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“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” —Stephen Hawking

In 1959, at an Anglican mission in the village of Boianai, on the north coast of the mountainous southeastern prong of New Guinea, there occurred one of the best-known examples of what the UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek would later call a “Close Encounter of the Third Kind.”

The case involved a series of UFO sightings—by mission staff and other locals—of odd lights in the sky and saucer-shaped crafts, over a period of several weeks, culminating in a close encounter in late June. The mission head, William Gill, a 31-year-old Australian named William Gill, had more or less dismissed some of the earlier sightings in a letter written June 26 to a senior colleague based elsewhere in PNG:

I am inclined to believe that probably many UFOs are more likely some form of electric phenomena—or perhaps something brought about by the atom bomb explosions etc.

Having signed himself “Doubting William,” Gill later that day became a UFO believer, as he explained in a follow-up letter to the same colleague on June 27:

Life is strange, isn’t it? Yesterday I wrote you a letter, expressing opinions re the UFOs. Now, less than 24 hours later I have changed my views somewhat.

Last night we at Boianai experienced about 4 hours of UFO activity, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are handled by beings of some kind. At times it was absolutely breathtaking.

What Gill and his staff and parishioners saw (and more than three dozen later signed a statement affirming the truth of Gill’s account) was a saucer-shaped craft that approached the village closely, and came as low as 100 meters from the ground. It had a deck on top, from which four different beings, human in appearance, observed the people on the ground.

One figure seemed to be standing looking down at us (a group of about a dozen). I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head then the two outside figures did the same.

Ananias and myself began waving our arms and all four now seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were answered. All mission boys made audible gasps (of either joy or surprise, perhaps both).

As dark was beginning to close in, I sent Eric Kodawara for a torch and directed a series of long dashes towards the UFO. After a minute or two of this, the UFO apparently acknowledged by making several wavering motions back and forth.

Waving by us was repeated and this followed by more flashes of torch, then the UFO began slowly to become bigger, apparently coming in our direction. It ceased after perhaps half a minute and came no further.

After a further two or three minutes the figures apparently lost interest in us for they disappeared ‘below deck.’ At 6.25 pm two figures re-appeared to carry on with whatever they were doing [seemingly setting up equipment on the deck] before the interruption. The blue spotlight [emitted upward at a 45-degree angle from the top of the craft] came on for a few seconds twice in succession.

The craft was accompanied by others in the sky nearby, but none landed, and eventually the sightings—often obscured by cloud cover—petered out, more or less coincident with a series of mysterious, loud explosions in the sky.

Gill later commented that the saucer-like object he had seen at close range “looked a perfectly normal sort of object, an earth-made object. I realised, of course, that some people might think of this as a flying saucer, but I took it to be some kind of hovercraft the Americans or even the Australians had built. The figures inside looked perfectly human.” [italics mine]

*

The Boianai encounter has long been seen as a classic, high-quality UFO case. How could one convincingly dismiss such a close and well witnessed encounter involving a university-educated priest who was on record as being skeptical about UFOs?

To me, though, the Boianai case is important mainly because it illustrates the weakness of the standard hypothesis about UFOs, which is that they (i.e., the ones with no ordinary explanation) are visitors from other star systems. This “ET hypothesis” is weak for cases like Boianai because visitors from other star systems wouldn’t look human, as the Boianai visitors did, and probably wouldn’t use tech that so closely resembled ours. Like many other UFO cases, the Boianai case seems more consistent with the moderately less woo idea that these visitors are visitors from our own future, or at any rate from “parallel-universe” versions of Earth that resemble our world much more than distant planets would.

In this view, the UFOs coming from our own near future, or from parallel universe Earths close to our own timeline, would have occupants that look very much like us, and tech that resembles ours—whereas UFOs from our distant future or “distant” parallel Earths would seem much more “alien,” while remaining humanoid.

*

But let me back up. I have never been a UFO researcher or “enthusiast.” I was once a journalist, and as such, in bygone days, I did spend a small slice of my life thinking and researching and writing about UFOs, and becoming acquainted with the lore.

I met, among others, senior current/former government/contractor types who told me they thought it was all real—UFOs, crash retrievals, the whole nine yards—though they couldn’t get access to verify anything. One or two of them wanted me to dig into it.

I did that eventually, in a small way, with the backing of a prominent media organization (as in “yes, feel free to tell them you’re working on a story for us—and let us know if you find anything interesting.”) I spoke to former government officials and contractors (e.g., metals experts) who should have known something, if there was something to know. Whether I approached them directly or obliquely, they all genially professed ignorance about anything that would indicate the existence of a crashed-UFO exploitation program. Eventually I ran out of leads to pursue, and went back to writing about more ordinary stuff.

I felt some relief at that. The idea of a supersecret government UFO program was unsettling. I also felt to some extent that if it existed, it probably should be kept a secret. Moreover, the whole UFO field by then had become, to me, a hall of mirrors in which fact and rumor, fact-finding and UFO evangelism, were almost impossible to tell apart. I was never comfortable there.

I still found the UFO literature compelling, not in its entirety, of course, but in key cases involving multiple independent witnesses, some with radar backup and so on. I retained a sort of middle-of-the-road view of UFOs, reasoning that we’re in a big universe, we’re unlikely to be alone, and so probably some UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin.

I also came to the conclusion, not then but eventually, that the ability of contemporary humans to learn about visitors from advanced ET civilizations is probably very, very limited, so that ufology (in the usual sense, aimed at ET-UFOs) is likely a mug’s game, whether conducted privately or with taxpayer funds.

Had I not walked away from UFOs, I might even have ended up being the journalist the government-connected enthusiasts used to break that big story in the New York Times in 2017. In any case, thanks to those enthusiasts, and to the journalist they chose, Leslie Kean—above all, thanks to the late Senator Harry Reid who got a small UFO program funded from 2008-2016 or so—UFOs in the last few years have become almost a mainstream thing again. New government programs have been set up, and the “expert” panels for these include government-employed individuals who are very enthusiastic about the subject.

Maybe in some cases they are too enthusiastic. One or two of them heard a story like the one I heard, about a UFO recovery/exploitation program, and in recent months have been trying to use their positions on these panels to act as “whistleblowers” and rip the lid off the whole thing.

Good reasons to keep it a secret, if it exists:

• • Harmful psychosocial effects could follow the exposure of such a program—which would disrupt most of the “realities” and moral orders humans have constructed for themselves. Just being forced to acknowledge the existence of beings with superior technology could, on its own, have a seriously demoralizing effect.

• • If any of the material can be exploited technologically, then it is better for the US to do that, and to keep it secret, than to “share it with the world,” including the world’s bad actors such as China and Russia.

• • The knowledge that the US has such material, and the possibility that the US and its allies can exploit it, might be enough to dissuade some of those bad actors from doing seriously bad things, such as using nuclear weapons. (More than two decades ago, I started but never finished writing a novel, loosely based on my journalistic experiences, in which the whole “UFO crash retrieval” story turned out to be a psy-op against the Chinese in the run-up to their planned Taiwan invasion.)

For the same reasons, I find it hard to take at face value the claims by the so-called whistleblowers (who may have been making large sums off their fame/notoriety even before their claims are verified) that they are selflessly doing humanity a favor by forcing disclosure of this alleged secret program.

But to return to my main point: If these claims about recovered vehicles or fragments are true (and there are quite a few such cases in the UFO literature, even if none is very convincing), then they suggest, once again, that “alien” visitations involve a surprisingly low and error-prone level of tech. Why would star-faring ET civilizations that are millions or billions of years ahead of us in development send such failure-prone craft into our skies? It just doesn’t make sense.

One of the self-described whistleblowers, David Grusch, has indicated that pilot bodies were recovered in one or more of these cases. Why flesh-and-blood pilots, for a journey across light-years? And why are the “aliens” in UFO cases always described as humanoid bipeds?

It also doesn’t make sense that the technology left behind by these supposedly super-advanced visitors would invite the prospect of reverse-engineering by ourselves. For us to reverse-engineer a crashed saucer from a millions-of-years-ahead civilization would be like Australopithecus ape-men reverse-engineering a crashed F-35.

Again, these crash/recovery stories, along with Boianai and many other cases in the lore, would make much more sense (to the extent we need to take them seriously) if the visitors in question were not from other star systems, but from somewhere much “closer.”

*

Tourists from the future is a catchy phrase, but isn’t precisely what I am hypothesizing here.

Classical physics, and even early (“Copenhagen Interpretation”) quantum physics, did not offer much hope for those wishing to develop time-travel technology. A paradox always stood in the way. For example, if you were to depart in your time machine, in Hollywood time-travel fashion, and land in your own backyard the day before, greeting yourself and your wide-eyed wife and children, then you would be changing your own past—you would stop being you—and that just seemed impossible. To put it another way: the traditional conception of time implied a single timeline on which the entire universe exists and unfolds, with no apparent allowance for jumps backward and forward.

The now-dominant Relative State Formulation (a.k.a. the Many Worlds Interpretation, or MWI) of quantum theory is, in principle, more accommodating. It implies—to simplify—that reality comprises an infinitude of ever-branching universes or timelines. Thus, apart from other physical considerations, you could travel “backwards in time,” though the timeline on which you alighted would be distinct (possibly differentiating at the moment you arrive) from your timeline of origin. This means that if you traveled a day backward in time, the people you met in that “destination timeline,” including your “self,” would be merely different versions of those populating your departure timeline. You’d be in a “parallel universe” version of the universe you’d left, and nothing you did there would alter your original timeline—your personal “past.”

In principle, if you could jump from one timeline to another, you also could jump to more distant, parallel timelines to visit more different versions of Earth, whether in the present, past, or future. In this sense, you would be traveling not just along the dimension of time, but across it—across timelines, or “across the multiverse.” I’m not sure what this kind of travel should be called. Perhaps “trans-timeline travel” or “frame shifting” or something like that.

How you would jump between timelines—or travel back along your own and alight somewhere, forcing the branching-off of a new timeline—is of course the hard problem here. Possibly there would be a conservation-of-energy issue, so that major amounts of energy would have to be released or subtracted with each jump. The explosions reported at Boianai, and in other cases, call that issue to mind (although a straight conservation-of-energy calculation implies at least gigaton yields). Though it seems that most reported UFOs depart by moving rapidly upward into the sky, it is conceivable—this is all extremely speculative anyway—that any necessary energy exchanges take place high in the atmosphere where they are less noticeable, and might even be taken for bolide explosions when they involve energy release.

Why would “trans-timeline-travelers” use flying machines, instead of just materializing on the ground, as in time-travel movies? Perhaps because “arriving” at coordinates corresponding to solid matter, inside a mountain for example, would spell instant death for the travelers—and thus a high-atmosphere or outer-space entry, in suitably equipped craft, would be a standard safety measure.

The general idea that some UFOs may be time-travel vehicles, not ET vehicles, has been suggested in various forms over the years. There is also a somewhat more vague idea, put forward by Jacques Vallee many decades ago, that UFOs may represent non-human visitors from other dimensions but not other star systems. Replace dimensions with “timelines” (or “universes,” per MWI) and you arrive at something similar to what I am suggesting. Anyhow, again, this is all highly speculative—and it is very possible that the UFO-crash-retrieval/exploitation story will soon be debunked and discredited. But even if that happens, the wider UFO phenomenon, with solid cases like Boianai, retains its potential to blow our minds.

***

The US government shut down its official UFO investigations in 1969, and thereafter, for more than four decades, the UFO phenomenon wallowed in a low-culture morass of tabloid stories, books by “abductees” claiming to have been impregnated by ETs, TV documentaries about ancient aliens, etc. Over the past decade or so, thanks to the efforts of influential enthusiasts in the U.S. Senate and the military/intelligence community, UFOs have begun moving back towards mainstream acceptance. Since 2021, the Pentagon has had an office—currently called the “All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)—tasked with collecting and analyzing UFO reports. The recent media flap over a Chinese spy balloon prompted the setup of an additional Pentagon-FAA-DHS-CIA “airborne objects” study team. Even NASA now has its own blue-chip panel for studying UFOs “from a scientific perspective.”

It would be tough to argue that these developments are entirely bad. We’re now in the Drone Age of warfare, so it absolutely makes sense to “watch the skies” and identify what’s up there. It also seems sensible not to dismiss UFOs as purely terrestrial phenomena—a small proportion of cases, including some sensational recent ones involving military aircraft, really do invite an ET interpretation.

That said, I suspect this will be a case of shifting from low-culture nonsense straight to elite hubris and foolishness—premised on the conceit that we can undertake a detailed study of ET-UFOs as if they were ordinary scientific phenomena.

It should be obvious that we cannot—not if these phenomena represent advanced intelligent ETs that are studying us, reading our beliefs and intentions and shaping our perceptions, perhaps to obscure their true nature. This is just common sense, although the UFO lore also supplies many instances of mysterious aerial objects’ seeming to anticipate, and sometimes even thwart, the actions of human observers such as pilots.

And what if, despite our very limited ability to learn about UFOs, we gathered enough evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that some really are advanced, starfaring ET species? Would we take pride in this “scientific” discovery? Or would we enter into a state of smoldering despair, as we faced the painful fact that we are an also-ran species? Anyone who seriously ponders the ET-discovery possibility is reminded eventually of the many inter-civilizational encounters in our own ages of conquest and discovery. Those encounters generally went badly for the inferior party—in part because the “knowledge” they gained was basically toxic to their prideful worldview.

The good news is that the average starfaring alien in our galaxy is unlikely to be apprehensible enough to have this toxic effect. The popular notion of a Captain-Cook-like ET visitor who is eager to tell us about his own world, eager to share his advanced scientific and technical knowledge, seems particularly far-fetched. The thing that we humans find hardest to understand about putative ETs—and this is evident from our relentlessly anthropomorphic depictions of them in fiction, folklore, and even academic papers—is just how alien most would be.

Consider that our galaxy, along with the rest of our observable universe, was around for roughly 10 billion years before our solar system existed. That’s a lot of time in which other life forms might have arisen, and it suggests that the average age gap between our starbound species and true starfarers in our galactic vicinity is on the order of billions of years. The resulting difference in civilizational development would thus be enormously greater than that between, say, 18^th century Englishmen and Pacific Islanders. It would be more like humans vs. ants, or humans vs. bacteria.

Conceivably an alien species even with that degree of superiority could communicate in some way that our comparatively rudimentary brains could understand. But why would it even bother? We humans don’t feel compelled to introduce ourselves to ants or bacteria, let alone try to teach them things about ourselves or other aspects of the reality we know. These lower species cannot contain the kind of information we would consider worth imparting.

By the same logic, any specific assumption we humans make about the activities of advanced alien civilizations based on what we would do (broadcasting radio signals, building megastructures, and sending probes from motherships are favorite themes among our so-called experts) is just fatuous anthropomorphizing. We simply lack the capacity to imagine what it would be like to be such creatures. “Where there are no men, there are no motives accessible to men,” as Stanislaw Lem famously put it in Solaris.

