She's gonna blow

I used to read more Fred Reed. I don't even know where he posts these days. Is fredoneverything.com still around? I dunno. I mostly used to read him at the Unz Review, and I know he's not there anymore. This post was cross-posted or reposted on the Ilana Mercer blog.

Annotated by me. Fred's pretty sharp and has many cogent things to say. But he's also got some mile-wide blind spots, enabled/facilitated by his identity complications. I.e., I believe, reading between the lines, that he lives or has lived in Mexico, with a Mexican wife and probably either Mexican step-children or half-Mexican children. So any discussion of demographics and an ethnic component to our problems, he refuses to see. Except for black people, which for some reason he has a keen eye for. But Jews, Indians, or Hispanics—don't expect him to recognize that their "ethnic behavior" has any component in what's going wrong with America. He'll recognize the problems and then go out of his way to not recognize who's responsible for them or why.

Anyway, without further ado:

FRED REED: She’s Gonna blow: It’s Weimar, But Where Is Our Adolf?

As the sentient have presumably noticed, the United States is in crisis, the country’s problems are profound, intrinsic, without solution, and worsening. When a population reaches the point of despair, even desperation, when it sees a darkening future for itself and its children, people yearn for a strong man who will forcibly put things right. Yet it is unlikely that helicopters of Marines from Quantico will descend on the White House and announce the dictatorship of some general. Military officers are too well paid and comfortable to worry about the country. It is hard to imagine an American Mussolini. Trump is a caricature and no one else comes to mind. Yet “unrest” –less euphemistically, “chaos” on the order of Mr. Floyd’s massive riots, is possible. We have seen it. We can see it again.

Consider America today. By comparison with Japan, China, Korea, it is a barbarity, a dumpster, an asylum, an abattoir, an astonishment. San Francisco loses conventions because of needles and excrement on the sidewalks. Almost weekly we see multiple shootings in stores, high schools and, now, grade schools. Murders of whites by blacks run at thirty a month, the news being suppressed. In cities across the country crime is out of control, the tax bases moving out, bail abolished so criminals are freed in hours. Stores leave to escape undiscouraged shoplifting and robbery. Seven hundred homicides a year in Chicago, 300 in Baltimore, and at least twice as many shot but survive, similar numbers in a dozen cities. For practical purposes, law does not exist in these ungovernable enclaves. Sexual curiosities, once called perversions, flourish with American embassies hoisting flags in support of transsexualism. Mobs topple historical statues. Many tens of thousands live on sidewalks and a hundred thousand a year die of opioid overdoses. The country drops math requirements and English grammar in schools, AP courses, and SATs as racist. The economy declines, jobs have left for other climes, medical care is beyond most people’s means, government is corrupt and incompetent, and wars are unending. There is actual hatred between racial, political, and regional groups. Ominously, gun sales are up.

How is this going to end well? How did we get here?

America has never been a nation in the correct sense of the word, a people sharing values, language, a culture. Rather it has been, and is, a collection of peoples having little and common and, often disliking each other. West Virginia has nothing in common with Massachusetts which has nothing in common with the Deep South which has nothing in common with coastal California which has nothing in common with Cavalier Virginia which has nothing in common with Latinos who have nothing in common with blacks.

No, that's not true. America absolutely was a nation in the correct sense of the word when it declared independence, and for a long time thereafter. The Founding Fathers clearly recognized it, as does census data from the 1700 and 1800s. Regional difference exist within nations. In fact, the American regional differences are largely, as explained clearly by David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed, the SAME regional difference that already existed in England transposed to America. Is he suggesting that the English aren't a nation? Or the Germans—if he thinks that there's dissimilar homogeneity in Germany, he's smoking something. French wasn't even the majority language of France until 100 years ago, just the biggest plurality language, and Occitan was nearly as big. Regional differences exist within nations, without negating their state of nationhood.

He is correct, however, in noting, offhand though it may be, that Latinos and blacks are not part of the American nation. They're just people living IN America, but rejecting its culture and heritage, because it's not theirs, natch. 

Until perhaps the early Sixties, the regions got along with each other reasonably well because there was little communication between them. Roads were poor, the internet was not even on the horizon. Radio stations and newspapers were local, reflecting the surrounding culture and taste. The central government was remote and had little influence locally. Each region lived as it wished.

