Stay out of the road, if you want to grow old.
- Unknown

Before we begin, posting may be light the next few weeks, as your faithful secret agent must once again venture out into the world for God and Country. I still have another draft in the mix, another edition of Max’s Musings, so I may have something for you during my time on assignment. Otherwise, posting will be sparse, unless something pops off during that time (which routinely occurs while I’m away).

Today’s entry will be a short one, a prepping-related piece. As some of you may be aware, I’m a true crime fan, especially missing persons cases. I recently discovered the YouTube channel Hot On The Case, hosted by Breanna Heim, and she’s got me hooked. Heim does an excellent job diving deep into both solved and unsolved mysteries, offering exhaustive, fact-based overviews, along with a full slate of possible explanations, approaching everything with a heavy dose of scientific skepticism. She’s good at conveying large amounts of information in a comprehensive, concise fashion, so I highly recommend her channel.

One of the cases she covered was that of Lars Mittank, a 28-year-old German man who went missing in Bulgaria while on vacation in July 2014. It’s a case so bizarre, it must be seen to be believed, and one which, in Heim’s words, you won’t be able to get out of your head.

For the sake of time, I’m not going to analyze the case itself, as Heim’s video more than does the good job of thoroughly explaining all facets of it. I’ll however discuss some practical preparedness and personal safety lessons we can learn from Lars Mittanks’s disappearance.

When in a foreign country, be on your best behavior. The trouble seems to have begun while Mittank and his friends were at a bar watching a soccer match (the 2014 FIFA World Cup was ongoing at the time) and he got into an argument with some locals. Though it was about soccer, getting into arguments with locals about anything can be dangerous. I have no way of knowing if Mittank did or said anything to provoke the men he argued with, but it apparently did escalate to where the locals were threatening violence.

Good or bad, right or wrong, none of it really matters. What matters is that you’re in someone else’s home. Their rules are the only ones that matter. Interact with and enjoy the company of locals, most certainly. But remember that you’re a guest and if you want to be treated with hospitality, you must act in such a way to court that hospitality.

Stick together. Period. The next major misstep occurred when his friends stopped by a McDonald’s on their way back to the hotel. Mittank chose to wait outside while his friends ordered food. He then decided he didn’t want to wait and chose to walk back on his own, a bad idea in its own right, a decision which is apparently at the heart of his eventual disappearance.

It bothered me that Mittank chose to walk back to the hotel alone. Why? Could he really not wait for his friends? I understand he had been drinking and thus may not have been in the most sound state of mind. It makes it all even less excusable. His friends probably should’ve kept a better eye on him, maybe even insisted he come inside with them.

Whatever the case may be, being in a foreign country, separating yourself from your group, and walking around alone at night is a bad idea. It ended up being a costly choice for Mittank.

If you get hurt, get treatment immediately. Mittank appeared to have been assaulted at some point while separated from his group, suffering a damaged ear drum in the process. As Heim notes in the video, this can be a serious injury. Even if it didn’t feel like a big deal, the fact he was in a foreign country made it all the more important to get checked out, since it’s always more difficult for visitors to get medical care. What troubled me while learning about this case is how Mittank and his friends still had a few days until the vacation was over, plenty of time to get to a hospital and get checked out, but he never did until the very end of the trip.

We’re not talking about a cut or bruise, either. We’re talking about an injury resulting from a blow to the head. Typically, an ear drum gets damaged either through direct contact through the ear canal or a very hard blow to the head. It seems what happened to Mittank was the latter. Head injuries are always worth getting checked out. Maybe Heim mentioned it in the video, but I don’t recall hearing that the assault was ever reported to police, either. Not that it would’ve made a difference. But it would’ve at least created a paper trail or alerted authorities to a potential problem.

To their credit, the friends did express concern over what had happened to Mittank. It was probably his insistence that he was fine which eventually allayed their concerns, and he apparently displayed no outward symptoms over the next few days, until the end of the trip. Still, let the story be a lesson: if you suffer a blow to the head, especially during a physical altercation, get checked out. That’s not the type of injury you want to take a chance on, especially in a foreign country.

Bad decisions snowball. I think what ultimately sealed Mittank’s fate was that he was left alone in Bulgaria when the trip was over because symptoms were still present and he was finally convinced to get checked out to make sure he was okay to fly. It was at this point he learned his ear drum had been damaged, and several days had passed since. I’m hard-pressed second-guess anyone’s decisions in the heat of the moment, but I highly doubt Mittank wasn’t feeling some symptoms afterwards, even as his friends reported he seemed fine. A damaged ear drum isn’t asymptomatic.

Unfortunately, by the time he learned his ear drum had been damaged, it was time to fly home, but Mittank couldn’t, not without getting checked out first. His friends did offer to stay with him, but Mittank told them he’d be fine, and for them to go on home. Honestly, I can’t help but confess I’d have probably told my friends the same thing. This is where at least one friend should’ve been willing to make a sacrifice and insist on staying with him. I can’t overly fault them, but man, leaving an injured friend in a foreign country seems quite the reckless gamble.

Still, you can’t get around this fact: had Mittank been checked out sooner, he would’ve learned of the extent of his injuries when not only his entire friend group was around, but when they still had a hotel reservation. By waiting until the end of the trip, not only did his friends have to choose between leaving or staying with him, Mittank also had nowhere to stay. He eventually did find a hotel, albeit in a more dangerous part of town, the last thing you want to have to do as a foreigner. By making one wrong choice after another, Mittank had built himself a whole mound of trouble by the end of it, one he clearly was unable to climb.

A key theme in my writing, especially when it comes to prepping, is that the most important choices you ever make are never made in the moment. They’re in fact made in advance, and the choices you think you make in the moment are a reflection of what you’re forced to fall back on when Life deals you a challenge.

Someone who prepares and thinks ahead of time about how they’re going to deal with an emergency is far more likely to make the prudent decisions and to not allow events to take them for a ride. Someone who didn’t prepare, didn’t think ahead, all because they didn’t want to let it spoil their good time, or had the arrogance to believe they’d just figure it all out when it happens, will either suffer from paralysis-by-analysis or make one imprudent decision after another.

Life isn’t about being at either Condition Red or Condition White at any given time. You can prepare for emergencies without letting it ruin your good time. Making the conscious decision to always stick with your group or at least one other person is a simple prep which requires next to no effort on your part. Going to the hospital is uncomfortable, nobody likes going to the hospital. That’s why it’s often better to go sooner rather than later, when the stakes are lower. You don’t want to wait to go to the hospital until the stakes are high. By then, it could be too late.

I’ll wrap things up on a personal story. Over Memorial Day a couple years ago, I traveled overseas. It was a great trip, one I still think about regularly, but the one hiccup I had occurred while surfing, when I got seawater trapped behind one of my ears. Though admittedly a less serious problem than Mittank’s, I still decided to let it drain on its own. Except it wouldn’t.

The next day, I went to a local pharmacy. They gave me some drops to put in my ear, which did nothing to alleviate the problem. By now, I couldn’t hear at all out of that ear, and felt pressure building inside of it. Ironically, there was an urgent care center right next door to the resort hotel I was staying at, but I foolishly resisted the urge to pay it a visit, even though in retrospect, not only should I have, but I had plenty of time to do so without putting a dent into the trip.

Finally, on the day of departure, I didn’t want to risk flying with an ear full of water, so I finally visited the urgent care. In a visit that lasted little over a half-hour, the doctor inspected my ear, determined I had a giant chunk of earwax obstructing my ear canal, and successfully drained my ear by flushing it. My hearing out of that ear was probably the best it’d been since childhood. Afterwards, I paid the low, low developing world price of $75 USD out of pocket for the visit. You can imagine how stupid I felt for not addressing the problem sooner.

In the end, I made the right choice, and all’s well that ends well. My story is a lesson in why tolerating pain and discomfort isn’t necessarily a good thing, why glaring problems - not being able to hear out of your ear is one, as is a damaged ear drum - need to be addressed immediately, and how waiting to deal with a problem always has a consequence of more problems down the line.

In my case, I was fortunate. In Lars Mittank’s case, not so much. Learn from me, learn from him. Decide ahead of time how you plan on handling an emergency and have preps in place. Even a broad outline of a plan lacking specifics is better than nothing. It’ll at least help you focus if a problem does arise. Travel as a group, stay together as a group. People ultimately never make it on their own. Even one friend can be the difference between life and death. Your life is nothing to mess around with.

Watch Breanna Heim’s video on the Mittank disappearance when you get the chance to get the full story. By the way, she also has an excellent overview and analysis of the Brian Shaffer disappearance:

What are your thoughts on the Lars Mittank case? What do you think happened to him? What personal safety or preparedness lessons can we learn from it? Discuss it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Financial analysts are atop the list of commentators and experts I love listening to most. That’s because I find them among the most sober observers of current events. It likely owes to their analytical, data-driven mentality, which means they tend to suffer no fools. They’ve also proven uniquely resistant to ideological persuasion, unlike, for example, scientists.

Finance is also a holistic discipline. This means financial analysts must understand a wide range of issues and subjects, as it all has a hand in how money moves around the world, how it influences the thinking of decision-makers. I find what financial analysts have to say far more interesting than anything experts or specialists in any other discipline have to say about a given topic, even if it’s within their professional lane.

It’s why I tend to take financial analysts more seriously than I do others when they the United States is headed for some major cataclysm such as civil war. Not all of them do, or at least they don’t talk about it much, preferring to stick to number-crunching. But many not only do, they use data to show how it could happen here. This is quite different from the usual commentary on the topic, which entails little more than vibes with a nod to history here and there. Facts never convince anyone, but if you’re going to tell people how we’re all going to die, the only way to get people to listen is to show you know what you’re talking about.

That’s exactly the argument made recently by financial analyst Darius Dale on Erik Townsend’s excellent podcast Macrovoices: [quoted without edit]:

Again, where this is all headed is on slide fifty-six. The s- historical track record of societies that share the US’s wealth pump/reverse Robin Hood effect dynamics is extremely poor. Again, this is data from 100 societies that they studied at the Complexity Science Institute across millennia, multiple millennia.

Societies that have our reverse Robin Hood wealth pump dynamics They don’t-- It doesn’t end well. There’s seventeen percent of them had systemic violence against elites. Again, we have four hundred million guns in this country. We saw what happened. We saw a preview of that on Jan six. We have a standing militia now that is only operates to the drum of one man.

I tend to be of the belief that if those 400 million guns posed any real threat, we would’ve been disarmed by now or they would’ve at least tried. I think guns are here to stay and I also think the people running things have come to terms with the fact Americans are the most heavily armed population in the developed world, maybe the entire world. If they see it as a problem, it’s one they’ve learned to manage rather than confront.

At the same time, I think the point here, the real point he was trying to get across, is that the U.S. has a capacity for internal conflict second to none in the developed world. That very much is true. Despite civil war in Europe being much more likely, the violence there is very one-sided, perpetrated by migrants possessing a strong propensity for savage violence. In the U.S., it’s more diffuse, even as some groups have a much higher propensity for violence than others. Americans are a mix of tough and meek people who, nonetheless, only need an excuse and cover to become violent.

It gets worse:

Twenty percent of these societies end in recurrent civil wars lasting for a hundred plus years. Forty percent of these societies wind up with assassination of rulers. Fifty percent of these societies see substantial population decline. Sixty percent of these societies see state collapse via conquest or disintegration into multiple states.

Hundred-plus years? Of course, it’s important to understand what’s really being said here. The term “recurrent” means a society sees many civil wars throughout its history, or that a conflict becomes “frozen” before it resumes once more. Yet this still offers cold comfort. If the U.S. is now entering a period which, historically, brings about more than one bout of civil war, then the only question left is how much violence we’ll see in our lifetimes. My personal belief is that armed conflict is more integral to the U.S. than most are comfortable admitting, and that war will once again become the center of American life.

You might’ve noticed Dale makes reference to something he calls the “reverse Robin Hood effect.” It’s exactly what it sounds like - if Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, then the reverse is to steal from the poor to give to the rich. Basically, the wealth gap is growing, which is old news, except now we’re reaching a point it’s going to have tangible consequences for America’s safety and stability.

Sixty-seven percent of these societies see systemic downward mobility of elites, which I would argue is like the least, the most peaceful path here. That’s the New Deal path. That’s, if you think about what this one represents, that’s the New Deal. That’s the elites coming together to realize that this system’s gonna malfunction if we don’t stop this reverse Robin Hood effect.

I think the New Deal, like the Civil Rights Act, is something Americans have never been forced nor permitted to critique at a substantive level. It’s become yet another sacred national myth, one we must worship as though it were itself a deity.

That said, a certain amount of redistribution isn’t just necessary, it’s inevitable. A society cannot endure vast levels of inequality for long. The elites depend on the lower classes as much as the reverse is true. Without making the Marxist argument that economics is a zero-sum game, the wealthy do benefit from the fact not everyone can be wealthy. The problem is that something like the New Deal, is ultimately, a form of damage control. It’s not a repair. It was a success only because World War II got the economic engines humming again. Without some outside stimulus to the economy, the next New Deal is likely to cause more problems than solve.

Hence:

And so where I think this is headed is the last bar on the right, revolution, civil war, or both. Seventy-five percent of this N of one hundred, those societies had re-featured revolution, civil war, or both. We are two of them, by the way. We had
this thing called the American Revolution in the eighteenth century.

The economy is a national security issue. People consider it barbaric to wage war to save the economy. Yet, what’s history if not a tale of how societies have waged armed conflict to secure resources for itself in the interest of survival? Whether you think it’s right or wrong doesn’t matter. If a society doesn’t wage war against an external enemy, it’ll eventually find an internal enemy, because it’s those you share a home with who are the biggest drain on your resources. Therefore, civil war.

Darius Dale then goes there:

I’m not sure if folks have heard of that. We had this thing called the Civil War in
the nineteenth century. I’m not sure if folks heard of that Do you know what caused
both of those wars? They’ll tell you freedom. They’ll tell you slavery, emancipating
slaves. And I’ll tell you, eh. What caused both of those wars was white men fearing
economic malaise, not just having their income confiscated by the crown or not
being able to establish a real working livelihood for themselves out west and
fearing competition from the slave ruling class.

He’s not wrong. That’s why what he said there was so dangerous. Americans’ understanding of their own history is quite flawed, much of it a form of cope to deal with the tremendous bloodshed and disruption each Fourth Turning brought - Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War II. The way we remember these moments matters a lot. It’s not healthy for a country to remember such cataclysmic events in brutally honest color, but it’s not healthy for a country to have their collective memories be so far removed from reality, either. Fighting and dying by the hundreds of thousands to free slaves sounds more noble than fighting because people thought their livelihoods were at stake, even though that’s literally the top reason people have fought wars throughout history.

He continues:

When white men feel like they can’t put food on their table and take care of their family in this country, they go to war, and they have every right to go to war based on this reverse rob--this perverse reverse Robin Hood effect that I think everybody
should go back and study slide forty-seven and think about what that ultimately
means long term for.

Dale, who’s black, clearly sympathizes with White men here. That said, I don’t think it’s a race thing. Every group prioritizes itself, every group ultimately has the same concerns. It’s just that they have different ways of addressing them. Some groups immediately resort appealing for state intervention or even state violence. Other groups seek greater independence, using violence for the purpose of drawing a line between themselves and state overreach, or even to split themselves off from the incumbent regime, as the Founders and Patriots did during the Revolution, as the South did during the Civil War.

One thing Dale doesn’t get into is the shape of the civil war to come. That’s outside his lane and he rightfully refrains from speculating. He clearly does see some form of widespread violence coming, unless the elites can somehow manage some form of redistribution which doesn’t piss too many off. This doesn’t solve the problem of polarization and disunity, however.

This is why I truly believe with strong conviction that only a major war could save us. Only a major armed conflict could provide the national purpose and the moral justification to allow for redistribution as well as stimulate economic growth. Not a civil war, either, but a war against a foreign enemy. But who? And how could such a polarized, hopelessly divided country be brought together by what’s certain to be an equally divisive conflict?

I don’t know. I don’t even think it’d work. It’s just the only thing that could work. A country that’s never been one people can only be united through bloodshed and hardship. But not if the country is already in a cold civil war as the U.S. currently is. You don’t go from secretly wishing death upon your political opponents to suddenly fighting alongside them in a life-or-death struggle. Stranger things have happened, but until proven otherwise, the idea America can come together once more is wishful thinking.

The Money Is Running Out

What do I think will happen? My views on civil war coming to America have softened over the years. Though I still largely adhere to the Fourth Turning theory, one issue which pops up constantly when thinking about it is that we’re living in vastly different times today compared to previous Fourth Turnings. America’s a much older society, more diverse, more atomized, with a population that only has access to the most comfort we’ve ever seen, but utterly addicted to it. Those factors matter a lot more than people might be willing to admit. Previous Fourth Turnings occurred during more trying circumstances, when America was much younger, more homogeneous, less atomized, life expectancy much lower, and had to endure some real hardship at times.

But you’ve heard my thoughts on that before. Here’s something you haven’t heard yet - this Fourth Turning is happening at a time when a massive welfare state exists in the form of programs like Medicare and Social Security. This ties back to our aging population. It seems like just one factor among many, but it’s unprecedented and changes the game entirely, in my view, in terms of not only how this Fourth Turning will play out, but what we’re going to fight over.

explains in the context of socialism’s rising popularity in the U.S.:

Our financial future is largely set based on decisions that were made long before most Americans were born. Social Security and Medicare were established in 1935 and 1965 respectively. In 1970, they made up a combined 19% of the federal budget. Now, the number is about twice that. And if you don’t include the cost of interest on the debt, without major restructuring Social Security and Medicare will likely be over half of all federal spending within two decades.

When our last Fourth Turning ended in 1945, Social Security had been around for only a decade. Medicare is about as old as the oldest Gen. Xer. That puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? In less than a century, both programs combined constitute the single largest bloc of government expenditure.

We’ve been hearing this argument for years, but we’re now really hitting the point where the math isn’t mathing:

We’re already running a $1.9 trillion deficit. In other words, we have less money coming in than going out, and the problem is about to get much worse.

One might ask why we don’t simply cut Social Security and Medicare. These are programs that transfer money to old people, who are the richest age group in the country. Yet public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of expanding these programs. The public doesn’t like large and broad tax hikes either, so something has to give. And no, simply “taxing the rich” doesn’t solve the problem. Removing the payroll cap on Social Security, for example, would impose an additional 12.4% payroll tax on earnings above $184,500 — paid entirely by the self-employed and split evenly between employer and employee for those with wage income — and only get you between half and two-thirds of the shortfall, depending on which assumptions you use.

The socialism debate is basically about wanting to give everyone, young or old, Social Security and Medicare and not having to wait until retirement age for it. It’s not going to happen, but that’s what the fuss is all about. This is no longer an argument over “big government” vs. “small government.” Both sides agree, in principle, that government should be big and powerful. It’s just a question of scope, who gets to run things.

More:

It’s going to be a fascinating decade in American politics. But that’s not because we’re going to be choosing between implementing or not implementing socialism, which there isn’t room for.

I have no idea what formula of tax increases and spending cuts Congress will eventually settle on. But one thing I know for sure is that we won’t get massive new government programs.

Voters tend to strongly support welfare programs that exist while being pretty unenthusiastic about new spending. The latter requires higher taxes, and if we are willing to massively increase taxes, the money is going to entitlements. No politician is going to be able to enact a massive tax hike to maintain entitlement spending, and then implement another tax hike on top of that. Likewise, no politician is going to be able to cut Social Security and Medicare in order to fund something new.

The tradeoff between raising taxes and cutting entitlements is already going to put future politicians in a difficult enough situation. They will have to anger broad swaths of voters regardless of what they do. That means there will be no political capital left over for the federal government to take on substantial new responsibilities. New major forms of spending – whether Medicare for All, baby bonuses, or whatever – are simply not in the cards.

I think the point sort of gets buried there, but I think what Hanania is saying is this: the next decade - the Fourth Turning, as it were - will be defined by this increasing expectation among voters for more government programs, but an inability to deliver the goods due to a lack of money and inability to raise new taxes, combined with increasing difficulties in funding existing programs.

The entitlements crisis is different from most other things in that politicians in power will have to do something. If they do nothing, spending on Social Security and Medicare will be automatically reduced in the early 2030s as the money runs out. So they can let that happen – which seems unlikely – or do something else that will be tough to swallow.

This Fourth Turning seems destined to center on the question of what to do about the fact that people are living long lives, more people keep migrating to the U.S. and the West, and how nobody really wants to put a stop to any of this or just slow things down. This is quite different from past Fourth Turnings, where there was greater competition for limited resources and lifespans were much shorter. In many ways, people are fighting over the same things they ever did, but the dynamic is reversed. Instead of fighting over a little, they’re fighting over a lot. Instead of fighting to see who lives and dies, they’re fighting over whether we all get to live as long. None of this precludes conflict, but it does fundamentally alter the character of a hypothetical conflict, for better and for worse.

The thing is, this isn’t an economic competition, not strictly. Both sides have elites and their vanguards are the affluent. I doubt we’re going to see old pitted against young, either. Both sides, oddly enough, see similar problems, but they blame different people for it. There are many layers to this clash, which is, ultimately, an ideological one. It’s a problem stemming from a failure to reach achieve consensus, which can be traced back to the fact Americans have never been one people. And likely never will be.

When the U.S. finally does hit that crisis point where, as Richard Hanania says, politicians must do something, what will they do? For years, my own conventional wisdom has been that they’ll do what countries in such a situation have always done: try printing their way out of the crisis. The U.S. Dollar is the world’s reserve currency, after all. As long as America possesses the world’s most valuable monetary denomination and the world’s biggest economy, it has no reason not to exploit this tremendous advantage in their corner, right?

Not so fast. In his own interview with Erik Townsend, economist an fund manager Daniel LaCalle dismisses the notion the U.S. can keep printing its way out of crisis. He begins by explaining how most people don’t understand what money is:

Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about this because a lot of people don’t understand what money is. The concept of money, the way that weunderstand it, i.e., state-issued money, is predominantly state-owned debt. It’s government debt. So what happens is that when governments issue debt, central banks all over the world use that debt as a reserve asset.

That idea that the sovereign debt is the asset of lowest risk and the first recourse in the financial system has been a relatively new, but because we have lived in that environment, we tend to believe that is what has happened always, and that is not the case. So the reason why there was this entrenched view among many citizens and investors about the fact that governments can issue as much debt as they want and nothing happens, and that the 2008 crisis, 2011 crisis, and 2020 crisis showed that it’s governments that actually can bring stability to the economy, is actually the opposite.

So no, governments cannot issue all of the debt that they want, and certainly cannot issue all the currency that they want. Why? Because currency, at the end of the day, is an IOU in which the government basically is demonstrating its credit credibility. It’s the capacity of the state to issue a currency that is widely perceived by citizens as a reserve of value, unit of measure, and generalized mean of payment However, post the 2016, 2016, ‘17 idea of a, of an allegedly eternal growth in debt that would have no significant repercussions because inflation was not a risk, we found ourselves in the 2020, 2021 period in which all limits were exceeded.

And the limits that governments have in terms of issuing currency, i.e. issuing debt, are three. The first is the economic limit, which shows that despite increasing indebtedness and, i.e., stimulating the economy does not grow, productivity growth stagnates, and debt continues to rise faster than GDP.

The second one is the fiscal limit, the one in which governments all over the world f- have found themselves, particularly since 2011, which is that more taxes and higher stimulus packages generate a much worse fiscal situation. Deficits continue to rise, those deficits become unsustainable, and the burden of interest expense in the budget of governments rises to levels that become incredibly dangerous, even with central banks supporting and keeping rates at a low level and obviously with central banks making purchases of sovereign assets.

And the third one is the inflationary limit, which was clearly exceeded in 2020, 2021, when that monetary excess led to an abrupt increase in inflation all over the world, but particularly In those economies that were bragging about the idea that they could increase money supply and debt without any inflationary impact.

So just to summarize, governments have surpassed all of the limits that give them credibility to maintain their debt as a reserve of value, and those limits are the economic limit, the fiscal limit, and the inflationary limit.

There’s a lot there, but I shared it all so you get the full thrust of his argument. The simplified version of this is that the global financial system underwent a major stress test in the early 2020s, exposing its limits. It turns out printing money to stimulate the economy doesn’t work, debts and deficits aren’t getting paid off, and inflation is a very real thing, and any further measures to print our way out of a crisis will only intensify inflation.

The problem, of course, is that politicians don’t have the luxury of sweating such details. All they’re going to hear is the people demanding action be taken to solve a crisis. Nobody’s going to care that it won’t work. They just want to know money’s being spent on them. If you’ve got to print the money to make it happen, then they’re going to print the money. The inflation will be a separate issue they deal with later or allow some other administration do so by finding a way to kick the can down the road.

There are other possibilities, of course. That’s the most likely course of action, however. It’ll unleash a spiral of compounding crises that, if it goes on for long enough, could eventually culminate in civil war, revolution, maybe even a collapse of the union. We’re not there yet. But the road to any one of those destinations is becoming clear.

My guess is that we’ll muddle along, probably at a heightened state of violence or even low-intensity conflict. Polarization will remain high, even worsen. It’s when the U.S. finally hits a major economic or financial crisis that affects the livelihoods and stability of millions of households that a civil war, revolution, collapse, or even the emergence of a Caesar-like figure will finally materialize. I once said before that government shutdowns are becoming so routine, it’s very possible we may end up with a long-term shutdown that drags on endlessly. When it begins affecting daily life or even Medicare and Social Security payments, something will have to be done to break the impasse.

America’s last Fourth Turning began with the Great Depression. It ended with World War II. The current Fourth Turning began with the Great Recession. It’s yet to seen what it’ll end with. If one were to look at the glass as half full, we’ve made it almost two full decades since the start of this long crisis. Maybe the worst is behind us? Or is our luck about to run out?

Final Thoughts

Listening to all these different financial analysts is like listening to a true wiseman’s council. They possess both the knowledge and wisdom to confidently speculate on future events without the bombast or self-assuredness that’s become so emblematic of the commentariat. You have some who believe the U.S. will become an empire with the arrival of a Caesar-like leader. You have some who, like Darius Dale, believe a civil war could happen. Then you have those who see neither. Agree or disagree with them, what you cannot do is dismiss them.

Americans are butting heads over many issues. Yet only one is likely to finally trigger the catastrophic clash so many people seem to think it coming - money, or lack thereof. Ask any married couple what they fight about. Money is usually among the most common responses. There’s a lesson there.

One last thing - maybe things aren’t too bad, according to another financial analyst:

What do you think? What are your thoughts on the role money will play in whether or not the U.S. will see greater violence and unrest in the years to come? How will the U.S. confront the burgeoning financial crisis, if it’s not already here? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on X at @AgentMax90.

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Can anyone be American?

That’s the question at the heart of arguably the hottest political debate currently in the United States. The answer to that question depends mostly on one’s political persuasion, but it also depends on one’s understanding of history, of reality in general. Most on the Left believe the answer to the question to be yes, while most of the Right believe the answer to be no. For my part, the answer to the question may surprise some of you, especially if you haven’t been reading me for long.

Before we get to my answer, I was motivated to write this post in response to an essay written by friend of the blog , who wrote an excellent essay on his own Substack on the topic of ethnic and national identity. Of course, anyone who has followed Kaiser Bauch for any length of time knows he speaks on the topic routinely, But his latest post on the topic is, I think, among his best, because it challenges conventional wisdom on both sides of the debate to an extent not found anywhere else. The reality is that both sides are, to a large degree, guilty of reality-denial, even if one side may be more guilty of it than the other.

I think this is incredibly important because of how fraught the debate is. It’s a highly emotional, triggering topic, and I don’t think there’s really a way to answer the question politically, not in such a way that it “settles” it in any substantive fashion. One way around triggering strong emotions when discussing a contentious issue is to point out how both sides can be right and are wrong on the issue when they are. If nothing else, it filters the stupid loudmouths out of the debate, as it exposes their inability to really engage on the topic at a high level. One of the obstacles we run into is that people in way over their heads try to get in on a discussion for wise adults, making things harder to talk about then they ought to be.

Kaiser Bauch summarizes each side’s stance when it comes to ethnic and, by extension, national identity (for the purposes of this essay, I’ll conflate the terms “ethnic” and “national” and predominantly use the latter over the former):

Both sides of the debate seem to have rather clear-cut answers to those questions. On the “inclusive” side, ethnicity is mostly “disembodied” — stripped of the biological or phenotypical markers of how a member of a certain ethnicity should look — and is determined either purely culturally, or not even that, reduced instead to a mostly administrative-legal status interchangeable with citizenship. For the “exclusive” side, ethnicity is an innate characteristic you are simply born with. For the inclusive group, [former British Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak can become English; for the exclusive group, that is simply nonsensical, because he is, as Kisin said, a brown Hindu, and thus of a different ethnicity.

Pretty straightforward. Liberals, to the extent they believe in it, view nationality as something malleable, at best, or a figurative uniform which can be donned or doffed at any time, at worst. Conservatives, who tend to be more nationalistic, are more sympathetic to the idea there exists a hard limit to whether someone can be of a certain nationality.1

Kaiser explains how both sides are wrong, by first explaining that nationality is a social construct, but that doesn’t make it any less real:

And yet, with all that being the case, I still must hold on to the claim that modern ethnonational groups are, in essence, social constructs. Let me elaborate: something being a social construct does not make it less real, important, or viable — a category error that has become common on the right, largely as an allergic reaction to the left’s opposite error of insisting that everything, including biological sex, is merely constructed. Yet social constructs are real, and they are everywhere around us. Being a fan of a sports club — an affiliation that often reaches quasi-religious and even violent dimensions of tribal in-group affirmation — is one example. So is having close friends, many of them much closer than family members such as cousins. Religion is a social construct. And so is ethnonational affiliation. Large, complex societies require impersonal principles capable of binding together people who are not related in any traceable, kinship sense — no shared grandparents, no family tree connecting them — even if, on average, they may be more genetically similar to one another than to outsiders. They do not know one another, and yet are willing to cooperate and feel some degree of mutual loyalty and solidarity.

My belief is that social constructs are very much real if people are willing to kill or be killed over it. That might seem like a very crude way of looking at it. But I’m a practical man with a bias for history. The reality is, nations and states exist because people were willing to kill or be killed so they could. And as Kaiser says, all societies need something to bind everyone together. What matters is it works.

To hit closer to home, try telling any family, the most common social construct in the world, that what they have together isn’t real. It won’t go down too well. Not much more to say there.

Kaiser goes on to challenge genetics as a basis for nationality, a thinking which has strong currency on the Right, especially on the more extreme end. The passage is long, may be difficult to follow for some, and his Substack is subscription only, so I don’t want to give away too much out of respect for his work.

I’ll summarize his main point: genetics themselves tell us nothing about what group a person belongs to. Since nationalities are social constructs, one would need to first create the identity group, then associate to a particular genetic make-up. In other words, until someone first created the English Premier League and someone else first established the Manchester United Football Club, Cristiano Ronaldo could never have become arguably the most famous Red Devil in history.

Put another way, Kaiser compares genetics-as-nationality to gender:

A good way to illustrate this limit of genetics as a basis for ethnic belonging is to compare it with biological sex. Sex has a real genetic on/off switch. One gene (roughly) flips development toward male or female — that’s why sex splits people into two clear groups with very few in-between cases of intersex people. Ethnicity doesn’t have a switch like that. You can’t point at a genome and read off ethnicity — you first have to decide, using history and politics, which group counts as “French,” and only then can you go and measure it. Sex doesn’t need that extra step. Ethnicity always does.

Surely, genetics means something, doesn’t it? Of course it does. Not everything in this world is a social construct, and genetics is literally how humans are “coded.” Even if you dupe yourself into drawing a distinction between genetics and the whole person, there comes a point where the distinction is meaningless.

As Kaiser says:

What is crucial here is whether the person visually passes as a member of the group, rather than how genetically distant they really are. If I spoke the language without an accent, I could probably pass, without much question, as a member of almost any nation in Europe. So looks, and thus skin color, obviously matter a great deal, because there is a point at which genetic distance becomes large enough to carry phenotypical traits that make the, conscious or subconscious, belief in common ancestry simply unbelievable. The person simply looks different enough to clearly not be part of the ethnic group — they are of what we usually describe as a different race. Genetic distance, in other words, is not just a figure that grows steadily — past a certain point, the accumulated difference stops being a matter of degree and starts being a difference in kind: quantity becomes a quality of its own.

Simplified: nationality may be a social construct, but there will always be a correlation between nationality and genetics. After all, groups do attract and develop like-for-like people. Over time, no matter how inclusive a group may be, it’ll eventually develop a “profile” of its own.

Getting to the point, Kaiser argues that while a nationality certainly cannot be entirely inclusive, it cannot be entirely exclusive, either:

Yet after thinking about it for quite a long time, I came to a conclusion about how to really define belonging to an ethnic group that is not entirely satisfying, but is the only one that does not immediately hit an endless stream of roadblocks, exceptions, border cases, and grey zones. A member of an ethnic group is someone who identifies as such and would be authentically accepted as such by an overwhelming majority of the members of that ethnic group. That’s pretty much it. If you say “I am English/German/Czech” and most people of that ethnicity honestly agree with that, then you are that. It is what I would call a matter of collective subjectivity.

Again, because nationality is a social construct, there’s no scientific, no procedural way to answer the question of who belongs and who doesn’t. It’s ultimately up to the members of the group itself, and that standard can and often does change over time. How that change comes about is a separate matter. The point is that change takes place, whether we like it or not, and the rules for inclusion and exclusion will eventually evolve. Furthermore, every society will have different standards of inclusion/exclusion. It’s simply not useful, due to cultural, contextual, historical, and social differences, to use any other society as a model of what to do or what not to do.

This implies that someone like Jared Taylor, born and raised until age 16 in Japan, is off-base in aspiring for the U.S. to become Japan-like culturally and demographically. He can wish for it all he likes, but it’s never going to happen due to America’s peculiarities, and don’t tell me all we need to do is remigrate or ethnically cleanse everyone.

Conversely, liberals are barking up the wrong tree when expecting other countries to embrace diversity and multiculturalism the way we have here. The rest of the world simply isn’t as progressive, and for good reason. As we’ll touch upon later, demographics aren’t anything to mess with, even as we should accept that demographic change and migration are perfectly normal phenomena in history.

There’s so much more Kaiser discusses that’s worth mulling over. Out of respect for his work, I’ll leave the rest of it be. I’ll summarize why he thinks both sides are wrong on the issue of national identity.

Those who argue for more exclusive definitions of national identity are wrong because, in addition to it being a social construct, we’re all mixed to a degree (there exist few truly unique ethnic groups in the world). Step outside the Western context for a second - it’s hard for even the most progressive liberal to understand how truly diverse the world is. If we’re not mixed at a biological level, then we most certainly are at a social level, all over the world. I often make the observation that a country is basically an unhappy household where all sorts of different people are forced to share a home. That’s true even in the West. But I digress.

The point is, aside from biology, there’s no hard-and-fast way to define who’s of one nationality and who isn’t. Yet genetics isn’t just an impractical way of determining national identity. As explained earlier, it doesn’t really define it at all. Again, groups like the Irish and Koreans are unique enough to build biologically-determined national identities out of, but ethno-states are quite uncommon for the most part, for reasons beyond the scope of this essay. It simply doesn’t define reality for most people of the world.

In an essay from December 2025, Kaiser, who’s Czech, said:

But precisely because of the geographic position of the Czech lands at the center of the European continent, and the development of Central and Eastern European national movements as highly language-driven, it has always been self-evident to me that the Czech nation is not a biological construct but a cultural one. If one of my male ancestors living during the centuries of the Austrian Empire had joined the hundreds of thousands of Czechs who emigrated to the overwhelmingly German-speaking parts of the Empire—territories that only after World War I became Austria—decided he liked it there, met a woman, and stayed (as roughly half of those who made such a move did), I would today be Austrian, plain and simple.

