ends up advancing a kind of split-consciousness theory, too, as the only internally consistent one. How could it be otherwise? The “liar’s paradox” is a fun little game to play in the first class meeting of Logic 101, but nobody can really live that way … and yet we do deceive ourselves, all the time, and no one more than SJWs, whose lives indeed seem to be nothing but “self-deception.”

Bicamerality explains that. The “god” that lives in the smartphone says X today, so X it is. That same “god” says not-X tomorrow, so now it’s not-X! It’s not self-contradiction, it’s not self-deception, for the simple reason that there’s no real “self” at all.

Finally, it explains what might be the most frustrating thing about the Left, the thing that’s likely to end in a nuke or two here before too long: Their utter inability to see the glaringly obvious consequences of their actions. Those of us who tend to see “Leftism” as a big conspiracy love to point out that if they, the Left, were just stupid (childish, contrarian, herd animals, whatever), cold impersonal chance alone would guarantee that at least some of their fuckups would benefit us at least some of the time. Much like The Media’s “retractions” and “admissions” and so on, the “mistakes” always always always go in only one direction … ergo, they’re not mistakes.

That’s the reef on which we “emergent behavior” types always crash. To me, “emergent behavior” still seems like the best explanation … but however the behavior emerges, it’s always retarded. They’ve never made a non-stupid decision, not once, and it’s always stupid in exactly the same way. I remember waking up one morning to the sound of something crashing into my bedroom window. I figured it was a bird, which happens all the time, and it was … except that it kept happening, monotonously, every fifteen seconds or so. I got up to look, and here was a robin, smashing itself into the glass over and over and over again. It was early spring — mating season — and this stupid robin had mistaken its own reflection for a rival. I must’ve watched this bird slam himself into the glass for ten minutes, “attacking” his “rival”, before he knocked himself out cold …

That’s how the Left do. Always. They simply can’t learn, and they can’t change their pattern. The only explanation for that, therefore, must be that it’s programmed. Literally. Zero consciousness involved. They do what they do because they literally cannot do otherwise. Their “god” has put “rage” into their thumos. Just as Achilles would’ve literally jumped off a cliff had his “god” told him to, so the Left does … well, pretty much everything their teevee tells them to.

Needless to say, this has some important implications for practical action. How does one “get inside that OODA loop”, as the keyboard commandos like to say? In the land of the utterly unconscious, the one-brained man is king …

Severian, “Striving Towards Bicamerality”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-20.

Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 26, 2025

QotD: Racism and social justice

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A definitive proof of the evil of social “science” is that — faced with the real problem of racism — it has come up with the insane idea of racist post mortem justice; demanding that living white people compensate living black people for what some dead white people did to some dead black people. If you question the logic of this then — boom — you confirm the whole crooked theory because it’s your “privilege” that blinds you to its truth. It’s like the ducking stool as a test for witchcraft. Guilty or not, you’re done for. Oh and by the way, you can’t just ignore this piffle and quietly get on with your harmless life because “white silence is violence”.

This very American problem is poisoning the world through the dominance of US popular culture and the influence of the wealthy US universities. On this side of the Pond we have our own problems. We really don’t need a whole raft of America’s too. But white privilege is such a wonderful tool for creating and exploiting division that our leftists can’t leave it be. It’s a social A-bomb just lying there waiting to be detonated.

The Left is an immoral political movement. It seeks to divide. It seeks to promote hatred between classes and other groupings in society in order to create problems that can only be “solved” by employing legions of leftists with no otherwise marketable skills to direct us to the “correct” path. The extent to which it’s already achieved its real, unstated aim of creating a well-paid cadre of apparatchiks is visible in the present pandemic. The only jobs that are safe are of those employed by the state and rewarded by reference to almost anything other than economic contribution. Those thus paid for are “essential workers.” Those who pay for them are not. Anyone who points this scam out is monstered by a leisured army of social “scientists” and their graduates in the media — also paid for by us “inessential” saps.

