The Day We Quit Pretending

What our ancestors hoped we’d never have to endure, we probably will.

One day, they quit pretending in France. America’s day is coming soon. Source

This essay is more of a follow-up to the last, as I’ve come across a number of things since then related to what I discussed that are worth delving into.

Let’s get right into it.

Civil Terrorism

We’ve all heard of “civil disobedience.” But what’s “civil terrorism?”

Tal Fortgang explains in City Journal:

Masked criminals attacked several Citibank locations in New York City one night last September. They brandished no guns and demanded no cash. Instead, they squeezed epoxy and cemented stickers on debit-card readers, damaged door locks, and vandalized windows with profanities and threats of future violence. Rather than keep their identities hidden, the marauders filmed their work and posted it to their enterprise’s Instagram page. “Unity of Fields,” the recently rebranded group formerly known as Palestine Action US—the new name comes from a Palestinian Islamic Jihad call for violence across the world—included a lengthy caption in the post, exhorting followers: “These actions are not hard to do. Please escalate for Palestine and humanity. We will not rest until Palestine is liberated from the river to the sea.”

Over the last few years, but especially since Hamas massacred Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, this type of organized criminal mayhem has increasingly become part of American life. The criminal bands that have arisen act for ideological reasons. They operate where they believe that they have the most latitude: on college campuses and in Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. And their beliefs are overwhelmingly left-wing: radically environmentalist (“Just Stop Oil”), anarcho-socialist (Antifa), and, most often, anti-Israel.

A framework beyond protest politics and civil disobedience is needed to understand this phenomenon. Today’s left-wing agitators deploy random acts of lawlessness designed to inconvenience and disrupt as many civilians as possible, hoping to pressure them to get the government to change course. This tactic is reasonably described as a form of terrorism, though the activists aren’t murderous like al-Qaida or Hamas—they don’t use guns, bombs, or threats of unpredictable bloodshed. Instead, they engage in civil terrorism.

Those were the first three paragraphs in an excellent, incisive essay I hope everyone makes time to read in its entirety. The problem isn’t new - leftist civil terrorism has been a problem at least as long as I’ve been alive - but it’s a problem which isn’t only becoming more acute, we’re at a decisive point in history where we need to make more people aware that it’s a problem. Up until now, the Left has been able to get away with passing it off as mere “protest,” but we all know it’s a lot more than that.

Two major obstacles stand in the way of dealing with civil terrorism. One, as Fortgang explains, is that leftist civil terrorism is all but state-sponsored. The Trump administration is really the first to take this problem seriously, but there are plenty of leftist judges out there who’ll likely obstruct attempts to prosecute the terrorists. The left-wing activist and non-governmental organization network is well-funded - how else are they able to protest during working hours? As long as this system remains in place, they can engage in civil terrorism indefinitely.

This also, unfortunately, means that deadlier acts of violence are most certainly on the table. The Sinn Féin party was linked to much of the violence exacted by the Irish Republican Army throughout The Troubles of Northern Ireland, while always denying any involvement. I’d expect the Democratic Party to do much the same - provide the funding, while ensuring plausible deniability for themselves.

But, as I’ve said before, the coming civil war will manifest at lower levels as much as it does at the national level.

This is how close the civil war will be to all of us:

Source

To which ex-police officer “Don Shift” said:

Now you see how easily it will be to radicalize people to violence once they have a real reason to be upset like a depression, war, ethnic violence, etc. It only gets worse from here.

The veneer of civilization is very, very, thin.

Multiculturalism Is A Failure. So Is Civic Nationalism.

The Premier (basically a state-level prime minister) of New South Wales, Australia Chris Minns says the quiet part loud:

Source

Well, if a left-wing member of the establishment says so, it must be true, right? Watch the video and decide for yourself, but it sounds to me Minns is saying what many of us on the Right have said for decades: you can have multiculturalism or freedom, but you can’t have both.

To get diverse cultures to live amongst each other in peace, you need more barriers, not fewer. You need more rules in place to regulate behavior and to prevent conflict from arising, to prevent conflict from escalating into outright violence. Being a “decent person” isn’t enough. We don’t realize it here in America, but even we live under quite an umbrella of rules governing our behavior, just not to the extent which exists in Australia or Europe. None of us truly have freedom of speech in any meaningful sense, irrespective of the fact that freedom of speech isn’t absolute.