In other words, our national identity is often a product not of genetics, but of where we ended up being born. Of course, what he says isn’t universally true. Once more, the point is that biology is one factor, not the only one, nor even the most important, and that different nations are different types of constructs. There are no immutable laws of physics when it comes to national identity. It’s worth noting that culture seems to form a better basis for nationhood than biology, because culture truly is distinct and all-encompassing.

On the other hand, those who argue in favor of more inclusive definitions of national identity fail to acknowledge that, at some point, the line has to be drawn. All groups are inherently exclusive in that eventually you bring in someone who just doesn’t belong. Liberals would argue this means nothing, as there’s always an exception, but it means something precisely because this inclusive mentality is premised on the belief the differences between humans are only skin-deep.

This is obviously false. The fact biology serves as a poor basis for national identity doesn’t change the fact there, in fact, exists significant differences between people of different groups, what Kaiser calls “genetic distance.” At some point, it matters, because, as Kaiser says, quantity has a quality all its own. Get enough of one group of people, they become another rule as opposed to an exception. The idea biology has no impact on things like behavior and culture is so stupid, so wishful, only a highly-educated progressive could believe it.

Identity also matters with respect to time. That a people were the result of demographic change, migration, and mixing 900 years ago means very little today in practical terms. That millions of people throughout Asia carry the genes of Genghis Khan doesn’t mean they have any sort of birthright by virtue of the lands he conquered. I once made the point that anything that happened more than a single human lifetime ago holds very little significance to us personally, nor should it. Telling someone to accept replacement because it happened to them hundreds or thousands of years ago is like telling someone to end their lives immediately because their ancestors are dead.

On the flip side, the more a society endures, the greater the length of continuity, the more it matters. Given the impermanence of life in general, for anything to endure for centuries or even millennia is truly remarkable. All societies have a right to exist, to defend their land and way of life, so why shouldn’t it be more so for societies that have lasted longer than others? Furthermore, if an identity group stands the test of time, why can’t it stand on its own, independent of how it came to be centuries, millennia, or even as recently as a few decades ago?

I’m belaboring the point, but in an American context, why would someone whose family lineage goes all the way back to the founding or past that not only not be considered purely American, but also not be more American than anyone else? Why would the thought of that be offensive to anyone?

I know I said I wouldn’t quote any more from his piece, but I think Kaiser makes the point better than I could:

If modern genetics has proved anything beyond doubt, it is that every single group on earth is the product of many layers of deep historical mixing of previous populations. That is simply a scientific fact. Yet with enough time passed, quantity becomes a quality of its own as well. Sure, we are all mixed, but recent mixing and mixing that took place 4,000 years ago are simply qualitatively different phenomena — the same way the genetic distance between the average Dutch and average French person, while real and measurable, is qualitatively different from the distance between the average Dutch and average Indonesian person.

Even if someone buys into civic-liberal model of nationality, there still needs to be a line drawn somewhere. An identity means absolutely nothing if you cannot clearly demarcate where it ends as well as where it begins. For anything to be viable, it has to have limiting principles. If, for example, an American is simply someone who’s a citizen of this country, fine. But that means non-citizen immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, are by definition not American even by that open standard. Even the civic-liberal model implies that it’s impossible for every last person on the planet to become American. Yet, this is the very dispute causing a great fissure today in the U.S.

Once more, I hate to keep quoting from his essay, but I’ll share this last bit where Kaiser cautions against using history as a way to justify and rationalize contemporary demographic change and mass immigration [bold mine]:

The fact that mixing has historically occurred does not, by itself, license the inference that any pace and scale of migration today is therefore equally normal and unproblematic. Historical mixing events varied enormously — some unfolded over centuries, some involved near-total population replacement, often accompanied by conflict, violence, disease, or famine among the existing population. The people being mixed most likely weren’t all that fond of the process. The historical fact that mixing happened tells you nothing, by itself, about whether this particular pace and scale will integrate smoothly, or produce friction, or whether the product of the mixing will be better, more functional, or more successful than the previously, recently “unmixed” populations.

In the end, change is inevitable. But this doesn’t mean change is desirable or that we should get ahead of ourselves and force the issue. Demographic change, the mass movements of people, these are things which have never happened smoothly throughout history, have led to tremendous violence, and to the ends of everything people have known and loved. It’s easy to accept change when it’s on your terms or when it happens to someone else. And no, it’s not a simple, black-white story about natives obstinately resisting change, using violence to do so. Sometimes, it’s the newcomers who do the oppressing.

Only a fool thinks we can get it right this time. The problem is it’s not up to them. It’s not up to some highly-educated inclusive, progressive feminist living in a two-story home in suburbia, surrounded by limitless comfort and convenience, and the highest median standard of living in the world, to decide what the consequences of change will be. The exclusionists and restrictionists may be wrong about much. But when it comes to the road ahead, it’s those trying to halt or at least slow the inevitable who understand best what’s at stake for all of us.

In the next installment of this two-parter, I’ll answer the question posed at the outset: Can anyone be American? For now, what are your thoughts on Kaiser Bauch’s argument? Do you also think both sides, not just one side, get it wrong? Talk about it in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on X at @AgentMax90.

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Still hot on the heels of the release of his new book Kakistocracy, Richard Hanania continues to rail against letting the people have too much of a say in governance [bold mine]:

Many support democracy because it supposedly gives the people what they want. A better argument in favor of democracy is that it very often doesn’t. Take the issue of price controls, which have broad support across the political spectrum.

Wait - what? A better argument in favor of democracy is that it doesn’t give people what they want? WTF kind of college degreed nonsense is this? Why even bother with democracy, then, if the outcome must ultimately be what the people in charge prefer over what the body politic prefers?

It’s not that I think Hanania is wrong, not necessarily. I agree with what he says here, at least in principle:

The public wants government to tell firms what to charge for products and services, but elites of both major parties almost never do this. Why? Well, politicians are much smarter than the public and listen to experts who tell them that if you implement price controls, you’ll get shortages. Leaders might care about the well-being of the country, or they might be completely self-interested and not want to deal with the backlash from people not being able to find the products that they’re used to buying. Either way, the result is you end up with policy outcomes that are superior to what you would get if politicians just did what the voters wanted.

He’s right. A lot of popular policies like price controls, rent control, etc., are bad ideas, rejected by the experts, and we always listen to experts, right? That’s not the point, however. The point is this: if we can’t trust the people to make the right choices, why do we allow them the choice to begin with?

Think about it. Let go of all the assumptions you hold about democracy, especially the stupidest one of all: Democracy Is The Worst Form Of Government Except All The Others. That statement not only has no basis in fact, it serves as an excuse to not critique democracy at all, and it wouldn’t be democracy then, would it?

Once you’ve let go of all the assumptions you hold about democracy, once you quit treating it as sacrosanct, then you realize none of it makes any sense. If you think the people cannot be trusted to make the right choice, giving them the choice to begin with makes no sense. You don’t hand a chainsaw to someone whom you believe is dumb enough to saw off their own toes.

More importantly, if, in the end, the preferences of the politicians and experts must always prevail over popular will, then what good does the vote do? The vote isn’t merely voicing one’s opinion - it’s an exercise in force, violence, as it were. If all leaders wanted was to know where public opinion landed on a given matter, I think polls would serve the same purpose. Voting seems rather redundant.

Hanania explains that authoritarian states are actually more sensitive to public opinion, but that this isn’t a good thing:

Interestingly, autocracies seem more willing to shield consumers from high oil prices, though the evidence is mixed: one IMF study of fuel-price pass-through in developing countries finds the political variables pointing that way without reaching significance. As I point out in Kakistocracy, authoritarians have less legitimacy on account of not being elected, so will often make up for it by acting more in accordance with public opinion than democratic leaders do. Dictators also tend to be dumb compared to elected officials, and in many cases may simply not have access to the information that would let them know that price controls are counterproductive.

Granting this all to be true, the problem is that life isn’t a binary choice between dictatorship and mass democracy. Government is far more diverse than that. Even democracy is more diverse than that. Mass democracy is simply one form of it. The idea that every last man and their mother must be allowed to vote isn’t just unfounded, it’s nonsensical. Nobody’s forced to participate in the political process, but there’s no real filtering mechanism built in, either. This means if you’re like Hanania and don’t want stupid people having a say, you can’t just hope and pray only the smart people vote. You need to take active measures to keep stupid people away from political participation.

Whatever the form of government, in the end, the only thing that matters is that someone needs to be in charge, and the arrangement needs to make sense. Authoritarianism makes more sense, if anything, because it’s clear who’s in charge, whereas democracy employs smoke-and-mirrors to convince us the people are in charge, since the whole point is to make you think the state answers to the body politic.

Results matter, of course. Authoritarian states have a reputation for failure, one well-earned. They’re often less stable. Democratic states seem more successful and more stable. But this perception is skewed by the West, which, on top of being nominally democratic, has also reached high levels of development and prosperity. Without getting into a chicken-or-egg debate, it seems to take more than just democracy to make a successful society. The experience with democracy outside the West has been much more of a mixed bag.

In addition, as the West also takes an increasingly authoritarian turn, ironically under democracy-worshiping liberal regimes, that foundation of stability is beginning to crack. If bluntly authoritarian states are wrong to be overly sensitive to public opinion, then nominally democratic states are wrong to completely disregard it, also. The immigration situation in Europe is probably the best example of what happens when the state poo-poos public sentiment on an issue.

As I’ve explained time and again, Hanania is an aspiring member of the establishment, so he cannot afford to be critical of democracy, ever. Here he tries to protect democracy’s reputation [bold mine]:

The fact that authoritarians try to be popular too is something critics of democracy often miss. A dictator also has political constraints. It’s not as simple as “the people are dumb, so let’s have a smart guy make all the decisions instead.” Abolish democracy, and you’ll still have to deal with political realities and humans as they exist.

But that’s exactly the argument Hanania is trying to make: “the people cannot be trusted to make the right choices, so us smart people have to make the choice for them.” He just adds in an extra caveat of “we’ll just be nice enough to ask them what they think first.”

Democracy “works” because it gives people the illusion of a say in the matter. But again, without development and prosperity, democracy simply isn’t enough to keep a society stable. You could take away democracy, but as long as development levels and prosperity remain high, a lot of trouble could be avoided. It’s when development lags and prosperity is out of reach for the masses that the people insist on a bigger say in governance.

The irony here is that I agree that with Hanania that the public cannot be trusted to make the right choices most of time, it’s just that his attitude on democracy differs starkly from mine. Hanania cannot afford to be caught dead arguing in favor of anything less than mass democracy, universal suffrage, and unlimited franchise. Max Remington, however, is under no such restriction. Like Hanania, I’d rather not live under a dictatorship if I can avoid it. Unlike Hanania, I’m more than happy with restricting the vote, even if that means my own vote gets taken away. I believe it with that level of strong conviction.

At this point in my life, I’m under no illusions about the fact that my vote means nothing, that if voting actually meant anything, they probably wouldn’t let us vote to begin with. I’m not being cynical, either. This is just resignation to reality. More important, if we get a vote, I want that vote to mean something. It cannot mean anything in a system where everyone and their mother gets to vote. So, who should get to cast a ballot?

What do I always say? If voting wrong meant losing everything, wouldn’t you vote a whole lot more different than you do now? Or would you even vote at all? Simply put, those who participate in the political process should be people for whom failure means more than just getting angry. We all like think we have something to gain and something to lose from voting, and maybe that’s true, but it’s also true that others have more to gain and more to lose.

Some Millennial or Zoomer who moves from city to city, spending only a few years in each location before moving onto the next, is a glorified traveler, investing next to nothing in any one place. They have no long-term commitment, not even to a place they call home. Someone like that isn’t a model citizen, even if they might be a good person otherwise.

Put simply, a good citizen believes, “This place where I live must make it or I won’t.” They view their personal fortunes as tied to the well being of the community they live in. Someone who owns property, runs a business, has a family, these people simply have more to lose than someone who lives in a place for a short time for the fun of it before settling down there or moving on to the next place.

Nobody wants to believe some of us contribute more than others. But facts don’t lie. You simply cannot afford to be cavalier or flippant about things like crime, taxes, or even hot-button social issues if you’ve bought and live in a house, if you’re trying to participate in the local economy besides simply being a consumer, and if you have kids. The way you look at these issues changes when you’re on the sharp end of the consequences.

Even super-leftists are far less progressive when it comes to their own homes. Not one of them want homeless on their front yard. Their real concern is about how everyone else thinks about homelessness. They don’t want to deal with crime, either. They just don’t say so because complaining about crime is low-status-coded. Besides, crime does serve a purpose as long as it’s victims are the hated White people (which never includes liberal Whites themselves, interestingly). But I digress.

The viability of implementing an ideal democracy, whether it’s practical to do so in America 2026, isn’t the point of this exercise. I doubt we’ll ever see a better system in our lifetime. The point is that if we want a better way, we first need to confront the fact that mass democracy is a contradictory, dysfunctional, and, most important, failed system of government. If we consider it the best or the worst form of government except for all others, there’s nothing to criticize. There’s nothing to improve upon, either, because the goal of mass democracy is universal suffrage. It doesn’t go any further than that.

If a person truly believes that affording everyone a vote is the most important thing, that a dysfunctional democracy is still superior to a functional authoritarianism, then you can’t complain about the results, and you most certainly can’t complain about the fact the least-qualified, worst of us, get to not only have a vote, but also become leaders themselves. It’s the logical end result of limitless democracy.

I agree with Hanania here, but it’s also unbelievably disingenuous of him to say so, given the fact he refuses to see that democracy itself is the problem:

What does he think democracy entails, anyway? Under universal suffrage, unlimited franchise, no restrictions on political participation, there’s no limiting principle. Anything and everything goes. For such a smart guy, he fails to understand this, or is engaging in cognitive dissonance.

He’s not the only one. The problem with all democracy-worshipers is once you turn something into a religion, there’s only one acceptable answer in the end. Democracy is simply not up for debate. Yet democracy is premised on the idea of free and open debate, the exchange of ideas. You can’t claim to be for all that but draw the line at criticizing democracy itself.

Then there’s the fashioning of democracy as the system preferred by smart people:

As usual, she thinks she’s checkmated someone, somewhere. She’s only checkmated herself. If the government claims it cannot solve problems because of complexity while still insisting on holding authority over you, then you don’t live in a democracy. You live in a tyranny. Anne Applebaum didn’t think too far, did she?

The fact is, we elect leaders to make it simple for us. Not easy, no. But simple, yes. We establish governments in large part because we realize the act of maintaining civilization, managing economy and society, and keeping order is a big job, beyond the capacity of most of us to perform. Hence, we pick people to do so on our behalf. These people must make things simple for us, in large part because we’re dealing with simple problems with simple solutions. For example, crime isn’t a complex issue.

Even when it comes to genuinely complex issues, it’s up to leaders haggle over the complexity of it amongst themselves. Their job is to provide solutions to problems, not to educate the public about how complicated everything is. By the way, I’ve never heard of a candidate spending all their time talking about how complex everything is winning elections. Sometimes, the people do get it right. Someone who thinks our problems are too complex to solve, but still wants to be in charge of running things, has no business being in a position of leadership.

Strong leaders, of course, do speak truth to power, albeit in simplified form. But even speaking hard truths is impossible in mass democracy, as Singapore founder and the 20th century’s greatest political leader, Lee Kuan Yew, once observed:

I think a lot of what passes for conventional wisdom regarding the preference for authoritarianism versus democracy misses the point:

The problem is when leaders use complexity as an excuse for failure or inaction. That’s unacceptable. Leaders should be cautious, judicious, and restrained, in the interest of doing no further harm. But they cannot use complexity as an excuse to be derelict in their duty. That crime is a complex issue (it’s really not, but whatever) isn’t a reason for the state to refuse to provide public safety. That immigration is a complex issue (again, it’s not) isn’t an excuse to not enforce immigration law nor protect the border. That’s the point here.

I suspect that another reason, if stupidity isn’t it, why Hanania believes democracy can work if managed properly - hence, manage democracy - is because he understands, deep down, that democracy is, in fact, a scam, the point of it not even being to give the people a say in governance. It’s just a pressure relief valve, a way for the people to be placated. It’s not a thought entirely devoid of logic.

As I stated before, when things go wrong is when people tend to demand a greater say in governing affairs. Dictatorships are inherently unstable because staying in power is the bottom-line concern for leaders. Discontent in a dictatorship rises very quickly, hence, dictators are sensitive to public opinion, as Hanania pointed out. But mass democracies are also organized power struggles, leaving little time for governance. And according to Hanania, they work better the more they disregard public opinion. Maybe there isn’t a meaningful difference between authoritarianism and democracy, then?

I think the lesson here is this: what’s important is for the government and the governed to be on the same page. How you do it is far less important. It must also be sustainable. Democracy can work when there’s congruence between those running the country and the citizenry, when society itself is stable, and when both state and society uphold the same order instead of each offering competing visions of how things ought to be.

Even in less-polarized countries with functioning democracies, there exists a tremendous amount of conformity, suggesting that this American Dream of a pluralistic political culture where nobody agrees on anything yet the system is still supposed to work is a childish, dumb fantasy, held increasingly by the well-educated who appreciate complexity.

Oddly, it’s the less-educated who prefer simplistic solutions who might understand government the best. Everyone else is just outsmarting their common sense.

Final Thoughts

Looking back on almost five years (yes, five years!) of We’re Not At The End, But You Can See It From Here, I think the most profound shift in my thinking concerns my attitude towards democracy. Like most Americans, I once took it as a given, as the proverbial worst form of government except all other forms.

As you can tell, I no longer believe in any of that, and I’m kind of ashamed I ever did. It’s not that I prefer authoritarianism, either. No American, myself included, have ever lived under anything other than a democracy. At the same time, what exactly is democracy if our vote means very little, there still exists a powerful ruling class who not only can, but always overrides public preferences, there already exist limits on public discourse, and the overall trend is towards less democracy and more authoritarianism?

Democracy doesn’t fail because people stop believing in it. As Lee Kuan Yew observed, democracy fails because it’s success requires a whole host of preconditions which few societies have managed to achieve or are even capable of achieving.

the biggest problem is that liberal democracy, human rights, high-trust societies and basically anything good at a country scale require a large enough part of the population to have an IQ above a certain threshold

you need people capable of maintaining complex systems, coordinating and cooperating over abstract rules

even morality at scale needs intelligence. universal rights, rule of law and moral obligations toward millions of strangers are abstractions that exist only because of intelligent people. you need enough cognitive ability to understand and maintain them. that’s why low IQ countries live in a constant state of crime and terror, or why the UK needs pamphlets to teach migrants that actually rape is bad. they can't conceive that it could be wrong, they are too stupid to

if these projections are even remotely right, the future is going to be poorer, more criminal, more chaotic and much more authoritarian without exaggeration, unless we somehow reverse this, the only hope might literally be Al

There’s a reason why democracy wasn’t a common form of government until the last few centuries. Civilizations needed to reach a certain level of development before democracy became a viable option. Even today, it’s dysfunctional outside the West, potentially unsuitable for much of the world, and is becoming more dysfunctional inside the West. Once again, the immigration problem is emblematic of the shift:

Let’s close on this last bit from Richard Hanania:

Yes, your fellow citizens are this stupid. One has to recognize this in order to get around public opinion.

Really? Then quit pretending like you want them to be able to vote. Only an idiot would say what Hanania said, but then consider it some high virtue that everyone gets to have a say. If you think your fellow citizens are stupid, but that they should still be allowed to vote, maybe you’re the stupid one.

It’s hard to believe, but, in our lifetimes, democracy just might become the form of government stupid people prefer. It already kind of is.

What are your thoughts? Do you still believe in democracy? Share them in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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I honestly didn’t want to talk about the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy. It might be the hottest topic in the United States today, but it’s also quickly becoming the thing stupid people are arguing about. Nevertheless, that it’s such a hot topic is influencing me to share my views on it.

As is my style, I’m going to discuss the case from a different angle, one I’m not really seeing being considered in most discourse about it. As I’m sure my long-time readers know by now, in addition to being a practically-minded thinker, I’m also a big-picture guy. I occasionally sweat the details, but to the extent it helps people get the point and understand what’s happening here. There’s a lot of strings attached to the Clancy case, but there’s one in particular I consider especially important.

One thing I’m absolutely not going to do is litigate the case. I’ve litigated other cases in the past, but only because I feel like there are practical lessons people can learn from them. In the Clancy case, there’s not much in the way of practical lessons, unfortunately. I’m also not going to get into the clinical aspect of the case, which is drawing lots of attention. In addition to not having enough familiarity with the concepts involved, I personally consider them distracting and lead us to miss the forest for the trees.

Let’s begin by saying there’s literally only two reasons you can get away with killing someone: defense of self or others or it was a genuine accident. By “accident,” meaning that the killing is attributable to circumstances and factors entirely beyond the control of an otherwise sane, sober, moral, prudent, and reasonable person. There’s a reason I italicized all that, as you’ll see in a moment.

If anyone hasn’t been following the Clancy case, or has only a tangential understanding of it, that’s as good a place to being as any on developing a stance on this case. No matter what you think about the case overall, let’s at least agree that Lindsay Clancy wasn’t defending herself nor others from death or great bodily harm when she killed her three children. Let me say it more obviously: this wasn’t self-defense.

Nor was it an accident. Since the defense is claiming she was suffering post-partum depression-induced psychosis, it may not be outright murder, but it’s certainly no accident, either, because it can only be so if the perpetrator was an otherwise sane, sober, moral, prudent, and reasonable person. Someone suffering from psychosis clearly doesn’t fit that description. You could argue that psychosis, like all mental illnesses, are beyond a person’s control. But a person’s mind isn’t just a part of their body - it’s literally what makes the person. If anything, arguing psychosis suggests the person is very much liable.

I’d hope that we can all agree on both points - these were thoroughly unjustified killings and they were no accident. More importantly, the defense isn’t even disputing the fact she killed her children. They’re employing what’s known as an affirmative defense, where litigation centers not on the crime itself, but on the justification for it. This, in my view, means Clancy mustn’t be a free woman no matter the outcome of this case.

In fact, if she is acquitted, she’ll be remanded to state custody to undergo a 40-day mental health evaluation, at the end of which it’ll be determined whether she’ll be institutionalized or set free. Even if she goes free, she’ll need to endure a lifetime of periodic reviews and mental health evaluations. I don’t know what precedent says about her chances of going free, but I do know similar cases didn’t end so well for parents found not guilty by reason of insanity after killing their children.

Andrea Yates, arguably the most famous case of filicide until now, was acquitted by reason of insanity. She still lives in a state mental facility to this day. In fact, most cases where someone acquitted of killing their own children by reason of insanity either remain or spent years in state custody. Even those eventually released are subject to a whole list of conditions. I hate to put it this way, but the state has strong incentive to not allow Clancy to be a free woman, at least not so quickly, if she’s acquitted. To do so would be a bad look, to say the least.

Even if she ended up going free, seriously, what kind of life could she expect going forward? Clancy was a nurse; she’s never going to work in healthcare again. Defendants acquitted or eventually released in past cases are often not allowed to have unsupervised contact with minors. No matter how much public support Clancy is receiving now, when it’s all over, nobody’s going to be standing by her side, except maybe her family, and people will move on to the next cause célèbre. Nobody’s going to dare employ Clancy; it’s one thing to sympathize with someone like that from a distance. It’s another to have someone like that in your workplace or life. Not that Clancy is a hero, but I feel the point is the same: Never meet your heroes.

I’m not so cynical to believe that Clancy would manage to profit from any of this if she were acquitted and eventually returned to civil society. I doubt she’d be able to get a book deal out of this, to say nothing of the fact it’d only reveal just how devious a person she really is. Peoples’ minds do change, even in this day and age. Once the sensationalism dies down, time and perspective will lend to more sober takes. I realize this seems absurdly optimistic, but people aren’t thinking straight right now. Those who try profiting off killing their children aren’t going to have too many fans when it’s all said and done.

Let me get to the point. This case will say a lot about whether we still believe, as a society, that killing children, let alone anybody, is a defensible act, beyond the two exceptions discussed earlier. Clancy’s trial appears to have opened a whole can of worms speaking to the state of our country, the health of civil society. It doesn’t look good.

The fact a case like this has proven so divisive, with so many defending someone who killed three innocent children, is deeply troubling. Again, this isn’t the first high-profile trial of a mother who murdered her children. The Andrea Yates case was a major story at the time. I remember it well. But it wasn’t a divisive politicized issue.

In fact, the case is a startling wake-up call to how much things have changed in a quarter-century. Maybe less. Though the circumstances of the case were vastly different, women were overwhelmingly more outraged by the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial than were men and were more likely to believe the murder charges against her than men were. That was back in 2011.

15 years later, women are defending Lindsay Clancy just because she’s a woman. The level of atomized tribalism in America has reached limits of logical insanity, to the point where women are defending the murder of children out of feminism, gender solidarity, whatever. The message from women who support Clancy is unanimously: It could’ve been me. I could’ve killed my own children just by losing my mind. Well, I could’ve been Daniel Penny, using deadly force to stop a crazed black criminal from terrorizing passengers on public transit.

Many of Clancy’s defenders, which include conservatives, claim to not be defending the killings, they’re only trying to bring light to what they regard as a problem in post-partum depression, which they don’t believe society takes seriously enough. However, it’s quite obvious what they want is for someone else besides Clancy to be responsible out of the sympathy they feel for her. The fact that they want someone else to be responsible for Clancy killing her own children implies her supporters know full well what she did was indefensible.

I want to stay away from the philosophy for this essay, but this case is exposing both the limits of liberalism along with revealing a major philosophical fault line in our society. Liberalism espouses maximizing individual freedom while minimizing personal agency. It’s as contradictory as communism and socialism were. Our society has become divided, though not strictly, between those who recognize that contradiction and those who either cannot or can but choose to accept out of one principle or another.

In practice, maximizing individual freedom while minimizing personal agency is as impossible as it sounds in theory. To do both, a massive enforcement apparatus must exist to protect people not only from each others, but from themselves, also. Does that mean we must live in a world where nobody can ever be held responsible for their actions, ever? Can such a world even exist?

The contradictions are endless:

The SAME group of women who are pushing for Lindsay Clancy to be acquitted on the grounds that, “her doctors and husband failed her by not intervening earlier and taking control over her treatment”, are the SAME group of women who would blow a complete GASKET at any man for proposing that a husband and doctors should have the ability to intervene and take control over a woman's decisions on her own treatment.

And it’s so easy to imagine their chants in that alternative universe:

“How dare you take a mother away from her children!”

“A husband has no authority over what a woman needs for her own body, especially after a pregnancy!”

“Until a man gives birth, how a woman takes care of herself after birth is none of their business!”

“How male of you to want to control women!”

“Involuntarily committing a woman who is feeling down after pregnancy is the definition of The Handmaid's Tale!”

Had that pre-murder intervention actually occurred here, EVERY SINGLE ONE of these raving women outside of the courthouse would be DOWNPLAYING Clancy's diagnosis, characterizing her emotions as routine baby blues, and STRESSING the autonomy that Clancy, a fierce, independent tiger woman should have been able to retain in the face of men trying to control her.

So which is it, Western Woman?

Either: (A) there are some circumstances when women become so utterly unstable that they lose any right to their own agency; or (B) a woman's agency is never the business of men?

I assure you, it cannot be both.

And:

I’ve argued, and I think I’m correct in saying so, that women are inherently conservative in the sense they’re pro-status quo and the staunchest defenders of it. The far-left radicalism of women today isn’t a revolutionary impulse at work. It’s women defending the status quo, which is very leftist, very liberal, at the moment. Women are also the moral center in every society, in that they tend to represent what a society thinks about right or wrong in a given point in time.

In 2011, women were more conservative, or at least less liberal than they were today. Hence, they viewed Casey Anthony killing her daughter as unequivocally a bad thing. Today, women are more liberal, hence they see Lindsay Clancy killing her children, bad as it might be, something that needs contextualizing and pathologizing. It’s the same with their attitude towards crime, especially when committed by blacks, illegal immigration, any and all issues you can think of, especially when it involves violence.

Women inherently don’t understand violence as well as men, but they also once had a better understanding of when it was justifiable and when it wasn’t. It’s not so much they’ve become disoriented, but because their moral compass has been inverted due to political indoctrination, which included a startlingly successful media propaganda effort.

Again, I doubt any woman supporting Clancy thinks what she did was justifiable, but they most certainly don’t think she has any agency here, and that’s the real problem. It begs the question: if women have no agency when they do the worst thing imaginable, why do they have rights? Expanding that circle, if the only group that possesses agency today are White men, why shouldn’t they be the only ones with power and a full slate of rights in America? Or did they not think that far ahead?

Make no mistake: it’s not what Clancy did that makes this case noteworthy. It’s the reaction:

People are still somehow misunderstanding why this Lindsay Clancy story is a point of interest, especially for men on the Right.

It has almost nothing to do with the mother. Mothers have been killing their kids (rarely, thankfully) since time immemorial, I grew up with the story of Andrea Yates reverberating through my skull. This is not a new phenomenon.

What is new is the reaction, as it is with the reaction to several other stories, animated by several demographics which it is now inescapable to confront how much of a problem they are becoming (at an exponential rate) in society.

And [bold mine]:

3. Lindsay Clancy. Like the others, this has almost nothing to do with the case itself, but the reaction to the case. Andrea Yates was roundly vilified by everyone in society as a monster, like Aileen Wuornos. That's the normal reaction to a mother killing her children, because that's what she is, postpartum whatever notwithstanding. One could say that pedophiles are “mentally ill” but that doesn't absolve them of their crimes. At least not to anyone who isn't an LGBT+ activist pushing the whole “MAPs” narrative. You don't let a crazy dog who bites people all the time run around, you euthanize it.

A concerningly large proportion of women have collectively lost their minds when it comes to who the victims are in the this case, and they seem to think that any woman involved must remain the perpetual victim, even when they murder children. Actual murdered children in this case aren’t considered victims but collateral. Accessories to her brave story of victimization by her Gemini husband and the evil pharmaceutical industry (that was trying to help her not kill her kids). This is a shift within the mentality of women that cannot be ignored.

Think about it - there’s been next to no talk about the lives Clancy snuffed out. It’s been all about her. The children don’t even matter, honestly. If you sense a pattern here, that’s because this is the same model our society follows in every single hot topic today. Victims of crime are simply sacrifices made in the pursuit of social justice. Negatively impacted by illegal immigration? Too bad, they have a right to pursue the American Dream by any means necessary. Sad about three dead kids? Where’s your concern for women suffering mental health issues? No matter the problem, how you think about it, not the problem itself, is what needs correction.

The Lindsay Clancy trial captivates the public, in my view, for all the wrong reasons. What we should be worried about is the precedent being set here: that a person can kill innocents, their own children, but somehow not be responsible for it. Clancy’s ultimate fate is of little importance to us as a society. It’s the lessons that we take from it which are. It may be unfortunate that Casey Anthony wasn’t convicted for killing her daughter, but at least we understood that killing children was a bad thing. Women understood that better than men.

This time around, we may end up concluding that killing children may, in fact, not be such a bad thing if it frees women from the oppression that’s pregnancy and motherhood. Which makes me wonder - what are we working towards as a society, anyway?

“Come In, Abyzou”

Scientist Michael Shermer expresses concern over what the Lindsay Clancy case says about the moral direction of society:

It reminded me of the movie Undertone, which came out earlier this year. A horror film, it’s one of the scariest I’ve ever seen and criminally underrated despite still being relatively new. In Undertone, the demon Abyzou, which exists in real-world folklore from the region of the world where West meets East, is central to the story. Legend says she drives women insane, forcing them to kill their children.

I’m not a believer, but figuratively speaking, something demonic is happening in America. As I hope I’ve explained, there’s no upside to standing up for Lindsay Clancy like this. As even her supporters openly admit, she’s not going to be a free woman even if convicted. So, what’s the message here?

I’m not sure. What I do know is that it’s tearing society apart. No, I’m not saying we’re headed for a collapse or anything like that. Not even civil war. What I mean is society has probably passed the point of no return in terms of dysfunction. I’ve long since been saying that there’s no fixing any of our problems at this point. This is what I mean - if we can’t even say that killing our children, for any reason, is wrong, then we’ve lost the thread completely. No society can reject morality entirely. It has to have some sort of moral center. Some things just need to be right or wrong. Otherwise, you get barbarism and savagery.

I’ll say one more thing on this: Iryna Zarutska was murdered by a black career criminal a year ago. Women never mobilized to protest her murder and the circumstances which led to it. Women don’t protest against crime, in fact. This despite all these concerns they claim to have over their safety. We all know why that is.

But the fact they’d protest in support of a woman who killed her three innocent children doesn’t just speak to the state of politics in America. It speaks to the fact that women, who are supposed to be society’s moral center, have lost their moral compass, or it’s been completely inverted. In doing so, everyone, man or woman, has lost their moral compass.

Those supporting Clancy may as well be chanting “Come In, Abyzou.” In Undertone, that’s the phrase repeated constantly, except it’s done so in reverse, giving it a very disturbing and unsettling… well… undertone. If you can tolerate horror, I strongly recommend you watch the whole movie. Maybe it can change your mind about the Lindsay Clancy case. At the very least, by portraying the act of killing your own children as an act of unquestionable evil, maybe art still has a role to play in shocking our conscience and straightening us out.

One last thing:

Let me see: men invented police, gallows, even lynch mobs for dealing with violent men. Women did nothing. If anything, it’s women who now want police defunded, the death penalty abolished, and oppose using violence in general.

Feminists aren’t the ones to talk. They’re the ones getting everyone else killed. They can sit down and quit being so loud. That’d be a step in the right direction.

What are your thoughts on the Lindsay Clancy case? What does it say about what’s happening to our society? Talk about it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Before getting to the topic of the day, I want to address something something I suspect some of you might’ve noticed, which is that I’ve been avoiding the hot topics. For example, I’ve yet to say anything about the immigration crisis in Ceuta. I’ve said next to nothing about the Iran war. There’s no shortage of stuff to talk about, yet I’ve been talking about more general topics or tangential matters.

There are two reasons for this. One, while there’s plenty to discuss, we haven’t had an SHTF-type event that really changes the game or has the potential too. For the most part, we’re still chugging along here. Two, after five years of this blog (the anniversary comes in October), I feel like I’ve said everything I could’ve said, for now. I spend a lot of time repeating myself on this Substack, and while it’s important to reinforce key points often, there’s also a point of diminishing returns when it comes to saying the same things over and over again. Someone asked recently, “Are we losing our capacity to be shocked?” I’m not only afraid so, I fear I myself have lost the ability to be shocked as well.

Until, of course, the stuff really hits the fan again. It’s going to happen, it’s only a matter of time. When it does, you know I’ll have so much to say about it. Until then, let’s talk about some other stuff, shall we? Stuff with greater application to our daily lives?

Almost two years ago, I made mention of an incident involving YouTuber Jared Coker, an urban explorer from the Kansas City area, who films videos of himself exploring abandoned locations primarily in the Midwest region. His channel is highly active and visits some very interesting places. He’s arguably most notorious for an incident in 2022, where he was exploring an abandoned pet food factory and was confronted and detained by a man armed with a gun, with the entire incident caught on video.

Here’s the video of the incident [cued to begin at the moment he’s confronted by the gunman]:

Due to the notoriety of the incident, Jared Coker later released the full, uncut footage of the encounter. Since there’s always a few of you who don’t watch the video, the skinny is this: Coker was exploring the factory when he noticed a vehicle driving onto the grounds. He eventually saw the man behind the wheel, whom he recorded exiting his vehicle, weapon in hand. After finding a way out of the factory and while attempting to leave, Coker was stopped by the armed man, who casually threatens to kill the young man unless he handcuffs himself so he can be detained.

Coker complies, and is escorted to the man’s car, where they wait an hour and a half for police to arrive (kind of gives you a sense of how serious a situation the police judged this incident to be at the time). Once they arrived, the police unfortunately had to arrest him, since the abandoned factory along with the property it sat on still did belong to someone - the gunman, it turns out - and proceeded to take him to jail.