Judge them by the outcomes of their policies and governance and the theorists and politicians of the Left are clear failures. The squalor in which poor black Americans live is almost invariably presided over by them just as a Labour council in Britain is a promise of continued poverty for all but its apparatchiks. If the poor are your voters, the more poverty the better. If the oppressed are your voters, the more (real or imagined) oppression the merrier.

The perfect symbol of Leftist politicians in this respect is the character of Senator Clay Davis in The Wire — perhaps the greatest TV show ever made and (among many other marvellous things) a searing indictment of American racial politics. It’s a show that couldn’t be made today because it reeks of white privilege. By the way, the fact that this concept would have prevented The Wire being made is by itself a small proof that it’s a wicked one.

Tom Paine, “Checking my privilege”, The Last Ditch, 2020-06-02.

November 13, 2025

How the school environment encourages male disconnection and stokes extremism

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, a parent describes the experience of visiting a local high school and observing just how politicized and progressivized most of the classrooms are (which also strongly implies that the instruction is part education, part indoctrination):

Wokal Distance @wokal_distance
Nov 11

I despise the Groyper movement, but if you want to understand where Fuentes gets purchase with young men I will tell you how it happened by telling you about my experience at the orientation night when my son joined elementary school band:

My 11 year old son son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents orientation night which was held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious to me why young men rage against the larger social system.

The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and various decorations that all invoked the various totems if diversity. Black lives matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging, and basically ever sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present. The advertisements for post secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on indigenous ways of knowing” as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation. Many of the teachers has “this is a safe space” sticker son their doors, and others had variations of “in this house” messaging on their doors or on the walls of the classroom.

The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive leftist coded “in this house” and “be kind” aesthetic. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as the the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that classroom. The only way I can describe it is to say that progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory.

A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before acknowledging the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing. Standard leftist land acknowledgement boilerplate. Additionally, every interaction was done in the style of HR style professionalism mixed with progressive leftist coded gentle parenting.

When it comes to how the teachers behaved I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my sons school in order to explain it. To begin, the boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate modes of interaction and serve as the taken for granted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my sons school are women with almost no exceptions. One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education Assistant, and my son came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a “boy teacher” at school. The level of wonderment and surprise he expressed was on par with what I would expect if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways.

My son often comes home from school and expresses utter frustration at the fact that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament are treated as though they were somehow inferior. As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently “gentle” and “kind” in response to various passive aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carries out by his more socially developed (often) female peers.

To say that band night was feminine coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn’t well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan “the future is female” was taken to be a command delivered from God Himself turned into an education program.

Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11 year old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. he is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be effectively managed rather than engaged with an taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry (although examples of that exist) it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes, and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules, and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women.

This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is 6 years old all the way until he is graduated from university.

It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of Social Justice. What I want to point out to you is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of the average 11 year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, etc) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in. And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye with a straight face and deny that any of this ever happened. Making matters worse these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots.

And all this happens during their formative years.

Now, Imagine you are a young white male.

You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile “nice boy.” On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and “diverse” candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements, and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.

On top of that, that if a you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings, and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the worlds pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male.

While all this is going on a series of scandals (COVID, Men in womens’ sports, trans kids, etc) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl.

Once you understand this, the real question is not “why are some young men radicalizing?” the real question is “why are there any young men at all who have not been radicalized?”

None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. The point is to get you to understand why young men will attach themselves to any voice who is willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success.

The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men, and have completely destroyed young men’s trust in institutions. Young men view the current set of social institutions as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate, and they view the narratives that emerge from those institutions as being expressions of as nothing more then a story told to legitimize an ideology which seeks to hold them back. As such, the institutions and their narratives have absolutely no normative pull on young Gen Z men.

I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you acknowledge what I have laid out here, and engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, Universities, non-profits, HR departments, and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Andrew Torba, and other pathological influences.

/fin

H/T to Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit for the link.

October 12, 2025

A second American Civil War would not resemble the first one

Filed under: History, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The American Civil War, if you try to look at the big picture, started off with the states dividing as this Wikipedia map indicates (although no state was all secessionist or all unionist, of course):

Union states in blue (light blue for states that permitted slavery), Confederate states in red.
Map by Júlio Reis via Wikimedia Commons.

