Derb and the Magic Dirt - Demographics and Immigration

In which John Derbyshire discovers the power of proper rhetoric:

In the past couple of decades we’ve seen the rise of one particular explanatory strategy. That strategy recently acquired a name—or possibly it’s had the name for a while and I only just recently noticed. Whatever, I really like the name: Magic Dirt.

The core idea is that one’s physical surroundings—the bricks and mortar of the building you’re in, or the actual dirt you are standing on—emit invisible vapors that can change your personality, behavior, and intelligence.

That’s why, for example, you read so much about “bad schools” or “failing schools.” The thing to be explained is that schools whose students are overwhelmingly non-Asian minorities—blacks and mestizos—get much worse results on academic tests than schools whose students are majority white and East Asian. This has been so for decades, defying even extravagantly expensive efforts to change it, like the Kansas City fiasco of the 1990s.

Parsimonious explanation: innate differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality between the races.

Magical explanation: Bad schools! The bricks and mortar of these schools, the asphalt of their playgrounds, are giving out invisible noxious vapors that enstupidate the kids!

Bob Weissberg tossed and gored the whole “bad schools” flimflam in his 2010 book Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, which I recommend to your attention.

Another aspect of the Magic Dirt theory is the current popularity of economist Raj Chetty‘s researches on social mobility. Analyzing millions of individual tax returns from the 1990s, then the returns of those individuals’ now-adult children fifteen years later, Chetty found there’s more social mobility in some places than in others. Who woulda thunk it? Sample quote:

    For children growing up in places like Salt Lake City … the odds of moving from the bottom fifth of the national income distribution to the top fifth are more than 12 percent … In contrast, in cities like Charlotte, North Carolina … a child’s odds of moving from the bottom fifth to the top fifth are less than 5 percent. [The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Economic Opportunity,Brookings Institute, June 1, 2015]

Parsimonious explanation: Those places have different proportions of the various races, so race differences in average behaviors cause different outcomes.

Official explanation: Magic Dirt! Salt Lake City’s dirt has beneficial qualities that Charlotte’s just doesn’t.

A very cynical person—not me, you understand, but a hypothetical extreme cynic—might surmise that Prof. Chetty’s research is funded by the real-estate industry as part of their plan to reclaim America’s cities for upscale whites by driving out minorities and scattering them to distant towns and suburbs—so they can improve themselves by living on better dirt, you see?

Magic Dirt theory is a key component of immigration romanticism, too. Sure, Mexico and Central America are messed-up places, and presumably their inhabitants played some role in messing them up. If we just move thirty or forty million of those people to the U.S.A., though, our Magic Dirt will transform them into civic-minded Jeffersonian yeomen!

Our hypothetical extreme cynic might again wonder if there isn’t some commercial interest at work behind the scenes there. Central Americans work for very low wages—especially when they’re here illegally and dare not complain.

Magic Dirt: the explanatory power of it is truly wonderful. Perhaps we can use it to elucidate String Theory, or the Mystery of Consciousness.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Higgs boson is implicated somehow…

Simplicity + truth + contempt = effective rhetoric. As Derb illustrates, the core pro-immigration argument really is that stupidly ahistorical and cargo cultist. It is so obviously wrong that it can be accurately dismissed in just two words: Magic Dirt.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/11/derb-and-magic-dirt.html?m=1

Vox Popoli: Germany has Magic Dirt too

Germany has Magic Dirt too

Angela Merkel announces that standing on German ground is sufficient to make one a member of the Volk:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing heavy criticism for claiming the German people, or Volk, are comprised of anyone currently living in Germany regardless of their background.

The word “Volk”, or people, in German (pronounced “folk”), is a somewhat controversial term in Germany and like many German phrases has no exact English equivalent. Chancellor Merkel is now facing opposition from many, including within her own party, for claiming that anyone living in Germany is part of the Volk, which amounts to saying that all migrants are German by virtue of living in the country, Tag 24 reports.

Merkel made the comments in her home region of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania as she received the formal nomination from her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), to lead the party in this year’s federal election. 95 per cent of the roughly 140 delegates voted for Merkel who ran for the nomination unopposed.

“There is no justification that small groups of our society presume to define who the Volk are, the Volk is everyone who lives in this country,” Merkel said.