Here’s where the story takes an insane twist. On scene, two other individuals were seen walking towards the factory. The gunman, Kenney “Ken” Lee Thomas, 64 at the time, stated in the presence of police, that he was going to shoot them. Obviously, he was warned otherwise, but police didn’t do anything about it then, probably because Thomas owned the property and therefore did possess some right to use force against trespassers.

Shortly after arriving at the jail, a call came in over police radio that a shooting had taken place at the abandoned factory Coker had just been picked up from. Thomas had followed through on his threat.

Here’s The Wichita Eagle with a write-up on the case when it reached a conclusion in court back in September 2023:

The owner of a shuttered Wichita pet food business will spend two years on probation in the shooting of two teenagers who wanted to explore his dilapidated, fire-damaged property in 2021.

Kenney “Ken” Lee Thomas was accused of shooting the 17- and 19-year-olds with a 12-gauge shotgun around 10:30 p.m. on April 2, 2021. The two had just walked onto land around the TreatCo plant, 2300 N. Broadway, after climbing through a hole in a chain-link fence. Thomas, fed-up with trespassers, waited after spotting the teens headed toward the property and fired six shots without warning, striking one in the arm and leg and the other in the leg, buttocks and arm, prosecutors said.

If the punishment doesn’t seem like it fits the crime, that’s because, as Coker explained towards the end of the video, Thomas hadn’t fired buckshot or slugs, but something akin to pellets instead. Still, pellets are dangerous and can be lethal. I think the punishment does fit the crime, all things considered.

The article makes reference to Coker’s arrest:

He even pointed out the approaching teens to a police officer who was on the property that night for an unrelated trespassing report, promising to fetch his shotgun and “rustle you up two more,” court records say.

The other reason Thomas received a relatively light sentence is because both of the teens he shot survived (attributable to the use of less-lethal ammunition):

The teens told authorities they thought the TreatCo plant had been abandoned. The property has been the site of at least three fires since 2011.

Thomas, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, argued before his July trial that the shouldn’t be prosecuted because the teens were trespassers who scared him. But jurors weren’t convinced he was innocent and convicted him of two counts of aggravated battery.

I don’t know to what role, if any, Coker’s video played in the case against Thomas. Coker never says it played any role, never says he was subpoenaed to be a witness in court, so that tells me he was probably not involved in the prosecution of Thomas. The thing about Coker’s video, though, is that we can clearly see the assertion by Thomas’ defense of the then-64-year-old being “scared” was absurd. Thomas was clearly fixing to shoot someone and found victims. He got what he deserved.

Finally:

Thomas’ probation carries an underlying prison term of two years, said Dan Dillon, a spokesman for the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office. He could be ordered to serve that time if he fails to follow the conditions of his probation.

Again, it seems a light punishment. All things considered - the use of less lethal ammunition, the fact nobody died - mitigates things. If I had it my way, he’d receive a stiffer sentence. I take unjustified shootings very seriously. But I’m not running Wichita, I’m not running Kansas, and I’m definitely not running the U.S.

So, wow. What to make of all this?

Let’s start with Jared Coker. It always troubled me how quickly he gave in to handcuffing himself. When asked why he simply complied with the Thomas’ demands, Coker explained in the comments of the edited YouTube video):

These are questions I still ponder myself all this time later, unfortunately hindsight is 20/20. I’d never been seriously caught before in my time exploring before this took place so I was always under the impression that if you do get caught just play nice and be reasonable and 90% of the time you'll just be let off with a warning. Not to mention a dude with a gun with God only knows what kind of ammo in it isn't something to take too lightly. But with all things considered, yes, if I were transported back in time, I would have 100 percent taken off at full speed with a good head start the second he popped up.

It’s Coker’s decision to comply with the gunman that I want to focus most attention. First, I find it refreshing to see Coker has the introspection and self-awareness to actually evaluate his own actions honestly, rather than simply saying something to the effect of, I did what I thought was right, I’d do it again. Personal safety, prepping, these are thinking men’s games. You need to be willing to criticize yourself and open yourself up to criticism.

Upfront, I can’t criticize Coker for his choices. Besides inaction, the worst thing you can do in a situation like that is to act half-heartedly, without 100 percent commitment, a willingness to go all the way. If Coker didn’t feel confident in either running away or defending himself against the gunman, he may have been better off not trying. We shouldn’t be too critical towards Coker, because none of us really know what we’d do in a situation like that until we’re staring down the barrel of a shotgun.

At the same time, we need to understand what the consequences of compliance are. We’re not talking about someone who wants your property. We’re talking about someone who wants you. I don’t consider robbery to be some minor thing as liberal-minded Americans do, but I also do recognize a stark difference between robbery and kidnapping. And what happened to Coker could be recognized by a reasonable person as a kidnapping attempt.

Last year, I spoke on the topic:

I think this kind of goes without saying, but once you’re in captivity, you’re completely at the initiative and mercy of your captor. The time to fight has passed. There’s a reason the acronym “SERE” [Survival, Escape, Resistance, Evasion] doesn’t include the word “fight”. That’s not to say you should give in and accept the fact you’re forever someone else’s prisoner, but it’s to say your actions and movements will be severely limited, dictated entirely by your captor.

When someone tries to take you, that’s the last red line that can be crossed. Even most liberals would agree that if someone tries to take you, there’s ought to be no restrictions on the sorts of violence a person is allowed to use to try to stop it from happening. I understand why Coker acted as he did. I also realize it was just as risky as fighting or running would’ve been, that he took a big chance with his life. The point I try getting across with everyone is this: whether it’s a minor or serious crime, either way, you’re putting your life into someone else’s hands. You’re expecting them to be careful, to not do anything to hurt or kill you. It’s a ridiculous expectation to impose on yourself or anyone else.

What should Coker have done? It’s hard to say, I admit. Maybe there’s no answer. Or maybe the right answer is what leaves you alive rather than dead, in the end. I can’t recommend anyone try running from a gunman or attacking him. In fact, I’d rule out attacking an armed person, period. The best I can suggest is to walk away, with your hands up, and tell him you’re leaving and that unless he plans to become a murderer today, he best let you do so. It may not work. You may be forced into a situation where you need to defend yourself. But in my opinion, walking away is still better than just allowing someone get control of you.

There’s, of course, a mitigating factor here - Coker was trespassing. It’s up to each of us to determine how serious of a transgression it was on his part. If you ask Coker:

I go to places that are neglected and abandoned to film light hearted little exploration vlog style videos where I do no damage, take nothing, and never enter unless there’s already an established way in. This guy uses his free time to camp out where he knows people will be and uses it as an excuse to threaten or shoot them for fun, I commit victimless “crimes” and he is no victim. That’s why a judge and jury sentenced him to prison time and 2 years probation as compared to my little 200 dollar fine.1 I cross no moral lines by going to places these alleged “property owners” are too neglectful to upkeep. They’re not houses or places of business, they're abandoned unused properties.

I’m sympathetic to his view. What Coker did is nothing worth shooting someone over, nothing worth detaining someone over. As a strong believer in property rights, as someone who doesn’t adhere to the pervasive belief that property isn’t worth killing someone over, not strictly, the important questions are: was anyone’s life in jeopardy? Was Coker committing a crime that justifies the use of any force? The answers I think are clearly “no” to both.

That said, as responsible adults expected to exercise sound judgment, trespassing on anyone else’s property is a risk, nonetheless. As a cardinal rule, if it’s not yours, don’t touch it, don’t enter it. Yes, the abandoned factory is basically just ruins at this point. There’s nothing of value. As long as it belongs to someone, however, it’s also not up to any of us to decide what it is, what it’s worth, and when we can show up.

As I explained regarding safety during urban exploration in 2024 [bold added]:

There are legal issues associated with urbex as well. “Abandoned” doesn’t mean “not owned” not necessarily. Some abandoned properties reside on land that’s owned by somebody, so exploring said property can constitute trespassing. People have been arrested, charged, and even sued for being where they weren’t supposed to be. Some have even been killed. If you choose to risk it, treat every abandoned property as though it were owned by someone. Don’t take anything; leave everything in place to the extent possible. If nothing else, do so out of respect.

“Abandoned” also doesn’t mean “unoccupied.” There’s always someone - or something - lurking within. America is a land of homeless and squatters; many of them take up residence in abandoned properties. Criminals and others on the run from the law do so as well [bold original]. You can encounter some truly dangerous people while exploring; are you prepared to deal with them? [bold added] Remember that even those who aren’t criminals see the abandoned property as their home and would protect themselves the same way you and I would do so if someone entered our homes without invitation. You have no idea who or what you might run into during the course of your explorations.

Jared Coker does urbex right. Still, he’s taking a risk every time he enters an abandoned property. I don’t know if he checks ahead of time whether a property is owned or not prior to exploring it - he does seem to do research ahead of time - but if you do enter someone else’s property knowingly, you’re trespassing, and that does complicate things a bit.

I agree with Coker that Ken Thomas was probably looking for an excuse to hurt someone. There are folks out there who feel that need to have power over others. Objectively, there’s nothing worth defending with deadly force, any level of force, at that abandoned factory, to say nothing of the fact that I don’t know how he expects to defend it, period, all by himself, without even being on-site all day long. The fact that he was charged and convicted of shooting two trespassers says it all - he was entirely unjustified in his actions.

Since trespassing is illegal, also, Thomas does have, on paper, the right to exercise some force to stop it from happening, to force people off the property. I don’t like what he did to Coker, I think it was unnecessary. But citizen’s arrests are permissible. Did Thomas do it right?

I’ll just say something I’ve said a time or two before: citizen’s arrests are messy. Since we aren’t sworn officers, therefore lacking the all-important mandate to take fellow citizens into custody, the law gives us very little room for error. The simplest way of putting it is that anyone affecting a citizen’s arrest better be crystal clear to the most black-white degree imaginable that a crime has occurred and the person they’re putting their hands on is indeed the suspect.

It shouldn’t be any crime, either, in my view. It ought to be a felony. Something like trespassing, on abandoned property, no less, is typically a misdemeanor, a point even conceded quite nonchalantly by Thomas. In fact, in some states, citizen’s arrests are permissible only if a felony has been committed. In still some jurisdictions, the arresting party must’ve borne witness to the crime.

Are there times when making a citizen’s arrest might be justified for a misdemeanor? Sure. That a crime is a misdemeanor doesn’t mean it was a victimless crime, of which there’s really no such thing. The point is that that unless someone’s life is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury, a citizen’s arrest is difficult to justify, not to mention risky.

To answer the question, the only thing Thomas probably did right was not shooting Coker at first sight. Even though the police apparently didn’t have an issue with the arrest, had Coker chosen to fight or run and ended up getting shot in the process, Thomas, as we end up seeing, would’ve probably gotten in trouble for it.

So, what did we learn here? What lessons did Jared Coker get taught on our behalves?

• Accepting risks means accepting risks. Again, I’m sympathetic to Coker’s perspective. Still, as he concedes, there are risks to trespassing, even onto abandoned property. Don’t operate with the assumption, as Coker did, that you’ll get warned off the property and that’ll be the end of it. You don’t know who you’re going to run into out there, you have no control of their actions. You only have control over yours. If you accept the risk, also take measures to mitigate that risk. Otherwise, you’re only gambling with your safety.

• Once the restraints are on, they’re not coming off. That’s the mentality you need to work with. There’s only one reason to slap restraints on someone and that’s to take them into captivity, to control them. If someone even tells you to put on restraints, a red line has been crossed. The only people who have a mandate to restrain you are law enforcement officers. Citizen’s arrests aside, if someone else tries to take you into custody and you haven’t committed a felony, you have the right to resist detention.

• Avoidance is the best policy. The best way to deal with a situation like what Coker dealt with is to just not end up in that position altogether. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t in his shoes, so I’m not sure what more he could’ve done to avoid getting caught. I’m honestly surprised he did, given how large a property it was. Seems like bad luck. Still, while escape should be your top priority, sometimes, doing so safely means taking your time. When you find yourself held up at gunpoint, it’s too late.

• Defend what’s yours only within reason. While I don’t believe in victimless crimes as a matter of principle, what Coker did was as victimless a crime as can be imagined. I don’t see any value nor upside in defending an abandoned property with deadly force. I understand there have been fires at the property in the past, but if this is such a concern, then the owner has a responsibility to better-secure the facility. Otherwise, this is like worrying about home invasions while refusing to lock your doors.

On that last point, I’m at odds with the Right when it came to the case of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man killed when three White men tried to make a citizen’s arrest of him in February 2020. Many on the Right, including voices I respect, are still upset by the conviction of the three White men of murder and false imprisonment. I think the conviction was justified, however, as they weren’t in compliance with the law as it was written at the time.

Arbery had committed, at worst, trespassing on the lot of an unfinished home, a misdemeanor offense. None of the men involved in the attempted citizen’s arrest had witnessed the crime. Unless the Right really wants to die on the hill where citizens can detain someone else entirely on the basis of suspicion without restriction, I don’t think defending the killing of Arbery makes sense. I feel the same way about what happened to Jared Coker, who had the fortune of living to tell his story.

I devoted an essay to this topic because I think it’s worth discussing. The reality is, people who end up in trouble like Coker did do so because they do dangerous things. Danger attracts dangerous people. I’m not so obtuse to think that “gun violence” in America isn’t driven in large part by the availability of guns, that the unique capabilities of firearms don’t give folks an outsized sense of power.

But I’m also not so ignorant as to fail to realize most of us will never be exposed to gun violence unless we do dangerous things and associate with dangerous people. Gun violence is a deeply misunderstood problem in America, and I’d even say what happened to Coker isn’t a threat most of us really need to be preoccupied with, because it’s an avoidable problem.

If you learn nothing else from this essay, learn this: safety is a practice, not a vibe. It’s something requiring both active and passive practices to ensure for yourself and others. Jared Coker did nothing wrong. Doing nothing wrong won’t save you when you have a gun in your face by someone who wants you to place cuffs on yourself.

What do you think? How do you think Jared Coker handled the situation? What would you have done given the same scenario? Discuss it in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Today we return to the “Max’s Musings” series, where I opine on a series of topics in as short a form as possible. Let’s get going.

No Such Thing As Paradise

Did you hear about the school shooting in Nonthaburi, located outside Bangkok?

The incident shocked many, who felt it contrasted with Thailand’s outward image as paradise, a peaceful place full of some of the most wonderful people on Earth. The country, a popular tourist destination for decades, has more recently become the top destination for digital nomads, expats, and influencers.

I often criticize people for being too willing to accept things at face value without even the slightest bit of skepticism. No different when it comes to Thailand. It’s a wonderful country, but like households, there are always things lurking beneath the surface:

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Thailand is not some "Oh Thais are always so happy and sweet!" tourist paradise as its made out to be,

like every other modern society there is a LOT of resentments and stress beneath the facade.

In fact, if you spend enough time in one place, eventually, you’ll start to see a different side to them, it’s just that they don’t present it often:

There’s something to be said about how every society eventually goes through the same problems as all others, it just takes it longer to get there. Still, if you place Thailand and the U.S. side-by-side and asked me which country is less dysfunctional, I’d say Thailand. But it still remains less developed, its institutions less robust, and life is still difficult for the average Thai. Digital nomads and influencers are a bad source of information for understanding what life is really like in Thailand.

By the way, racism exists in Thailand:

We can laugh at that and call it funny. But this sort of thing comes out of a place of spite. The same people who seem so wonderful are also the ones who have no problem openly telling people of other groups what they think of them. Americans get so much derision, especially from other Americans, but it’s just an objective fact that we’re not this racist. We’re arguably the least racist people in the world.

My experience tells me it’s often times the nicest, warmest, most welcoming souls who are also the most capable of cruelty. You won’t find a finer crop of people than American Southerners, yet they’re the same folks who committed grievous acts of racially-motivated violence in the 19th and 20th century. Many of them owned slaves. It’s the duality of humanity. What makes us wonderful is also what makes us capable of so much evil. The Thai are the same way. All people of the world are the same way.

The line between good and evil truly does run down the middle of everyone’s heart.

The Banality Of Evil

When people show you who they are, believe them:

I think what COVID really showed was that liberals are the biggest conformists of them all. If Dr. Anthony Fauci told them to drink bleach, they absolutely would’ve done it. Fancy titles like “Dr.” are enough to convince liberals of anything.

Being a conformist isn’t a bad thing, of course. Not on its own. The problem is that liberals fashion themselves as inherently dissident, the reformers and revolutionaries, yet when the rubber meets the road, they’re the true conservatives, they’re the people unwilling to challenge the status quo.

There are many reasons for this, but among the top reasons is that liberals are addicted to comfort. So are conservatives, but liberals make assumptions about the world based on the belief the lights will always turn on, the water will never get shut off, safety is a given, and order is the natural state, not something to be imposed. That and their discomfort with violence. They see government as an exercise in meeting room deliberation and laws as nicely-asked requests, when in reality government is an exercise in force and laws aren’t suggestions. They’re orders.

The level of reality denial seen in 2020 by liberals shocked even me. It’s something I hope we never see again, but we unfortunately will. I now understand what they mean when they speak of the “banality of evil.” Evil doesn’t come in the form of monsters. They come in the form of normal, everyday people. That’s what makes evil truly frightening.

Men Aren’t Here To Be Your Villain

said something interesting (among many interesting things!) the other day [bold mine]:

When I was living in Hungary, I would meet from time to time American men who had married women from what we used to call “Eastern Europe”. They all said the same thing: that Western culture had poisoned the minds of Western women they had dated. It was definitely not that they wanted wives who were subservient; they just wanted wives who weren’t constantly on an adversarial stance.

This is something that’s been on my mind for a long time now when it comes to the gender discourse. I once made note of the fact our society has turned men and women into competitors, something unprecedented in all of history. One of the most obvious, most predictable consequences of doing so was to make gender relations adversarial, to use Rod’s term, as well as toxic.

Remember: there are no such things as unintended consequences. There are only consequences considered and consequences neglected. In the haste to put men and women on a level playing field, we forced them to compete with one another and are now wondering why men and women are butting heads like they are. Maybe we’re not actually the smartest people to ever live?

Personally, I think you could go a long way towards mending gender relations, or at least making them less toxic, if women quit trying to make enemies out of men. To me, this is the biggest problem. You can ask people to change, but you can never ask someone to be the villain. Nobody will ever agree to that. No man asked for a woman to be a competitor, nor did any woman ask for men to be one, either.

Whatever problems may exist with Western men, misogyny isn’t one of them:

And, to be fair, I heard often from young, unmarried Hungarian female friends that they preferred to marry Western men, who, in their view, did not come with the sexism that they said is natural to men from their own culture. I had no way of knowing if that is true about Hungarian male sexism, though in being part of Hungarian social life for four years, albeit as an outsider, I did pick up some clues that it probably was. Still, none of my female interlocutors struck me as feminists. In fact, all identified as conservatives (some as practicing Christians) who were eager to marry and have kids. But they were educated, and, they said, a lot of Hungarian men their age found that threatening.

Quite the dilemma. Western women are rejecting Western men because they’re neither feminist nor progressive enough. Western men are rejecting Western women because they don’t want to be antagonized, instead seeking women from more traditional backgrounds who not only prefer the more gender-egalitarian norms of Western men, while also being traditional enough to not view men as the enemy. Who’s making more sense, here?

Clearly, a big part of the problem is that Western women have such sky-high expectations of men as to be unrealistic. On top of that, even relationships have become politicized. Yet we’re ultimately speaking of an issue which cannot be resolved politically. In some ways, expecting the problem to get solved through governance is a concession that we’ve failed as a culture and society in one of the most fundamental of ways: to manage orderly relations between men and women.

Trump: King Of The Low Road

I’m on the record as speaking ill of former President Joe Biden. I don’t believe him to be a good man, the damage he did to the country irreparable. That said, what Trump says here is quite appalling:

One of the reasons I’ve never considered myself ‘MAGA’ is because it’s a personality cult where one must sacrifice both their integrity and humanity in the interest of “winning,” which, in practice, amounts to whatever makes Trump happy in that moment, whatever makes Trump look good in that moment. Except this doesn’t make Trump look good at all, nor do I understand how this could make him happy. But Trump is, according to MAGA, some benighted figure with the Mandate Of Heaven, so what do I know?

I’ve said this from the start, I’ll say this when Trump’s days are over - it’s baffling how anyone can regard him to be a great leader when he exhibits none of the characteristics of great leaders. No, wishing Biden well alone doesn’t make someone a good leader. But demonstrating class does. At the very least, say nothing. That alone says quite a lot. Or maybe a “good luck, Joe” and end it there. That’s what I would’ve said.

MAGA insists there’s no time for grace when you’re locked into a life-or-death power struggle. First off, we’re not. Second, good leaders show restraint. Trump clearly lacks it, otherwise, he wouldn’t have done stupid things like the tariffs and Iran war. Third, good leaders aren’t about showmanship. I once remarked how Trump doesn’t even compare to many of the autocratic strongmen the media liken him to due to his lack of seriousness. Even Hitler was a dead-serious, highly intelligent person. We’re now at a point where comparisons between Trump and Hitler are more insulting to the latter than the former.

Six years of Trump are long enough to know what this man’s all about. Anyone who thinks there’s anything left for him to prove is a retard. This is as good as it’s going to get and it ain’t too pretty.

Support The Troops To Stick It To Trump

Marine Corps veteran Elliot Ackerman criticizes media coverage of the spartan conditions aboard the Navy aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, currently deployed in the Persian Gulf:

All of which perhaps should be the level of concern this country always gives to the suffering and safety of the volunteers who make up its military, but usually is not. In this case, however, the wall-to-wall coverage of the Lincoln and the reported suicide attempt seemed to serve a different purpose. Critics of President Donald Trump pointed to the incident as evidence of his mishandling of the war in Iran, a conflict he had said would last weeks but has extended into months with no clear end in sight. Now, the criticism goes, that mismanagement is placing the troops under intolerable levels of strain.

This is a tidy argument against Trump, but ultimately a cynical one. Sadly, a service member trying to kill himself on deployment is an all too regular occurrence. Each year, we lose 470 to 525 uniformed service members to suicide; that number jumps more than tenfold when you include America’s 18 million veterans. (The total population of U.S. military veterans is around 18 million, in addition to somewhere over 2 million current service members.) Suicide in the ranks and the strain deployments place on service members and their families have proven endemic for decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. This crisis has run straight through George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the first Trump term, and Joe Biden. It did not spike with this president, and the lawmakers now discovering their outrage have said very little about the 17 veterans lost to suicide per day when the pointing finger has had nowhere partisan to aim. The post-9/11 American way of war—multiple deployments sustained by an all-volunteer force—has been hard on those who serve.

One of the reasons the military is the most trusted institution is because of the perception of selflessness among service members. Those who serve indeed suffer in silence, depending instead on the public to do the talking for them. Unfortunately, this has turned into both sides speaking on their behalf only when politically useful to do so, as Ackerman argues.

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People crack under these conditions. Life in the military is hard, physically and emotionally. When they say war is hell, this is also part of that hell. And to pretend that hell is specific to Trump is disingenuous.

Extended deployments are nothing new. The service members sent to the Pacific or to Europe in World War II had no idea when they were coming home. During the surge in Iraq, the Army extended active-duty combat tours to 15 months—far longer and more lethal than the more than 260 days the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln have endured. To use the personal crisis of a single sailor as political ammunition does nothing to help or to support our troops; it is vulgar, an adjective that Trump’s critics often apply to him.

Even during peacetime, military life is difficult. It’s a job made more difficult when the partisans attempt to score political points using the military. Trump is 100 percent guilty in this regard. But so is the Left, increasingly so. The military is an influential, if not politically powerful, institution in America, and will become increasingly embroiled in escalating power struggle.

I’ll say this: if you really care about the troops, don’t just care about them when its convenient to your political cause. Care about them even when they’re not fighting wars. Don’t just thank service members for their service. Get to know them as people, get to know what life in the military is actually like. You may end up changing your mind, for better and for worse, about both the military and those who commit violence on our behalf.

“ID Required When We Say So, Bigot!”

My, the irony:

In response to criticism for the obvious disconnect between this and Mamdani’s strong opposition to voter ID, a spokesman for the Mayor’s Office came back with an all-time brain-dead response:

As if there’s any other reason to present ID. This is the caliber of people running the world’s most important city. This is the caliber of people who want total authority and power over you. This is people who truly believe themselves to be the smartest people ever to live and that everyone else is an uneducated fool who can’t figure the simplest things out. In reality, it’s people like Mamdani, the people trying to control our lives, who can’t figure simple things out, and it shows.

The Mayor’s Office further tried walking it back by saying the city-run grocery stores would require something akin to a library card. However, New York City’s own library system requires those applying for a library card to present proof of identity. Sure sounds like they’re asking you to present an ID, doesn’t it?

In addition to dealing with people of low intellect, we’re also dealing with people who make a career out of finding out how to lie to people and get away with it. The thing is, it’s one thing to deceive others. It’s another thing to engage in self-deception. That’s what the Mamdanis of the world are doing - being dishonest with others and, in doing so, deceiving themselves.

By the way, will theft be legal at these new government-run grocery stores?

You can shut down this nonsense by asking one question: shouldn’t everyone be allowed to steal, then? Better yet, if it’s okay to steal from businesses, why wouldn’t it be fine to steal from a government exchange? Or did she not think that far ahead?

Get Smart, Get Smacked

Kirill Basin, 40, Democratic Congressional candidate in Hawaii, learned the hard way that squaring off has consequences, suffering a humiliating defeat in the process:

Word of advice for any and all: if violence isn’t your thing, you’re better off not getting tough with anyone. This goes for triple if you’re running for Congress. Quadruple for liberals. I’m singling them out because of their attitude towards violence in general. If they think just barking loudly at someone is enough to cow someone, then they don’t understand how this works.

If you possess enough self-awareness to realize violence isn’t your thing, focus your energy on learning talk your way out of conflict, or avoid confrontation altogether. Nobody’s going to think less of you for it, trust me. They’ll gain respect for you, if anything. What will make people think less of you is to get into a confrontation and getting your ass kicked like Mr. Basin here.

Living In Virtual Insanity

Let’s shift to something more light-hearted. Remember Jamiroquai, their hit song, and the accompanying music video from 1996?

Can you believe this is 30 years old? 30 years ago in 1996 put you back in 1966. I assure you, the ‘60s were ancient history by the ‘90s. I think about this often, but it almost seems, at some point during the last 30 to 40 years, everyone and everything quit aging, even as time continued passing by.

Of course, much has changed since 1996. Yet instead of appearing old, stuff like the “Virtual Insanity” music video appear more modern, even futuristic, compared to anything contemporary. I don’t know what it is. Maybe nobody does. But I also know I’m not the only person who feels this way.

I suspect our culture has something to do with it. Back in the 1990s, the mood was much lighter and our attitude towards technology was more optimistic. That’s ironic to say, given that “Virtual Insanity” is literally a song about skepticism towards technology, a warning of what the future clearly held in store. At the same time, the culture being what it was, it conveyed a message of caution in an upbeat fashion. That’s what made it such a ‘90s song.

The music video was also famous for showing the performer, Jamiroquai’s lead vocalist Jay Kay, appearing to glide along the floor. Speculation ran rampant for years on how the video was shot. It turned out the concept was simple, yet so novel: everything moved except Jay Kay, who stayed mostly in one place, dance moves aside. Yes, the walls were moving and the camera was synchronized to move along with them.

It can be tough to pick up just from watching the video, underscoring just how creative a solution this was. In today’s age, when computerized special effects and AI can create just about any kind of… virtual reality, it’s astounding to look back and see what creative minds were able to achieve using practical methods just through brainstorming.

As for the song’s message… it was prescient, wasn’t it? I mean, just read the lyrics:

Futures made of virtual insanity
Now, always seem to be governed by this love we have
For useless twisting of our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound, for we all live underground

1996 was already a pretty high-tech world. It pales in comparison to how things are today, but it was sophisticated enough that any intelligent person could see what was coming up the road. Again, the only real difference was our attitude towards it. It was mostly optimistic with a dash of consternation. Since it hadn’t completely overwhelmed us nor consumed our daily lives, we were still able to live in the “real” world, real in the sense that our world wasn’t viewed entirely through a filter as it is today. Disconnecting wasn’t a choice. It was a part of the process.

Even things like hyper-polarization today are the result of viewing the world entirely through a filter. I’m on record as saying that I believe social media to be more indicative of reality than appreciated, but I also think living in a shared reality, even a fabricated one, does much to temper polarization. It probably explains why America, despite being more polarized than the rest of the developed world, was still a far less fractured society back in the world which produced Jamiroquai and “Virtual Insanity.”

What have I been saying a lot lately? There are no such things as unintended consequences. If musicians could see the negative impact technology would have on society, what’s your excuse? By the way, it says something about our culture today that there’s virtually no dissent like there was back in the ‘90s. It calls to mind something Shahid Bolsen once said about why he believes there’s never going to be a revolution in America: A people capable of revolution has to be a people capable first of imagination.

Since our culture today propagates the narratives our institutions impose, there’s no foundation for revolution. It’s not everything, no. But it gets at what people like say about how things like civil war or revolution require the existence of competing institutions. There has to be an alternative offered to the status quo. I’m not saying there was an alternative presented in 1996, but our culture then was at least willing to say something different than what our institutions were saying.

I’ve said more than I’ve intended, so we’ll close by observing that until our culture is more willing to say things like what Jamiroquai said in 1996, nothing will change for the better.

R.I.P., Brenda Fricker

This is already old news, but since I didn’t have a chance to say it then, I want to say it now. Fricker was a mainstay in the movies of my childhood, known for portraying motherly figures. She passed away at 81 last month, which is kind of funny, given that she seemed quite elderly to me when I was a kid. Similarly, I thought Steve Martin was 70 when I was a kid. Turns out he’s 70-something now.

My most memorable Brenda Fricker role was in 1994’s Angels in the Outfield. It’s this scene that always stayed with me over the years, even as I remembered little else about the film:

I’m less of a believer than I am. But this scene still spoke to me because it explains, better than any theologian ever could, why people believe in the first place. We believe because we need someone to look out for us. We need to believe that someone or something is ultimately in control, because we have so little control ourselves. It’s why we get up and face each day’s challenges - because we have faith that it’ll all work out in the end. If we didn’t even have the slightest glimmer of hope, we’d just stay in bed.

We like to think that controlling our own destiny is a good thing. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that frightening. Not because I don’t believe in agency - I absolutely do - but because humans are fallible. What gives me confidence isn’t knowing that I’ve got it. What gives me confidence is that someone or something out there has my back, and will be there for me when it all goes wrong.

The scene from Angels in the Outfield also reminds us of a time when it was easier to speak more openly and honestly about faith, including Christianity, when even our popular culture occasionally reflected those values. This was all within living memory. Brenda Fricker’s passing is a reminder of the world that once was, and no longer is.

What are your thoughts on anything we talked about? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Listening to global strategist Viktor Shvets on Erik Townsend’s podcast MacroVoices, I heard him say something interesting [bold mine]:

The interesting thing to look at is V-Dem database, which is a variety of democracies database. It’s run out of Sweden. It has a database going all the way to early 1900.

And the way they assess polarization, how polarized societies are, is how people, groups of people, parties in democracy relate to each other. Can they talk to each other? Can they exchange views? Can they pass legislation through parliament? Can they form coalitions in some form? And mathematically, they design it a score between minus four, which is very benign, everything is absolutely fine, to plus four, when you basically have a civil war.

And traditionally developed countries and developed economies like Europe, Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, places like that, they traditionally have a negative number. Negative one, negative two. More developing countries and emerging markets traditionally have a positive number, like one or two.

Now, if you’re saying two years ago, for example or three years ago, because in ‘24 we would have had ‘23 numbers, US was looking much more polarized than it did before, but it wasn’t really strongly in a positive territory. So if you go back to late 1990s, for example, or mid 1990s, US was always more polarized than other developed countries.

I checked the data myself - he’s correct. I was surprised to learn that, honestly. It does explain a lot about the United States. It’s true that we weren’t as polarized 30 years ago as we are today, that it was easier to talk politics with the other side. But it can also be true that polarization was more prevalent in the U.S. compared to other developed countries.

I can say that 30 years ago politics wasn’t something people identified too strongly with. Then again, I was a kid, and didn’t understand politics all that well. Still, if politics was something that got in the way of, well, everything, that would’ve been apparent at the time, and it wasn’t. Probably because we weren’t that polarized. People had their opinions, people thought this or that of the president, but we didn’t tribalize over it.

Political tribalism appears to be a uniquely American problem, at least in the developed world [bold mine]:

But the score was about minus one. In other developed countries like Canada, it would have been minus one and a half, minus two. In Europe, it would have been minus one and a half, minus two. US was more polarized, but not dramatically. By 2023, US already gone into net positive number. And other countries were becoming more polarized, but not extreme.

If you think of the latest numbers coming out for ‘25, ‘26, US is plus 2.3 That’s the highest and the fastest polarization in the history of the database that you have seen. Now, other countries also becoming more polarized, especially UK, Germany, France, Central and Eastern Europe, like Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary.

The question is two-fold: why has America always been more politically polarized than other developed countries? Why is America polarizing at such a fast rate? For all our problems, we have so much still going for this country, our situation is more stable than appreciated, and our problems are, to an extent, manageable still. I know many of the Right won’t like hearing that, but it’s fact. Even other right-wing figures like say similarly.

I posed the question to historian Dr. , friend of the Substack. She replied:

We aren’t one people. You cannot have a country that has allowed centralized government and have this many people and not have conflict.

It’s important to not misunderstand or mis-extrapolate what she’s saying. The implication isn’t that the U.S. is some multinational or even multicultural society at its core. What we’ve never been is one people, a.k.a. a nation. It’s something I’ve discussed before and while there’s room for nuance, we’ve been a country made up of strangers and individual communities than we’ve ever been an ethnos or polity. In fact, it’s bizarre to call America a nation when our entire culture entails expressly rejecting the building blocks of nationhood - common language, religion, ancestry.

Compare that to the nation states of Europe. Not only are they much older, they’ve went through the processes that create nations, namely centuries of warfare, including civil wars. Nations aren’t born from love. They’re born from bloodshed, lots of it. That’s why liberals think “nationalism” is a dirty word because it kind of is. Concepts like civic nationalism exist only in theory. In practice nations are born from war.

The point is that a country lacking any clear identity, that’s never enjoyed true cultural solidarity, will of course be fractured. Our higher rates of polarization reflect that. People think it’s bad to unite around a common language, religion (especially religion), and ancestry, but if not those things, then what would unite us? Ideas? Values? Neither of which anyone seems able to agree on?

Unity isn’t anything all that special nor transcendent. The only reason why Americans feel that way is because of our culture’s emphasis on the importance of universal values, which has it’s roots in… wait for it… Protestant Christianity. Refusing to unite around language, religion, ancestry because it’s “outdated” or something silly is just that. People have united around such outdated things for thousands of years precisely because that’s what brought people together. Those who keep searching for more “enlightened” forms of unity are searching for a unicorn. It exists only in their heads.

Violence Still Makes Us American

Let’s get away from the philosophy. Looking at America’s own relatively short history, it’s seen an awful lot of violence. It hasn’t seen many civil wars and revolutions, but over the long term, lots of blood has been shed through crime, civil unrest, and mass racial violence. None of this is conducive to unity, obviously. What has united the U.S. has been war against foreign adversaries. It’s the reason why war remains so central to our national myth, why the military is promoted as the one institution so central to our national identity.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - only a war can save us now. Not only must it be a war against a foreign adversary, however, it may end up permanently splitting us apart. Unity through war is tough to be had if a society is disunited to begin with, if people don’t want to be unified. A generation of Islamist terror has only culminated in the increasing prominence of Muslims in the West. I don’t see a war of the scale necessary coming up the road, anyway. Who are we going to fight? Are we seriously invading Iran, a war that’s popular with nobody? We really going to beat the Russia drum again? Fight China, our largest economic partner? Who’s the enemy, really?