Out on the long tail of the age-gap distribution, there might be some ET visitors that are only hundreds to thousands of years more advanced than we. But even they would be very difficult for us to grasp, given the vast differences in our environments and evolutionary histories, and the technologies they would have that we don’t. How would a modern fighter jet roaring overhead look to someone living in America just 300 or 400 years ago? Probably no less strange than the “dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere” that Navy F/A 18 pilots observed in a 2014 midair encounter off the Virginia coast.

Whatever we can grasp about aliens is likely going to be found in the common threads of UFO reports—for example, the apparently benign nature of putative ETs and their craft. They don’t go around killing people, and despite official fears about midair collisions, they have never verifiably knocked a manned aircraft out of the sky. That is at least consistent with what our own history as a species suggests: that as we’ve become more civilized, we’ve tended to become more “humane” and caring, towards outgroups within our species and even toward other species. If ETs are at least as humane as we are, and smarter as well, then even the ones closest to us in age and development might not want to disturb us too directly, lest they trigger our despair-driven demise.

It seems at least plausible, then, that virtually all ETs capable of visiting us are either too advanced and alien to bother, or, if they do visit, are wise and benign enough not to make their presence too obvious. This is one possible resolution of the “paradox,” famously stated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, that aliens seem scarce and elusive though our universe should be teeming with them.

If this way of thinking about ETs is correct, then our “scientific studies” of UFOs should yield little, at least while we remain in the pre-starfaring state. Though the skeptics might consider themselves vindicated in this case, it would otherwise seem the happiest possible outcome for us as a proud, ambitious species.

On the other hand, it is at least conceivable that among the 100+ billion star systems in our galaxy, there are some starfaring civs that have zero empathy for primitives like us, and would upend our world with no more thought than you or I would have for bugs we happened to crush underfoot while strolling outdoors. These aliens are the kind that would park on the White House lawn, making their presence impossible to ignore. These are the ones we should fear. That our experts frequently evince a yearning for such open contact really underscores how primitive and vulnerable we are.

Incidentally, the gulf between our prideful view of ourselves as a species and our (likely) actual backwardness and insignificance—which direct ET contact presumably would force us to acknowledge—points to yet another reason UFOs seem so scarce: that intelligent creatures tend to die of despair as soon as they discover their true place in the universe.

***

United Airlines flight 93 was the one that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/01, instead of being flown into the US Capitol. The reason it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania was that a group of passengers, ordinary peace-loving Americans, put aside their fears of immediate harm from the edged weapons held by the hijackers and united with one goal: to storm the cockpit, kill the hijackers, and regain control of the plane. Although they didn’t succeed in regaining control of the plane, they did at least induce the hijackers to crash it prematurely.

These passengers had the advantage of knowing, from communications with people on the ground, what was up that morning—and thus, what their hijackers probably intended to do with the plane. So really they knew they had nothing to lose. Among the many sounds the cockpit voice-recorder picked up in the final minutes of the flight, was that of a food cart being rammed against the cockpit door, and a cry from one of the passengers, “In the cockpit! If we don’t, we’ll die!”

According to Wikipedia, “Vice President Dick Cheney, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center deep under the White House, authorized Flight 93 to be shot down, but upon learning of the crash, is reported to have said, ‘I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane.’”

He was right. But the heroism of the flight 93 passengers was a different kind of heroism than the lone-actor heroism we’re more used to reading about. It was a heroism involving a coming-together, a coalescence, of people who could accomplish a heroic task only when in a “united state.”

The rarity of that kind of coalescence nowadays points to a basic conundrum of human affairs, especially governance. In other words, even when a large mass of people has ample justification for rebelling against the relatively small group of individuals who control their lives, and ample means to do so—if united—they almost never unite effectively.

*

Consider the recent unprecedented popular protests across China, which ultimately involved more than a dozen cities. The background was a general unhappiness concerning national and local “COVID zero” policies, plus an even more general dissatisfaction with one-party rule. The triggers for protests were World Cup broadcasts from Qatar showing fans not wearing masks, and a deadly fire in a residential building in Urumqi that took firefighters hours to extinguish due to extreme local anti-COVID measures—Urumqi had been locked down for months. As for the leadership of the protest movement . . . the movement seems to have been relatively leaderless and spontaneous, driven chiefly by the circulation of Internet messages and images. That leaderlessness is unsurprising in China, where any dissident leader visible and vocal enough to shape and direct protests is likely to be swiftly bundled away by police. It also may have been the decisive factor, for these relatively leaderless protests were limited to public gatherings, and did not have clear goals other than the mass voicing of complaints. Ultimately, the Chinese government was able to climb down from their COVID policies without their tight control of the country being threatened significantly.

A popular uprising against the government of Sri Lanka earlier this year was arguably more successful. The government, headed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and including some of his family members, was widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt, as Sri Lankans faced out-of-control inflation, power shortages, and other problems. When these stresses worsened and protests began, the government responded with repressive measures such as arrests and social media blackouts, exacerbating the situation. The protest movement eventually developed a leadership structure, including some firebrand student leaders. In July, a very large crowd of protesters stormed the Presidential palace in Colombo and Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country. However, the new government soon cracked down on the protest movement leaders, who apparently didn’t have much support among the country’s elites.

There are also ongoing protest movements in Iran and Russia. The one in Iran is very prominent and broad-based, and has forced the Tehran regime to backpedal somewhat, but so far has failed to result in an overthrow of the theocratic regime—which recently has started publicly executing protesters. The protest movement in Russia, against the Putin government and its Ukraine invasion, is hardly visible and seems to have achieved little if anything—clearly many dissidents have opted to leave the country rather than stay and protest, while some higher-profile dissidents have been disposed of via the now-classic Russian method of defenestration.

Just looking at these examples, one can postulate that a popular political uprising, to have a decent chance of success, requires:

• • Sufficient popularity, i.e., support from a large, preferably dominant proportion of the population, among whom there is a strong commonality of interest;
  • Strong stressors/triggers that convince ordinary people that regime change is needed and compel them to take action (starting with protest marches and other gatherings);
  • A vision of how things should be different, e.g., more liberal, less corrupt, more aligned with some alternative ideology, etc.
  • Effective leaders who can inspire and direct the movement in ways that achieve regime change;
  • Elite support, boosting the movement’s power by enabling it to control or influence key institutions (e.g., media, academia, police, military).

*

Ticking most or all these boxes is going to be challenging anywhere, particularly so in Western countries. I would say it’s virtually impossible in the United States at present.

Popularity: Considering how the current US regime favors nonwhites, and considering how many contemporary white women are content with this anti-in-group discrimination, it seems likely that American dissidents are mostly white males—the principal heirs, as it were, of the country’s founders and builders. I would guess that this putative dissident group, all in all, comprises less than a third of the US population. That is still a very large number of individuals, somewhere between 50 and 100 million. Certainly they would be unbeatable if united as one against disunited foes. But even white American males remain highly disunited. Moreover, the fact that dissident Americans, as I have defined them, are very much a minority puts them in a weak position culturally. It also would be used (and to some extent is already being used) to justify harsh regime measures against them, since they do not “represent the average American.”

Stressors/triggers: The level of stress and urgency that would normally compel dissidents to go out onto the streets and protest is so far not very evident among dissident Americans. To be sure, the regime (an entity that is cultural as well as political and extends far beyond formal government) has done great damage to the country, via the wokeification/corruption of education, media, academia, immigration policy, the judiciary, and most other policies and institutions. Their misrule seems much more deserving of a punitive popular reaction than the misrule that prompted the American Revolution. Yet the US, for now, retains relatively high living standards, certainly for white males—and those living standards are supported by a huge structure of financialization/debt. In short, American dissidents still have much to lose by revolting openly. And so, like the proverbial slow-boiled frog, they still mostly prefer waiting (and complaining ineffectually, often indirectly via conspiracy theories) to real, in-the-streets action. I doubt that they will prefer action until there is much more radical and extensive regime provocation and/or a prolonged economic depression that leaves them with “nothing to lose.”

Envisioned change: American dissidents are remarkably fragmented in their views of what has gone wrong and what is to be done about it. Many of them, as I just noted, believe in bizarre conspiracies involving things like elite pedophile rings, or “chemtrails.” It’s often hard to tell where the conspiracy-theory fringe ends and the mainstream begins.

The only halfway-cogent explanations for USA’s predicament that I’ve ever heard/read are from right wing intellectuals with small followings. The average “angry white male” appears to have little or no understanding of, say, the recent cultural and political impact of women, or the history of blacks in the USA and their manipulation by the major political parties. The most popular view now among right-wing American dissidents seems to be that “wokeism is the problem,” and that things would get better if it could just be toned down a bit. In other words, they have neither a solid grasp of the problems facing the country, nor a positive alternative vision—let alone one that captures the energy and idealism of young people in the way that progressivism/wokeism does.

Inadequate leadership. The American woke regime seems almost as effective at suppressing the leaders of dissident groups (e.g., Proud Boys, Oath Keepers) as the Chinese Communist party’s secret police are at suppressing pro-democracy leaders. In the wake of the regime’s 1/6/21 prosecutions and hearings, I can’t think of a single person, inside or outside of American politics, who currently has the visibility, stature, energy, intellect, and vision to reverse the adverse trends and put the country on secure footings. A big part of the problem, of course, is that at this late stage of the national disease, saving the country almost certainly would require a revolution-like abandonment, at least temporarily, of its current political framework—and the regime, understanding this, has begun to treat any opposition as sedition. Given these stakes, many of the right’s most prominent “leaders” have switched to less risky goals, such as enriching themselves—which to me is a clear indicator of organizational defeat/degeneracy, seen also among Democratic Party-controlled African American leaders.

Lack of elite support. Perhaps the most obvious of all its defects is that the American conservative/dissident movement lacks elite and institutional support. This is not a trend that seems likely to be reversed any time soon. The takeovers/makeovers of elites and institutions by anticonservative activists and their ideas (often these begin as conquests by women, who are inherently more left-wing and susceptible to wokeism) reflect a process that has been at work for decades, and is now accelerating through its final stages to a state of more or less complete control.

Thus, while the Flight 93 story presents a striking case of group heroism in the face of disaster, it’s more an example of what US isn’t (yet) than what it is. The legacy population of the United States, though well advanced in their cultural and political emasculation, and in the related, sad handover of their inheritance to foreigners, are still surprisingly comfortable, still quite far from an “if we don’t, we’ll die” moment.

***

When labor becomes scarce, expensive, and/or unreliable, business owners start looking for alternatives. For most of the past 30 years, a very attractive alternative was offshoring—to countries like China, where labor was cheap, plentiful, and reliable. In the past three years, the COVID pandemic and the maturing of once-cheap labor markets, plus the increasing obviousness of China’s IP theft and overall hegemonic ambitions, have begun to reverse that trend. Economists are now forecasting “the end of globalization,” with labor scarcity continuing for decades as the workforce shrinks. Big companies, desperate for workers, are even indicating a willingness to hire people without college degrees for positions that traditionally required them.

To me, though, the idea that labor will continue to be scarce seems wrong. As I see it, mechanization and AI are now moving onto the steepest part of the innovation slope, and will soon start “disemploying” people all the way up the labor value chain, from manual trades to those overpaid millennial marketing girls sipping lattes on TikTok. Even I, with my fairly challenging profession and decades of experience, am likely to be left jobless at least a few years before I’d like to retire.

AI has taken longer than expected to arrive in useful forms, but is now definitely arriving and ready to start disrupting. It can, technically if not yet legally, drive cars, tractors, trains, and boats; fly planes and drones; and guard warehouses. The mechanization technology underlying humanoid robots has been making big advances too—such robots now can open doors, climb stairs, recover from falls, hold and manipulate heavy objects, etc. Once such robots are mass-produced and made available for leasing, their use as replacements for factory workers, waiters, construction workers, checkout clerks, etc. will become a viable proposition. Will we have to wait as long as five years before that starts?

AI language-processing software that can be taught, or can teach itself via the Internet, should start displacing office worker bees well before then—and by worker bees I mean basically anyone whose job consists largely of emailing, writing reports, filling out spreadsheets, and doing other routine kinds of paperwork. And we’ve all seen the AI text-to-image and text-to-movie packages that were unleashed recently and have been improving at a rapid pace. How long will it be before a single writer, working with one of those algos, generates a feature-length film on his own? A year from now? Two?

Essentially, we’re facing the prospect of the abrupt end of the labor market, an institution that has been at the center of human civilization for millennia.

I’m aware that critics of earlier forms of labor-saving technology, such as the Luddites and their ilk, were somewhat shortsighted in their predictions of mass labor displacement. These early industrial workers were themselves displaced in large numbers, and in that sense had every reason to complain. What they failed to see was that the labor-saving innovations that displaced them would, on the whole, lead to greater productivity and economic growth, and ultimately a net rise in demand for labor.

But that was then, and this is now. The tech that’s going to be released into the world in this decade will be capable of displacing humans from their jobs much faster than the latter will be able to keep up. In other words, if you are laid off because your employer or clients can just buy an AI package to do the same job more cheaply, and you then decide to retrain for some “AI-proof” job, it’s quite likely that that “AI-proof” job will be overtaken by AI long before you can get into it. Even if that job stays available, you’d be competing for it with an exponentially rising number of other displaced human workers.

It’s impossible to predict in detail how this will all play out. But I can easily imagine an early phase in which language-processing AI, vehicle AI, warehouse robots, and a few other related innovations are hailed as game-changers for businesses and other organizations, allowing them to do much more with fewer workers and at less cost—and alleviating inflationary labor shortages along the way. Close on the heels of that “denial” phase, though, will come the bargaining, depression, and acceptance phases, as the pace of disemployment accelerates. I see this as an ouroboros—snake-eating-its-tail—process, because it involves the economy effectively consuming itself, i.e., destroying, with every increment of growth and investment in innovation, the employment earnings that are the principal fuel for a modern economy.

There may be no stable equilibrium in this process for a long while. Governments probably will try to tax businesses, especially AI-using businesses, to fund welfare payments to the unemployed masses, but will that work? Even if governments could manage it fiscally, what would be the psychological effect on tens of millions of people who can no longer earn a living for themselves? (We already know that men become easily depressed when unemployed.)

It also seems unlikely that Western governments would ever simply disallow the use of AI and robotics. One of the great lessons of the mass immigration era is that Western governments, ostensibly “democratic,” like having electorates made up of financially stressed people whose votes can be bought with government largesse.

It stands to reason that the disemployment situation will be easier in countries that currently have relatively small workforces—or rely on guest workers who can be sent quickly back to their home countries if needed. By the same logic, countries with open borders and huge, low-skill, permanent immigrant populations, like the US, could be in serious trouble. Those countries will suddenly have many millions of excess mouths to feed, and to do so might easily require taxation levels that trigger capital flight.

I’m not totally averse to the idea that at the end of this transition lies a society in which robots do everything for near-zero cost and humans can stay busy however they like without worrying much about money. But it’s hard to believe this transition will occur without historic levels of pain. I’ve written often in this space about various drivers of Western decline, collapse, and general upheaval; the now-imminent “ouroboros economy” of AI and robotics is surely another one.

