The subsequent graph shows how baby boomers, defined as those born from 1946-1964, self-identified when asked about their political orientations in 1974 all the way through how they did so when asked in 2018:

The one demographic trend American conservatives had in their favor–the positive correlation between age and a tendency towards rightwing politics–is at risk of being reversed by deaths of despair and the not unrelated catastrophic social and governmental responses to Covid.

When Boomers finally exit stage left, or right as it were, will subsequent generations follow in their political footsteps or will it be lights out for the Republican party? Stay tuned!

GSS variables used: YEAR, COHORT(1946-1964), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

In a week we will have confirmation that January 2021 was the best month for American incomes in history, surpassing the old record set in April of 2020 at the epidemiological nadir and economic zenith of the Covid crisis.

This miraculous feat will occur in spite of record trade deficits and weekly jobless claims being 4x what they were in January 2020. Turns out there is such thing as a free lunch, or in this case free shipping containers of goods from Asia!

We have assurance that consumer price increases are under control–the CPI is still under the target rate of 2%!–and an unshakable faith in the imperviousness of the US dollar. Our elites have found the Midas Touch. Remind me why we are so upset with them, again?

It’s shameful Joe Biden is going to miss the opportunity to make the first full calendar month and first Black History Month of his administration to set yet another new record. That’s what his party campaigned on to win the special elections in Georgia, after all. March is hopeful, though. Better late than never!

Almost Missouri on nature raw in tooth and claw:

On reflection, this may be all that all rights are: the practical result of a balance of power. Why do we have the “right” to vote? Because voting is a proxy for combat. Rather than spill a lot of blood over every political disagreement, potential combatants realized it is easier and less destructive to count up the number of combatants on each side and award electoral victory to the likely winner of a real battle: same result, far fewer casualties, even for the winners. But this logic only pertains to those who might actually show up on the field of battle. There is a reason that membership in the state militia used to be a prerequisite for voting in America.

Rights, it appears, belong to those strong enough to enforce them. There are occasional times, such as in the former United States, where those in charge have the conviction and curiosity to permit rights to those weaker than themselves, but those times are fleeting, as the inheritors of such noble sentiments are rarely so noble themselves.

You are walking through the woods when you come upon a grizzly bear. It sees you and draws near. Whatever you’re able to do in the next few moments constitute the full the extent of your “natural rights” in this world. Everything else is a privilege.

Ryan Andrews on why conservatives keep losing:

The Left is successful at pushing its cultural agenda because, unlike the mainstream Right, its ideology is guided by a very simple principle: equality/inclusion. The libertarian sort of right-wingers have freedom as an ideal, but cultural conservatives only have a convoluted mess of post hoc rationalizations. You’ll notice that the Right’s “freedom” agenda has fared mush better over the years than its cultural agenda.

To analyze this thing on the basis of specific issues is to miss-the-forest-for-the-trees. When it comes to specific issues, the Left is just as full of convoluted rationalizations as the Right, but their rationalizations flow out of their prior commitment to their egalitarian first principles.

…

I’m not saying that leftist egalitarianism flows primarily out of some dutiful, disinterested adherence to principle. Most are just following their innate inclinations, but they are helped in doing so by the fact that their thought leaders have provided them a coherent moral justification for their interests. The leaders on our side have failed to give us the same.

Incidentally, this is why Trump’s America First messaging was successful. It provides a similar simple message grounded in an easily comprehensible concept of putting the interests of American citizens before the concerns of everyone else.

DanHessinMD on what Dr. Bruce Charlton identified as the problem of clever sillies:

A major failing of many high-IQ people is the tendency to argue against and over-complicate simple truths. There is a conceit that everything is open to challenge and debate when many things are not.

Consider the following statements:

Men prefer women who are prettier.
Women prefer men who earn more money.
A man contributes the sperm and a woman contributes the egg.
Not all people are equally smart or beautiful.
People are born smarter or duller, and smart kids usually turn into smart adults.
Smart parents tend to have smart kids.
People don’t want to live near crime.
If crime is not punished, there will be more crime.
Most people are comforted by religion.
Advanced societies tend to have smarter people than primitive societies.
Certain types of people are better at certain types of jobs.

