Thinking about things is both easy and hard. It is easy to sit around, like the mass of our academics, frittering away the day dreaming of nonsense that is of no consequence to anyone. If you are, for example, Leah Lowthorp of Harvard University, thinking about the world is easy. She is the Harvard College Fellow in Folklore & Mythology so she spends her days thinking about elves and sprites.

If on the other hand, if you wish to understand something about the real world, thinking about the stuff you see and hear for the purpose of discovering truths about the world is hard. The world is complicated. There are easy to recognize trend lines, but seemingly infinite variables underlying them. Even the stuff we think we now can be turned on its head quickly.

I would imagine that most of my readers have heard about the many worlds interpretation and some of you may even know the math. I used to have a reader who was a doctoral candidate in physics, but I have not heard from him in some time. Regardless, this is extremely tough stuff that is well beyond what most of us can comprehend. I suspect most people reject the “Big Bang” because it makes no sense to them. It does not make that much sense to physicists.

Anyway, this came to mind when reading this post by Steve Sailer today. Sailer is a smart guy, but he has his blind spots and knowledge holes just like everyone else. My first reaction was to jump on the fact that political parties are not very good proxies for ideological groupings. One of my pet themes is the broader, more subtle cultural groupings that define American political life.  Somewhere in the comments I make that point.

In those comments is something that got me thinking about how hard it is to think about this stuff in a clear way.

Worth reading all of the posts Jayman links to. He has written on this extensively.

It is also worth considering how much the political orientation gap among white Republicans and white Democrats has widened over time. In the mid-seventies, white Republicans were only slightly more likely to self-identify as politically conservative than white Democrats were. That difference has trebled in the last four decades to the point that white Republicans are now far more likely to identify as conservative than white Democrats are.

Political orientation is probably more heritable than partisan affiliation. I’d guess the gap will appear wider on the liberal-moderate-conservative spectrum than on the Democrat-independent-Republican one.

Two variables that are stronger predictors of fertility than political orientation or party affiliation are educational attainment (inversely correlated, especially for women) and religiosity (positively correlated–to the extent that high IQ people who attend religious services regularly outbreed the irreligious at every level of intelligence, social class, race/ethnicity, etc.

Parenthetically, educational attainment looks to be the driving force, not intelligence. Fertility by wordsum score varies little once educational attainment is controlled for, but educational attainment is a strong predictor even after wordsum score is controlled for–put more clearly, educational attainment is 5x as strong a predictor of fertility as IQ is.

The strong inverse relationship between education and fertility shows up strongly on the international level as well.

For as long as I have been alive, the official religion has claimed education results in fewer children. Specifically, educated women have fewer children. Even more specifically, stupid uneducated women have litters of rugrats because they are too dumb to work a rubber. This is the automatic response from Progressives anytime the topic of fertility comes up. I have heard it since forever.

That’s always struck me as ridiculous. Stupid teenage girls know where babies come from and how they are made. Humans have understood the mechanics of baby making since the dawn of time. The ancients knew about the use of Silphium as a contraceptive and abortifacient. The women of Rome were not heading off to the university to study folklore, yet they seem to have known where babies came from and how to prevent pregnancy.

Further, there are plenty of examples to the contrary. In the English speaking world, there was a time when the upper classes had loads of kids as a way to signal their success and intelligence.Then we have modern Iran where women don’t have ready access to formal education and their TFR is below replacement. The connection between education and fertility, if one exists, is not necessarily causal.

That’s where things get hard and maybe why the official response is the official response. There’s something that drives women to seek out credentials and it also may drive them to avoid motherhood. In other words, there’s some third element that explains the correlation between education and fertility. But, thinking about that is hard and it may reveal things that are unpleasant. Best not to get too close to those truths.

Watching the iceberg of life is easiest from a distance. Get too close and you discover unpleasant things, like there is a big portion of it under the waterline ripping a hole in the hull of your ideological ship. Everyone on the Titanic was wiser about the human condition after the ship started taking on water, but it came with a dear price. Most people are happy to not know and you can’t blame them for that.

Even so, fertility rates tend to fall when a society’s prospects are on the wane. In times of stress, we typically see a spike in religious observance. Yet in the West, church attendance has collapsed along with fertility rates. At the same time, the quest for credentials by women is at an all-time high. The women of the West are telling us something through their behavior, but no one seems all that interested.

One of my themes here is to point out the similarities between modern Progressives and the Islamic lunatics in the Middle East. Both sides of that equation would deny the equality symbol exists, but that’s the nature of the fanatic. The hatred of Islamists toward the West, in most respects, is due to the similarities they perceive in the other side. You always hate most in others what you fear about yourself.

One way to look at ISIS is in the context of the sectarian wars within the Christian West starting with the 30 Years War. The first schisms eventually lead to increasingly extreme  rejections of the dominant sect culminating in the Puritans who left the West entirely and set out for the wilderness. The folks who landed on Plymouth Rock were the ISIS of their day.

It turns out that Obama agrees with me.