Leftists will argue that it costs us nothing to be kind and tolerant to one another. Sure, but leftists also know full well that’s not the whole story. To them, kindness and tolerance is also about not saying anything which speaks of minority groups in anything other than the most glowing of terms. You don’t need to even say anything truly offensive; saying something like “Islam has an extremism problem” is considered intolerant. In Britain, speaking about the Islamic rape gangs will land you in jail. Of course, nobody needs to watch what they say about Whites, Christians, or any previously-dominant group in the West. We can say what we really think about them without any fear of reprisal. We might even be rewarded for it.

The fact is, multiculturalism has worked only as well as it has because Whites willingly acceded to the demands of the Left and the multiracial coalitions. Even that’s not something safe to openly state. But it’s the truth. Any society where the racial or ethnic majority is allowed to make the rules - places like China, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, Poland, and Turkey come to mind - life’s more orderly, predictable, and nobody’s obsessing over “microaggressions” or being sensitive to the feelings of less than 1% of the population.

Some of those places might be less than democratic, but once again, what use is democracy when you cannot even speak your mind freely? I was recently in a foreign, developing world country not associated with either the East or West, where our interlocutor all but bragged about how they didn’t have the same level of free speech as America. They’d probably say it didn’t matter to them, since they’re all still allowed to believe whatever they want, but this is disingenuous. Thoughts are propagated through speech. Without freedom of speech, there exists no freedom of thought, either. Without freedom of thought, we’re not free, period.

Even Aristotle, who last lived over three centuries before the birth of Christ, saw that diverse societies must be not only anti-democratic, but chaotic:

Source

Conventional, public school wisdom of today says tyrants are anti-diversity. Turns out that might not be true. Diversity actually breaks down social bonds to where nobody can organize to put up a substantial united front against those in power. Scholars, including Dr. David Betz, if I recall correctly, observed that homogeneous societies may actually be more susceptible to civil war because it’s homogeneity allows for easier collective action than diverse societies. I, too, once said that when it comes to avoiding civil war, diversity is indeed our strength.

However, this doesn’t mean diversity societies are more peaceful societies. You exchange one large-scale conflict for numerous small-scale conflicts, along with greater authoritarianism. What are empires if not autocracies governing a diverse array of peoples, anyway? There’s no other way to make everyone submit to a single authority and also not fight with one another. Sometimes, the state may need to use its power to favor one group over another. What do you think Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was? You really think it was about fairness? Or was it more about making sure resources are directed towards preferred groups, placating the unruly, and keeping a lid on violence?

The way America has approached multiculturalism isn’t the same as the way the rest of West has, which explains in part why things have been a bit more tranquil here. Since the 1960s, the approach has been integrationist as opposed to assimilationist. This is an important point we’ll return to in a moment.

In the rest of the West, the approach has been to effectively cede ground to foreign cultures - especially Islam. The influence of Islam and other Third World cultures cannot be overstated. I often remark that powerful cultures and identities will always prevail over weaker ones. Europe is a real-time example of that phenomenon in motion. Islam is, without a doubt, the single most powerful sociopolitical force on the continent. But they couldn’t have done it without some help, not entirely.

Ed West of

Wrong Side of History

revealed in a recent Substack how it happened. I’m sharing the following passage courtesy of

Rod Dreher

, as West’s Substack is paywalled:

Increasingly, naturalised immigrants were asserting the right to “integrate”—basically, to live in Europe as foreigners—rather than to assimilate.’

Sir Bernard Crick, designer of Britain’s ‘citizenship curriculum’, said that ‘To the immigrant, Britishness is essentially a legal and political structure. It doesn’t mean the culture. When the immigrant says I am British, he is not saying he wants to be English or Scottish or Welsh.’ These were elite ideas, mostly unintelligible to the public at large, and even to the intellectuals debating them; a weak form of civic nationalism was not only hard to define, but became even more inadequate as the size of the immigrant-descended population grew larger and more assertive.

In the Netherlands, integration and asylum minister politician Rita Verdonk said that integration, not assimilation, was sufficient: ‘Our policy is: You must learn the Dutch language, follow our norms and values and obey the law.’ The Dutch system was called ‘Integration with Maintenance of One’s Own Identity.’ Yet integration was not occurring as intended, and as Caldwell wrote, ‘a partial embrace of the national identity of the new country has been followed by a withdrawal to the religious identity of the old’. This issue of religious identity would be crucial to Europe in the 21st century.

