> it occurred to me how comically absurd it would be if one of his interviewees refused to talk to him because he was an Indian.
Sure, but how many of the interviewees want to move to India? You can’t just hand wave over demographics and culture and claim that everyone who cares about preserving them is a racist chud. Someone told me, “libs talk like MLK but live like KKK.”
Ok, but they very demonstrably don't. They pay absurdly high rent to live in more diverse and cosmopolitan places. Once there, they perform weird humiliation rituals where they blame each other for every single ethnic family who rationally chooses to decamp to cheaper places, and vote for policies trying to slow the hemorrhage by explicitely or implicitly taxing themselves and giving the money to local ethnics. If they ever decamp for the suburbs, it's some Class X/Bobo suburb where their next door neighbor is an Indian engineer and their kid goes to school with the children of a taco truck owner who did well, something they prize very much.
I could go on all day but no, libs really do not live KKK. They might live Rockfeller Republican after 40, but even that is less and less true tbh.
Incredible analysis on how the onlne Right fundamentally misread the Minneapolis situation. The point about competing for image-making power rather than just resisting "moral blackmail" is spot on, especially when the fed government picked maybe the most favorable battleground possible. I saw this dynamic play out irl with local news in my area and it was wild how ineffective the counter-narrative was compared to what it could've been.
The "real elite human capital ... never came" claim just seems nuts to me given the fantastic success of Mossad (e.g. the exploding pagers, Stuxnet, and prior impressive human ops), Israeli army success in the early decades, kibbutzim and moshavim, Israeli Nobelists and startups. Was there a narrower claim you meant to make? Much of this is quite recent so "already left" doesn't seem right either. Usually my role is to object to people wrongly grading on a curve on metrics like "is this person telling the truth?", but here it seems like you're failing to grade on a curve when you really should, and mistaking a global decline in elite competence for a local brain drain.
There have been 11 non-peace Israeli nobel prize winners, compared to >100 Jews total since WW2.
Also, look at the 'Israelis'. Daniel Kahneman went to American and stayed there. Robert Aumann did his work in America and then came to Israel and became a kook. Michael Levitt did most of his work in Stanford etc. I think this quite neatly illustrates what I am saying.
Oh, so they have a minority of Jewish Nobelists? "The very best 90 Jews in the world" seems like an unusually high threshold for elite human capital; I'd think mere Nobel overrepresentation would count.
"Israel is two things. The first is the decaying remnants of an ethnostate built by and for the Ashkenazim of the Russian empire. As a people of above average talents, the Zionists of the Second Aliyah and onwards reasoned quite reasonably that, if Bulgarians and Slovaks and who knows what else were going to get a country of their own, then they should too. Somewhat less reasonably, they decided to do it in the Land of Israel for reasons that, looked at in retrospect, appear quite delirious. They were not, perhaps, the wisest of their people, but they were the boldest, the most practical, those most possessed of virtu, and, when you are starting with an average of 112, you can afford to drop a few IQ points and still come out way ahead. Under the most trying circumstances, they did what they set out to do, and the country they made, while in no danger of becoming one of the world’s cultural titans, was pretty cool in many respects. "
So the elite Jews mostly never came, but Israel scraped by because the Ashkenazi talent pool was so good. The Nobel prize data shows that pretty clearly I think. See also this https://www.timesofisrael.com/putting-the-no-in-nobel/.
However, what I was really getting at in the article is this: most of best Jews never came, or already left, but even the ones who are still here are mentally checked out. If it gets intolerable, they won't fight, they'll just go. The ones who are out fighting are the ones who know that they don't really have better options.
This narrower claim seems plausible to me, but it is a narrower claim than the one it seemed like you were making in the article, which is only directionally correct if we are treating gentiles as a noncentral case rather than the vast majority of people in the world. I think it's important to keep distinguishing between "Israel isn't getting the people who are elite by Jewish standards" and "Israel isn't getting people who are elite by global standards, most of whom are lame by elite Ashkenazi standards."