This Thanksgiving, President Obama is calling for Americans to lend a helping hand to another group of pilgrims fleeing persecution.
“Nearly four centuries after the Mayflower set sail, the world is still full of pilgrims – men and women who want nothing more than the chance for a safer, better future for themselves and their families,” Obama said in his weekly address Thursday. “What makes America America is that we offer that chance.”

The president praised Americans who have offered to open their homes to refugees fleeing war-torn Syria.

“One woman from Pennsylvania wrote to me to say, ‘Money is tight for us in my household. … But I have a guest room. I have a pantry full of food. We can do this,’ ” Obama said.

“Another woman from Florida told me her family’s history dates back to the Mayflower — and she said that welcoming others is part of ‘what it means to be an American,’ ” he added.

Obama called for citizens to put the “generosity” of America on full display by welcoming refugees into the country with arms wide open.

“I hope that you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving, surrounded by loved ones and full of joy and gratitude,” he said. “And together, may we all play our own small part in the American story, and write a next chapter that future generations can be thankful for.”

Obama, like all Progressives, sees the West as a fading force in the world. The future will belong to the yellow, brown and black. You really can’t blame him for that. That’s what the facts are telling us.Just look at the television for a short time. It’s Pale, Male and Stale being pushed aside by young and vibrant. The Puritans had the same view of Europe in the 17th century.

There’s a new Audi commercial that captures this perfectly. It starts with an old white guy thinking no one is coming for the Solstice celebration. He’s putting away all those old western culture items, preparing to have dog food for dinner. Then, his mixed race family arrives and all is good. His hilariously black granddaughter informs him how Audi is responsible for her being there. Not hard to see the point of that ad.

Audi is letting you know, old white man, that the future is not you. Audi is the future, helping bring the black, brown and yellow to you. You better embrace it. That way you can have some peace in your final years. Otherwise, it’s dog food for you. Or, worse.

That’s ultimately why the Left across the West wants to flood your neighborhood with young male Arabs. You’re not just the past. You’re a wilderness, a nothing, into which the vibrant people of the future will arrive and build a new mosque on the hill. In the process, that means slaughtering the locals and pushing them into holding pens, but let’s not notice that and instead pretend our sacrifice will be noted by Allah God.

If you view the mass media through a skeptical lens, you can’t help but notice how parts of the official narrative are at odds with observable reality. The “whole black lives matter” nonsense is a good example. It is a handful of paid trouble makers, but the media carries on like it is a great wave sweeping society. Even race obsessed blacks know that the biggest threat to black lives in America is black lives.

The thing is, the flow of made up nonsense is so steady and universal, it is easy to stop noticing it. Everything is warped to fit the narrative in a million little ways that is hard to notice after a while. Take a look at this “news” story in the sports pages.

A Florida State official said in a deposition that 20 rape claims had been made against Seminole football players in the last nine years, according to the Associated Press.

Melissa Ashton, the director of FSU’s victim advocate program, made the statement last summer during a deposition in the ongoing civil lawsuit filed by former student Erica Kinsman against the university. Kinsman said the university failed to respond to her allegations that former quarterback Jameis Winston raped her.

The deposition was released as part of an open records request by the Associated Press.

Ashton also asserted that she thought football players received special treatment at the school and that most of the alleged victims declined to press charges for fear of retaliation.

A Florida State spokesperson told the Associated Press that the school could not confirm the number of allegations because communications with victims in confidential through the victim advocate program.

The first red flag is the weird data set of nine years. That tells me they are trying to have fun with numbers to get a scary statistic. Even so, let’s use the nine year figure. How many players would have gone through the program in nine years? Roughly 300 is the number. A college program carries 100 players and adds/subtracts 25 per year. Using a full roster in year one. they added 200 new players over the subsequent eight years.

Let’s assume for a second that these rape claims are actually rapes and not the more common “next morning regrets”, that’s 20 rapes in a pool of 300 men. Let’s assume the worst case and none of the “rapes” were committed by the same men. That’s a 6.6% rapist population. Even the most outlandish estimates from the rape industry claim 4.5% of males are rapists.

So, the reporting of the “rape epidemic” seems plausible, until you think about how a man gets a scholarship to play football at an American college. For their demographic, these males have higher grades and test scores than their coevals. They overwhelmingly come from two-parent families compared to their cohort. They have participated in extracurricular activities for most of their primary school years.

More important, they are subjected to extensive background checks that go back to elementary school. These kids have been recruited since they hit puberty. Teachers, coaches and counselors have been hovering around them 24/7 as soon as they showed promise as an athlete. In college, they have full time minders to watch over them.

The point being is that the likelihood that football players will have a 50% higher rape rate is at odds with everything else we know. Scholarship athletes have higher graduation rates than the general student population and lower overall crime rates than their demographic cohorts (age, sex, race). In other words, the rape industry is suggesting that the “rape culture” as it pertains to athletics is this wild outlier, completely out of sync with all of the other statistics.