How the hell has America not collapsed anyway, without any real unity? Obviously, things aren’t so simple, states and societies being robust and resilient, more so than given credit for. But, as our friend explains, there’s something truly bizarre or remarkable, depending on your perspective, about the U.S.:

More:

Nevertheless, Americans do not seem to be particularly content with their lot — the country is constantly being convulsed by various sociopolitical upheavals, such as the now rather routine assassination attempts on the current president etc.

I do want to push back slightly on this. As unstable as our sociopolitical situation is growing, we’re still not in as bad a place as we were in the 1960s and 1970s. If one wants to reject the better-worse framing, then we’re in a situation without any real precedent, at least not in U.S. history. We’re a middle-aged and aging society of 334 million people, diverse and multicultural, with rapidly declining crime rates, among other things. Even protests and civil unrest these days are less spontaneous than ever (if ever they were) and more manufactured than ever. We really do live in a time when our problems are manageable, yet we all still need a crisis or moral panic every once in a while.

Don’t misunderstand - I’m not saying everything’s fine! But I’m saying that we need to accurately assess the situation. I named my blog We’re Not At The End, But You Can See It From Here for a reason. Our problems our mounting and we can certainly see that things are reaching an inflection point. Yet not only are we not there, not only is there really no telling when we will, but when we do, there’s not going to be much we can do about it. That’s not Max talking, either, not entirely. That’s history talking.

More from Kaiser Bauch [bold mine]:

If anything, one wonders how a society that is used to having the highest living standards in human history, without really even being aware of the level of abundance it has, would react to a serious economic downturn that would curtail those living standards measurably. I do not think it would be pretty. High living standards might be the last thing holding the country together.

That’s what I’m afraid of. Again, many of our problems are manufactured, the result of boredom, the need for crisis instead of the existence of one. In addition to being a middle-aged society, another reason we’re not headed for some cataclysmic upheaval is our addiction to comfort. It’s a drug all of us, even on the Right, have consumed to the point of dependency. Even most leftists won’t carry out acts of violence unless they can do so within the safe confines of the mob. A lone crazed or mentally ill leftist is the one to worry about.

And that’s just the point Kaiser Bauch is making: what happens when that comfort is removed? I refuse to speculate given that it’s easy to succumb to apocalyptic narratives. Even if an economic crisis were to occur, it might take time before people resort to more extreme measures, in hopes of things eventually returning to normal. Normalcy bias prevails even during an SHTF.

Even with rising costs, people still spend lots of money, thanks to an abundance of credit. Sure, excessive reliance on credit is a sign an empire is running out of road. But the fact people are still spending the money suggests high costs are still manageable. The affluence in this country is a double-edged sword in that even as prices rise, demand never falls. Or maybe this is the best-case scenario. Maybe the alternative is that both prices and demand falls, which leads to deflation, which would mean we’re in an economic collapse.

Still, we can assume things won’t be pretty if a high standard of living were to ever be taken from Americans. For a broad outline of what the future looks like, let’s return to Viktor Shvets [bold mine]:

At the same time, they feel no matter how hard they work They won’t be able to make it. And so that explains two or three things. It explains why the later millennials and Gen Z, anybody born after sort of 1985, why they’re not becoming more conservative when they age. The traditional demographic star guide tells you that you start liberal and then you, as you age, you become more conservative.

With this generation, it’s the opposite. They’re actually becoming even more liberal than what they were when they were younger. And the reason it’s happening, as I said, is that they don’t see their way out, and so they’re willing to take a gamble. And so number one, they are more gambling individuals anyway, so younger generation gamble more because that’s the only way to get ahead.

Or they try to swing for extreme answers, sometimes transferring their loyalty to somebody like Donald Trump and taking it away and putting an extreme left like, Mamdani or AOC or or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. So to answer your question, remember we discussed how you can solve it, violence, redistribution policies, or fast productivity.

That’s your three answers.

This might seem an overly materialistic view of things, but remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: if you don’t have a job, if you can’t make ends meet, little else really matters. Obviously, as Kaiser Bauch points out, having it all can’t save your country. But since America continues to chug along thanks to its economy and standard of living, it stands to reason a decline in both would likely be our undoing.

When Erik Townsend asked Shvets if he believes violence will break out sooner rather than later, this was the response:

Unfortunately, yes, because for very simple reason people are not ready for redistribution policies. People are not ready for things like universal basic income.

People are not ready for changing social and welfare system. So neither political systems, nor individuals and people, nor businesses are ready for any of this. And so the most obvious policies to apply in order to define the extreme are not being implemented. The other set of policies you can introduce, and that’s regulating AI and technology, and that basically saying, “Let’s just develop it, not just at a slower pace, but let’s develop it in a way that it augments humans, not replaces humans.”

I don’t know if redistributionist policies are the answer not because I’m a free market capitalist more than I’m not, but because actual redistributionist policies are popular only if people believe they won’t need to pay anything for it. But that’s not how it’s going to work in practice. It’s not just billionaires who are going to have to lose something. To make redistribution sustainable, everyone has to contribute.

Most Americans, including liberals, aren’t willing to participate because they don’t think they possess the moral obligation to do so. Remember: nobody pays taxes voluntarily. Even on the Left, most people would rather make more money than not and are imagining a world where they get to enjoy both an affluent lifestyle plus a Nordic-style welfare state. It’s interesting how they never cite any other countries as examples to aspire to, given the exceptional nature of Scandinavia.

This is point that Neil Howe, co-author of the “Fourth Turning” theory, makes, but the existential crisis America faces during the Fourth Turning has the effect of redistributing wealth. Redistributionist policies work best when the necessity for doing so is undeniable or the urgency of the moment makes it difficult to say “no.” When you have to spend money, you have to spend money. In other words, don’t expect redistribution to happen absent a major war or catastrophe.

Final word from Shvets on violence:

Again, there are very few takers apart from academia and some places that actually agree with that. So to me, do we have answers outside of violence? Yes, we do. Unfortunately, we’re not really embracing it. And it do- doesn’t just apply to United States. As I said, it applies to everyone. You find level of violence is less in the countries that less polarized.

So Australia started less polarized. Today it’s less polarized. You don’t have quite the same level. Japan started less polarized. Today it’s less polarized. You have less. Other countries who already were polarized before and become even more polarized, like US or India, you do have a lot more of that occurring.

And I said unless polarization have come down, we can’t come back to something that we would regard as normal.

Don’t take the U.S.-India comparison too literally. Shvets is just saying that polarization was a bigger problem in America in the past than it was in other developed countries, and is an even bigger problem now, with India simply being another example of what a country with strong polarization looks like.

Divided Empire Of America

What do I think the future holds? I agree with Shvets that if we had to sum it up in one word, it’d be violence. Exactly what form it’ll take, I don’t want to speculate too deeply on. Not only have I done plenty of that in the past, I’m not so sure about it anymore. But I also instead want everyone to consider what the end state, by extension the solution, as it were, might be.

We’ll rule out one outcome entirely: collapse. This is such an unlikely scenario which, if were come to pass, would be far too devastating to prepare for. So we’ll instead consider devolution and empire. The former is where the union remains intact, but instead of wealth redistribution, power redistribution takes place. Basically, we become something more like what the Founders had envisioned, where the states held more power and the federal government played a far lesser role. This is the best-case outcome, since it’d end the absurdity of 334 millions people at the mercy of a power struggle between two mass mobs, returning governance to a smaller-scale, more manageable level.

This is also an unlikely scenario, as history shows no example of a state devolving in this fashion, let alone breaking apart voluntarily. History shows instead that the powerful tend to get more powerful, and I don’t see why that wouldn’t happen in the U.S., given that the state at all levels, but especially the federal government, has done nothing but become more powerful over time. The U.S. also isn’t a weak country, nor would it be even if it weren’t a superpower.

Technology makes centralized, authoritarian governance more viable than it ever was before. There’s no need for a coup, military junta, none of that. That’s so 20th century. Besides, Americans, who worship democracy as though it were a god, prove you don’t actually need to be a democracy to keep everyone content. You just need to pretend to be a democracy.

On top of that, as much bad as there is out there, there’s much that’s not so bad, either. The likelihood Americans will become a victim of crime is as low as it’s probably ever going to get, even as America remains more dangerous than the rest of the developed world. The real problem is how atomization makes society dysfunctional, anarcho-tyranny, the absence of rule of law, and how participation in public life - politics, specifically - is becoming more dangerous, especially as the ideological rift widens.

To quote Nathan Pinkoski:

To be in public life, you will need 24/7 security and surveillance. People who cannot endure that lifestyle will withdraw from the public arena. We are moving very quickly toward a low-trust society, where we hesitate to speak openly with neighbors or fellow citizens, because deep down in our hearts we fear encountering someone who wants to eliminate us.

A democracy cannot function is people are afraid of what might happen to them if they participate in the public discourse. We need to have confidence that our views, a wide range of views, can be safely shared without undue risk to either our lives or livelihoods. Free speech isn’t without consequence, no. But if the punishment for saying the wrong thing is to lose everything you worked for, maybe even your life, don’t be surprised that fewer and fewer people have anything left to say, and most certainly don’t expect democracy to work if a free and open exchange of ideas cannot take place. It already doesn’t.

This leads to only one outcome: empire. Don’t think of empire as a solution rather than the logical, natural outcome of existing trends. The same thing goes for collapse: if it happens, that’s because it’s the only thing that could happen, not that anyone wanted it to. Ultimately, the state seeks to preserve itself. In an existential crisis, don’t expect it to stand idly by while everything comes crashing down around it. That’s how a collapse happens and states always do whatever it takes to prevent it from occurring.

The other reason why empire is the only possible outcome because it’s simply the only way to hold a fractured society together. Create maximum dependency along with a vast control mechanism - surveillance state comes to mind - and you can keep even a divided country of hundreds of millions together. Don’t say it can’t happen here because it’s happened throughout history across a wide variety of societies with far less sophisticated means at their disposal.

I think this is the way Neil Howe will be vindicated when he says unity always follows the existential crisis of the Fourth Turning. It won’t be a nationalistic type of unity, no. It’ll be the kind of unity seen in empires and there exist plenty of examples of it. It’s not ideal. But there won’t exactly be an alternative, either.

Maybe We’ll Never Be United. Maybe That’s OK.

The bottom line is that an apolitical, depoliticized America, whichever term you want to use, is aspirational and mythical. Yes, we saw happier days, but even then, an ugly divisiveness lay just beneath the exterior. In some ways, what we’re seeing today is a return to the baseline. The problem is, I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to feel ambivalent or concerned about it. If this is who we are, what’s the big deal? Might as well get used to it.

We’ll close on a timely essay by Jesse McKinley writing in The New York Times about how the Blue-Red, Democratic-Republican, Left-Right tribal framework is increasingly outdated today, kindly unlocked for us by the irreplaceable :

It’s an article of faith that America is polarized. Its people are bifurcated and bunkered, engaged in a never-ending Spy vs. Spy with each camp finding it nearly impossible to relate to the other side of the divide. That certainly describes our ruptured two-party political system: The very concept of a United States, it seems, is now misleading.

But what if that idea doesn’t quite sum it up?

Some social scientists and cultural observers are increasingly considering a more extreme concept: atomization, or the scattering of people — not into two opposing factions but into countless smaller tribes.

Make no mistake: coalitions still exist. Ultimately, in an ideological conflict, coalitions will need to be built. But even coalition-building is a struggle today because it’s difficult to get all these groups on the same page. There also exists an 80-20 dynamic where the people willing to the hard work of politicking are a very small percentage of each coalition.

America is atomizing and fast:

Cultural critics and historians say our atomization is driven by many forces, including the nation’s foundational pledge of personal freedoms, its proud and sometimes stubborn streak of individualism and its regional and ethnic diversity. Perhaps most important is the internet, offering anything to everybody, no matter how niche — and often leading to a distracted, fragmented and overstimulated online world.

If you needed any more evidence of how democracy is untenable in the U.S., there it is. But we’ll talk about that more some other time.

After a necessary broadside against the Right, singling it out as uniquely problematic, apparently oblivious to how it contributes to the tribalism he laments, McKinley continues:

That brew of disinformation and disgust parallels a deep civic disillusionment: Poll after poll has found Americans less likely to know their neighbors, to trust other people, to have faith in the modern family. America is the only country where a majority of people think their fellow citizens are “morally bad,” according to Pew.

I’m curious if people like McKinley will ever seriously contemplate the massive role the media has played in creating such a problematic state of affairs. But if they did, they probably wouldn’t have a job, would they? I spent all essay discussing how division is endemic to the U.S. But the level of division we see today is so unprecedented, it cannot be explained away by the fact we’ve never been one people, not alone.

America is already past the point of no return:

The Balkanization of belief also undercuts a shared national narrative, students of political theory say, noting that commonalities are important to help bind people together in hard times like wars and economic downturns. Atomization has dangerous historical precedents, too. Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher widely credited with popularizing the idea, saw the phenomenon as a precursor to regimes like the Nazis and Stalinist Russia.

“Totalitarian movements,” she wrote in 1951, “are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.”

It’s not the focus of my piece, but again, when will liberals, the media, the elite class as a whole, confront the role they played in bringing us to this moment, instead of pretending like they’re a neutral party simply noting the obvious? Furthermore, why do they continue to push this idea that you can create a country like America of 2026 and still expect to have things like a shared national narrative and commonalities, when our entire culture today is oriented around rejecting such archaic, fascistic notions? It’s all so tiresome.

The passage above also explains why empire isn’t just the next obvious step in our evolution as a state and society, but also why it might be the only salvation from totalitarianism. Empires aren’t totalitarian, not necessarily. The only way to stop totalitarian movements is through power. Strong states aren’t what lead to things like communism and fascism. Weak states are. Collapsed governments are. You don’t have to like it. But this is how it works.

It wouldn’t be an NYT essay without a feeble attempt at trying to draw inspiration for the present from our past:

Still, there is a precedent for our current moment — and a comeback, Putnam said. The last Gilded Age, in the late 1800s, also had enormous concentrations of wealth, technological advancements and a self-centered sense of social Darwinism.

But he argued that those Americans found their way back to a more unified country, in part by solving issues at a local level, where citizens have more trust in their leaders. And they relied on younger people to find solutions.

Americans led their country to “an upswing,” as he described it in a 2020 book.

“They,” he said, “fixed it.”

No. Don’t flatter yourself, liberals. You aren’t our ancestors, you’ve completely rejected them, remember? We simply aren’t the same country we were back then. As I keep saying, the situation today is truly unprecedented, not just in American history, but in global history. In addition to being far more diverse than we were in the late-19th century (I thought we wanted to be less White), we’re also much older demographically, and the country has grown stagnant.

These attempts at trying to draw inspiration from our past is a pathetic attempt at equivocating today’s multicultural America to the truly brave and intrepid folk who actually built this country. It’s not only insulting to those who came before us, it’s just not true, either. People today, rather than being weak, are just too addicted to comfort, accustomed to a world that’s eliminated much hardship. Furthermore, the changes described such as that of the Gilded Age don’t happen just because people recognized we were on the wrong path. They happen in the wake of cataclysm. What was that awful thing that happened in the mid-19th century that effectively amounted to a hard reset for the country?

I hate to sound vindictive, but please: if you want to be part of the solution, be intellectually honest. Otherwise, quit pretending like there’s anything left to save, and prepare for imperial governance. Learn to shut up now before it costs you. The rest of us already have.

But what do you think? Why do you think America has always been more polarized than the rest of the developed world, even during better times? What’s our high rate of polarization today mean for the future? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: Having recently turned 40 years of age, I want to take an opportunity to write this letter to my 20-year-old self, sharing thoughts and lessons I’ve learned over the last 20 years. I realize this isn’t my usual fare, but the moment is still significant enough for me that I feel compelled to use the opportunity to reflect and share my thoughts.

Feel free to skip this entry if it’s not what you subscribe to my Substack for. I won’t take it personally. But I hope you’ll read it and find meaning in it. So, here it is.

Dear 20-year-old Max,

Remember when age 40 seemed so far away? Well, here we are! It’s 2026 and you’ve turned the big four-oh! So right out of the box, the good news is that you’ve made it this far! The older you get, the more you realize how living a long life is no guarantee, and that it really takes lots of work and some luck, unfortunately, to stick around for the long haul. I can’t help but think about how human life expectancy was once only about as long as I’ve been alive. I’ve outlived Jesus, for one. For what it’s worth, I’m as old as John Lennon was when he died. It’s sobering to think about, but it also makes me even more grateful to still be here.

I know, from where you’re at, you probably weren’t thinking about what life at 40 would look like. You probably instead have lots of ideas of what your life is going to look like five, at most ten, years from now. All I can tell you is this: it’s going to be a roller-coaster. Emotionally as well as literally. You may not feel like you’re doing anything all that important, and looking back on it, I don’t think I made much of a difference. But you tread water, weathered the storm, whichever term you want to use. That’s not nothing.

Here in 2026, you’re doing well for yourself. You have a great career. You even have a budding writing career, though honestly, it’s still kind of stillborn. You’re not wealthy, but money isn’t a big problem. You’re enjoying life, for the most part. You’ve visited over a dozen countries, most of them in the most recent several years. All things considered, you have a lot going for you. Rest assured - your struggles will all pay off in the end. You made mistakes, sure. But you eventually make all the right choices. Be proud of that.

Now, I know that on some level, that sounds disappointing. I get it. None of your dreams come true, unfortunately. But if nothing else, know this: you’re in a better place now at age 40 then you were at age 30, and most certainly age 20. Not everyone can say that. Sometimes, better than before is the best there is. You’ll learn that as you make it to where I am today.

Now, for some bad news. I hate to do this, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to warn you of what’s to come. I know my 20-year-old self would absolutely want an idea. That way, he can prepare himself. So, here it goes. In a few short years, you’ll undergo the biggest test of your life. I won’t sugarcoat it: the floor will give out on you. You’ll end up questioning everything about yourself, every choice you ever made, and your pride will take a massive hit. And you’ll need to make a major decision about the direction you want to take in life.

I wish I could tell you not to even go down the road you chose for yourself. But I can’t do that. I know my stubborn 20-year-old self wouldn’t listen, anyway. So, instead, I’ll say that when it does happen, close that chapter quickly, and move on. In the long run, things will work out. It won’t feel that way in the moment, no. You’ll feel a level of despair and hopelessness you can’t fathom, not right now. But understand that overcoming challenges like what’s to come is what life’s all about. In the end, it’s not the failure you’ll regret. It’s the time wasted that you will.

When you undergo this crisis, I ask one thing of you: don’t blame your family, especially your mother. They may not always agree with your life choices. But nobody else in this world is more committed to your success, roots for you more, than they are. And it’s when you undergo this test of character and will that you’ll learn the hard way the importance of family.

Your mother’s still here, by the way. Your relationship with her remains as strong as it ever was. Be grateful for that.

Which leads to my next point: a man is nothing if he’s not there for his family. And a few years after getting past that challenge, you’ll have to be there for them through tragedy. It’s going to be tough. But you’ll be strong and carry on, like a man should. You’ll look back and won’t help but be proud of how you were the person you needed to be when your family needed it most. I know you won’t believe it now, but trust me: it’ll make all your sacrifices, all your unanswered prayers, worth it. If nothing else, you won’t need to look back with regret and shame that you didn’t live up to your commitments as a family man.

A few short years after that, you’ll then meet a man whom you won’t know for long and quickly forget his name. All I can recall is that he was tall, late-40s, early-50s, and Italian. The reason I mention him is because he’ll tell you something that’ll change your life. I’m not kidding. Somehow, you’ll get into a conversation with him about how your life hasn’t worked out, how you don’t know what to do with yourself. He’ll reassure you that everything will work out, to just keep on grinding, that everyone finds their place in this world.

You won’t like hearing it at the time. You’ll even feel frustrated. You’ll ask him, “How would you know?” He’ll reply, very simply, by saying, “Because I lived it.” I can’t even begin to tell you how much that woke something up inside of me. It was in that moment that I realized how little I actually knew, that there truly exists an understanding only time can deliver. That’s what he was offering me: wisdom. Not knowledge.

With that wisdom, you’ll make a series of choices over the next several years that’ll change your life. Don’t get it wrong - you won’t run into great riches or anything like that. Not yet, anyway. But after years of struggle, you’ll finally find a direction in life, and a place in the world. Sure, it wasn’t the life you expected, nor was it the one you even truly wanted. But there are people out there who go their entire lives without finding any direction in life or place in the world. You will. Be grateful for that.

As for finding love, I wish I had good news to report to you there. I regret to inform you that “40 Year Old Virgin” wasn’t just a movie, not in your case. You thought that 20 years is a long time, that eventually, it’ll just happen on its own. You thought that, by 40, you’d at least have been in one relationship. Unfortunately, it won’t happen. You were the “incel” before the term ever became part of our popular lexicon. When it comes to love, life still rewards the attractive and socially adept. You’re still neither. At this point in life, it’s just fact.

I know that’s not what you wanted to hear. Believe me, I know. It sucks. And I don’t have any useful advice to offer, except maybe this: it’s easy to be liked, but it’s hard to be loved. So don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking it’ll happen “when the time is right” or something stupid like that. Love is something to pursue. Maybe some of us aren’t meant for it. I’m increasingly becoming resigned to the fact it’s the one blessing I’ll miss out on, unfortunately. But again, it won’t ever happen on its own. Keep that in mind going forward.

Let me now share the five most important lessons I’ve learned in these four decades of living. One, always make choices you can live with, that you won’t need to explain to anyone later, including yourself. Life is hard enough as it is. Don’t do anything to make it harder. This doesn’t mean don’t take risks in life. You’ll absolutely have to. I wish I’d taken more risks earlier in life. The key is to take calculated risks. You can explain those. You can’t explain recklessness or doing something you knew was wrong. Live your life with honesty and integrity, always.

Two, remember that when it’s all said and done, the only thing anyone remembers about anyone else is how that person made them feel. You can’t control what people think of you. But if you treat people with fairness and humility, nobody will remember badly of you. They say that if you don’t have a few haters in life, you’ve done nothing with yourself. That’s true, too. Still, do the best you can to make it so people remember well of you. Even if your relationship with someone might’ve been rocky, let their last memory of you be something positive. It’s the only legacy anyone truly leaves behind.

Three, I mentioned earlier that it’s easier to be liked than to be loved. Well, it’s also hard to get anyone to truly care about you. That shows the importance of family. But it also shows how important a robust social life is, how it’s something money cannot buy. The happiest people on Earth are part of strong families and communities. That’s a demonstrable fact. It’s going to be hard for you to have this for yourself. Find it wherever you can, if you can, however. I still haven’t found it myself. Maybe I never will. But it might not be too late for you.

Four, and you’ll hear someone say this, when it’s all over, we don’t think about all the money we made, all the success we’ve had in life, none of that. All we remember are the people we knew, those who meant anything to us. If you want to be around for them, then don’t neglect your health. I can’t stress this enough. You’ll be fortunate to make it to 40 without any major health problems (not yet), Max, but there are no guarantees in life. You’ll lose people along the way to health problems, you’ll lose many more thereafter. It’s tough to enjoy life when you can’t move around, when you’re in and out of the hospital constantly, when death is constantly in the room with you. Stay active, hit the gym, eat as healthy as possible. It truly is everything.

Five and finally, just enjoy life and let it surprise you. You’ll endure so many disappointments along the way, it’s just not worth it to get so obsessed with career, money, etc. Don’t get too wrapped up into politics, either. Trust me, the country is going to go through hard times. It won’t be the same place it was the first 20 years of your life in a short time from now, trust me. If I told you what it all looks like in 2026, you wouldn’t believe me.

So just let history unfold, look out for yourself, and remember that life is rough, but still worth living. Don’t miss a World Cup. Travel the world when you can finally afford to do so. It’ll be among the best memories you make for yourself. By the way, your favorite baseball team will finally win a World Series. There are so many wonderful experiences up the road, so stay on it!

Looking back, I think what strikes me most is to think how I lacked confidence in myself. Yet, here I am. How’d I make it so far, so successfully, without confidence? Maybe it’s because you, in fact, believed in yourself. You believed in yourself more than you know.

Make no mistake, though - you need success to be confident. But you also need to be successful to be confident. It’s less about what everyone else thinks of you. It’s what you think of yourself. But to think highly of yourself, you need wins under your belt. And you got them.

You did do it right, Max. Now it’s time to get to the task of living. I don’t know what I’ll have to say to you in another ten or twenty years. I certainly didn’t know what my 40-year-old self might say to my 20-year-old self. Now I do. The lesson here is that life is a mystery to be experienced, not solved ahead of time. If we all knew how it ends, would we really want to go through it all?

It calls to mind a song that’ll become a hit in just two years from your time, “Roll With Me”, by Montgomery Gentry:

Who knows what’s up ahead
I think I’d rather not know instead

So now I’m slowing it down
And I’m looking around
And I’m loving this town
And I’m doing alright
Ain’t worried about nothing
Except for the man I wanna be
I’m thinking maybe its time
To be living the rhyme
When I’m singing a song
About nothing but right
And it sure would be nice
If you would roll with me

I can’t tell you how much that song meant to me, how those lyrics still sustain me to this day. So hold onto something like that if you’ve got nothing else. And just roll with it. Maybe even find someone to roll with you.

Anyway, don’t let anything I’m saying get too deep inside your head. Focus on the present, focus on where you’re at currently and what you’re doing. I wish I’d done that more back in your time. Don’t forget what I said here to you, certainly, but don’t fixate on it too much, either. Let it serve as a guide, not a checklist. Make it something you can always come back to when you feel lost. Let it be the light in the darkness, at the end of the tunnel. All I ask is, don’t be in too much of a hurry to get to where I’m at.

In the meantime, remember that I’m always praying for my past self. I hope you’ll pray for your future self. Whenever you get here, just get here in one piece. I can’t wait for you to see how it all turns out. Meanwhile, I’ll get on moving myself, and I hope to have even better news to report to you in another ten, twenty years.

Good luck, God bless, and happy birthday, Max.

If you ended up reading this entry, thank you for letting me share my thoughts with you. What about you? Have any of you passed 40 years of age? What advice would you share with your 20-year-old self if you could? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Shortly after publishing my meditation on violence a few weeks ago, I came across this video on YouTube explaining why violence remains inseparable from civilization:

It’s a short video, so I’ll hope you’ll take the time to watch. In five minutes, the creator explains why civilization hasn’t de-programmed violence out of humans. At the risk of spoiling, he explains how violence, for much of human history, was at the center of life. He explains, astutely, how the human brain doesn’t perceive things in terms of good and evil. Instead, it perceives in terms of threat, power, dominance and survival.

He also goes into how just witnessing violence, even through a barrier such as an electronic screen, triggers a physiological response, meaning that nobody really chooses whether or not they’re drawn to violence. If anything, violence, when presented as entertainment, is uniquely capable of holding our attention like no other, because people can bear witness safely and because violence for the purposes of entertainment provides clarity, order, and structure to something chaotic, messy, and often supremely dissatisfying, not to mention unsafe, in real life.

If you don’t follow what I’m saying, watch videos of a scripted fight in a movie or even a UFC event, then watch videos of real fights. You’ll see obvious differences. In a movie, fights are choreographed, and the performers know exactly what’s coming next. Same with professional wrestling. In martial arts, moves can be anticipated to degree, but more importantly, are governed by clear rules of the road. Not so in real-world violence. Yes, there exist laws and unwritten rules, but they can be violated at any time. Criminals always do.

In the end, the video’s creator drops a heavy truth-bomb:

Civilization did not erase humanity’s darker instincts. It only taught us where they are allowed to appear.

In other words, civilization doesn’t exist to provide free college and healthcare, as liberals like to believe. Civilization exists to restrain humans from each other and themselves, and in doing so, provide order. If it struggles with this one task, it’s a failing, if not failed, civilization.

It’s for this reason saying things like “violence isn’t an answer” or “we don’t solve our problems through violence” isn’t helpful at all. Ultimately, solutions to society’s problems involve some form of violence. More important, violence, both for good and bad ends, is all around us. It’s just that civilization keeps a lid on it, allowing us to ignore it at will, or not partake in it at all.

None of it makes it go away.

Dear Ladies: War Isn’t Better Than Babies

A feminist tries to argue that women, not men, are built for war:

I have some thoughts. First, the fact that women have never shouldered the burden of violence in society means that this sort of research is practically meaningless. Violence isn’t just about physical resilience. Most people, man or woman, seek to avoid danger. Most men don’t make great soldiers, either. Every war has revealed a sort of 80-20 dynamic when it comes to combat. This doesn’t rule women out of combat, not on its own.

But it does reveal that physical resilience is only one aspect of being an effective soldier. You can give them all the best equipment and training in the world, but without the mentality necessary to face and confront danger, they’ll be useless in war. Biologically, most women don’t possess that mentality. They simply didn’t evolve that way. In this house, we believe in science, right?

Second, feminists will boast of their ability to endure the pain of childbirth, all while regarding reproduction as burdensome. In the same breath, they’ll demand the “right” to go to war or participate in violent activity. Since women, at least in the West, have never been conscripted to fight wars or never had to prove themselves worthy through violence as a matter of custom, the modern woman, specifically, has no concept of mind concerning violence. Having the right to do violent jobs means you also have the right to get punched, kicked, shot, and killed. People who ignore this aspect of it or are flippant about it like feminists are wholly unsuitable for the job.

Third, feminists cannot have it both ways - they cannot, on one hand, emphasize the fact men are the more violent of the two genders (which is a biological fact) while also claiming women are just as capable of violence or are better at it. Nature is two-faced; what makes men brave and courageous in the face of danger is also what can turn them into brutal savages. It’s socialization which channels male violence towards constructive ends. What makes women the better of the two genders is also what makes them weak and incapable of violence at scale. It makes no sense to screech about how violent men are but then also argue that women should be sent to war or out on the streets where they tackle such monsters.

Fourth, I’ve made this point many times before, and will continue making this point for probably the rest of my life: the fixation feminists have with violent occupations like law enforcement and the military isn’t out of a sense of duty or even an interest in such work. It’s with the status benefits these occupations provide. The push for greater female representation in policing doesn’t carry over to corrections work, for example, because being a prison guard simply doesn’t have the same level of prestige as being a street cop or detective does. There’s little to no push for women to be further represented in dangerous work that doesn’t offer much in the way of salary or status upgrades.

The debate surrounding women in violent occupations is a loaded one and this isn’t the essay to lay it all out. I’ll end it by saying that if you have to ask for the “right” to go to war, it’s probably not in your nature to do so. If you strip any society down to its barest essentials, men, by virtue of evolution, will band together to protect the women and children, who’ll in turn band together to seek refuge. It just happens without anyone thinking too hard about it.

Look at what happened last month in Guajes de Ayala, Mexico - women, children, and elderly banded together in refuge while the men, forming a community self-defense group (some call them “vigilante” militias), went off to battle cartels:

This is how it happens in the real world. This is how it is when the illusions civilization affords us are stripped away. It’s easy to demand the right to fight when violence isn’t something you have to face every day, when death is the last thing on your mind daily.

The protection civilization offers women isn’t an entitlement, either. Women aren’t protected simply for being women, not really. Women still have to offer something, just as men do. They need to offer labor, reproduction, something. Resources are finite and if you want access to civilization’s protection and resources, you have to contribute. Nothing in life comes free, even in an anarchy. In fact, it’s in anarchy that the cost of survival becomes more apparent. Even feminists get that, right?

This is basically another variant of the silly “Bear vs. Man” debate. If women think childbearing is tough but going to war isn’t, that’s because they haven’t been to war enough, they haven’t been in enough fights. All I can say is this: there are plenty of wars going on around the world. You’re free, empowered women: you need nobody’s permission to go off and find out what it’s really like to kill and have someone try to kill you.

I wish you well. Girl power!

No State Monopoly On Violence Means Dead Influencers

Speaking of Mexico, it isn’t a Third World country. Not by a long shot. It’s still also a good example of a country whose state monopoly on violence is in jeopardy. The cartels are the most prominent example of this. But so is crime in general.

A Mexican influencer named César Gastélum was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Culiacan [WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT]:

There have been multiple murders of influencers in Mexico over the last few years. It seems to be a fairly common occurrence south of the border. I’ve been to Mexico and I love the country. There are even things I like more about Mexico than I do about the U.S. This doesn’t mean I deny the reality of what’s happening down there. This is the problem people seem to have - the inability to accept that perfectly wonderful places filled with perfectly wonderful people can still be terribly imperfect and have problems we don’t need to deal with.

America is a violent place, too. It still pales in comparison to the level of violence in Mexico. Influencers do periodically get assaulted or even killed in the U.S. It still doesn’t compare to the frequency with which it happens in Mexico. The difference is the extent to which the state possesses a monopoly on violence. Mexico isn’t as close to being a failed state as some on the Right describe it as. But it’s definitely a place where the state doesn’t have full control over what’s happening within its own borders, either.

Anyone who thinks state monopoly on violence is a bad thing should look at Mexico and consider what the alternative looks like. It looks like influencers being shot and killed with alarmingly regularity, for one.

They Understand Violence

If the West doesn’t understand violence, they better and fast, because the Muslims certainly do:

I think this about sums up the problem with Muslims, why there’s ultimately no co-existing with them in the West:

This isn’t any exaggeration nor mischaracterization. Muslims are loyal to themselves. As I’ve also explained before, they might find extremism and terrorism inconvenient, but it serves a purpose. It’s through violence that Muslims have gained prominence and political power in the West. Since 9/11, since the mid-to-late-2010s Islamist terror wave, it’s only been up, up, up in the West for Muslims.

As Islamo-leftism - what the French call Islamogauchisme - rises now in the U.S. also, the West needs to come to terms with how it happened. It didn’t happen peacefully. It didn’t happen because the West indulged its better angels. It happened because a society was taught to hate itself and a force capable of exploiting that self-hatred was able to effectively employ violence to force submission. That’s what Islam is, after all.

Liberals Can’t Be Scared Straight

The account has since been suspended, but someone posted recently on X that White liberals should be subjected to the “scared straight” treatment in hopes that they come to their senses on crime and quit infantilizing criminals, especially those who are black. For those of you who may not know, this refers to a famous 1978 documentary titled Scared Straight! where several juveniles are forced to spend a few hours with felons doing serious time for serious crimes at a state penitentiary.

During those few hours, the felons use a mix of intimidation and tough love to talk some sense into these young people on the wrong path in life. The documentary, which you can view here, was ground-breaking, released at a time when crime was genuinely skyrocketing in the U.S. and so was juvenile delinquency. It spawned spin-offs even decades later.

Personally, I’m not a big believer in the “scared straight” approach. I think it’s hit-or-miss, evolving into spectacle more than anything else. I think the real value in Scared Straight! and its spin-offs is that it gives you a look into the criminal mind, at least among the criminals who’ve engaged in self-reflection and don’t want anyone else to follow in their footsteps. I think it’s important to know these people exist and when they have something useful to say to us, it’s worth it to listen. As a way to fix the broken? I’m skeptical.

The other reason I’m not a believer in the scared straight approach, at least for liberals, is that they’re likely to learn the wrong lessons from the experience. No, I don’t mean that liberals are suddenly going to decide to lead lives of crime.1 What I mean is that such an experience is likely to humanize criminals even more than they need to be. They’re even more likely to view them not as agents of their own fates, but victims of a society which has failed them. Liberals view criminals as authority figures, meaning direct exposure to them in a controlled setting such as a scared-straight program is likely to increase the respect they already hold for them. Remember: even being victimized doesn’t change the way they feel about crime.

Some of this is ideologically-driven, no doubt. The other reason is the criminal will kill without a second thought. The inmates featured in Scared Straight! will openly confess to that. Therefore, the credible threat of violence cows liberals. The ideology is what gets them to accept what would otherwise be unacceptable.

Liberalism is, therefore, no ideology of peace. Whether it comes to crime, Islam, whatever, it’s built off a foundation of compliance and submission through fear of death.

Only the West Doesn’t Embrace Violence. That’s Not Necessarily A Good Thing.