I'm only saying plausible rather than unambiguously correct because Israel has at times plausibly offered better opportunities to display the "possession of virtu" relevant to war, which involves a sort of cognitive excellence, than America has, so I'm not sure the selection consistently disfavors Israel.
Differential selection for martial virtu works just as well if not better as an explanation for why the right is more successful in Israel than in the USA.
But it does weaken the general argument that peripheralization is the cause; in subordinate countries like the UK or New Zealand, which offer proportionately less opportunity for martial virtu than the US, I'd expect the brain drain among gentiles to lean strongly right relative to the brain drain for Israel, and possibly lean right overall, even though the US is also quite attractive to nonmartially ambitious types.
Israel was a fairly poor country till recently, and most of these Nobel prize winners were in America. Nobel prize level work wasn't really possible in Israel till recently. (And certainly for that reason anyone who wanted to win a nobel prize didn't go to Israel).
I'm not sure what would be a better measure to test this theory. Fields medalists? (One out of 15 Jewish winners are Israeli, but its not a huge sample).
That's not what we were arguing. You claimed elite human capital didn't move here. I'm saying it's possible they did, but wouldn't have been able to win Nobel prizes if they did.
I think you are an exception, but regardless, your type had a sweet spot where Bibi managed to leverage the MENA electorate to create a free-market economy while he bought them off with trinkets. Now the cat's out of the bag, and it's just a matter of time until you decide you are sick of getting exploited to pay for people who hate you.
In tech, Israel has some of the highest salaries outside
the US.
I hate to break it to you, but if I move back to the UK I'm hardly going to be off the hook for getting exploiter to pay for people who hate me. At least Israeli TFR is high enough that there's a chance we don't all collapse in the welfareocolypse.
> "The online Right has managed to convince themselves of a different and completely insane thesis, namely that [ICE backlash] was a test of their ability not to give into moral blackmail."
Yeah... I'm sorry, but aside from the arrestees here being less-obviously-degenerate-people I really don't see how this is any different from the furore over George Floyd. Even in the best-case-scenario for mandatory E-Verify leading to self-deportation and so on, there were still going to have to be millions of forced deportations from the US, and some non-zero percentage of those interactions were going to involve violent altercations, particularly when leftist agitants are doing everything they can to aggravate the situation.
Chain-multiply all that by probability of death, possibly caused by incompetence, panic or misconduct on the officer. It's not pretty, but if you forcibly deport ~200K people per year and only two people die under sub-optimal conditions you're actually doing pretty well.
All law enforcement is like this, and we have to stop indulging these left-wing cycles of manufactured hysteria, particularly when you need to see waaaay more than 200K deportations per year.
Very few people, even MAGAs, really want to see normal, peaceful, hardworking people, families and children, violently rounded up and imprisoned and deported on a massive scale. They don't like the demographic change in the country and will incessantly complain about it, but they aren't hateful and fascist enough to endure watching these brutal actions against nice innocent people, on a massive scale and long term.
ICE are generally targeting gang members and associates first, and if you're present in the country illegally you are by definition not "innocent" of a crime.
But they're not doing that. They're going to schools and restaurants and home depots. That's the big change. And most normal people regard a hard-working, peaceful family who happens to be in the country illegally as a crime like going 5 miles over the speed limit. Imagine a Democrat administration deciding to arrest millions of people who at some point were recorded going 5 miles over the speed limit. Imagine them targeting those people at their workplaces or picking up their kids from school, and doing it in the most brutal way possible.
Do you have some statistical breakdown on the percentage of ICE arrests involving "hard-working peaceful families"? Is this a serious conversation where we break out the numbers on per-capita public-service/welfare costs vs. tax contributions and wage depreciation?
There is evidence that ICE arrests have been trending toward people without criminal convictions or pending charges.
This study from the Guardian, dated November 2025, found that people without criminal convictions or pending charges had just become the largest group of people detained by ICE.
This study, based on public data provided by ICE, has found that in January 2026, found that the proportion of immigrants detained by ICE without covinctions or charges has been steadily rising over Trump's second term, from 21.9% (itself an elevated baseline) to 43% in January 2026.