Of course, that’s not the case. One of those rape claims is against Jameis Winston. The police, Feds and school have investigated this, depriving him of many normal protections in an effort to corroborate the accuser’s charges. The facts suggest the accuser got drunk, went home with the player, woke up and figured out she may have won a golden ticket. How many of the other charges are similarly bogus is unknown, but some surely are.

That’s the easy stuff to spot for a crime thinker like the people reading this blog. Shame on you! The hard part is picking out the more subtle agit-prop baked into mass media reports. The line, “most of the alleged victims declined to press charges for fear of retaliation” is the sort of thing we always see in these stories, but never see much in the way of supporting evidence.

What we’re supposed to believe is the college campus is a testosterone fueled penis culture where women are treated like the TV show Mad Men imagined women were treated in the olden thymes. Here we have legions of examples where males are driven off campus for wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo, but they have a free hand to wear the coeds as hats.

At Yale, a women falsely accused a male student of rape. Her charges were dismissed as entirely without merit. She was permitted to harass the male student and have her friends harass the guy. The campus even helped her do it. Yet, we’re supposed to think that women who were actually raped really fear retaliation? The only way to believe that is to believe the same admins celebrating “mattress girl” are then shaming real rape victims.

Mass media is Imagination Land for the ruling elite. Granted, much of it is deliberate. The people running the BBC want to use their power to shape behavior, promote their friends and skim money from the people through taxes. The same rackets exist everywhere in the West. That said, a lot of it is just a general insanity that has infected these people, like a rage virus. For them, reality has become the enemy at the gates.

The American domestic conflicts of the current age are unique in human history in that they are entirely caused by social reformers. In prior ages, reformers sprung up when there was a need for actual reform. Social conditions demanded changes so that the people could attain a higher degree of peace and prosperity. Today, peace and prosperity are the default, so reformers sow discord and mayhem, like firemen who set fires so they have something to do.

It is tempting to assume this is by design, but as Goethe put it, “misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.” While there are certainly cases where the people in charge swing the wrecking ball just for fun, more often it is due to incompetence, an incompetence that is the inevitable outgrowth of a universalist worldview.

One defect of the universalist mind is the inability to appreciate the complexity of life.  This is something most people understand intuitively. What works for you in your life is probably not going to work for everyone. The proletarian cliche of “different strokes for different folks” did not spring from nothing. It is a readily observable phenomenon and why restaurants have menus and cars come in different colors.

The great minds that rule over us just assume that everyone wants what they want, hates what they hate and loves what they love. There’s no room in their imagination for valid and legitimate alternatives to their ethics or even their aesthetics. Instead, when our betters hear the phrase “different strokes for different folks” they assume it means varying the application of the whip in order to achieve conformity.

This is the color of every great blunder made by the American ruling class over the last half century. They cannot imagine that anyone, at least anyone worth considering, would have different priorities, values or passions. In foreign policy it means blundering into foreign lands handing out ballots at gun point. Domestically it means toppling over traditional institutions in favor of technocratic solutions that appeal to no one but their designers.

Another aspect of this is the inability to grasp the concept of scale. An old gag in statistics is that quantity has a quality of its own. Many things simply do not scale up or down very well. An obvious example is the New England town meeting system of governance. In a small town, getting the citizens together to hash out problems works very well. Try that in New York City and you end up with a riot. Try that in New Orleans and you have a hip-hop video.

The universalists cannot grasp that what works for them in their small groups of privilege and plenty cannot scale up to society as a hole. Caroline Swipple in Greenwich thinks it is great that Whole Foods does not sell sugary breakfast cereals. She thinks that should be the case everywhere so she demands government ban the sale of Fruit Loops. It is baked into the universalist worldview that their personal choices are universally good so they just assume they will work for everyone.

From the outside, it simply looks like the people in charge, the so-called social justice warriors, are just ignorant busy bodies obsessed with pushing people around. In some cases it appears to be spite that motivates them. Making smokers huddle in alleyways behind the pubs looks like the sort of thing one does to someone they hate. But, that is not what is driving it. It is a blinkered view of life that cannot incorporate the great complexity and variety of human action.

This narrow view of life is the root of another defect and that is the lack of self-awareness. Stable, sensible people have some regard for their limitations. They know that some problems are not fixable. The best you can do is work around them. The people in charge, truly believe that all problems are solvable, including death itself. Not just that, but they are certain they are the ones to solve them.

The constant blundering in the Middle East is the most obvious example. Since the Bronze Age, the people living in and around Mesopotamia have been at war with one another. This is the nature of tribal people who have outlandishly high rates of inbreeding. Cousin marriage is near universal in some parts of the world, the most clannish parts of the world. Cousin marriage fosters clannishness, corruption and clan warfare.

Violent, tribal societies composed of low-IQ individuals is not the raw material for a liberal democracy. Despite these well known facts on the ground and 5,000 years of history, American leaders have been blundering around the Middle East for over 25 years. Bush gets most of the blame, but Obama has proven to be just as incompetent, despite actually being a Muslim of sorts. Obama, like Bush, just assumes he’ll solve thousands of years of problems in a few years.