The problem is that language, norms, values, and laws are all downstream of culture. Politics are a product of culture. Integration was basically a compromise, a middle-of-the-road approach, but like any compromise, each side needs to give something up, and in practice, one side often concedes more than the other. The side that concedes more is often the weaker side, but not necessarily. Sometimes, it’s the side which has more to lose. They may wager, as Whites of the West did, that conceding more forestalled greater potential losses. In this moment in history, that gamble is turning out to have been a very dangerous one.

By compromising with integration, immigrants are, as West explains, electing to live as permanent foreigners. And why not? Assimilation is hard. It demands sacrifices on the part of newcomers, in addition to more work. It’s not easy living in one place, one way, your whole life, then go somewhere else to live another way. As humans, we can all empathize with that.

But without assimilation, there can be no strong social bonds. America is evidence of this fact, Europe more so. One way of living ultimately has to win out. America is big enough that it can allow many different cultures to exist in parallel, but this is only tenable with an abundance of prosperity. That and the complete erasure of any kind of public culture. “Mind your own business” is the extent of it and we are good at it. Without any expectation of assimilation, America is increasingly becoming, in many places, a land of mini-ethnostates, united by a consumer culture divorced from any common heritage or history.

I pointed out a few years ago that a certain amount of this was already happening in the U.S. Even the most liberal person of color is, ultimately, a right-wing ethnonationalist for “their people.” In fact, what tends to happen following the downfall of such empires and multicultural unions is an explosion of nationalism. Nobody on the Left would ever admit it, but it’s the truth: their obsession with Hitler stems from the fact, deep down inside, they all want their own Hitler, who will do everything for his people, and crush enemies.

This also means civic nationalism has failed. In its most simplified form, civic nationalism is an identity centered on an idea or a set of ideas. But since ideas are fungible, worth only about as much as the paper they’re printed on, it’s the weakest form of nationalism there is. If freedom of speech, an idea, was supposed to forge a common identity, but we end up rejecting free speech, if we end up curtailing liberties to keep the peace between different groups, if multiculturalism requires this much fine-tuning to maintain, then what value do those ideas have? Why bother with multiculturalism if it leads to the end of everything which supposedly bound us together?

There are benefits to diversity, equity, and inclusion. More freedom isn’t one of them.

I wish I could’ve explained this in fewer words. Simplicity is what I aim for, after all. But I also think it’s important to unpack this all so we operate off fact, not assumption. Most people don’t understand arguments against diversity, not because they’re incapable, but because they’ve never been made to question any of it. Once you start questioning it, you discover it’s full of contradictions and lies. For some, the discovery is liberating. For many, it’s frightening.

If you still don’t get it, ask yourself this: when you have two people in your family, workplace, whatever, who never see eye-to-eye on anything, who are at constant loggerheads, who may also engage in physical violence from time to time, would you have them spend less or more time together?

Don’t overthink it.

Netflix Fans The Flames Of Civil Conflict

The Netflix series Adolescence is getting attention for all the wrong reasons:

Source

The British Left has pounced on the show’s popularity, calling for Adolescence to be shown in schools to indoctrinate students and to demand further crackdowns on free speech.

Though said to be inspired by more than one true story, one case in particular seems to have directly inspired this show, apparently striking a chord with the show’s creator and star, actor Stephen Graham.

From My London:

National treasure Stephen Graham has revealed the horrific murder of a Croydon schoolgirl inspired his latest Netflix drama which is wowing audiences and critics. Adolescence, which dropped on the streaming platform yesterday (Thursday, March 13), follows the story of a 13-year-old boy accused of stabbing a teenage girl to death in Liverpool.

And:

“Then there was another young girl in South London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop.” Graham cites the tragic death of schoolgirl Elianne Andam, 15, who was killed by Hassan Sentamu after she got off a bus outside the Whitgift Centre on her way to Old Palace of John Whitgift School in Croydon on September 27, 2023.

The problem? The killer youth in Adolescence is White, but 15-year-old Elianne Andam’s murderer wasn’t:

Source

The operative question: had Andam’s murderer been White, would they have re-cast him as Black or any other race in the story? Again, don’t overthink this.