The basic problem is that (i) deporting violent criminals is popular with normies but (ii) deporting everyone else isn't. Meanwhile, the people in charge of the national right wing movement (and the relevant government agencies) are attempting to take the public's consent on (i) to enact massive demographic change to the United States in an extremely short period of time by deporting people in category (ii). There is no way to deport millions of immigrants in 4 years without deporting millions of sympathetic immigrants.
So they get to Minnesota, claiming they're there to get rid of all the criminals, but there's just not a lot of criminal illegal immigrants in Minnesota (the Somalis are citizens). But they got to meet their 3,000 immigrants a day quota. So they're randomly stopping people who look like they're born abroad and seeing what shakes loose. They're setting up stings at Home Depots and hospitals. Of course it was going to be unpopular.
> "to enact massive demographic change to the United States in an extremely short period of time by deporting people in category (ii)"
You do of course realise that the Democrats had absolutely no problem enacting equally-if-not-more-massive demographic change using blatant criminal negligence when it came to border security?
I can accept the general argument that the optics here may be worse than with category (i), but the normies are just going to have to realise that this is what effective border control is going to entail. They all need to go.
Just start fining those employing illegals into bankruptcy and they'll self-deport. They're here to work, not to piss you off.
Obv, it'd require you to 1. hurt some people you actually like, eg the local gentry heavily relying on illegal labor to run their small businesses 2. not hurt people you very clearly hate, such as the illegals themselves and urban Americans.
I'm not sure I'm especially fond of (1), but to be clear, I'm all in favour of introducing mandatory e-verify, fining employers, reducing welfare access, ending jus soli and possibly adding taxes on remittances (although given the income disparities with some of these people's home countries and the fact they're *not supposed to be in the country at all* you might as well ban their remittances entirely.)
I 100% agree that the GOP should pursue these 'soft power' options more aggressively, and perhaps Trump should be talking about it more. Nonetheless, there was never going to be any scenario where millions of *forcible* deportations were not going to be required.
If they cannot find any work here, the only people who will still be here are who, the ones who live here without working? So mostly abuelitas of citizens/permanent residents, maybe a couple sugar babies? Hardly millions of them, hardly worth deporting.
Genuinely, the only reasons why we need forcible deportations at all is because god forbid someone of the GOP power base might suffer any consequences, and some American outside it might have a nice day.
> "If they cannot find any work here, the only people who will still be here are who, the ones who live here without working"
Criminals do not typically find work within the officially-monitored economy, and while I'll accept that the average illegal migrant doesn't make a living from crime, a sufficient percentage do that millions is still a likely figure.
I'm not sure I'd give Abuela a free pass either, since there's still the problem of amnesty deals and chain migration. If her home country is poor/dysfunctional enough that it can't afford to look after the elderly then we can talk about aid programs and peacekeeping initiatives to address that problem, and I believe I've made the case for this extensively in other comment sections. But if a very elderly person broke into my home and started eating from my fridge and sleeping on my couch, I would still reserve the right to remove them.
Classic Moldbug take on Minneapolis, but your radar on Pretti is horrifically off - he is absolutely not just a normal white guy. You're writing for your EHC audience, whether consciously or unconsciously. A personal, radar-honing question, if I may: how many covid vaccines (+ boosters) did you take?
●I fully agree about MAGA being structurally anti-white (racially). For example, in today’s America being German practically equals “Antifa,” lol. I’ve heard insane diplomatic stories: German students, tourists and Aupairs followed by ICE, accused of terrorism. Our bank accounts in german territory monitored by American intelligence agencies for “communism” or “terrorism”, which in reality just means solidarity with Cuba…
●I really liked your article; very refreshing, I agree with the vectors you present but not with the name/"semantics" behind; I want more precision. I think we need to be much more precise about the real nature of Trumpism. We are not dealing with a neocon project in the style of the New American Century. The defense of interests through permanent war is not its engine, and Monroeism and hemispheric sovereignty, not globalist management, is far closer to its real doctrine of state.
●Trump is not Straussian. He does not follow the Kissinger doctrine of managed chaos and permanent geopolitical balancing. If he did, NATO would already be in open war with Russia instead of quietly reorganizing imperial forces while negotiating with it. Reaganism 2.0 yes and NO at the same time.
