Glad to see this open thread and so many familiar interlocutors. The iSteve comment section was something I looked forward to every day, and the Substack comment section tends to be far to short to really get things rolling.

Mitch would have been a great president but his window really never opened up, plus the Romney people let him know that the embarrassing story about his wife running off with his buddy would be thoroughly discussed in the media if he actually ran.

I suppose that might be accurate for a lot of federal offices outside the orbit of the imperial capital. Having lived in DC, my impression of federal employees that I had to work with or ride the Metro with is substantially different than your experience.

So many to choose from…I did like him stripping the security clearances from the Biden laptop letter signatories as well as John Bolton, as well as the one indicating that they would be firing executive level employees who fail to click their heels and salute smartly when given their marching orders.

For the former, possession of a security clearance is an important credential for their employment so I totally approve clipping their wings a bit here, and frankly I think there are probably far too many former federal employees walking around with various clearances regardless of politics.

In the case of the latter, the first Trump Administration encountered a ton of internal resistance by employees slow walking or outright ignoring directions from the WH. It’s long past time to take quite a number of scalps and bring the executive branch to heel. The anti-DEI and pronoun stuff is also part of the phenomenon of the federal government being a vector for the spread of leftwing ideology.

The media will naturally squawk about all this as though its some violation of civil service protections but it’s no secret that the federal workforce skews heavily Democratic and when given the chance departs from neutrally carrying out their jobs. Hell, the Biden Administration had an EO directing *all* federal departments to do whatever they could to get people registered to vote – I have a friend who worked for the SBA and that’s almost all they did this past year, and I can assure you it wasn’t directed at rural or ‘red’ areas.

It seems to me that the most useful thing city and state governments could do for both rebuilding and to enhance preparedness for future disasters would be to remove environmental or review processes that slow down permitting for demo and new construction. All of the people whose homes were destroyed are looking at years before they could rebuild (assuming they can afford to, many cannot) under current procedures. Same would apply to any fire suppression systems that could be installed in locations that are likely to burn.

One of the most catastrophic errors of the Western ruling class is thinking people are basically interchangeable biological units. Yes, we are all of the same species, but we are not the same in terms of strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and value systems. Not everyone is a fit for the society that was created here, which is why it’s so frayed at the moment thanks to mass immigration.

“Yes and no. Puerto Rico is really a Latin as opposed to North American culture, and as such timeliness and attention to detail don’t really seem to characteristics that are prominent features of their society, so nothing will ever run like it does in the average US company or political unit.”

A great point. I was deployed to Puerto Rico for disaster relief after the 2017 hurricane when I was with the federal government. A native Puerto Rican, who is bilingual and had lived in mainland United States, told me that Puerto Rico is really a second-world country, not first world like the US. My observation is that he’s absolutely correct. The way things operated down there from the basics, like garbage pick up, to how they care for animals (a huge stray dog problem) and of course public infrastructure, made it clear that the lifestyle and culture there is totally different than pretty much anywhere in the mainland US. I would say the problem there is the Latin culture, and not necessarily a brain drain. After all, no Latin American country seems to be excelling or offers a consistent standard living like the first-world United States.

It could very well be closest to the truth, as I feel like most reviewers default is to find the positives in a show or movie. Steve uses the term “competently” in his review which to me is a signal that technical execution is good in this film but it’s not an entirely fresh angle on a guy who has been extensively examined by the culture over the years.

I watched Gladiator II last night and frankly I think Steve was a bit kind in his review of it as well, as I thought the movie was predictable and ham fisted in its story, and even though Denzel Washington had the best performance it was still not very memorable. I have occasionally rewatched the original Gladiator over the years, but I will never watch the sequel again.

Yes and no. Puerto Rico is really a Latin as opposed to North American culture, and as such timeliness and attention to detail don’t really seem to characteristics that are prominent features of their society, so nothing will ever run like it does in the average US company or political unit. People who do possess those traits are a small share of the population and for many their economic prospects are better in a location where they can leverage them as opposed to staying at home where they are held back by the dominant culture. Even if PR was made independent and there was no longer free movement I seem to recall standardized test scores indicate it has worse overall human capital than any US state, so that coupled with Latin culture doesn’t argue for a massive leap in competence in this scenario.

As far as brain drain applies to locations that are independent countries, on net I think it’s bad for both the US and the country of origin when high ability people from low performing countries emigrate. We just end up subsidizing these places via remittances or foreign aid with no broad benefits to US citizens own economic security. In fact, any effort to curb immigration should include a hugely punishing tax on remittances.

Indeed. Our current immigration system – if one could call it that – is designed *not* to allow for assimilation but to produce an atomized society of rival ethnic groups that the left assumed could be united on the basis of dislike of whites.

The reality that even well-intended leftists cannot admit is that any society must have a dominant culture of one kind or another to function. In our case, the Western European civilization that originally produced the US is also the best option of all available in the present. But because it’s ‘white’ it is therefore hated and thus we have all sorts of social theories and political movements intended to break out of that.

Obviously a number of schools are basically daring someone to sue them. Overall it seems that while the percentages are implausible based on ability they are not disastrously bad, and obviously what really matters is what happens in one’s professional career. As I have shared before, I have a close friend who is an executive at a large law firm, and basically they always have a very diverse class of incoming associates but the share of black and to a lesser extend Latinos who are ultimately made partner is quite low. Obviously some stay on as “of counsel” but a lot probably move onto not particularly influential and mundane careers with non-profits, government, and perhaps the odd small business.

The real scandal is the same as higher ed at the bachelor’s level – millions of students are admitted who have no real business being there but schools are happy to relieve them of their student loans. We still very much need reform of higher education to prevent this and offer alternate certifications that work for specific jobs and can be obtained for a lot less than a traditional college experience.

Kind of a sad effort, really. Obviously Gillibrand thought this would get some political traction – otherwise why do it – but what it shows is that the Dems are so bereft of concrete ideas to counter the changes coming next month the best they could do was a for-show stunt that has so little foundation in actionable reality that it hasn’t occurred to any ERA supporter over the last 40 years.

Also interesting is that the ERA explicitly addressed equal treatment based on sex. In light of the current cultural moment where the left tries to extend rights on the basis of gender identity, obviously the only way this amendment would further that is if it was subsequently decided through an act of Congress or perhaps some court that declaring that gender identity = sex for purposes of the law. Which ironically would be using the ERA to empower men.

So no, woke hasn’t gone anywhere and won’t for awhile. I do see some evidence that a portion of the left is pretty sick of performative stuff like this, since it’s burned up a ton of political energy and capital over the years at the expense of more concrete economic goals.

Seems like a worthwhile lark if that kind of money is something you can afford to put out and not get much of a return on – I would think the non-ski season activities could possibly attract enough people to bump along. The price is quite cheap all things considered.

Here in the Rust Belt, once in awhile I see golf courses for sale and often they are shockingly cheap, as in less than the $2M+ price for this ski area. Obviously the cost of irrigation, mowing and other maintenance must be pretty high so there isn’t a great return on of these. I know a guy who is part of a group that bought one and judging by his lifestyle I don’t think he’s getting much in the way of an annual distribution from it.