Potential lines of demarcation today, well, here’s a guess from a few years ago based on county voting patterns, and again it’s still an approximation:

Any civil strife on this modern battlefield will be very unlike the organized Union and Confederate armies of 1861-65 having stand-up battles against one another in the countryside. Tom Kratman wrote about a potential civil war breaking out several years ago and has reposted the first part on his Substack:

I can’t quite shake the feeling that the side that wins any new civil war, to the extent that anyone can be said to “win” such a frightfulness, will be the side that a) engages in as humanitarian a form of ethnic and political cleansing as possible, first, and b) shoots second. I say “as humanitarian … as possible” because, as previously discussed,1 we are not a nation of red and blue states. Rather, instead of red and blue states, we are, as discussed a couple of years ago, “counties and neighborhoods and streets and the couch versus the bedroom after an argument with a spouse or significant other over political matters”. In short, anyone who engages in really harsh internal security measures will tend to drive people who should be its friends over to the other side. Since I’m writing this on behalf of the more or less anti-bolshevik, anti-progressive, anti-SJW2 half of the country, let me emphasize that, when the northeast, the left coast, “Yes, we old retired farts can be bribed by robbing the future” Florida, “Under the Fairfax County Bootheel” Virginia, “Cannot control Baltimore” Maryland, and CorruptionRus Illinois, unchained from the restraints we’ve imposed on them, go full lunatic lefty, let them turn into Beirut of the 80s while we try to maintain something approaching civilization as long as we can. Yes, that means I think it would be easier for us to conquer or reconquer a California devolved into its own civil war if we can avoid the same in our areas.

Note that it’s a fine line we’ll have to try to walk, rounding up those who would turn us into Beirut, without rounding up those whose rounding up will cause their friends and family to turn us into Beirut. My suggestion would be using extreme measures for those who are certain enemies, but safe and comfortable lagering or exile for those about whom there might be some doubts.

Though I may find it distasteful, honesty compels that I not shy away from that other aspect of securing the base areas, ethnic cleansing. If this nightmare comes to pass then ethnic cleansing is going to happen, I am certain, to at least three groups, Moslems, Blacks, and Hispanics. Some of it will probably come in the form of self-exile, but I would be very surprised if more of it isn’t forced. So let me throw a little damper on the KKK/alt-white-wing of my readership, if any; Trump is leading by comfortable margins in Louisiana (over a third Black and Hispanic), Mississippi (close to 40% Black and Hispanic), and Alabama (over a quarter). He’s not leading in those places by the kinds of margins he is without a more than fair sprinkling of Blacks and Hispanics, who will not be much like the rioting for fun and profit thugs of Black Lives Matter (and White Lives Don’t). Those people are us as much as anyone can be. It would be a grievous and perhaps unhealable wound to your alleged souls if you don’t treat them that way.

  1. http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/01/12/politics/breakup-of-united-states-terrible-idea/#1
  2. SJW stands for social justice warrior. Unlike many such epithets, this one was coined by the people to whom it applies. Think of idiot PhDs who call canoeing “racist”, the universe of the trigglypuffs, and those who consider eating a taco to be a crime against Mexicans, if not even a crime against humanity, which latter classification expressly excludes whites.

Update, 14 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 2, 2025

“In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Tristin Hopper provides some excerpts from his book Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, published earlier this year:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear in the proximity of a soil disturbance in a field at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan.
July 6, 2021.

This is the story of how, in 2019, Canada became the first (and, to this day, only) country to declare itself guilty of committing an ongoing genocide against its own citizens.

To outsiders, who (correctly) view Canada as a humane democracy, the tale will seem bizarre. But to Canadians, there was a certain twisted political logic to it — at the time, at least.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, back when my country was still ruled by Justin Trudeau, Canada’s progressive elites bought into then-ascendant social-justice manias with a born-again fervour that was arguably unmatched in any other nation. This was a time, readers will recall, when college students were busily confessing their internalised white supremacy and racist thought crimes to one another on social media. Seeking to ingratiate his Liberal Party with this young demographic, Trudeau extrapolated their cultish movement on a national scale.