●There are two structural traits that define neocon bipolarity:Russophobia and elitist antisemitism.Yes, they are Zionists. But Zionists of an antisemitic type (a phenomenon Hannah Arendt already hinted at when speaking of instrumentalized Jews in imperial politics). And we’ll see this more clearly very soon.Trump himself is neither antisemitic nor Russophobic, though American antisemitism is hijacking Trumpism, and there are already signs of this drift.
●Since 2016, the US has gone through a soft, veiled coup d’état, institutional, media-driven, bureaucratic. We’ve seen this movie before: In Germany, between the failed Munich putsch and the 1933 elections, the Weimar Republic itself helped articulate the internal and external conditions for a National Socialist revolution. Neither the German left nor the Prussian establishment managed to contain the madness.
●The US has passed through a similar phase, and the contemporary left is playing the same ridiculous role. Instead of infiltrating the superstructure (media, institutions, labor organizations), it runs into cultural guerrilla warfare for globalist Lumpen queer trashy values.Or in Engels’ terms (I can’t hrlp my classic marxist roots): it aligns itself with the lumpenproletariat, the socially unanchored mass without stable class interests (criminals and... queer white trash).A left obsessed with criminals, performative identities, and lumpen politics pushes the actual proletariat straight into the arms of a brain-dead right.That’s exactly what many of these “normal whites” with pure white kids resisting ICE represent: a queerized lumpenproletariat spectacle.
● The worker with a mortgage and a Filipino wife with half filipino kids goes with Trump; not out of race solidarity, but class instinct, because being white is more a cultural-social thing, an identity, rather than just "race", though they use the race thing against the lumpen model; just like the f nazis did in Germany. Race is a Nazi façade that didn’t work in Germany to solve the class struggle, and it won’t work in America either: only antisemitism worked, and it will work in America as well since Jews in America are extremely powerful, visible and rich; namely, perfect targets of the antisemitic rightoids and I don't see Jewish Zionists have an strategy against them.
●What they’re really staging isn’t a Weimar drama, it’s more a Spanish Civil War fantasy. Didn’t you see how Franco has become a meme-war character...???? As a Hispanist philologist, this trend is suuuuuuuuuurreal to me, lol. But yeah, it is what it is.
●Yes, btw; Franco used Moroccan troops against the Republic and brutally exterminated white Spaniards for political reasons… 😁
I much appreciate your link to Shtetl-optimized. I was not mature enough in 2017 to have been exposed to such spaces online. Your link has opened my eyes and given me much additional resource to deal with.
Thank you very much, and know that your linking continues to do much good, past and future.
Always chimp turns into the destruction of the FDR state, huh? The open system needs its beautiful losers, huh? The left is winning against ICE, huh?
All seem true enough, except that at any moment the reversal could be. FDR state is remade against the chimp. Open system splits beauty and loserdom, so we get beautiful winners and ugly losers. ICE kills the left politically by biasing the map.
Either way, figure out a way to win by selling to neither side and buying from each, until it comes time to sell to each and buy from neither. That’s the Moldbugmas way, no? Ho Ho Ho.
“Democracy is thus forced to adopt a one-party liberal state as its crystallised form, and so the self-stabilising equilibrium of liberalism will have to become something brittle”
Unclear how consequent follows from antecedent. Seems a bit wishful thinking no?
I'm on edge about what Trump will ultimately cause for the U.S. But it's strangely comforting to say to myself, "If our government can't survive this, we didn't deserve to survive in the first place."
> it occurred to me how comically absurd it would be if one of his interviewees refused to talk to him because he was an Indian.
Sure, but how many of the interviewees want to move to India? You can’t just hand wave over demographics and culture and claim that everyone who cares about preserving them is a racist chud. Someone told me, “libs talk like MLK but live like KKK.”