***

In prior essays on this site and elsewhere, I’ve argued that the spread of wokeness and its recent marked intensification (the “Great Awokening”) is best seen as a social contagion—of feelings and sociocultural ideas that broadly reflect women’s maternal instincts, and are much more transmissible among women than among men.

I’ve also suggested that wokeness is apt to be ultra-transmissible among females whose feminine, maternal energies aren’t absorbed by husbands and children and may seek another outlet. The terms “cat lady” and “wine aunt” refer to a subset of these individuals, but many unmarried girls and young women, as well as successful career women, also fit this description.

I’ve proposed, moreover, that wokeness is driven into institutions not just by the conversion of (especially female) workers already in place but also by the takeover of those institutions by women and tamed males, via biased hiring.

I’m more certain now than ever that all these hypotheses are correct, as far as they go. But I think there is one more aspect of wokeness that requires an explanation. I’m referring to what could be called wokeness’s spiraling frenzy—its tendency to move away from norms of belief and behavior and towards extremes, wherever it takes hold.

To put it another way: The woke women and their enablers who in the past decade or two have effectively taken control of virtually all major American institutions and professions have not been content to implement a modest set of reforms and leave it at that. As their power has grown, they have increasingly attacked the core values of Western civilization: everything from due process of law to meritocracy to the shielding of children from sexual deviants and predators. As their policies have become extreme, so have their methods. They have made it clear that they don’t want sober deliberations—they want emotional shock and awe!

One could argue that there is a counter-cultural logic to this movement—that it wants to collapse the existing order as completely as those hijacked planes collapsed the Twin Towers on 9/11.

But is the Great Awokening replacing the old culture with a new one that can bind society sustainably—a “successor ideology”?

Wokeness and the Great Awokening are driven chiefly by women, who have their own ways of thinking and persuading—ways that typically seem more emotional and less rational than men’s. So one might suppose that there is a genuine ideology being built here, albeit a feminine one that seems alien to the average male, and that the Great Awokening is just the final, dramatic dash in this “pink shift” takeover of Western culture.

However, to me, that’s not the full story. To me, the Great Awokening’s spiraling frenzy, and its attraction for people who are evidently mentally ill, suggest that it is for the most part only a temporary and reactive social phenomenon: a social “mania.”

Logic and Madness

As many have noted, the Great Awokening bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

The CCR’s spearpoints were cadres of “Red Guard” fanatics, young people (even teens) whose instability and restlessness, suggestibility, and high susceptibility to fanaticism were probably comparable to what one finds in today’s millennial Antifa brigades. These howling Maoist minions sought the erasure of whatever competed with Maoism, which in practice meant just about anything predating Maoist China—history books, art, architecture, temples, even genealogical records. Red Guards and their camp followers toppled statues of Confucius, pasted huge banners with their slogans everywhere, and went around attacking intellectuals or anyone even lightly connected to the teaching of pre-Maoist history or philosophy.

That was the counter-cultural logic part of it. But there was also the crazypants part—shocking, obscene, savage stuff, ultimately including murder and even cannibalism.

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over “counterrevolutionaries” …  Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. [NYT]

Not content with attacking living reminders of the old China, Red Guards also broke into cemeteries and dug up the skeletal remains of ancient Chinese emperors and nobles, desecrating them and denouncing the persons these remains had once been.

Other examples of these social frenzies come to mind. In some of the pre-Christian feasts of Rome and northern Europe, open drunkenness and debauchery, and various other intentionally shocking inversions of everyday social norms, were encouraged, at least in part as cathartic but controlled ventings of accumulated stress. (Modern parties, especially the ones teens and young adults have, seem like echoes of these displays.) As Samuel Johnson famously said, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Or a woman. The infamous convent hysterias of 1500s-1700s Europe supply many illustrations of spiraling frenzies among women, especially sexually frustrated younger ones. In the 1632-34 Loudoun case, for example, at a public exorcism of supposedly demon-possessed Ursuline nuns, a Sister Claire “fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, lifting up her petticoats and chemise, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes.” [link]

Sexual themes dominated the antics of “possessed” nuns, although there were maternal—or inverted maternal—themes too, for example claims of mystical pregnancy, and stories of secret witch conclaves (“witches’ sabbaths”) at which children were eaten.

Themes of sexual violation and impregnation, theft or killing of unborn babies, and witchcraft, along with the same spiraling of fantastic claims and odd behavior, were also typical in the medicalized versions of possession—”multiple personality disorder” and “UFO abduction”—that were popular among young women in the 1970-90s, and ended up discrediting many therapists and psychiatrists, as well as the whole idea of “hypnotically recovered memories.”

To me, these are examples of social manias—not just contagions (for even healthy, sustainable behaviors can be contagious) but contagions that spread intense and increasingly bizarre, often counter-cultural activities, and are essentially reactions to excessive stress.

A holiday from stress and inhibition

As the comment by Dr. Johnson implies, human beings in modern civilizations are inhibited and stressed by the social rules they are supposed to obey and the complex social environments they are supposed to navigate—the “pain of being a man.”

It makes sense that women nowadays would be relatively hard-hit by such stresses. Women’s basic lifestyle has shifted dramatically—much more than men’s has—over the past few generations. Women during this interval generally have had to face new stresses from:

• • higher education and the pressures at higher levels of the working world;
  • the postponement or abandonment of marriage and child-bearing;
  • a new (or newly de-civilized) courtship environment in which their natural desire for love and motherhood is taken advantage of again and again without being fulfilled.

All the while, women have been told (by the most authoritative sources, including Hollywood and feminist activists) that these changes represent “progress” and must not be resisted.

Women also, compared to men, appear to have an innately greater desire for “equality” and social harmony. Yet these lofty, sentimental social goals, during the same critical period, have slipped—frustratingly—further and further out of reach, as the West has intensified its effort to remake itself as a highly multi-racial/ethnic civilization.

In addition to having to face these new stresses, women are (on average) more emotionally sensitive than men, and thus are apt to be more affected by the same stressors.

Small wonder, then, that a very large proportion of women and girls in Western societies can now expect to be diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder. It probably also should be unsurprising that the essentially feminine notion of “trauma”—a highly stressing psychological injury—has now taken on an outsized role not only in Western medicine but also in the wider culture.

On the whole, then, the recent changes in the standard female lifeway, and the demographic makeovers of Western societies, have created a large and chronic background level of stress for women. But the severe emotional contagion of the Great Awokening was triggered only after additional, more acute stressors appeared in the first half of 2020: the pandemic with its lockdowns, social isolation, and widespread fears of illness/death; and then the inflammatory treatment—by left-leaning media, activists, and politicians—of various police killings of miscreant African Americans.

Thus I think one can fairly easily fit the Great Awokening into the broader category of stress-induced, stress-relieving social manias. Amid the furious revels of such manias, inhibitions are necessarily going to be relaxed (for some more than others, of course) and people who were relatively labile, even frankly nuts, to begin with will also be drawn in, given the camouflage these frenzies provide for their behavioral issues.

The function of boundary-pushing

A social mania—one that is true to the concept of mania—cannot run forever. It must end by depleting its energy source or by inducing resistance, just as an individual with psychiatric mania will become exhausted after many days without adequate sleep, and/or will cause herself to be hospitalized and treated by exhibiting increasingly abnormal behavior. If a social mania’s deep purpose is to relieve accumulated social pressures, then its tendency to be ever more immoderate might even be seen as functional—in the sense that the spiraling further and further away from social norms serves to reduce support and induce opposition, thus limiting the damage while allowing the requisite venting of steam. To put it crudely, a social mania with its spiraling frenzy is a societal “cry for help.”

This is all speculative. It’s also a group-level, forest-not-the-trees view that people with an ordinary individualistic bias might find hard to wrap their heads around. But it’s a novel take that I (obviously) think should be considered. On the whole, it suggests that the Great Awokening should interest us less as a new cultural movement, and more as a signal indicating deep problems with the existing culture and society. In other words, it’s a social version of a seismic tremor, or even earthquake, and its intensity and direction of slip are interesting mainly for what they tell us about the underlying stresses at work—stresses that are unbearable and thus have be relieved, in one way or another.

***

I’ve already written a lot of essays about women’s maternal and other sex-specific traits, and how the mass entry of women into public life, in the last several decades, has brought those feminine traits to bear on culture and politics, driving extensive and ongoing changes in Western societies.

I am convinced more than ever that that “great feminization” argument is essentially correct. But there is another facet of male/female cultural competition that I have mostly overlooked until now. It’s really something that relates to groups in general, not just to women, but I think it’s especially relevant to the current female-driven social transformations of Western societies.

The idea here is that, when women a few decades ago began to achieve parity/dominance vis-à-vis men in professions and institutions across the West, they automatically set up a rivalry, a “battle of the sexes,” in each of these professions and institutions. Why? Not because of any particular “female” or “male” trait, but simply because the two sexes are different in general. They have different group identities, different ways of thinking, different group cultures. If only at an instinctive, nonconscious level—and if only to avoid the emotional pain of having to conform to the others’ ways—each has sought dominance over the other.

This certainly seems to be true from women’s perspective. You can hardly open a newspaper or browse news websites these days without encountering lamentations, by female writers, about male workplace behavior—from the mildly irritating to the supposedly traumatizing. These behaviors typically are blamed upon the male domination of the workplace in question, although from my (admittedly biased, male) perspective these complaints often look more like attempts to stamp out the last vestiges of male culture in workplaces that are already significantly feminized.

Women in their workplaces nowadays also—typically with the thinnest of formal rationales—are apt to organize emotional coalitions to oust their male CEOs or other leaders whose ways are insufficiently accommodating to the current female mindset.

I suppose that if one ventures into the “manosphere” reaches of the Internet, one will find similar complaints from men trapped in female-dominated institutions. One will strain to find similar victories, though.

On the whole, the institutional battle of the sexes is something that seems to have really crept up on men, creating a challenge for them that they may be unable to surmount. Men, in particular the white, European-derived men who created the institutions of Western civilization, were trying to be progressive and even-handed when they welcomed women into the workplace (they were relatively welcoming, compared to Asians, Arabs, Africans, etc.). They were trying to be meritocratic. Arguably that relatively fair-minded meritocratic mindset was a psychological or cultural trait that helped Western men build their civilization into the powerhouse it was. (Most men also regarded the scaled-up presence of women in the workplace as a colossal and wondrous sexual opportunity.)

What men didn’t reckon with is that women eventually would reach a certain level of presence and power in the institutions and professions where they worked—a critical mass, as it were—and from that point onward would tend to seek not parity but dominance, and by just about any means.

I submit that we are already seeing this reach for (and, frequently, achievement of) female dominance across multiple institutions and professions. While the most visible manifestation is the one I just mentioned—the noisy cancellation coalition that dislodges a problematic male executive (who is often replaced with a woman)—women also have been feminizing their institutions, and crowding out men, in much less newsworthy ways, e.g., the practice of “preferred pronouns,” “inclusive,” i.e., non-meritocratic hiring including quotas for female execs and board members, mandatory pro-diversity statements, and feminist/ESG/green constraints on investment and general corporate policy.

The upshot of this organizational capture is, of course, women’s use of these entities to promote the wider feminization of culture and politics—often synonymous with “wokeification”—which, again, I have written about elsewhere.

Their steamrolling victories suggest that women are much more powerful and effective than men in these institutional struggles, and, in a way, this should be unsurprising: Men presumably have not been under long-term evolutionary or cultural pressure to cope with competition of this kind from women. Women, on the other hand, as the weaker sex, have long had need of “force multiplier” tactics and instincts.

I strongly suspect that women’s greater power derives especially from a set of closely related female traits that include superior emotional sensitivity, superior sociality, superior ability to catch and transmit social contagions, and superior ability to form emotional coalitions—traits that, again, may have evolved not just in support of maternal functions, but also as special weapons in contests with otherwise dominant males. (I have touched on these points in previous essays, e.g., here and here.)

Of course, women also benefit tremendously from the civil rights dogma and legal regime that has gripped the US and some other Western societies for decades now, and often designates women as “traditionally disadvantaged” and thus worthy of favorable treatment, especially vis-à-vis white males.

Other groups

As I suggested at the top of this essay, women’s quest for supremacy within traditionally male institutions/professions is just one specific example of a much more general phenomenon of modernity. In other words, my hypothesis here is that any two (or more) groups that are sufficiently well defined and coherent, with sufficiently distinct group identities and cultures and so on, are bound to vie for control, to some extent, whenever they occupy the same social space.

Ethnic/racial groups are probably the most obvious examples of highly coherent but non-gender-defined groups that we would expect to see in these wars for institutional supremacy. As in the case of women vs. men, some of these ethnic/racial groups, due to their own particular traits, will be better than others in such contests. Immigrants to Western countries, especially those who have to travel from remote parts of the world, already tend to be the smartest, most ambitious, get-up-and-go members of their societies. Moreover, some of those societies are already highly stratified, with highly intelligent, highly entitled, highly ambitious (even ruthless) upper strata—so the immigrants from those upper strata are really going to pose a challenge to Westerners in the context of institutional struggles.

Thus, we are essentially looking at the flip side, the dark side one might say, of the fact that America and other Western countries attract the world’s best: Yes, many of these immigrants are the best, or are at least highly ambitious and sharp-elbowed, but that also means that they may soon have your job—and may even control your organizations.

Additionally, virtually any non-legacy-Western ethnic group is nonwhite, and ipso facto will be granted further strong advantages by contemporary civil rights culture. These advantages, over the past fifty-odd years, have included preferences/quotas in academic admissions, in public and private job hiring, and in government contracting—even when the group’s members have hailed mostly from elite, wealthy castes in the home country, and have not been “disadvantaged” in any sense.

Apart from the very tangible, often windfall-scale benefits of this civil rights regime, there has been, especially in recent decades, a civil rights mindset within organizations, a mindset that provides a further advantage to nonwhite ethnicities. Cloaking themselves in civil rights victimhood, preaching about the need for more diversity and equity, calling out alleged racists and racism, nonwhites can basically activate and direct that mindset as a further, quite powerful tool for displacing legacy Whites, for individual and group benefit.

I can think of at least several ethnicities that are doing very well in Western societies for the reasons I’ve just described. Indians are probably the most obvious example. They make up only about 1.5 percent of the US population now, and were hardly visible at all in the country half a century ago, but already they are strikingly overrepresented in the ranks of big-company CEOs as well as in other influential professions such as law, medicine, and politics.

Again, according to this general hypothesis, the struggle for control of institutions and professions could involve any other type of group with a significant presence and a sufficiently distinct and coherent identity. I think there are not many good examples beyond gender- and ethnicity-based groupings, but surely the “LGBTQ community” is one that has had some success in influencing big organizations’ policies.

 A General Hypothesis of Cultural Struggle

To sum up, then, my hypothesis is that a “collective instinct” to vie for supremacy over institutions/professions is something that occurs to some extent, and more or less automatically, even non-consciously, within all well-defined, cohering groups of significant size within those organizations. Different groups will have different traits that affect the intensity of their participation, their strategies, and their overall chances of success in these struggles. Some will also be advantaged or disadvantaged by the surrounding law and culture, e.g., civil rights law and culture.