Essentially all of our insane race/DEI stuff that is happening today is a product of the failure of the central premise of the civil rights era: if we eliminated de jure discrimination and gave blacks preferences across a broad spectrum for awhile then they would naturally catch up to whites.

Obviously this didn’t happen despite tens of trillions in wealth transfers, explicitly pro-black discrimination, overhyping of black achievements and contributions, and turning a blind eye as their culture deteriorated into an appalling mess that everyone secretly is revolted by.

Much of the social policy pursued by the left (and some by the right) are based on the idea that man and society can be perfected through the application of enlightened political choices and programming. Additionally, the modern left looks at the upliftment of blacks as the single most important social endeavor of American history. The former cannot accomplish the latter and it’s driven them to increasingly bizarre and totalitarian efforts in pursuit of the impossible. As I mentioned, I think there is a minor but not insignificant share of the left that is beginning to realize this and most are hoping there is some kind of softer version of civil rights-oriented policy they could still push to satisfy their consciences and have a marginally positive effect.

Along with this, I think the more perceptive political strategists on the left recognize it’s now a political loser that will not claw back the working class defections to the GOP that have grown for three straight presidential elections. This is a difficult situation for them because they are dependent on 90+ support from blacks to win national elections and this group is accustomed to being catered to, but the rest of the country increasingly doesn’t care about.

There has definitely been a shift in the last few years and one that I think will continue when it comes to acknowledging that every social problem or gap is not because of fiendishly clever systems of white oppression. I have noticed it in conversations with lefties on the topics of crime and education that there is substantially less pushback – and not infrequently agreement – that differences are to some extent a reflection of the people themselves and that they cannot be eliminated by social interventions, as well as exhaustion with the ham-fisted DEI efforts.

I have also observed some rear-guard doubling down on this stuff recently but it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a position of strength. Cultural momentum shifts take time but once they start it’s hard to stop, so I am hopeful we are at the front end of just such a shift that will give us quite a bit of space to operate in the years ahead in terms of culture and politics.

Yep. The US being the biggest cultural force on the planet for a century or so means everything is magnified, including our history with slavery. Objectively it was quite minimal and pretty tame by historical standards as well as compared to contemporaries like Brazil and the Caribbean colonies whose appetite for Africans dwarfed what is now the US (because they worked them all to death), and by all rights should be a relatively minor footnote in history.

Instead it’s been elevated out of all proportion, including the sense of grievance and what is owed to the descendants of slaves. I saw Biden was in Angola yesterday, and the NYT had an article this weekend about how the country is trying to strengthen ties to the US by playing up slavery, which obviously glides right past the fact that it was Africans who were the enslavers of other Africans. That every slave who arrived in the US had their fate decided long before by co-ethnics is the part of history that is studiously avoided because nothing can be extracted from them, while it can be taken from modern whites through our perverted version of democracy.

I thought Trump should have done it, and wouldn’t have a problem with Biden pardoning him for the crimes for which he has been charged and tried. But a nearly 11 year lookback for crimes yet undiscovered that covers both a portion of Biden’s VP term and when Hunter got involved with Burisma is the smoking gun that all the allegations about the family’s corruption are true.

I always thought they were since it’s the most obvious explanation for Hunter having a career of any kind at all, but it also puts the lie to the concept that Joe had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings – he obviously would have to in order to put this specific time span on the pardon for it to be useful.

The only question now is who else gets pardoned.

I am not an avid theatre-goer but did see Wicked back in the day with the wife and a lesbian couple. I was bored out of my mind and struck by how un-catchy the songs were, so left baffled as to its popularity. My companions liked it better but seemed to be trying to talk themselves into it a bit because you were supposed to.

As to the casting, I personally find both women unattractive and contra Steve, the Nigerian lady looks solidly in her late 30s to me even with the makeup on, whereas Ariana Grande could still pass for early 20s. X has had a series of clips of their interviews together and they are insane – largely the Nigerian ruminating on her insecurities and Grande saying non-sensical new agey supportive stuff.

Which brings me to how much I loathe most actors. Constantly seeking attention, always poor-me, but utterly convinced that they are imbued with incredible insights that everyone else ought to hear again and again. I really appreciate the greats, but there are a lot of mediocrities even in big productions these days.

Blacks are receding in cultural importance – which they were over-elevated anyway – so we will be treated to more stories like this that glide right past the inconvenient parts of history to point the figure at the end users in the familiar attempt to guilt whites into going along with the left’s preferred politics. However, it’s aimed at a shrinking share of the population that is vulnerable to this tactic so it will work less and less.

The recent election showed that there is a path to power with a working/middle class coalition of white and Latinos, and despite all the hullaballoo about more black men voting Trump it really didn’t matter. Conversely, the Democrats very much still need black voters which they have traditionally secured by promising that they are the most treasured group in America, but that’s going to be a lot tougher line to walk if they also need to lure back Latinos.

Now, I never underestimate the ability of the GOP establishment to fumble the ball so it’s quite possible they fail to learn the obvious lessons that would let them build on recent successes. But the opportunity is definitely there, and because old habits are hard to break I don’t think the Democrats are really at a point where they can abandon the playbook on blacks that has worked for 3 generations.

While I normally grit my teeth at this kind of thing, I have to admit that I like Denzel as an actor and I could probably buy him in this role. As a villain in Training Day he made the movie. Similarly, although I groaned at the House of the Dragon show to see the Velaryon family portrayed by blacks, the guy who plays the patriarch is actually a very good actor so I can sort of suspend my disbelief there…unfortunately, the black actors that play his legitimate and bastard children are not good, and the next season that will address their rise will be painful to watch.

As for the Met, as I have commented before, blacks in America are desperate to have some kind of identity associated with past glory but don’t actually have one, which leads to absurdities like claiming they are the original Hebrews or Egyptians. To some extent I get it – virtually every other group here can claim ancestry with peoples who did something significant, and even the conquered natives are still revered as warriors which is why multiple military weapons systems are named after different tribes. It’s got to suck to be the one segment of the population without any of that going for you in popular lore or entertainment.

Still, it shouldn’t be humored and the Met thing shows the white progressive fondness for head-patting blacks whenever possible, which ranks high on list of objectionable characteristics of that group – and there are many to choose from. It’s dishonest and makes a people who crave respect from broader society look pathetic.

I think you are right – they were in college for the civil rights era, internalized that politically and inflicted their misguided ideas for two subsequent generations.

One thing that I read that resonated about the rightward turn of men under 30 is that they have lived their entire lives in an environment in which they have been crapped on as would-be rapists, misogynists, taking up unrightful space in the culture, schools and professional life, etc. They are reacting against that, and that’s good in the long term – this is their coming of age and it’s a lot different than the boomers and they will have different politics as a result.