These luanatics are making the historical National Socialists look sane and reasonable by comparison. The Nazis merely regarded their ethnicity to be ideal. Merkel is openly disavowing science, history, and philosophy.

The Teutonic edition of Magic Dirt theory is no more credible or convincing than the American version. Indeed, if we are to take it seriously, we will be entirely unable to make any sense of history whatsoever. I mean, who sacked Rome? It couldn't have been the Visigoths, because the Gothic people who crossed the Danube became Romans as soon as they settled inside the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire, regardless of their background.

Therefore, Alaric the Roman sacked Rome in 410 AD, with the assistance of tens of thousands of other Romans, for no apparent reason.

Civic nationalists who understand that Magic Dirt theory is completely insane when applied to Germany or Great Britain should be able to grasp that their logic is just as insane, and and just as false historically, when applied to the United States of America. At this point, one has to be either borderline retarded or stubbornly self-deluded to remain a civic nationalist rather than a nationalist proper. A dog living in a human household remains a dog, even if it has lived there its whole life. This is hardly a revelation. A can never be Not A.

There is no such thing as a "proposition nation" any more than there is a "proposition animal" or "proposition element". A "proposition nation" is no more a nation than "social justice" is justice. It is the same damnable deception by redefinition in which the Left habitually engages.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/03/germany-has-magic-dirt-too.html?m=1

Free Not To Be Around You - The Z Man Blog

Talk to a real estate agent, who deals in mid-sized suburban properties, and they will tell you that the local schools sit atop their client’s list of concerns. A great house in a bad neighborhood usually means bad schools and no one will choose that on purpose. Instead, families will pay extra for a not so nice house in a great neighborhood because that means good schools. You can fix up your house, but you cannot make the local school better if it is full of misbehaving knuckleheads or headed that way because of the neighborhood.

People instinctively understand a basic truth about education. That is the quality of product coming in dictates the quality of product coming out. Despite generations of lectures from our betters, we still know that the apple does not fall far from the tree. If the parents are low-IQ losers, the kids are most likely going to be low-IQ losers. The schools are not correcting this. In fact, it is the opposite, because the other old saying about apples is also true. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.

Everyone, including our hypothetical real estate agent, is too polite and too afraid to say what this means as a practical matter. For instance, I knew someone who lived in a mostly Jewish suburban neighborhood of starter homes. These were townhouses and ranchers. A black family moved in next door and they got along well with everyone. Then another black family moved in, but it was ghetto time, with parties into the late hours. Suddenly, the neighborhood sprouted “for sale” signs and the demographics changed within one summer.

In a prior age, this problem was mostly solved through free association, homeowner associations, and covenants. People in that neighborhood would have prevented the threat to their property values by prohibiting the sale of houses to people who did not belong. It was not entirely fair, of course, but it allowed people to protect their property rights without having to resort to lying. As is always the case, there were trade-offs, but at least there was a natural way for people to guard their rights as property owners and citizens.

Similarly, in a prior age, the neighborhood association would have cracked down on the troublemakers. Even the “progressive” neighborhoods policed their ranks and used the rules to enforce standards. A couple generations of myth-making have convinced everyone that these rules were used strictly by racists, and they often were, but they were more often used to maintain public order without having the government send in the police. With enforced diversity came the police state and that is not a coincidence.

Free association is illegal now. If a real estate agent is too obvious in how they handle these things, they face disciplinary action from the real estate board. A homeowner, who refuses to sell or rent to whoever shows up, can easily find themselves in front of a judge. Freedom of association is no longer a right in America. Everyone has to seek permission from the state before they can make these decisions. That means finding a place to live has become a game of cat and mouse for middle-class families.

It’s yet another example of the worthlessness of modern conservatism. They rolled over for this stuff long ago, accepting the Left’s assertions that discrimination was the vilest of sins and therefore required an extraordinary remedy. Once you accept that people don’t have a right to say with whom they will associate, addressing things like crime and the schools means begging the Left to make exceptions to their moral code in order to enforce anything resembling civic order. That’s where school choice and voucher programs come in. They are an appeal to the Left for an exception.