I am not sure how original this idea is. Certainly, the idea of group culture is not new; nor is the idea of a struggle between cultures—what the Germans call a kulturkampf—novel. But the idea that such a struggle begins almost automatically when two or more rival cultures share a defined social space—a profession, an organization, a country—is one I don’t think I have encountered before.

I may not have emphasized enough that this “struggle” normally, for most of its participants, would be relatively subtle and even non-conscious. We all have our conscious explanations of, and justifications for, the things we do, but clearly there is a lot of other stuff going on under the hood—under the “limen,” the threshold of consciousness, as psychologists call it. Thus, Sanjay from the IT department may not be consciously plotting to dislodge the white CEO of his corporation; but, if asked to sign a petition decrying overheard off-color remarks by his company’s white CEO at a recent company retreat, he may be, ceteris paribus, much more likely to sign it if he knows the replacement CEO will be one of his countrymen—even if he isn’t consciously aware of that knowledge’s influence on him.

Another point to emphasize is that many, maybe most large organizations and institutions will have more than one group vying for control (e.g., women, assorted nonwhites, LGBTQs) against the legacy group (white males). These factions will coalesce and separate as needed, negotiating power-sharing strategies and arrangements, one faction slipstreaming behind another that has more power, and so on—similar to the workings of political parties in a multiparty system.

The uniqueness of whites

I have hesitated to include the legacy managerial class—white males—as combatants in these ubiquitous struggles, for the simple reason that they seldom seem to put up a fight. It’s downright eerie how some of these guys, no matter how innocent, will grovel, apologize, and plaintively attempt to appease when attacked, instead of showing any kind of defiance. It’s also odd that these men are so easily isolated; they are like those hobbled old wildebeests from the nature documentaries: left behind by the panicked herd for the pursuing, shrieking jackals to surround and kill at their leisure.

As for most of this social-psych territory, I can only speculate about the source of white males’ peculiar weakness and apathy. Maybe just having been on top for so long is enough to erode the mojo needed to stay there; maybe success has made us too soft, as the ascendant Greeks of antiquity said of the descendant Persians. Maybe we also developed psychological tools, such as hyper-individualism and relative cultural openness, that were once highly adaptive in enabling us to build our great civilization, but now leave us vulnerable as our environment becomes more post-patriarchal and multi-ethnic, and the protection and promotion of the “tribe” acquires a renewed importance.

Indeed, we aren’t merely passive in the face of challenges from women and nonwhites. We—a huge number of us anyway—are quick to respond with active self-loathing and self-abasement. Our women are even quicker in this regard, so I guess that this represents not a male trait but a white trait: a guilt/appeasement reflex that is related to emotional sensitivity and social (“virtue”) signaling.

Whatever the cause, it is or should be remarkable, not to mention alarming, that nonwhites don’t seem to have this self-abasing, guilt-signaling reflex. Nonwhites have at least many skeletons in their ancestral closets as whites do—everyone living now is the beneficiary of hundreds of invasions and genocides going back to ape-men times. Yet I’m sure I’ve never heard an Indian, a Nigerian, or a Filipino lament his own ongoing, deliberate colonization and exploitation of the countries of the West.

Implications

In principle, some struggles between group cultures will merely simmer, remaining unresolved indefinitely, because the factions that would challenge the incumbent white male faction cannot put together the numbers to prevail, or simply because a certain number of white males are needed to keep the organizational ship afloat. But now in the 2020s, after six decades in which Western women and nonwhites have been crowding into Western professions and institutions (lately empowered by blatantly anti-white-male ideology) they seem to be seriously reaching for supremacy, at least wherever white males and their mindset are less necessary.

In any case, one implication of this hypothesis is that adding “diversity” to an organization doesn’t necessarily bring it closer to some happy, stable equilibrium. It may, instead, disrupt what had been a relatively stable balance of forces, stimulating anew the struggle(s) for dominance in that organization—and leading to the further marginalization of white males.

Moreover, struggles among factions within organizations reflect, and also to a great extent add up to, a struggle at the societal level. By this reasoning, increasing demographic diversity in Western societies via mass-nonwhite-immigration is simply adding fuel to the kulturkampf fire, making ethnic factionalism burn hotter to the detriment of most, and increasing the chances that at least in some countries, nonwhites will prevail—marginalizing whites in their own lands.

* * *

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

The sanctions against Russia—both the official economic sanctions and the unofficial, often petty-seeming sanctions such as banning Russian owners from cat shows—arguably represent the first great “geopolitical cancellation” of this new feminized era in the West.

This cancellation obviously goes far beyond the usual diplomatic noises that are made when the blame for conflicts is murkier and the victims more remote from us. It is a public reaction to an outrage that rises explosively above the usual outrages, involves fellow Westerners, and is available to tug at the heartstrings 24/7 on a variety of electronic media.

Moreover, it really does look like a broad translation of the usual domestic cancellation strategies to the geopolitical scene, including economic punishment, censorship, general ostracism, threats of judicial action, and indirect assistance for those who fight the Cancelled One, but of course no direct, overt involvement in that fighting.

Given the scale of this response, the scale of the atrocity that triggered it, and the scale of Russia’s ongoing losses in Ukraine, Putin’s downfall seems inevitable. After killing many thousands of innocent Ukrainians, destroying probably trillions of dollars’ worth of Ukrainian buildings and other infrastructure, utterly breaking Russia’s army and air force, and of course lying through his teeth about his actions and motives, he does not appear to have any way out—any peaceful “off ramp.” He is our generation’s Hitler, and I suspect he already knows that his days, in office at least, are numbered.

There are many potential pluses to a Putin downfall. One is that Russia again will have a chance to achieve what it could not achieve in the 1990s, namely a more mature form of government and economy, oriented towards and not against the West. Such a transformation of Russia, which I think is somewhat more likely than the alternative, would mean a final unification of all the West’s major powers, and at least a temporary “emboldening” of them. That in turn could usher in one of those periods of history, like 1990-2010, in which the West reigns supreme over all earthly comers. In this scenario, bad actors such as Iran, China, and North Korea would have to watch their step, at the very least, and the world in that sense would be a safer place.

But here’s the bad news. Even if the “best case” scenario happens—including a glorious Russian uprising and overthrow of the dictator, maybe even on Easter Sunday (April 24 in the Russian Orthodox calendar)—the West has suffered a blow in its own ranks that I think is of dire significance.

If you’ve read any of my previous essays on this site, you know that I have taken a generally dim view of the West’s future. Cultural/political feminization; mass immigration, multiculturalism and wokeism; and the lack of political tools for solving these problems, have doomed the West in the most basic ways, as I have seen it. On the other hand, conservatives in the West have been gaining strength and coherence in recent years in reaction to the excesses of Letfism/wokeism. As recently as a month ago, it had seemed plausible to me that a Zemmour-ization of the Western Right (Eric Zemmour is explicitly against both cultural feminization and mass-immigration/heavy-multiculturalism) could, eventually and with a lot of luck, restore the situation.

But what Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed all too clearly is that much of the Right in the West is, well, wrong, and about fundamental things. Sadly, these Wrong Rightists include Zemmour as well as prominent commentators in the US, Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance among them.

The Wrong Rightists hate, first and foremost, what they call the Globalist American Empire (GAE). Fair enough—I hate it too. The problem is that they view Putin not as a murderous kleptocrat and global troublemaker (as I view him), but rather as a valuable counterweight to the hegemony of the GAE—a counterweight they want to strengthen, not weaken. These pro-Putin rightists have seemed quite willing to nullify the sovereignty of Ukraine (and, since the invasion started, have been willing to let Putin’s murders of tens of thousands of Ukrainians go unpunished), in order to preserve this counterweight—this bastion of old-fashioned Christian values according to the peculiar delusion afflicting some of them.

Of course, quite a few of the Wrong Rightists are backpedaling now, saying they deplore what Putin did, etc. They understand, at least at some level, the parallels between their sentiments and the discredited sentiments of say, Laval in France and Lindbergh in the USA during 1939-41. They therefore tend to exhibit their distress over the impending collapse of Russia as a Great Power, and the impending destruction of Putin and Putinism, in ways that are more or less indirect. They are peevish about Ukrainian “propaganda.” They lament the “lost opportunity” to have prevented the horrors of this war by barring Ukraine from NATO, thereby calming the nerves of their sensitive hero in the Kremlin. They speak darkly of Ukrainian “Nazis.” They yearn for a swift settlement that preserves Putin in power (and, not incidentally, conceals the fatuity of everything they have claimed or predicted about all this). They emit copious cope about how Russia is still destined to “win.” Above all, they say the West should care less about Ukraine and more about problems at home.

Here are just a few examples of this output (to which I may add soon as time permits):

What I think all this means is that the Western Right in general now is left with much less credibility in the eyes of the average normie citizen, just as occurred in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. In particular, the pro-Putin, “America First” sector of the Right, the sector that happens also to be most deeply concerned with the most serious issues, such as mass immigration, has grandly shot itself through the foot—or maybe through the heart. This has left the Left/center-Right “GAE” coalition in a much better position, so that there won’t be a Zemmour-type president in the USA any time soon—and I’m guessing now there won’t be one even in France. Thus the West’s demise will have been hastened at the very moment of its own apparent triumph over its longtime mortal enemy.

***

World War II ended less than two decades before I was born, yet I’ve always felt that it belonged to much more distant age—set off from modern existence by its different ways of thinking and doing, different patterns of speech and dress, grander scale of horrors and heroism, even the monochrome of its newsreels. The bad things, especially, seemed mostly unrepeatable in the world where I grew up.

American isolationism is a good example. Conservative Americans, for the longest time, didn’t want to help Britain, or Western Europe, with their struggles against Hitler and Mussolini. The USA had helped out Britain and France in 1917-18, and felt that they shouldn’t have to do anything like that again. Let Europeans sort out their own problems, they said.

That was part of their public reasoning, anyway. Another part of it seemed much more instinctive and tribal, much more driven by the false logic of “the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend”—their enemy being FDR, of course, their new friends being the Axis dictators.

It might seem facile to criticize the American isolationists of 1939-41 from our postwar perspective, but really they should have known better just from the information available at the time. In any case, it’s always striking now to read and hear the things they said. Here, for example, is aviator Charles Lindbergh, on September 11, 1941 (Europe conquered, Britain under siege, Wehrmacht nearing Moscow etc.), blaming the British, Roosevelt, and “the Jewish,” for pushing America towards war:

The Pearl Harbor attack, less than three months later, embarrassed the America First movement into silence. Lindbergh himself spent much of the war trying to get into combat to redeem himself, and eventually succeeded—in getting into combat, not at redeeming himself.

But anyway, here we are again, with the same kind of geopolitical setup (armed dictator on the prowl abroad, liberal Democrats in control at home), resulting in the same strange mindset on the part of American conservatives.

By the way, in case this is the first essay of mine you’ve read, I’m pretty conservative too (notwithstanding David Goldman’s swipe at me, below, as a “neocon/GlobLib”). Yet the fellow conservatives who, in defiance of recent history, have started talking up Putin and talking down Ukraine, the US and the Western alliance, are now as alien to me as DEI consultants.

I’ve already set down my own anti-isolationist, fight-the-bad-guy thoughts on Putin and Ukraine, a month ago on this site. Here I just want to record, mainly out of sheer amazement and chagrin, some of the sentiments I’ve been reading in recent days from elsewhere on the American right.

To keep things manageable, I’ve focused mainly on two prolific and very widely followed commentators, Goldman and Richard Hanania, and I’ve organized their comments by their major themes.

“Ukraine is a corrupt and backwards place that isn’t worth defending—or invading”

“Ukrainians are So Dumb”

“It’s All NATO’s/Neocons’ Fault for Expanding NATO and Threatening Russia”

“Putin is Smart and Will Win”

“The Woke are the Real Enemy—not Putin”

(See also “No Viet Cong Ever . . .“)

“You Neocons are So Dumb”

“Love Ukraine = Hate America”

“We Should Cut a Deal With Putin”

“Our NATO Allies Won’t Help Us—In Fact, NATO will collapse”

“We’ll Be Better Off When Russia and China Have More Power”

“Enough with the World War II Analogies!”

“And Now For Some Other Clever Ideas”

I’m aware that, as readers go through all these posts, they might find themselves agreeing with the sentiments expressed. But, as I post this, the long-awaited Russian offensive to conquer (presumably) Ukraine is just starting. It’s unlikely to be as dramatic for Americans as Pearl Harbor was, especially since it’s an attack on Ukraine, but modern electronic media, and weaponry, are going to be amplifying factors. I hope it will shock many of the Putin apologists and associated naysayers into rethinking their attitudes.

***

This short essay was prompted by the debate surrounding the ongoing Russian threat to invade Ukraine. But it is really a more general argument about state-vs.-state conflicts—even human-vs.-human conflicts.

My train of thought here was first tugged into motion when I read some of the remarks by Twitter nomenklatura, to the effect that the US shouldn’t lift a finger to help Ukraine and countries like it, should focus on its own problems, should stop “warmonger” talk, etc.

To me, such arguments reveal not just that a lot of Americans have failed to learn the lessons of history, but also that they’ve lost touch with some of their most basic and useful moral instincts.

(I should note here that I have no “axe to grind” where Ukraine is concerned: I don’t know any Ukrainians; I’ve never been to the place; I probably never will go there.)

Some quick background

In the 1980s, severe economic divergence between the Eastern Bloc and the democracies of the West, and the related weakening of the Soviet state, led to the emergence of durable pro-democracy movements in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other captive nations. These movements came to successful conclusions in 1989, when they brought down the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall, and the entire Iron Curtain. Two years later, the USSR itself disintegrated, its constituent “republics,” including the core Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Russian Republics, seceding from their union in late 1991. Most of the government offices and instruments of power in Moscow reverted to the control of the newly named Russian Federation, which became, initially, more of an ally than an adversary to the West.

This was, for the West, a victory almost on the scale of the Second World War’s. Indeed, it seemed to bring to a close not just the Cold War but also the broader process of European upheaval that had begun with the start of the First World War in 1914.

But the waters did not stay calm. The first post-Soviet leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was an alcoholic and a clumsy and corrupt administrator, and was forced to resign in 1999. He was replaced by his appointee Vladimir Putin, an ambitious former mid-level KGB officer who had entered politics after the fall of the USSR. Putin had a mess on his hands at first, and had to contend, among other things, with a much more democratic political system than had existed in the old USSR. But he eventually got things under control, in the traditional Russian way one might say—he smothered Russian democracy in its cradle, enriched himself and his cronies, and made Russia yet again an adversary of the West.

Putin never achieved a Stalin level of power, but he had enough control to bully and imprison political dissidents at home, and assassinate them abroad. He also was increasingly able and confident enough to impose Russia’s imperial will on some former captive states that had become too independent-minded, namely, in the oughties, Chechnya and Georgia, and, starting in 2014, Ukraine—following a popular Ukrainian uprising against that country’s pro-Russian leader, Viktor Yanukovych. Russian troops, not very convincingly described as volunteers and separatist freedom fighters, invaded Ukraine in that year, ultimately occupying the Crimean peninsula as well as a resource-rich eastern region called the Donbas.

