“What is it they think they can have? What do they think’s available? Peace, happiness, and justice? To be achieved by pretty women and schoolboys? The millennium? By people who want good, respectable company lawyers?”
From the conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer
Jan. 6th, 2025
I think that for the educated classes the constantly shifting language (especially that of 'social justice') is a status symbol and a marker of group affiliation. It's also a mechanism to weed out those who didn't attend private schools or spend years studying the performativity of gender or indigenous positionality or whatever.
For young people it's a similar (conformist) impulse. It's a way to display (to strangers, online) that one is quirky or fun or casual or clever... by using the same words that everyone else does. It doesn't make a lot of sense but then that's adolescence (or adulthood for many people-they're barely distinguishable for many at this point).
I think that the constant language churn is driven mostly by young women. First we had all of the strange phrasings taken from black drag culture (yass queen), and then a smattering of critical-theory type terms, etc. Ironically a lot of this lexicon comes from the poorer tier of black culture (although the richer tier just endlessly copies the poorer tier's culture anyway).
That's right: a bunch of people who get deeply upset about cultural appropriation are appropriating the turns of phrase of a very distinct and much different culture in order to bolster and burnish their online image. Can you believe it?
I see many claims made about demagogues and populism and Trump and Orban (and Milei, for some reason).
The accusations made by these writers: that demagogues use lying or repetition or focus on economic resentment or fear or hatred of the ‘other’ are all easily applicable to the elite status quo.
Lying - really doesn’t even need examples… they’re simply too numerous
Repetition - Trump MSG rally evoked a pro-Nazi rally in the 1930’s, Trump “should never stand before the seal…”; all political movements use repetition (and all of them use lies)
Economic resentment - resentment of billionaires or producers or property owners or white men or oil companies or…
Fear/hatred of the other - can anyone really listen to Democrat rhetoric during the past few years and tell me that fear and hostility toward Trump and his supporters (despite the fact that this group now comprises, by some calculations, the majority of voters) isn’t a central theme? How about fear of Russia (much less than fear of China, for some reason…)? All political movements use fear and hatred of the other to some degree.
Progressives will claim that their alarms and hostilities are against the ‘bad’ side but that’s not compelling to neutral and independent observers (or even many Democrats, like me). Our recent election showed that beyond any doubt.
What’s the REAL division between Le Pen and Trump and Orban… and their opponents? The former question the existing former structure of society, including the prerogatives and capability of institutions and the privileges of wealth and credentials, and the latter defend it. When it comes to EVERY agency and issue and debate (CDC, IRS, FBI, green infrastructure funding, DEI hiring, foreign policy, tax policy, border policies…) there are roughly two sides:
(1) an educated (and disconnected) elite struggling to defend their ideas and privileges from questions of corruption and incompetence and ideological capture, and paying the political prices for inflation and crime and disaster unpreparedness and state oppression of peaceful opposition figures
(2) a less-educated (but more experienced) working class fighting to reduce immigration, grow birthrates, cut bureaucratic bloat, and pursue people who use their positions to manipulate the public (COVID) or engineer harmful policies (immigration).
The people in group 1 will claim that group 2 is motivated by fear or hatred or racism or resentment but, on a purely emotional level, I find more of these phenomena among group 1 than I do group 2. People who are sure that they are resisting evil (and those who have the institutional status quo behind them) tend to be the most certain, arrogant, merciless, and spiteful, as a general proposition. Group 2 is generally welcoming of dissent and friendly towards doubters and skeptics. This is purely my experience, but it’s been affirmed by many people. Trump voters regard Harris voters as misled and naive. Harris voters regard Trump voters as bad people (racist, for example). I think the asymmetry is clear.
Trump and Orban and Le Pen are political representatives of this second group, or at least that is how they portray themselves, and this is the source of their political support.
It’s not about lies or fear or repetition or ethical deficiencies versus their converse; this is a wildly simplistic and moralized (and self-serving) view of political division. EVEREYONE wants to believe they’re on the side of righteousness- but the fact that the pro-Trump side has gained far more ground in the past two years than the anti- should give Trump critics pause. This is about carpenters and parents and police and truck drivers and farmers against therapists and executives and professors and journalists. The institutions erected and manned by this latter group have proven insufficient and new ones are emerging. This is a rupture that goes deeper than politics or economics and involves two competing worldviews. One seems to be winning.
Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.
I’ve been endlessly surprised by the persistence of progressive delusion. COVID policies? Thefts and store closures? Immigration chaos? Surely the election? SURELY media manipulation?
But I’m trying to remain empathetic. Imagine how difficult it must be to abandon the conviction that you’re riding the long arc of justice and surveying the world rom the moral high ground. That kind of arrogance can be chipped away at but unseating it entirely is a journey into the Jungian labyrinth. Most people simply lack the gumption for that kind of confrontation. These folks will grow more confused, and more unhappy, as time passes.
Jan. 14th, 2025
I’m reflecting on this today. Could female voters have such strange ideas of human behavior and crime and punishment and success… because they are insulated from such things, by design? Beautiful women are patronized and catered to endlessly… but even plain women are treated gently and shielded from consequences.
Look at any arrest video involving a woman and there’s a 60% chance she begins crying and pleading. Could it partly be that (some) women don’t understand consequences?
This post, written by me, Jake Mackey, describes my experiences as a professor on a college campus over the last 4 years. To judge from the polling, there are many professors who feel similarly. A new poll of 6,269 professors at 55 higher ed institutions, conducted by theFIREorg, just appeared a few days ago. The findings are sobering, and indicate the context in which my post (cross-posted from Lee Jussim’s Unsafe Science) should be read:
—I'm one of the 27% of faculty who feel unable to speak freely for fear of how students, administrators, or other faculty might respond.
—I'm one of the 40% of faculty who worry that my reputation may be damaged if someone misunderstands something I say or do.
—I'm one of the 23% of faculty who worries about losing his job over a misunderstanding of what he's said or done.
—I'm one of the 35% of faculty who's tempted to tone down his writing for fear of controversy.
—I'm one of 35% of politically moderate faculty who at least occasionally hide their political beliefs from other faculty in an attempt to keep their jobs.
—I'm one of the 27% – 28% of faculty who frequently self-censor in conversations with other faculty, admin, and students.
As I say in my post, some readers will be tempted to gaslight me, denying that much of anything happened over the last few years, or insinuating that any difficult times I may have experienced are my own fault, for holding views that are beyond the pale (when in fact, I’m a New Deal/Civil Right Act Democrat).
I despise anything that falls in the category of 'gossip' and decline to discuss the character of individuals and instead address ideas unless they are simply impossible to separate from an individual. This is one of those cases. When it comes to the richest and, arguably, most influential person in the world and his dubious relationship with the truth, it is particularly important to set the record straight and address the lack of honesty and integrity.
We really need to care about what is true and hold people who don't care about what is true in low esteem until they rectify this failing. Nothing else will incentivise them to do so. If people continue to reward those who engage in ideologically-biased narratives and partisan speaking points with no attempts to be accurate, fair-minded and self-aware about the tendency to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias that we all have, we will just spawn more people willing to do that.
I am always vulnerable to accusations of indulging in my own motivated reasoning and confirmation bias when it comes to criticising Musk, Trump or the right more broadly because I am open about being left-wing myself. I would be very unlikely to ever vote right even when right-wing leaders are honest, principled and care about what is true because I favour left-wing policies overall.
However, I would remind people inclined to dismiss my critiques as partisan bias that I have spent the last decade criticising those on the left who prioritise ideological narratives over what is true and hold illiberal views and helping people to protect themselves from being impacted by these ideologies. Many of those people have been ethical conservatives whom I respect and recognise as essential to a well-functioning liberal democracy.
You are needed more than ever right now, ethical conservatives. We need you not to make the same mistake that so many well-intentioned people on the left did when they minimised the problem of illiberalism and rejection of truth on the left because they felt that those people, while over-zealous and not altogether rational, were a minority and had their hearts in the right place while the illiberal elements on the other side did not. The liberal left is reaping the consequences of not having acted decisively to get its own house in order and hold those who held illiberal values and rejection of truth in low esteem and prevent them from forming a dominant moral orthodoxy that did great harm.