Of course, the Left hates the middle-class so any appeal on their behalf is denied. Instead, these appeals have to be decorated in such a way that appeals to the vanity of the Left and allows them to benefit. So-called charter schools that are for the “gifted and talented” are marketed to Lefty as a way to cull from the ghetto, all of those bright and creative minds, otherwise left to be raised by their parents. In reality it means those self-righteous progressive women get to send their kids to schools that are not so diverse.

School voucher programs attempt to expand on this by playing the Magic Dirt game. “If only those poor mothers can get their kids off that tragic dirt and onto the magic dirt.” They muster statistics and education studies to buttress the claims. It’s all nonsense, but it is the only way modern conservatism can frame the issue. They are begging the Left for an exception to the moral code. No one is fooled by it, which is why school voucher programs have gone nowhere. The Left will not tolerate them.

Freedom of association is not just forbidden. You’re not even allowed to talk about it anymore. Imagine what would happen if someone went on TV and said they don’t want to live next to Koreans or Somalis. They would have their life ruined. It’s why all those principled conservatives we keep hearing about were nowhere to be found when the queers started attacking bakers. Even libertarians sprint from the room when the topic of free association is raised. It’s the result of conceding the moral high ground to the Left.

It’s why the so-called Right is in a panic over Trump’s immigration talk. If it is acceptable for Americans to say “no” to Muslims on the grounds that we don’t want any more Muslims, then we’re back to discussing the limits, if there are any, to the freedom of association. Put another way, if we don’t need a reason to say “no” to Mohamed, then we don’t need to ask for permission in order to say “no” to diversity. That’s not a fight or even a discussion, the so-called conservatives want to have with the Left.

It’s also why the hand-wringing over free speech on campus is a pointless distraction. You cannot have free speech without freedom of association. That’s the obvious lesson from the confines of the academy. Put a bunch of people in close quarters and you have to police what they say and where they go. Otherwise, you have violence. The same is true of all other rights. All natural rights are premised on freedom of people to live apart from those they do not wish to associate. Self-segregation requires little policing.

Bring back freedom of association and all the other rights follow.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/03/no_author/free-not-around/

Society is a racial construct - in support of Rep. Steve King's statement of the obvious.

Le Chateau spells it out, in support of Rep. Steve King's statement of the obvious.

Steve King ✔ @SteveKingIA
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies.

• Society is a racial construct.
• There is no magic dirt that will transform, say, Somalis and Syrians into lovers, defenders, and disciples of Constitutional republicanism.
• Race matters.
• Once more…..RACE MATTERS.
• In fact, race is the primary source pool of civilization and culture; all other variables are commentary in comparison.
• Culture isn’t a costume. It can’t be worn like a Turinic shroud with the expectation that it will reverse-imbue the intrinsic character of any people who happen to hop the border and adopt its most superficial trappings.
• Culture is an emergent property of the people that comprise it, who themselves are properties of their genes and of the predispositions and beliefs and behaviors and temperaments and aptitudes with which they are endowed by their genes.
• America is not a nation of immigrants. America is a nation of colonists who, along with their descendants, created, built, and nourished America into a great nation, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known. Immigrants came later, and they were for a long while chosen from stock populations that were not too dissimilar from the founding stock of America (African slaves stand as a glaring exception). It was not until relatively recently (1965 onward) that immigrants significantly deviated in numbers and racial congeniality from the historical norm of immigration into America.
• Quite simply, the myth of American exceptionalism is just that. American ideals aren’t spread by osmosis into the deep psyches of different races of people; rather, a very specific race of people — White Europeans of primarily Anglo-Celtic-Germanic descent — breathed life into the American ideals, and without them their ideals wither from neglect and misuse in the care of their usurpers.
• We are not created equal under Nature, and this truism applies to races as it does to individuals. Memorable exceptions only prove the wisdom of pragmatic generalizations.
• The Constitution, or any stirring stanza of words written by Whites for White sensibilities, will not change a Chinaman into a heartland Chad. Racial foreigners can mouth the words, but if they don’t feel it in their bones they’ll have no trouble betraying those words when its personally advantageous or when the Law isn’t hovering closely to motivate their observance.
• A civilization is the sum total of the people that inhabit it. Change the people, change the civilization.
• Some cultures really are superior to other cultures. If it were not so, millions of those from the lesser cultures would not be escaping into the homelands of the better cultures.
• Finally, the character of a nation is not established by a founding document; instead, the founding document chronicles the character of a nation. PEOPLE MAKE THE NATION, THE NATION DOES NOT MAKE THE PEOPLE. If the people change, so does the nation, into whatever form the replacement people find most familiar, which usually means a facsimile of their native homelands they left behind.