Obviously a confluence of things, but to start on the Dems side of the ledger Biden was not popular and Kamala was even less popular as VP. She had barely been sworn in when articles started popping up in mainstream political coverage that she 1) was incurious about actual policy, 2) was very hard on staff, and 3) wired in Dems considered her incapable of winning a national election and were maneuvering to shove her aside. Although her approval rating jumped after being announced as the nominee it was Generic D support, not support for her specifically.

I think there is also lingering resentment over Covid with a decent share of the population. It’s not talked about much, but a lot of people who trusted to the government now understand masking and social distancing were BS, it was definitely a lab leak, the vaccines are not effective, and it was primarily a disease of the elderly and huge numbers of people were threatened with loss of jobs and social standing if they didn’t go along with heavy handed coercion that was all based on bad information from the government and media.

The NYT has had an interesting series of focus groups over the last few months and today they returned to a group of under 30s to see how they voted. Very few voted for Kamala, about half for Trump, the rest didn’t vote or Jill Stein. They basically all said the media lies and Kamala was incapable of giving a coherent reason to vote for her. Several also said they liked that Trump and JD went on Rogan because it showed them as normal people that could actually engage in an unscripted conversation, and JD got positive remarks even from a couple that didn’t ultimately vote for Trump.

On the GOP side, apparently Trump’s anti-trans commercial was very effective and it was brilliant to air that during NFL games. Immigration is obviously one of the biggest issues and one that normies have legitimate concerns about and who are also well aware that it got substantially worse under Biden. Trump’s willingness to go after both of these is a sea change for the GOP, which has traditionally shied away from issues where they might get called bad names by elites but which have broad public support.

Last, and I cannot remember who predicted this like 10 years ago, but Latinos started moving right as more of them moved up from low income to working and middle class – in effect they are voting similarly to their white counterparts in the same economic class and for the first time outnumbered blacks in terms of total voters. This has to be the biggest warning sign for the Dems – blacks shifted a bit but basically remained loyal Dems and it’s simply not enough anymore. The difficulty is that the GOP has a path to winning with a white and Latino coalition of the middle and the Dems have to try to chisel away at that without losing blacks, a much tougher proposition.

I have been saying for awhile on this page that blacks had hit the apogee of their political relevance and influence in 2020 and it’s only downhill from there. I think this was borne out in 2024, and how Dems and the black left deals with this is going to be hugely entertaining. White progs have mentally put blacks on such a pedestal and prioritizing them is going to be a hard habit to break, and blacks are really, really not going to like realizing they are no longer the primary focus of their “allies” and never will be again.

I think when the trans stuff is just an abstraction for normies it didn’t translate into political capital for the right to use, but when when society began being force fed trans stuff like a French goose a strong undercurrent of disgust developed that elites were insulated from. Like Kamala herself, the more the public learns about trans culture and ideology and practice the more they are turned off.

Wes Yang (who is center left) had some comments on X this week talking about how the political left in America’s embrace of this is literally the most insane cultural stance taken in our history. He had some kind of hilarious comment that he would have been fine going through life not knowing what an autogynophile is but the left made him learn and react to it. I totally agree with that and I have noticed over the last couple of years how my left of center friends who are parents have gone from quiet discomfort about this subject to being able to openly say they cannot get on board with it at all.

Still this is not over by a long shot. It’s been pointed out that a lot of parents are complicit in harming their kids with hormones, puberty blockers and surgeries and most are not going to be able to live with themselves if they admitted what they did – so they won’t and will cling to this culture and the idea their kids are some kind of persecuted class. There’s going to be a lot of human wreckage.

Indeed – a totally inorganic nominee who would have never survived a real primary that they gaslit themselves into believing would be carried into office first by “joy” and then by calling Trump a Nazi. She is truly the worst major party nominee I can recall, and Dems totally forgot there’s a reason she dropped out of the 2020 contest before a vote was cast with multiple white candidates polling better with the black base than this woman. And although generally I don’t think VP nominees matter much, there have to be a lot of Dem strategists looking at Walz and wondering how in the world he was the pick. He brought absolutely nothing to the table.

Self-reflection does not seem to be a quality most of the professional left possesses these days – on immigration, DIE, and trans stuff the public is clearly on the other side and yet the Dems just kept pushing forward on all of it like they didn’t think there was going to be any penalty for it.

Many comments on iSteve, including some of mine, have made fun of blacks.

Here is a black guy who died helping to carry out FJB’s Gaza Pier stunt.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/11/u-s-soldier-hurt-during-bidens-failed-gaza-pier-operation-has-died-of-injuries/

RIP

Love stuff like this. Naturally the article asserts without evidence that diverse leadership boosts profits and employee satisfaction – which sort of glides past the reality that essentially every successful enterprise in the US was founded and scaled up by white guys.

Obviously we spend a lot of time talking about HBD from the perspective of IQ, but personality traits are also heritable and some combinations are more conducive to leadership and naturally will occur more frequently in some groups and less in others. I am sure there is some scholarship out there on leadership traits but the frequency in different racial/ethnic groups is probably never addressed head on.

There is a black conservative guy I follow on X who likes to periodically post examples of whites doing sort of crazy stuff and asking why we do it, and once I responded that yes we do some inexplicably high risk stuff but that instinct is the same one that took us to the moon and he agreed with it. Obviously the DIE crowd asserts that whites unfairly claim leadership for themselves but I wouldn’t be surprised that if someone looked into what traits people look to for leadership that whites are over represented.

The left positions itself as the side that is committed to following the data no matter where it leads or how uncomfortable it is, but in reality it’s anything but that.

Very true, and for Exhibit 6,349 we have a $10 million study on the effect of puberty blockers on children that has not been published because the babe who did the study didn’t like the results.

Even the NYT has noticed: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-olson-kennedy.html

The left positions itself as the side that is committed to following the data no matter where it leads or how uncomfortable it is, but in reality it’s anything but that. Obviously everyone has their biases and intuitive understandings of how the world works, but there are a slew of issues on which the left tries to contort policy around flat out false realities.

There is no gentle way to bring them around. Only the determined use of political and cultural power by the right will move the needle for society.

I wouldn’t be totally surprised that the Dems ‘fortify’ their way to victory with what is possibly the worst major party nominee in history but…everything about the body language of various party figures, the candidate herself, and the media says they think she is going down.

Trump is polling better against Harris than he ever did with Biden or Clinton and although you could chalk some of this up to corrections in methodology, no one is acting like they believe that’s the full explanation. Early/mail in voting totals are not showing the level of Dem advantage they expect to see, although it is possible this is just a shift in GOP voting behavior and not evidence of greater turnout. That said, even if that’s the case it means the Trump campaign will be able to spend the last few days trying to get reluctant voters to the polls to provide the necessary margin of victory rather than just reminding normies to show up.

Now, if Harris does win one upside is that to the extent a fair number of people on the right are semi-radicalized against our existing system this will increase a great deal. It would demonstrate leftist control is so deep on a broad front that they can literally put up anyone and get a manufactured EC win at this point, not to mention that the candidate is just a figurehead for the activists who really run things, if you didn’t already understand that from watching Biden’s corpse go through the motions of being chief executive these past 3.5 years.