His rhetorical style became increasingly manic, as one social-justice slogan led to another; with each being rapturously liked and retweeted on social media. In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide.

In this regard, Trudeau’s first truly epic act of national self-incrimination took place at a 2019 women’s conference in Vancouver. The PM had just been handed the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), a probe he’d authorised as a means to investigate the high rates of homicide committed against Canada’s female Indigenous population.

As it turned out, however, the MMIWG report authors’ most prominent demand had nothing to do with the technical details of criminal investigation. Instead, they were focused on language: They wanted homicides targeting Indigenous women and girls to be described as an ongoing “race-based genocide” perpetrated by Canadian society at large.

Murder wasn’t the government’s only instrument of genocide, the authors claimed. Higher rates of Indigenous heart disease and suicide attempts were also described as foreseeable results of Canadian policies that are “explicitly genocidal”.

Canadians tend to feel guilty about the genuinely shameful way their country treated Indigenous peoples at many historical junctures (more on this below). Because of this high baseline guilt level, it is often seen as taboo (especially among journalists) to push back against even the most obviously counterfactual claims made on behalf of Indigenous peoples. And the MMIWG report was a case in point: the inquiry’s insistence that Canada was in the midst of an active genocide was reported uncritically by most media outlets.

Some public figures did speak out against this hyperbolic use of language — such as Roméo Dallaire, the retired general who’d been in Rwanda during that country’s (actual) genocide in 1994. Yet Canada’s most important public figure — Trudeau himself — accepted the inquiry’s conclusions without reservation; even if this meant that he was now signalling his status as leader of a nation that, day in, day out, under his own watch, was committing a genocide against its own population.

“Earlier this morning, the national inquiry formally presented their final report, in which they found that the tragic violence that Indigenous women and girls experienced amounts to genocide,” he told his Vancouver audience. Trudeau then paused for nine seconds to accommodate his desired reaction — which consisted of cheers and applause.

QotD: The bane of socialism — boredom

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… even the Yankee Leviathan at the very height of its powers couldn’t have made Socialism work long term, for as the Bolshies discovered, there’s more to life than just shit, shoes, and bread. The old proverb says “A man with an empty belly has one problem; the man with a full belly has a thousand”, and like most old proverbs it’s 100% true. It’s no surprise our modern cat ladies — of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to-now genders — don’t realize this, as you can overfeed a housecat into total somnolence, but anyone who has ever had so much as a dog knows what happens when all its immediate physical needs are satisfied: it grows bored.

Most “bad” dogs aren’t actually bad. They’re not misbehaving because they’re willful, or mean, or whatever. They’re just bored out of their fucking skulls, because the kind of bugman who gets a dog these days has no idea that you actually have to play with it, and pet it, and interact with it, in much the same way you have to interact with a young human. Given a dog’s limited intellect, the only thing it can think of to do to alleviate its boredom is chew on things, or dig in the yard, or piss on the rug, or, if all else fails, chew its own fur off.

Being slightly more complex critters, humans have more options, but bore a human enough — overfill his material needs, so that he’s stuffed to somnolence, but take his sense of purpose away — and you’ll see the exact same dog behaviors. Why do you think they shove all that metal shit in their faces? And no, I am absolutely not joking. Why all the huge, gaudy, gross tattoos? The constant changes of hair color and style?

Have you ever asked them?

Again, I’m 100% not joking. I know most of y’all avoid SJWs like the plague, and that’s a smart move, can’t blame you for it, but if you do, you’ll just have to trust me: I was in academia for a long time, so I was around not just SJWs, but bleeding-edge lunatic SJWs, and I asked them about it. One must be discreet about this, of course — hey, I’m thinking of getting a roll of toilet paper tattooed on my bicep, to remind me that We’re In This Together, what do you think? — but it’s fairly easy to do. And every time, they’d spin me some elaborate tale of how deep and meaningful it all is.