Providing a degree of commonalty was that the country was overwhelmingly white, European, Anglophone and, at least nominally, Christian. It was socially conservative, largely consisting of small towns.

He doesn't seem to notice that he's contradicting his own statement above here, really. But he's right this time. Until the invasion of hordes of foreigners, America had a single culture. Even during the Civil War, and in its immediate aftermath, former combatants on both sides recognized their common culture, heritage and co-nationality.

The resulting culture was unsophisticated but civilized. In the suburbs of Washington (I was there) you really could leave your bike anywhere and it would be there when you came back. In summer children really could play great sprawling multiblock games of hide-and-seek after dark and no one worried. In high school in rural Virginia (I was there too) the boys had guns for hunting deer and shooting varmints in the bean fields and you could leave your .410 in the back seat of your jalopy in the school’s parking lot. Nobody thought of shooting anyone. It wasn’t in the culture. If a thing isn’t in the culture, it doesn’t happen. You don’t need policemen. The boys didn’t use bad language around the girls or vice versa and nobody even thought of disrespect to teachers. There were class clowns (I may know somewhat of this), but no real misbehavior. It wasn’t in white, technically Christian, semi-rural culture.

Then many things happened. In no particular order:

The reach of the federal government grew and grew. Washington, which had been a distant city concerning itself with foreign policy and the economy, could now impose its values on remote society. It did.

Washington discovered the “separation of church and state,” which had lain unnoticed in the Constitution since 1789. In regions of deep religiousness, it became illegal to recite the Lord’s prayer, to have creches on the town square at Christmas, or two sing carols on the public streets. It had nothing to do with meticulous adherence to the Constitution, but everything to do with the discovery by angry minorities that they could impose on majorities. In short, like many movements to come, it was a revenge operation. It has become a de facto program of de-Christianization, weakening a source of social cohesion and leading to anger.

He says "Washington" here, but doesn't point out that this didn't happen until a number rentier of Jews were put on the Supreme Court and immediately started interpreting American law to be out of harmony with American culture. It wasn't, of course. Although Yankees do this to some extent too, and many of them jumped on the bandwagon with the Jews, it was really a very Jewish thing to do to ignore the spirit of the law and attempt to lawyer your way into interpreting the law to mean the exact opposite of what it says. In fact, the Talmud is very much a document that attempts to do that with the commandments. That's not an American point of view or an American approach to structuring society. But because Americans weren't really interested in rentier roles, we kind of inadvertently let foreigners with hostile intentions to our culture creep into positions where they could impose their anti-American "morality" on the rest of us.

But again, Reed is incapable of seeing the effects of cultural differences between Jews, Hispanics and Americans, so he'll never recognize that. He'll just say that it was "Washington." And to be fair to him, as I said, the descendants of the New England Puritans were more than happy to go along with it and boost the signal; they've also got a penchant for telling everyone else what to do and being an entire race of Karens.

The federal government began to dictate what could be taught in local schools. Teachers were forbidden to mention Creationism because a judge in Philadelphia, who appeared to have the scientific grasp of a potato chip, said this transgressed the doctrine of separation. The decision had little practical relevance as there was no likelihood that hearing of Genesis would turn students away from the study of biochemistry. It was, however, an early manifestation of class snobbery against what was seen as primitive Christianity that would later coalesce into hostility toward the Deplorables.

Remote anonymous committees in New York wrote highly ideological textbooks imposed on distant states which did not share those ideologies. The effectiveness of this relied on the principle that outraged parents in Arkansas would have no idea how to oppose distant bureaucracies of whose existence they were unaware and whose phone numbers they could not find. American government is democratic while not allowing the people to exercise power. It is a brilliant system, until it explodes.

Again; notice the geography? Yankees and Jews imposed their values on the rest of the country. Because it burns them up inside that people don't recognize their need to tell everyone else what to do and how to think. It's kind of intrinsic to their natures, to some degree, and it's almost exceptional and extraordinary to meet one who doesn't lean into those tendencies. Some people also call this a feminine vs. masculine approach. There's something to that too. The feminine mind looks for consensus, and if it doesn't exist, tries to force it, because it is deeply uncomfortable with differences of opinion.