Now Putin has positioned Russian troops and equipment seemingly for a new invasion, and has issued the West (principally the USA) a set of extreme demands that essentially convey the message: Ukraine is part of Russia, or at least should be forever under Russia’s thumb.

While Putin has acted boldly (by timorous Western standards) against Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya, he has not dared to attack other former Soviet satellites, such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. There is a simple reason for this: In the wake of the USSR’s collapse, the latter all eagerly joined NATO to protect themselves against their ancestral Russian enemy. Being a NATO member carries the solid-gold guarantee of full military assistance—troops and weaponry—from other alliance members in the event of Russian invasion. This has, to all appearances, been a sufficient deterrent against Russia since NATO’s inception. Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya are not members of NATO.

Reasons to Leave Ukraine to its Fate

There are true, mostly unspoken reasons why Americans, and Westerners generally, don’t want to help Ukraine in a decisive way, and there are essentially false, justification-type reasons that are provided for public consumption.

The true reasons are 1) having troops killed and precious military hardware destroyed on behalf of a country that is out on the margins of Europe would be costly—above all politically; and 2) opposing Russia too strongly would interrupt its supplies of natural gas to certain European countries (e.g., Germany) that badly need this resource, which, again, would be politically and otherwise costly.

These reasons strike me as quite similar to the reasons schoolchildren use, or feel, when they observe a bully threatening someone else: Although they at least vaguely recognize the value of stopping the bully, they fear the cost of “sticking their neck out” to fight, and feel that it would simply be cheaper to look the other way. The bullies, of course, understand this reasoning and exploit it.

The public reasons for not supporting Ukraine, a relatively democratic European state facing invasion by an authoritarian semi-Asiatic aggressor, largely have to do with Ukraine’s not being part of NATO, with Russia’s alleged right to control states on its periphery—sometimes referenced with the phrase “sphere of influence”—and with a general feeling that leading Western countries, especially the US, are overextended already and shouldn’t always try to be the world’s policeman. There is even the notion, apparently popular among many right-wing Americans, that Ukraine in recent years has become an American colony, the creation of warmonger “neocons,” and should now be liberated from the American empire so that it can return to the natural, bosomy embrace of its Russian mother.

Reasons to Stand Up for Ukraine

Firstly, the people of Ukraine, despite their ancestral brutalization and periodic annexation by Russia, consider themselves—and are—a distinct Western, Christian people, with their own culture and language. If there is one broad political-philosophical priority that Western societies should stand up for, it is the political independence of their distinct peoples—the same “inalienable right” of self-determination on which the USA was founded.

Secondly, NATO intervened decisively in Bosnia in 1995, to defend the independence of that country from what was essentially an attack by neighboring Serbia as well as by Bosnian-resident ethnic Serbs. What did the beleaguered Muslim Bosnians possess, to justify NATO’s protection, that Christian Ukrainians now lack?

Thirdly, and just obviously, the only broadly applicable and effective way in which small states can protect themselves from much larger aggressors is by joining alliances or other collective security arrangements. Ukraine naturally would like to do this, but for various reasons, including the terminal pusillanimity of Germany (which still flinches when anyone mentions the Red Army), has not been allowed membership in NATO. Thus, the fact that Ukraine is “not part of NATO” is more a cause of Russia’s bullying than a valid justification for acquiescing in it.

Fourthly, the US and Russia in 1994 inveigled Ukraine (along with Kazakhstan and Belarus) to give up the Russian nuclear weapons stationed on their soil, in exchange for various security guarantees, under the so-called Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Twenty-eight years on, Russia has blatantly and repeatedly violated this agreement. The US, though it promised at the time to come to Ukraine’s aid if Russia turned against it, has instead sought to weasel out of any real commitment. However, the agreement was explicitly meant to provide a security assurance—it’s there in the title, folks.

Fifthly, failing to stand up to Putin will embolden him. I notice the mockery some on the right have leveled, not only at this obvious argument, but also at the obvious Munich 1938 comparison. If there’s anything about this debate that really sparks my ire, it’s that smug “you can’t compare now to 1938” stuff. This is not an argument requiring fine, scholarly distinctions between historical events! This is about basic human nature. And, while it’s true that Putin’s aims now might be limited to Ukraine (or mere threats to Ukraine), it’s also true that Hitler’s aims were limited, vis a vis Western Europe, in 1938—but of course his aims got bigger as the threat from those who opposed him got (as he assessed it) smaller. Another way of putting this is that the manly instinct to fight the bully, even at considerable cost, even when the bully doesn’t directly threaten oneself, is not a useless atavism, as some commentators seem to think. It is still an adaptive reflex and, along with antibully systems such as NATO (imperfect as they are) underlies the relative peace of the developed world.

Sixthly, failing to stand up to Putin, allowing him to carry out his rape of Ukraine, will have demoralizing effects on the people of the West. The revealed weakness of the leading Western countries also could nudge any country that had hoped to get the West’s protection to instead become a minion of Russia.

Finally, failing to stand up to hegemonic bullies is a bad long-run strategy, just in simple logical terms. With no credible alliance to oppose him, the bully can subjugate his victims one by one, conceivably until he is too powerful even for an alliance to oppose.

What should have been done?

In general, those in a position to do so should have provided Ukraine with a worthy alliance to join as soon as the country started moving away from Russia. Although Germany and France (which are partly to blame for the current situation) have long opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO, the US and UK should have helped organize an alternative alliance, perhaps including other, highly motivated ex-Soviet Republics. Even now the US could tell Germany: agree to admit Ukraine to NATO immediately or the US will quit NATO and form a new alliance. In any case, the moment Ukraine enjoyed the formal protection of NATO or some other strong alliance, the Russian threat—if so far uncommitted—would recede.

It’s important to emphasize that last point. The purpose of having alliances is to not to be a “warmonger.” It is to deter war by showing the would-be hegemon that he will get a bloody nose if he takes a step further.

In future, it would also be a smart move for the US and other Western countries to encourage their former regular military men to serve as paid volunteers, equipped with gray market hardware, in conflicts like these. The presence or even the possible presence of such experienced mercenaries would be a significant additional deterrent to an aggressor.

Every day, on Twitter and a thousand other media and social-media forums, Americans of a “conservative” or “right-wing” persuasion bemoan and lament the civilizational destruction caused by the crazed, bureaucrat-and-brownshirt armies of wokeness.

I bemoan and lament with them. But what distresses me even more is the destruction—serious destruction—caused by trends that ordinary people on the right approve or at least choose to keep silent about.

One of these trends concerns some of the criminal and civil cases inspired by the #MeToo movement—cases that represent the anti-male, pro-histrionic-female theme in the broad wokeist takeover of the American judicial system. (Another prominent theme in that takeover, the anti-white-law-abiding-citizen, pro-black-felon theme, I wrote about just over a month ago.)

A particularly striking #MeToo case, still in its early stages but already with prominent media coverage, lies before us now.

This is the case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the most media-noisy of the sex kittens paid and kept by the late Jeffrey Epstein. She claims that—more than two decades ago, when she was just 17—she slept with the British royal Prince Andrew, and suffered so much harm thereby that she is now entitled to significant monetary damages. According to the complaint filed by her lawyers:

Prince Andrew committed sexual assault and battery upon Plaintiff when she was 17 years old. As such, Prince Andrew is responsible for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress pursuant to New York common law. The damage to Plaintiff has been severe and lasting . . . .

The below photograph depicts Prince Andrew, Plaintiff, and Maxwell at Maxwell’s home prior to Prince Andrew sexually abusing Plaintiff.

The reader is free to peruse the full complaint [pdf], to follow the case as it progresses, and to make judgments accordingly. I offer here, as a mere bystander who knows none of the parties, only my own humble, hushed opinions.

Which is to say, I think it’s a shameless fraud that demonstrates the shambles of the American legal system under the pressures of wokeist feminization.

Worse, I think it puts on full display America’s cultural corruption—for no media commentator of prominence, as far as I know, has offered even mild skepticism about this outrageous case or others like it.

In other words, while I believe that the stink of this business is more or less universally apparent, the average media person pretends otherwise because the stories generate clicks, and also for fear of cancellation—cancellation by the same hysteria-prone demographic that got people hanged at Salem and other innocents burned at the stake throughout Europe.

Let me clarify that Giuffre’s case against Andrew doesn’t—I mean, logically shouldn’t—have a close connection to the legal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I happen to think the latter were both obviously guilty of sex trafficking and related offenses, even if the sentence Epstein would have received in New York and the one Maxwell is now set to receive will be excessive (on the Great White Defendant principle) compared to typical trafficking cases, i.e., involving some Nigerian or Honduran who really does enslave and brutalize his victims. But no one has ever presented evidence that Andrew was a party to Epstein’s trafficking scheme, or that he was anything other than a gentle fool who, like other fools (Bill Gates and Bill Clinton among them) hung out with his friend Epstein from time to time. (How Epstein generated the charisma to gather such people in his orbit is to me a significant mystery, albeit not relevant here.)

Giuffre’s case rests on the simple allegation that Andrew, in cahoots with Epstein and Maxwell, somehow “forced” Giuffre to sleep with him—which seems not just an unsupported allegation but a preposterous one. Assuming Giuffre and Andrew even did have sex, we have been given no reason to picture it as any less volitional on her part than her demeanor in the photograph would suggest. And I think it’s safe to say that Andrew, whatever his other failings, has never shown a propensity for treating women in the manner alleged.

At the same time, it appears that Giuffre, having partied and traveled widely and gotten to know various men, all on Epstein’s nickel, has been, since E’s legal troubles began, squeezing him or his estate (also Ghislaine Maxwell and Alan Dershowitz) for further money; and the suit against Andrew represents one of the continuations of that broader effort; all of which speaks clearly to the issue of her motive.

In short, the case has the prima facie appearance of being no more than a shakedown: an attempt essentially to extort money with the threat of an embarrassing civil trial if the money is not paid.

Despite this, there is a good chance Giuffre will prevail—her blue-chip lawyers, who probably stand to get around a third of any award or settlement, would not have taken the case otherwise. Most likely she will prevail because Andrew and his family will decide to settle rather than endure the pain of a trial. Even if they are willing to endure that pain, the corruption the #MeToo strain of wokeness has caused in the American legal system, including juries, makes any such case a roll of the dice, at least. The judge in the case also may not be an even-handed Myron Kovitsky type (Bonfire of the Vanities); he is Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee and a paid-up member of the New York liberal elite, whose demeanor in an early hearing does not bode well for the prince.

Shakedowns occur all the time, among highlifes and lowlifes, but this one is so prominent, so front-and-center, and yet apparently so untouchable by simple reason and skepticism. No disinterested observer can question it! Everybody loves Empress Virginia’s new clothes! Little wonder that Dershowitz, target of another one of Giuffre’s suits, has come across as almost apoplectic when talking about her to reporters.

certified, complete, total liar [link]

I’m not neutral on this, because [Giuffre] also accused me of having sex with her, and I proved conclusively — through her own diaries, through her own lawyer, through our own emails — that it would be impossible for me to have ever met her. [link]

Anyway, I hope my writing this emboldens some of you out there to speak up—quixotically, I know, but so be it—and state what is obvious about cases like this, namely that they need to be strongly discouraged somehow, and the men targeted by them need to be better protected. The US and other Western legal systems already make many concessions to women, including protection from incidental reputational harm in rape cases. Why can’t men receive a similar level of protection from the deliberate reputational harm of shakedown cases?

Well, of course, you know why—because women essentially are now in charge, and are remodeling the institutions of Western life to suit themselves. With essentially zero pushback from men. I begin to tire of pointing this out.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

I’ve written about women and their cultural/political ascendancy so much in recent years, especially the last three, that I worry about sounding like the proverbial broken record if I write any more. But it seems to me that as this idea is accepted more widely—including by commentators who see it as their own idea . . .

. . . there is a tendency to narrow the focus (e.g., “female graduates,” “HR ladies,” or “women explain wokeness”) so that the true extent of the West’s feminization is obscured.

Moreover, the case can be made that feminization is having not only an enormous but also a potentially fatal impact on Western civilization as we have known it. Thus, thumping the tub about this subject may be a good and necessary thing to do now.

To that end, I think at least several key points within this overall hypothesis bear repeating:

Women’s broad cultural/political ascendancy has been reshaping the West for decades

The big idea here is that women have been the principal drivers not only of the creeping wokeism post 2015 or so, and of the ongoing semi-spiritual movement known as the Great Awokening, but also of the general “leftward” (in fact, “feminine”) trends in Western culture and politics over the last six-plus decades. This is the period in which women moved en masse into, and achieved parity or dominance within, culturally and politically influential professions such as journalism, publishing, entertainment, law, academia, politics, even blogging.

It is not just from one or two of those professions but from all of them, and in every circumstance along the way (e.g., university life, engagement with social media, office politics, voting, protest marches), that women have been causing cultural and political change, effectively feminizing the West to a degree never seen before in any large civilization.

Activist women—mostly single, university-educated, and/or young—may be the “shock troops” of feminization, and the most dedicated and effective practitioners of wokeism and cancel culture. But women in general have been driving this social transformation.

Women’s ascension to cultural and political power has had cultural and political consequences because women on average are different than men across a wide range of attitudes and behaviors

Gender differences in attitudes and behaviors were presumably shaped—at a biological level with changes that cannot easily be undone—by men’s and women’s distinct roles during the long period of hominid evolution, roles that for women centered on maternity. Women even now in modern times appear to be markedly more emotionally sensitive than men on average, quicker to form social networks, less interested in abstract and inanimate things, less interested in systems, more personal (including ad hominem) in their thinking, and more fearful—not just of ideas and people they dislike but also of toxins and other putative environmental threats. All these differences have had cultural and policy consequences as women’s power has increased in societies designed and traditionally run by men. One could say that women effectively have been using their new cultural and political power to renovate and redecorate their civilization according to their distinctive tastes. As Virginia Woolf put it in her 1938 essay, “Three Guineas”:

Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilization” in which we find ourselves?