After the migrant masses were booted from the Spanish city of Cueta on the North African coast, they were given a warm welcome back home by Moroccan security forces [WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT]:

Someone reacted by saying:

The West is more moral than the rest of the world and it always has been. So tired of the gaslighting.

The thing is, I’m not sure this is a good thing. Not anymore. Societies must be willing to use violence on some level. Permissiveness, lowering of the guard, this opens societies up to violence from the outside. Nobody should be allowed to pretend otherwise. All countries have their problems. But one thing guaranteed to both exacerbate existing problems and create new ones is an unwillingness to use violence for perfectly valid means.

If cruelty is what concerns you, why would you expect outsiders to treat you any better? It’s time to re-consider your priors.

What are your thoughts on anything discussed today? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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In an attempt to curb police shootings and to supposedly hold law enforcement officers to a “higher standard,” unrealistic standards may instead be being imposed, Force Science explains:

For decades, courts have evaluated police force through the lens of objective reasonableness. The central question was whether the officer reasonably perceived a threat and reasonably responded to it based on the facts known at the time. This standard reflects the operational reality that reasonable people can disagree, reasonableness does not require consensus, and reasonableness allows for mistakes. In other words, reasonableness reflects the realities of decision-making in the real world, which can be complicated, complex, and chaotic.

Believing constitutional reasonableness to be insufficient to regulate police use of force, academics and reform advocates began promoting standards that extend beyond the Fourth Amendment. Officers and agencies committed to the lawful exercise of authority and strict adherence to constitutional policing are increasingly met with officious criticism: “Come on, you can do better than [Connor v.] Graham.”

The simplified explanation is this: officers’ actions used to be judged against a standard based on what they could’ve reasonably expected to have known at the time. The perception that too many people, black men, especially, were being shot by police led to the belief that this standard was far too lax. Thus, new standards are being imposed where officers’ actions aren’t being judged only against what they could’ve known at the time, but whether it could be argued that another course of action could be taken to avoid having to shoot a suspect.

Force Science makes reference to an ongoing criminal case against a Connecticut police officer who shot and killed a knife-wielding man:

Connecticut has taken a much broader view of the totality of the circumstances approach to force evaluations. Legislators have statutorily mandated that the authority to use deadly force be tied to an overall assessment of “reasonableness.” This is not merely an evaluation of whether the threat assessment was reasonable, but whether the officer could have done more to save the suspect from the consequences of the suspect’s own behavior. In the evaluation of reasonableness, the legislature required reviewers to consider pre-force conduct, de-escalation efforts, tactical options, the exhaustion of lower levels of force, and whether the officer’s own conduct unreasonably increased the risk of the confrontation that ultimately resulted in force. In effect, this incorporates the officer-created jeopardy theories into the analysis.

This sounds noble in theory. Saving lives is good, right? But as Force Science argues, this is a standard inapplicable in practice [bold mine]:

How many commands are enough? How much distance is enough? How many warnings? How many failed less-lethal attempts? How much risk must officers assume before the requirement is satisfied? How many backup officers need to be on the scene? The law and policies never say—because they cannot.

Violence is more art than science. At the end of the day, what works, what gets the job done, is what was necessary. “Is this necessary?” is obviously a rhetorical question. If someone refuses to comply with verbal commands - nothing a police officer says is a suggestion - at what point is violence permitted to enter the picture?

Obviously, nobody wants the force employed in a given scenario to be disproportionate to the presented threat. But proportionately itself is an art, an imperfect science. There are a lot of people who seem to think shooting a knife-wielding suspect to be disproportionate. Let’s grant that for a moment - what would be a proportionate response, then? Remember that police officers are subject to the same limitations as any of us by virtue of being human and only have so many tools available to them. The next step down from from a firearm is either a Taser or blunt-force weapon like baton or nightstick.

Trying to electro-shock a knife-wielding suspect is risky due to their well-documented downsides, to say nothing of the fact Tasers are close-range weapons. Likewise, batons and nightsticks require officers to come within the knife’s lethal envelope. While these weapons can certainly cause injury, the ability to cause injury in itself isn’t enough to stop an attacker.

Let’s look at the incident in Connecticut Force Science is referring to:

Despite the amount of time spent trying to de-escalate the situation, despite the fact police officers were backpedaling as the suspect was advancing, Hartford Mayor Mayor Arunan Arulampalam (LOL) had Officer Joseph Magnano fired and investigated for potential criminal charges.

Was a shooting absolutely necessary here? Maybe, maybe not. I personally like to believe this situation could’ve been handled some other way. Ideally, every officer should’ve drawn their batons, swarmed him, and, beat him until he submitted. The problem of course, is that this is what cops used to do in the bad old days, until Rodney King happened. That and the part about forcing officers to come within the knife’s lethal envelope, meaning they would’ve had to risk getting stabbed or slashed for the potential benefit of saving the suspect’s life.

The point is, violence is going to be on the table, no matter what Mayor Arulampalam thinks. The only question is, which party is supposed to assume greater risk in this situation? The police? Or the suspect? Clearly, the fact Officer Magnano was fired proves Arulampalam thinks his officers should assume more risk, as if they don’t assume enough simply by being the ones who have to deal with dangerous people and situations.

Make no mistake about it either: there’s a political angle to this as well. Officer Magnano’s firing was a political move:

That city mayors refusing to live in reality doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility for doing so. We must be honest about the facts of violence, even if our leaders refuse to be. Typically, only serious, debilitating injury or even death stops or disarms an attacker. If someone doesn’t want to let go of a knife, they’re not going to. I often have to wonder if getting officers slashed and stabbed is the whole point for liberals. The cops are racists, after all, so they deserve to be hurt and killed, right?

They may sincerely wish for suspects to be taken into custody with the least amount of harm possible. The problem with framing the argument in terms of the least amount of force necessary to subdue a suspect is that there’s no way to answer that question definitively nor scientifically, not to where it becomes a matter of practical application. The more appropriate way of framing the argument is in terms of what force is necessary to stop an attacker. Not only does that question get to the heart of the matter, it’s also easy to answer. Everyone knows a gun is far more likely to stop a knife-wielding attacker than a baton, Taser, pepper spray, whatever.

That’s not the question critics of police are asking. The question they’re asking is how can police not hurt or kill suspects, especially when black. Stopping the threat doesn’t even matter, not really. In fact, enforcing the law, the prime directive of police, is de-prioritized over ensuring suspect safety. The protests in Wisconsin over the shooting death of Corey Ruiz by police despite the fact he had a knife and had used it against officers shows that liberals believe even using a knife as a weapon doesn’t merit a deadly-force response. I don’t think we’re far from them arguing that even using a gun doesn’t warrant lethal force.

Sure, we don’t want police to make a bad situation even worse. But police are in the business of violence, meaning sometimes people have to get hurt or at least suffer the risk of injury or death, especially when engaged in violence themselves. Any honest person, of which there are few, understand that it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to be involved in a physical altercation without suffering even a bruise.

Putting the weight of responsibility for the suspect’s welfare entirely on police is a non-starter because complying with police isn’t an option and that resistance is what escalates the encounter:

That omission matters because an undefined requirement to exhaust alternatives has no natural stopping point. If the answer is always one more command, one more warning, one more step backward, one more less-lethal option, or one more minute, then the standard ceases to function as operational guidance and becomes a vehicle for unlimited hindsight. For years, proponents of officer-created jeopardy theories have struggled with the same critique—their attempt to shift culpability from the suspect to the officer has no limiting principle.

If I were to be cynical, I’d argue that’s exactly the point: to relieve criminals of all agency. They already do, if only rhetorically. But if one were to be sincere about trying to fix anything, at some point, agency must be placed upon criminals, upon the parties who made law enforcement contact necessary, who made violence necessary in the first place. It cannot be entirely placed upon police. This is especially true if one genuinely believes that the state should possess a monopoly on violence.

Officer accountability is a sticky subject because of the uniquely chaotic nature of violent encounters:

The problem becomes even more significant when these standards are evaluated by investigators, lawyers, politicians, and jurors operating under entirely different conditions than the officer. They have time. They have physical and psychological distance. They have video replay. They know the outcome. They can isolate each decision, debate alternatives, and imagine a more refined response without bearing the risks those alternatives might have created. The officer has none of those advantages.

There are trade-offs to having cops oversee cops. There are very few professions overseen by people from outside the discipline, however. Doctors are overseen by doctors. Lawyers are overseen by lawyers. Even in the trades, individuals with experience in the field enforce standards. Yet people seem to think police officers should be overseen by literally anyone else, including former criminals.

Furthermore, anyone who wants to question the actions of police officers should at least know something about violence and use of force. They ought to be people connected to reality, people who understand that there’s a world of difference between what would’ve worked versus what would’ve been practical to do in that moment in question, how law enforcement officers have a duty to act, not stand around observing endlessly or contemplate the million different possibilities for taking down a suspect without leaving a scratch on them before taking action.

They must understand, if nothing else, that the human body responds differently mentally and physiologically in the face of danger:

As Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes observed more than a century ago, “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.”

This is true no matter how much great gear and training police have. None of that changes how a person’s body reacts in a situation that could cost them their life. Gear exists to allow officers to handle a threat with greater ease and safety for themselves, not so suspects can more easily and safely resist. Training makes dangerous scenarios more familiar, more predictable, to where officers can overcome fight-flight responses and react more effectively. It doesn’t reduce the level of danger in a situation. What reduces the level of danger is the violence police bring to the table. Everything else misses the point.

As our culture once again tries to make an issue out of police shootings, those who understand violence must be willing to push back against bad messaging, even if it ultimately falls upon deaf ears. When it’s all said and done, the public wants police to be held to an impractically high standard because they’re the police. They have a unique ability to ruin our day like no other.

Yet the public also underestimates the ability other parties have to do the same. A victim of medical malpractice can just as easily lose their life at the hands of a doctor or nurse. Incompetent attorneys can land people in prison or cost them untold sums in lawsuits. City councils, judges, and mayors make choices that negatively impact us all the time, it’s just that we don’t pay attention to them because talking about national politics is more interesting.

Most important, the people most likely to do us harm are our fellow citizens and criminals, in that order. When that happens, the police might end up getting involved. When they show up, what do we expect them to do? If all we expect of them is to ask everyone nicely to behave themselves, why call the cops in the first place? What do police offer that you and I, John Q. Public, don’t?

If your answer is anything besides “the credible threat of violence,” you fail the test. Start from the beginning and read this essay all over again.

For those who passed, you get to move on to the group discussion. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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has come under fire, mostly from the Right, for comments he made during an interview with Jeremy Boreing:

Here’s an especially lengthy criticism from a popular X account, in which he describes Rod as a “raped conservative” (WTF???):

Here’s a deplorable low-blow against Rod (he didn’t abandon his family):

There’s plenty more where that came from. You can see for yourself. It seems like he really riled up the crowd!

I’ve mentioned this once before, but I’ve met Rod Dreher. In person, he’s as wonderful a man as you might gather from reading his writing. I certainly can’t consider him a close friend, but a friend of mine he is, nonetheless. Not to mention, Rod’s literally the only reason anyone ever heard of my Substack. The vast majority of my subscribership can be credited to him and him alone. Thus, I’m compelled to come to his defense.

Let me start by saying that I don’t agree with everything Rod says. As I’ve explained quite bluntly, I think Rod is highly susceptible to moral panic. This owes less to his conservatism and more to his religiosity, which also lends itself to making him more likely to believe in the paranormal, aliens visiting Earth, etc. Rod and I may be friends and we may have a similar political alignment, but we’re still very different people who look at the world very differently.

There’s much Rod gets wrong. You’re not going to hurt his feelings by telling him that, though. You certainly won’t combat any of his ideas by attacking the man, neither. You combat them by attacking his arguments and consulting a range of sources. Rod speaks on much, but that doesn’t make him in expert in everything. Furthermore, acting like he himself is a problem, an enemy of the Right, is a non-starter. The reality is, Rod’s been fighting the good fight for much longer than many of today’s commentators and influencers on the Right have been.

Rod, unlike many of today’s right-wing commentators and influencers, entered the crosshairs of Islamists and even Al Sharpton almost a quarter-century ago, when many of today’s most popular right-wing thought-leaders and voices were still children. He’s survived attacks and condemnations that would’ve canceled most people were it not for the fact Rod was a media figure. The man would never allow himself to be characterized as a warrior given his humility. But he’s a survivor. He’s overcome much in both his personal and professional life, things I can’t fathom, things I simply cannot relate to. It’s why I admire him so much and why I’m offended by the criticisms he’s enduring, even if he’s not right about everything.

The idea that Rod’s betraying Vance in any way is ludicrous, given the role he played in making Vance into what he is today. Rod doesn’t brag about it, but he also doesn’t shy away from mentioning that Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, didn’t catch much attention until Rod discussed it on his defunct blog on The American Conservative. Everyone in this world needs a push to get somewhere; Vance got his from Rod. He’d never tell anyone that the vice president owes him anything, but if you ask me, Vance most certainly does.

So ask yourselves: who exactly was betrayed here? If you still think Vance and the rising radical right are the victims here, what exactly did Rod do to hurt them? Did he defect to the Left, like the insufferable “Never Trumpers” did? I’m just going to be blunt and say the criticisms of Rod are the same criticisms he’s endured his entire career as a right-wing voice: he’s not extreme enough. That’s all there’s to it. Rod is criticized for being either too doomerish (which is my criticism of him) or for not being and out-and-out extremist. Funny, though: nobody’s criticizing him for being wrong.

One of the things I like about the Right is how much easier it is to be a dissenter than it ever was on the Left. Data shows the Right can handle a difference of opinion far better than the Left. This rising group of right-wing commentators appear to be trying to emulate some of the gatekeeping tactics of the Left, however, all while accusing Rod of trying to be a gatekeeper himself. You see this in the absurd No Enemies To The Right (NETTR) philosophy, which, in practice, means everyone on your side is allowed to be more extreme than you, anyone less extreme than you is the enemy. It’s a philosophy for children.

“Maarek,” co-host of the popular Good Ol’ Boys podcast, had this to say about Rod in 2022:

Coward and weak, you say? What’s that make Maarek, then, an anonymous podcaster trying so hard, alongside his co-host, to become right-wing thought leaders? The fact is, not only is Rod totally exposed, he’s put more skin in the game than the Good Ol’ Boys or any other aspiring right-wing thought leader. Unlike Maarek, Rod was once friends with the vice president. He’s met multiple world leaders and politicians. Who’s got more influence here? Looks like Rod’s critics will need to settle for Donald Trump-worship and dreams of following Erik Prince to their deaths.1

I often disagree with Rod when he defends truly problematic figures like Davids Brooks and French. But doesn’t that say something about his character? Doesn’t that show that, unlike most liberals and, increasingly, many conservatives, that he doesn’t let politics get in the way of friendship? Call it cowardly and weak, if you’d like. But Rod’s still a more virtuous person than most of us can aspire to being. That’s what we want in our leaders, no? Virtue? And do you really want to make politics a part of your personality? If it looks ugly on the Left, why’d it be any prettier on the Right?

The thing is, the Right maybe unhappy with Rod engaging in friendly fire, but he’s always reserved his worst criticism for the Left. Because he’s a man of integrity, however, he calls out wrong everywhere he sees it. A recovered Catholic, he was and remains highly critical of the church for its corruption and trespasses over the decades. Nobody really gets on him about this, interestingly. Though he’s happy his current denomination, Orthodoxy, is gaining adherents, he’s also expressed concern over the fact it’s being used as a vessel for propagating far-right politics. Welding religion and political ideology together is toxic combination and Rod rightfully calls it out. If he doesn’t, who will? Who even has? You want a liberal to do it instead?

Returning to the accusations of betrayal, it reminds me of erstwhile intelligent people saying we “owed” President Trump our loyalty. Again, for what? What’s Trump done to earn our loyalty? Better yet, why doesn’t anyone ever say Trump owes us his loyalty? We’re the ones who made him president. Meanwhile, Trump’s performance in office has been nothing to boast about. The best anyone can say in his defense is that he tries.

This is the Right’s respect for authority taken to absurd extremes, at a time where there exists such a vacuum of authority, even someone like Trump will do. I suspect these same people will try doing to the same with Vance. They’re already trying. Between Vance and, say, Marco Rubio, my views align more with the former. If forced to choose, I’d probably choose Vance. But let’s make something clear: Vance is supposed to work for us. In America 2026, we owe no loyalty to the elected. They better do the job or they can lose it. Get mad at me, stay mad at me.

The thing is, politics can make even the most virtuous of leaders into villainous figures. Ironically, this is most true in democracies. In a society where politics becomes a hustle - yet another downside of mass democracy - competition is so fierce, you have to be willing to compromise your own integrity at times in order to remain relevant.

I think that’s all Rod wanted for Vance - to not sacrifice his integrity:

One of the worst things about Trump’s political victories is that the Right seems to have over-learned lessons from his success. Specifically, they seem to believe that the more extreme, the better. Obviously, we can’t go back to the days when Romney, McCain, and Bush (who were all considered Nazis, by the way) represented the Right, nor should we. But the idea we should push the most extreme figures imaginable is also wrong. Pushing the Overton window, destroying taboos, forcing a debate on previously untouchable issues, is a delicate task. We can see in real-time how Trump’s successes in this arena are accompanied by ugly failures as well.

I don’t think Rod’s concerns about rising antisemitism are entirely off-base, either. It’s not that I take his “Weimar America” thesis literally. I’ve explained that America proved uniquely resistant to fascism back in the 1930s and a big point I’ve tried to make time and again is that life isn’t a binary choice between eventually being under the jackboot of communists or fascists. That’s an absurdly 20th century way of thinking and isn’t what much of history has amounted to.

The problem with rising antisemitism is that it opens the door to the kind of tribalism that can irreparably fracture societies. I’m not saying it’ll happen, but once the taboo has been broken, all other similar taboos become fair game. No group - ethnic, racial, religious - is above criticism. If we want, as Americans seem to do, to celebrate all the different groups making up our multicultural society, it’s perfectly fine to criticize them as well. Besides, anti-Whiteness, which is the only acceptable form of discriminatory hatred today, dominates our culture and politics. Liberals can contort themselves into justifying it all they’d like, but nonsense is nonsense. There’s much more to criticize blacks over than Whites, for one.

Antisemitism, however, criticizes Jews just for being Jews, often attributing to them conspiracy theories and falsehoods. There’s plenty of things to rag on Jews over, as with any other group, but pretending like they’re the source of all problems is hate for the sake of hate. Nobody’s going to convince me, for example, that Jews are a bigger threat to the West than Muslims are. That’s simply preposterous. Nor can anti-Whiteness, an animating concern on the Right, be fought through antisemitism. Jews aren’t to blame for anti-Whiteness and are actually victimized by it as well.

My bottom line is this: whatever his issues, Rod Dreher isn’t the enemy. If the Right fails, he won’t be to blame for it. If anything, the Right’s failures are more likely to be blamed on the fact they gave into the extremists and crazies instead of leaning into the voices of reason like Rod. The fact that Rod doesn’t deny the Holocaust or call for TND (if you don’t know what this is, don’t look it up) is the least of the Right’s problems.

None of this is to say he’s any kind of right-wing leader. Even he’d reject that title. But he remains a valuable voice in the discourse. His ability to break through to the mainstream is limited, since the public has such a strong allergy to anything not liberal. Given the public has a predisposition to viewing the Right in the worst light imaginable, why then is the Right so determined to validate their views? Whether on the Left or the Right, if you can’t handle Rod, you’re not going to make it.

Which leads me to my final point: I can’t tell whether the Right thinks the rise of extremist ideologies and antisemitism on their side is a good or bad thing. Personally, I don’t care much what the Left thinks of the Right, given their predispositions. But if the Right wants to be able to enjoy the same successes the Left did, they have to get some of this extremism under control. Remember that the Left always managed to present themselves and their leaders as the sane ones, despite holding ridiculously radical views. They had an easier task given the direction our culture shifted, but unless you enjoy this luxury, you cannot put the extremists at the forefront of your movement and expect to win.

When you read Rod’s writings, you get the sense of a conflicted man. On one side, he understands something has decisively changed, the system cannot be reformed, and we simply can’t do politics the way we once did. Hence, his post-liberalism. On the other side, he’s not ready to just throw everything over the cliff, either, because he understands, through history, that even a broken system is better than none at all. Hence, he still holds onto some of the sacred cows of his generation, such as the post-Civil Rights consensus on race. I think that’s where many of us are today, even on the Left. It’s just that Rod’s honest enough to say so.

I wrote this essay to defend Rod, so I’m not going to critique all of his thoughts, not now. There’ll be plenty of time for it later. While I disagree with Rod adamantly on the issue of race, for example (I’m definitely more of a radical than he’s on that), the fact that I’m even developing these thoughts in my head, writing them down, and able to explain to readers why I believe as I do shows you the true value of Rod Dreher: he makes you think. His critics seem to want two things at once which are in conflict: they want someone to tell them what to think, but they also want what they’re told to align with their predispositions.

He’s not there to do that. He’s there to make you ask yourself: why do I think as I do? A little self-reflection does a person lots of good. So the real question is: why are Rod’s critics on the Right so afraid of self-reflection? Is it because, perhaps, he’s not wrong about them?

That’s it for this one. What are your thoughts on the drama? Talk about it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Today, we return to “Max’s Musings,” where I opine on a variety of unrelated topics and happenings. Let’s get on with it.

Bully, Not Patriot

An angry fan tried to enforce patriotism during the playing of the national anthem prior to a Chicago Cubs game:

This might put me at odds with much of the Right, but not only am I not ideological, I’m my own man: I don’t agree with this. First, nobody’s forced to stand. Nobody should be forced to stand. Second, putting your hands on someone like this is uncalled for. Maybe in a different kind of America, it might be justifiable. We don’t live in that America.

Even then, this is still over the line. We don’t know if he tried, but if you feel the need to tell someone to stand, do so with courtesy. My gut tells me this guy was aggressive about it from the get-go. When the guy sitting down refused to stand, this only made him angrier and more insistent. I often speak of this, but America has become a place where people cannot manage the simplest of social encounters without it devolving into violence.

As far as patriotism goes, I’m not about this performative stuff. Ceremony and symbols have their place, but they’re not the essence of what patriotism is. I personally don’t understand why the national anthem gets performed prior to every single public event, either. They even perform it prior to 5Ks. Why? It was a tradition that began during World War II, a time when national unity was both strong and absolutely needed to be.

Now? It seems like it’s a way for people to pretend like we’re still one people, like we all love America. Neither of which is true. Some of us still love America. Many of us don’t. It’s bad, but it’s not up to us to correct that, and it’s certainly not up to us to pretend otherwise. But I digress.

The lesson here is that if you want to get people to do something, smacking them on the head and screaming at them isn’t the way to go about it. This man is a bully, using patriotism as a way to blow off some steam. Forced unity is no unity at all. If anything, it’s the patriots who ought to stand up to him.

“Former Federal Prosecutor”

Sunny Hostin, co-host of The View and former federal prosecutor, was caught on police bodycam trying to use her privilege to get her son our of legal trouble:

Since there are millions of liberals out there who’ll obstinately miss the point, let’s make clear what the issue is and isn’t. The problem is that Hostin is being a colossal hypocrite, as she makes opposing privilege a big part of her public profile. The problem isn’t that she tried to help her son, which is something any good parent would do.

I often observe that liberals are, despite their insistence, hyper-focused on what others do, what others have. It’s not their own privilege or wealth that’s the problem. It’s everyone else’s, especially if they have more of it. Theirs was justly earned, everyone else’s was stolen. It’s everyone else’s behavior that’s problematic. Nor does Sunny Hostin, an empowered black woman, think she’s in any way privileged, despite being caught on camera playing her privilege card more than once.

As commentators like Dr. Todd Grande observed, Hostin can easily help her son without ever mentioning she’s a former federal prosecutor and co-host of The View. Just being present for her boy probably helps. Instead, she went way beyond, trying to influence the officers’ decision-making. It’s one thing to ask for leniency; we’d all do that. It’s another to dictate to the officer what they should do because of who someone’s mom is.

Police officers today have far less rope, far less flexibility with which to handle incidents. Much of this is an attempt to try to rein in officers, to combat abuse of power and brutality. In practice, this means officers’ actions are more centrally controlled. In turn, this means officers have to make the arrest, write the ticket, or take some sort of action to show that the problem was handled.

It’s the result of policy changes pushed for over the years and decades by people like Sunny Hostin. As I explained last essay, there’s no such thing as “unintended consequences,” not really. There’s only the consequences you considered and consequences you didn’t consider. Now that her son was on the receiving end of the product of the labor people like her put in for years, she’s learning, if she has a self-aware bone in her body, that even she’d try exploiting every advantage she has to get her people off.

I don’t know what Hostin has said with regards to this incident. I do know she and other black people would say her privilege, to the extent she has any, is the only way to defend herself against disparate impact in the legal system. They can think that, but even if they believe black people are given less of a pass than White people, that still means that not only would some White people be detained and cited, most White people wouldn’t have a famous mother and former federal prosecutor who can step in on her behalf. Hostin’s actions seem even more dubious given that her son wasn’t even being cited for a criminal violation.

The lesson here is that we’re all hypocrites on some level. I can be hypocritical as well if I don’t think things through. It’s what makes us human. What practically assures hypocrisy is the thought that it’s everyone else, their behavior, their privilege, their wealth, that’s the problem, not one’s own. Unfortunately, half the country adheres to an ideology centered on this belief. You just saw that belief system live in action as demonstrated by Sunny Hostin.

Money Where Your Mouth Is

An American business owner wants everyone to know just how wonderful workers Haitians are, like the best ever:

I wonder: why not move his business to Haiti? That’s not a ridiculous proposal. Not only would labor be cheaper, he’d end up with an endless supply of these wonderful people! Imagine how much more profitable his business would be! By the way, that’s what happened during globalization. Big businesses moved operations overseas to take advantage of cheap labor and lower taxes. In doing so, American workers lost out, but who cares, they’re all a bunch of druggies, right?

The first priority of a business, of course, is to make money. But a business must also benefit their community. Nobody should be forced to hire bad employees just because they’re American, no. But if a business doesn’t benefit the people living in that community, if it doesn’t use locally-available manpower to the extent possible, then who’s it benefiting besides the capitalist? I’m resorting to using Marxist talking points because not only do I think businesses should benefit the communities they’re in, it’s also the only way most Americans could ever be moved by such an argument.

Seriously, when did relentlessly pursuing cheap labor even become a liberal principle? And if having such cheap, productive employees matters so much, why bother doing business in America? Think about it. It’s already expensive doing business in the U.S. Not so in Haiti, plus you get unlimited access to the best workers ever. If they can thrive in the U.S., they can thrive even more back home, where they’re surrounded not only by their own people, but in the embrace of the great institutions they surely must’ve created, right?

Right?

Empowered And Unassimilated

Here’s a young Muslim woman showing us how American she is:

I don’t know - that actually looks like a girl who doesn’t belong in America, who has failed to assimilate into American culture, of which handshakes are customary. The smile and peace sign to the camera hides an undercurrent of anger and resentment, which is what’s driving such behavior. I live here, I don’t have to be part of your culture, but you do have to respect mine is the thought here. Ironically, it’s American culture itself which encourages them not to assimilate, in large part by worshiping foreigners and immigrants.

I remember once upon a time when this wasn’t a thing. I’ve personally shaken the hands of Muslims, male and female. Maybe they weren’t supposed to according to their religion, but they did by virtue of it being an aspect of American culture, and when in America, you do as Americans do. Foreigners, immigrants, Muslims included, understood that, once upon a time. It also reminds me of how older immigrants, even today, are less culturally disruptive, despite assimilating less. It’s a contradictory dynamic, but an observable one. It’s young immigrants or the offspring of immigrants like the young woman in the video above who are the problem.

Again, I can hear liberals - since when are handshakes uniquely American? Of course they’re not uniquely American, you diploma-wielding retards. But they’re part of our culture, nonetheless. By the way - if we don’t have a well-defined set of customs, what’s our culture supposed to be, anyway? You can’t have a functional society without a culture. If American culture consists of basically capitulating to the loudest voices in the room, to the minority for fear of being judgmental, racist, xenophobic, whatever, then what we have is an anti-culture. I know of no historical precedent for such a thing.

I’m not one to question the sincerity of anyone’s faith, but I also can’t help but think this trend of increasing devoutness among Muslims, especially among women, is performative. Hijabs weren’t seen commonly aside from older Muslims women 10 to 20 years ago. Now, even very young women are wearing them. This says to me that the hijab, among other articles of Islamic faith, serve as a strong source of identity for young Muslim women. It’s about letting everyone else know who you are, the power you possess, and a way for them to exercise what they feel to be righteous resistance against their oppressor.

Muslims will likely never demographically threaten the U.S. and they don’t need to. All they need to do is to be able to wield disproportionate power over others through displays of cultural strength, with the full power of the Regime behind them. It’s a privilege greater than what they could ever enjoy in an Islamic country, strangely enough.

Democracy Requires Effort

A far-leftist tries to catch proponents of voter ID requirements in a conundrum:

If they think they’ve checkmated anyone, they’ve only checkmated themselves. I, like millions of other Americans, have had many IDs over the years. Never did I not have to put some effort into getting one. Not once was an ID simply mailed to me without having to do something besides simply existing. Seldom was an ID provided to me without any extra cost. Even free IDs, like for school, I still needed to show up in person at the office to at least have my picture taken. I live in a Blue state; you think the state government issues anything for free?

Liberals believe that once something becomes a civil right, state and society have an obligation to provide it free of charge, to remove all obstacles in the way of enjoying that right. That’s not how it works. It simply means, by a matter of law, nobody can be obstructed from pursuing attempts to exercise that right. I can’t believe I have to say this, but someone who’s hospitalized and is therefore physically unable to cast a ballot cannot vote. That doesn’t mean the right to do so has been infringed upon. If that’s what people really think, why doesn’t the government just cast the vote for us?

Liberals and progressives are confused about what it means to be free, to live in a democracy. Though it certainly doesn’t work out that way in practice, to be free and democratic means the citizenry puts in the work of governance. It doesn’t mean the government just gives the people everything. In a democracy, it’s not up to the state to make it work, not entirely. It’s also up to body politic.

That so many people believe voters shouldn’t even have to put in the work of getting ID is yet more evidence for why we’re a people wholly unsuited for democracy, why mass democracy itself is a sham. Governance is a responsibility; if the citizenry doesn’t feel the weight of responsibility every once in a while, it won’t succeed. What means nothing to a person has no value.

A Narcissist, Not A Professional

Criminal defense attorney Beth Bourdon celebrated sparing the life of her client who was convicted of raping and murdering a 93-year-old woman:

Putting aside the utter depravity of openly celebrating sparing the life of a rapist and murderer (apparently, these aren’t heinous crimes anymore, while racism is), the post drew attention because she had deleted the original and explained why.

The Internet, fortunately, is forever, however:

Lesson: if you’re going to delete it, just delete it and move on. If you try to explain why you deleted it, you’re trying to justify obviously bad behavior, such as gloating over the fact you spared the life of a rapist and murderer.

I’m admire a good defense attorney. I also like to think even deeply committed defense attorneys have the decency and self-awareness to understand how they come off when they openly celebrate their victories in this manner. Remember: she wasn’t celebrating an acquittal. She was celebrating the fact she spared a man guilty of capital crimes the punishment he deserves. There’s a big difference.

They say social media brings out the worst in us. I think it’s more of a demonstrable fact that social media exposes the kind of person one truly is.

Obama: False Sage

Former President Barack Obama is still out and about, trying to be America’s voice of reason, and still failing at it:

I never had the same level of regard for Obama that so many Americans seem to have. This sort of thing is exactly why. One, it’s not any of his business who J.D. Vance marries. Two, immigration policy, what it means to be American, these aren’t prescriptions for how to manage our personal lives. These are matters for how to manage society at large.

Are there times when politics and personal lives intersect? Absolutely. For example, a person doesn’t have much room to call for wholesale demographic change to the country while choosing to live in places where they get to be a member of the majority. That’s because subjecting everyone else to change while you get to choose whether or not to be part of that change is hypocritical.

Obama, however, is conveying the old Marxist belief that the personal is political to a rather extreme degree. Basically, he’s trying to paint Vance as the hypocrite for marrying a native-born daughter of Indian immigrants, who didn’t come here illegally, by the way. Meanwhile, Obama still constantly expresses solidarity with blacks and the broader underclass. Why doesn’t he live in the ‘hood, then, if he doesn’t want to be a hypocrite?

The Vice President never argued against interracial marriages. If he did, that certainly would make him a hypocrite. He simply argued that in any nationality, ancestry matters to a degree, even if you believe, as I do, that America isn’t a blood-soil nation (though that’s primarily because it’s not a nation at all). Remember that Latin America isn’t comprised of blood-and-soil ethno-nationalist countries, either. Yet even there, ancestry matters to a large degree. That’s because identities are strong and there’s an implicit understanding that just showing up doesn’t make you Mexican, Salvadoran, Colombia, Peruvian, whatever.

None of that matters, anyway. If America is a country, then regardless of what the source of our identity is, then it has a right to decide who gets to come here, who gets to call themselves American:

The thing about Obama is that he knows next to nothing about the people he champions. He has very little in common with black America. He has much more in common with White liberal America. His exposure to diversity is quite superficial. JD Vance has far greater exposure to both black America and to people from different backgrounds. President Donald Trump, for all his faults, is seen as authentic in large part because he never pretends to be someone other than himself, never pretends to understand people he can’t relate with. It’s arguably the one virtue he possesses.

Obama, in his lifetime journey of trying to speak for all people, only exposes how little really understands of anyone. He’s simply a hyper-ideological man, for whom politics is the beginning and the end of one’s identity. No wonder he’s so admired by liberals.

The Right To Peaceful Protest Is For All

What’s the big deal? All I see is a peaceful protest:

We’re all entitled to peaceful protest in a liberal democracy, regardless of our motivations. Don’t like it? Blame liberal democracy, not the “far-right.”

Only an ideologue could see any difference between what’s happening in Glasgow versus what’s happening in Madison, Wisconsin, USA:

Equivocation aside, at some point, SCOTUS needs to rule on this - whether or not the right to protest means a right to insurrection, a right to falsely imprison, a right to assault and terrorize. If you don't get control of this now, anarchy will become normalized. Maybe it already has.

If protest does amount to a license for all sorts of otherwise illegal behavior, then SCOTUS also needs to rule on whether that license applies regardless of a protest’s ideological leanings. Such rulings would provided greater clarity on the rules we live by than any written law.

At this point, all I care about is clarity and consistency. I could almost care less what the rules actually are. As long as we know what they are, as long as people can’t pretend like the rules are something other than what they demonstrably are, that’s all that matters. There’s a lesson there.

Democrats Scammed By Democracy

This is what I mean when I say mass democracy is an organized power struggle, even in a homogeneous ethno-state like Hungary:

Of course, this person couldn’t actually explain to you how anyone tried overthrowing democracy in Hungary, aside from boilerplate corruption and implementing policies they didn’t like. This person is, however, totally oblivious to the role they actually play in mass democracy. Having the illusion of power does inflate one’s ego.

What’s most amusing is how liberals so strongly believe in the power of democracy, when their votes mean nothing aside from dictating the outcomes of these organized power struggles by factions whose leaders could care less about good governance. When all your time is taken up by gaining power and holding onto it, there’s not much time left for anything else.

When even liberal democrats like the X account above are scammed by mass democracy, who’s really the cuck?

Retard Gallery

Before closing it out, let’s quickly smack down a few liberals who think they’re getting one over on someone else. We’ll start with:

There’s an easy way to prove or disprove this assertion: run genetic studies. Such science proves that millions of people throughout the world share the DNA of Genghis Khan, one of the world’s most notorious conquerors. But liberals don’t believe in science and they most certainly don’t believe in violating their sacred narratives, so they’d never agree to this.