Compulsory racial integration, as distinct from desegregation, was an untarnished disaster. Few wanted it, and few want it. The people who imposed it did not, and do not, send their children to black schools. The races transparently do not want to live together. If blacks move into white neighborhoods, “white flight” occurs and if whites move into black neighborhoods, blacks furiously complain of gentrification.

When two cultures have utterly different views of acceptable language, dress, behavior, study, and curricula, mixing them does not work. In the schools, academic standards fell. Discipline became a problem. Across America, cities burned because of conflict between black populations and white police. Eurowhite culture, it turned out, was incompatible with Negro culture. The potential for yet greater disaster seems great, and no one has a solution. There probably isn’t a solution.

It's funny how his vision between white and black is so clear, but he won't apply this same logic to the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Jew, or American and Mexican/Latino. Obviously, the exact same logic applies between any two differing population groups, no matter who they are. It is true that blacks are extraordinarily difficult to live with and beside compared to any other population group due to their well-documented r-selection, impulsivity, lack of self-control and higher tendency towards criminality and violence than any other population. But that's why they should have always stayed in Africa where their only neighbors were each other, and they could practice the culture that worked for them without being meddled with by anyone else, or without themselves meddling in the culture of anyone else. 

So, I guess because of the order of magnitude problem of the difference between black and white culture, he can only see it for one population group or something? Not sure the cause of the blind spot here. Probably, again, his own complicated identity situation makes it harder for him to see what he doesn't want to see. Neal Maxwell used to talk about "wintry doctrines" of the Gospel, and Heartiste used to talk about the difference between pretty lies and ugly truths. In spite of the vast difference in spiritual capital between a literal Apostle of God and an unrepentant and defiant sinner, they were both intelligent, and they were both right. Sometimes the truth is hard to see because it isn't as "nice" as we wish it was, or because it threatens something about our own personal sense of identity, so we reject it in spite of its obvious truth. And the truth is that it isn't just people in the individual sense that are different, peoples in the generic, plural sense, are also different. They're not interchangeable widgets. That's really a pretty insulting and dehumanizing point of view, if you think about it, but it's also at the core of the virtue-signaling delusional wishful thinking that is the foundation of our Current Year ideology, on both sides of the political aisle. If anything, "conservatives" buy into this even harder than Leftists, actually. How many of them brag about "not seeing color" when in fact, color is more highly correlated to behavior than all of the things that (I guess) they think that they do see.

This doesn't mean, of course, that we should just assume that all black people are violent criminals. That would be insane and obviously wrong. But it does mean that we shouldn't think that we can simply "absorb" tens of millions of Third Worlders and expect our culture or our economy either one to withstand that intact.

The Constitution, which once brought political stability, withered, being ignored or interpreted into unrecognizability by judges or made irrelevant by changes in technology and society. Freedom of speech, which meant that I could say that the President was a fool and should be removed from office, became freedom of expression, meaning that porn sites, accessible to children of nine years, could upload videos of a German Shepherd copulating with a beautiful blonde tied down to a bed. Some doubted that the writers of the Constitution had this in mind when providing the Bill of Rights, but none could gainsay the Supreme Court or the federal power.

Again; he should look a little more carefully at which justices were the ones responsible for these precedents. Few of them have good old Anglo-Saxon names. I'm just sayin'.

The behemoths of the electronic media imposed political censorship. Being private enterprises, they could not be disciplined. They became more and more an arm of the central government, which became more and more the property of the Northeastern coastal elites. Entities with names like Google, Twitter, and Facebook cleansed themselves of content thought inappropriate, websites delisted, credit card accounts closed. People disappeared by the electronic media were almost as disappeared as those disappeared in Latin America, though less bloodily. The intention and effect are the same.

That's not true. Private enterprises can of course be disciplined. They just haven't been, because 1) if the government didn't actually help establish them in the first place which there's strong circumstantial evidence that they did, then 2) they certainly saw the advantage of an unofficial arm of the same managerial movement that could do things that was illegal for the government to do, and vice versa. Like with fascism and fascist-like political movements 100 years ago, the partnership of government and "private" enterprise to reach the exact same ideological goals is a one-two punch that's difficult to get away from. Because nobody is vested in taking them on that is in a position to effectively do so.

