Max's Musings

Ours is a cruel society, and the American Dream is to become the oppressor.

What we’ve become: a pro wrestling promotion where certain people get to hit for real.

Time for another episode of Max’s Musings, what I used to informally refer to as “thought dumps.” Let’s get on with it.

Ding-Dong, The Kid Is Dead

A tragedy out of Texas:

A man has been charged in the deadly shooting of a boy who was struck in the back by gunfire while playing “ding-dong ditch” Saturday night in Houston, Texas, authorities said.

Gonzalo Leon Jr., 42, is charged with murder and currently jailed in Harris County, which includes the east Houston neighborhood where the shooting took place, according to the Houston Police Department. Police said a SWAT team took Leon into custody on Tuesday.

In addition to confirming Leon’s arrest, Houston police identified the boy in a news release as 11-year-old Julian Guzman.

Earlier, police had said the boy suffered a gunshot wound late Saturday while carrying out a “ding-dong ditch” prank, where a prankster rings the doorbell or knocks on the door of a home and runs away before anyone comes to answer it.

Houston Police Sgt. Micheal Cass, the lead detective in the case, told CBS News’ Karen Hua that two children who are cousins had knocked three times on the suspect’s door within a span of about 15 minutes. The children sprinted away after the third knock but the homeowner was “waiting in the shadows in his own side yard behind a fence,” Cass said.

This doesn’t sound like a self-defense shooting at all. Lying in wait is effectively premeditation, which would explain the murder charge. Another account I read made it sound like the killer might’ve shot the boy unintentionally, I’m presuming in the interest of portraying the incident as fairly and factually as possible, but there’s really no such thing as “unintentional” when it comes to shooting a gun. If you deliberately discharge a weapon in someone’s direction, whether you intended to hit them or not is irrelevant.

Now that we know definitively which direction this case is going, I have less to say about it than before. However, I still think a word of caution concerning pranking is merited. One of the reasons I’m glad I waited before saying anything is because you can’t really render any judgments without a clear understanding of what took place. Unfortunately, many on both sides of the case cast their judgments ahead of time. Some immediately assumed the worst, that this was a roving band of “youths,” the euphemism for violent young men, usually Black or Hispanic, who engage in supremely dangerous, threatening pranks of a truly malicious nature.

However, this doesn’t appear to be that at all. Yes, the boys playing the ding-dong ditch prank in this case were Hispanic (so was the killer), but race doesn’t matter here. Without going as far as to call it an innocent prank, I don’t think it was malicious, either. Discourteous, ill-mannered, certainly. But I think it was ultimately boys who went overboard in their good times, as many of us did when we were their age.

Still, you can’t totally absolve them either, even if Gonzalo Leon was wholly unjustified in his actions. The incident occurred around 11 pm; there’s never an appropriate time to prank people, but 11 pm is way too late in the night for any kind of nonsense. This was a supremely reckless game to be playing at that hour, whether a gun was involved or not.

In 2023, a California man was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder after he engaged in a vehicle pursuit of three teenagers who played the same prank on him, running them off the road and killing all three of them. It’s a shocking story with a shocking outcome, revealing that guns aren’t the problem. It’s triggering people’s fight-or-flight responses that’s the problem and how, sometimes, people whose emergency physiological mechanisms are activated cannot de-escalate themselves, proceeding to do something tragic.

There were opportunities for the kids in the Texas incident to seriously re-consider what they were doing, for someone to intervene, and prevent the tragedy from occurring:

Allison Gatz told KHOU 11 she saw the group of kids pranking her neighbors earlier that day and tried to warn them.

“I warned them that they shouldn’t be doing what they were doing, that it was dangerous, and they had two minutes to go and leave the property or I would contact the police,” Gatz said. “They knew that they were doing something wrong.”

Neighbor George Skinner said the tragedy could have been prevented.