Steve King is right. You can wave your final goodbye to White American civilization if some other tribes are having all the babies. The future belongs to those who show up, and the shape of that future depends on the innate character of its inheritors. That’s Stone Cold Truth 101, and it’s the truth that has bedeviled suicide signaling leftoids for generations, and driven them into increasingly insane postures of delusional doublethink, obscene hypocrisy, and hoary lies.

THERE IS NO MAGIC DIRT.

NATIONS ARE GROUPS OF PEOPLE, NOT LINES ON A MAP.

THERE ARE NO MAGIC WORDS.

AMERICA IS A NATION. AMERICANS ARE A PEOPLE.

X CAN NEVER ALSO BE NOT-X.

CIVILIZATION IS NOT GUARANTEED.

DIVERSITY + PROXIMITY = WAR.

Vox Popoli: Society is a racial construct

Immigrants don't share American values

The Magic Dirt Theory is clearly not working as advertised. Immigrants are heavily anti-gun rights:

The millions of foreigners the U.S. government voluntarily imports each year can be counted on to vote en-masse in favor of unconstitutional restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, Winkler explains:

Polls show that whites tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a significant margin (57 percent to 40 percent). Yet whites, who comprise 63 percent of the population today, won’t be in the majority for long. Racial minorities are soon to be a majority, and they are the nation’s strongest supporters of strict gun laws.

The fastest-growing minority group in America is Latinos. Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population grew by 43 percent. Hispanics, which make up 17 percent of the population today, are expected to grow to 30 percent of the population in the coming decades.

Gun control is extremely popular among Hispanics, with 75 percent favoring gun safety over gun rights.

Asian Americans also represent a growing anti-gun demographic. Although only about 5 percent of the population today, the Asian American population is predicted to triple over the next few decades. A recent poll of Asian American registered voters found that 80 percent supported stricter gun laws.

I find it remarkable, although not exactly surprising, that so many people are so determined to defend their idiotic theory that all immigrants will magically become Real Americans, real life nephews of their Uncle Sam, reborn on the Fourth of July by virtue of geographical relocation, thereby instantly negating of all of their racial, ethnic, religious, political, and cultural traditions.

How very shocking to discover that immigrants place no value on "rights" that don't exist, and have never existed, in their alien cultures. As I have repeatedly pointed out, immigrants have no understanding of limited government nor do they harbor any love for it. None. Let's face it, even after generations in the USA, many descendants of the previous waves of European immigration still don't grasp the basic concept.

It's bad enough that the Magic Dirt theory is absurdly stupid; logical criticism should be sufficient to convince those who subscribe to it to abandon it entirely. But when they first reject the logic and then continue to cling to their theory in the face of actual evidence of the sort cited above, well, at that point we might as well just call them fat, ugly, and out-of-date. That sort of rhetoric will be more likely to persuade them that they are wrong, because it is obvious that neither facts nor reason are enough to do the trick.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/10/immigrants-dont-share-american-values.html

Reality Check - by Steve Sailer

Back in May 2013, it dawned on me that, crazy as it sounded in those more innocent times, the Establishment was gearing up to make transgenderism into the next big thing. Lately, my Spidey sense for zeitgeist trends has started tingling again, telling me that my old jokes about how the “equity” that the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity racket wants is your home equity aren’t funny anymore.

For example, the mainstream media is ramping up the antiquarianist articles about how ancient inequities in real estate practices mean that in 2021 it’s your fault that black neighborhoods have low property values and, therefore, you must pay. Redlining, which was abolished 53 years ago in 1968, is the usual suspect, but the latest fad is to emphasize racial covenants in home deeds, which the Supreme Court ruled unenforceable in 1948.

That was 73 years ago, but who’s counting?

For example, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal splashed a long article on May 1 entitled:

Why Black Homeownership Lags Badly in Minneapolis

Restrictive property covenants once helped keep people of color out of neighborhoods around America. The effects have compounded.