All of these statements are basic truisms across time and place. Most people around the world (past and present) know these things. They are pretty close to immutable laws. They don’t call for debate and or endless footnotes. They aren’t a challenge. They are just examples of the terms of human reality. The sooner you can accept these and many other little realities, the sooner you can get to the important business of succeeding in the framework that we have.

And yet it seems many modern, high IQ people are drawn to want to argue and modify things like these. Many high IQ people get stuck unproductively or even destructively trying to fight the terms of our reality. This or that part offends them.

They do not grasp the lesson of King Canute, or do not understand that so much of what they see as a challenge is simply beyond their power to change.

Parenthetically, I know it’s a variation on Lord Tennyson. Improve on Tennyson? The audacity of an epigone. Really though, with out the rest of its context, the phrase flows better this way.

– Is the February cold snap climate modeling’s stagflation? Probably not, but expertise from the comment section is thanked in advance for explaining why. Are there supposed to be days of record breaking low temperatures across huge swaths of the North American continent if the center of the temperature distribution is accelerating its movement towards increasingly warmer temperatures? Is part of the semantic shift from “global warming” to “climate change” a necessary improvement to account for a wider distribution, or is the average temperature distribution not a normal one?

There is something annoyingly unfortunate and harmful to the cause–or poetically just depending on your vantage point–about less reliable methods of power generation like wind and solar having replaced more reliable methods like natural gas and coal fire over the years for the purpose of reducing warming going kaput during an unexpected surge of cold weather and then having to be rescued by the old dirty methods that cause the warming that is inconveniently absent at the moment.

– The Cruz craziness is a good indication of how the establishment is concerned about rogue elements in the junior party positioning themselves as avatars of the working class fighting against the government-corporatist oligarchy. Leaving Texas was a boneheaded move for the senator to make. The optics are terrible. Of course it’s not as though he’d be fixing the power grid if he’d stayed in Houston. That’s what makes in an optical blunder–it exclusively concerns appearances. Beyond the tabloid content, though, it betrays a real growing concern among the ruling class.

– To the bad faith assumption that white gentiles who accept the idea of human biodiversity necessarily believe there is a genetic hierarchy with blacks at the bottom, is it also assumed these people view Asians and Jews as superior to themselves? The thinking is really lazy. That’s what makes it bad faith, I guess. Within the broader category of “HBD realists” there are a subset who believe in racial hierarchies, but do most? Do many? And among those who do, are fertility and survivability the metrics for assessing positions on that hierarchy? These are mostly rhetorical questions, I think.

Racists are the neo-liberal establishment’s biggest boogeymen. Communists are the right’s biggest boogeymen. Because the neo-liberal establishment has a lot more influence in the modern West than the right does, racists are the worst thing a person can be. Even in the midst of The Great Awokening, though, a majority of Americans oppose censoring them:

The racial/ethnic categories are mutually exclusive (ie whites are non-Jewish, American Indians are non-Hispanic, etc). To avoid language fluency issues, Wordsum buckets are restricted to survey respondents born in the US.

This characterization of racism is about as unflattering as it gets. Instead of asking about racism in general, let alone something sober like “do you believe human racial groups differ biologically on average?”, the framing concerns a hypothetical “person who believes blacks are genetically inferior”. This is a serious abstract test of tolerance for words one finds offensive.

Higher intelligence and having been born in the US are the two strongest indicators of support for free speech.

The same, this time for communists:

Tolerance of the two boogeymen together:

Note there is no group more accepting of free speech for racists than for communists. Those of modest intelligence come close but tolerance of communist speech is still marginally higher. The gaps are not the same, however, and they offer some insight into the cultural and political dynamics of the day:

If he were a racist, they’d be throwing rocks instead of fruit:

GSS variables used: YEAR(2010-2018), BORN, WORDSUM(0-4)(5-6)(7-10), RACEHISP, RACECEN1(3)(4-10), HISPANIC(1), RACEHISP, RELIG(1-2,4-13)(3), SEX, SPKRAC, SPKCOM, COHORT(1800-1945)(1946-1964)(1965-1979)(1980-2000)

There is no battle for the hearts and minds of the GOP electorate being waged. Trumpism has won decidedly. The idea that there is a McConnell/Romney/Cheney wing on one side and a Cruz/Hawley/Greene wing on the other among voters is fake news. The merchants of mendacity are lying when they frame it this way. The subsequent graph shows the latest YouGov net favorability ratings among Republican voters:

Similarly, Civiqs daily tracking shows net favorability among Republicans for Trump at +79 and for McConnell at -37. That’s an utterly staggering difference.