The potential danger for Trump is that he is really going to have to make some difficult but necessary choices that the media will relentless criticize based on the optics rather than facts. I found his lack of focus disappointing in his first term but hopefully he learned his lesson and obviously he cannot run again so might as well go for it, provided the GOP weathervanes in Congress can be brought to heel.

Although Miranda clearly has theatrical talent, I sort of wondered if Hamilton was essentially his One Big Idea and subsequent work would largely be derivative of that – and that appears to be the case here. If its struggling to get produced, that seems indicative that it must be somewhat unconvincing even for the type of people that would like this concept at a high level.

I am also wondering if the girlboss/yass kween genre of entertainment is on its way out. Obviously the Star Wars series was hated by audiences and critics alike, and I am sure there are other examples. Last year I tried to watch “Lioness”, a spy thriller series by Taylor Sheridan* with a female protagonist with the wife since she really likes action movies. We both groaned our way through the first season at the absurdity of 105 lb women kicking ass all over the world and the biracial daughter side story.

*Taylor Sheridan is another example of a guy who sort of has a single angle but unlike Miranda apparently managed to leverage that into multiple production lines. I was a latecomer to “Yellowstone” and came away thinking he had something but couldn’t resist mangling it, so perhaps its unsurprising that he had the kernel of a good idea with Lioness and blew it.

Oh dear. Even if I had heard nothing about this movie until reading this, the extremely on the nose character names are a gigantic flashing warning light.

I would appreciate more frequent movie reviews however. I pay very little attention to film these days and am only occasionally interested in new releases, which usually turn out to just be OK at best in the end.

I think a lot of blacks that ascend to positions dominated by elite whites adopt the same deliberate ignorance about crime and culture that they truly know better about.

Partly it’s signaling but partly it’s probably something of a mental relief to pretend they are not massive outliers for their group.

The inability or refusal to take human nature and behavior into account is behind nearly all public social policy failures that I can think of.

Entertaining read in Politico today about how Portland is finally sorta coming to grips with the catastrophic policies it embraced over the years. Mind you, they still plan on doing progressive things, just not quite so hard core. I’m sure that’s the ticket.

One LOL is that they disbanded the anti-gun task force because too many black and brown Portlanders were then arrested, and everyone was apparently surprised that shootings and murders then rose.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/09/portland-oregon-2024-elections-00182935

Ah yes, what change can you make to a neighborhood that virtually guarantees decline? There is one gigantic dot with a bunch of other dots that apparently orbit it without ever being directly connected by our betters.

On a related note, I can recall one of my kids learned about the Great Migration in school last year. Naturally all the discussion was about hopeful blacks leaving the racist South only to discover their new neighbors in Northern cities were not exactly thrilled, and that was wrong. It’s also apparently where history ends because there is absolutely no discussion about what happened to those cities whose demographics underwent a rapid shift. Certainly none of those jaw-dropping pictures of neighborhoods in Chicago and Detroit from a century ago to what they look like today.

We are currently experiencing the greatest migration yet – any bets on how it turns out?

Cretin?

Anyway, a lot of urban schools have attempted to draw in what remains of white public school students through IB or offering atypical educational models, but it’s just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I made this mistake with my kids when they were still in elementary school, which was quickly rectified and it has been private school from there on out. I recently met with a nice white lefty parent who is looking to move her kids from her local public school to our private one due to “bullying” which didn’t surprise me based on the demographics.

This experiment has failed and parents are abandoning ship, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised that in a decade that Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore have a lot company as places that have lost significant population.

I already had a low opinion of Minnesotans’ political judgment but it’s even lower having seen this guy try and show he provides any value as a 2nd banana.

Walter Mondale may have been a bit of a weasel, but he was head and shoulders above this guy Walz.

Comparing these debates to, for example, one of the 1984 Presidential debates between Reagan and Mondale, you realize how far this country has fallen.

At this point I am not sure how many people are undecided, but Walz was outclassed and maybe they decide to keep him out of the public eye more, which means Kamala will have to get by on her own more. I already had a low opinion of Minnesotans’ political judgment but it’s even lower having seen this guy try and show he provides any value as a 2nd banana.

When I was in high school as part of some “invite a local business” type of talk a representative of the state lottery came to the class to talk about how it works, how much money it raises, which games have the best odds, which games are most popular/available in what neighborhoods, etc. It became obvious from his data that the low cost and low return games were the most popular in terms of sales in poor neighborhoods. When I asked him if that product placement was deliberate he refused to answer and at the end didn’t give me the little goodie bag everyone else got.

While it’s obviously unethical for anyone associated with a sports franchise to bet on their own sport, it’s pretty gross how much gambling is promoted in the culture at large. You basically have sports commentators who constantly talk about it, a variety of apps that have sprung up to facilitate betting, and you even have colleges and universities entering into deals to facilitate gambling with their students: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/caesars-sports-betting-universities-colleges.html

I don’t have any great ideas off the top of my head how you can balance personal freedom and try to protect people from themselves, but it would be interesting to see some analysis of what estimated annual gambling losses are and any associated demographic information. I personally think state-sponsored lotteries should be illegal. All this stuff has a strong bread and circuses vibe, although with the added benefit that it transfers even more money away from the plebes to elites.

I had the same thought – although he stretches the piece out, it all seems very pro forma. I would say it’s likely that his pieces on Lomez and Steve are likely to produce the Streisand effect rather than reduce Steve’s audience, hostile or otherwise. And although there is no doubt that the percentage of Wilson’s readers who are firmly on his side already and immune to reconsideration of his views is very high, there will surely be some small share that start hate-reading (or perhaps out of curiosity) iSteve and will have their thinking altered.

At any rate, Steve undoubtedly welcomes Wilson’s attention as all publicity at this point is good publicity. I wonder if Wilson realizes he as undoubtedly broadened the number of people who follow his journalistic targets?

Definitely within the decade.

If you can, move to an area that still takes itself seriously insofar as local, independent governance.

Get to know your local government very well – the political set, the emergency personnel, the school board, public works, etc., for when the federal government loses the ability to project national power down to the local level, those aforementioned will be your most important – and dare I say troublesome, in many cases – set of governing entities. Get your personal perseverance in order.

All politics will very much indeed become local, moreso to the detriment of the urbanites who either didn’t (or didn’t want to) see it coming.

Obviously as Steve and others noted there is a very easy way to prove she was unfairly disparaging our most sacred demographic group without violating any individual’s confidential information. I am not a lawyer but on the surface it appears that she could easily sue them and likely win or force a settlement…which I suspect is the end goal of UPenn. They cannot fire her and they don’t want her around obviously, so they no doubt took this current action in an effort to frustrate her to the point she takes her winnings and agrees to leave. They will frame it as racist instructor might have sort of prevailed on legal grounds but not moral ones.

This is a good point – I probably am a bit blind on this because of my relative economic security compared to the average person.