Don't succumb to the same trap, genuine conservatives who care about what is true and value your cultural heritage and want to conserve the principles underlying your own liberal democracies. Please be alert to those on your own side who do not care about what is true, who hold authoritarian values and spout ideologically-biased narratives divorced from reality and seek to form an illiberal moral orthodoxy based on those narratives. Don't let them. Hold firm to your conservative philosophical traditions that values evidence and reason and truth and your cultural heritage of liberal democratic values that foregrounds individual liberty and individual responsibility. Yours is a noble and steadying political philosophy that holds societies steady and rejects the revolutionaries and reactionaries.
All of us who care about evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles must come together now to push back the ideological narrative builders and illiberal story-tellers, but ethical conservatives are those best able to do this on the right and we all really need you to do that.
The four dirtiest states Harris won and their respective demerits in parenthesis:
· California (8)
· Hawaii (8)
· Colorado (7)
· Washington (7)
Ballot Harvesting
16 of 20 (80.0%) Harris states (including Washington, D.C.) permit and/or practice ballot harvesting.
…
Unique Corruption
I tagged 7 of 20 (35.0%) Harris states (including Washington, D.C.) for the arbitrary designation of unique corruption, which ranges from Colorado’s leakage of electronic passwords to Hawaii’s counterfeit mail balloting scam and beyond.
No Voter ID
12 of 20 (60.0%) Harris states (including Washington, D.C.) lacked any Voter ID requirements in the 2024 election. Some states recorded as having voter ID have only marginal precautions on the books.
What would be our media’s and government’s reaction if hundreds of white men had targeted Muslim girls for gang rape, torture and beatings? What would happen if it turned out that a father who came to rescue his child from the rapists was arrested by the police they called, instead of the perpetrators? What would happen if we learned that there were tens of thousands of victims, by the most conservative estimates? In a country that spent a full week on wall-to-wall coverage of a white woman asking a black woman where she was really from at a Royal function?
The media would have gone ballistic. Debates about the “far right”, “Islamophobia”, “racism” and so on would have gone on for months. We would have had apology after apology, inquiry after inquiry, press conference after press conference.
But none of that happened with grooming gangs. Until now.
After Sleepy Joe retires to the nursing home where he should have resided for the past decade, leftist historians and commentators will memory hole his entire presidency because it implicates them in malfeasance. They sacrificed their careers and credibility for a cadaver. The more time goes by and damage uncovered, the uglier the cover-up of his senility will get. He was the final flail of an imploding regime. His stubborn pride not only led to his downfall, but it also wrecked the entire Democrat machine that he and his cronies built for 50 years. The social contract was collateral damage. Our justice system, politicians, economy, “science”, and “experts” will never be trusted the same away again. It will take decades to reestablish a high trust society, if ever. We should never forget what they did to our country.
In her article for the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch chronicles the decay of reading in high schools, exposing a general shift away from the belief that the purpose of high school English classes is to read books cover to cover. She finds that students are now more frequently assigned short-form pieces like book excerpts and news articles, leaving them unprepared to tackle longer works like Pride and Prejudice or Crime and Punishment—both of which were on Columbia’s Lit Hum syllabus when I was a student, though Dostoyevsky has been suspiciously retired. As someone who works with high school students at my college consulting startup, I have witnessed a decay in general literacy among my own seniors, many of whom have cruised through almost the entirety of high school without having read a single book—and not simply because they shirk their assignments. For instance, during a mock interview for Stanford, I asked one of my students to reflect on a book she had read in the past four years that had changed her perspective on the world. She stuttered before admitting that she had not read a single book since middle school; when I prompted her to name the books she had been assigned in English class, she said she had been asked to visit a restaurant and write a “food review.” Another student recently came to me with an AP Literature assignment that asked her to analyze the lyrics of a Kendrick Lamar song. A student who had, in fact, been assigned a book cover to cover slogged through the entirety of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles without comprehending a single important plot point—and her teacher told her that that was all right and that they would be moving on to an easier read in the spring.