Ok, but they very demonstrably don't. They pay absurdly high rent to live in more diverse and cosmopolitan places. Once there, they perform weird humiliation rituals where they blame each other for every single ethnic family who rationally chooses to decamp to cheaper places, and vote for policies trying to slow the hemorrhage by explicitely or implicitly taxing themselves and giving the money to local ethnics. If they ever decamp for the suburbs, it's some Class X/Bobo suburb where their next door neighbor is an Indian engineer and their kid goes to school with the children of a taco truck owner who did well, something they prize very much.
I could go on all day but no, libs really do not live KKK. They might live Rockfeller Republican after 40, but even that is less and less true tbh.
Incredible analysis on how the onlne Right fundamentally misread the Minneapolis situation. The point about competing for image-making power rather than just resisting "moral blackmail" is spot on, especially when the fed government picked maybe the most favorable battleground possible. I saw this dynamic play out irl with local news in my area and it was wild how ineffective the counter-narrative was compared to what it could've been.
The "real elite human capital ... never came" claim just seems nuts to me given the fantastic success of Mossad (e.g. the exploding pagers, Stuxnet, and prior impressive human ops), Israeli army success in the early decades, kibbutzim and moshavim, Israeli Nobelists and startups. Was there a narrower claim you meant to make? Much of this is quite recent so "already left" doesn't seem right either. Usually my role is to object to people wrongly grading on a curve on metrics like "is this person telling the truth?", but here it seems like you're failing to grade on a curve when you really should, and mistaking a global decline in elite competence for a local brain drain.
There have been 11 non-peace Israeli nobel prize winners, compared to >100 Jews total since WW2.
Also, look at the 'Israelis'. Daniel Kahneman went to American and stayed there. Robert Aumann did his work in America and then came to Israel and became a kook. Michael Levitt did most of his work in Stanford etc. I think this quite neatly illustrates what I am saying.
Oh, so they have a minority of Jewish Nobelists? "The very best 90 Jews in the world" seems like an unusually high threshold for elite human capital; I'd think mere Nobel overrepresentation would count.
As I wrote:
"Israel is two things. The first is the decaying remnants of an ethnostate built by and for the Ashkenazim of the Russian empire. As a people of above average talents, the Zionists of the Second Aliyah and onwards reasoned quite reasonably that, if Bulgarians and Slovaks and who knows what else were going to get a country of their own, then they should too. Somewhat less reasonably, they decided to do it in the Land of Israel for reasons that, looked at in retrospect, appear quite delirious. They were not, perhaps, the wisest of their people, but they were the boldest, the most practical, those most possessed of virtu, and, when you are starting with an average of 112, you can afford to drop a few IQ points and still come out way ahead. Under the most trying circumstances, they did what they set out to do, and the country they made, while in no danger of becoming one of the world’s cultural titans, was pretty cool in many respects. "
https://nonzionism.com/p/the-war
So the elite Jews mostly never came, but Israel scraped by because the Ashkenazi talent pool was so good. The Nobel prize data shows that pretty clearly I think. See also this https://www.timesofisrael.com/putting-the-no-in-nobel/.
However, what I was really getting at in the article is this: most of best Jews never came, or already left, but even the ones who are still here are mentally checked out. If it gets intolerable, they won't fight, they'll just go. The ones who are out fighting are the ones who know that they don't really have better options.
This narrower claim seems plausible to me, but it is a narrower claim than the one it seemed like you were making in the article, which is only directionally correct if we are treating gentiles as a noncentral case rather than the vast majority of people in the world. I think it's important to keep distinguishing between "Israel isn't getting the people who are elite by Jewish standards" and "Israel isn't getting people who are elite by global standards, most of whom are lame by elite Ashkenazi standards."
I'm only saying plausible rather than unambiguously correct because Israel has at times plausibly offered better opportunities to display the "possession of virtu" relevant to war, which involves a sort of cognitive excellence, than America has, so I'm not sure the selection consistently disfavors Israel.
Differential selection for martial virtu works just as well if not better as an explanation for why the right is more successful in Israel than in the USA.
But it does weaken the general argument that peripheralization is the cause; in subordinate countries like the UK or New Zealand, which offer proportionately less opportunity for martial virtu than the US, I'd expect the brain drain among gentiles to lean strongly right relative to the brain drain for Israel, and possibly lean right overall, even though the US is also quite attractive to nonmartially ambitious types.