One of the saddest things about the American right is the relative paucity of organizations committed to lawfare against stuff like this. It’s one of those issues where the majority of the public is aligned with the right’s position and there seems to be very little organized effort to capitalize on it, probably because the various think tanks and 501c3 people are afraid their Dem friends in DC (where they all live and play) won’t invite them to parties anymore.

From the outside, California seems to be a terrifying warning of what progressives have in store for the rest of the country if they are successful in turning the US into a one party ‘democracy.’ It appears State Senator Scott Weiner – a gay fetishist and from all appearances a pederast to boot – is lining up a bid to succeed Nancy Pelosi.

Having a leadership class that treats the United States first and foremost as an economic zone rather than a nation is at the root of a lot of our problems and it’s not dissimilar from the blank slate sociological view taken by most of our politicians. It’s contributed to the incredible lack of concern for the American worker over the last half century and led to huge numbers of them being displaced or leaving the workforce and kept in what is essentially economic hospice care through the social welfare system while tens of millions of foreigners are allowed in, a large share of which are also recipients of federal assistance but provide cheaper (and yes, often harder working) labor and eventually votes.

While on the surface one would think the American left would put up more of a fight on behalf of blue collar families, a bigger goal is the fracturing of the country as a more or less cohesive culture and polity, and globalization and multiculturalism achieves this. The right has been too stupid to realize the long term effects of these forces and was content to collect their checks from the Chamber of Commerce who is fine with this as well since the people harmed are now wards of the state and no longer the concern of the employers the represent.

The left (correctly) thinks pushing forward even more on this arrangement will lead to greater state power and control and they will soon only have rump political opposition under our performative version of federal self government. However they also think this state of affairs can be maintained virtually indefinitely, whereas it seems likely that economic and external events are going to bring on challenges we simply are not equipped to deal with and will come with a lot of pain and change. The only real question in my mind is how close or distant that moment is, and right now I think the odds are better than even it’s in the next decade or so rather than a generation or two away.

You’re right about HBCU engineers. I worked with a Howard grad many years ago – ostensibly an engineer (also, based on phenotype, at least 87.5% White). He was a diligent worker and a competent technician, and would have been an outstanding mechanic at someplace like Pep Boys, but the fine points of electrical engineering were simply beyond him.

The reason HBCUs may (or may not – I’m seeing various figures in this comment thread) produce a large proportion of the black engineering/legal talent (such as it is) is because the fix is in. They have the organization and contacts in place to get their graduates hired. In America, big engineering firms (doing alot of work on government contracts) are forced by Disparate Impact rules to hire a certain number of black employees (these used to be mainly janitorial, but the illegal aliens captured that market decades ago). The places you get these are the HBCUs and the military, because they are pre-screened. You’re not going to be getting the guy who invents cold fusion, but at least they are disciplined and passed some minimal entry test, and they’re probably not going to start a Crips chapter on your factory floor.

The same dynamic applies at prominent non-black universities, but black talent at those places tends to be more like Barack Obama – there are a few of them, but they are blown up all out of proportion to their actual achievements. True story – I once had an office mate who was a very smart Japanese-American guy, had gone to UCLA in the mid-90’s. This was during a period following the collapse of the USSR and before the dot-com boom, and the local engineering industry (Aerospace) was in a severe downturn. In college, he was a member of some Japanese students club, and they used to play pickup basketball. Through the basketball games, a couple of his buddies got invited to a party at one of the black fraternities. As you walked in, there was a table with a tray on it, into which you could put your CV. His buddies went and got their CVs and dropped them in the box. That summer, of all the engineering students in the Japanese students club, the only two who got summer jobs in the Aerospace industry were the two who dropped their CVs in the box at the black frat.

Good point – austerity is coming one way or another in the decades ahead. I have even seen liberal figure Noah Smith on X say the same thing. Things that can’t go on forever won’t and as the US is gradually crushed by its debt load a lot of things politicians and beneficiaries thought were essential or untouchable services are going to disappear. Probably don’t get there in the immediate future but I think the odds are pretty good that within 10 years there is a major economic event that will cause a lot of pain.

I am under no illusions about a comprehensive overhaul, but I’d take an incremental change that starts to bend things a bit and I don’t think that would be out of the question under the right circumstances. If colleges had to take on some financial risk when it came to student loans, it could be sold to the public as a way to help students who were failed by their schools, and make them think a bit harder about who they let in.

Yes, by all means get rid of federal guarantees and force lenders to actually look at the student’s academic record, school attended and course load, and where they have been accepted. There are a lot of levers that would require a lot more honesty in college admissions and kill off the worst schools are force the survivors to alter their degree offerings.

I have found that in my local paper, stats like these are just regurgitated from the source (ie the politicians or advocacy orgs) without being fact checked in any way, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case in the NYT. It appears to me that the political reporters at the Times are far more likely to cite dubious stats and sources than those that cover real estate and business. The culture reporters simply relay the claims of whatever artist they are interviewing with no pushback whatsoever as well.

In any case, it’s somewhat alarming that HBCUs have *any* engineers or lawyers given the exceedingly low quality they represent. Spelman is the best-regarded HBCU and is very mid overall for private schools, and Howard is a step down from that – I had a friend who decided to apply to its law school just to get a degree and they were accepted with a 152 on the LSAT. Those two plus Morehouse are considered the black Ivies, which really says something. Frankly I doubt any HBCU attracts more than a single digit percentage of students who had the option of going to a better private or public school.

Higher ed reform that puts schools partially on the hook for repayment of student loans would be welcome in my book, but it would kill off the bottom third of colleges and universities, which means 90% of HBCUs. Aside from the fact that tens of thousands of useless by lefty administrators and low quality professors would lose their jobs, the impact on HBCUs is probably a non-trivial reason Democrats would fight a proposal like this.

An issue that used to be discussed but I don’t see much of lately is how by siphoning off the top people from nations that are 2nd or 3rd rate we are making them less prosperous and stable in the long run and thereby incentivizing more of them to leave for greener pastures – which is a massive problem because the leaders of the West don’t have the inclination to say “no” to literally anyone who wants to waltz in. In the US we have gone from an immigration system in which arrivals were on net a value add proposition to one in which they are more likely to consume more than they contribute – and this is a conscious decision by our rulers, mind you.

I feel like I read somewhere that this is the last class that was test-optional, and if so that offers a pretty significant fudge factor. Next year if Harvard requires SAT or ACT testing it will be a lot more difficult to plausibly avoid significant reductions in black and Latino admissions.

Of course, if you have any brains at all their open admission that they take race into account to achieve diversity targets is an implicit admission of the lower academic ability on offer. They claim diversity is important as a learning experience – but for who? The canary in the coalmine in all this is that they never, ever, release statistics to show that by the time they graduate their diversity admits have proven themselves to be the quality of scholar they were treated as at the time of admission even though they lacked hard evidence to prove it.

The silence on that tells us everything.