Next:

Respondents cited a Pew Research poll showing 76 percent of Americans have visited at least one other country. Your faithful Max has visited over a dozen countries and remains as radically right-wing as ever. Most people of the world are also what Mark Ross here would describe as “insular.” Cosmopolitan liberals like him are a minority among a minority. It’s he who has very little in common with most people of the world.

It’s also worth noting how these people, who go out of their way to remind everyone how much they love America, never seem to have anything nice to say about their fellow countrymen. Imagine trying to find any unity with someone like that.

Finally, here’s conservative commentator-turned-liberal commentator Pedro Gonzalez:

Is Pedro okay these days? Since when does law enforcement police speech? It’s such an odd thing for him to say. Furthermore, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were quite obviously obstructing law enforcement, something even their defenders openly concede. Becoming a liberal means you have to adopt the ideological nonsense that’s their hallmark. Maybe this is just part of the transition for Gonzalez. The more liberal he becomes, the better he’ll get at it. Give him time.

That’s all for today. What are your thoughts on anything covered? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Police bodycam footage from February 2025 showing a transgender woman raging out uncontrollably to a police officer for being misgendered went viral:

A lot of people had a problem with the video. Not what the video captured. With the video itself. They felt like it amounted to public humiliation of someone clearly suffering from a mental illness, someone who deserves help, not shame.

Here’s an example of a less hysterical, but still wrong argument:

Leaving aside the fact that transgenderism isn’t supposed to be a mental illness, according to liberals, first off, this is an incident occurring in a place where nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Second, any interaction with a police officer is a matter of public record, including any audio/visual recordings of the interaction. That this involved a transgender, someone suffering mental illness, doesn’t change that fact.

Third, cameras don’t only record what we want them to record. We only wanted bodycams to capture footage of police brutality, not all public behavior! seems to be the mentality of liberals. Again, it’s not up to them. This was the trade-off (or benefit, depending on your perspective) of police bodycams, that it wouldn’t only capture police conduct or misconduct. It would capture the behavior of everyone involved in or in the periphery of a given interaction with police. This is inevitable. Liberals not understanding trade-offs, not understanding how cameras work in general, remains undefeated.

There are a number of articles on the topic published over the last year addressing the issue of unintended consequences of widespread usage of bodycams by law enforcement. Except nothing about it is unintended nor unexpected. All of these consequences were foreseeable by anyone who pursued the topic with clear-eyed seriousness instead of childish outrage.

To deal with buyer’s remorse, the media is coping by shifting blame, criticizing the fact bodycam videos have become social media content (as if most things aren’t these days). Predictably, the far-left New York magazine ran a “Women Most Impacted”-premised essay on the topic. There really are no surprises left, are there?

Most of these articles are paywalled. Here’s a passage from one that’s not, getting at the heart of what the Left’s beef with bodycams is:

The channel, Code Blue Cam, is based in Wisconsin and boasts a subscriber base of more than 3 million, with total views exceeding 1.15 billion. The platform is a repository of videos showcasing high-speed pursuits, arrests involving intoxicated individuals, and other intense police encounters. These clips are sourced from police body cameras, edited to highlight dramatic moments, and presented with an added layer of commentary and sound effects.

Despite stating its mission as educational, Code Blue Cam has faced criticism for allegedly prioritizing sensationalism over content that truly informs the public. The channel’s creator, LJ, who remains anonymous for privacy and safety reasons, insists that the videos are meant to provide context on police work. However, some viewers and those featured in these videos feel otherwise, citing examples of content that seems to ridicule rather than educate.

Again, as opposed to what? Millions of videos on social media of “Karens,” mostly White women supposedly getting what they deserve for being disrespectful towards service workers and others? Nobody seems to have a problem with that. Besides, what would a society care about ridicule or sensationalism when everyone’s first and last impulse is to take out their phones to record anyone and anything in public, then post it instantly, often for clout, without bothering to provide a better understanding of what’s happening?

Since police bodycams concern a defining political issue for the Left, however, being reasonable, sober, and judicious is suddenly important. An AI-generated article on the topic elaborates on other concerns:

Potential for Biased or Manipulated Footage

Another concern is the potential for body camera footage to be biased or manipulated. Footage can be edited, selectively released, or manipulated to support a particular narrative. This can be particularly problematic in situations where there are conflicting accounts of an incident.

O RLY? You mean like the way supposedly reputable mainstream media outlets, whom we’re all suppose to trust without question, have for decades used videos filmed by the public to propagate inaccurate, incomplete, or even false accounts of interactions with police? I suppose two wrongs don’t make a right, but we’re not trying to right any wrongs here.

The point is that all footage is subject to manipulation, regardless of the source. The concern over police bodycam footage being subject to impropriety was never extended to footage captured by the public. It says less about the high standards we hold our law enforcement officers to and more about the low standards we hold ourselves to.

Furthermore, police bodycam footage cannot be so easily altered. The original recordings are meant to be preserved; nobody, not chiefs, not even system administrators, can alter or delete footage. Bodycams are also provided through contractors, meaning there’s always a third party involved in that chain of custody. Is footage often censored or edited prior to public dissemination? Yes, but there are a million reasons besides lying why an agency might do that: graphic nature, witness protection, evidence preservation, just to name a few. I’ve watched lots of police bodycam videos over the years and agencies always make the full-length videos available. It’s the media that doesn’t.

In the first major incident where supposed police misconduct was caught on video, the media infamously never broadcast the entirety of the footage of Rodney King’s beating in March 1991. Surely, the full-length video being almost nine minutes long had something to do with it. But the media never showed any other parts of it, either, only the outrage-inducing parts. It left out parts that provided important context, not to mention just a complete account of what took place that night.

The full-length video was certainly shown in court and, eventually, other parts of the video were released publicly over the years. But not only did most people never see the whole video, nor have a choice to see it all, when it mattered most, the public saw at most several seconds out of nine minutes. It makes you wonder: how would the Rodney King incident have gone down in the era of bodycams?

Back to the present. Eventually, complaints about bodycams come back around to one of the biggest reasons liberals and police critics demanded them in the first place:

Exacerbating Existing Inequalities

Body cameras can also exacerbate existing inequalities by disproportionately surveilling marginalized communities. Research has shown that police are more likely to stop and search individuals from marginalized communities, and body cameras can provide a permanent record of these interactions.

The Impact of Body Cameras on Marginalized Communities

The impact of body cameras on marginalized communities is a pressing concern. Marginalized communities are already subject to disproportionate policing and surveillance, and body cameras can perpetuate this cycle.

Surveillance and Control of Marginalized Communities

Body cameras can be used to surveil and control marginalized communities, perpetuating systemic racism and inequality. This can have a chilling effect on individuals’ willingness to interact with police or report crimes.

Disproportionate Impact on Communities of Color

Communities of color are disproportionately impacted by body cameras, as they are more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested by police. Body cameras can provide a permanent record of these interactions, which can be used to justify further policing and surveillance.

Potential for Body Cameras to Perpetuate Systemic Racism

The use of body cameras can perpetuate systemic racism by reinforcing existing biases and stereotypes. Footage can be used to justify discriminatory policing practices, and can be used as evidence in court cases.

Did your eyes roll reading all that? Mine sure did. So, the thing that was supposed to protect marginalized communities, people of color, and fight against systemic racism is now part of the oppression regime. Putting aside the fact no such thing exists, if even bodycams can’t save black people from getting shot by police or going to prison, what can? Have they tried just not committing crime, not causing problems, or not giving police a tough time?

It’s time to cut the crap - the problem isn’t that anyone’s being shamed or publicly humiliated. We all know that’s par for the course. No, the real problem is that bodycams aren’t telling the story liberals intended for them to tell. They don’t show rampant police brutality, they don’t show systemic racism, they don’t show blacks and other criminals behaving like civilized, law-abiding citizens. Instead, police bodycams expose the reality of policing. They show how many criminals actually are black, how violent they can truly be, how much restraint police do exercise, and just how dangerous the profession of law enforcement actually is. I think it’s even humbled the silent majority of liberals.

Without a doubt, bodycams are one of the biggest own-goals by the Left:

Some liberals counter by saying bodycams worked because they incentivize police officers to better behave themselves, therefore, the policy is achieving the intended outcomes. This is cope, because that’s not how it works.

Though based on data nearly a decade old at this point, a 2022 federal government study revealed bodycams didn’t change much:

According to the 2018 BJS report, the main reasons (about 80% each) that local police and sheriffs’ offices had acquired body-worn cameras were to improve officer safety, increase evidence quality, reduce civilian complaints, and reduce agency liability.

Research does not necessarily support the effectiveness of body-worn cameras in achieving those desired outcomes. A comprehensive review of 70 studies of body-worn cameras use found that the larger body of research on body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects.[3] This meta-analysis was rated by CrimeSolutions and resulted in a No Effects rating for the impact of body-worn cameras on use of force, assaults on officers, officer-initiated calls for service, arrests, traffic stops and tickets, and field interviews (i.e., stop and frisk). See Practice Profile: Body-Worn Cameras’ Effects on Police Officer Behavior. This profile is based on a meta-analysis published in 2020.

The same report shows that in cities with high crime rates, like Washington, D.C., or at least a high rate of police interactions, like New York City, bodycams were to no real benefit or detriment. That’s not to say they didn’t help anywhere - they did, in fact, in many places. It’s to say, however, that overall, the impact they had wasn’t all that strong.

What does this say? This says, most importantly, that bodycams don’t change the nature of crime and disorder in a given area, nor does it change the nature of policing. Bodycams don’t make bad people go away, it doesn’t make bad people less bad, and they absolutely don’t make police kinder and gentler. All they do is provide a record of events. Their greatest benefit is that they provide the facts, a better understanding to any reasonable person who hasn’t been brainwashed as to what actually happens out there.

Furthermore, if the policy is working as liberals intended, then why are police brutality and systemic racism still problems? Do problems ever get solved, in the minds of liberals? Certainly not. These are moral panics and moral panics need to be constantly fueled.

The bottom line is this: bodycams haven’t changed minds. The best they’ve done is that they’ve taken away one less issue for the Left to mobilize over. Millions of Americans still believe in rampant police brutality and systemic racism in the justice system. What they can no longer do is make a big issue out of it. It went from being a foundational one to being a tangential one.

Still, the Left will occasionally make a big deal out of a police shooting. Currently, discord is growing in Madison, Wisconsin over the police shooting of Corey Ruiz, who resisted arrest and allegedly stabbed an officer before being shot and killed.

Here’s the thing: there’s no bodycam footage of the incident. Madison Police Department doesn’t use them. As a result, far-left agitators, including former Madison city councilmember Juliana Bennett, pounced, and are now trying to turn Ruiz into a George Floyd-like martryr. Some things never change.

But wait - there’s a twist to the story! [bold mine]:

In 2015, the council rejected a body-camera pilot by a 19-1 vote. In 2017, it removed $123,000 from the capital budget that would have funded 47 cameras and related equipment. A limited pilot in the North District was eventually approved in 2023 by a 16-4 vote after years of study. The four “no” votes included then-Alder Juliana Bennett, along with Alders Nikki Conklin, Yannette Figueroa Cole and Sabrina Madison. Bennett had previously proposed language directing the city not to pursue either a pilot or full deployment of body cameras. Bennett, who left the council and is now the DSA-endorsed Democratic candidate for the 76th Assembly District

In November 2025, during debate on the 2026 operating budget, Alders Barbara Harrington-McKinney, Isadore Knox Jr. and Joann Pritchett offered a floor amendment that would have redirected approximately $405,000 from the Office of the Independent Monitor to staff positions needed to support a body-camera program. The amendment failed 17-3. Only the three sponsors voted yes. The majority of the council, including progressive members, rejected the funding shift. Body cameras were instead placed on a “horizon list” for possible future consideration.

Says everything, doesn’t it? Why vote down bodycams if they’re so important? I strongly doubt it was out of fiscal prudence or a clear-eyed examination of the benefits and trade-offs. Someone like Juliana Bennett cares about neither, nor do they possess the intellect for doing so. She probably opposed bodycams either because she wanted the money to go to something else or because she knew bodycams wouldn’t help at all.

If even a BLM, “Defund the Police” progressive doesn’t believe in bodycams, what more proof do you need that they were neither the solution nor the problem to begin with? Not a single one of these people cared about Corey Ruiz until he got shot and killed by police. Not a single one of these people’s minds would change if the police had been wearing bodycams. If their minds could be changed, they wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions and called it murder. We’ve seen this play out far too many times to know otherwise. If you already know what happened, then does the evidence matter?

Again, we’ve seen this play out many times before. Bodycam footage was available in both the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Everyone still thinks the shootings were murder. So, what would it matter if ICE agents didn’t have their bodycams turned on in the shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán more recently in Maine, cynical as that may be to say? It could show both a legally and morally justified shooting and nobody’s minds would change. That’s because learning the truth never mattered. Upholding the ideology does. Whomever said we live in a “post-truth,” “post-fact” world was correct. They just didn’t realize they were projecting, as usual.

There are many lessons here. I think the most useful one for anyone who hasn’t been completely ideologically captured to learn, but likely never will, is that public outrage is an awful reason to adopt policy change. One can view the implementation of bodycams as a net positive while also acknowledging that it was not the outcome of sober, judicious, reasoned public debate, but rather a moral panic.

As explained by Force Science:

Without question, “accountability” and “transparency” are vital to an ordered society. However, their timing and placement as top priorities of reform activists and politicians served as a not-so-subtle indictment of law enforcement. Calls for accountability did more than imply police were routinely getting away with misconduct; they were often coupled with express accusations of murder, even in cases where racism and misconduct had been ruled out.

Outcomes matter. Widespread use of bodycams by police was objectively the right decision. It’s also true that sometimes, change doesn’t happen absent public outrage. But if liberals really think the consequences of bodycams were truly unintended, that’s because their expectations didn’t align with reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates their inability to think things through, their emotional impulsiveness, and the failure to understand that everything comes with trade-offs, most of which can be clearly seen well ahead of time. It just takes experience, maturity, and wisdom, the kinds of things you can’t learn in school or from scrolling through social media.

It’s yet another reason why such important, consequential decision should never be made by the masses. But when we worship democracy like it’s God, giving everyone the vote at the cost of destroying everything we built is merely the Lord working in mysterious ways.

What The Flock?

Flock cameras (known for by their manufacturer, Flock Safety) are increasingly becoming a public controversy in cities across the country. Deployed in various cities for public safety, concerns about civil liberties and privacy are forcing a debate on the cameras.

I personally find the whole debate intellectually dishonest, given all the other infringements on our privacy we tolerate, but we’ll set that aside for now. There’s still a worthwhile debate to be had.

Former law enforcement officer Keith Vincent, host of the excellent The Common Sense Practical Prepper podcast, covered the topic in a recent episode. He explains why Flock camera might be worth being concerned about, saying:

So the flock cameras, what are they exactly? They are automated license plate readers, ALPRs. They create a searchable digital record of your vehicle’s movements, and they’re not rare. Many cities have hundreds, if not thousands, of these cameras set up. It’s all over the news, it's all over social media. Most of you out there are probably familiar with them here in the States. So Flock Safety alone reportedly has 40,000 cameras deployed across the country, and every single day they add more. And they don’t have them just in high crime areas. They’re in suburbs, schools, residential streets, entrance to neighborhoods. Some HOAs even have them installed at the entrance of their subdivisions, meaning that your HOA, if it’s on private property, your HOA is now part of this surveillance network and they have access to some of that data.

Vincent explains Flock cameras, as well as public safety cameras in general, aren’t useless. In fact, they do the job they’re intended to do:

Now, I will give credit where credit is due. This camera has helped recover stolen vehicles, missing people, murder suspects, kidnapped people, and that side of it works. Perfect. I get it. If your car gets stolen and somebody drives past a flock camera, which they probably will, there’s a real good chance that the police will get a hit on that license plate and they'll find out which direction it's heading. If a child goes missing and the suspect’s plate is in the system, that’s a tool to help bring the child home. I’m not dismissing that. But in anything else, technology needs to be used for good, not evil. These are not just useless toys up on little poles. So the question is not whether they can do good. The question is whether the trade-off is worth it and whether anyone’s actually watching the watchers.

Trade-offs. That thing that grown-ups are supposed to consider, first and foremost, but liberals, The Most Educated People Ever, never do. But I think we’ve beat up on liberals enough. What are the trade-offs, exactly?

Before getting to that, we all already know what a lot of folks would say: Don’t care, I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve heard this line so many times, including from loved ones. We all have the freedom to think whatever we want, but it doesn’t make it right. It’s dead wrong, in fact, to say we’ve got nothing to worry about as long as we’ve got nothing to hide. Not only that, it’s a dangerous thought.

First and most important, we don’t just allow authorities access to our lives because we have a right to presumption of innocence. That presumption of innocence is upheld by authorities not having access to our personal lives upon demand or monitoring our behavior 24/7. All relationships, even loving relationships, are ultimately upheld by boundaries. It’s one thing to be open and transparent. It’s another thing to have someone looking over your shoulder at all times. That’s a relationship based on mistrust.

Second, as Keith Vincent said:

The “nothing to hide” isn’t an argument. It’s an assumption that the rules won't change. It assumes that people with access to the data will always be trustworthy and the political environment will always be stable. And no one will ever redefine what suspicious means. History tells us otherwise. So let me put this a different way. You might not have anything to hide from the government under these laws today, but data lasts longer than administration's, and once it exists, the data gets used.

To confess, I don’t find it an entirely unreasonable assumption that the political environment will always be stable. It’s been quite stable our whole lives. But I’d also challenge that assumption by having you reflect on how much has changed in just the last quarter-century. I’m not just talking about the USA PATRIOT Act, either. I’m talking about our culture, our way of living. We live in a surveillance society already, despite swearing up and down it’d never come to pass. Though the state remains stable, our politics are becoming more turbulent. Things change. Everything’s fine until it’s not. Welcome to the Fourth Turning.

Vincent offers the United Kingdom as an example of how quickly even a free, liberal, democratic society can become a full-blown surveillance police state. Certainly, the British state has far less restrictions than the American state does in terms of exercising its vast powers. In practice, however, this just means it’s going to take the U.S. longer to get to where the UK is, but get there, it probably will. It also means the American state will simply outsource its surveillance state duties to outside contractors like Flock Safety instead of doing all the dirty work itself.

Listen to the entirety of Keith Vincent’s podcast episode on the topic if you can, it’s not that long. What do I think? At this point, I’m resigned to both the surveillance state and more authoritarian government akin to that of the UK coming to the U.S. As our society fails to self-govern, as we continuously look towards a single source of power for the answer to all our problems, the state’s power will expand, even as we rail against the government, ironically. Each administration, each faction, will find an excuse to employ greater surveillance capabilities, often for ideological reasons.

In some cases, surveillance capabilities will also be dropped for ideological reasons, as was already done with the ShotSpotter system in cities like Chicago, for, like bodycams, revealed the amount of deadly violence that was occurring in neighborhoods predominated by blacks. At the same time, they’ll increase surveillance capabilities in other areas, in the name of combating other threats, such as the mythical far-right White supremacist threat that’s supposed to kick off a civil war and mass racial violence in America at any moment, but never does.

The surveillance state is here to stay. There’s no undoing it. The question is: how do we ensure it’s utilized for non-ideological purposes? Ironically, only a powerful, non-ideological authoritarian state could ensure that.

Between that and tyranny, options are few. The system cannot be reformed. History tells us that. As survivalist and Bosnian War survivor Selco Begovic explains:

In many places and countries in the world, it is where we are now – democracy waiting to become tyranny.

Some regions are more or less in the process, but eventually we are all there.

If I want to strip it down to essence, Plato’s above statement is about democracy bringing too much “freedom “, because people tend to look for “absolute rights and freedoms“. It eventually brings out all kinds of s..t “wrapped” in rights and freedoms, so society goes into social disorder more or less.

Eventually a “saviour“ emerges, who promises to solve all problems, but guess what he turns out to be?

A tyrant, not a saviour.

So then there is Tyranny.

Sounds familiar with all problems in every “western modern“ country?

If you want the state to make everything, including not being offended, a civil right, the state needs to have power to enforce that. Ironically, the very things that were supposed to make us free only end up making the state more powerful in the process.

If anyone wants to argue that it was worth it, by all means do so. Just don’t go off lying acting like these were unintended consequences. The trade-offs were all very clear and obvious to all except the unintelligent and unwise.

Hope It Was Worth It!

This discussion ended up going on much longer than I anticipated, so let’s wrap up here.

Whether bodycams or Flock cameras, both are examples of what many people thought were obvious, no-brainer solutions to seemingly obvious problems. In the case of the former, bodycams were thought to be the solution to police brutality and systemic racism. All they did was reveal how violent the streets could be, the stress police are under, and that black people are a problem. In the case of the latter, you have a solution that worked, but is also contributing to the increasing power of the state as we inch closer to empire, tyranny, or both.

It’s all an expensive, highly contentiuous way of learning among the earliest lessons our parents try to teach us: Think before you act.

What do you think? Were bodycams worth the trouble? Why have liberals and progressives suddenly soured on them? What do you think of Flock cameras? Let’s discuss it in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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is having a moment. His book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, is now out and drawing mostly positive reviews. It earned him a profile in The Atlantic. I haven’t read his new book and I don’t know if I will. But it’s an interesting argument he raises, one I think is worth debating.

Longtime readers know I have something of a love-hate mentality when it comes to Hanania. Sometimes, he has something useful to say. Other times, he’s so far off the mark. That’s what makes him an interesting voice in the discourse - he keeps you on your toes, constantly forcing you to assess arguments and priors. I often give him a hard time, but there’s utility in someone like Hanania.

I’m not a populist myself, and I share Hanania’s view that the people shouldn’t be in charge of governance, which seems to be the premise behind Kakistocracy:

Before going further, for anyone who may not know, kakistocracy (not to be confused with khakistocracy), is a government run by the worst people a society has to offer, the least qualified. Like many forms of government, it’s a theoretical more than practical concept, but it does exist in shades. In my view, the U.S. has been something of a kakistocracy for some time, even pre-Donald Trump.

Hanania’s thesis seems to zero in on Trump, MAGA, and the broader right-wing populist movement, however. There’s validity to the argument. The Trump presidency does seem to court lots of people who really have no business in positions of power to a degree unseen in previous administrations, even as many, the Obama administration specifically, were all kakistocracies to one extent or another.

The appeal of the Trump administration for many was that we finally had outsiders, some fresh eyes and faces at the helm of the country. As we’re finding out, the thought of an outsider is better than the reality of it. Not everyone is a good fit for every job and government is no different. Even if one believes outsiders are at some point necessary, they have to bring a steady hand, a steady mentality to the table. That part of the qualifications list doesn’t change. Moreover, the fact that government exists to serve the people (a questionable assertion, but set that aside for now) doesn’t mean that the people themselves can provide good governance. Government itself is an implication that people cannot govern themselves.

Let me get to the point. Here’s the problem I have with Hanania’s argument: exactly what does he intend to do about it? Since I didn’t read his book, I can’t comment on any solutions he might’ve offered. But I’ve heard enough of his thoughts over the years to have a good sense of what he’d propose and what I notice most of all is what he doesn’t say, which is what I’m about to say.

If you don’t want stupid people to have a say in politics, as Hanania does, then you must restrict franchise. There’s literally no other way. Mass democracy breeds populism, which lays groundwork for tyranny. Unless you want to argue in favor of restricting franchise, railing against populism is a moot point. The only way to stop the worst, least-qualified people from ever coming close to participating in politics is to restrict political rights.

This, of course, is a non-starter in the U.S., which guarantees the right to vote for all, the right to run for office for all. We accept as a given that this is a good thing, a sacrosanct American value. Without rendering a moral judgment, it clearly comes with trade-offs most Americans, liberal or conservative, Left or Right, seem to acknowledge, namely that ignorant, stupid, uneducated people get to have a say in governing affairs.

Liberals, however, hold an irreconcilable stance. On one hand, they lament the fact people they regard as dumber than them getting to vote. On the other hand, they don’t believe voting rights should ever be curtailed. In fact, they believe voting rights should be expanded. This despite the fact even many within the left-wing coalition are less educated than them, with plenty of stupidity to go around on their side. But since mass democracy turns elections not into an exercise in governance, but power struggles, liberals want voting rights expanded because it ensures they’ll get more voters.

Based on his past commentary plus what I can suss out from his new book, Hanania appears to endorse the alternative: mass democracy, but access to information is restricted by gatekeepers. Managed democracy. Aside from the fact a managed democracy is no democracy at all, the problem with this is that it misdiagnoses the illness. The problem isn’t bad information, troublesome as it is. It’s that most people have no clue how to process information to make a political decision. Education doesn’t make people smarter. If anything, education, in practice, reinforces people’s worst proclivities because it provides an intellectual foundation for them.

The only way to influence people to make better choices is to impose tangible costs. Voting isn’t about “making your voice heard.” We already have free speech for that. Voting is about deciding which direction to go in, which plan formulated by policymakers is to be executed. To do that, voters need to have a clear understanding of the benefits and trade-offs of each candidate, of each policy to be decided on. People have to know what they might gain from their vote, what they might lose from it. It cannot be intangible, either. It must be real, not something which could be true in a strictly theoretical sense. When the time to govern has come, the time for philosophy has passed.

I asked this question once before and I’ll ask it again: if you had to face the fact you could lose everything, your job, wealth, property, as a result of voting for the wrong candidate or policy, wouldn’t you vote differently than you do currently? Better yet, would you even want to vote at all? The point isn’t that this would be a good thing. The point is that politics is a serious matter and voters must feel the weight of responsibility for democracy to function as intended. It cannot be driven entirely by vibes, a “your side-my side” affair. Otherwise, you get things like city residents voting for Democrats for decades despite their obvious, entrenched failures.

In a democracy, to truly be an informed voter, a person must be politically engaged at a very deep level. Most people have neither the time nor the interest for it. We all know this. We see it all around us, in our daily lives. I don’t even want to call it apathy, because that implies people should care but don’t. The reality is that politics and governance isn’t for anyone. That’s been true throughout history.

I once quoted a woman who goes by the psedonym “Aella” who came to a profound realization concerning democracy:

2. Democracy is an insane invention. It feels sort of default or obvious now, and I sort of assumed that... people in the past all kinda wanted something like democracy but were oppressed by their monarchs, but this is not the case. Much of the time, calls for democracy were radical, even among the suffering unrepresented lower classes. If you went back in time and said “every man should have the right to vote” people would go ‘whoah there are you insane? that would absolutely destroy civilization!’

People like Richard Hanania would prefer you forget, but the U.S. didn’t enter statehood following the Revolution as a mass democracy. That came nearly a half-century later. None of the Founders were liberal democrats and they most certainly didn’t believe in mass democracy nor universal suffrage. Yes, they were worried about government becoming too powerful. But like most of their time, they were what we’d consider today to be aristocrats, believing that governance was something most people couldn’t be trusted with. That doesn’t make them authoritarians, either. If anything, they might agree on some level with Hanania.

As long as America remains a mass democracy, politics will trend towards keeping one faction in power over another. Mass democracy is, in practice, an organized power struggle, leaving no time for solving any real problems. If it seems like nothing ever gets fixed, well, there you go. Our leaders may be of poor quality, but they’re the product of a dysfunctional system called mass democracy, not the cause of it.

Experts, along with other forms of elite gatekeepers, are simply not sufficient for keeping things orderly in mass democracy. Hanania says:

To start, who’s in charge here? As someone who likely believes in separation of powers, Hanania probably views gatekeepers as a check on authority. The problem is, this is an informal relationship. It’s an indirect way to ensure leaders, the people with authority, cannot pull a fast one on us. It sounds nice in theory.

In practice? Who are we supposed to defer to? The gatekeepers? Or the people with actual political authority? If we cannot trust authority, what’s the point? And if we should trust the gatekeepers over authority, if they’re the ones who get to tell us what to think, then doesn’t that imply the gatekeepers are the ones who are actually in charge?

Separation of powers can work if formalized. It cannot work on an informal basis. By the way, we already have the system in place that Hanania proposes. It hasn’t worked very well. Doubling down on failure rarely leads to success. More importantly, and this is something Hanania probably would never concede, but the biggest problem with elite gatekeepers is that there exists no accountability for them.

Think about it - Hanania says to trust the elite gatekeepers because they’ll be right more times than they’re wrong. But this isn’t how authority works. This isn’t how responsibility works. You don’t get to insist on having legitimacy, being trusted because you get things more right than you get things wrongs.

Nobody’s perfect, no, and expecting perfection is entirely unreasonable. The point is that for gatekeeping to work, either as part of a formal or informal arrangement, there must be a way to hold gatekeepers accountable for their failures. There exists no such way. They can’t be fired, voted out of office, none of that. Nor do I think gatekeepers would ever agree to be held accountable, more importantly. There’s no greater freedom than a lack of accountability, after all.

There’s a lot of wishful thinking one must engage in to think this sort of indirect, mass democratic gatekeeping can actually function:

Again - where’s the accountability? More important, people’s attention spans are short. It matters little that The New York Times and Harvard will correct their mistakes, because by the time they do, the seed has been planted and the public has been programmed. There’s plenty of data out there showing just how poorly informed, especially the college-educated, actually are, in turn proving these corrections by elite gatekeepers to be entirely meaningless. In the business of politics and public opinion, you have to get it right the first time.

Everywhere you turn, the demon inherent in mass democracy emerges. Only a committed, engaged body politic even cares about hearing corrections. Only such a committed, engaged body politic has both the interest and attention span necessary to seek out the right information. Hanania seems to think most voters in a mass democracy are like him. But they’re not. They have other concerns. It makes you wonder: is he the one who’s detached?

Hanania’s bottom line seems to be that mass democracy can work as long as certain controls and safeguards are in place, with elites in control. The reality is, mass democracy itself is the problem, and no amount of controls and safeguards maintained by elites will make it tenable. If anything, all those controls and safeguards ultimately end up restricting democracy, restricting political participation, leading to elite rule. You’ve got to ask: why bother with mass democracy if a small group of people atop the hierarchy end up calling all the shots, anyway?

I’ve said this before, but Hanania cannot afford to oppose universal suffrage. For one, that’d make him the enemy of the establishment he so badly aspires to be part of. If he wants to be a gatekeeper, a member of the political mainstream, he cannot oppose mass democracy. He must ascribe to their religion, the state religion, and anything he says must conform to that dogmatic framework.

Does this make him intellectually dishonest? Not entirely, as you’ll see in a second. Inconsistent, definitely. What it surely also means is he’s been compromised. Because he desires to be a gatekeeper himself in defense of a thoroughly unaccountable regime, this means that even if his argument has merit, he himself cannot be allowed to be any kind of gatekeeper. It means that for whatever his traits, he lacks the integrity necessary to be the sort of elite necessary for a healthy, functional republic.

In fact, as I once said, you cannot be any kind of leader without being able to command respect:

Think about the people you admire and respect in your life: why do you admire and respect them? Is it because of their accomplishments? Their credentials? Or because they lead their lives in a certain way, treat others a certain way, and believe in putting others before self? Not all aristocrats are like this, of course, but you’re never going to become one unless you can convince people you hold such values.

Put another way: why are military veterans so often viewed as having the traits necessary to become political leaders? That’s because the soldier is popularly viewed as being brave and virtuous. Obviously, this isn’t universally true, but don’t overthink it. The profession of arms has been viewed through its existence as a task requiring brave and virtuous individuals to carry out. The medical profession is also highly respected, but there’s comparatively less demand for a doctor to become politicians. That’s because doctors are respected for their expertise, not virtue.

Remember: Hanania wants respect because he knows much, despite the fact he himself isn’t a credentialed professional like a doctor. Like doctors, however, the kind of respect you get from simply being smart and knowledgeable means your credibility hinges on never being wrong. Hanania is wrong on much. Why should we ever trust him with being our democratic gatekeeper?

In addition to commanding respect, I think the most important thing for leaders, experts, gatekeepers, anyone who wants the responsibility of running the show, is to understand what it even means to be responsible in the first place. It means you can’t blame anyone else. You especially cannot blame those below you, you cannot blame “dumb” voters.

They must also understand the nature of authority and power, to understand the difference, and realize that in politics, you’re not asking anyone to do anything. You’re telling them. Great leaders understand this. They embrace it. They don’t shy away from it, pretending it’s something it’s not. If they’re people of virtue, the understanding humbles them and guides their actions. If they’re not people of virtue, they either fail to live up to their responsibilities, or they become tyrants.

Again, I can be very hard on Hanania because he gets it so badly wrong when it does. But he also gets much right and I think he does make an effort to be intellectually honest. For example, in Kakistocracy, he does include a chapter on how and why right-wing populism can actually be successful. I agree with Hanania that not only has Trump and MAGA been more failure than success, but also that populism in general doesn’t work, and it especially doesn’t work in such a developed country like the U.S.

I don’t think he offers much in the way of solutions, however, largely because of his commitment to mass democracy, universal suffrage, etc. Until he’s willing to question his own priors on those, Hanania is, whether he realizes it or not, demanding a return to the status quo ante-Trump. That worked so well, didn’t it?

What are your thoughts on Hanania and his ideas? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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I’m beginning to think I need to start a new “Max’s Musings”-like series dedicated just to refuting the Left’s attempts to talk history, which they’re so bad at. That’s because leftists view history entirely through an ideological lens. Any time you try to make something fit a fixed set of beliefs and worldviews, rewriting history is inevitable. This needs to be pushed back against, especially if leftists claim to be speaking with academic authority, since they’re The Most Educated People To Ever Live.

It’s up to us to expose their ignorance.

Infinite Regression

Alonso Gurmendi, quickly becoming a contender for The King Of Bad Takes, delivers another:

If you want to go back nine centuries to prove a point, it’s more than fair to point out that migration and demographic change almost never happened peacefully for the vast majority of human history. It’s not happening peacefully now, either, not really.

Anyway, why would it matter what happened nine centuries ago? Aren’t liberals about a better way? If so, shouldn’t immigration restriction be considered a better way, given that migration has been the norm throughout history and it’s seldom happened peacefully? Wouldn’t that mean restricting immigration would be more aligned with our better angels, more progressive, as it were?

The problem with so many of the Left’s historical takes is that they go so far back in time as to be meaningless, even when factually accurate. I’ve discussed this at length once before. This is because they’re not trying to actually win the argument. They’re trying to make it impossible for the argument to be had in the first place.

Think about it: if you can prove, through history, that mass immigration and demographic replacement is perfectly normal, if you want to cite the Norman invasion of 1066, to argue against immigration restrictionism, then you’re effectively trying to convince people to come to terms with the fact they’re being invaded and to not put up a fight. What happened before must happen again, no?

The problem, of course, is they don’t apply this principle consistently (surprise!). Liberals leave out how violent migration and demographic replacement was throughout history, even today. Liberals certainly would argue against returning to slavery, despite its universality throughout human societies across the world, over time.

When it comes to history, the only consideration for the Left is this: how can I make it suit the ideology?

Anti-Colonialism Breeds Retardation

Actor and Latino nationalist John Leguizamo rages over the impact colonial imperialism had on his people:

Despite it’s origins within academia, anti-colonialism and Third Worldism are both based off some of the worst history, worst science imaginable. They truly are low-intellect ideologies and make its adherents retarded, including Leguizamo. How retarded is he being here?

500,000 tons comes out to no less than one billion pounds. Read that again: one billion pounds. Even over a century or two’s time, that’s an unfathomable amount of gold that would’ve been impossible to ship across the Atlantic. Most galleons, which were made entirely of wood, were only 500 to 1,000 tons. Considering how much men and material they needed to be able to ship across the Atlantic Ocean, that doesn’t leave much room for something as heavy as gold. Scholarship suggests the amount of gold Spain took from its colonies, at least during the period of time Leguizamo references, comes out to a more reasonable 180 tons, which is still a massive amount.

You have to wonder: is Leguizamo stupid? Or does he think everyone else is stupid? I think it’s a blend of both, but I also think it’s more the latter. The thing stupid people all have in common is that they all think they’re smarter than everyone else. All you can do is refute these people publicly. They cannot be intellectually engaged because they’re ideologues and history exists to fit their ideology. Also, you can’t debate stupid people. I don’t recommend you try.