Cultural/political feminization therefore involves a multitude of changes

Cultural and political changes that have plausibly been driven by the ascendancy of women in Western societies are not limited to the extreme changes associated with “wokeism.” They include also relatively mild and gradual, long-term trends:

• • more extensive and generous welfare programs;
  • more rights, often including reverse-discrimination-type rights, for “traditionally disadvantaged” or otherwise marginalized groups (blacks, Hispanics, nonwhite immigrants, women, gays, transsexuals, etc.);
  • more emphasis generally in culture and policy on “equality of outcomes” over “equal opportunity,” and on guilt and compassion (vs. dispassionate, long-term calculation) as drivers of policy and social change;

• • more emphasis on “trauma”—emotional upset—everywhere from journalism to law and medicine, with a related emergence of trauma-memory (PTSD) or otherwise trauma-related syndromes that are strongly contagious and now highly prevalent;
  • less affinity for traditional, often Constitutionally protected forms of (emotionally painful) confrontation such as free speech and free debate, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law (e.g., the right to face one’s accuser, and the right to cross-examine)—and increasing affinity for systems that suppress and punish “unacceptable” speech;
  • the acceptance of what amount to special rules for women when they are complainants against men in sex-related court cases, e.g., they can bring cases decades after the alleged crime, and when they claim to have been abused by men they later dated or exchanged love-notes with, their claims are still taken seriously—are simply chalked up to their presumed trauma;

• • the intrusion of distinctively feminine values into the traditionally male-dominated world of sports, such that, for example, athletes putting their “self-care” instincts over their competitive instincts are not derided but celebrated;

• • the alteration of language, including the elimination of upsetting terms and invention of new ones (“safe space”), to reflect the reigning new feminine mindset;
  • the routine, rapid formation of social networks to exert pressure on corporations or other institutions to “cancel” someone who has fallen afoul of feminist/woke orthodoxies;
  • strong environmentalism and related advocacies and preferences (anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-nuclear, climate-change alarmism, veganism, “organic” foods and medicines, etc.), stemming plausibly from women’s relatively strong sensitivity to the idea of environmental harms including toxins;
  • Shifts towards less systematized/hierarchical and rule-based religious forms, from paganism to evangelical/charismatic Christianity.

Cultural/political feminization, far from being “progress,” is probably destroying Western liberalism—the liberalism that emancipated women in the first place

Yes, men on average have their own ways of thinking and acting—their own stubborn, long-evolved biases. And yes, the traditional male mindset is not necessarily optimized for running human societies in the 21^st century. But there is an obvious reason why the male mindset, compared to the female mindset, is probably better adapted for managing culture and politics: Men have been managing culture and politics, and getting punished in the harshest ways for failure, for hundreds of millennia. Women, by contrast, have been working on a large scale in public life for not even two generations—and still seem inclined to blame men when things go wrong.

On the flip side of that argument is another obvious point: Women’s mindset is not simply unadapted or insufficiently adapted by evolution for managing public affairs; it is adapted specifically for other tasks, mainly domestic tasks revolving around the bearing and raising of children. In other words, women’s higher emotional sensitivity (compassion, guilt, fear, anxiety/turmoil); their relative indifference to machines and systems and cold, abstract thought; their stronger fear of toxins; their greater tendency to think un-independently and transmit social contagions, etc. are in a fundamental sense out of place in the culture- and policy-making spheres.

I’m not suggesting that women’s traits are totally separate from men’s in this regard—for virtually any trait there would be two highly overlapping distributions, so that there would be lots and lots of women further towards the “male” end of the distribution compared to the average male.

But there clearly are differences between the means of those distributions, between the average male and the average female in other words; and the central idea here is that those differences, on a population level, are not only meaningful but potentially cataclysmic in their civilizational impact.

That impact is evident not only in the broad cultural and policy shifts since the early 1960s—the “pink shift” as I have called it—but in the more recent and extreme policy changes in places where cultural and political feminization is most advanced: “defund the police,” “let violent criminals out on bail,” “open the borders / diversity is our strength,” “let homeless people camp and crap wherever they like,” “give addicts needles,” “math is racist,” “logic is sexist,” etc. Not all of these policies are wildly popular, and obviously specific groups of hardcore activists are to blame for some of them, but I don’t see how these changes, collectively, could have taken root to the extent they have except against a heavily feminized cultural background—they are essentially ad absurdum expressions of the feminine mindset applied to policy.

I don’t think that every manifestation of feminization will be harmful in the long run. But some will. The move away from free speech towards speech- and thought-policing seems pretty ominous. Even worse, I suspect, is the encouragement of mass non-Western immigration to Western countries. One does not have to “hate” non-Western immigrants to understand that they and the culture they bring with them are . . . non-Western . . . so that the more there are of them, the less Western their host countries become. The women who encourage mass non-Western immigration seem surprisingly indifferent to the fact that non-Western cultures generally are less liberal, and a lot less friendly to the idea of female power, compared to Western cultures even from a few decades ago.

Can liberal Western societies nevertheless avert their impending self-destruction, by—among other measures—reining in cultural/political feminization? We’ll soon see, but I doubt it. I think it could help some to talk more about this cultural feminization hypothesis—“cult-fem theory”—at least as a way of dispelling the holy aura of “progress” that feminization-related social changes have acquired. But could one attack cultural feminization more directly and conclusively? Could one expel women, or even just the “bad apples,” or even persuade them to think and act differently, in all significant Western institutions—legislatures, government offices, universities, corporations, media organizations, philanthropies—where they are now embedded and substantially run things? I don’t see how. I don’t think liberal Western societies have any strong defense against this threat, other than by reverting to overt illiberalism.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

An unpopular cause I feel compelled to stick up for today is the cause of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, all of Brunswick, Georgia, USA, who were recently found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Rightly or wrongly, I am convinced that this verdict is blatantly unjust. I also believe that many Americans, not just the jury and the prosecutor, are complicit in this injustice—an injustice that is much closer to murder (these men are likely to die in prison) than was the actual killing of Arbery.

Grievous miscarriages of justice occur frequently now in the United States, and often arise due to race-related issues that bias prosecutors and jurors. So why am I writing about this particular injustice, and not, say, the travesty of the Derek Chauvin verdict? I think it’s mainly because in the Chauvin case I read a healthy amount of commentary defending Chauvin, whereas in the case of the McMichaels and Bryan I read no defenses, only smug expressions of satisfaction or at least placid acceptance of this verdict, even among people who should know better.

The guilt of the McMichaels and Bryan is, in other words, part of the contemporary American “conventional wisdom” that I have come to distrust almost reflexively.

Why the McMichaels and Bryan were abandoned to their harsh fate so easily, even willfully and joyously, by their countrymen is something I’ll speculate about later in this essay, but first I want to go over some of the basic facts of the case.

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery

Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year old African-American man who lived in Brunswick, Georgia. Like many African-American men, he had a police record for at least moderately serious crimes, including bringing a handgun to a high school football game in 2013, and an attempted shoplifting of a TV from a WalMart in 2017. He was still on probation when he died.

In late 2018, apparently based on his own observations as well as those of family members, Arbery’s probation officer recommended that Arbery get a mental health evaluation. At this evaluation—the defense lawyers brought this up at the trial, but the judged ruled it inadmissible—Arbery described to the evaluator (apparently a psychiatric nurse) “auditory delusions sometimes commanding him ‘to rob and steal’ and sometimes telling him ‘to hurt people,’” as well as general difficulties controlling his anger. Arbery was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and prescribed olanzapine (Zyprexa), a second-generation antipsychotic that is also used treat schizophrenia and the manic episodes of type 1 bipolar disorder; however, he apparently didn’t take the drug for long, and there was no evidence of it in his system when he died, although there were trace amounts of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

The MSM stories after Arbery’s death were heavily biased in the young man’s favor, and tended to omit or downplay anything negative, preferring to show a picture of him looking spiffy in his prom suit . . .

. . . and preferring to emphasize that at the time of his death Arbery was “planning” to attend a local technical college to become an electrician, and often went jogging for exercise.

In general, because of this overwhelming bias, it is hard to trust the information about Arbery that was provided by his family and their lawyer and cannot be verified, e.g., with documents. We can’t say with confidence much more about his background than what judicial records show, namely that he had a history of being armed illegally, and of attempting theft, and of showing signs of mental illness including serious impulse-control problems. This shouldn’t necessarily have had any bearing on the jury’s findings, but it does speak to the broader moral picture, and definitely belies the many MSM portraits of Arbery that were designed, in part, to whip up hatred against the men who killed him.

Late in 2019 Arbery had begun taking occasional jogs into a mostly white neighborhood called Satilla Shores, where the McMichaels and Bryan lived. A video camera also had recorded him, in his jogging clothes, walking into a house in the neighborhood that was under construction—this had happened several times, mostly at night.

In the months immediately preceding his fateful encounter with the McMichaels, there also had been several break-ins or thefts in the neighborhood, including the theft of a gun from an unlocked truck—reported by Travis McMichael on January 1.

On the night of February 11, according to Wikipedia:

Travis called 9-1-1 to report a slender 6-foot-tall Black man with short hair, wearing red shorts and a white shirt, who was trespassing on the site of a house under construction. Travis said, “I’ve never seen this guy before in the neighborhood.” The dispatcher asked whether Travis was OK, and he said, “Yeah, it just startled me. When I turned around and saw him and backed up, he reached into his pocket and ran into the house. So I don’t know if he’s armed or not. But he looked like he was acting like he was.” “We’ve been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately”, Travis said on the call. He told the dispatcher that he was out in his truck, and that as many as four neighbors were out looking for the man. His father Gregory was one of the people out searching that night, and Gregory and at least one other neighbor were armed. Police responded and searched the house along with a neighbor, but found no one. However, surveillance video from that evening showed a man who reportedly looked like Arbery, briefly walking in and out of the house under construction. He did not take anything. The under-construction house did not have doors or windows.

While Arbery died before the mystery of the local thefts could be solved, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that exonerates him in all those thefts, despite the MSM’s implications otherwise. Given his background and the correspondence of his jogging and the local burglaries, it seems at least plausible—and evidently many Satilla Shores residents suspected—that he used his jogging at night as a cover for burglaries, and jogging in daytime to select his night-time targets. (I would be interested to know whether the burglaries continued after Arbery’s death, but haven’t seen any reference to such data.)

On the 23^rd of February, shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, Arbery once again ran into Satilla Shores, and into the house under construction, and once again was recorded on video camera.

A neighbor, Matthew Albenze, also spotted Arbery and called 911 to report the trespass on the building under construction. Wikipedia again:

The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked if the man was “breaking into it right now?” The caller replied: “No … it’s all open.” After the caller said the man was now “running down the street”, the dispatcher said police would respond. The dispatcher asked at 1:08 p.m., “I just need to know what he was doing wrong. Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?” The caller responded, with some parts garbled, saying: “And he’s been caught on camera a bunch at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing.”

Why Arbery ran away isn’t clear, but the perception among those who saw him was that he was trying to escape after stealing something from the construction site. Apparently he hadn’t stolen anything, but if he had known that the cops had been called, then, being on probation, he might have wanted to avoid another brush with the law. Then again, if Arbery was mentally ill, it is probably pointless to try to rationalize his actions.

Soon Arbery ran past the McMichaels’ house, where Gregory McMichael, working in the yard, saw him and recognized him as the repeat trespasser the neighborhood was worried about. He and Travis armed themselves and got into their white pickup truck, and gave chase.

The MSM accounts, and the account of the prosecutor, are worded to suggest that the McMichaels were racist good-old-boys who pursued Arbery that day simply because they wanted to hunt down, and snuff out the life of, an innocent black man whose only “crime” was “jogging while black.” To say that this is false, and as such represents both journalistic and prosecutorial misconduct, would be putting it very mildly. Both McMichaels had law enforcement experience, and obviously (all the evidence leans this way) were attempting a citizen’s arrest, a procedure that has a long history in the United States and at the time was specifically sanctioned in Georgia law. In other words, they wanted only to detain Arbery so that he could be questioned by police.

Whether they had sufficient reason to attempt a citizen’s arrest is debatable. However, to say that in the heat of the moment someone slightly exceeding his rights under a citizen’s arrest law automatically will be charged with false imprisonment, and then murder for defending his life when the mentally ill arrestee attacks him, is completely absurd. Citizen’s arrest laws are not meant to sanction vigilantism, but they also are not meant to be life-destroying traps for honest citizens who are trying to protect their neighborhoods—in what was here a demonstrable absence of effective policing.

The McMichaels tried unsuccessfully to cut off Arbery as he ran, and, they said later, even asked him to stop and let them talk to him, but he didn’t respond and continued running in an attempt to evade them. They could easily have shot him, if killing him had been their intent, but they did not; they simply kept trying to get him to stop.

At some point Bryan, who had seen the chase go by his own house, joined in with his black pickup truck and tried—again, unsuccessfully—to cut off the running man. Note that Bryan was not a close friend of the McMichaels; he was merely another resident in this neighborhood that was now literally up in arms over the rash of thefts and trespassings, and hoped to put the perp behind bars.

Ultimately the McMichaels gave up pursuing Arbery—apparently the neighborhood had many open yards through which he could always evade them—and simply parked their pickup at a crossing where they thought he was likely to appear in his attempt to get away.

At this point, just several minutes after Albenze’s 911 call, Travis McMichael, standing on the road by the driver’s side door, made his own 911 call—but then saw Arbery coming and handed the phone to his father, who stood in the truck bed:

a male caller said: “I’m out here at Satilla Shores …There’s a Black male running down the street.” The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked, “Where at Satilla Shores?” The caller replied: “I don’t know what street we’re on.”

Arbery now as he approached apparently saw Travis standing with his shotgun by the open driver’s door on the left side of the pickup truck. Arbery might have turned around or veered onto either of the lawns beside the narrow road. Instead he kept running towards the truck, though he altered course to the right side of the road, and then ran along the right side of the truck, just a few feet from Gregory McMichael who stood in the truck bed talking to 911. When he reached the front of the truck, Arbery suddenly cut left and charged Travis.

This was the impulse that killed Arbery. You and I, and pretty much every sane person aware of the story, know this, and know that we would never have done what he did. We know that we would have stopped, and we know that if Arbery had stopped, as he’d been asked, he would still be alive, the McMichaels and Bryan would be free, and none of us would have heard of any of them.

But Arbery charged Travis. Bryan, who had been in pursuit of Arbery, parked his pickup in time to catch most of this tragic encounter on his cellphone camera.

Arbery in his fatal lunge had almost reached Travis when the latter fired his shotgun, catching Arbery in the chest. Arbery kept coming and tried to wrest the gun away from Travis. Meanwhile Gregory McMichael, with the phone still to his ear and the line to the 911 dispatcher still open, screamed at Arbery to stop.

The caller shouted, “Stop! … Watch that. Stop, damn it! Stop!”

Why did Gregory McMichael shout at Arbery to stop? Well, obviously because he and his son had never intended to kill Arbery and were astonished that he was making it necessary.

Arbery did not stop. He kept struggling for the shotgun until Travis had shot him with it a total of three times. After the third shot, which went through the left side of his chest, Arbery quickly weakened, staggered, and collapsed to the pavement.

Aftermath

Alerted by the first 911 call, the police soon arrived. Arbery by then was dead. Travis McMichael was splashed in blood and evidently in shock (“No, I’m not all right,” he told the cop. “I just fucking killed someone.”)

But, along with his father, he cooperated. Bryan cooperated too. They freely discussed the events of the preceding minutes, evidently without any sense of having committed a crime. The police did not arrest them, and the local district attorney’s office did not charge them. The Brunswick Circuit DA, Jackie Johnson, saw the case as an unfortunate but not really criminal one involving a mentally ill young man who essentially had brought about his own death through his own impulsive and violent actions.

Johnson had connections to the McMichaels, though, so she recused herself and turned the thing over to a neighboring district, Waycross Judicial Circuit District. The DA there, George Barnhill, felt the same way about the case. According to Wikipedia:

On April 2, Barnhill wrote a memorandum to Glynn County police, recommending that no arrests be made. Barnhill wrote that the McMichaels were within their rights to chase “a burglary suspect, with solid firsthand probable cause”; that “Arbery initiated the fight”; and that Travis McMichael “was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself” when “Arbery grabbed the shotgun”.