I personally am lukewarm on his music, but he did have his moments and obviously wrote a fair number of songs made popular by others, and that’s not nothing. A good friend and musician swears up an down that as a live performer he is the best he had ever seen. Although I am not sure whether this really happens anymore, like some other prominent artists of the 70s and 80s he would periodically make unannounced appearances at small way off the beaten path venues. There is a dump of a bar not too far from my house that he apparently showed up at after having played a full concert at the arena downtown and proceeded to play another full 2+hours of his songs and covers. I appreciate that sort of restless creative energy.

Now the only time I really think of him is when I am in the MSP airport, where there is a Prince store full of massively overpriced apparel and trinkets – or perhaps the Chappelle show’s “True Hollywood Stories with Charlie Murphy” skit about him.

Agree. I actually had a reminder of this last night when I went over to the local public high school in to hit some tennis balls with my kids. There were various sports practices and games going on at the complex across the parking lot and in one area there were a few cars parked together with a large group of ‘youths’ who were carrying on their virtually incomprehensible conversation at such volume that I could hear it from 250 yards away, but what I could discern were largely boasts about their romantic conquests and threats issued to other people, usually repeated in triplicate at a minimum. Other students of all stripes gave that group a wide berth when walking back from the fields.

Having lived in black neighborhoods in a couple of large cities, not only do you have this incredibly destructive group, but other blacks are almost entirely passive in their reaction to them even when they disapprove. Whites do not like their losers and are willing to see them be punished or suffer for their behavior, blacks by and large stand by them politically and culturally and support lenient treatment from the state and society. I sense a bit of a gender split on this with black men being a lot less tolerant, but for black women these elements are their sons and boyfriends and they try to protect them. Unfortunately they are a hugely important constituency for the Democrats and this skews public policy a lot as a result.

I think you are missing the point. I am not saying there are literally no refuges from violence in DC or Baltimore, just that a very high percentage of these cities residents live close to it relative to lower density and geographically large cities where most of the population lives quite far from shootings and so on, so the quality of life is perceived differently even when the overall rate is high in either case.

One factor that I don’t often see in evaluating perceptions is how close your particular neighborhood is to regular violence. Places like DC, Baltimore, and St. Louis are pretty small in land area so violence is never really that far away no matter where you live, and probably skews views of SF just because it’s also densely populated.

Sprawling cities like Houston and Indianapolis have pretty shameful homicide rates but per square mile it’s not very high – violence is highly concentrated in a few areas so it means many parts of these cities are miles away from any murders at all, which would not be the case in the first list of cities.

These days, “debunked” just means they don’t want to believe a claim and don’t actually have any data to buttress their beliefs. People like Stancil and whoever this guy is fall back on “systemic racism” as having altered what would otherwise be impressive black progress and achievements but they never, ever, have any actual data with a clear link to that.

The Mother Jones reporter I can actually sympathize with to an extent. Although wrong on this and no doubt many other political issues, he’s clearly reasonably intelligent and no one with any sense of pride in their ancestry wants to believe that they are a major outlier rather than representative of what is possible for most of one’s co-ethnics. You can see this with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter as well, although they are far more honest about at least the cultural aspects that keep blacks dead last when it comes to every single positive socio-economic indicator. To Loury’s credit, he at least has a ‘let the chips fall where they may’ view rather than demanding interventions to artificially boost the appearance of achievement. McWhorter clearly understands the genetic piece as well but is so uncomfortable with it and the implications he clings to a sort of old school liberalism that is all but extinct with the actual left that holds power in academia and elsewhere as a kind of intellectual safe harbor.

Stancil, on the other hand, is pond scum. Earnest prog whites who construct increasingly absurd political theories and actual policy that supposedly will put blacks (or other supposedly marginalized people) in their rightful societal place have wrought more political, cultural, and economic damage on the United States than anyone else and it’s not close. I think some people look at him with bemusement due to his low-T and nerdy demeanor, but he and his fellow travelers are truly the biggest enemies of a well-functioning and cohesive society that exist and they deserve be utterly destroyed in the professional and political realm.

We will be subjected to this sort of BS until the end of time unfortunately. It’s both an explanation for the persistent underperformance of blacks and a way to redirect attention from the fact that no one takes a back seat to blacks when it comes to ending black lives.

If others are paying for infrastructure and services that benefit you (roads, defense, courts, environmental and other safety protections, etc.) and forego some of their economic security and opportunity via taxes while you get all the same benefits at no cost year after year, it’s a transfer of wealth as far as I’m concerned.

The amount of wealth transferred to blacks via a) the massive under contribution via taxes to shared national spending priorities and b) cost of social welfare benefits distributed since the civil rights era is in the tens of trillions in present day dollars and that’s just federal, not state and local. I doubt there is an ethnic minority group in human history that has been the recipient of more direct and indirect assistance in an effort to boost their prospects.

It far exceeds any of the wildly overestimated values of slave labor for the 70 some odd years it existed when the US was an independent country, and we will have to subsidize this population for eternity while absorbing massive indirect economic and cultural costs. There is a saying that “if you can’t make it in America, you can’t make it anywhere” and well…

I am assuming that since Cena has previously been shamed into apologizing to China for calling Taiwan a country, this “journalist” is hoping to claim an easy scalp if he responds with unfollowing some accounts or even a written/spoken apology. Obviously he should just completely ignore this manufactured controversy.

A couple of years ago the Reuters published a list of congressmen whose ancestors owned slaves, and just the other day I saw a post on X in which the linked story says those that fall into this category are better off economically than average. No doubt they are hoping for some self-abasement to generate more useless news, which seems to be a common and I guess successful enough tactic to generate enough eyeballs to keep various online publications running despite not serving any real journalistic purpose.

American slavery is a subject that is ripe for a quiet but sustained effort to reduce from its current outsized presence in our history and culture to a more realistic and honest treatment. What is now the US was not a particularly significant consumer of Africa’s warlords most important export, and its impact on economic growth is wildly exaggerated. If Harris is successfully installed as president and the Dems have at least one chamber of Congress, I completely expect a push for reparations to be made as a way of consolidating political support from her base of blacks and single white ladies.

I have commented on this before, but just speaking for myself and the world I inhabit, I am actually quite optimistic that young whites are decidedly unwoke on the whole.

That is also my experience with respect to my children. The only people I have met who seem to be susceptible to the mainstream’s propaganda are a subset of the elderly. Those who still read a newspaper.

Incidentally, it was my oldest’s English teacher that most often tried to work some gender/queer stuff into lessons as well. We asked him what he thought about it and he essentially said no one buys into it and no one really likes that teacher because of her ham-fisted sermonizing.

You also make a good point about who really buys into the woke stuff – it’s the scolds and those without the looks or personality to achieve any social standing on their own merits. That’s accurate for the adults as well by and large, and in my view a large part of the cure for what ails our culture is to just call out that this is all just a power grab an no one in their right mind would listen to the loudest voices. I was once watching news with a lefty acquaintance when they were covering a pro-trans rally of some kind and I simply said “look at these people – do they look like people that we should listen to on anything?” and I got a laugh and “maybe not” as a response.