Perhaps what’s truly insufferable about anti-colonialists and Third Worlders is how most of them live in the West and lead very privileged lives, yet still feel the need to be oppressed by the weight of their own history:

Yet none of these people would ever survive one day if they ever had to fight a superior power. The thing about being oppressed as an ideology is that you can never overcome being oppressed. Otherwise, you become the very thing you fear and loathe most.

It’s a pitiful ideology, on top of being fueled by unbridled stupidity. This right here is its essence:

It’s frightening to see the extent the ideology has been normalized. The only way it happens is through power. Maybe the oppressed aren’t so oppressed, after all?

Don’t Pick On The Amish, Libs

Liberal commentator Joshua Reed Eakle recently tried getting one over on cultural conservatives and immigration restrictionists by singling out the Amish:

Here’s the rest of “Sensurround’s” top-tier rebuttal [bold mine]:

The Amish don’t assimilate into modern society. Correct. They also don’t demand that you give up yours. Assimilation is not the issue by itself. It’s shorthand for something much larger.

The Amish don’t spend their weekends gluing themselves to highways demanding the rest of us abandon electricity. They don’t firebomb data centers because somebody installed fiber internet. They don’t organize marches insisting Ford recall every F-150 because horses are morally superior. They don’t sabotage power plants. They don’t campaign to outlaw smartphones. They don’t scream that your pickup truck is violence. They don’t insist Congress mandate horse-and-buggy quotas.

They do something that is about as American as you can get: “Y’all have fun with your civilization. We’ll be over here churning butter.”

They built their own communities, accepted the tradeoffs, and ask to be left alone. It’s almost as though “living differently yourself” and “forcing everyone else to live differently” are two completely different concepts.

I know. It’s a shocking development. Scientists are looking into it.

From what I can see, Joshua Reed Eakle never further addressed this topic, suggesting he was so thoroughly rebutted, the only thing he could say is to concede defeat. Honestly, I’m not sure how he could’ve allowed himself to be destroyed like this, unless he’s an idiot.

There’s a saying in Japan: The nail which sticks out gets the hammer. But you can say the same about any society. If a minority group insists on drawing attention, if they insist on the public caring about their particular grievance or issue, why should anyone be surprised that people do in fact have something to say about it? Furthermore, why should anyone be surprised some people might disagree or simply not relate?

The Amish are the one minority group in America that truly puts its money where their mouth is. America is a country big enough that entire groups can carve out a sphere for themselves, one which others can’t nor won’t encroach on, and live their lives the way they see it. Other minority groups don’t - they want to live their lives the way they see fit, while still insisting on having access to the same resources and spaces as everyone else.

Eventually, conflicts and disputes arise, at which point minority groups, taking full advantage of America’s predisposition to protecting the civil rights of minorities, demand the world change in accordance with their preferences. They start off by claiming they’re not asking for much, then little by little, they demand a little bit more, and any resistance is met with lawsuits and admonitions about failing to live up to our ideals and values as Americans or some nonsense like that.

The Amish don’t do that. Therefore, nobody cares about them, nobody hates them. It’s really, really difficult to have a problem with people like the Amish - unless you’re Joshua Reed Eakle - who stay out of everyone’s way, who don’t demand the world change for them, and when they do show up in your neighborhood, put on their best face and are on their best behavior. Speaking of which, it’s the same reason why the Japanese are admired the world over. Compare them to, say, the Chinese. Prejudice is real, but it’s not always rooted in blind hatred.

Ironically, the minority groups liberals like Eakle seem to want in America and to fully engage in the wholesale disruption and transformation of society are the absolute worst, most incompatible peoples of the world. That says something about their intentions, doesn’t it?

Slavery Is Always Bad Or It’s Not. Pick One.

As long as we’re alive, the attempt to single out the U.S. and Whites for slavery, a most universal phenomenon, will never end:

This sounds a like perfectly innocent argument, but it’s because it sounds so innocent it must be resisted forcefully from the start. Once you accept the premise of the argument, it leads down a black hole from which there’s no escape, and the discussion becomes less about the what - slavery and more about the who - Americans and Whites.

If we all agree that slavery is bad, then context, identities, motivation, none of that matters. It’s all bad or it’s not. The fact that other societies weren’t committed to liberty means nothing. Liberty is just an idea, anyway. It’s not real. For liberty to exist in any tangible sense, someone must be in charge, someone must have a monopoly on violence to protect everyone from everyone else. Again, it doesn’t matter. Someone living under someone else’s jackboot, forced to toil or die, doesn’t care one bit that their masters believed in liberty for all or not.

I went to Brazil last year, the country which had the most slaves out of any other in the Western Hemisphere, and ended slavery much later also. Our trip leader tried downplaying the legacy of slavery in their country, specifically citing the fact women could marry their way out of it. Others note that slaves in Brazil had more legal protections, while slaves in the U.S. had next to none.

The sense you get is that nobody’s really troubled by slavery. They’re just concerned with how it makes their country look, how it makes them feel about themselves. Every society just has a different way of coming to terms with it. For America, the way we’ve chosen to come to terms with it is to not come to terms with it at all. We built our entire national identity around race and slavery, we allow it to remain an open wound which we’re supposed to somehow unite around, but as common sense would predict, divides us instead.

Ironically, despite not being obsessed with it like liberals are, it’s those on the Right like me who more universally view slavery as bad. The only difference is that I also possess the maturity and wisdom to have a constant moral panic over it. Granted, liberals don’t, either, for reasons cited above. They just pretend like they do for political reasons, for social acceptance.

One of the reasons the Left will never truly be a patriotic faction is because, even when they speak positively of America, it always begins with a caveat about how we were once a terribly racist country, how we haven’t always “lived up to our values:”

The thing is, there’s nothing innovative about this approach. It’s kind of been standard my entire adult life. It hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s time to try something new?

Elections Don’t Last. Gender Is Forever.

X account “Carl,” who fashions himself as the fatherly liberal voice of reason, tries to downplay the Left’s denial of science and up-play the Right’s denial of the 2020 election outcome:

Nobody had any doubt as to what a woman was until 10 seconds ago in historical terms. The 2020 election will be forgotten in short order. Gender realities will remain with us forever. Furthermore, as scholars like point out, a society which cannot agree on something as fundamental as biological reality isn’t having a political crisis, it’s having a philosophical crisis, which cannot be resolved politically. If you can’t agree on what a woman is, forget about agreeing on tax rates.

By the way, I’ve made it clear my thoughts on the 2020 election: Joe Biden won, hands down. Whatever fraud existed wasn’t enough to tip the balance against Trump because there was no balance to tip. 2020 went so badly for Trump that thinking he won demands a greater stretch of the imagination. I’m sick and tired of people on the Right still holding out on 2020, I’m sick and tired of Trump still bringing it up. If he won in 2020, his presidency would’ve ended over a year-and-a-half ago. Does anyone consider that?

One more thing - if transgenders are such a small percentage of the population, then why do they consume such a large percentage of public discourse? It’s not the Right bringing transgenderism to the table. It’s the Left. Why is transgenderism such a big deal if they’re such an insignificant proportion of the population? We see this with every left-wing issue: they bring it up, they make a big deal out of it, and the moment they receive the slightest push-back, they wonder aloud what the fuss is all about. It’s how they normalize the abnormal, like transgenderism.

Carl, for all his years, for all his education, knows much. What he lacks in is common sense and wisdom. If this is the best our elders can forge, that’s pretty bleak, if you think about it.

Damn Puritans

I often lament the fact Americans know so little of their own history, including the truth about some of the biggest events leading to the formation of their country. The Boston Massacre is one such example. It’s viewed by many as a veritable point-of-no-return, where the split between the 13 colonies and Britain was all but assured, and those who died were basically peaceful protesters gunned down by brutal British soldiers with orders to suppress dissent.

If nearly every historical event seems to follow a liberal narrative, that’s because it’s meant to be that way. The truth is, of course, not so liberal. explains, in his excellent book Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution, the events leading up to the Boston Massacre:

While moderates like [Benjamin] Franklin and [George] Washington discussed the merits of the boycott, radicals in Massachusetts took their arguments into the street. Boston remained the hotbed of resistance to British authority, and although the monthly temperature rose or fell according to the mood of the ministry in London and the policies of Parliament, the trend was decidedly in a warming direction. Samuel Adams and his allies pushed against the boundaries demarked by the British government, and the British government pushed back. London sent a warship to Boston for the nominal purpose of capturing smugglers; the unspoken purpose was to awe the populace. London sent British troops to ensure the safety of British colonial officials, and to deter violators of the peace and British law.

Neither tactic worked; the Boston mob grew more unruly than ever. In February 1770 a riot threatened the home of a Boston resident conceived to be too partial to the British. “Having been a landwaiter, or inferior custom-house officer, and before that an informer against illicit traders, he was particularly obnoxious to the people,” Thomas Hutchinson recalled of the man and the rioters. “The mob surrounded his house, threw stones and brickbats through the windows, and, as it appeared upon trial, were forcing their way in when he fired upon them, and killed a boy of eleven or twelve years of age.”

The boy was the son of German immigrants. The Boston radicals constantly confronted and provoked British troops, who exhibited tremendous restraint under pressure. When the Boston Massacre happened, it was in response to a riotous mob attacking British soldiers. To call it a massacre is historically false. Even John Adams, one of our founders and eventual president of the soon-to-be U.S., defended the troops in court, because he, correctly, viewed their actions as self-defense.

Does any of this sound familiar? It’s shocking to study history and discover that Americans are, in many ways, the same people we’ve ever been. New England radicals accelerated America’s road to rebellion from Britain and they continue to call the shots today, this time driving events from the Ivory Tower, even from the halls of power in Washington. They’re even still sacrificing the lives of immigrants like they were in the 18th century!

In so many ways, the story Americans have been told about us isn’t any kind of real history. It’s the New England radicals’ revisionism of history. The Puritans, of course, dominated the region, and rhetoric like Shining City Upon A Hill is Puritan-talk. It’s ironic, given the term “Puritan” has a negative connotation, often employed by liberals to denigrate conservatives. Yet not only do liberals today have more in common with Puritans than conservatives, today’s liberals are descended from the Puritans, if only in an intellectual sense.

The difference between history and narratives is that the latter requires clearly identified good guys and bad guys. On some level, it’s necessary for things like national myths, a unifying story we can all rally around. But they cannot be built on outright lies, total inversions of history. I explained earlier how the U.S. has chosen not to come to terms with racism and slavery. There’s really only two things any society can do: own it and tell everyone to just deal with it, or simply not talk about it.

Liberals could be taken a whole lot more seriously if they confessed that yes, they’re the Puritans, yes, they’re whom they accuse conservatives of being. But that makes them the bad guy in our American story. As long as liberals control the narrative, you can expect even more bad history to be propagated and become woven into this bizarrely inaccurate national story.

No, Things Weren’t Better. And Yes, They Were.

This isn’t a bad history take, but I still think it’s worth discussing here. There are lots of people out there who think America was a better, happier place pre-Trump, specifically during the Obama days:

I’m not going to pretend that nothing changed because things obviously have. However, as I’ve said many times before, politics was highly charged and contentious back then, too. Maybe not to the degree it is now. But it wasn’t easy having political discussions back then, either. More importantly, a lot of the unfortunate trends which have become an indelible part of both our politics and social fabric - extremist feminism, institutionalization of LGBTQ+ ideology, constant racial moral panic - emerged during the Obama administration. If that’s what liberals liked about that time, fine, whatever. But they must then concede that Trump was a reaction to those trends.

That said, is everything a matter of nostalgia? Data is never the end-all, be-all, but it does help us decide how seriously to take people’s word about how things used to be. Look at how Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country ebbed and flowed over the years:

Two things I want to highlight, specifically: satisfaction was quite high for much of the 1980s and 1990s. The ‘80s were, of course, the decade the Baby Boomers thrived and Generation X’s childhood and formative years, while the ‘90s were the childhood and, to a lesser extent, formative years of Millennials. The high satisfaction numbers during these two decades suggests there’s something to people remembering these times as wonderful, even as they were accompanied by some truly low lows (WTF happened in 1992???).

After the early 2000s, the satisfaction rate never again hit 50 percent, proving just how down on their country most Americans have been these last 20 years. The numbers may not tell the whole story, but they don’t lie, either: people weren’t happy with the way things were going pre-Trump. Tucker Carlson, controversial as he may be, was absolutely correct when he said that a happy country doesn’t vote for Trump. He’s not the kind of leader who shows up to ruin everyone’s good time. He’s exactly the kind of person who shows up when everyone’s angry and miserable. And we absolutely were during the Obama administration.

Re-imagining pre-Trump America as some happy time is 100 percent nostalgic. But as far as our childhoods go? Those might’ve really been some good times.

“Nice Societies Are Fascist!”

We’ll close on one more topic. What in the actual f**k is this?

And yes, it’s a fair question. Why are fascists and racists always portrayed as living in nice places, having nice things? Don’t we all want the same things?

Author Devon Eriksen explains this portrayal is rooted in the basic psychology of fascism and communism:

Fascism is a disgust spiral, whose basic commandment is “thou shalt not be worse than me.” It starts out with anti-smoking campaigns and burning child pornography, and ends up disappearing anyone who doesn’t mow his lawn.

Communism is an envy spiral, whose basic commandment is “thou shalt not be better than me.” It starts out targeting captains of industry and genius intellectuals, and ends up disappearing anyone who wears glasses, which create the suspicion that he might have read a book once.

This is why people with communist psychology (the left) equate clean streets with fascism.

Leftists can’t keep their streets clean and their lawns mowed, but instead of the psychologically healthy response of being slightly embarrassed and resolving to do better, they decide that anyone in a nice neighborhood is a fascist who needs to be exposed and purged.

Leftists, of course, have no problem owning property, participating in free market capitalism, as long as they benefit from doing so. It’s everyone else who owns too much property. It’s everyone else who perpetuates inequality in society. I see the homes leftists live in - the stereotype of the messy hippie is real, but I also see leftists live in beautiful, well-maintained homes, well-trimmed yards, all in nice neighborhoods, like the one depicted in the crazy video above.

The point isn’t that leftists are hypocrites. That much is obvious. The point instead is that leftists are fixated on making sure nobody else is better off than anyone else. Once you make politics about criminalizing the desire to have more, the desire to be better off, the desire to maintain standards, to not allow things to degrade or become tainted, that opens the door to destroying your own society, because the simplest way to part someone with their property is to burn it all down.

I explained a few essays ago how envy is the liberal’s favorite sin, how leftist politics is the institutionalization of envy. What makes envy, like any sin, terrible is that it’s insatiable. There’s always going to be something to be jealous about. Envy and resentment go hand-in-hand; you can never respect someone you’re envious towards. Friendships end, families are split, lives are ended, all over envy.

Why make politics about something like that? At least disgust influences positive behavior. Envy doesn’t. That’s what makes it a deadly sin.

That’s enough for today. What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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One of the biggest shifts over the last several years is the extent to which talk of civil war has faded from the discourse. Some people still talk about it and the consensus, at least on the Right, is that the United States is headed for a period of heightened political violence, but not outright civil war.

Much of this was due to the election of President Donald Trump. Like it or not, his election did have a de-escalatory affect on political tensions in the U.S., if only for a short time. Tensions are rising again. However, talk of civil war remains muted, if only because so much time has passed and it still hasn’t popped off. Eventually, you get tired of talking about it, and become resigned to the fact it’s either not going to happen or, if it does, nobody will see it coming, thus there’s no use in trying to predict if and when it will, or even devoting so much of your resources and time to preparing for it.1

One person still has civil war foremost in mind. Right-wing commentator “Auron MacIntyre” (I put his name in quotes because that’s apparently a pseudonym) posted on X at the end of last month:

This triggered a wave of negative reaction, mostly from the Right. They found his assertion that a civil war should’ve started over the assassination of Charlie Kirk last September to be callous and flippant, and his description of the Right as cowardly as insulting and hypocritical. After all, is he going to do any of the fighting himself?

Apparently not. In response to the backlash, MacIntyre tried clarifying his remarks:

To be fair, he makes a good point: refusing to start a civil war may not be a bad thing, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t drawbacks. Political violence, as well as protest, has become so left-sided in America that even a peaceful protest by the Right gets met with tremendous backlash, as we saw over the Independence Day weekend with Patriot Front marching in Washington, D.C. It’s clear that even peaceful protest has become a privilege claimed exclusively by the Left.

The Right is, therefore, in a dilemma. It’s long overdue to put up a fight and the longer it waits, the more costly it’ll become to do so, but the cost of doing so is already prohibitively high.

Still, to say Charlie Kirk’s murder should’ve sparked a civil war isn’t only brazen, it also misunderstands how and why civil wars start. A single assassination is never enough to start any war. Remember that Kirk is a political commentator - even if arguably a leader of a political movement, it wasn’t like he was on the path to seizing power. More importantly, assassinations only really matter in an environment of political instability. I’m sorry to put it that way, but it’s true. The U.S. has lots of problems, instability is rising. But this isn’t the same as being in a unstable state.

, the Right’s voice of reason, addressed MacIntyre’s comments:

He has a lot to say, so while I recommend you listen to him, I also understand if you don’t have time to do so. His big points are that things are much too stable in the U.S. for a civil war to happen. We’re not even a country regularly roiled by mass protest and civil unrest. That’s taking into account 2020 and all the leftist protests, including the pro-illegal immigration rallies and riots that have taken place over the last 12 months. Yes, it’s happening. Yes, it’s bad. Yes, the Left is becoming more brazen. But it still hardly amounts to the kind of thing that’s going to threaten the legitimacy of the state, which is where it really counts. There are states the world over suffering from levels of violence unimaginable for most Americans, yet civil wars aren’t happening there. You can be an incredibly violent country and still not have civil wars.

Greer makes the point that most people aren’t going to attack anyone, destroy property, burn neighborhoods, etc. They just aren’t. Radicalized as America has become, most people aren’t so radicalized to the point they’re going to hit the self-destruct button. As Auron MacIntyre himself says, most people are cowards and will settle for holding radical thoughts or expressing radical views, but violence is still a line they won’t cross. That’s because it comes at a cost. Despite their propensity for violence as a group, leftists, as individuals, are weaklings, and weaklings are the ones who most casually threaten violence.

The real concern is what we saw in 2020: Americans throwing their support behind mass protests and rioting after a successful psychological operation, only for it to spiral out of control to where even those who supported the uprising at first turn against it, if quietly so. This is where things do have the potential to lead to serious violence. However, most people don’t want violence and unrest, at least where they live, and even the insurrectionists will eventually tire of it and want to go back to their normal lives. Again - nobody’s as committed to the cause as they like to think they are.

There’s also the matter of demographics, the Right’s kryptonite. I’ve made note of this also - America is aging. Not as old as Germany, Italy, or Japan, no. But we don’t have a surplus of young men, which was a key ingredient present in past civil wars and revolutions. You can’t even have high crime rates without a surplus of young men. You most certainly aren’t going to see older Americans and women waging insurgencies. Yet it’s precisely these people, not young men, who make up the radical left’s base.

Yes, you have people out there willing to do violence or confront authorities. But not only are most of these people not in the right state of mind when they do, they’re also few in number. You see plenty of protest and disruptive activities, but not much in the way of an organized insurgency on the level of Northern Ireland’s IRA, Spain’s ETA, or even groups like the Weather Underground from America’s own past. What insurgencies do exist are very low-level or carried out by lone wolves.

Greer makes the interesting observation that America’s concerns over young men have changed dramatically over the last half-century - from the 1970s into the 1990s, the worry was how to keep them away from crime and drugs. Now, the worry is how to get young men out of their rooms, in Greer’s words. Similarly, we used to worry about teenage pregnancies or having children out of wedlock for young women. Now, we worry that they’re not having babies at all. A saying comes to mind: Don’t follow the headlines; follow the trend-lines.

The most controversial argument Greer makes, I think, is when he says the Left isn’t as formidable as it once was. Obviously, you can’t go pedal to the metal forever. But I also think the reason why the Left doesn’t seem as scary as it was just a few short years ago is because they’ve won so decisively at an institutional level, converted so many hearts and minds, that there’s just not much left for them to do. Once you rise to the top, you have to become more respectable.

Philosophically, the Left is unbelievably radical. But the institutions present themselves and their ideology as normal. To employ Yuri Bezmenov’s subversion framework - demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization - we’re at the end of that process, and the only way you end up at the end up at normalization is if demoralization, destabilization, and crisis were successful. They’re consolidating their gains

Greer muses about what the whole civil war debate says about the Right’s pathology - whereas the Left always looks toward a proletarian revolution or infinitesimal social “progress” without interruption, the Right looks toward for civil war or collapse, because they think it’s a struggle in which they’d come out on top and establish a new, better, BASED order. The Right is more religious than the Left and I think this has a lot to do with it, since apocalypticism is a big part of Christian mythology.

The difference between proletarian revolutions and progressivism versus civil war and collapse is, of course, reality. The Left’s fantasies are just that, while the Right’s fantasies do in fact happen frequently throughout the grand scope of history. However, the Right doesn’t get to dictate when civil wars break out or when it all comes to an end. Civil war and collapse aren’t things that happen because conservatives aren’t happy with the status quo.

As Greer also notes more than twice, many on the Right are, in fact, people with lots to lose. When you have lots to lose, not only is a cataclysm the last thing you ought to be hoping for, you’re probably not going to be dumb enough to participate in self-destruction. We see the Left do this because they’ve been so ideologically captured. Even then, nobody on the Left is as brave as they think. We see how the Left expects police to act with total restraint while they get to act as aggressively and provocatively as they want. That’s not someone who’s ready to sacrifice it all.

It’s worth noting that the Right didn’t start a civil war over Charlie Kirk’s murder proves that all the Left’s great thinkers, like Barbara Walter and Stephen Marche, were maliciously lying when they said America was headed for civil war because of the Right’s discontent. If the Right didn’t start one after Kirk died, it’s going to take much more than anger for them to do so. It all proves the Regime has been trying - and failing - to preemptively blame the Right for America’s next civil war. Unfortunately, not only have they not been held accountable for such inflammatory lies, they’ll stop at nothing to continue to paint political dissidents as the biggest threat to the U.S. today.

The bottom line is that our problems are many, but things are still far too stable for civil war. It may even be too stable for even a low-intensity, “Years Of Lead”-like conflict. There are many people on both sides who want to see violence. the one thing they all have in common is that they want someone else to do the fighting. Someone once made the same observation about the Middle East years ago, which explained why the region wasn’t more violent despite all the hostility.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Today, the Middle East is completely engulfed in armed conflict. As 2020 demonstrated, we’re always just one black swan event from destabilizing things dramatically. Maybe a lot has changed for the better since then. But civilization always hides a savagery that lies beneath.

I stand by my prediction that we’ll see at least one more bout of serious civil unrest, and it’ll get bad enough that it’ll seem as though the country is on the verge of civil war. But like so many low-intensity conflicts throughout history, we won’t go over the edge. And that should be considered a good thing because civil war is a worst-case outcome and there’s no guarantee the new order that rises from the ashes will be any better than what we have now.

I often struggle to describe what I see coming up the road in large part because it’s never easy to talk about something we don’t have a precedent for. As Greer points reiterates, America today is much safer and more stable than its ever been, no matter what anyone thinks. Not only was crime much worse in the past, within living memory, the race riots of the 1960s caused far more damage and deaths than all the unrest of the last 15 years. Given demographic realities, a return to even the conflict and instability we saw in the 1960s into the 1990s is highly unlikely. The waves of violence of the future will probably be sharp and headline-grabbing, but short-lived.

The best I can manage is the world seen throughout the Deus Ex video game franchise. Specifically, as depicted in the most recent installment of the series, Mankind Divided. Set in 2029 - three short years from now - the world is attempting to move on after what can only be described as “quasi-civil war” - an outburst of mass violence which drives a deep very wedge across societies throughout the world. In the time and place of Mankind Divided, humanity is living in apartheid.

Personally, I don’t see apartheid coming in our future. For a state of apartheid to exist, there must be a clear and obvious way of differentiating people - race comes foremost to mind. Since today’s divide is ideological, however, it’s very difficult to clearly separate groups in this manner. Even in past ideologically-riven societies, there were clear class distinctions between the two factions, among other identifiers which made it possible to discriminate.

In the U.S., we also have the Civil Rights Act, and our freedom of association is limited. However, many left-aligned groups have more freedom of association rights than those right-aligned, so some self-segregation is inevitable. While divide-and-conquer is an important power for any state to have, one which the U.S. government at all levels has in abundance, their ability to also force people to associate and share spaces is a means of control as well. Ironically, apartheid would actually hurt the Regime, whereas in the past, it tended to help regimes.

In the world of Deus Ex, most of the armed conflict takes place in the shadows, beyond public view. There’s occasional civil unrest, wars going on in the background. But at home, the fighting is done by police and secret agents. Terrorism is an ever-present threat, there are insurgent and subversive moments of all stripes trying to influence events while also trying to remain anonymous. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Managing the chaos is a powerful surveillance state, one with plenty of agents and deputies at their disposal, with increasingly more sophisticated means of keeping tabs on everyone. The surveillance state is a major theme of the Deus Ex franchise, how there’s no hiding from those in power, it’s only a matter of how interested they are in you. The surveillance state cannot be viewed as an ideological actor, either. Whomever commands it will inevitably abuse it. The best we can hope for is that those in control aren’t an ideological faction, but pragmatically concerned with safety, security, and order. That’s all we can really expect from the state, anyway.

In the Deus Ex universe, so much of life concerns those three pillars of civilization - safety, security, order. It means that none of its guaranteed and society is always one misstep away from it all unraveling. I think that’s what the future looks like - the line between civilization and barbarism is a thin line, and those lines are drawn everywhere, even at our front doorsteps. Crime may remain low by historical standards, but what few criminals exist will find few obstacles in their way and plenty of tools with which to terrorize the rest of us.

The most enduring and important theme of Deus Ex, in my view, is that someone’s always in charge. The universe of the franchise undergoes multiple cataclysms over a narrative covering a period of almost a half century. Yet, in the end, someone is always running things. Anarchy is simply not a thing. Not only is someone always in charge, it’s often the same people as before.

There’s a lesson there. Things don’t change as much as we think they do. Power vacuums always get filled. Because chaos is the natural state of affairs, there’s always a bias towards order. The only question is, who gets to be in charge?

Though he was speaking about crime specifically, Fabian Ommar made a point recently about how increasing crisis and disorder makes the state use its power more assertively, in ways we may not especially enjoy:

As mentioned, there are also violent conflicts with the police forces, sometimes resulting in high body counts and involving innocents. Talking about that, the rise in police brutality is another side effect of violent crime: in order to deal with a well-armed, deadly, and ruthless enemy, the police also gets more violent and lethal.

Again, the point is that crisis always makes the state more powerful. It has to, if it wants to stay in charge. Anyone who wants the state to become less powerful during a crisis is asking the impossible.

At the same time, anyone hoping for the state to bring the hammer down should temper their expectations as well:

The state is vastly powerful; any government has more resources, a much larger capacity to mobilize civil society, the military, and other institutions for longer than any criminal organization. So why don’t they all join forces and fight crime with iron fist? Why don’t they all do like El Salvador?

There are many reasons, from incompetence to lack of motivation, from bureaucracy to corruption, not to mention practical obstacles. There are also political reasons.

The combat against trained, well armed and organized armies entrenched in civil society can be bloody and dirty. An open, all-out war against crime involves Civil Casualties (known as CIVCAS), which are inevitable in these cases. That doesn’t go down well in democracies and has a high political cost.

The matter of civil and constitutional rights can be more or less contentious depending on where we’re talking about, but is still sensitive in most instances – not to mention the potential for second-order (i.e., unwanted) developments, like the rise of populist leaders and other radicalisms.

This brings us full circle back to people like Auron MacIntyre, who think we should’ve fought a civil war after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and supporters of President Donald Trump who think he needs to unleash the dogs of war against the Left. There’s a cost to violence, there’s a cost to using power in this manner. The mandate for it simply isn’t there and there won’t be for the foreseeable future. Finally, it’s just a cold, hard, fact, that as bad as things are, things aren’t so bad that it’s time to flip the table over and attempt to establish a new order. It sounds nice, but even a communist revolution sounded nice until they actually tried to establish one.

The lesson? If you really think things are bad now, don’t do anything that’ll make it worse. You’ll be the first to pay.

Over to you. What are your thoughts on Auron MacIntyre’s post? Do you think a civil war should’ve started by now? Why haven’t we had one yet? Will we ever see one? Discuss it in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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That’s a shot from the 1997 cult-classic horror film The Devil’s Advocate, starring, in addition to Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, and Charlize Theron. It’s one of my favorites and I regard it as criminally underrated. I won’t speak too much on it except to say Pacino portrays the Devil, and his iconic line from the movie is Vanity; definitely my favorite sin.

Well, for liberals, their favorite sin is envy. Though comparing liberals with the Devil might be lowbrow, all sins have one thing in common: they bring out the worst in us. For liberals, envy brings out the worst in them.

Now that Elon Musk has become a trillionaire, critics are pouncing to condemn him for not solving all the world’s problems with his newfound riches:

It doesn’t matter to liberals if world hunger gets solved. They simply don’t like the idea of anyone having that much more than them. Their thinking doesn’t go any deeper than that. Their opposition to cutting government aid programs isn’t because people actually benefit from them. It’s because they regard the act of giving as the end itself. It doesn’t matter the outcome, success or failure has no bearing. If anything, failure is better than success, because it justifies demanding even more money.

It’s also worth noting that liberals are less likely than conservatives to donate to charity. Which is fine, of course - nobody is entitled to anyone else’s money. But it’s hypocritical to demand others be charitable while not being charitable yourself. How much money a person has doesn’t have anything to do with it, especially if they think the act of charity is the whole point. I believe there’s something in the Bible about how a poor person giving what little they have means more than a rich person giving a lot of what they have.

This is a talk for another time, but scholars like point out that today’s class divide isn’t between rich and poor, but between the affluent and the even more wealthy. In other words, the biggest critics of the wealthy are quite well-off themselves, even by American standards. The irony is lost on these affluent liberals, of course, who see themselves as the voice of the voiceless.

The reality is, someone like Elon Musk has benefited more people than any affluent liberal or any leftist politician arguing for higher taxes ever will:

Show me a single government program that can help a person like this. I’ll wait.

Of course, when you can’t win the argument, you move the goalposts:

No. Just no. Liberals have made it clear the super-wealthy like Musk are supposed to use their riches to deliver millions from poverty, to affect major social changes, not merely ease suffering. All that does, at the end of the day, is preserve the status quo. Sure, it might make for some feel-good stories, but if the wealthy aren’t going to be expected to help the less fortunate rise above it all, what’s the point, really?

By the way, what did MacKenzie Scott donate her $26 billion to, anyway? This:

None of which helps pull people out of poverty. Looks like liberals don’t actually believe in that, either. What they absolutely do believe in is advancing the ideology. It’s an expensive job, you know?

They also tried blaming Musk’s DOGE initiative for the deaths of millions:

I’m not going to address the mathematical aspect of this, which requires some stretch of the imagination to credibly accept. I’m going to address the philosophical aspect of this - according to such logic, why should anyone ever help anyone? If helping someone effectively incurs a lifetime of liability, and there’s no way to back out of an entirely voluntary, one-sided commitment, why would anyone ever agree to that?

Liberals can attempt moral blackmail all they want. It doesn’t change a thing. Since it’s not up to them to decide what anyone else does with their money, nobody has any obligation of any kind to attach themselves to what effectively amounts to lifetime bondage. According to Bad Takes King James Surowiecki’s impressive logic, slaves should’ve never been freed since they’ve been made to be dependent on their masters for survival. It also stands to reason that once they’ve been freed, by no means do former slave-masters or anyone else hold any obligation towards them, except for perhaps what was separately agreed upon or what is legitimately owed. If America owed the former slaves anything, it was probably the plots of the land they worked or free trips back to Africa. But I digress.

Why’s it that when liberals are told to be more charitable themselves, all they have to give are excuses?

Seriously, that’s his response. We already know liberals are far less charitable than conservatives. That’s fine, too - again, nobody should be told what to do with their money. But then why are liberals so preoccupied with how others spend their money? Why does everything need to come out of taxation? When will liberals ever invest any risk of their own?

Because when you’re the one assuming risk, the outcome matters.

This is why electing people who’ve never put any money or skin into the game or allowing them to participate in the political process isn’t just a bad idea, it’s anti-democratic:

The point is that someone like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani risks nothing. If anything, he’s someone who made a career out of convincing everyone else to risk something. Now he’s in a position of authority, where he doesn’t need to ask. He simply tells. I think that matters. For democracy to work, we need to be able to trust that both leaders and voters know what it means to risk something, that they understand that not everyone can win, that sometimes people can lose. Anyone whose politics revolves around the idea everyone can win is selling a false bill of goods.

Of course, if we took democracy as seriously as we claim, we’d understand that.

Envy Is Worse Than Hate

Global entertainment superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, starring in the live remake of Disney’s Moana, laments the lack of representation in the media he endured as a child:

Hmm. My gut, which is usually not wrong, tells me that The Rock didn’t give a damn about representation 15 or even as recently as 10 years ago. We all know what changed in the interim, there’s no need to go over that. For Johnson to claim that representation was an issue for him growing up is ironic, given that it never stopped him from pursuing an entertainment career, going on to become a mega-star.

Popular X account “RAW EGG NATIONALIST” claps back (we can play that game too!) with as good a response as any:

Seriously. At the risk of dating myself, I was nine when I saw Will Smith portray fighter pilot Captain Steven Hiller, U.S. Marine Corps, who saved the planet from aliens in the movie Independence Day. Despite not being black myself, not once did I think “I can’t be a fighter pilot like him; I’m not black!”1 No, I didn’t become a fighter pilot, but it had nothing to do with race nor the lack of representation of people like me in media.

Similarly, the fact Bruce Lee was Chinese didn’t stop millions of young White men from getting into martial arts. If anything, White men would’ve been considered even more racist than they already are if they expressed such sentiments. By the way, why are Whites consistently the least racist or racialized of people?

One of the false promises of liberal, civil rights-centric culture was that it wouldn’t matter that Indiana Jones was White. That the many characters Will Smith played were black. They all transcended race. You still saw a bit of yourself in them. One of the reasons why The Rock became a superstar was because millions of young White boys, as well as those of other races, saw something in them that they liked. I don’t think any of them thought, “He’s Samoan, I’m not. I couldn’t ever be him, I couldn’t ever identify with him.” The Rock was someone who transcended every divide imaginable. He still does, in many ways. That’s what makes these most recent comments on representation disheartening to hear.

A nice thought was all it was. In the end, civil rights and liberalism indulged envy, creating a society where literally everything is defined by the fact someone has more than you, has more representation than you, looks better than you, the list goes on, and you’re supposed to get angry about that. You could end up becoming as successful as Dwayne Johnson and it’s still not enough. There’s still an unaddressed grievance, an axe to grind. Maybe that’s the whole point, too, because without something to struggle against, does our existence even mean anything?

In that light, envy is just like hatred. It’s insatiable, something which cannot be assuaged. Hate begets hate, envy begets envy. Think about it: the last time you were jealous of someone, did you respect them? Or did you resent them? The feelings may not last, but the point is, in that moment you felt jealousy, did you also not resent them at the same time, even if the feelings eventually subsided?

The fact is, no amount of representation will satisfy anyone. No amount of charity will satisfy anyone. That’s because none of that matters. None of that was ever the point.

In closing, it’s worth remembering that of the seven deadly sins, hate wasn’t one of them. Envy not only was, hatred was considered a byproduct of envy. This means that envy is far worse than hatred. Yet, not only do we consider hate to be the greater sin, we build entire political platforms based off envy.

I see a problem here. Don’t you?