“It’s an innocent life taken. He could have avoided it. The parents maybe could have avoided it,” Skinner said. “You got to teach them and let them know what’s right and what’s wrong, and it’s wrong to knock on somebody’s door playing a prank.”

Here’s a video of the two neighbors mentioned being interviewed:

The older gentleman interviewed at the end speaks for me. It’s easy to say they’re kids and don’t know any better. Well, like the man said, that’s why we teach them. Mistakes need to be immediately corrected. The neighbor who warned them appears to be the only one who tried, unwittingly, to avert a deadly outcome. Where were the parents? Maybe the neighbor was just better off calling the police. It might’ve seemed unnecessary in the moment, but it would’ve saved lives, potentially at the cost of raising tensions between neighbors. There are no perfect answers. After all, nobody actually thought anyone would get shot, until it happened.

I’ve been saying as of late that these sorts of incidents are of greater risk to us than an encounter with some hardened violent criminal. America is a dangerous country, but it’s still safe enough to where a reasonable person can avoid becoming a victim of crime as long as they act prudently. Maybe the margin for error is narrower than it ought to be, but we live in the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be.

May justice prevail in this totally unnecessary killing. May it also be a lesson that being a kid doesn’t mean every mistake they make is okay, and mistakes must be corrected quickly, otherwise, tragedy results. The problem isn’t that some people have guns and many of those who own guns are easily scared. The problem is that we allow people, including kids, to get away with bad choices one too many times, and when their luck finally runs out on them, it does so in the worst way imaginable.

“Mind Your Own Business?” Yeah, How About You?

Sticking to the theme of not having so much to say about stories we know so little about, here’s another:

Yikes. Do we really have to do this every time there’s a contentious interaction between a White person and a Black person? Or any other “person of color”? I can’t take anyone who thinks positive race relations can be had in this country seriously any longer.

As Amala Ekpunobi explains in the above video, the only evidence anyone was racist was a comment, which could be heard on camera, for everyone to lock everything and watch their belongings. But we have no idea why that was said. Even if the comment referred to her, why does it need to be racially motivated? If she wasn’t Black, or better yet, she was White, would it have been justified?

The business in question has received a deluge of outrage, including visits from angry White liberal women, the Regime’s self-appointed commissars, proving “Woke” is still around, and cancel culture is alive and well. But here’s the thing - not only does anyone not know what really happened, why’s it anyone else’s business what happened? Spare me the line about how race is a “national concern.” Bullshit. Crime is a national concern. But try talking about crime in Black neighborhoods and you’ll get told by the Black community, with clapping-like-seals approval from White liberals, for you to “Mind Your Own Business.”

Fine. Then mind your own! Do they really have nothing better to do?

Which provides a perfect segue to our next topic…

Black Supremacy Reigns Supreme

Shiloh Hendrix, the White woman in Minnesota who went viral for using the N-word at a playground, has finally been charged with crimes.

From KIMT3:

The Rochester City Attorney’s Office has filed a complaint summons related to an April 28 event at Roy Sutherland Playground in Soldier’s Field Park.

The complaint charges Shiloh Hendrix with three counts of disorderly conduct, which could lead to a maximum of 90 days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine, according to Minnesota statute.

In early May, a Rochester man shared a video online allegedly showing Hendrix calling a child a racial slur at the playground.

The draft complaint requires review and approval by a District Court judge. The City Attorney's Office emphasized the complexity of the case, noting the extensive evidence and the necessary involvement of the crime victim's perspective as required by Minnesota law.

The likelihood Hendrix wasn’t going to be charged with a crime was highly unlikely. The incident was too viral and the case had drawn the attention of all the wrong people, like BLM and the NAACP. That’s the black cloud (pun intended) which will always hang over this case: this is a political prosecution.

From the City of Rochester’s statement on the prosecution decision:

As the legal process moves forward, the City recognizes not only the significant attention and emotion surrounding this case, but also the complex and lasting impacts situations like this have on communities of color and our broader community. Conversations and activities are unfolding across many different spaces, reflecting both immediate reactions and long-term needs. These ongoing efforts will continue regardless of the outcome of the legal proceedings.