We are basically ruled on this by the misfits and teacher’s pets from high school.

I have commented on this before, but just speaking for myself and the world I inhabit, I am actually quite optimistic that young whites are decidedly unwoke on the whole. I have middle school and high school aged children and not only have they not bought any of the gay/race stuff but they don’t even try and hide it, nor do their friends. My oldest son’s best friend’s parents are Dems who say all the stuff they are supposed to and he goes to the most prog HS of the local options and he’s a full bore conservative despite (or possibly directly in reaction to) it. At any rate, regularly being around a bunch of HS boys and hearing them talk, they all know what o’clock it is.

Returning to baseball, I was at a game recently when I heard the announcer ask everyone to rise and acknowledge the passing of Billy Bean, which I thought referred to Billy Beane and without looking up commented to my neighbor said I was surprised I hadn’t heard of this before given how well known he was…and was then informed it was not the former A’s executive but an obscure former player who is only known for being gay and the VP of Diversity for MLB. I immediately sat back down.

Universities from the elites on down have come up with an array of stratagems to ensure their diversity admits eventually graduate, but largely it revolves around extremely soft/invented majors that leave instructors a ton of leeway in evaluating the quality of a student’s output.

However, I would think that this would be a lot more difficult at MIT, as it has a lot fewer degree offerings that enable schools to hide the quality of their admits. So while there is still no question there is a very unlikely proportion of black and Latino students in the new class, it would be interesting to see a) what degrees these student intend/actually pursue and b) how many graduate and how long it takes.

Obviously there is a load of closely held data on this at all universities going back decades and curiously they don’t seem anxious to share it as evidence of the quality of their diverse student bodies. I am assuming paring things down means the overall quality of diversity admits is higher, but it would be interesting just how much that helps their numbers on degrees pursued and obtained and if they start trumpeting that information as a way to claim they have struck upon the magic formula for identifying NAM talent.

I do think Trump will regain his stride somewhat, and at the end of the day *all* of the criticisms he could have leveled at Biden apply to Harris so he should stick to that. Harris is probably going to come out of this convention as popular as she ever will be, so the race ultimately comes down to how much/how quickly that erodes in the time left.

As before, I think the election will come down to the two of the so-called blue wall states – MI and PA. Trump is still more likely to sweep the sunbelt battleground states (NV, AZ, NC, GA), in which case Harris must sweep WI, MI, PA. If Trump indeed does sweep the sunbelt and then wins either MI or PA, it’s curtains.

That said, even I am occasionally affected by the constant drumbeat of how Kamala’s numbers are rising and how she is now leading the election, but then I see a poll like this:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/poll-harris-trump-statistical-dead-heat-in-virginia/ar-AA1p7Eu6

Virginia appears to be in play in the presidential election, with Vice President Kamala Harris holding a slight lead over former President Donald Trump in the commonwealth, according to a poll released Tuesday morning.

The Institute for Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College shows Harris ahead of Trump by three percentage points (47%-44%) in a head-to-head matchup. When other candidates were included, Harris still leads by three points (45%-42%). When factoring in the poll’s 4.5% margin of error, Harris and Trump are in a statistical dead heat.

The poll is the first major survey on Virginia voters since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race last month. Earlier polling data showed Biden and Trump tied, with some showing the former president leading in the commonwealth.
Virginia is not a consensus battleground state, though the Trump campaign and Republicans such as Gov. Glenn Youngkin differ from that opinion and believe it is pivotal.

The economy appears to be the most pressing issue heading into the election, with 48% of respondents saying it is the No. 1 factor. A distant second is abortion (16%), closely followed by immigration (15%), foreign affairs (6%) and crime (4%).

If Harris can’t carry VA, a relatively reliable blue state these days and one that contains the epicenter of the Establishment and THE suburb of the Imperial Capital (Northern Virginia), she is done.

The fact that she is only 3% ahead in such a blue state (margin of error 4.5%) at the height of her media-driven popularity doesn’t bode well for her, I think.

Also, I bet this (and the fact that he’s facing Harris-Walz, not Biden-Harris) makes Trump wish that he had picked Glenn Youngkin, not JD Vance as his VP candidate. Unlike Vance who underperformed all other Republicans in a reliably Republican state in his only election, Youngkin won in a reliably Democratic state and now enjoys a commanding voter approval (around 55%).

If the Trump/Vance ticket were to lose, Youngkin would make a formidable Republican candidate in 2028 against Harris.

I seem to recall Mr. Breland was the genesis of another iSteve post sometime in the not too distant past.

Anyhow, the total unwillingness to accept that evolutionary pressures doesn’t exempt the brain is at a conscious level related to the racial implications since the left has been assuring us for several generations now that blacks are just as capable – nay, more so – than whites if only the fiendishly clever systems of discrimination erected the dominant society prevented them from demonstrating this. That blacks haven’t taken their rightful place in the neighborhoods and positions of power they richly deserve absolutely in no way reflects any cultural or cognitive shortcomings.

But secondarily, and perhaps not as consciously although maybe more important from an ideological standpoint, the reality of a genetic basis for IQ implies that the overwhelming majority of political and social interventions in life and culture will never, ever work. At the broadest level, the left believes humans and society can be perfected through clever social engineering, and this has spawned a vast web of programs that a) redistribute income, another core goal, b) buy voter loyalty, and c) validates their sense of being more moral and innovative than the knuckle draggers who populate half of the country who they get to inflict their will upon.

So to accept a biological basis in cognitive ability and the futility of solving what they view as the most pressing racial and economic issues through the gentle hand of well-intentioned policy leaves them with nothing to offer than a program of redistribution that essentially comes down to vengeance. To be sure, the most committed members on the left *are* motivated largely by vengeance, but a large part of normie Dems are not.

I am somewhat hopeful that the hereditarian view is gaining real ground, albeit much more slowly that I would like. I was at a conference recently in which I was talking to a white female lib about the lack of ‘representation’ in a particular business and made the comment that different groups have different interests and abilities and she agreed with that. Obviously anecdotal but on a broader level within my particular field there is a distinct lack of zeal for racial preferences across a broad front of professionals despite the attempt of regulatory agencies to impose it.

Having some Minnesotans in my family, unfortunately they are utterly deluded about what they have done to their state. It seems like a very high percentage of the Twin Cities population are naive left of center whites who grew up in distant suburbs or exurbs and feel like being associated with diversity is positive, even if it means substantially higher crime and totally alien populations of both foreign and domestic origins consume a lopsided share of public resources, to say nothing of the degradation of their urban neighborhoods. It’s a sprawling enough area where most are not directly impacted so they can be sanctimonious about their new-found diversity without having to interact with it much.

Silver isn’t right about everything but I do feel that he is better than most than putting his emotions and bias to the side to try and put forth his best forecast about where things are headed at the present. His sentiment that Harris has the lead at present is accurate, I believe.