In fact, Adolescence has an agenda so obvious, it’s on-the-nose, according to The Guardian:

On a street level, it’s about knife crime. Over the past decade, the number of UK teenagers killed with a blade or sharp object has risen by 240%. On a cultural level, it’s about cyberbullying, the malign influence of social media and the unfathomable pressures faced by boys in Britain today. Male rage, toxic masculinity, online misogyny. This isn’t just all-too-plausible fiction. It’s unavoidable fact.

Crime is a social problem, so there’s nothing wrong with exploring what’s driving young males towards violence. But if they really think “male rage,” “toxic masculinity,” and all the other narratives cited are the root cause, they should note there exists a wide disparity between foreign nationalities and the native British when it comes to crime.

Crime statistics based on race are tough to come by in the United Kingdom. However, what data is available shows that violent crime, knife attacks especially (the UK all but outlaws guns), are perpetrated by Blacks. And yet, despite the data, they chose to create a villain out of a young White boy, making young White males the poster-children of violence in Britain?

A key argument made by Dr. David Betz in his predictions of civil war is how Western governments are doing everything possible to make it more likely. This is yet another example of how. Young Black and Brown males are radicalized almost from birth, are disproportionately perpetrators of violent crime, and aren’t exactly feminists themselves - the notorious Andrew Tate, cited in Adolescence as motivating a young White male towards misogynistic violence, is more popular among young non-White males. Yet the institutions and the state (what I collectively term the “Regime”) continues to put the crosshairs over a single group: young White males.

It’s young White males who are forced to shoulder the burden of representing violence not just in Britain, but throughout the entire West. The idea that Adolescence is going to draw attention to the problem of violence in general is maliciously dishonest. The West has become so racialized, neither Black, Brown, or other non-White communities are going to look at the program and think a young White male is representative of problems in their community. It effectively absolves non-Whites of any accountability, any necessity to change. Whites are always implicated in society-wide problems, while non-Whites are either exclusively its victims or their problems are unique and theirs alone to be concerned with.

I haven’t watched Adolescence and I don’t plan to. Unfortunately, it’s apparently Netflix’s most-watched show ever. It means there’s not only a market for this kind of propaganda, but audiences are sucking it down. Overall, I remain a fan of Netflix, and I see this as more of an Anglospheric problem than anything else. French, Spanish, and Latin American programming, I enjoy the most, in part because it hasn’t been completely infected with far-leftism. There’s a lot of great entertainment out there, you just need to look for it.

You won’t find it in the English-speaking world, unfortunately.

Patriot? Loyalist? Time To Pick Sides Again.

Historian

H. W. Brands

summarizes the state of tribalism in the U.S. today:

Americans profess to eschew tribalism – despite a long history of forcible displacement of Indian tribes, race-based slavery, and the post-slavery system of racial segregation. In modern America, tribalism appears not least as political partisanship. Republicans demonize Democrats. Democrats revile Republicans. Each treats the other as an existential threat to the republic. For much of human history, marrying outside the clan or tribe was forbidden. Think Romeo and Juliet and innumerable other star-crossed lovers of myth and literature. In America, marrying outside one’s religion or race was long the great taboo. Today it’s marrying outside one’s political tribe.

Tribalism is not wholly harmful. We humans wouldn’t have survived as long as we have if we hadn’t learned to stick together and tell friend from foe.

Wisdom lies in tempering the worst aspects of tribalism. Turn tribal feelings in positive directions where possible.

We really have arrived at a point where political alignment is the great social dividing line. At least it’s not ethnicity, race, or religion, right? Must be that “progress” we keep hearing about! The catch is that ideological divides can also result in horrible outcomes. See 1789 France, 1917 Russia, 1936 Spain, 20th century China, the list goes on and on.

I like that Brands (whose Substack is worth subscribing to) says that tribalism isn’t all bad, that it’s natural and it’s how we’ve survived for as long as we have. However, tempering tribalism, noble as that sounds, isn’t as simple as Brands suggests. That’s because political tribalism is particularly messy, since politics is rooted in ideology.