When you roll it all up, America is a country with an abundance of peace and prosperity, but an over abundance of blinkered blunderers obsessed with conquering the human condition. Almost all of what ails us as a people is inflicted upon us by people who simply refuse to leave well enough alone. There is no version of the social contract that obligates or even permits the civil authorities to sow discord among the people. Yet, that is exactly where we find ourselves.

Thus endeth Part III

Yesterday I got started on this project by blabbering on about my view of the dominant mode of thought in America. Today, I’m going to get into the chief alternative to it. I’m using the word “alternative” loosely as few people of any consequence subscribe to this view.  Those that do tend to come from the parts of the country and culture that are unrepresented in the American elite.

One of those areas, and one that is a convenient example, is the US military. The great innovation Americans brought to war fighting is the prioritization of training over discipline. Put another way, the prioritization of what gets done over how it gets done. Soldiers and officers are encouraged to be creative in their problem solving and be mission focused.

This was most evident in the Great War at the Battle of Belleau Wood. German commanders ordered an advance through the woods onto the Marine’s position. The French commander ordered a retreat, but American General James Harbord refused the order and told his men to hold their position. Both the French and the Germans marveled afterwards at the ferocity and improvisational tactics of the American Marines.

On the afternoon of 3 June, German infantry attacked the Marine positions through the grain fields with bayonets fixed. The Marines dug shallow individual trenches so they could lie concealed, but still fight  while lying on their bellies. The Marines waited until the Germans were within 100 yards and then opened fire. The German infantry was mowed down and the remainder was forced back into the woods.

The legend of the United States Marine Corp was born in the Battle of Belleau Wood not because they had great leadership or they had superior numbers. It was not technology that gave the Marines their edge. It was their tenacity, improvisational prowess and unrelenting ferocity in pursuit of the mission. “The deadliest weapon in the world is a United States Marine and his rifle,” was said by General Pershing after this battle.

The philosophy at work here is you solve problems by giving competent people the tools and the support to go solve the problem. How they solve the problem is secondary. In small business, this is the dominant mode of thought. The owner can be seen washing the toilets then signing payroll checks. Alternatively, his second in command could take over the toilet washing and then hire a new person for accounting. The point is to get the job done, whatever it takes.

It is in sales that this way of looking at the world is still dominant most everywhere. No matter the industry or scale, salesman are always on some sort of commission system. They are also given more freedom of action than other employees. You hire a good salesman, train him on the product, give him a quota and let him go, trusting that your best weapon is a salesman and his commission check.

Hold on. My meth dealer is here.

The pithy and patriotic examples aside, this way of thinking is most popularly understood as using “the right tool for the job.” It may not be the perfect tool and the completion of the job may not be ideal, but often, good enough is, in fact, good enough. Underlying this mode of thought is the understanding that the human condition is immutable. Perfection is for the after life. In this life, human error is a feature, not a bug.

For most of Western history, this has been the dominant mode of thought. Even in the age of kings, finding the right man for the job was the way things were done. No one had grand, complex schemes for creating the perfect society. In fact, having grand schemes for creating heaven on earth was a good way to get burned at the stake.

The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.

The last time this utilitarian mode of thought was dominant in America was at the founding. The first shot at a national government was pretty much just leaving most everything to the states to figure out on their own. The Articles of Confederation did not work, because the impotent national government was the wrong tool for the job, so we got the US Constitution.

The men of the Tidewater who crafted it understood that we needed a strong central government for managing trade, national defense and the courts. At the same time, they knew the Puritan lunatics in New England would immediately try to pervert the national government so they could dominate the rest of the country. James Madison had no illusions about the nature of John Adams. The result was a government based on Negative Liberty.

While this mode of thought is common in the lower classes, the people who run the country reject this completely. Therein lies the rub. The people are asked to validate the decisions of the rulers with their ballots, but no one on the ballot thinks like the people standing in line to vote. To remedy this the parties make noises about American values and talk about the Constitution, but that’s just for show. Thus the inevitable conflict.

Thus concludes Part Deux

Somewhere in the Clinton years I began to sour on official conservatism. Part of it was the odious carbuncle Newt Gingrich becoming the leader of the Right. If that loathsome human toothache was the Right, I was going to be something else. Part of it was the general incoherence of the official Right. How can you be in favor of small government, but in favor of an exotic tax code designed to alter behavior?

The other thing that bugged me was the hoard of B-school and J-school strivers taking up positions in the official Right. Naturally, they set about making culture into science! and loading up their language with meaningless jargon. Hearing a guy like Paul Ryan say, “proactively leverage other’s high standards in infrastructures” generates warm thoughts of Gavrilo Princip.

Anyway, I slowly came to the conclusion that the whole Right-Left dynamic was just a myth. One of things about working in Washington, even briefly, is you learn quickly that politics is nothing like you see on TV. Two people on a show ripping one another apart will be at the bar after the show yukking it up like old pals. That’s because they are old pals. The Right-Left narrative has simply become a convenient framework for the reality show called politics. This has been true since the 80’s.