The Dem establishment – who deserves condemnation for the deliberate fraud the Biden presidency has been – had the brains to shove him out the door when it was obvious he couldn’t win. Harris is not particularly politically talented, is implicitly part of the unpopular current administration, and has zero grasp of any public policy that I can discern. However, putting her forward gave them a fresh shot at defining their candidate in the public eye with the aid of their collaborators in the media and it’s working, which a useful reminder of just how easily led and manipulated most Americans are. Trump reacted with his trademark lack of discipline, which is the best thing that could have happened for the nascent Harris campaign.

I do think Trump will regain his stride somewhat, and at the end of the day *all* of the criticisms he could have leveled at Biden apply to Harris so he should stick to that. Harris is probably going to come out of this convention as popular as she ever will be, so the race ultimately comes down to how much/how quickly that erodes in the time left.

If whites had comparable behavior and violent crime rates it would be on the front page of every news site and nightly broadcast, with the Dems leading the way on hard core punitive measures in the name of public safety and decency.

Instead it’s crickets because nothing is allowed to reflect poorly on the left’s favorite group and most loyal voting demographic.

Perhaps he is assuming they will manage to kill off the St. Paul Pioneer Press and absorb their subscriber base?

Anyway, it seems a large enough share of Minnesotans are OK with being told all the political changes and social costs imposed by their diversity own goal are actually good for them. Truly a place with its collective head in the sand about what they have wrought.

I said in 2016 it no longer matters who the President is. Trump tried to make it matter. He accomplished some very good things: progressive tax reform with the higher personal deduction and the SALT caps; remain-in-Mexico; withdrawal from Afghanistan; getting NK and SK talking to each other; appointing solid, federalist judges; lightening the regulatory burden.* He was attacked every step of the way and we were subjected to a four-year freakout over Russiagate, BM, and COVIDiocy, culminating in abandonment of longstanding election integrity measures.

The Democratic Party rigged its own primaries to lock out Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden assumed office already entering Stage 4 dementia after a statistically improbable, opaque and logistically flawed election. Joe Biden was not, not I tell you, unfit for the Presidency until all of a sudden he was, after sweeping up all the delegates with no time left for an open primary fight, and bequeathing Caramel Harris $90M in campaign funds. (How? Is that legal? Who knows, who cares!)

Harris for her part is a complete midwit, and even lazier than Obama. Again, it doesn’t matter who the Presidentess is. We also get four years of calling a tall Ashkenazi lawyer named Doug “First Gentleman.” Puke.

* – Wait a minute, remind me again why I’m supposed to be collapsing onto my fainting couch at the prospect of a Trump presidency? Why I’d vote for Caramel Harris? Maybe Steve can write a post and explain.

Obviously there are policy questions that might lead one to consider voting Democratic but it’s hard to take any political movement seriously that indulges in what is so obviously an invented fantasy for maladjusted and massively insecure people to try and distinguish themselves. I have yet to have encountered a real-life pronoun person that isn’t just outright homely and awkward with people.

I used to feel sort of sorry for them but no longer – most of them would happily see you publicly castigated and suffer actual punishment for violating their constructed gender identity, so frankly you can’t give them any quarter. Same with the people who still mask, another group that proudly wears their neuroses as a badge of honor and given the chance would make everyone else participate in it again under pain of government sanction.

Kamala is truly an unusual breed of mutt. I have to say that she is perhaps the most improbable major party candidate that I can recall – she doesn’t have family money/power behind her like Bush/Gore/Kerry/Romney and although she’s from a broken home she clearly isn’t as smart as political strivers like Clinton or Obama.

It seems her most important skill in relation to her political rise was vigorously tapped to its fullest extent quite awhile ago, so perhaps the lesson here is that the Deep State or whatever you want to call it is so fully in control that it can manufacture consent to the point that you just need a warm body as a candidate – Biden’s 2020 run was totally inorganic and Harris 2024 is even more so.

Walz is the absolute worst type of white person in America – he lives in a fantasy world of white oppressors and beleaguered yet noble blacks while having zero first hand experience of either, and shapes his entire worldview and actions around it. It’s this archetype that has brought the entire West to the pass it’s at now, where the cultural inheritance and historical people are being shoved aside for a supposedly superior multicultural popular democracy of which there isn’t a single successful example in human history.

Kamala is a windbag who has found that she simply has to parrot the identity-based bromides expected of any minority political figure in America. I hate them both for different reasons but Walz is worse – he at least should/could know better and is a traitor to his own class and people whereas I don’t expect anything out of the Kamalas of the world.

Exactly – the media got tough on Biden only after it was apparent that no amount of massaging or framing would be enough to rescue him, which is exactly what the Democratic brahmins wanted so they had cover to force him off the ticket. Now they are back to carrying water for the party, and the sudden appearance of stories about how dynamic and fun Kamala is (oddly, no actual voters felt that way when she got loads of exposure in 2020) are all over the place, and they will hammer how historic she would be and so on.

It’s important as a general rule to remember most people are sheep (applies to both sides) and that there are a *lot* of people who hate Trump and will take any excuse they can to vote against him, which is why Harris has benefitted from a significant swing in polling. This is where Trump’s historic lack of discipline could really come back to bite him. Harris is beatable because enthusiasm will probably cool off a bit, events at home and abroad will happen that can be used to hold the de facto incumbent to account, there are no doubt plenty of personal and political opportunities to make hay, and fundamentally she doesn’t engender personal loyalty from voters.

The media will never, ever intentionally help out the right or Trump. The fundamental public anxieties about inflation/economy, competence, illegal immigration and crime remain – stick to those topics and eventually Harris will have to address these things through the media.

Totally agree. The history of the Anglosphere is really going to be something to behold for future generations. The trajectory from exploring and conquering various parts of the globe to the deliberate dilution and disenfranchisement of its heritage population really is a descent into civilizational mental illness, to say nothing of late stage fetishism around worship of outlier racial and sexual groups.

The left’s “saving democracy” slogan is a hollow joke for the most part, but there is a kernel of truth in the oft-repeated claim that support for representative government is weakening. It’s portrayed as a sort of MAGA cult having to do with Trump when in reality it’s that a growing share of the population realizes that this system not only doesn’t reflect the will or interests of most people, it’s actively hostile to them and the gay/race/immigration stuff is simply a humiliation ritual. The question of our age is whether a successful backlash takes place or if we essentially slide into permanent administrative state authoritarianism dressed up as multicultural democracy.

As the famous video of the Chinese supervisor working in Africa goes, “it’s all so tiresome.” For the life of me, I cannot think of a single large news outlet story I have read in the last 25 years that treated blacks as accountable for their actions or spoke honestly about national trends that are driven primarily by this one group.

That said, I will stick to my repeated claim that the tide is going on America’s longstanding cultural and political deference to blacks. Aside from the demographic changes that will mean diverse America has a much larger share of the population from groups that are largely indifferent to black demands, based on my completely anecdotal observations of my teen children and their friends, many young whites are not the least bit unclear or deluded when it comes to racial reality. Naturally the last group to change their views will be the elites at the helm of various media outlets, colleges, and so on, but I do think in the coming years there will be subtle cultural indicators that things are changing.