“This was a situation that deeply affected many people, especially our communities of color, and caused real turmoil in our community,” shared Mayor Kim Norton. “We acknowledge the lasting impact this incident has had, not only on those directly involved and across our community, but also in the broader conversations happening at the state and national level. These moments remind us of the complexity and far-reaching impacts of situations like this. The City remains committed to staying engaged and proceeding with transparency and care, continuing efforts that support accountability and progress in Rochester.”

Excuse me, but what the fuck are they talking about? Was there a crime or not? If you haven’t seen the video yet, watch it, or watch it again. What sort of disorderly conduct was committed by Shiloh Hendrix? She was walking away. The accusation at the outset was that she used a racial slur against a child, but the video doesn’t capture that moment. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course. But what the video does show is Hendrix trying to walk away while the man filming is following and provoking her, at which point she utters the slur. It’s not a good look and sound, but again - where’s the crime?

Racial slurs aren’t necessarily protected speech, but using them isn’t a crime either. Actions speak louder than words, anyway - if she’s walking away, the argument that she’s engaging in disorderly conduct is very thin, especially if the man filming her is following and further provoking her. At that point, it’s an argument, and the last time I checked, people were allowed to argue in this country.

By the way, the charging decision even concedes that Hendrix was reacting to theft. It doesn’t justify using racial slurs, but again, that’s not a crime. But theft sure is!

The city’s statement makes clear there probably was no crime. They’re charging Shiloh Hendrix for political reasons, to uphold not laws, but the values the Regime imposes on the American people. What are those values? Don’t disrespect Black people. Apparently, a society deeply ashamed of its White supremacist history has decided the only way to correct our history is to become Black supremacist. Except I don’t think even Whites had the luxury of the entire state apparatus defending their honor. I don’t think I’m diminishing history at all, either, in saying that. It’s just fact.

As always, the foundation for Black supremacy is anarcho-tyranny. As X account Bad Crowley explains:

When I said that Shiloh Hendrix was not out of the woods, some asked, “For what exactly?”

They pointed, rightly, to the First Amendment, to the fact that she committed no crime in the traditional sense, that she defended her own property and spoke freely. All of this is true. Yet the possibility of prosecution remains real, not because the law requires it, but because power may find it useful.

The reality is that we no longer live under a government bound by its own laws. It rewrites, reinterprets, or disregards them to serve its ideological aims. This condition is what Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny: a system that refuses to protect the public from real criminals, yet punishes those who transgress its political orthodoxy. Beneath this dysfunction lies a deeper structure. As Carl Schmitt observed, sovereignty resides in the one who decides the exception. And in our time, the law applies to us only as punishment. That is what makes us the exception.

They do not act because the law compels them. They act because they have the power to do so. Law is not a restraint on power, but its instrument. It does not stand above politics; it enforces its interests. Justice is not blind. It serves the friend and punishes the enemy.

This is not just about Shiloh Hendrix. We have seen this pattern before. When Daniel Penny restrained a violent repeat offender on a subway car to protect passengers, he was charged with manslaughter. When Kyle Rittenhouse stepped in to defend a town abandoned by its own police, he was put on trial for murder. In every case, the logic is the same: when the state withdraws its protection and ordinary people act in defense of life, property, or the fragments of social order, they become the enemy.

It is not defense that is criminal. It is who dares to exercise it, and on whose behalf. The line is not drawn between violence and peace, but between obedience and defiance. When defense serves the regime’s narrative, it is called justice. When it is carried out on behalf of one’s own, it becomes extremism.

This is not law. It is domination. It is a political theology that demands passivity from the innocent and solidarity with the transgressor. It will not stop until resistance itself becomes unthinkable.