Once you free your mind, if you will, of that framework through which you are expected to see your world, you have to make sense of what you see. If the Right-Left construct is just a version of good cop/bad cop where the people in the media hustle the rest of us so they can live above their utility, then what’s really going on in the world? How do things really work?

One way to understand the world is to think about the primary modes of thought that dominate the age. If you want to understand the Mongol Empire, for example, you have to learn something about the Mongol worldview, how they organized themselves and why they believed that was the correct way to do things. Just knowing what they did is not going to tell you why they did them.

In America, there are two dominant modes of thought that are not exactly in conflict, but they are incompatible. The primary mode of thought is best illustrated by an example from business. Every company in America of any size has some sort of quality initiative or business process improvement program. Big companies have whole departments to improve performance throughout the organization.

The basis for this is the belief that the human errors can be mitigated by arranging things in just the right way. For instance, you can stop Jose from putting the wrong stuff in a box by implementing software systems that physically prevent Jose from making that error. Jose’s machine supervisor stops him before he can sin against the firm by making a shipping error. Ideally, Jose gets eliminated completely and a robot does the job.

Everything and everyone in the company gets this treatment. If you read through the literature of the Six Sigma Cult that was popular at General Electric, it sounds like a pagan purification ritual. The financial incentives for reducing errors quickly give way to spiritual incentives. Being right 99% of the time is less fulfilling than being right 99.9% of the time. The last time I checked, salvation in Six Sigma comes at 99.999999% accuracy.

This scales up to social advocacy. Progressives, for example, are obsessed with the people they see as failures or victims, the human error rate. The former are people that, through poor choices, fail to have self-actualizing careers, achieving their full humanity. The latter are people who are prevented from fulfilling their potential due to structural impediments like racism, sexism, interstellar conspiracy, etc..

This is the crux of the dominant mode of thought and it even has a name, Positive Liberty. In politics, you see this with Obama’s health care plan. They fully believe that abundance can be had if they arrange the parts of the public health system a certain way. It’s also on display with the myriad of Conservative tax schemes. Arrange the incentives the right way and people will make the “correct” choices. The tax code becomes the enterprise software of the economy.

As an aside, what fuels the semi-sexual fantasies of the robot future types is the belief that the robots will remove human error and therefore human sin. Once the robots are in charge, there can be no more human error. The Christian conception of God and Heaven is perfection. You see how that works? Perfect the human condition, and you have created Eden. Alternatively, the robots slaughter everyone and the human stain is removed from creation.

There are few people in public life that reject this mode of thinking. Almost all of the so-called conservatives accept this as a premise. Progressives not only believe it, they view anyone who does not accept this world view as a mortal threat to civilization. The debate, therefore, in modern American politics is over how the central planners arrange things and whether or not to punish the refuseniks.

The revealing character trait of people who subscribe to this mode of thought is the refusal to ask why things are as they find them. If they talk about the “why” of anything, it is as a jumping off point to debate their preferred “solution” that they believe will solve some aspect of the human condition. “Why are the prisons full of blacks? Racism! Now, let’s talk about how we fix that.”

Thus concludes Part I.

Jonah Goldberg still churns out a newsletter, of sorts, that National Review distributes via the miracle of the Internet. I’m not a subscriber, but they post it on their site regularly for some reason. I don’t read Jonah Goldberg very much, but I don’t have anything against him. It just feels like he has said everything he has to say as a writer. Whenever I read one of his columns these days it just feels like I read it a few times already.

That’s not unusual. A lot of opinion writers exhaust their supply of insights, gags and gimmicks within a few years. The exceptions are those who have very fertile minds and a high degree of curiosity. Christopher Hitchens was an example of someone who never stopped fine tuning his worldview so he kept his work interesting, even though I rarely agreed with him.

Anyway, his column starts with the stock gags he has been doing for a long time, but the point of it is to solve the puzzle as to why the Left keeps denying the obvious about Islam. After meandering around a bit, he gets to this:

And that is why, as I argue in my column today, Barack Obama is so eager to respond to the Paris attacks with a rhetorical fusillade against Republican bigotry. It is a ploy as brilliant as it is disgustingly cynical. Obama is a co-author of this refugee crisis. As Walter Russell Mead writes, “No one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama.” Somewhere deep inside Obama’s supposedly Niebuhrian conscience even he must suspect there is some truth to this. And even if his denial is total, he must understand that a great many historians will side with Mead in this appraisal.

One of my themes here is that the Professional Right is not all that interested in understanding the motivations of the Left. They much prefer to be the foil as the pay is better and the work is easier. Instead of digging deeper, the preferred response is to just assume the Left is playing politics, dodging responsibility or scoring points for the party. In this case, Jonah just assumes Barry both agrees that the refugee situation is a disaster and that he knows he is largely responsible for it.

There’s no evidence of this and there’s plenty of evidence that Obama thinks the refugee situation is a pretty good result. Further, he does not seem all that concerned about the politics of it. You can tell when a politician is worried about how something looks by watching him change his position, often denying he was ever on the other side of the issue. None of that is happening with Obama.