“The problem is that a more empathetic and effeminate military isn’t a more efficient one. It’s a more inefficient one,” Hegseth says. “That puts everyone at risk.” It raises casualties.
It also loses wars, which are fundamentally macroeconomic affairs involving material and manpower, emphasis man. The average soldier carries 100 lbs (45kg) of kit and no amount of DEI training will ever change that. Democrats cannot change it. Believe this historian: the soldier’s load has always been too heavy, and better men than us have tried to reduce it, though rarely with any success. All but a very few women are being set up to fail under such burdens. Democrats kid themselves by imagining otherwise.
I believe that Joe Biden is the last Democrat who can legitimately present an image of being a moderate. I will leave it up to you to decide whether Biden’s image matched the reality. Every other potential leader of the Democratic party on the federal level is further to the Left than Biden’s image. This image will not hurt the Democrats in Blue states, but it will seriously hurt them in the 35 other states.
The Democratic preoccupation with racial, gender, and sexual identity is sabotaging the future leadership of the party. Every potential leader must either check off a box of being either:
a racial minority,
a woman, and
have some sort of non-heterosexual gender identity.
All the exceptions must hew the party ideological line or risk ending their careers. This makes the Democratic bench for national politics extremely thin. And since the Left controls the primaries, fund-raising, and activists, no one else has a chance to step forward.
What the Starmer Government’s backdown on grooming gang inquiries reveals is how central narrative control has become to the left-progressive politics of the professional-managerial class and how much the attack on “hate speech” and “dis/mis/mal-information” is about retaining narrative control and so social leverage through controlling discourse-legitimacy.
“When people assume that those who look like adults will act as mature adults, immature adult behaviour will catch them off guard. By the time mature adults become aware that they’ve given immature adults access to information, networks, privileges, status and technologies that can be weaponised, it’s already too late. The enabling culture has already been established for immature adults to run amok, ready to smash traditions like a child destroying a lego building.”
Nothing more clearly reflects political priorities than the enforcement of laws.
Progressives want masculinity, weapons, property, self-defense, and religion to be deprioritized, and Leftist ideology, immigration, climate activism, and social division to be celebrated and advanced.
[Germany] will do all of this to set an example for others, to feel good about ourselves and to believe that we are on the Right Side of History.
Stuck politics in Germany will become an increasingly glaring and bizarre phenomenon as the progressive liberal consensus withers away everywhere else. Still worse, stuck politics render German politicians incapable of responding to contingencies, of perceiving the changing world as it is and of appeasing their increasingly restive citizens. The resources spent on keeping politics stuck – because stuck politics is a deliberate choice of our elite and not some bizarre Twilight Zone problem they’ve stumbled into – also mean that Germany will face ever poorer domestic circumstances and shittier governance.
I think the feeling aspect is incredibly important. In my experience progressives don’t have useful experience or deep policy knowledge so often as they have a self-serving and moralistic worldview, in which their beliefs give them status and psychological reassurance.
Germany’s progressive self-identity is rooted especially deeply. It was a fundamental and intentional reaction to the mistakes of the Nazi regime. They are confused, and flailing… and still self-righteous.
My refusal to participate in the moralizing linguistic games of the people I’m surrounded by immediately marks me for those people as nothing more than a rube. Further, women particularly use these language games as a social sorting mechanism. Despite being generally non religious, women in this class tend to enforce linguistic piety with religious zeal.
Donald Trump isn’t even president yet and we’re seeing all sorts of changes. Wikipedia is suddenly starting to police its biased editors. The FBI has abolished its DEI office. States and universities are abolishing theirs. Illegal immigrants are already starting to self-deport. Transgender mania is receding.
I think the rapid collapse of many of these social constructs reflects their profound moral emptiness. These were never matters of principle for most-they were shallow status games and immature virtue mobs.
If people really believed in that shit they would’ve risen to defend them against objections. Instead they smeared and cancelled whomever they could, then climbed the heaps of bodies.
Don’t live with hate in your heart… but never forget what they did, or they’ll do it again.
Great compilation of great work! Thank you for including me!