The GOP’s voters are literally more favorably inclined towards moderate Democrats than they are towards the party’s non-Trumpian establishment leaders. The GOPe has the procedural power for the time being, but unless the 2024 Republican primaries are rigged harder than elections in Turkmenistan, the anti-Trumpers don’t have a prayer.

The following graph shows the percentages of respondents, with the 13% answering “don’t know” excluded, who express a favorable opinion of the people who trespassed into and vandalized the Capitol Building on January 6:

Overall, for each person with a favorable opinion, six respondents express a negative one. Not as widely despised as 9/11 obviously, but a very unpopular event nonetheless.

Something that has been a recurring theme here is how supportive younger Americans are of political violence. The riots over the summer of 2020 made that perennial observation trenchant. Here it is manifesting once more. Cross tabs aren’t publicly available, but white men without degrees and Republicans, the other two relatively highly supportive groups, do not skew young. This makes the high aged 18-29 figure the more remarkable.

Apropos recent remarks about how conservative whites will increasingly come to wield civil rights legislation as an aegis against systematic oppression against them, consider two current events germane to the subject. The first has garnered a lot of attention–gone “viral” as they say:

SCOOP: The principal of East Side Community School in New York sent white parents this "tool for action," which tells them they must become "white traitors" and then advocate for full "white abolition."

This is the new language of public education. pic.twitter.com/0XA3xUpcuT

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 15, 2021

But, but, it’s whiteness, not white people per se! POCs can fall into these white categories, too. You know, just like white people commonly adopt colored identities. It’s totally normal, not the least bit controversial.

Or maybe white identities are like white countries. They are open to everyone. POC identities, in contrast, are exclusively for POCs–African countries are for Africans, Asian countries are for Asians. To suggest otherwise is to advocate for cultural erasure.

The Great Replacement theory is either an unhinged conspiracy or something to be celebrated depending on who is discussing it. Likewise, focusing on white identity is either the greatest evil on the planet or the necessary work we all must do to improve ourselves and our society.

When a white nationalist talks about race traitors, it’s hate speech. When an anti-white academic talks about race traitors, it’s an exercise in intellectual edification and moral uplift.

And in case you were unsure whether or not Wokeness is a religion, there it is at #5 to settle it for you.

The second current event would’ve gone unnoticed by your humble correspondent had it not been mentioned recently by the Derb. In Oklahoma, a state representative has introduced legislation that will forbid the state’s public schools from teaching anything “that promotes or degrades any race, gender or sexual orientation”. Good luck getting “The 8 White Identities” past that.

Action like this, at the state and local levels, is where the opportunity to effectively strike back against the regime’s cultural imperialism is. Marching on the Imperial Capital is not.

If the UR commentariat thinks it’s a bridge too far, dfordoom suspects the prospects elsewhere are grim:

That is the problem that the dissident right, right-wing populism, white nationalism and other far right political movements face. Their views are not just unpopular among blacks and Asians and Jews – they’re unpopular even among white gentiles. Most white gentiles are rather repelled by the far right.

I’m a white gentile and I agree with a lot of the far right’s criticisms of modern society and I despise Wokeism and SJWism as much as any dissident rightist despises those ideologies. But those far right movements are just too extreme and too crazy and too misogynistic for me to be comfortable with them. And those far right movements seem to me to be too politically inept to have any chance of success. If they can’t win over anti-Establishment whites like myself I suspect they’re never going to win over more than a small minority of whites.

AaronB on how the elite uses the archetypal racist white prole in their morality play:

It is the elites that are playing divide and conquer. They are trying to get you to focus on race and not on social inequality.

What they want, is a poor White to be fighting a poor Black, and vice versa, to focus attention away from inequality itself. While they recommend racism for you, they are happy to unite across racial and ethnic lines themselves, and form a united bloc against you.

As long as you think having a White elite is the important thing, the elites feel much safer than if you question the privileges and power – or the very concept – of the elite itself.

But Aaron is Jewish, so his target audience is naturally going to be skeptical, to put it mildly. Writes he in response:

I am opposing all excessive elite privilege and power, whether its White, Jewish, Black, or Asian, in favor of greater fairness and justice for ordinary people. How is that an example of favoring Jewish interests?