Israel was a fairly poor country till recently, and most of these Nobel prize winners were in America. Nobel prize level work wasn't really possible in Israel till recently. (And certainly for that reason anyone who wanted to win a nobel prize didn't go to Israel).
I'm not sure what would be a better measure to test this theory. Fields medalists? (One out of 15 Jewish winners are Israeli, but its not a huge sample).
You can't say 'Israel is an attractive place for talented people except for its economy', that's not how it works.
That's not what we were arguing. You claimed elite human capital didn't move here. I'm saying it's possible they did, but wouldn't have been able to win Nobel prizes if they did.
I think your argument is only relevant to physics, maybe a bit to chemistry. (Also, I didn't bring up Nobel Prizes, Ben Hoffman did).
It wasn't till recently, now it is (other than the USA). My salary in high tech doubled when I moved from the UK to Israel, and I am not an exception.
I think you are an exception, but regardless, your type had a sweet spot where Bibi managed to leverage the MENA electorate to create a free-market economy while he bought them off with trinkets. Now the cat's out of the bag, and it's just a matter of time until you decide you are sick of getting exploited to pay for people who hate you.
In tech, Israel has some of the highest salaries outside
the US.
I hate to break it to you, but if I move back to the UK I'm hardly going to be off the hook for getting exploiter to pay for people who hate me. At least Israeli TFR is high enough that there's a chance we don't all collapse in the welfareocolypse.
Maybe relevant though:
The ratio of total non-haredi Ashkies in US vs. in Israel is probably 6:1
Maybe you’re assuming common knowledge that it’s an euphemism for high-level globalist clergy?
> "The online Right has managed to convince themselves of a different and completely insane thesis, namely that [ICE backlash] was a test of their ability not to give into moral blackmail."
Yeah... I'm sorry, but aside from the arrestees here being less-obviously-degenerate-people I really don't see how this is any different from the furore over George Floyd. Even in the best-case-scenario for mandatory E-Verify leading to self-deportation and so on, there were still going to have to be millions of forced deportations from the US, and some non-zero percentage of those interactions were going to involve violent altercations, particularly when leftist agitants are doing everything they can to aggravate the situation.
Chain-multiply all that by probability of death, possibly caused by incompetence, panic or misconduct on the officer. It's not pretty, but if you forcibly deport ~200K people per year and only two people die under sub-optimal conditions you're actually doing pretty well.
All law enforcement is like this, and we have to stop indulging these left-wing cycles of manufactured hysteria, particularly when you need to see waaaay more than 200K deportations per year.
Ok, stop indulging it. Close your eyes and click your heels extra hard.
Very few people, even MAGAs, really want to see normal, peaceful, hardworking people, families and children, violently rounded up and imprisoned and deported on a massive scale. They don't like the demographic change in the country and will incessantly complain about it, but they aren't hateful and fascist enough to endure watching these brutal actions against nice innocent people, on a massive scale and long term.
ICE are generally targeting gang members and associates first, and if you're present in the country illegally you are by definition not "innocent" of a crime.
But they're not doing that. They're going to schools and restaurants and home depots. That's the big change. And most normal people regard a hard-working, peaceful family who happens to be in the country illegally as a crime like going 5 miles over the speed limit. Imagine a Democrat administration deciding to arrest millions of people who at some point were recorded going 5 miles over the speed limit. Imagine them targeting those people at their workplaces or picking up their kids from school, and doing it in the most brutal way possible.
Do you have some statistical breakdown on the percentage of ICE arrests involving "hard-working peaceful families"? Is this a serious conversation where we break out the numbers on per-capita public-service/welfare costs vs. tax contributions and wage depreciation?
There is evidence that ICE arrests have been trending toward people without criminal convictions or pending charges.
This study from the Guardian, dated November 2025, found that people without criminal convictions or pending charges had just become the largest group of people detained by ICE.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-criminal-record-ice-detention
This study, based on public data provided by ICE, has found that in January 2026, found that the proportion of immigrants detained by ICE without covinctions or charges has been steadily rising over Trump's second term, from 21.9% (itself an elevated baseline) to 43% in January 2026.