The WSJ propounds:

A trove of new research suggests that one factor is a tool of discrimination from 100 years ago: racially restrictive covenants that were attached to thousands of Minneapolis homes in the early 20th century, prohibiting sales to many minorities.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, it’s human nature to imagine you deserve to be rich because, knowing what you know today, your great-grandparents should have bought the magic dirt that was cheap then and is valuable now (even though you or your more immediate ancestors probably would have frittered it away in the intervening decades before it turned into pay dirt).

It’s particularly likely that blacks, who on average spend more on conspicuous consumption relative to their incomes than other races, would have blown through potentially valuable property inheritances before they fully matured.

Moreover, there is the Heisenbergian factor: If a lot of blacks had moved into the neighborhood, it wouldn’t have gone up in value as much. The fundamental reason that homes don’t appreciate as fast in blacker neighborhoods is not their tragic dirt, but because blacks tend to be lousier neighbors. Fortunately, there is an obvious win-win solution: If blacks want to make more money off home ownership, they should work harder at being better neighbors.

Unfortunately, nobody is supposed to mention any such bracing realities to African-Americans. It is widely assumed that blacks can’t handle the truth. Instead, everybody is supposed to reassure them of how oppressed they are.

“The further we get into the future from the civil rights era of the 1960s, the more we are lectured about the increasingly distant past.”

Not surprisingly, black behavior, as measured by objective standards such as their murder rate relative to other races, hasn’t much improved, and indeed blacks’ already horrific murder rate worsened sharply as soon as the racial reckoning was declared last year.

In any case, the WSJ article about Minneapolis is self-evidently absurd. Why? Because there were almost no blacks living in Minneapolis during the covenant era. The Wikipedia article “Demographics of Minneapolis” notes:

From the 19th century until about 1950, Minneapolis hovered around 99.0% white.

The further we get into the future from the civil rights era of the 1960s, the more we are lectured about the increasingly distant past. How come?

One reason is because, the fewer who can remember them, the easier it is to mislead contemporary Americans about the Bad Old Days. For example, with Minneapolis constantly in the news for its black riots, it’s getting harder to recall that Minneapolis was once perhaps the most orderly big-league city. In 1973, Time magazine ran a cover story on the “Good Life in Minnesota” about how it was “the state that works.”

Similarly, we are constantly hectored that black slaves built most of the wealth of America. Americans, however, used to know that by 1865 that wealth was gone with the wind. As Abraham Lincoln explained in March of that year, the Civil War was a disaster of biblical proportions:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk…as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Since 1865, there has been a sharply negative correlation between how many slaves a state had and its current prosperity: Compare slave-free Minnesota to its partner in alliteration, slave-rich Mississippi.

In truth, the reason that the lies have mounted to such a fevered pitch in recent years is that nobody really believes anymore, as we begin the third full generation after civil rights, that blacks have what it takes to reach statistical equality in economic productivity with whites, much less with Asians or Jews, or even with Mexicans.

Hence the gold rush to extract as much as imaginable from the net worth of naive whites before the country is taken over by cynical immigrant nonwhites who will laugh at black claims.

What can be done instead?

First, we must recognize that blacks have a very good deal in America even if they aren’t as rich as everybody else. While African-Americans are the poorest Americans, they should feel grateful that they are the richest Africans in the world.

Second, whites need to drop their unspoken but debilitating concern over black fragility. Millions of whites assume that if blacks ever heard the truth—Due to reasons of nature and nurture, your race is on average better at sports and music than at coding and physics; and you need to work more on not shooting each other so goddamn much—black self-esteem will vanish and they will just die of embarrassment.

Nah, blacks have plenty of self-esteem. What they could benefit from more of is criticism. Blacks need to be treated as if they were human beings rather than sacred cows.

Third, important news that almost nobody has noticed is that, after black fertility soared during the early crack years, it has fallen below replacement level during the past decade. Unless America botches up its policy on immigration from Africa, we won’t again face the rapidly growing black population that so stressed our cities in the decades after World War II.

Fourth, we must understand that if you want integration, you must have law and order.

When a white policeman superbly stopped a 16-year-old black girl, Ma’Khia “Ma’K the Knife” Bryant, from eviscerating another black woman who was armed only with a purse puppy, numerous writers explained that it was racist to not allow black youths to indulge in their culture’s tradition of knifeplay.