By this time, of course, Arbery’s family had got a lawyer, “leaders of the black community” were getting involved, and there were demands for a prosecution. So the whiff of racial protest, with all that entails for a prosecutor’s career, was already in the air. Soon Barnhill washed his hands of the case, with a rather tenuous excuse:

Arbery had previously been prosecuted by his son, a prosecutor for the Brunswick Circuit District Attorney’s Office, in an earlier case [and] one of the defendants [Gregory McMichael] had served as an investigator on the same prosecution.

And so, on April 13, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office handed the case to another nearby venue, the Atlantic Judicial Circuit.

It’s unclear what would have happened if the case had simply been left at the Atlantic Judicial Circuit, with no new event to inflame the situation, but presumably its DA, one Tom Durden, would have been under the same political pressures as the two DAs that had passed on the case.

What did happen is this: On May 5 a local defense lawyer who had consulted informally with Gregory and Travis McMichael uploaded Bryan’s cellphone video to the website of a local radio station. Stories were circulating to the effect that Arbery had simply been gunned down while jogging, and the lawyer apparently thought that the video would convince the public of the McMichaels’ innocence. He thought wrong—not because the video shows the McMichaels to be murderers, but simply because it somewhat shockingly depicts a young African-American man’s death at the hands of two fairly stereotypical-looking southern white fellows. This publication of the video was, remember, in one of the hardest, most hysterogenic periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few weeks later, America would erupt in the Great Awokening after George Floyd’s death—but even now it was clear that this society was becoming very restive under pressure, and its politicians and politically sensitive prosecutors were doing what they could to placate the more restive elements.

From Wikipedia again:

Within hours of the video becoming public, Tom Durden, the district attorney for Georgia’s Atlantic Judicial Circuit, said that he would present the case to “the next available grand jury in Glynn County” to decide if charges should be filed. The convening of grand juries had been postponed until after June 12 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Durden accepted Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s offer to bring in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to investigate. [italics mine]

At this point, with the most senior state politician getting involved in what should have been an obscure case, and more or less signaling—virtue-signaling—which way it should go, the McMichaels’ fate was sealed.

The GBI found probable cause to charge Gregory and Travis McMichael within 36 hours of taking over jurisdiction of the case, and, on May 7, arrested and charged them with felony murder. The McMichaels were booked into the Glynn County Jail. At an appearance before a judge the following day, the McMichaels were both denied bond.

A few days later, Bryan too was arrested and charged.

Ladies of the Jury

When the case came before a jury, it was widely reported that eleven of the twelve jurors were white. It was much less widely reported that nine of those eleven were women.

Women, as I have been writing for the past decade, “wear the pants” now in most Western societies, i.e., have unprecedented and often dominant influence in many realms of culture. This is important because on average women think about and react to the world differently than men. Compared to men, for example, women seem much more emotionally aroused by stories of white-on-black racial conflict. Women, white women, also appear to have been the dominant participants in the bizarre BLM frenzy of the summer 2020 Great Awokening.

If the McMichael/Bryan defense lawyers had read my essays, they would have known this (I write this only half-jokingly—my essays are not that obscure) and accordingly might have tried a different jury-selection strategy—though really, as this and many other examples show, the jury system in the United States is generally unlikely to deliver justice in cases where the forces of Wokeness favor one side.

In any case, the jury members were mostly women, the DA that ultimately charged the three defendants was a black woman (she claimed at the trial, among other things, that the defendants “chased, hunted down and ultimately executed” Arbery), and the lead prosecutor in the trial was a woman. And of course, Al Sharpton sat in the courtroom with Arbery’s family, and a mob of demonstrators camped outside the court building, to remind those sensitive women of the jury what they would face if they delivered the wrong verdict.

The jury, without much deliberation, duly returned a verdict of guilty on most of the charges. These charges included felony murder for all three defendants—even Bryan who had not been armed and had done nothing more than pursue Arbery in his truck. Travis McMichael, who presumably would have been killed by Arbery had he not defended himself, was additionally found guilty of “malice murder,” which means murder with “express or implied malice.”

These charges bring a minimum 30-year sentence before the possibility of parole, and for Travis McMichael, with the additional malice murder rap, there may be no parole—that will be up to the judge.

The Biden Administration, of course, watched this show trial approvingly.

However, it isn’t going to let it go at that. No, the Biden Administration via its “Justice” Department will try to earn further brownie points in the eyes of its voter base, and at the same time try to crush the spirit of conservative Legacy Americans, by pursuing a federal hate-crime trial of the McMichaels and Bryan—scheduled to convene next year.

Meanwhile the state of Georgia, led by “Republican” Gov. Brian Kemp, will also send a message by prosecuting former Brunswick Circuit DA Jackie Johnson—the first one to recuse herself, remember—for “obstruction of justice.” This will ensure that, the next time a black person in Georgia is killed by whites for any reason whatsoever, local DAs will show the proper Stakhanovite zeal in prosecuting.

Flaws in the Law

Note that Georgia law defines the kind of murder alleged in the case as follows:

(a) A person commits the offense of murder when he unlawfully and with malice aforethought, either express or implied, causes the death of another human being.

(b) Express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take the life of another human being which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof. Malice shall be implied where no considerable provocation appears and where all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.

(c) A person commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.

Did “all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart” on the part of Travis McMichael? The answer is obviously no. He did not shoot Arbery from the window of his truck (or at any time until charged) as he would have done had his intent been murderous; he phoned 911 prior to the fatal encounter; he did not flee the scene of the killing; he showed every sign of having been shaken by that killing because he had not expected it; and he cooperated with the police who came to the scene. If he had an “abandoned and malignant heart” (why are these vague and archaic descriptors even allowed in the legal code?) he would have acted like a typical premeditated killer, shooting Arbery in a way that would not implicate himself, and denying involvement if questioned. I can imagine that a lot of American men who are forced to live with the problem of Black crime will now prefer that option, at least those men who are not totally demoralized by show trials like these.

The bigger problem here is the implied notion, noted above, that even mildly overinterpreting a citizen’s arrest law, as any concerned citizen might easily do without bad intent, can abruptly (by the whim of a biased jury) turn the citizen into a felon, and then a murderer if he has to defend himself against the arrestee’s violence. If such a notion were valid, a citizen’s arrest law would be worse than worthless. It would be as if the government invited motorists to drive across a very long and narrow, guardrail-less bridge over a mile-deep gorge, having positioned the bridge in such a way that it constantly swayed and shimmied in the wind. It effectively would be no bridge at all—only a deathtrap for the unwary.

The Malignant Heart of the Matter

Is there even any point in arguing over the legal questions at the heart of such cases? I can remember many racially tinged travesties of justice in my adult life, going back at least to the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995. These cases always feel like inversions of the To Kill a Mockingbird setup—either an apparently guilty black man goes free or gets off lightly, or a wrongfully prosecuted white man has his life ruined. More importantly, the process by which these injustices occur is always (as in Harper Lee’s model of 1930s small-town Alabama) a social process involving race-politics pressures as well as a lot of venality, cowardice, and hysteria. Tom Wolfe somehow got away with writing a big novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, about the modern versions of these circuses, a novel that even in 1987 conveyed strongly the message that American society and its judicial system had been irretrievably broken by decades of racial factionalism.

Similarly, what really drew my attention to this case was the evidence of race-politics pressure on DAs and politicians, the jury’s disregard for the basic evidence that should have exonerated the defendants, the MSM’s wanton mischaracterizations of the case (go back and read their accounts!), and then, above all, the overwhelmingly positive, smug reaction to the verdict by so many Americans.

Of course, Twitter and social media generally are full of people who can cheaply virtue-signal while never having to deal with the unhappy realities afflicting ordinary Americans. Stephen King, for example, lives in a humongous complex on a barrier-island beach south of Sarasota—I know because I once lived nearby—at the least-accessible extremity of a wealthy neighborhood that was designed by its residents to keep out the riffraff, including anyone who looks remotely like Ahmaud Arbery. From that fortress King is unlikely ever to have to face the problem of burglary or thievery, and anyway any losses from such property crime would be infinitesimal in their impact on him.

But I think virtue-signaling is only a small and secondary part of this. Over the past few years, and especially since the COVID pandemic started, the more or less diffuse growth of wokeness in American life seems to have cohered into a Salem-like episode of socially sanctioned savagery—arguably almost as deadly as Salem, and much more broad and durable. I’ve even had the vague imaginative sense (from a distance, as an expatriate) that this mass hysteria has been developing into a kind of cult, presided over by a collectively summoned black perp-god, or purple-haired Gender Studies goddess, who in strident tones demands a constant flow of human sacrifices. (Another writer elaborated this human-sacrifice concept before me, so I will mostly leave that imagery to him.)

The centrality of pictures and videos should give us a clue to how these weird social phenomena arise. If, let us say, a young black man, a man like Ahmaud Arbery, is found dead in the street by gunshot one day, but there is no video evidence of how he was killed, what will be the public reaction? The reader knows the answer already, because such cases occur many times per day across the US, especially in heavily black cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Baltimore. There is generally no reaction, no wider resonance. The man’s family may weep. They may call on the police to solve the crime. But usually only if the cops identify a white suspect (a relatively rare event) will the case make out of the back pages of the papers, and only if the white-on-black killing is caught on video (much rarer) is the case sure to be lifted from the muck of the ordinary criminal court docket into the glare of a Woke Cult show trial.

People in general, and I guess women moreso than men on average, are apt to be distressed when they witness—for example on a video—a violent death. The distress in turn creates a sense of urgency to do something. (Consider how heavily US foreign and immigration policies in recent years have been driven by distressing images in the media, e.g., of wounded children in Syria or refugee children crossing the Rio Grande.) Distress also tends to suppress rational thought, making the mind more susceptible to the beating tom-toms (to paraphrase McLuhan) of mass delusion and madness. And when a killing depicted on a distressing video can be made to seem even remotely consistent with the central wokelore motif of evil whites harming innocent blacks—that very live snarl of wires in the American psyche—the mass delusion and madness will come together and start to lurch in a predictable direction. It will start to be controlled and guided, to do meaningful political work, by a political faction that I would say definitely has “an abandoned and malignant heart.”

It seems to me that there are usually two main group of actors that ignite these episodes: blacks who from basic instinct or family ties support fellow blacks in conflicts with whites, and a certain large stratum of white women who have, in regard to blacks, a powerful guilt and appeasement reflex. Once those two groups start up and gather steam, craven politicians and their judicial minions join in with the rapidity of scurrying rodents, and then the superorganism swells to its maximum size with the additions of journalists and millions of ordinary and celebrity virtue-signalers. This frenzied entity of many voices and noises somehow achieves a certain harmony as it demands “justice,” which is code for: give us a white victim.

One cannot overemphasize how uninterested in truth is this entity. In the case of Derek Chauvin, the entity assured us that the smirk on Chauvin’s face as he held down George Floyd was simply his sadist-cop’s delight at the approaching demise of his poor African American victim. Chauvin was a police officer with long experience of having to deal with unruly and bullshitting black perps, and of course did not have the clairvoyance to know that this particular perp, this one unlucky time, was telling the truth—but try explaining that to some vapor-brained leftist millennial or wine-aunt who is caught up in the full guilt-hate-love ecstasy of the Awokening.

In the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the entity (speaking even through the man who is the current US president) assured us that the defendant was a white supremacist who had gone hunting for innocent protesters. The entity let it be known among the softer minded that Rittenhouse’s victims were black—this became a very widespread perception. Rittenhouse avoided becoming the next sacrificial victim mainly because the people he had shot in self defense were actually white. It must have helped too that he, Rittenhouse, was a cherubic-looking lad liable to trigger the protective maternal instincts of many American women—instincts that are normally directed entirely toward the shooting victim in such cases, at least when the victim is black.

In Georgia, of course, the victim was indeed black and the accused were southern whites who drove pickup trucks, carried guns, probably had a few Confederate flags around, and probably held African Americans in low esteem. On the great totem pole of wokeism, these men were the lowest of the low. Thus, the story the entity told of their vile misdeeds, in the MSM, in social media, in the courtroom through the mouths of sworn officers of the court, was a festival of lies and obfuscations, and essentially the defendants had no defenders other than their paid lawyers.

The victims of human sacrifice in ancient times often were drawn from the lowest, most marginalized castes. Is it not plausible that tens of thousands of years of primitive religion have worn certain paths into our minds such that even now we subconsciously act out those rituals—and perhaps can even experience, every so often, the vivid illusion that an angry god is present and wants to be appeased?

This particular deity will never stay appeased for long, though, will it? And as evidence accumulates that America’s grand racial experiment has failed, will Americans ever face up to that failure and respond rationally? Or will that failure just drive them crazier and crazier, as they deliver more and more sacrificial victims to a god who will not relent?

***

America’s leftist elites regard white American nationalism as their principal ideological adversary. But they have another adversary that is often overlooked: black American nationalism.

Black American nationalism is very easy to overlook, here in the third decade of the new millennium. Although it has had its day in the sun—even Lincoln was in favor of it, once upon a time—its best-known proponent since the Civil Rights Era, Malcolm X, died 56 years ago, at the hands of rival black nationalists, and the movement seems to have gone only downhill since. Already by the mid 1970s Richard Pryor was mocking the “Back to Africa Movement” in his stand-up routines. Black American nationalism also has been tainted (or so one is supposed to think) by the moral support it has occasionally received from overtly white supremacist organizations. In any case, although there must still be millions of black Americans of the nationalist persuasion out there, their movement has by now been relegated to the fringes—the black nationalists who make the news these days seem mostly violent, deranged and disorganized.

By contrast, black American activism that is not nationalist seems to have been doing pretty well lately, judging by the recent wildfire contagions of enthusiasm for BLM, the 1619 Project, the George Floyd hagiology, and Critical Race Theory. Last year, leading Democrats actually donned kente cloth stoles and bent a knee on the US Capitol’s marble floor during the announcement of police reform legislation, as if genuflecting to a Justifiably Angry Black God.

Non-nationalist black activists also seem to have been doing pretty well for themselves personally. Consider Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of BLM, whose income as an activist has enabled her recently to purchase several homes collectively worth several millions of dollars. Or Nikole Hannah-Jones, of the 1619 Project, with her consulting, if that’s what one should call it, for Shell and other large corporations, and her remarkable habit of promoting products in interviews and speeches. Or the so-called family of George Floyd, with their $27 million payout from the city of Minneapolis. Or Stacey Abrams with her novel and its lucrative adaptation for TV. Or Ta-Nehisi Coates with his comic books and film scripts. Or reparations-demander Ibram X. Kendi with the miraculous largesse he attracts from wealthy whites.

Now, granted, some of this flow of wealth to activists could be framed as prudent purchases of insurance by white-run organizations—inoculations against the cooties of “racism” and “white supremacy” that can afflict, and cancel, any prominent organization if it’s not careful.