No, really. By some mental process I can’t begin to reproduce, getting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face tattooed on your calf is, to them, striking a blow at ambient civilization. That is the literal truth of their motivation. It’s the same reason the dog digs in the backyard, or pisses on the rug, or chews its own fur off: That’s the only agency it has, the only purpose it can find.

Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.

May 12, 2025

Hiding Sir John A. from the woke mob

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Woke iconoclasm swept across the country, but the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside the Ontario Legislature in Queen’s Park was hidden away inside a plywood box. James Pew catches up on the situation inside Queen’s Park Crescent:

“Free John” spray painted on the plywood boards covering the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Queen’s Park Toronto.

It’s not just historical content distorted by bad actors, it is the entire way history is thought about, taught, and used to legitimize all sorts of nefarious agendas, which forms a broader set of concerns. For instance, a Toronto man recently found himself in trouble over a meaningful act of non-destructive civil disobedience involving a monument to a beloved and needlessly contentious Canadian historical figure. Daniel Tate is an ardent patriot and founder of a civic advocacy group called IntegrityTO, who describe themselves as “a coalition of concerned citizens who want to restore integrity-driven leadership so that Toronto can be a great city once again”. In a minor act of public vandalism, and in a moment of frustration over the disrespect shown to Canada’s boxed up father of confederation, Tate spray painted “Free John” on the plywood hoarding covering the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park in Toronto. No paint touched the statue itself, just the plywood that hides it away from the public, and protects it from the angry and destructive social justice mob.

Sir John A’s Queen’s Park statue initially became the unseen centerpiece of the current unsightly plywood enclosure after an incident which took place in 2020; three radical social justice activists splashed it with pink paint. It is worth pointing out that this cherished monument to the father of confederation was first installed in 1894. And although Black Lives Matter activists Daniel Gooch, Danielle Smith, and Jenna Reid initially found themselves in hot water over their costly and disrespectful acts of public vandalism (they also painted statues of Egerton Ryerson and King Edward VII Equestrian), all charges were withdrawn in 2021. In their statement to the media the group said, “along with a coalition of artists, the group artistically disrupted statues of slaveholders and monuments to colonialism at Ryerson University and at Queen’s Park”. One would think Daniel Tate should be extended the same leniency for his “artistic disruption”.

Image of Black Lives Matter activists vandalizing the Queen’s Park statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, (via CBC)

As it stands, Tate has been criminally charged with mischief under $5000 which carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Still in the preliminary stages, his next court appearance is scheduled for June 30.

Last month Tate appeared on AM 640’s The Oakley Show where he remarked, “The sad irony of it, people were defacing and vandalizing national monuments with impunity … four or five years ago. No Charges. We were all watching aghast at how this was all happening. And, it was acceptable somehow. And here I am five years later. I didn’t even deface a statue or a monument, it was literally a piece of plywood – the cheapest plywood you could find. And now I’m clogging the criminal justice system with this completely frivolous charge.”

While covering Tate’s case, independent journalist Daniel Bordman said, “This is a great example of 2-Tier policing because if he wrote Free Palestine instead he’d probably be given the key to the city”. And journalist Anthony Furey posted the following on X: “There has been so much lawlessness and disorder on Toronto streets in recent years that goes totally unchecked … But if you write FREE JOHN on a boarded up statue of Sir John A, police handcuff and arrest you on the spot – which is what happened to Daniel Tate the other week”.

This begs the question, if security was on-site to arrest Tate in the immediate moments that followed his minor spray paint transgression, why does Sir John A. need to be boxed up at all? One security guard around the clock would suffice. Does the Queen’s Park premises not already have security? It appears they keep a close eye on Sir John A’s unfortunate wooden container. So, why not free John? Beef up security a little if necessary, but let our first Prime Minister once again be visible and unadulterated in his rightful place of honour. For the sake of our blessed Holy Peter, it’s been five bloody years!