We could allow blacks to carve each other up and resist arrest all they want, but that would mean confining them to Escape From New York-style reservations.

Instead, we should make clear that all races are entitled to the equal protection of the laws and that no race is above the law.

Fifth, we need intellectuals to tell the truth.

Next month, Charles Murray is publishing Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America in answer to the current dominance of Ibram X. Kendi’s dogma that black underperformance in anything must be proof of white guilt, and thus, whites must pay. Murray answers:

Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability…. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must.

We’ve tried lying and look where that has gotten us.

https://www.takimag.com/article/reality-check-2/print

The Flight 93 Election - By: Publius Decius Mus with comments by Vox Day (I strongly urge you – make that implore you - to read the article in full text.)

The incoherence of conservatism

I don't know who "Publius Decius Mus" is, except in the Samnite War sense, but this is the best article I have ever read at the Claremont Institute. It very clearly makes the case for the need for the Alt-Right, if not for the Alt-Right per se. And in doing so, it also underlines the petty narcissism of the dwindling #NeverTrump crowd:

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.

Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion." That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.

Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.

Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

One thing that I expect has become clear to most readers here, whether of the Alt-Right or the conservative persuasion, is that conservatism is utterly unequipped to deal with the current situation. Even if conservatism were a coherent ideology - it isn't, read Cuckservative - or if it were not partially culpable for the current situation - and it is - conservatives are both intellectually unarmed and emotionally unprepared to deal with the ongoing transition from ideology politics to identity politics.

A favorite phrase of mine is, "let reason be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions." Conservatives correctly point out the ways in which American liberalism, Leftism, and progressivism all fail the test of experience. However, conservatives completely fail to recognize their own pie-in-the-sky thinking when they appeal to Magic Dirt, Magic Words, and the Zeroth Amendment. They do not understand the significance of the Supreme Court's version of the US Constitution not being the same as the original written version of the Constitution, they are unaware that most immigrants, children of immigrants, and grandchildren of immigrants neither know nor care what any version of "the Constitution" is, says, or represents, and they ignore the very purpose of the Constitution as laid out in the Preamble.

Most importantly, they elevate a single phrase from the Declaration of Independence, a meaninglessly utopian piece of rhetoric which is not only contradicted by the Preamble, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the acts of the First Congress, but by subsequent phrases in the Declaration itself, and proclaim it to be the foundational core of both state and nation. To conservatives, "all men are created equal" is a Magic Spell of unlimited potency that is not only, contra literally ALL the evidence, historically definitional, but can even be invoked to instantly transform any individual, tribe, people, or nation into Americans.

However, neither the Magic Spell nor the Magic Words prevented the Civil War, or if you prefer, the Second War for Independence. And the Magic Words will not prevent Round Two, or if you prefer, the Third War for Independence, or what is considerably more likely to be the free-for-all that follows the general collapse of the US central state. Very few saw the Soviet collapse coming, and I expect even fewer genuinely see the US collapse coming, despite the profiteering of opportunistic media doomsayers who have never seen an Apocalypse, a Ragnarok, or a Rapture they didn't like.

Where conservatism has proven intrinsically fragile and self-contradictory, the Alt-Right is anti-fragile and intellectually consistent. A nation has considerably more ruin in it than a state; the state cannot survive long without a single dominant nation but as the Jews, the Kurds, and many other peoples have proved, a nation can survive indefinitely without a state. The architects of 4GW theory and the globalists alike have chronicled the way in which we are coming to the end of the Westphalian period where the state held a monopoly on violence. Therefore, it should surprise no one that as the international state system is in the process of coming to an end, the ideology politics that arose within it and subsequently dominated it should also be in decline.

So, conservatism is not merely incoherent, it is now as entirely irrelevant as a biplane during the Battle of Britain. Neither a Balanced Budget Amendment nor pledging undying loyalty to AIPAC nor deciding to "rededicate ourselves to the notion of liberty for which generations of Americans fought and died" are going to even begin to address the implications of the post-Westphalian shift to identity politics, much less prevent the collapse of the USA.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-incoherence-of-conservatism.html

I strongly urge you – make that implore you - to read the article in full text.

Full text at:  http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/

Vox Popoli: Enjoy the inevitable (Will the collapse of the American Empire lead to the restoration of Western Civilization? - CL)

(This is a message primarily for young men! The rest of us blew it – BIG TIME!)