So when a White woman defends her property and speaks without submission, she becomes the target. When she speaks plainly, they call it “bias-motivated harassment,” not because it is truly criminal, but because it is disobedient to the system’s values. That is what this system punishes. This is anarcho-tyranny in practice.

A government is what it does, not what it says, and it must always be judged by its actions.

The most important to remember is that it doesn’t matter if Shiloh Hendrix is actually convicted. The process is the punishment. Forcing her to spend money on legal services, allowing her to be terrorized by the mob, exposing her life and identity to the world, those are the real punishments. As Shahib Bolsen said of America, ours is a cruel society, and the American Dream is to become the oppressor.

It Shouldn’t Take Racists To Have A Conversation On Race

I’m not a fan of Nick Fuentes. I often remark that most “normie” Americans would consider me an extremist, but Fuentes is an actual extremist. He’s openly and honestly racist, and not in a casual way. His views aren’t what I find most problematic, however. Interestingly, from my experience, the honest racists like Fuentes are both the easiest and least threatening people to deal with. Thinking bad thoughts doesn’t make a person dangerous; if that were the case, the Left is full of extremely dangerous people, given their rhetoric. And honesty is always more virtuous than virtuous dishonesty.

The problem with Fuentes is, as even his more honest critics would say, that the good points he makes are drowned out by his more absurd rhetoric. I’m skeptical of just how much mainstream popularity or notoriety he actually enjoys, but the fact he even has a following at all says to me he does have something interesting to say most of the time, it’s just that it’s hard for him to get his message across because the controversy drowns it out.

That said, I found what Fuentes had to say about the Raja Jackson controversy interesting enough to post here and share my thoughts. For those who may be unaware, Raja Jackson is the son of MMA fighter “Rampage” Jackson and was involved in a professional wrestling event recently where he severely injured a performer in what’s quite clearly a fit of uncontrolled rage.

Here’s Fuentes’ commentary:

What I found interesting in what Fuentes was saying is that this is far from the sort of rhetoric you’d often hear from avowed White supremacists. Fuentes is certainly criticizing the Black community, but he’s also making an appeal to them, of sorts, to do better. Of course, this is likely to fall upon deaf ears in the Black community.

When he says that it’s okay to be racist, he’s not saying it’s okay to hurt or kill Blacks, either, as many true extremists would say. He’s just saying it’s okay to avoid them out of a sense of self-preservation. And if we’re going to be straight with ourselves here, there’s nothing racist in that. Nobody should be forced to associate with anyone they don’t want to associate with for any reason. We don’t really have any freedom, otherwise.

We don’t hear it so much anymore, but once upon a time, calls for America to have a “national conversation on race” were incessant, specifically during the Obama years. The problem has always been that it was never a conversation they wanted to have. What they wanted was for Blacks to be able to talk at America and for the rest of us to just sit here and take it. But a real conversation is a two-way street. Blacks need to be willing to listen as much as talk. By the way, notice the YouTuber who posted the video above is Black, and agrees with Nick Fuentes’ commentary.

It’s not just the Black community that’s the problem. White liberals who indulge the grievances of the Black community, stroke their egos, are maybe the biggest impediment to us having anything close to an authentic conversation on race. In either case, if that national conversation involves Whites, or anyone of any race, being forced to hear things they don’t want to hear, the same thing goes for Blacks and White liberals, also. It means they have to be willing to hear what people like Fuentes are saying in the video above, because honestly, that’s as good-faith an exchange as they’re going to get.

If you don’t want to listen to racists and extremists like Fuentes, who are the only people willing to speak honestly about race, then you have no choice but to keep the channels of communication open both ways, and allow everyone to say what’s on their mind without fear of judgment or retribution. Of course, this is a pipedream - nobody ever speaks without fear of judgment or retribution, and race relations in America have become so poisoned, there’s no way to have anything remotely close to a productive conversation on the topic at this point.