April 11, 2025

Critical Trade Theory

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A discussion at the amusingly named Handwaving Freakoutery on the ongoing wave of tariff activity under the Trump II administration, characterizing them as “woke” tariffs:

The great argument playing out in the media right now about the relative value and ethical implications of reciprocal tariffs is not relevant. It is not relevant because these tariffs are not reciprocal tariffs in any measurable way. They aren’t reciprocal, they aren’t sensible, and the justification for them is Woke in every sense of the word. Let’s take a close look at what we might call Critical Trade Theory, back our way into an understanding of what a woke tariff is and how this is definitely that, and close with a quick word about how political realignments portend doom for the left even though the right is really screwing this up. Then we’ll all buy mop handle futures.

Awokening

The Great Awokening of the prior decade was founded in part on the False Cause Fallacy. Our major institutions for the better part of the last ten years were operated by wokerists, who used an Intersectional Matrix of Culturally Encouraged Race and Gender Prejudice to counteract what they viewed as hidden unmeasurable forces such as “systemic racism”. They couldn’t point to the systemic racism, but they knew it must be there because of the imbalance in socioeconomic metrics, and they denied any other possible explanation for the imbalance. Once the False Cause was in place, the devout wokerist was forced to fight the hidden prejudice with overt reverse prejudice, because they couldn’t conceive any other cause.

For example, if black folks have a hard time getting into Harvard or UNC, it must be because society is systemically racist against black people, and no other reason, therefore we should redirect admission slots from Asians who earned them to blacks who didn’t, for race balancing.

Harvard did exactly that, for exactly that reason, and admitted it, and it was sent to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court banned it, and then Harvard kept doing it and is still doing it using different words.

Some of our other institutions are still running this wokery program, although the Trump Administration purged much of it from the halls of federal power this year under their DEI ban, and many other institutions used Trump as cover to independently purge it from theirs. But this same smooth-brained thinking wiggled its way right into Trump’s tariff plan last week, through an equation that looks fancy but is something my middle school son could figure out.

[…]

The media thinks these woke tariffs are going to bomb the economy back to the stone age, but when I make the abhorrent choice to read the graphs myself it looks more like January 2024. A 20% tariff on Chinese goods is rough. Adding 34% more to it is rougher. But a 54% tariff on Chinese goods is nothing compared to Shenzhen closing its entire manufacturing sector down because they found a germ, and probably not significantly worse than the Fed turning off the free money spigot in 2022.

These tariffs are going to do goofy shit to the economy. I don’t like the goofy shit they’re likely to do. I think that trade balancing through tariffs is an idea so stupid that only Rust Belt union workers could come up with it, which is why they probably did come up with it, and also probably why Trump won the election by flipping the Rust Belt.

March 22, 2025

Fundraising is much tougher for Democrats right now … and they’re not coping well

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s not just Canadian politicians getting driven completely insane by the Bad Orange Man’s antics — he’s even doing it to his domestic opponents in the Democratic party as well:

“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee.

Kansas City Star:

    Democrats Suffer Blow Ahead of Senate Elections

It’s a goddamn slide show, but as it might be amusing I shall wade in. The things I do for you people …

    Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s retirement is expected to significantly impact the Democratic Party’s prospects for the upcoming Senate elections, amplifying pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The party’s challenges ahead have heightened with the departures of Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). Democrats must regain four seats to reclaim the majority.

It sure looks like the Donks are planning to get clobbered in 2026. Or, more likely, they anticipate a series of bruising primary fights as the old grift-and-grin Democrats are challenged by True Believers, because as HGG has taught us — credit where it’s due — SJWs always double down. Batshit insanity is the hill they’ve chosen to die on — Trump keeps handing them 80/20 issues, and they keep jumping on the 20 with both feet.

    CNN’s Chris Cillizza recently noted the Party’s challenges in the upcoming Senate elections. With the need for a net gain of four seats, Cillizza expressed concern over potential financial limitations that may hinder effective campaigning.

Yes. “Financial limitations”. Democrat donors are stupid — if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be Democrats — but even they can see that 80 is way, way bigger than 20.