Lest you be discouraged, keep in mind that everything we've been seeing over the last few days has been absolutely inevitable since 1965. There was never any other possible outcome. The decline and fall was designed. On a related note, see if you can spot what I found amusing about this rather apposite article concerning my prediction of the coming collapse of the United States.

According to Vox Day, the 1965 immigration act and the subsequent amnesty were nothing short of existential disasters for the United States. He recently wrote about the consequences of the Act:

“The post-1965 mass immigration policy was entirely based on lies and misrepresentations, and 50 years on it is clear that global migration has destroyed America, the largest invasion in human history has severely weakened the United States, and if a significant portion of the post-1965 immigrants and their descendants are not repatriated in the next decade, they will cause the complete collapse of the Union, violent ethnic conflict, and a civil war of unprecedented magnitude.”

Vox wrote a long post last year about Representative Emanuel Celler, the primary author of the 1965 act. He suggests that as a third-generation immigrant, Celler was blind to the inevitable consequences of increased migration. Many dismiss Vox as a racist because he observes the actions and consequences of different ethnic groups, but they rarely engage with those observations themselves. It should be obvious that the descendants of the pioneers who fought the American Revolution will have different worldviews than the descendants of Ellis Island immigrants. Many of the most vocal proponents of increased migration are descendants of immigrants themselves. The notion that America is a “nation of immigrants” is a mantra repeated by the descendants of immigrants.

Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, Vox responded to Globalist Party Republican John Kasich’s call for amnesty for illegal aliens:

“The dirt is not magic. The USA is not magically exempt from the same rules of power, politics, and war that have stricken nearly every other multiethnic society in history at one time or another. There is absolutely nothing preventing what has happened many times elsewhere from happening on US soil.”

I believe it was Steve Sailer who coined the term “magic dirt” to refer to the belief that migrants from diverse nations and cultures can suddenly become just as American as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson when they set foot on American soil. Despite globalist media doing their best to label any such discussion as racist, the debate about exactly what it means to be American is a necessary one to have. Is America a place? Is it an idea? Or is it a people, the descendants of its founders? This question is easier with mono-ethnic nations. Ethiopia is a place inhabited by Ethiopians. Japan is a nation inhabited by the Japanese. But who decides who is American?

Oh, the irony.... Actually, I don't believe for one second that Cellar was unaware of the inevitable consequences of his actions. While many of his co-ethnics bought into the con, Cellar himself was seeking to break the power of the white Christian world hegemony created by Great Britain and inherited by the USA after World War II. Anyhow, do you seriously believe that you can live in peace in the same society as the joggers who are protesting and looting everything or the Antifa activists who are burning and breaking everything? Forget whether you want to do so or not, do you actually believe it is even possible?

One reason the Roman Empire lasted so much longer than the US Empire will is that the Romans knew better than to permit the foreign corruption of their state.

From the readiness wherewith the Romans conferred the right of citizenship on foreigners, there came to be so many new citizens in Rome, and possessed of so large a share of the suffrage, that the government itself began to alter, forsaking those courses which it was accustomed to follow, and growing estranged from the men to whom it had before looked for guidance. Which being observed by Quintius Fabius when censor, he caused all those new citizens to be classed in four Tribes, that being reduced within this narrow limit they might not have it in their power to corrupt the entire State. And this was a wisely contrived measure, for, without introducing any violent change, it supplied a convenient remedy, and one so acceptable to the republic as to gain for Fabius the well-deserved name of Maximus.
- Machiavelli, CHAPTER XLIX, Discourses

This column, written more than nine years ago, may help one put recent events in the proper historical perspective.

The New White Man's Burden
28 February 2011

The harsh historical reality is that no human society ever survives. They come into being, they thrive, they decline and eventually they perish. If they were remarkable, perhaps they will leave indications of their past existence through literature and the arts, through place names and through their influence on subsequent ideas and modes of thought. But that does not bring them back to life; the modern Greece of IMF-inspired riots, burning banks and filthy streets is not the ancient Greece of the philosophers and the Athenian Empire.