An unexpected effect of censorship was that those doing the censoring also censored themselves. The media, talking to each other, reading each other, having no contact with or interest in the silenced and deplorable, had no idea of the anger out there. This brought us Floyd and Trump as deep wells of undetected anger exploded. The media are doing it again.

Floyd and Trump are completely unrelated movements, and Floyd, by which I mean the BLM domestic terrorism and riots, were largely sponsored and encouraged by the Establishment as punishment on the American people for attempting to assert their interests by electing Donald Trump in the first place. For him to lump them together as two symptoms with the same root cause is shockingly obtuse. Even the actual BLM organizers weren't overly concerned about the death of George Floyd (from drug overdose, just to be clear. That was also extremely well documented, in spite of the nonsense kangaroo court trial.) They were "trained Marxists" in their own words, and they simply took advantage of the death of George Floyd as a trigger to jump in to action.

The current regime in Washington appears deliberately and intensely divisive. Biden has attacked the South, supporting renaming of military bases in deliberate affront. A thorough racist, he frequently denounces whites. He denounces Trump and his supporters, nearly half of America. He has ostentatiously chosen black women as justice of the Supreme Court, member of Federal Reserve, Vice President, and White House spokeswoman. While these may or may not be competent, he announced them as diversity hires. He is poised to assault owners of guns, sure to provoke fury, has involved America in another war, and wants a federal Ministry of Truth to prohibit ideas he doesn’t like. Profoundly partisan, he makes no attempt to calm things or promote tranquility.

The universality of the internet made difficult or impossible the maintenance of distinct values or mores. It became impossible for the cultivated to inculcate in their children manners, good English, and appreciation of learning when the electronics bathed them in not only the traditionally low culture of America but also the anticivilization of the ghetto. America undergoes both enforced peasantrification and homogenization. Anger grows.

You could also just call that the effect of toxic narcissism and resentment of the weirdos against normalcy and be just as accurate, of course. It probably hasn't escaped most peoples' notice that the champions of Leftist Lunacy are usually the unattractive, the socially unsuccessful, and those who've "taken the ticket" by taking rentier roles that they aren't even remotely qualified for. It's no wonder that they are effectively making war on normalcy as it used to exist in America. And as the saying goes, "Physiognomy is real." If you see some soy-faced pseudo-man or grumpy Karen blue-haired land-whale, you probably don't need to ask them what their politics are.

Congress and the Constitution largely ceased to function, leaving Presidents to rule by executive order, this not being entirely distinguishable from dictatorship. This included the making of war, which became both common and beyond public influence. The legislature no longer governed but was the storefront for special interests of immense power. There remained no body interested in the wellbeing of the country. This led to offshoring of jobs, poverty in Appalachia, the Rust Belt and rural Deep South, the impoverishing influx of cheap Mexican labor, Donald Trump, and intense regional hatred. Here we are.

Ah, he finally gets around, indirectly, to talking about the invasion of entitled, demanding, ungrateful and unappreciative Third World hordes from Latin America, and India, and to a lesser degree from the Middle East and East Asia. For quite a long time, America could support immigration from almost anywhere, because 1) it came in small enough numbers that it never threatened the economic or cultural well-being of America overall, and 2) there was a lot of social pressure for immigrants to conform to American norms of behavior, or don't come. Both of those have been destroyed in the last few decades, so now we're only a step away from open civilizational warfare over who's vision of America will prevail; that of the Americans themselves, or that of the squatters who have crashed the American party and now demand that the host accept them as members of the household rather than uninvited and unwelcome guests who have—notwithstanding—been pretty well-treated, especially before they became emboldened to become super obnoxious.

This can’t last. The hatreds are intense, the guns everywhere, anger growing at crime, something akin to economic desperation appearing. Washington will leave nowhere alone, will not address national problems, will always give priority to its military, its wars and its empire over domestic needs. The hostility that fueled the Floyd riots, the burning cities, the looting and vengeful vandalism, are still there. She’s going to blow. Watch.

He's right. I think the one of the first real breaking of the dam moments will be when white America finally shrugs off its guilt complex over the hoax of racism and sexism and says that it doesn't care anymore; women and minorities need to shut up and stop being so disruptive, or ship out. But I could be wrong. There are plenty of potential schwerpunkts out there.