The general consensus from people who have read his two autobiographies and studied his life is that Obama was a Muslim growing up. His church in Chicago was nominally Christian, but was modeled on a mosque. Within Islam there’s a tradition of street corner Imams building a following, which is what Reverend Wright did in Chicago, but waving the Christian Bible around instead of the Koran. Reverend Al is another obvious example. Holy man without portfolio is common in Islam, too.

That’s not to say he is a Muslim. I don’t think Obama is very religious. It’s just that when he thinks of religion, he thinks of what he knows and that’s the street corner Islam of his youth. Therefore he is sympathetic to Muslims in the same way normal Americans would be sympathetic to Christians fleeing the ISIS lunatics. The truth is, most Americans would welcome Syrian Christians. Obama’s instincts are 180 degree out of phase with normal Americans.

None of this is groundbreaking. As I said, this is the consensus of people who have read his books and studied his life. People who are his supporters often point to his exotic foreignness as the primary attraction. Obama’s critique of America is from the outside and his desire to fundamentally transform the country is from the perspective of an outsider, particularly an outsider who is emotionally outside the traditions of the West.

You never hear anyone in the professional Right point this out. It’s as if they fear it. If you go on Fox and talk about Obama’s own words in his autobiographies, you get branded an extremist loon. The only people referencing Obama’s writing in their columns are hate-thinkers like John Derbyshire, who may be one of the few people to read Obama’s books.

The reason for this studied avoidance of the obvious by the Professional Right is fear. When Obama was elected, the great fear of Republicans and their cheerleaders in the conservative media was that Obama would be accommodating to them. They would have no choice but to go along and, in effect, sign off on his proposals. The game would be up and it would no longer be possible to carry on like there is substantive fight over public policy.

Obama turned out to be a petty and venal guy once in office so everyone could relax and pretend there’s a real fight going in Washington. Obama seems to fine with it and may even enjoy it. He wins all the fights so I suppose he should embrace this dynamic. The GOP huffs and puffs. The “right-wing attack machine” goes into high gear. Then, Obama wins and he feels like a hero. Everybody is happy.

This is a public notice to all of my readers. Reports are coming in that The Backlash™ was spotted near the internet safe zones of the University Illinois. Reports are still coming in, but it appears someone associated with the university may have said some mean things on Facebook about rampaging black students on that campus.

A Facebook page ostensibly created for an audience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called “Illini White Students Union” has drawn fire after it characterized the national Black Lives Matter movement as “terrorism.”

Created Wednesday after a protest sympathetic to Black Lives Matter, the page declared itself “for white students of University of Illinois to be able to form a community and discuss our own issues as well as be able to organize against the terrorism we have been facing from Black Lives Matter activists on campus,” as the Daily Illini reported.

The page did not last long in its original incarnation, but was taken down after three hours. It has since been revived here.

“We recognize the right to free speech, and we encourage you to exercise that right when you see examples of racism, discrimination or intimidation on our campus,” Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson, who called the page “extremely disturbing,” wrote in a message Thursday to the student body.

Got that? When blacks go bananas on campus it is the most beautiful thing in the world. When a honky posts mean things on Facebook, well, they need to be stopped because they are extremely disturbing.

In an anonymous message to the News-Gazette, the page’s administrator discussed Black Lives Matter.

“We feel they disrupt student daily life and activity far too much,” the message read, saying that movement “marginalizes” white students. “… We are in the United States and not Africa and we don’t desire to have an African flag on campus.”

Given that there’s probably a 10-to-1 hoax to non-hoax ratio on campus, it is a good idea to assume the anonymous administrator here is a black guy, probably a professor at the university. Check that. Probably a black female professor. For some reason they are the most common perpetrator of hoaxes on campus. Even so, it is pretty tepid stuff.

A recent post was a clip from the 1998 film “American History X,” in which Edward Norton plays a white supremacist. In the clip, billed as “revelant to all Ferguson news,” Norton’s character denounces the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

“It’s a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go and loot a store, nothing more,” Norton says. “… Lincoln freed the slaves what, like, 130 years ago. How long does it take you to get your act together?”

The amusing part here is the quote is not actually on the page. Instead the WaPo reporter fished it out of the interwebs. If I were Steve Sailer, I’d assume that was not an accident.

While this was certainly eyebrow-raising, the original page was even more provocative.

“Feel free to send in pictures you take of any black protestors on the quad so we know who anti-whites are,” one message read, as FOX 55 reported.

According to a student reporter, protesters were particularly concerned that they were being targeted.

“One of the parts on the page particularly concerning to students is that they were taking pictures from the rally of the main quad and identifying students in attendance to identify the ‘anti-whites,’” Marijo Enderle, a 20-year-old senior at the university, said in a telephone interview. Enderle also pointed out that “there hasn’t been any indication that it has been a university student” who created the page.

My recommendation to the black lives matter types is they start wearing masks at their riots. Maybe dress up as the old Black Panthers and carry fake guns. That will scare those honky oppressors!

I like this closing bit from the WaPo story.