The stupid thing is, this was all predictable. Commentators from the Right have been saying for years, decades, that without a more open, honest, multilateral conversation, we’d get to the point where only the worst people on both sides would be talking about race. Clearly, that prediction has borne out. I don’t share the view that attitudes have changed or some “vibe” shift has occurred - data shows nothing has really changed.

But I do believe most Americans are just exhausted and have checked themselves out of the conversation, because it’s going nowhere. This leaves only Black identitarians and racists, their White far-left allies, and White identitarians and far-right racists as the only people having this conversation. Hate them all you’d like, but at least they’re speaking honestly, which is what the conversation always needed.

Speaking of extremists…

“‘Gen. Z’ Disapproves Of Trump For Not Being Hitler.”

Perhaps one of my most “non-right-wing” views is that polling is generally accurate and the methodology used, even by mainstream outlets, is sound enough. The Left loves to hammer the Right for being uneducated; I went to college and attended courses involving polling and am familiar, if not proficient, with the methodology. It was one of the most excruciating experiences of my academic life.

Anyway, do surveys accurately capture how all 330+ million people in the country feel? No, and it never will, because you can’t poll that many people. But does it accurately capture how the electorate, people with an opinion on the matter, feels? Yes, I believe it does. The naysayers have had every opportunity demonstrate otherwise, but they never do.

In either case, you can only work with the data available. Back in July, a CBS/YouGov poll asked respondents about President Donald Trump’s job performance. The results were negative overall, but what caught the attention of many was Trump’s approval rating among Americans under the age of 30.

It’s quite awful, a steep drop from where it was at the beginning of his second term:

More recent polling doesn’t show great improvement, either. The July polling led to a litany of responses - coping, really - from the online Right like this:

Boy oh boy do I have news for you

Or:

They have no idea what’s coming

What are they getting at? There’s a narrative, which exists mostly online, that young men, Generation Z males specifically, are politically far to the right, to the extent they’re damn near fascist. They point to the supposed popularity of figures like Nick Fuentes, as well as data showing a male-female political divide as evidence of this. Combined with our society’s deeply anti-male biases, as well as fact young men are less likely to enjoy the benefits of modern life compared to women, plus the “incel” phenomenon, the narrative goes that young men are going to violently revolt.

There’s something to this and it’s a discussion worth having. For now, in the context of the CBS poll results, many on the Right are saying that Gen. Z - “Zoomer” - males disapprove of Trump because he hasn’t been literal Hitler. However, there’s nothing, right now, to suggest Trump’s low approval rating among Zoomers has anything to do with the president not fulfilling his mandate to be a fascist dictator. Not only that, the polling results don’t even break age groups down by gender. This makes it impossible to see how Zoomer males specifically feel. This means, however, that takes such as “They have no idea what’s coming” are entirely anecdotal and conjectural.

Owing perhaps to the online Right’s distrust of polling, it’s funny because all one has to do is further examine the freely available data and see that Trump not being Hitler enough is probably not what’s behind the disapproval rates among the under-30 crowd.

Take a look:

That’s right - for young Americans, the vast majority believe Trump is deporting too many people. Note that even among men overall, they tend to think similarly. The only way the online Right’s narrative can be true is if Zoomer men and women are on complete opposite sides of the fence on the issue. Since the poll doesn’t break age groups down by gender, we can’t know this, but until I see the data for it, I find it highly unlikely to be the case. Extreme results rarely manifest and past polling has shown Zoomers are, overall, quite the liberal cohort.

On other questions related to immigration, you see similar responses undermining the “not Hitler enough” narrative. Young people think Hispanics are being discriminated against in immigration enforcement and that this is unfair. If young men were really demanding Trump be like Hitler, would the results of polling look like this? People have a tendency to overthink things in this day and age, but don’t.

What’s the right way to regard polling? The same way you regard anything else: look not for confirmation, but for consistency. If multiple polls show similar patterns and trends, it’s a sign you should probably take them seriously, or at least that there’s something to it.