Since Jews are a disproportionate number of the elite, shouldn’t my attack on the elite de facto not favor Jewish interests?

There are people, who for sentimental reasons would rather be exploited by someone of their own race than have a fair and just system for all – a sentiment unscrupulous elites will gladly encourage.

A century ago, Jews had the merit but not the power positions they disproportionately have today. Classism was a more effective avenue to the top for them than it is today.

Intelligent Dasein warns the 401(k) class that the financial security of its golden years may not be as secure as they believe:

I fear that they will never actually let you sell.

If the DOW starts dropping by thousands of points and no new multi-trillion dollar stimulus package suffices to stop the carnage, they will simply close the markets. Perhaps, instead of allowing you to pull all your money out, they will authorize you a small monthly distribution that they deem sufficient for you to survive upon. You will be forced to recapitalize the system with your investments.

“What, you expected to get your money back? I’m sorry, we cannot complete that transaction at this time. There is a national financial emergency underway. Goldman-Sachs appreciates your sacrifice at this critical juncture and looks forward to partnering with you in the future.”

I don’t think the TreasureFed has any intention of fighting inflation no matter what happens. It will sacrifice the dollar before it sacrifices the markets. But the idea that the affluence of white boomers will be plundered by the state in the name of various forms of X justice is one that should not be dismissed.

Channeling Nietzsche, nebulafox on how if you give a man a why he can bear almost any how:

Men need three things: a purpose, a mission, and the means to accomplish or at least embark on that mission. Give them that, and you’d be surprised how the worst loser you ever knew would be willing to crawl through fields of broken glass in pursuit of them. Take them away, learned helplessness ensues, which leads to depression. They need to be realistic: which a lot of men have trouble with. But they also have to be real, plausible missions worth busting your butt for: which society has trouble with.

Pressure to power, stress to strength.

Even Californians shot down a proposition to allow institutions more latitude in using race to make hiring, firing, and acquiring decisions. If immigration was the electoral $100 bill lying on the sidewalk in 2015, opposition to race preferences is the one lying there today. Support for it is limited primarily to blue checkmarks and their followers on twitter. A poll taken last week shows only a plurality of Democrats and nothing close to a majority of anyone else favors race-based college admissions:

From GSS data collected over the course of the Great Awokening on racial preferences in hiring:

Preferential hiring based on gender* enjoys relatively more popular support:

The pool of potential beneficiaries when the preference is based on gender rather than on race is larger. The potential beneficiaries are a numerical majority, in fact. And while a white man may not have a close non-white person in his life who might benefit from race-based preferences, he has a mother, daughter, or wife who potentially will.

The failure of Prop 16 in California last November presages an impending shift in the American discourse on civil rights. Civil rights have historically been viewed by white identitarians as a hostile force. They’ve historically viewed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 as an assault. We’re now at a point where the Act will act as a break on the most extreme impulses of people like those who pushed the failed California proposition.

Over the course of his prolific career Steve Sailer has been fond of trying to predict what the next civil rights struggle will be. It was race and sex in the past, homosexuality more recently, and then transgenderism. The pool of the putatively oppressed has been reduced to a fraction of a fraction of the population to such an extent that scarcely anyone remains. But the impulse is there, and as crazy as it sounds in The Current Year, whites will become the beneficiaries of some of it as the systematic oppression of the most vulnerable and unprivileged of them intensifies.

Modest rhetorical suggestion: Democrats are the real racists does have utility, but not if the emphasis is on their alleged antagonism towards blacks or other minorities. Their racism is directed against whites in government bailouts, university admissions, hirings and promotions, etc. Do not bemoan that the things Democrats do benefit people of color. Criticize them for hurting whites and Christians and rustics. You don’t sell opposition to a thing by focusing on who it helps, you do it be focusing on the sympathetic people it hurts.

GSS variables used: AFFRMACT, FEJOBAFF, YEAR(2010-2018), SEX, RELIG(1-2,4-13), RACECEN1(4-10), HISPANIC(1), RACEHISP, PARTYID(0-1)(2-4,7)(5-6)

* I’d prefer to use the term “sex” but its use as verb makes a sentence dealing with preferential hiring a little trixie tricky**.

** Unbeknownst to me until just now, that joke lands in a different way than it used to. TERFs lose again.