Ideology isn’t different from religion. Anyone who thinks religion does little besides give people a reason to fight and kill one another should understand better than most why ideology is dangerous. It’s a fixed belief system which forces us to believe certain things, often not congruent with reality. For example, it’s one thing to believe some people can think they’re the other sex. We can all agree such people exist. It’s another thing entirely to believe that only does that literally make them the opposite sex, but that we can change it at-will. Only an ideology can instill such absurdity in our minds.

Likewise, if America is stolen land, then none of us, immigrants included, have a right to be here. Yet not a single person who believes this is stolen land intends to leave. Rather, they intend to make this country their own. Again, only ideology can create order out of total nonsense.

On a more practical front, politics is our fault line. When the great divergence happens, it’ll be along political lines. This not only means you may end up losing friends to the other sides, but family as well. It’s disheartening to think about, but if it’s any consolation, just remember it happened during America’s own revolution.

In fact, Brands even wrote an excellent book about it. From the prologue:

The fighting had been vicious in the Carolinas since the start of the war. And it was the more vicious for pitting not American against Briton, nor even American against Hessian, but American against American. John Adams would say that the American Revolution was in the “minds and hearts” of the American people before it produced the armed struggle between the United States and Britain, what Adams neglected to mention was the degree to which those minds and hearts were at odds, one American against another. In every colony, and then every state, were thousands of men and women who wanted nothing to do with independence. They valued the freedom and security they had enjoyed under British rule, and they resented the rebel Patriots for bringing on the war. These Loyalists cast their lot with their mother country; the result was the shattering of trust among neighbors, the rending of families, and murderous conflict like that convulsing the Carolina backcountry.

The book is aptly titled Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution. In fact, I’d say our current moment has more in common in the lead-up to this first civil war than the second. My recommendation: add this book to your reading pile. It may actually prove useful in mentally preparing you for the troubles to come. What our ancestors hoped we’d never have to endure, we probably will.

Live Not By Lies Hits The Screens

Our friend

Rod Dreher

has gone Hollywood! Okay, not really, but his 2020 bestseller, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, has now been turned into a documentary and will be available for streaming at the Angels Studios website on April 1. There’s indications of potential theatrical release, though I don’t expect it to be widespread.

Here’s the trailer for it:

For those of you who never heard the book, I strongly recommend it. It’s a look at totalitarianism, how it comes into being, and how people lived through it. It centers on the experiences of those who lived in communist Europe during the Cold War, and the stories are harrowing.

The timing of the book’s release was provident. 2020 was the year many of us, during the COVID myself included, saw for the first time the true face of the state, of the ruling class, of the figures and institutions who run the country, along with the broader West. It’s not what we were told it was. What shocked me most, honestly, wasn’t that our institutions and state were capable of totalitarianism. All forms of authority are vulnerable to abuse. What shocked me most was how many of our so-called fellow citizens were more than willing to throw their support behind totalitarian measures. If they did so knowingly, that’s bad enough. If they did so unknowingly, then now we know how easily totalitarianism can take hold.

As the title implies, there’s a particular focus on how Christians endured suffering. However, I think these lessons apply regardless of whether you hold religious views or not. Totalitarianism is bad, either way. Anyone who has no problem with totalitarianism because they hold no views contrary to the regime exercising it is part of the problem. If there’s any appeal I can make to leftists it’s this: your liberal, progressive views won’t save you. You, like the rest of us, are useful until you’re not. The regime whom you entrust everything onto, including your life, has the power to take everything away from you. They just haven’t yet. But when it comes down to their survival versus yours, whose do you think they’ll choose?

Of course, I’ve been making this appeal for years, and it hasn’t worked yet. Bad things continue to happen because people don’t heed the lessons of history. With all their screeching about authoritarianism and how the Trump-Musk team is bringing Nazism to America, you’d think the Left would be open to such appeals, but they’re nearly immune to them. They think the people running the show - the people Trump and Musk are attempting to oust - can be trusted to know where the red line is. This is stupidity of the highest order, but again, you can’t change their minds.

If totalitarianism is coming, it seems we’ll just have to live through it. We’ve been living through it, if you ask me.

Let’s chat - what can be done about the problem of civil terrorism? What do you think about Western leaders speaking more honestly about freedom and multiculturalism? Did you watch Adolescence? What’s your reaction? Finally, do you see America as divided by ideology, more than anything else?

Talk about it in the comments.

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

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