Lastly, understand that the online Right is in a bubble, too. I’m sure some of them have heard from the young men in their circles they want a Hitler-like leader. But this doesn’t say anything about how young men feel as a whole. If anything, I think the online Right is as out of touch with the public as often as they accuse the Left of being.

We’re All Subjects, In The End

Tucker Carlson got himself into some hot water recently for saying the following:

There’s a lot one could say about this, but since this is Max’s Musings, I’ll keep my thoughts as brief as I can.

First, though I’m not a monarchist, I still think Carlson would’ve been better-served making the argument that our society today isn’t all that different from feudalism. That’s a much more defensible argument than saying feudalism is better than what we have today, because it’s true in many ways. Feudalism is defined, first and foremost, by property, the ability to create wealth (as opposed to just the wealth), and political power being vested exclusively in a certain minority class, as opposed to society writ large. Everyone else works to effectively serve this class, and livelihoods are contingent on having a functional relationship with it.

America has become feudal in many ways. Not only is creating wealth more limited than before, property ownership is becoming increasingly untenable for more Americans, and most Americans have no ability to influence governance at any level, despite being a democracy. Dispute this characterization if you’d like, but again, this is an easier argument to make than to say that feudalism is better than our current system, which is an entirely subjective statement, anyway.

More importantly, if the most important point someone got out of Carlson’s commentary was that he thinks feudalism is superior to what we have now, I’d say that person is either of low intellect or intellectually dishonest, because that’s not even remotely the most important point Carlson made. His big point - the one he gets unquestionably correct - is that the king is invested in his society’s well-being in ways the bureaucratic managerial state isn’t. That’s objectively true. This doesn’t mean monarchs always have society’s best interests in mind. But when it comes to the king, there’s no passing the buck, no shirking of responsibility.

The constant passing of the buck and shirking of responsibility is precisely what distinguishes the modern bureaucratic managerial state. Being so big, so complex, so vast, by it’s nature it’s nearly impossible to hold any one person or entity responsible for any failure. The president is sort of supposed to be the fall guy, but even he can shirk responsibility because it’s pretty clear the president not only has extremely limited control of the ship of state, he may not even by the one running the show (the underlying premise of the “deep state”).

Under feudalism, you can blame the king for your failures and you’ll be right. Get enough people to get angry at the king, and he’ll have no choice but to reform or to remove his crown. Usually, he elects to either reform or fight his own people. The point is that the buck stops with the king and he’s as beholden to his subjects as they are to him.

By comparison, the bureaucrat, not even our elected representatives are accountable to the body politic. In the case of the former, that’s because nobody elected them and they’re in a place where nobody can touch them. In the case of the latter, they answer not to the body politic, but to the people who paid for the ticket to enter the political cesspool, typically wealthy donors.

Whether it’s a feature or a bug, having no clue who’s actually in charge, no clue who’s actually responsible, is a big part of the modern bureaucratic managerial state. It’s why so many, myself included, are irreconcilably dissatisfied with it. Feudalism isn’t necessarily better and I don’t think I’d want to live under that, either. But it’s a simple fact of life that you cannot have effective governance, no matter the system, without accountability.

In the end, the lesson of governance is that we’re all someone’s subject, in the end. In a monarchy, it’s the king. In a liberal mass managed democracy, it’s the bureaucracy. At least under a monarchy, we can see whose subjects we are.

Lying About America And About Themselves

The following tweet made the rounds on X the other day:

What this German woman seems to be saying is that her country produced so much brain power because they were willing to do something Americans are apparently unwilling to do: educate the poor. We can obviously reject the premise of the statement; few countries attempt to educate the poor the way America tries to do and there’s plenty of data out there showing it. Lack of money isn’t the reason why so many Americans remain uneducated.

But the anecdote does reveal something interesting about how the rest of the world, Europe especially, views America:

I think Europeans have a skewed view of America because they primarily hear about it from American leftwing media sources. The American left wants America to be more egalitarian, so they emphasize all the ways it is inegalitrian. That’s all Euros hear.