Oh, and also: It doesn’t help that you’re openly, gleefully endorsing no-shit terrorism against Tesla dealerships — and drivers! — calling for Musk’s assassination, and so on. It’s a bad look in general, and a bad look in particular, because now the guys with the big checkbooks are wondering if that kind of thing won’t happen to them if they get crosswise with the most lunatic members of the lunatic fringe (hint: It will. As the scorpion said to the frog: can’t be ‘elped, mate, it’s me nature).

    Cillizza said, “The money that gets spent there playing defense, just to hold Democratic seats, means money that doesn’t get spent playing offense in, let’s say, a state like Ohio, where Democrats are trying to recruit Sherrod Brown, the former senator, to take on John Huston, the appointed Republican senator.”

Yes, a dwindling asset pool forces those kinds of choices. It also doesn’t help that you keep going back to the well like that. One assumes there’s a reason Sherrod Brown is a former senator. Do you have no one else?

Haha, just kidding, obviously you don’t have anyone else. That’s one of the biggest problems with gerontocracy — the Groovy Fossils are going to have to be carried out at room temperature, so anyone with anything on the ball has been giving Government a pass since the 1980s. Trump went around the Official GOP for lots of reasons, but not the least of them was: he had to. They have the same gerontocracy problem as the other side of the Uniparty. It’s turtles all the way down.

    Cillizza concluded, “I just do not see it. I don’t see the money there. I don’t see the energy there. I don’t see the candidates there to expand the playing field”.

It won’t be for lack of trying, though. You’ve still got The Media in your pocket, and they can still do some damage. You’ll never get to the 80 side of those 80/20 issues, but you might get it to 50/50 — as has been done with abortion, gay “marriage”, and so on. On the other hand, those took 40, 50 years, and The Media hadn’t totally pissed away all its credibility back then. It’s a real corner you’ve backed yourselves into, guys gals persyns.

It also doesn’t help that you’re stupid:

    Democrats have identified potential pickup opportunities in Maine and North Carolina, targeting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

Holy breakdancing Buddha, why would you target them? Thom Tillis is the very definition of “RINO”; Collins is a Leftist, full stop. The next time they vote against the Democrats on any issue of substance will be the first time they’ve ever done it. It’s as predictable as sunrise, so much so that it’s a joke to anyone right of Mao — the GOP officially has X number of seats, minus Collins and Murkowski.

    Vulnerabilities among current incumbents, especially Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), have added to the party’s challenges.

    Oh, don’t worry about it — the GOP will find some way to throw it. Georgia, Georgia … hey, what’s Herschel Walker up to these days? Think he’s up for another run? Why not parachute in Alan Keyes or Ben Carson? They’re still alive, right? What about “Nikki” “Haley”? She’s gotta keep her arm loose for the 2028 primaries …

      Some Democrats have remained optimistic despite the hurdles. Discussions have included potential candidates such as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-MI) for key races. New Hampshire Democrats have prepared for competitive primaries, with Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) considering a bid for Shaheen’s seat.

    As we know, when it comes to crime 13 does 50. When it comes to Leftism, though, it’s more like 20 does 100, and there’s no better illustration than New Hampshire. It should be the reddest state in the union, and people who live there tell me it really is… except for their Congresscritters, because the good people of New Hampshire didn’t shoot every Masshole they could catch. The fine folks in Oregon, Colorado, and (soon enough) Texas know what I mean — y’all didn’t introduce migrating Californians to wood chippers when you had the chance.

March 15, 2025

Eliminating “environmental justice” from the EPA

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille suggests that you not take the New York Times coverage too literally as they wail about the Trump administration’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency:

If you were to believe reporting from The New York Times — which is an increasingly unwise idea — the Trump administration is diverting the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from poor and minority communities that face “disproportionately high levels of pollution”. But if you scratch the surface even a bit, you find that what’s really being eliminated are “environmental justice” offices that infuse identitarian ideology into EPA enforcement efforts. Americans should welcome efforts to strip racial obsessions from the armory of regulators who already wield too much power.

Competing Takes on “Environmental Justice”

“The Trump administration intends to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, according to a memo from Lee Zeldin, the agency administrator,” Lisa Friedman wrote for the Times. She added that the memo directed the reorganization and elimination of “offices of environmental justice at all 10 E.P.A. regional offices as well as the one in Washington”.