And in 1991, the New York Times discussed a similar group at the University of Minnesota.

“I have no desire to harm the non-white races,” senior Thomas A. David, who founded the group, said at the time. “I simply think it would help everyone to separate.” He added: “I don’t want to be a mud race in this country, and I will fight to the death against that.”

Again, If I’m Steve Sailer I wonder if this is code to let people know the reporter is not as batshit crazy as it would first appear. It’s the magic signal to let the outside world know he is being held against his will. If that last time The Backlash™ showed up was 1991 – 25 years ago – one has to wonder if maybe it really even exists. But, that’s crazy talk. We all know the greatest threat to humanity is The Backlash™. We have always been at war with The Backlash™.

The news brings word that Bobby Jindal has dropped out of the presidential race. I can’t say I had strong opinions about him one way or the other. He always struck me as one of the earnest strivers that infiltrated the GOP in the 90’s when the Boomers took over politics in America. These are men and women who planned their elections from the womb, tailoring their education and early employment with the sole focus on running for office.

The dominant feature of these modern politicians is the obsession with apple polishing. In school, they studied hard not so they could become educated. They studied hard so they could repeat to the instructor the answers that most pleased the instructor. Out of school, they became a toady for a local politicians or maybe a judge. Having proven their skills at toadying, they moved up the party ranks getting prime appointments and then running for office on their own.

As politicians, they have carefully crafted positions that are designed to bore the voters into a trance. The idea is to curry favor with the locals, but not sound like a yahoo from the sticks. All of them dream of being president so that last part is critical. No thick accents. No local color. No nothing other than generic poll tested positions approved by the party and its donors.

That was the problem for Jindal in the primary field. He said all the same things the others said, but did it sounding like the guy from accounting telling us how he saved money on envelopes. The worse part for Jindal is that Indians are a successful migrant group in America so they don’t get any piety points. If Jindal were black or Hispanic, he probably would be in the thick of it trying to be the donor party candidate.

His other problem is regional. The GOP, like the Democrat Party, is run by people living in the Acela Corridor and financed by people in the great financial, cultural and technological centers. Money men from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, New York and Boston own the two parties and exert a tremendous amount of influence over the management of the parties. The result is the leadership is Yankee and Midlands, with a few members from the other regions of the country.

Louisiana is one of those outlier regions that Woodard called New France, but most people think is Deep South. I’m not sure any state, outside of West Virginia, carries a worse reputation outside the South than Louisiana. The typical person in the Northeast, for example, thinks Louisiana is a place full or spindly legged rednecks speaking gibberish while wrestling alligators.

But, the Deep South, Tidewater, Appalachia and the Far West have little say in the management of either party and that’s clear in these primaries. On the Democrat side, Clinton is a Midlander with Yankee predilections. Sanders is a Yankee Jew. Bill Clinton was probably the last national Democrat we will see that hails from outside Yankeedom or the Midlands.

The GOP field is similar. Trump is from New York and representative of what Woodard labeled New Holland. Carson is a Midlander.The Party Men may hail from areas outside the two dominant regions, but they reflect Yankee culture. Ted Cruz is perhaps the one exception. There’s a Appalachian dodginess to him that I can’t quite put my finger on with him. Regardless, the only member of the Deep South is Caitlyn Graham and he is a joke.

For Democrats, it makes perfect sense for their party leaders to be from their strongholds. New England, the upper Midwest and the West Coast are where the Cult is strong so it makes sense that they get their political talent from these areas. Modern Progressivism is the religion of Yankeedom now and to a lesser degree The Midlands. It makes sense that their leaders are the truest of true believers.

In the GOP things are different. They rely on votes from the Tidewater, South, Appalachia and the far west, yet they pick their leaders from Yankeedom and The Midlands. Boehner was from Ohio, but he represented a district with a strong Yankee culture. Look at the place names in his district. Hamilton, Fairfield, Middletown, Springfield, Eaton, Greenville and Piqua are place names brought by the Yankee settlers from New England.

His replacement is a man from a state that votes just like Massachusetts. Paul Ryan would have been a moderate Democrat thirty years ago. If you look through the GOP leadership in both houses, you find very few people outside the two dominant regions. Mitch McConnell is the glaring exception, mostly because he is a glaring exception. Otherwise, the GOP is a Southern Party with Northern leaders.

Some of this is an accident of history. You rise up in a party by sticking around a long time. The American South just went fully to Republicans in the last generation. There’s a lot of young guys from these areas, while old farts from the dominant regions fill up the leadership jobs based on their seniority. Father Time will remedy this. But, the time is rapidly approaching when the voters will not tolerate the foot dragging and deal cutting of the GOP leaders. Donald Trump says “Hello.”

It’s tempting to think the Trump Effect is all there is here, but take a look at this map:

Minnesota is a good place to use as an example. They have a deranged lunatic as governor. Mark Dayton has repeatedly said that people not in his cult should leave the state. Looking at the neighboring states in Yankeedom, one has to assume he is wildly out of step with the people. There’s also the fact that Trump is drawing huge crowds in these states, solely on the issue of immigration.