What are your thoughts on anything discussed? Talk it out in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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Violence is a core theme of my writing. I spend a lot of time talking about it, not only in terms of how it can be bad and how to protect yourself from it, but also how it’s foundational for civilization and necessary for allowing us to live in peace and safety. The United States, the West as a whole, claims to eschew violence, deeming it to be below us and contradictory to our values.

What’s actually happening is this: we’ve become so civilized and socialized to where we have a complicated, uncomfortable relationship with violence. We’re all aware violence is all around us, we know people use violence all the time, we’re even aware violence is sometimes necessary. It’s just that our attitude towards it changes depending on who and whom. We readily accept the fact that swarms of “youths” ravaging entire neighborhoods is just another Saturday night, blacks reacting violently to the mildest of provocations is simply the natural order of things and it’s up to us to take pains to avoid it.

This is wrongheaded. The reason why we cannot have nice things in America isn’t because of a lack of care, compassion, nor kindness. If that were really the case, we wouldn’t bother helping anyone at all, paying taxes, spending on charity, none of that. The real reason why we cannot have nice things in America is because we’re not willing to pay for it and I’m not talking about higher taxes.

Instead, the price we’re unwilling to pay is violence, because we’ve been successfully indoctrinated into thinking that violence is bad, only bad people engage in violence, good people don’t, and besides, there’s always a better way, isn’t there?

No, not really. Humans follow the path of least resistance. If talking it out was much easier and less painless, we’d have done that for most of history. But we haven’t, because it’s not. The reality is, if a person thinks they can exploit and leverage an advantage, such as strength, over someone else, they will. Even when talking it out, everyone’s always looking for an opening, an advantage to exploit. Nobody ever truly approaches one another looking to be on equal ground. It takes civilization, culture, and society to get a person to resist their natural impulses. Kindness doesn’t come naturally.

It’s not sufficient, either. Social relations cannot be governed entirely by sympathy any more than they can be run on the assumption that people will always do the right, decent thing. “Humans aren’t perfect” is the natural state of affairs. It cannot be allowed to become an excuse for malignant, anti-social behavior. We’re not talking about innocent mistakes any reasonable person can make, either. We’re about things like crime and predatory behavior.

Kindness works when everyone understands what it means to be kind, understands when someone is being kind, and understands it’s not an excuse to take advantage of someone. This is why kindness should never become an ideology, as so many liberals have made it into. First, everyone would need to adhere to it, but more importantly, once it becomes an ideology, it must be enforced with violence.

As Psychology Today explains:

It’s important that we offer kindness autonomously, without feeling forced to do so, and that we feel our efforts are effective.

Kindness, once it becomes enforced, no longer has any meaning or value. It becomes just another form of control, which seems to be what a lot of people want. More importantly, even when not coerced, kindness only works, only means anything, if the those benefiting from the kindness of others understand it’s not an entitlement, that attempts to exploit kindness will be met with some kind of reciprocity to establish consequences both for deterrence and to prevent transgressors from ruining it for everyone else.

Either way, violence is the common denominator. It’s because we ignore the reality of violence, it’s centrality to not only governance, but social relations in general, that things have become so dysfunctional in modern society. I think everyone, liberals included, understand violence is necessary to an extent. But to accept this is to confess, in accordance with contemporary prevailing values, that they’re bad people, so they pretend like violence isn’t the foundation of civilized life, while also inconsistently picking and choosing when violence matters, for good and for ill.

X account Chad Crowley had an excellent long post which motivated me to write this essay:

Violence is the iron life of law.

The West is collapsing because too many of its people live in a fantasy world, separated from reality.

They have been taught to believe civilization is maintained by sentiment rather than force. It is not. Nations that forget this do not become more humane. They become prey.

Every legal order, tax demand, police command, and prison sentence rests on force, or the credible threat of it. The state rests on it, and so does civilization itself. Civilization is the organization of force into order. Strip that away, and “law” becomes nothing but a suggestion.

The extent to which supposedly educated people struggle with this concept baffles me. It proves that not only is there a difference between knowledge and wisdom, our most educated populace ever may, in fact, not even be knowledgeable.

Our Most Educated Populace Ever really does believe governance in a liberal democracy is, even when it works properly, compromise reached through deliberation:

This is the great fiction of liberal society. It teaches people to imagine politics as a seminar and government as a neutral referee, when in reality law is never floating above human conflict. Law is made by those who possess power, and political power is organized force. It is interpreted by those who serve that power and enforced by those willing to act on its behalf.

Here’s the dirty truth about compromise: it can only work when both sides have something to offer the other. When there exists a power imbalance, no compromise can be had. In fact, neither side, even the weaker side, has anything to gain through compromise alone. For compromise to be worthwhile, each side needs to have something to gain, but this implies both parties come to the table as equals.

Look at it this way: let’s say you’re a manager at a workplace. Let’s say you tell an employee you need them to do something, which you absolutely have the prerogative to do. Let’s then say they refuse because they don’t like the assignment. As manager, you have every right to discipline, maybe even fire, them. It’s not up to employees to choose what assignments to complete and which ones they get to reject.

But instead, let’s say, out of a desire to avoid conflict, especially if the employee has a strong personality you cannot match, you accommodate their wish, and pass on the assignment to someone else. What happened here? Was that compromise? Or was it capitulation? The whole point of this mental exercise is to get you to understand what we often think of as compromise is anything but.

There are also things one should never compromise on. For example, border security, but the lesson here is that when there exists a power imbalance, not only can no compromise be had, there’s no reason to compromise. Applied to politics, once one side has more power than the other, once they have control of government, there can be no compromise, because having more power than the other side was the whole point.

Crowley goes on to explain that all players involve embrace violence to one extent or another, they just play word games to give it legitimacy or render it illegitimate:

That does not mean violence is always wise or useful. Quite the opposite. Under present conditions, it is usually futile. The Regime possesses overwhelming force, and even more importantly, it possesses the ability to define the meaning of force. Its violence is called “order.” Your resistance is called “extremism.”

This is why people must learn to distinguish between violence the system fears and violence the system permits.

The current protests in Belfast, for example, or the riots in American cities during the Summer of Floyd, were not allowed to unfold simply because the state lacked the will to stop them. They were allowed because they served a purpose.

Over the Independence Day weekend, the far-right group Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C., to the chagrin and horror of our leftist Regime. It was, however, an entirely peaceful protest. No violence occurred. Yet, liberals in both the establishment and public called for action to be taken against Patriot Front. For a peaceful protest.

Meanwhile, protests for left-wing causes, many of which involve some level of violence, are characterized as peaceful when they’re anything but, and both the media and political leaders provide them legitimacy. What explains the difference? Like Crowley says, it depends on the purpose they serve. The ability to organize, draw attention, and disrupt, if need be, amounts to political power. Leftist protests are, therefore, allowed greater freedom of maneuver until they get out of hand and force authorities to act, while right-wing protests are forced to stay on the straight and narrow, since they’re considered illegitimate and therefore impermissible.

The uncomfortable truth is that violence solves problems. The question everyone’s actually asking is who’s allowed to use violence, how much of it, and why:

Has America, for example, become more free since the summer of 2020? Has the state become less tyrannical, less censorious, less aggressive, and less eager to treat its own people as enemies?

The answer is obvious to anyone willing to see it. That is, in fact, the very point. Violence does solve problems, just not necessarily yours. It solves the problems of whoever has the power to define it and instrumentalize its consequences for its own purposes.

That is why the childish slogan “you can’t solve problems with violence” is so absurd.

History was not built by debate-club etiquette. States are born through violence, preserved through violence, and destroyed when their monopoly on violence fails.

The serious man does not worship violence, least of all if he has known it firsthand. Nor does he pretend it does not exist. He understands it as the foundation beneath politics, then acts with discipline and realism in a world ruled by power.

The question is not whether violence solves problems. It does. The question is who benefits from it, and whether you are acting with judgment or walking into a trap set by your enemies.

Of course, most Americans believe everything they learned in school (the little knowledge they do retain, that is), so they think it’s bad that the state is born, preserved, and destroyed via violence. That’s the wrong lesson, again. The right lesson is that functional statehood is achieved when a) Monopoly on violence is established; b) Rules are clearly defined and consistently enforced; and c) Compliance of the governed exists. Remove any one of those three pillars, and you have a problem.

The problem in the U.S. isn’t that the state doesn’t possess a monopoly on violence. It most certainly does. Monopoly on violence is often misunderstood to mean that only the state can exercise violence. It actually means that in addition to freely exercising violence, it dictates who else can dictate violence and when. The American state most certainly does that. Nor is compliance of the governed in any way in jeopardy. People like to think it is, but it’s not. The problem is that the rules aren’t clearly defined, nor are they consistently enforced. Increasingly, the rules very much come down to who? and whom?

The U.S. is on its way to becoming an empire. At least, it sure seems like it. One of the things an empire must establish is a precedent that only it can exercise force legitimately, only it can decide who gets to exercise force legitimately. There’s no such thing as a “liberal empire.” I think future left-wing administrations will try to maintain a veneer of liberal democracy while also very much affording their side license for violence. It’ll be met by resistance from the Right, who’ll, as the Trump administration has, put the brakes on the ability of the Left to liberally (no pun intended) employ violence for political purposes.

This struggle will carry on for at least a few more election cycles, before things get sufficiently out of control, a constitutional crisis occurs, or the collective weight of every single crisis threatens the state’s legitimacy. At that point, someone will step in to finally break the cycle. It means the end of the republic, it means the end of democracy as we’ve known it. But is that really the worst thing ever?

Democracy doesn’t fail because we stop believing in it or anything stupid like that. It fails because even democracy needs someone to be in charge. Yet our form of democracy expressly fights against anyone being in charge, while everyone is in charge. What ensues is a non-stop power struggle, which is absolutely not what democracy was supposed to be. It was never supposed to be organized power struggles. But that’s what it’s become. And that’s why it fails, resulting in tyranny, which cannot be resisted democratically. Only power can defeat power.

Democracy’s rise wasn’t peaceful, either:

Monarchy wasn’t replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.

Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.

He’s talking specifically about mass liberal democracy, which is the only form of democracy we regard as “real democracy.” He says, quite accurately, that it became possible only because the peasantry suddenly had a powerful weapon on their hands, with which they could forcibly resist monarchies like never before. The means of implementing democracy came before the philosophy did. I have a saying: humans evolved to act first, rationalize later.

It’s not just about having the means of violence, of course. That’s like saying guns, not people, are the problem. Ultimately, it comes down to whether the status quo is working for you or not:

When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people's minds, and those who can’t effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.

And they’ll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.

This isn’t some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either “the status quo works for me, so I don’t want you to upset it”, or “I suck at violence, and I don’t want to have to fight”.

In other words, democracy as we know it today was the convergence between means (guns) and necessity (this isn’t working out for me). That might be an oversimplification, but that’s what I’m trying to do here: make things as simple as possible as to make it easier to understand.

The most you might get someone to admit in a moment of vulnerability is that politics is a substitute for violence: instead of fighting it out, we’ll talk it out. But nobody really contemplates any further on what that means. The talking is simply a means. What are they talking about, exactly? They’re talking about how organized violence as practiced by the state will be utilized and to what ends.

In fact, what’s democracy if not the privilege of legitimate exercise of organized violence extended to the body politic?

He doesn’t want you to ask “Is democracy really want we want, or is it simply a means of creating a just and free society? And what if it doesn’t?”

He doesn’t want you to ask “Hey, wait a minute, aren’t lynchings and gang rapes the ultimate form of democracy?”

No, he just wants you to clutch your pearls, shriek “oh my ears and whiskers” and follow him down onto the fainting couch.

Think about it this way: once a vote has been held, how would the outcome be enforced? If you have to think long and hard about it or come up with some convoluted answer that side-steps the role violence plays, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

One of the most difficult things for a person to accept is how easily they take it all for granted. When not forced to fight for your survival every single day, as our ancestors once upon a time had to do, you end up thinking you’ve figured everything out, that you’re the smartest people who ever lived, and that people in the past were all bigots and ignoramuses. In reality, not having to fight for survival daily suppresses the very instincts that have allowed people to survive for so long in the first place.

It’s a good thing we don’t have to live without constant exposure to violence. But we should also be clear-eyed and honest about the trade-offs that come as a result of it. There are always, always trade-offs.

Why Are There No Civilizations Without Violence?

We often associate the state of being civilized as being non-violent. This is incorrect - to be civilized is to have properly channeled and compartmentalized violence for constructive ends. This is what distinguishes the civilized from barbarians and savages. How else would you fight them off, anyway? You can’t negotiate with those for whom unrestrained violence is a way of life, who instinctively believe might makes right, or for whom the only moral consideration is that they get what they want no matter the cost. Societies never survive without violence.

It’s not just about fighting off those trying to come over the walls. It’s just as important to fight off those within the walls. Today, the West has more to worry about the latter than the former, but we’ve become highly vulnerable to the threat within, including from our fellow countrymen, because we’ve taken the belief that life is precious to extreme logical absurdities:

There are certain philosophical principles that destroy any high-level civilization which holds them.

One of them is the idea that human life isn’t precious.

But the other is that human life is so precious that no attack on property, reputation, trust, or peace of mind can ever justify violent retaliation.

…

Because the moment you place violence off limits, then people who wish to harm others, who take joy in harming others, have now been given a free pass to do so in absolute safety.

Taboos against violence alone create neither order nor safety. Violent people or those who find violence useful have always used it regardless of society’s attitude towards it. The problem is our collective attitude towards it, the fact that we worry more about what people think about violence rather than the violence itself. In America, we more harshly judge a person who has something to say about the criminal than the criminal themselves, because the only cultural value we’re allowed to have is non-judgment.

We also downplay the severity of property crimes like theft, even robbery, because we think it beneath us to value things over life, without bothering to contemplate the implications of doing so:

If all of your property is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can steal or destroy all of your property, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.

Anyone who thinks this sounds absurd should ask themselves why they think so. Is it because it’s flawed reasoning? Or is it because it exposes the flaws in the lies we tell ourselves as a society, such as It’s Just Property, It’s Not Worth Anyone’s Life, Including That Of The Thief?

By the way, if it’s just property, then the fact that someone would risk their lives and the lives of others over it means it’s actually worth as much as human life, no? Value isn’t inherent, after all. A stack of rocks in the middle of the desert isn’t worth anything until someone dumb enough to pay money for it comes along. Likewise, your phone isn’t worth anyone’s life until someone risks violence to steal it. Then it’s worth someone’s life, like it or not. It may not be worth your life, but it’s worth someone’s life.

More:

If your entire reputation is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can dedicate my life to slandering and character assassinating you, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.

If all of your peace of mind is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can terrorize you night and day, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.

If all of your trust is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can betray that trust over and over again, until no one trusts anyone, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.

And if I can destroy all of these things, then enough people like me can destroy civilization itself, because civilization is made of property, peace, trust, and reputation.

Liberals will counter with one of two arguments. One is that everyone knows how to act like a kind and decent person, and that’s all that’s needed for civilization to survive and thrive. What liberals leave out is the part about how people need to be socialized, guardrails put up, and transgressors need to be dealt with. If standards of behavior are so self-evident, then the punishment for failing to act properly should in fact be quite severe. This is yet another example of failing to think the implications through.

A second counter-argument: there are no social standards except what two parties consent to. This is, of course, total nonsense. This reduces every social relation to a contractual affair, which is absolutely not how things demonstrably work in the real world. Even in chaotic, dysfunctional America, there are clearly rules of the road when it comes to social interactions, particularly between strangers. Sometimes, the rules don’t make sense. For certain groups, like blacks, immigrants, and Muslims, the rules are suspended. But for everyone else who opts in to the system, rules exist.

And no, nobody actually believes the rules ought to be suspended for anyone. It’s just that our government, society, our whole national identity, centers on civil rights and we’ve been made to fear and loathe violence so much, that we simply don’t resist, at least after a certain point. There are a lot of lies we’re forced to live by just to maintain a facade of tranquility, a veneer of civilization.

I don’t know how long this can go on for. I’ve quit trying to predict a backlash and so should everyone else. Blackpilling as it might be, the truth is we can keep going on like this for years, maybe even decades on end. Nothing says anything has to change. Our societies are so addicted to comfort, anything that jeopardizes our access to it is rejected by most.

When people fight against racism, prejudice, or any of these popular causes, what they’re really fighting for is to maintain their own comfort. When we condemn those who righteously exercise violence to maintain order, we do so because the thought of hurting others troubles us so deeply. If it’s not our own hands we don’t want to feel crashing into someone’s face, we don’t like seeing others doing it.

Yet, none of would be here today had those who come before us refused to partake in violence:

Why are there no civilizations without violence?

Because without violence, there is no civilization.

It calls to mind something Dr. Samuel Huntington once said, famously:

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Liberals would consider this an indictment against the West. It’s not. Again: humans evolved to act first, rationalize later. We’re just better at both and created something everyone benefits and enjoys. That’s what bothers liberals and Third Worlders - that they couldn’t do better even if they had everything they needed to do so.

Here’s a liberal trying to get one over:

There’s no denying it - Europe was an extremely violent place for most of its history, as much as any other place on Earth. Yet it also created the most advanced civilization in history, the origin of the most powerful country to ever exist - the U.S. - and is the place so much of the world lusts after and seeks to plant their feet. Maybe, unlike so much of the world, violence in Europe amounted to something worthwhile in the end?

Or is that not the lesson he was expecting?

The Foundation Of All We Are

Violence makes us uncomfortable and for good reason. However, we mustn’t battle this discomfort with denial or attempts to overcompensate. The truth is, a society which denies the necessity of violence and rejects it wholeheartedly wouldn’t last very long or soon find itself under the jackboot of a society that has no such internal struggle.

Look at it this way - today, we fetishize so-called “indigenous” societies. Yet, indigenous cultures are known, first and foremost for their warrior culture. Nobody seems troubled by the fact indigenous societies fought for the survival of their tribes through violence, and maintained order within through violence also.

Societies are in large part defined and differentiated by their varying attitudes on violence. America and the West have spent over two generations now trying to convince the world that there’s a better way than through violence, despite being more effective at using it than other civilizations. In the end, by condemning and eschewing violence, America and the West is making an open invitation to both the world and bad actors within that nothing stands in their way, not even the people charged with committing violence on our half to protect us.

I’m belaboring the point, so I’ll leave you with this interesting video I found on YouTube of two men discussing why civilization cannot exist without violence:

If you’re still struggling with getting the point, maybe a discussion between two individuals might help. I think they explain it all very clearly and answer any questions that might come up in any such discussion.

Over to you. What do you think is the role violence plays in civilization? Why does there exist such a taboo against violence despite the fact it’s so central to both the creation and survival of civilization?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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DISCLAIMER: We here at this blog endorse only lawful and safe behavior. Always consult the relevant legal code first before you engage in actions with potentially serious legal ramifications. Take only reasonable risks after you’ve considered the consequences of doing so.

The shooting death of 62-year-old Bart Diguglielmo in a North Lauderdale, Florida Walmart parking lot has made national news and has the public divided. It even has the staunchly pro-self-defense Right arguing among itself, highlighting just how contentious this case is.

A good place to always begin is with the facts of the case. From the Broward County Sheriff’s Office:

At approximately 12:28 p.m., on June 30, Broward County Regional Communications received a call reporting a shooting in the parking lot of the Walmart located at 7900 W. McNab Road in North Lauderdale. Broward Sheriff’s Office district deputies and North Lauderdale Fire Rescue responded. On scene, deputies located Bart Diguglielmo suffering from a gunshot wound. Paramedics transported Diguglielmo to Broward Health Medical Center, where he was later pronounced deceased.

The preliminary investigation revealed an adult female and the victim were involved in a verbal altercation over a parking space in the Walmart parking lot prior to the shooting. According to investigators, the shooter, the adult female, remained on scene, cooperated with detectives and she told them the shooting was in self-defense.

More details from Law & Crime:

Cellphone video captured during the confrontation shows the woman allegedly shooting Diguglielmo as he walks toward her. A witness told WPLG that the woman let Diguglielmo know she was going to shoot him during the altercation as he kept approaching her.

With the investigation still ongoing, this is the extent of the publicly known facts. The woman has also yet to be publicly identified, which is rare in these types of incidents. But we also have the smartphone video which captured the shooting. There appear to be two videos shot from two different angles, though I’m not sure if they were recorded from different phones. I’m having great difficulty finding the uncut, uncensored versions of each video (if anyone has access, please let me know), so all I can provide here are the edited clips widely available on the Internet and social media.

The best I’ve come across is this video which appears to have spliced the two clips together, creating the most complete documentation of the incident [WARNING: graphic content]:

Here’s the video most widely seen on the news and social media, which shows the moment where Diguglielmo gets shot:

Two things stand out. One, though the woman does exit the vehicle with weapon in hand, she appears to be trying to defend herself by putting space between her and Diguglielmo. Two, not only was the one who called police, when they do arrive on scene, she cooperates as she should and doesn’t resist. At least as far as can be seen in the video, she seems to be doing everything possible to protect herself. It’s Diguglielmo who keeps trying to confront her. Her post-incident actions also appear to be consistent with best practices, suggesting she’s a trained individual.

Of course, we can’t hear anything, and exactly what triggered this violent encounter remains under investigation. The thing to remember though is that verbal provocations alone aren’t justification for violence, threats aside. Then there’s also the matter of confronting an armed individual, which I’ll address in a few moments.

First, what do the experts think? We’ve heard from one, let’s consult another. “Nate the Lawyer,” who also has an excellent YouTube channel, is a source of reliable legal takes:

Popular self-defense attorney Andrew Branca discussed the shooting on his YouTube channel and does a good job of explaining why this is a justified shooting:

Failure To Walk Away Is Fatal

What do I think? Practically speaking, confronting an armed individual is foolishly dangerous. Worse, it negates any claim to self-defense one might have - anyone who approaches someone pointing a gun at them probably isn’t in fear for their life, and anyone not in fear for their life doesn’t have any legitimate claim to self-defense. This isn’t a situation where someone confronts an active shooter or comes to the aid of someone in danger. This is an interpersonal dispute over a parking space. I can’t think of anything dumber to shoot someone over, no, but I also can’t think of anything dumber to get shot over, either.

Like Andrew Branca, I’m surprised that so many following this case are either ignoring or failing to notice that Diguglielmo confronted and followed her around for a full minute while she had the gun in hand, walked away, before returning to confront her yet again. If he was in any way in danger of getting shot, he sure didn’t seem to feel that way. If he was in any way in fear for his life, his actions aren’t consistent with that of a fearful individual.

If anyone is still unconvinced, ask yourself: what would’ve happened if DiGuglielmo walked away? He wouldn’t have gotten shot. That much seems certain. So many tragedies occur unnecessarily because a person refused to walk away when they could’ve. That’s what appears to have happened here. Again, we won’t know for sure what started this altercation. But the video very clearly shows the woman in retreat, Diguglielmo following, then him briefly walking off before coming right back and walking towards her. It makes you wonder if Diguglielmo was in a right state of mind or had his fight-flight response so triggered, it completely overwhelmed his better judgment.

There’s also the fact that Florida is a stand-your-ground law state, which has become an inconvenient aspect of the case for those who generally defend the statute. A lot of people have criticized her for not walking away, for getting out of her car, gun in hand, you name it. They have more to say about her actions and very little to say about Diguglielmo’s.

Since Florida is a stand-your-ground state, however, and doesn’t require a defensive party to retreat even when the opportunity to do so exists, a lot of these criticisms are moot. First, if you watch the video, the woman does, in fact, retreat. Diguglielmo follows her around someone else’s parked car as she walks backwards, even as she points a gun at him. She only stands her ground when Diguglielmo comes back after walking away and advances towards her. This isn’t someone with murderous intent. As Andrew Branca said, if she just wanted to kill him, she had many opportunities to do so before she actually did.

Cynics might say that she was playing it smart, looking for the right moment to pull the trigger and get away with it. First, until we know more about what led up to the shooting, this is all useless speculation. Second, it was Diguglielmo’s choice, nobody else’s, to walk back towards an armed woman. It was an immensely stupid thing to do, and we need not absolve him of agency. I’ve said something to the effect many times before, I’ll say it again: when walking away safely is an option, it’s the only option. Obviously, stand-your-ground laws seemingly complicate matters, but again, they apply only to the defensive party.

And no, she doesn’t need to be attacked before she can shoot in self-defense. The law makes very clear the perception of threat alone can serve as justification for using force. Whatever force ends up being used must be proportional to the threat presented, and a lot of people are arguing that shooting and killing Diguglielmo was disproportionate.

The problem is that Diguglielmo was warned, both by word and through display of a firearm, to disengage, but he refused to. There’s also a potential for strength disparity, not to mention a defensive party has no obligation to wait around to see what kind of physical harm a person can inflict before they can act. Andrew Branca notes that she may have been wrong to get out of her car with her gun drawn, but once the gun had been drawn, it was stunningly imprudent of Diguglielmo to confront her. This is the opposite of standing one’s ground. As Branca also notes, the aggressor-victim are more fluid than people realize. An individual can start off as an aggressor, then become a victim later on during an encounter.

It’s Not Always About Race

There’s also unfortunately the race angle here. As Andrew Branca, who’s absolutely not a liberal, also points out, those who think Diguglielmo was murdered are suffering from “race derangement syndrome”. They think that because the shooter was black and Diguglielmo White, there’s no possible way she could ever have acted in self-defense. Race derangement syndrome makes it impossible for people to look at the case with any objectivity.

I get it - racial dynamics in these sorts of cases are real. My longtime readers know exactly where I stand on the race issue in America. I have nothing more to prove to anyone. Yes, blacks are more often than not the instigators of violent confrontations, they needlessly provoke and escalate, and are more than happy to exploit our society’s suicidal sympathy towards them regardless of their behavior during altercations with other races, Whites in particular. All of that’s true.

Here’s the thing: accepting all that, a person still needs to be able to analyze each individual case on its own merits, based on the facts presented. We rightfully criticize blacks and liberals for making assumptions and projecting all sorts of ridiculous notions onto these stories. Well, what are people doing in this case? They’re assuming that just because she’s black, she must’ve instigated, escalated, provoked, and therefore murdered an innocent White man. The fact that she remained calm, discharged her weapon only after Diguglielmo came walking back towards her after she’d warned him many times to back off, put down her gun, called police, and cooperated with them proves she was the reasonable party here.

So no, I reject any racialized take on this case. How many times do I need to say it: not every interracial crime has a racial motivation. That goes for incidents where blacks kill non-blacks as well. America is an atomized, low-trust society where people have forgotten how to avoid killing one another over the silliest of things. Blacks kill blacks all the time over the mildest of provocations. Whites kill Whites over property disputes. Hundreds of people are killed annually because Americans have forgotten how to resolve disputes without viewing them as zero-sum, winner-take-all affairs. I have a feeling that the some of the same people who think the black woman murdered Diguglielmo would think differently if the two individuals were of the same race.

In turn, I also reject the idea propagated by blacks and liberals that Diguglielmo was motivated by racism in confronting this woman. There’s no evidence of that and again, not every interracial altercation has a racial motivation. This seems to be yet another mundane dispute gone wrong, and whether or not both parties had a hand in things spiraling out of control, the person who ultimately crossed a red line was the one who got shot and killed in the end.

I’m sure Bart Diguglielmo was, all things considered, a good and decent man. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. The facts of the case, as they stand currently, tell me he was the aggressor when he was shot. It’s unfortunate and America doesn’t need another one of these cases to argue over. If the facts change or new facts come to light, I may change my analysis. For now, I’m content to consider this a justifiable self-defense shooting.

Don’t Fight Over Parking Spots

Before anyone allows their emotions to overwhelm their judgments of this incident, let’s refocus out mental energy on what really ought to matter to us: preparedness. What can we learn from this case? There’s not going to be a whole lot here I haven’t said before, but refreshers are always necessary.

First, I’m confident that this case was, like so many others, a case of overheated emotions resulting from people unwilling to give in or yield to others. We’ve all seen parking disputes. Some of us have been involved in them. We all know how easily our emotions can get stirred up in a hurry, how easily we can take offense, even though people are just being inconsiderate as opposed to deliberately trying to wound anyone’s pride.

We don’t know exactly what triggered this fatal fracas, so I’ll just say this: don’t get into disputes over something as silly as parking spots. If this means finding a different parking spot further away, so be it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so apply that thinking to your daily social interactions, also. No, nobody’s going to think you’re a wimp for parking further away so you don’t have to fight anyone for a parking spot closer to the Walmart, Costco, whatever. They don’t care actually. That’s what’s really happening here - they don’t care about you, they care only about themselves. There are few things more offensive than selfishness, which is why we take it so personally when on the receiving end of it.

Second, the longer you remain engaged in an argument, the more you escalate a situation, the harder it becomes to walk away, even when the opportunity to do so presents itself. This is because humans are emotional creatures and the more emotionally invested we become in something, the more difficult it becomes to disengage. Again, simply avoiding the situation in the first place is the best course of action. If you avoid an argument, you end up with nothing to get emotionally worked up over.

However, if you do find yourself in an argument, be civil, and always look for a way out. The other party being rude and uncivil isn’t an excuse for you to return the gesture. If anything, if a person is being rude and uncivil, then nothing you say or do is going to force them to back down or be more reasonable, so it’s probably better to just walk away. If they won’t let you disengage, then we’re now talking about a potential self-defense situation. But most people are content to simply yell at you, so just get out of there as quickly as possible. Nobody gets in trouble for walking away.

If you don’t like the sound of this, just remember: the longer you remain engaged, the harder it’ll become to walk away, even when you want to. Eventually, even the mildest of arguments can turn personal when they go on for long enough, and when it does, you’ll so overwhelmingly be consumed with anger, you’re not going to want to walk away. That’s a very bad place to be. That’s when the risk of a violent clash goes up exponentially. Keep it simple; don’t let it ever escalate to that level by getting out of there as soon as possible and always be civil in your interactions.

Third, assume that somebody, even a third party, will be recording events. Take a moment and ask yourself: how do I want to be perceived? Do you want to be perceived as Bart Diguglielmo was, trying to look tough as he awkwardly attempts to confront the woman who later shoots him? Do you want to be perceived as unhinged, having a temper tantrum? Do you want to appear weak? Do you want to be caught on camera getting beat up? Or to look like a bully, picking on someone weaker?

You can tell yourself that you don’t care what anyone thinks of you. The moment that video goes viral, however, you’ll very much care, because public perception carries tremendous weight in any society. It may not matter in terms of what happens in court, but it can matter with respect to whether the case even ends up going to court, to say nothing of how your employer might think, whether you can confidently show your face in public, etc.

Finally, and this is likely to be my most controversial proposition, but just because the law says you can stand your ground doesn’t mean you should. In my opinion, stand-your-ground protects a person who may have objectively had both the means and opportunity to retreat, but instinctively didn’t and chose to use force instead. Since these situations are so fluid, so sudden, everything unfolding so quickly, it’s unreasonable to expect people to make the objectively correct choices 100 percent of the time. Stand-your-ground laws effectively allow an otherwise aggrieved party to make an understandable mistake and not be prosecuted over it.

However, if time and space permit, if retreat is possible, absolutely do so. One, it’s conducive in terms of safety. Two, you’ll have a much stronger case for self-defense if you attempted to retreat. While the law doesn’t require a person to retreat and thus cannot hold it against them if they fail to do so, it’s a double-edged sword because not only does it expose you to further danger, stand-your-ground applies only if you remain the defensive party. It can’t help you if you end up assessed to be the aggressor. This is what so many people get wrong about stand-your-ground: it’s not a legal justification.

As explained by the website Law Shun [bold mine]:

Stand-your-ground laws, sometimes called “line in the sand” or “no duty to retreat” laws, allow people to use deadly force when they reasonably believe it is necessary to defend against certain violent crimes. However, these laws do not apply if the individual is the initial aggressor in the altercation. This means that if a person initiates a confrontation and then claims self-defence, they cannot invoke stand-your-ground laws as a defence.

In the case of Bart Diguglielmo, the question of whether this was a self-defense shooting will depend on whom investigators identify as the initial aggressor and when. People end up in arguments and disputes all the time without there being an aggressor, or at least not a clear and obvious one. It’s possible for a simple argument to escalate to the level of violent confrontation, with the beginning of the violent confrontation being the moment someone became an aggressor, not before. You can see how this can all get complicated in a hurry.

More from Law Shun:

Stand-your-ground laws remove the duty to retreat before using force in self-defence. In other words, they empower individuals to defend themselves without the obligation to first attempt to escape from a threatening situation. While these laws vary by jurisdiction, the general principle is that individuals can use force, including deadly force, if they reasonably believe it is necessary to protect themselves or others.

It is important to note that even in states with stand-your-ground laws, there are still restrictions on the use of force in self-defence. For example, a state may require that the threat of perceived bodily injury is objectively reasonable, and that the force used is proportional to the threat. Additionally, stand-your-ground laws typically require that the person using self-defence be lawfully present in the location of the altercation.

Basically, stand-your-ground laws still demand all other criteria for self-defense to be satisfied. Once more, stand-your-ground alone isn’t a defense. Nobody gets away with killing someone just because they had no duty to retreat. We can have disagreements over whom the aggressor and whom the victim is, but claiming that individuals get away with murder simply by playing the stand-your-ground card is brutally dishonest. I assure you, even liberals don’t think they should ever need to back down against anyone. It’s everyone else who should. It comes as no surprise.

In closing, forget about trying to “win” anything when you end up in a clash with someone else, especially over something as silly as a parking space. That parking space isn’t even yours. It’s not theirs, either, no. But that just means there’s no real rhyme or reason to so steadfastly defend your right to it. While you may have no obligation to be concerned for anyone else’s well-being, always remember: the outcome in which everyone lives is always the best outcome.

That all said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that, sometimes, you can walk away from trouble, but trouble can still follow you. Consider this appalling incident that occurred in El Paso, Texas only two days after the shooting of Diguglielmo:

A 32-year-old man is dead after a fight escalated into a shooting in West El Paso, according to the El Paso Police Department.

Nicholas Emanuel Wells, 26, was arrested and charged with murder. He was booked into the El Paso County Detention Facility.

…

Investigators learned that the incident began as a verbal argument in the parking lot over a handicap space.

According to the affidavit, Wells parked his vehicle next to a handicap parking space near the front entrance of the business. The victim, identified as Christopher Brandon Steven, his mother and sister also arrived at Walgreens and attempted to park their vehicle in the handicap parking spot directly next to Wells.

It was noted that the mother was driving the vehicle, and Steven was in the passenger seat.

Steven’s mother told detectives that Wells yelled at them, questioning why they were parking next to him. As a result, the mother then reversed and parked the vehicle in a different spot on the opposite side of the parking lot.

In the surveillance footage, Wells followed the family into the store and was seen “walking in close proximity behind (Steven) and appears to be speaking to him in an aggressive manner,” according to court documents.

A fight then ensued between Wells and Steven as they both grabbed each other. Then, Wells was seen holding a handgun in his right hand pointed toward the ceiling.

According to the affidavit, both Wells and Steven were fighting for the weapon and Wells is then seen putting an arm around Steven’s neck in an attempt to restrict his movement.

Wells pointed the firearm down at Steven’s head, but Steven continued to struggle until eventually Wells pointed the gun at Steven’s abdomen and fired one shot, according to court records.

Steven was seen in the surveillance footage falling to the ground, at which time Wells shot a second shot at Steven.

The shooter is black, but the article says nothing about the race of the victim. I did some research and came across a GoFundMe which appears to have been made for the victim’s family and includes a picture of the victim. He appears to be White. There’s no indication that the crime was race-related. Maybe it was. But as I said before, not only can it be true that blacks have a major violence problem which puts people of all races in danger, there are plenty of terrible people out there who’ll find a reason to kill someone.

So no, walking away isn’t always an option nor will it save you. That’s why stand-your-ground laws exist, in some states, at least. The lesson is to avoid danger whenever you can, to the extent possible. If trouble wants to find you, it will, unfortunately.

That’s all for now. If new facts come to light, I’ll share them, especially if they alter my judgment of this case. What do you all think? Was the killing of Bart Diguglielmo self-defense? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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