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/01/as-ice-arrests-increased-a-higher-portion-had-no-u-s-criminal-record/
The basic problem is that (i) deporting violent criminals is popular with normies but (ii) deporting everyone else isn't. Meanwhile, the people in charge of the national right wing movement (and the relevant government agencies) are attempting to take the public's consent on (i) to enact massive demographic change to the United States in an extremely short period of time by deporting people in category (ii). There is no way to deport millions of immigrants in 4 years without deporting millions of sympathetic immigrants.
So they get to Minnesota, claiming they're there to get rid of all the criminals, but there's just not a lot of criminal illegal immigrants in Minnesota (the Somalis are citizens). But they got to meet their 3,000 immigrants a day quota. So they're randomly stopping people who look like they're born abroad and seeing what shakes loose. They're setting up stings at Home Depots and hospitals. Of course it was going to be unpopular.
> "to enact massive demographic change to the United States in an extremely short period of time by deporting people in category (ii)"
You do of course realise that the Democrats had absolutely no problem enacting equally-if-not-more-massive demographic change using blatant criminal negligence when it came to border security?
I can accept the general argument that the optics here may be worse than with category (i), but the normies are just going to have to realise that this is what effective border control is going to entail. They all need to go.
Just start fining those employing illegals into bankruptcy and they'll self-deport. They're here to work, not to piss you off.
Obv, it'd require you to 1. hurt some people you actually like, eg the local gentry heavily relying on illegal labor to run their small businesses 2. not hurt people you very clearly hate, such as the illegals themselves and urban Americans.
But at least be honest about what you're doing
I'm not sure I'm especially fond of (1), but to be clear, I'm all in favour of introducing mandatory e-verify, fining employers, reducing welfare access, ending jus soli and possibly adding taxes on remittances (although given the income disparities with some of these people's home countries and the fact they're *not supposed to be in the country at all* you might as well ban their remittances entirely.)
I 100% agree that the GOP should pursue these 'soft power' options more aggressively, and perhaps Trump should be talking about it more. Nonetheless, there was never going to be any scenario where millions of *forcible* deportations were not going to be required.
If they cannot find any work here, the only people who will still be here are who, the ones who live here without working? So mostly abuelitas of citizens/permanent residents, maybe a couple sugar babies? Hardly millions of them, hardly worth deporting.
Genuinely, the only reasons why we need forcible deportations at all is because god forbid someone of the GOP power base might suffer any consequences, and some American outside it might have a nice day.
> "If they cannot find any work here, the only people who will still be here are who, the ones who live here without working"
Criminals do not typically find work within the officially-monitored economy, and while I'll accept that the average illegal migrant doesn't make a living from crime, a sufficient percentage do that millions is still a likely figure.
I'm not sure I'd give Abuela a free pass either, since there's still the problem of amnesty deals and chain migration. If her home country is poor/dysfunctional enough that it can't afford to look after the elderly then we can talk about aid programs and peacekeeping initiatives to address that problem, and I believe I've made the case for this extensively in other comment sections. But if a very elderly person broke into my home and started eating from my fridge and sleeping on my couch, I would still reserve the right to remove them.
Classic Moldbug take on Minneapolis, but your radar on Pretti is horrifically off - he is absolutely not just a normal white guy. You're writing for your EHC audience, whether consciously or unconsciously. A personal, radar-honing question, if I may: how many covid vaccines (+ boosters) did you take?
I took none and I was threatened with being fired for doing so.
I appreciate the candid response, I consider the radar better honed.
What's your point?
Random thoughts on your Notes:
●I fully agree about MAGA being structurally anti-white (racially). For example, in today’s America being German practically equals “Antifa,” lol. I’ve heard insane diplomatic stories: German students, tourists and Aupairs followed by ICE, accused of terrorism. Our bank accounts in german territory monitored by American intelligence agencies for “communism” or “terrorism”, which in reality just means solidarity with Cuba…
●I really liked your article; very refreshing, I agree with the vectors you present but not with the name/"semantics" behind; I want more precision. I think we need to be much more precise about the real nature of Trumpism. We are not dealing with a neocon project in the style of the New American Century. The defense of interests through permanent war is not its engine, and Monroeism and hemispheric sovereignty, not globalist management, is far closer to its real doctrine of state.