Societies also tend to collapse much faster than anyone, especially its inhabitants, ever anticipates.  Plato envisioned his ideal republic 24 years after the unexpected defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and no doubt he had little idea that Athens would never rise again to its former glory.  Cicero composed his ode to the ideal of Roman governance in De re publica only seven years before his beloved Republic of Rome collapsed into civil war and eventual dictatorship. The British empire, upon which the sun never set, ruled over a quarter of the world’s population and nearly a quarter of its total land area before it fell into rapid decline and disappeared within 30 years of it reaching its greatest expanse. Last week, the British were shocked to discover that they lacked the wherewithal to rescue their own citizens from the wreckage of a fifth-rate Arab country.

In summary, the apex is always the point at which the eventual decline begins. It is now abundantly clear that 1989, which marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet empire, also represented the high point for the American empire. As if the market and economic catastrophes of the last 12 years were not evidence enough, the stunning impotence of America in the face of Islamic revival sweeping over one collapsing U.S.-backed ally after another makes it eminently clear that America is a global power in decline.

American authors such as Pat Buchanan and Paul Kennedy were among the first to perceive that America was in a state of decline. Now, even foreign journalists are aware of the phenomenon and comment openly upon it. The neocon triumphalism behind the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq was nothing more than the usual last gasp of empires; this has been a recognizable pattern since the Athenians sent the flower of their navy to perish on the shores of Sicily more than 2,000 years ago.

The decline of America can be traced to three fundamental factors: debt, demographics and democracy.  Of those three factors, it is demographics that is the most vital. Since the 1965 Immigration Act, the American political elite has been electing a new people by encouraging immigration from a wide variety of societies that are vastly different in ethnic and cultural terms than American society. In combination with this vast invasion of the, shall we say, unconventionally civilized, the traditional male-female dynamic that had proven successful for centuries was altered through a transformation of the legal and judicial systems. This confluence of factors has created a tremendous challenge for the white male population, as young white American men now have every material incentive to opt out of activities which tend to foster societal survival and very little incentive to opt in.

This challenge does not exist because Roissy and the other apostles of Game are incorrect about the deck being grotesquely stacked against the delta males upon whom the continued survival of civilization ultimately rests. It exists precisely because they are correct. They are absolutely right. No society that has been reorganized and restructured to provide such a perverse system of incentives deserves to survive, indeed, no such civilized society ever has survived. And therein lies the awesome challenge present to the men of the West, to the young men of America, today.

The education system is stacked against them. The media are stacked against them. The law is stacked against them. The family courts are stacked against them. The church will cheerfully lecture them on their failures while uniformly giving women a pass on everything from abortion and gluttony to a failure to honor and submit to their husbands. Society has provided every possible excuse for a young, white Christian man to give up, opt out and become the videogame-addicted, marriage-avoidant, slut-shagging degenerate that the entertainment industry portrays him to be.

But is this not precisely the sort of challenge that real men have always craved? To stubbornly persist in the face of overwhelming evil is the root of all heroism. Instead of being seen as an unavoidable morass, the culture must be viewed as an evil to be resisted and eventually overcome. Not every man will survive the battle, just as not every Marine who stormed the bloody beaches of Tarawa lived to tell the terrible tale. For every man who marries a God-fearing woman and becomes the head of a strong family in which the basic tenets of American Christian civilization are preserved, there will be one who is financially raped in divorce court, is ruined by the parasitic governmental hegemony or falls victim to an intoxicated illegal alien driving without a driver’s license. But it is no shame to fall in the battle. The only shame is to be found in the failure to fight it.

There is no reason for despair. The collapse of American empire is precisely what will bring about the end of the current system in which the unproductive prosper on the efforts of the productive, and it is certain because it is mathematically unsustainable. The old White Man’s Burden was to bring Christian civilization to the savage. The new White Man’s Burden is to plant seeds of Christian civilization that are capable of surviving the coming descent into savagery.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/06/enjoy-inevitable.html 

Vox Popoli: Africans reject magic dirt

Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, a member of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, said that “no white person on this continent can claim to be African”.

Of course, this also means that no black person on the European continent can claim to be European. Which, if the evolutionary historians are to be believed, is even more true than the converse. At least whites can, in scientific theory, trace very distant genetic roots back to Africa, but blacks have absolutely no connection to Europe whatsoever.

Never forget that homogeneous nations arise from the bloody ashes of heterogeneous empires.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2021/04/africans-reject-magic-dirt.html