Contrast that with a press release from the EPA, which states “that EPA will immediately revise National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives to ensure that enforcement does not discriminate based on race and socioeconomic status (as it has under environmental justice initiatives) or shut down energy production and that it focuses on the most pressing health and safety issues”.

Whatever you think of the Trump administration in general, EPA Administrator Zeldin is on the right side of this debate. As I wrote in 2022 when the Biden administration formally introduced “environmental justice” concerns to the EPA, the term refers to “a decades-old school of thought that seeks to graft identitarian politics onto environmental concerns. That allows practitioners to wield civil rights law in addition to traditional environmental laws against perceived malefactors. It also makes it possible to slam offenders as ‘bigots’ if their actions affect one community more than another.”

There’s no need to read between the lines to figure out what is meant by “environmental justice” — its advocates are quite clear about their meaning. In 2021, the Northeastern University School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs published A User’s Guide to Environmental Justice: Theory, Policy, & Practice by Ken Kimmell, Alaina Boyle, Yutong Si, and Marisa Sotolongo.

The Ideology’s History of Racial Obsessions

“The demand for ‘environmental justice’ (EJ) has gained substantial traction in the last few years, as well it should,” the authors wrote in their introduction. “A key pillar in EJ will be widespread, community-designed and community-supported investment in neighborhoods that have been economically and environmentally burdened by a long history of racist government and industry decisions.”

“The environmental justice movement has evolved in parallel with and in response to traditional environmentalism to focus on the unequal distribution of environmental harms among different people and communities,” the authors add in summarizing the history of the movement. “Research revealing the whiteness of the environmental community elevated concerns that social justice and racial justice were not prioritized in mainstream environmentalism.”

“Applying the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin … frontline communities and others began to use the term ‘environmental racism’ to focus on the unequal (social and spatial) distribution of environmental burdens,” they continue.

February 6, 2025

QotD: Wokeness as substitute religion

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In Tom Holland’s Dominion, he] makes that point that in the absence of Christianity, there’s something instinctive about finding these belief systems. And it does have the same hallmarks: it has the aspect of original sin, the Augustinian concept of original sin which now comes in through whiteness, or being heterosexual — having these immutable characteristics that make you a sinner. And then you’ve got the heresy concept, the idea that anyone who doesn’t think the right things is a heretic who needs to be cancelled, and then you get the metaphor of cancel culture, which is a lot like witch hunting, and burning people at the stake as the Inquisition might have done.

And of course so much of the theorizing behind woke ideas is based on entirely unsubstantiated, faith-based positions. They believe in unconscious bias, and institutional power structures — things that you can’t quantify or put your finger on that just sort of exist in the ether like spirits. And to ask them to prove any of these positions is to simply get the response that well, they do exist because we know they do. Which is what a religious zealot would say.

So I think that certainly the best way to understand the social justice movement is to see it as a cult. Because then it all makes sense, and it also makes sense why they’re able to behave so barbarically toward those who don’t subscribe to their belief system. Because the hallmark of many religions is tolerance to a degree. And then where things start going wrong, where witches start getting burned at the stake and heretics start getting executed is where that tolerance runs out. And I think that’s what happened here: the social justice movement is a fundamentally intolerant movement. And fundamentally illiberal. There’s nothing liberal about it.

Andrew Doyle, talking to Spencer Klavan, “Titania McGrath and the Politics of Wokeness: An Interview with Andrew Doyle”, The American Mind, 2020-01-30.

November 21, 2024

QotD: The 1965 Immigration Act

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Caldwell’s account is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding how those resentments grew until they finally exploded under Barack Obama. The Tea Party was the first real movement of this sort; the collapse of immigration reform proposals under George W. Bush and then under Obama revealed how powerful these feelings were; Trump managed to wrap them all up into a populist fervor that was distributed geographically enough to give him a win in the Electoral College. Liberals, increasingly ensconced in their own economic and social bubble, were shocked.

Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.

But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.

So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.

I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.

Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?

Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.

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