I often joke in my circles that I’ve never met someone with stronger opinions on my country than a foreigner. That goes for double when it comes to people from Europe, Germans specifically. Perhaps it’s some residual chauvinism, but they seem to not only believe they know America very well, but they also seem entitled to speak authoritatively on a country not their own. If an American were to do the same to their country, they’d likely reply by saying, “Quiet! You know nothing of my country, ignorant American!”

Fine, why don’t we learn something about Germany, then?

Germany actually very aggressively streams students by ability levels. Not only does America do this much less, the American left has succeeded in cancelling some gifted and talented programs to Harrison Bergeron the smartest kids.

In other words, Germany’s education system isn’t egalitarian, not by American standards. In fact, education throughout Europe isn’t egalitarian in any respect. The mentality is more classical, more Darwinistic: you either have it or you don’t. In America, we don’t think that. Instead, we foolishly pretend, without honestly believing, that everyone is capable of achieving the same exact outcome, it’s just that some people need more attention, more resources than others. Yet, even when they’re given everything, they accomplish nothing. See what’s become of basketball superstar Lebron James’ private school, for example.

The German woman in the story is lying. At least, she’s being intellectually dishonest, which is the same as lying, ultimately. Germans produce lots of brainpower, though not as much these days, not because they educate the poor, but because they select for certain traits. This is hardly an egalitarian system, but that’s not a bad thing, either.

That said, don’t blame her too badly. Europe’s media tilts just as much to the left as it does in North America. People are, ultimately, at the mercy of what their regimes choose to expose them to. I always think of the story scientist Michael Shermer tells about his ironically-German wife when she was watching television in the U.S. and observed that almost everything had something to do with race. Shermer quotes his wife as saying, “Is this all you people talk about?”

Yes, we do, actually. Yes, we do.

Want To Raise Birthrates? Aim Small, Miss Small.

Charles Haywood says:

The only path to an increased birth rate among the population at large is a complete inversion of priorities propagandized into us. Most of all, a return to the exaltation of motherhood, and the total denigration of “career” as the main goal of women.

Of course, the answer is always so simple, yet so hard. Haywood seems to be suggesting that all someone in a position of power needs to do is push values downward onto society, and, eventually, things will self-correct. This, of course, is wrongheaded. People don’t change their values just because someone in a position of power imposes it upon them. I mean, you could, but you’re always going to run into resistance, and you’ll need to have a way of dealing with resistance. It typically involves violence, and violence can just as easily lead to an uncontrollable backlash.

Consider “cancel culture.” The Left tried to make America anti-racist by imposing a tangible cost on saying and doing anything out of step, whether it was genuinely racist or not. Did it work? I suppose it did, in some respects. But it worked on a society which was trended towards more liberal attitudes on race to begin with, and it also came with tremendous costs to our social fabric, along with a strongly negative reaction in many quarters. As far as we can tell, American attitudes on race have leveled off, and there are limits to which people can keep liberalizing on the matter, since so much of it comes down to biology.

When it comes to changing society’s attitudes on the role of women, not only would the Right be fighting against prevailing social attitudes, Haywood is talking about undoing norms which have been generations in the making. You’re not just going to reverse trends any more than you’re going to reverse human instincts on race, which are the result of thousands of years of human evolution. And again, you’d need to impose costs for non-compliance. As the Left ought to be discovering with cancel culture, the benefits aren’t worth the costs.

More important, even if career would be de-emphasized as a social priority for women, as I pointed out a few essays ago, women worked even more in the past. The era in which women were exclusively homemakers and parents was a very brief moment in the long span of human history. So de-emphasize career all you’d like, but it’s not going to lead to a “retvrn” to the home. Women will end up working, either way. They’ll have to.