But even moreso I think this wealth transfer reflects elites’ desire to reward and incentivize those who tamely do their bidding.

Malcolm X viewed elite-approved “black leaders” in his day with similar skepticism. He famously called Martin Luther King Jr. a chump and a stooge of white liberals for promoting the idea of peaceful integration within white America—an idea that to him was an empty promise, aimed as always at perpetuating white control of blacks.

I think he was basically right about that. And if contemporary America’s leftist elites have banished black nationalists to the fringes, and have instead anointed a bunch of racial-equity grifters as the approved “leaders” of black America, then surely black nationalism is something that Legacy Americans should support as energetically as they can.

I’m not just being enemy-of-my-enemy tribalistic here. I’m trying to be coldly logical. The leftist elites of the US, which is to say the leaders of the Democratic Party and their allies and henchwomen in academia, media, entertainment, big business, etc., need to keep American blacks in the country and on their side for the most basic electoral reasons. They cannot abide a black separatism that would lead to a new, black nationalist political party or—the elites’ ultimate nightmare—a substantial black exodus from the US to a new homeland, even an internal one. Obviously, such an exodus would, among its many consequences, fatally weaken those leftist elites, in part by removing most of the radioactive core that powers their racial-factionalist ideology.

There is also a strong moral argument here. African-Americans of today are descendants of West Africans who were brought to the New World against their will. Theirs is a population that was literally enslaved for a long time, and then was oppressed for a long time after that. Even as their oppression has eased it has become clear that they are, for the most part, trapped in a world not of their making. In other words, for all this time they have been denied the basic rights of ethnic nationhood and self-determination that most peoples around the world have traditionally enjoyed. The fact that European-derived whites, with their hyperverbal brains and their sentimental, empire-adapted ideology, have overwritten ancient wisdom about the primacy of ethnic nationhood and self-determination, and no longer consider it important, is—American blacks might say, with some heat—not their problem.

It shouldn’t be their problem, anyway. And yet it is. And it’s not just their problem, is it? This idea that nations should be substantially multi-racial/ethnic (“multicultural”), bound merely by civic nationalism, economic opportunism, and kumbayah songs, is really the ur-problem, the most deeply planted seed of destruction, in the United States and most other Western countries. This idea seems essentially Christian in origin, but was also elaborated in response to the circumstances of the modern West, including colonialism and the globalization of trade and labor. In the US, it was shaped inter alia by the issues surrounding the Civil War, and was used, e.g., to justify turning African slaves into Union soldiers and then Republican voters in the Reconstruction South.

Despite multiculturalism’s clash with traditional ways of organizing societies, and its century and a half of failure in the US, it persists—persists even as racial/ethnic factionalism ravages the country, burns its cities, corrupts its democracy, and ruins its quality of life.

Even worse, multiculturalism’s elite proponents have become ever more suppressive of traditional ethnonationalism—declaring it “white supremacy” if favored by whites—even as they openly stoke nonwhites’ racial/ethnic grievances to build their political factions.

So black American nationalism is really only one of a thousand notions rendered unacceptable by America’s multiculturalist cult—whose mindset has managed to colonize both of the major political factions, and has successfully compensated for its evidentiary shortcomings with an hysterical, Inquisitionist crushing of dissent.

Nevertheless, black American nationalism does have advantages that make it a more practical aim amid this woke, antinationalist Inquisition. For one thing, it’s about what American blacks want, and if they declare they want to live apart and self-governing, the elites have no good alternative to the granting of that wish. Again and again those elites have declared American blacks holy and inviolable. Even if the elites’ motive in saying so has been only political and expedient, many blacks, and liberal whites, have taken the assertion at face value.

Another practical advantage that should make black nationalism more viable as a white cause is that American whites, I guess for reasons relating to their Christian backgrounds, prefer to think of themselves as helping others, not as acting selfishly for their own benefit. What could be more unselfish than to carve out thousands of square miles from their fair land, and donate it to their black brothers and sisters, to give them a new and truer freedom?

Would the blacks who lived in such a country experience a decline in living standards? I expect that they would, at least initially and in material terms. But as naïve as it may seem for me to say so, the issue here really goes deeper than material considerations: It’s about self-determination and human dignity. There are about fifty million black descendants of slaves living in the United States, enough to form one of the world’s most populous countries, and in many ways they have made clear that they are a distinctive people who prefer their own kind to others. The claim that they must nevertheless be the permanent captives and pawns of one political faction or another, in a society of European origin that is majority nonblack—a society that also jails them at sky-high rates—is actually ludicrous. It is one of the many toxic lies Americans foolishly think they can continue to live with.

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Why are Americans on the political Right so drawn to conspiracy theories, from the chemtrails lore and QAnon to the conviction that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful?

It’s hard to say anything with certainty about the causes of social trends, societies not being very amenable to the types of experiments that can settle such issues in other realms of science. But to me a plausible hypothesis is that all this conspiracy-theorizing is a conversion of complex, partly unconscious, and above all inadmissible knowledge concerning existential threats, into a form that the average person can openly express.

In other words, even if this conspiracy stuff seems ridiculous to most educated people, it is stuff that ordinary folks can understand and discuss, and even if the threats are in fact imaginary, they are in principle as salient and alarming as the real threats that are suppressed: Dire threats from the culture and media are converted into dire threats from the water and the air, even from medicines. Similarly, the implicit knowledge that America’s elite-driven culture corrupts young people is transformed, in the QAnon belief system, into a simpler narrative about a ring of elite pedophiles.

To put it yet another way: on the Right the collective unconscious knows that something has gone terribly wrong and is causing great harm, but it tends not to acknowledge this directly—it tends to acknowledge only imaginary wounds. Psychiatrists call such phenomena, when they occur in individuals, hysterical or somatoform or conversion disorders: For example, a woman’s husband has been cheating on her, but instead of acknowledging this, she develops an ailment with nonspecific and unverifiable symptoms.

Why can’t Americans openly acknowledge what has harmed them? Most obviously because the principal causes of harm over the past half-century are the very things that American cultural and political elites have held up as holy and beyond criticism—indeed, anyone criticizing them is, in the lexicon of America’s new, feminized, despiritualized Puritanism, a hater.

Consider the general reaction if one were to make, on social media or in person in polite company, any of the following assertions (which I regard as essentially true):

• The permitting of mass immigration to the United States from 3^rd World countries over the past several decades has been—in effect, from the perspective of legacy Americans—a fraudulent and treasonous ploy by the Democratic Party to pack the electorate in their favor.
• To further this scheme, Democrats have depicted it as a compassionate, Christian policy that only “racists” would oppose—notwithstanding the fact that ethnically based nationhood is and always has been the norm worldwide.

• Democratic Party coalition-building over the last half-century has also relied heavily on the stoking of anti-white feelings among American blacks, anti-male feelings among American women (especially single women who are inherently more susceptible to this message), and anti-heterosexual feelings among homosexuals.
• To reward the members of its coalition and further divide them from legacy Americans, the Democratic Party has succeeded in establishing policies that significantly discriminate against legacy Americans and in favor of women and non-whites. Incredibly, these policies, including the euphemistically named “affirmative action,” favor even affluent non-white immigrants over legacy Americans. Again, to quash opposition or even debate, Democrats have depicted these discriminatory policies as compassionate and necessary measures that only evil people could oppose.

• Major news media organizations, the advertising and entertainment industries, academia, Big Business, large segments of the legal profession, and of course most of the pseudo-opposition Republican Party, have for their own selfish reasons enabled and abetted these schemes.

• While these schemes have as their inevitable result the destruction of traditional American society and its replacement with a grouping that necessarily will be degraded, unstable, partly atomized, and riven with ethnic conflict, the “new America” in principle will be much easier for these cultural and political elites to control.
• Although the Democrats’ latest power-seeking move—large-scale rigging of the presidential election, mostly through ballot-harvesting in key Democrat-controlled areas—has outraged many on the right, the Democrats’ much more harmful method of electorate-packing has been ongoing for decades.
• Effectively the USA’s cultural and political elites have ruined a great country in their pursuit of greater power over it. Many of these elites may actually believe that their motives have been pure. Yet the gravity of their crime far exceeds anything that any traitor or indeed any foreign adversary has ever done to the United States.

Obviously, for the average American, stating any of these things openly and identifiably, beyond one’s circle of family and close friends, would risk immediate practical consequences such as social ostracism and job loss.

Less obviously, such a declaration would also have an important psychological consequence: To acknowledge awareness of this real and colossal crime while doing nothing about it—continuing one’s normal routines—would be embarrassing; it would amount to a confession of pathetic weakness and cowardice.

For most Americans, such a declaration could invite as well the recognition that for years, even decades, they have effectively collaborated in this crime, by voting for Democrats and Republicans who have furthered it, and perhaps even by participating in ritual denunciations of fellow Americans who have opposed it.

For all these reasons, I suspect, many Americans avert their eyes from the harshest truths about their situation, preferring to embrace fantasies that signal their distress without inviting the labels “racist” or “white supremacist” or being otherwise unmentionable. They call these fantasies “red pills,” but they are really only blue pills.

And perhaps the remarkable mass rallies for a president who was always evidently an inept narcissist, the MAGA-themed protests and other gatherings, and even the recent, brief mob occupation of the U.S. Capitol, should be seen in a similar light: as make-believe manifestations of a rage that dare not speak its name—manifestations that in the end are ways of losing, not ways of winning.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, on the other side of the world from the USA, the elites and middle classes of the Philippines, with low-key but ample international support, overthrew their country’s elected president, Joseph Estrada, in what was later called a “constitutional coup.”

Estrada was in many ways like Donald Trump. He was an older guy with a womanizing past and rough-edged, frat-boy attitude who was widely known through past media exposure (he’d been an action star in Filipino movies, back in the day), and had plenty of mass appeal, but was somewhat repulsive to the more educated classes.

A big difference was that Estrada had been credibly accused of corruption. When, in January 2001, his Senate supporters effectively suppressed key evidence in his impeachment trial, the prosecutors walked out, liberals in the Philippines threw up a hue and cry, foreign diplomats and creditors became nervous, and the idea of simply ousting Estrada spread quickly.

Just a decade and a half before, in 1986, a mass movement that had come to be known as the EDSA Revolution (after an avenue in Manila where the main gathering took place) had resulted in the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The anti-Estrada opposition followed this obvious model, and when the impeachment trial collapsed, EDSA II took place immediately. The media were for it, the US, a key ally, gave the nod (G.W. Bush, fresh from his own Bush v. Gore court victory, was about to take office), important Philippine cabinet officials including the heads of the police and military abandoned Estrada, and even the Philippine Supreme Court blessed the coup with the airy declaration that “the welfare of the people is the supreme law” (i.e., salus populi suprema lex). Estrada saw that he had lost virtually all support, and resigned, allowing his successor, vice president Gloria Arroyo, to take office.

(Arroyo, who later pardoned Estrada after his corruption trial and conviction, eventually faced corruption allegations herself, concerning a bribe allegedly demanded by her government from a Chinese government-linked telecom company that wanted a contract to install a “national broadband network” linking Philippine government offices. But she was viewed much more favorably by the elites than Estrada had been, and ended up serving out her terms of office.)

Why is any of this of interest now? Well, for one thing, it’s a reminder that presidential transitions in “democracies” are not necessarily constitutional or legal just because the media proclaim them to be. EDSA II also illustrates how Trump’s presidency, if it were restored by court action, could come to an untimely end.

Perhaps more importantly, this two-decade-old “people power” story highlights some of the things that Trump and his supporters, or a post-Trump Red State America, would not have if they were ever to try to achieve political power through a revolt or rebellion:

• They would not have significant foreign support.
• They would not have the support of their country’s elites.
• They probably would not have the support of any major media organization, domestic or foreign.
• They almost certainly would lack support from the USA’s top military brass.

Could they still prevail? Sure. But they would have to overcome all these disadvantages. And since they would not have MSM support they could not simply gather dramatically in one place and hope for a media-induced buildup of pressure on the federal government.

Red States Army

Essentially, Red State America would need to form an army, à la 1776. Although the needed size and firepower of that army would depend on the movement’s ultimate goals, I think that force would have to be at least several hundred thousand strong to contend with Blue States National Guard units and possibly regular army and USAF units. Much of the “Red States Army” total could come from Red State National Guard units, defecting regular military troops, and retired/reserve veterans, though it would probably be able to pad out that core with a larger group of hunters and others who own and know how to use guns.

This rebel movement, to the extent it could control its own territory, would have a grip on most of the former-USA’s food production, so food shouldn’t be a problem. But the movement would need to set up its own banking system, central bank, and currency, much as the Confederate States did in Civil War I. It would need to establish control over the parts of the internet and telecom networks, rail and road networks, and other infrastructure elements within its domain. It would need its own social security system. And so on, and so on.

Moreover, prior to rebellion at state level, this movement would need a network of benefactors who would fund the cause covertly, for example by adding soldiers and support workers to existing businesses’ payrolls, or simply in a low-visibility, cash-based system outside the federally regulated banking system. As many on the right have learned already, US banks ultimately will not (knowingly) do business with those whom the left elites designate as “enemies of the people.”

The goals of a Red State confederacy could be, for example simply to break away and form a sovereign country, taking existing Red States along with any adjacent Blue State rural counties whose inhabitants vote to join. At county level the USA is mostly Republican, so in principle such a Red America would include most of the land area of the lower-48 states and of course all of Alaska. This would leave Blue America with most of the GDP-producing industry of the former USA, but also with most of the long-term social and demographic problems—“vibrancy” I think they call it.

All that vibrancy would be reflected in whatever army the Blue States could muster following the tens or hundreds of thousands of defections by Red State-loyal troops and officers, plus the loss of the many military bases within Red States. And if the Red States’ goal were purely defensive, the Blue States would have the added burden of having to subdue Red State cities, presumably through high-cost urban warfare.

What of the Antifa and BLM brigades we saw in action last summer? Well, their antics don’t strike me as particularly relevant to actual combat—although I can imagine many of them being unwilling to learn that lesson except in the hardest possible way.

In short, when it comes to actual fighting, a Red State army could have substantial advantages. (I’m assuming that neither side would go nuclear in this conflict.)

My guess is that the hardest task for an independence-seeking Red America would be the political task of convincing Red State governors and legislators to secede in the first place, so that the rebellion could begin to organize at scale. They don’t make US politicians like they used to—certainly not like they did in 1861.

In fact, neither Trump nor any prominent Red State politician, as far as I know, has had the mental clarity and courage even to raise the issue of resolving the USA’s current schism through political separation. That’s despite the Woke Left’s increasingly obvious willingness to tyrannize its domestic enemies, i.e., half of the country, by demonizing, canceling, and disemploying them, silencing their political speech, and, if necessary, imprisoning them in re-education camps.

The USA was founded on the principle of self-determination as the ultimate escape from tyranny, and the tyranny of the contemporary, woke Left already threatens to be worse in some ways than what Colonial Americans faced in the run-up to their declaration of independence. So it does seem appropriate at least to start thinking about how contemporary Americans might successfully act on that hallowed principle.

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