●Trump is not Straussian. He does not follow the Kissinger doctrine of managed chaos and permanent geopolitical balancing. If he did, NATO would already be in open war with Russia instead of quietly reorganizing imperial forces while negotiating with it. Reaganism 2.0 yes and NO at the same time.
●There are two structural traits that define neocon bipolarity:Russophobia and elitist antisemitism.Yes, they are Zionists. But Zionists of an antisemitic type (a phenomenon Hannah Arendt already hinted at when speaking of instrumentalized Jews in imperial politics). And we’ll see this more clearly very soon.Trump himself is neither antisemitic nor Russophobic, though American antisemitism is hijacking Trumpism, and there are already signs of this drift.
●Since 2016, the US has gone through a soft, veiled coup d’état, institutional, media-driven, bureaucratic. We’ve seen this movie before: In Germany, between the failed Munich putsch and the 1933 elections, the Weimar Republic itself helped articulate the internal and external conditions for a National Socialist revolution. Neither the German left nor the Prussian establishment managed to contain the madness.
●The US has passed through a similar phase, and the contemporary left is playing the same ridiculous role. Instead of infiltrating the superstructure (media, institutions, labor organizations), it runs into cultural guerrilla warfare for globalist Lumpen queer trashy values.Or in Engels’ terms (I can’t hrlp my classic marxist roots): it aligns itself with the lumpenproletariat, the socially unanchored mass without stable class interests (criminals and... queer white trash).A left obsessed with criminals, performative identities, and lumpen politics pushes the actual proletariat straight into the arms of a brain-dead right.That’s exactly what many of these “normal whites” with pure white kids resisting ICE represent: a queerized lumpenproletariat spectacle.
● The worker with a mortgage and a Filipino wife with half filipino kids goes with Trump; not out of race solidarity, but class instinct, because being white is more a cultural-social thing, an identity, rather than just "race", though they use the race thing against the lumpen model; just like the f nazis did in Germany. Race is a Nazi façade that didn’t work in Germany to solve the class struggle, and it won’t work in America either: only antisemitism worked, and it will work in America as well since Jews in America are extremely powerful, visible and rich; namely, perfect targets of the antisemitic rightoids and I don't see Jewish Zionists have an strategy against them.
●What they’re really staging isn’t a Weimar drama, it’s more a Spanish Civil War fantasy. Didn’t you see how Franco has become a meme-war character...???? As a Hispanist philologist, this trend is suuuuuuuuuurreal to me, lol. But yeah, it is what it is.
●Yes, btw; Franco used Moroccan troops against the Republic and brutally exterminated white Spaniards for political reasons… 😁
I much appreciate your link to Shtetl-optimized. I was not mature enough in 2017 to have been exposed to such spaces online. Your link has opened my eyes and given me much additional resource to deal with.
Thank you very much, and know that your linking continues to do much good, past and future.
Always chimp turns into the destruction of the FDR state, huh? The open system needs its beautiful losers, huh? The left is winning against ICE, huh?
All seem true enough, except that at any moment the reversal could be. FDR state is remade against the chimp. Open system splits beauty and loserdom, so we get beautiful winners and ugly losers. ICE kills the left politically by biasing the map.
Either way, figure out a way to win by selling to neither side and buying from each, until it comes time to sell to each and buy from neither. That’s the Moldbugmas way, no? Ho Ho Ho.
“Democracy is thus forced to adopt a one-party liberal state as its crystallised form, and so the self-stabilising equilibrium of liberalism will have to become something brittle”
Unclear how consequent follows from antecedent. Seems a bit wishful thinking no?
I'm on edge about what Trump will ultimately cause for the U.S. But it's strangely comforting to say to myself, "If our government can't survive this, we didn't deserve to survive in the first place."