I’m trying to make a few points at the same time with this post so forgive the length. On the one hand, we see a sharp divide between Yankeedom and the rest of the country culturally. The Midlands is currently aligned with Yankeedom. The leaders of both parties are from these dominant regions. Demographics and the calendar says the GOP is about to break loose from the ruling coalition.

Parallel to that process is the one issue that seems to unify the nation and that’s immigration. The loopy logic of the Left does not do well outside the faculty lounge. The average person in Yankeedom is paranoid of outsiders and hostile to strangers. In the South, familiarity with diversity makes people wary of adding more of it. The one thing everyone agrees on is we don’t want anymore immigrants.

Putting the two together you have one party that maybe can continue to dominate Yankeedom, but is struggling with core issues that contradict the cultural instincts of the people. Open borders and multiculturalism sell very well in New England as long as they are not applied locally. Otherwise, the locals will look elsewhere for their political leaders. Again, Trump is running the table in New England, for example.

On the other side of the street, the GOP is soon to become a very southern and southwestern party. Mark Steyn famously said that the future belongs to those who show up and right now it is the people from these nations showing up to vote GOP. They will get leaders that reflect their values and desires. Cultural Marxism is not going to be on the table, but maybe a divorce will be in order.

Steve Sailer has an excellent column on how Europe can manage its Muslim lunatic problem. The other day, I made the point that the will of the people cannot be ignored forever. If the politicians can’t be made to do the people’s bidding, they will get new politicians. If the parties are too corrupt to produce the right politicians, then we get new parties. Ultimately, if the political system proves useless in dealing with threats, then the people get a new political system.

The French Revolution is the most common example of the people getting a new system. Through trial and error, they eventually got to the Second Republic. In America, the Constitution may still be the theoretical framework of the nation’s political system, but our government is nothing like it was 100 years ago or at the founding. As times change the political system changes, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently.

The changes Sailer discusses are changes in the political system. Implementing a system of collective guilt where the clan of a criminal pays for the crimes as opposed to the current method of punishing just the criminal, requires a radical change in the political system. Sailer is no doubt being facetious with this, but it is not far-fetched. There has to be a way to keep the peace and if the current arrangements cannot keep the peace, we will get new arrangements.

John Derbyshire the other day mocked up his chart of probable outcomes with regards to the immigration issue. It sounds reasonable if one assumes the political systems remain static and you reject other possible outcomes, like revolts, anarchy, pestilence, war, etc. The countries of Europe, for example, have not faced an invasion like this since Batu Khan stood at the Mohi River.

The political systems and cultural structures in place did not evolve to face invasion, at least not invasion from over the horizon. Europe is what it is today due to the internal forces of Europe. For instance, the authorities no longer wear uniforms and solute one another in public. Instead they wear pants suits and grin like chimps so no one thinks they are Hitler.

What John gets right is the math, which stands to reason. The math makes clear that the ruling elite’s desire to replace their native populations with foreign imports is doomed to failure. A critical mass of Muslims will simply force changes on the political system that either trigger revolts or sends the West spiraling into anarchy.

Countries with lots of Muslims look like this:

Take a look at the responses from Western governments to the latest Muslim attacks. Civic life is being sharply curtailed and restrictions are being placed on citizens. All over Europe, large public events are being cancelled because they fear a Muslim may detonate and kill a bunch of spectators. The Germans government is telling people to avoid walking in large groups so as not be a target.

Today, the French president is out there welcoming 30,000 new suicide bombers into France. There’s simply no way they can keep importing Muslims and remain France. They know this, at some level, which is why they put in jail anyone who points it out. Holland says, “France will remain a country of freedom” unless you’re opposed to the Muslim invasion. Then it is not a free country.

Because the people in charge have defined themselves in such a way that open borders is the only option, they must implement these sorts of polices in order to prevent mayhem. The Muslims will adapt and find new ways to blow themselves up in public. That means new restrictions. This cycle can only go on for so long before even the most docile honky throws down his pacifier and picks up a rock.

It’s tempting to assume that whites are too timid and lost to fight back. Some are, for sure, but action in the streets has a funny way of bringing out the revolutionary in even old men. A big part of what plagues the West is there’s no place for men in modern societies. Rioting Muslim hoards in the streets suddenly will spike the demand for white males willing to crack skulls. The supply will soon follow.

History says this sort of large scale, transformative event washes away the old solutions for long ago problems. What comes next is something different. Again, Europe is politically and culturally alien to its past of just a century ago. Two great wars did that. An invasion by millions of Muslims will surely mean a different Europe, even if they beat back the tide.

That’s where John’s five scenarios falls down. Whatever comes next means the West stops being the West, politically and culturally. If it lets in the Muslim invaders, it becomes Muslim and follows the path of every other Muslim society into a dark age. Alternatively, it becomes a police state to keep the Muslims from killing everyone else. Or, the West changes to beat back the tide and do what is now unthinkable.

Regardless, what comes next will something entirely different than what we are today.