I’ve also come to realize that birth rates aren’t the problem the Right makes it out to be. It’s a problem, yes, but for now, it remains an economic one. But the Right emphasizes the cultural implications of low birthrates. Obviously, low birth rates is a culture-driven issue, so it stands to reason that changing the culture will lead to higher fertility. But this isn’t necessarily so. Birth rates in “based” countries like Russia and Poland are even worse than America’s, which is still relatively high, even if below replacement level. They’re falling even in countries with more traditional societies. If culture explains why birth rates don’t go back up, something other than culture explains why they go down in the first place.

There’s only one thing proven to raise birth rates: war. Only a sense of existential threat, massive loss of life, can remind everyone why humans are capable of reproducing in the first place. Even then, if people are too comfortable with their lives, it may just end up demoralizing them to where they have even less children than before. Be careful what you wish for.

That’s not to say we should do nothing. It’s just that trying to make birthrates a national issue is counter-intuitive. In a culture where a minority want children, it’s not worth it to convince the majority to change their minds.

As our friend

Kaiser Bauch

explains:

And there are social groups that are basically futile to try to influence. Your very liberal, feminist woman with strong climate anxiety who advocates abortion until birth just won’t be moved by any sort of pronatalist argumentation. Forget those people—it is futile to engage. You have to work with the demographic that is receptive in any way, shape, or form—basically your average “normie” (without any kind of condescension in that term; being normal is not a bad thing, it is normal), and first and foremost, women.

I have a joke: how do you get a liberal to change her mind? Answer: you can’t. It’s funny, I don’t care what you think. Anyway, so much of the birth rate discourse is spent arguing with people who not only will never allow their minds to change, but shouldn’t be having kids in the first place. Data shows that it’s, indeed, progressives who are driving the decline in birth rates.

The fact that the fertility discourse is also loudly dominated by disaffected young men, many with radical right-wing political inclinations, is a problem, too:

I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why the vast majority of contemporary online pronatalism is completely dysfunctional is because it is aimed at a demographic that is not all that relevant for shaping demographic outcomes—mostly frustrated single young males discontent with various forms of “the decline of the West” (or of their state if they are not in the West). Once again, I say “frustrated young males” without any sort of condescension—their frustrations are often justified, and their countries often are in decline. But in terms of effectiveness, it is pretty much useless.

Okay, so we leave out the angry feminist women and the angry right-wing men. Who’s left? How about the not-so-angry young people who want children?

So pronatalist efforts should be aimed at the demographic that is relevant—average young people, women included, who sort of want to have a family at some point, but for various reasons do not think that now is the best time and thus believe they should wait until XYZ happens. When you leave the online discourse and talk to people in real life, this demographic is still the majority of the population—the data clearly proves that. Most young people and young women DO want a family, and most still WILL have one. A portion of that demographic just won’t, for various reasons, realize this aim—some won’t have kids, and some will have fewer than planned.

Focusing on changing the perceptions of these people is the most effective way of approaching pronatalist efforts.

That’s as good advice as any.

Comply With Criminals, Just As You Would Police

Final thought - here’s a police chief in Canada with sage advice on how to deal with home invaders:

Source

In certain contexts, it’s not the worst advice, not necessarily. Someone who commits a home invasion must be assumed to be willing to do you and your loved ones harm. At the same time, that’s just it - trusting your life to someone like that is potentially suicidal. It’s also another thing to hear a police chief, someone charged with protecting the public, to do little else besides surrender unconditionally. A police chief cannot tell the public to do something that puts themselves in harm’s way, but this doesn’t translate to telling the public to never take active measures to protect themselves.

Ironically, the message from the police chief is the same as it’d be when it comes to dealing with police: comply. It seems in Canada, criminals are authority figures, just like police. Of course, it’s anarcho-tyranny, so we’ve known that all along. Again, it’s just another thing to hear it said by a police chief.

Now that I’m done musing, it’s your turn to do so as well. What are your thoughts on any of the topics discussed here? Muse away in the comments section.

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

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