The Limits Of Tolerance

Tell me how this doesn’t culminate in some form of violent conflict.

Has the night finally fallen on France? Is civil war really now an inevitability? Source

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This draft was started prior to the second round of the French elections, so my commentary may not fully reflect current events. However, I have attempted to incorporate the results of the second round in this entry. My apologies for failing to keep up with breaking news and release pieces in a timely fashion.

France is a country that I’ve discussed at length previously on a number of occasions on this blog. There’s a good reason for it - France is a linchpin of Western Civilization, perhaps in ways that even our ancestral homeland, Britain, isn’t. Compared to the Anglosphere, France has been less stable and routinely beset by revolutions of one degree or another. Though what happens in France doesn’t necessarily carry over even to its continental neighbors, I still believe the country is an encapsulation of where the West is headed in general.

Over the weekend, France held the first round of a snap-election called by President Emmanuel Macron to determine the composition of parliament, following the European Union elections which saw the so-called “far-right” National Rally party perform well. National Rally did just as well in the snap-election, portending a major rightward shift in French politics, unprecedented in generations. It’s an outcome years in the making, something that seemed as though it’d never happen. But as I often say, on a long enough timeline, everything will.

As you might imagine, the formidable French left didn’t like the outcome that democracy produced and made their displeasure known in a most uncivil fashion:

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You have to wonder: how does the global left keep getting away with the bald-faced lie that the right-wing poses not only the greatest threat of political violence, but also that it poses a national security threat and that they’re the ones baying for civil war? None of this comports with reality. It’s the Left that’s behind most political violence and crime waves roiling the West. The “right-wing threat” is a completely manufactured one and any truly objective observer can see that.

I guess at this point, it’s not worth stressing over, since the narrative inevitably prevails so long as the Left dominates the perception-shaping sphere. What we can instead do is better understand why France is where it is. If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be obvious now.

At the heart of the matter is crime, demographics, and immigration. Simply put, France has become a chaotic, dangerous place to live. It has some of the highest crime rates in the West, thought it lags behind the U.S. Still, it experiences an alarming number of assaults, murders, rapes, and Islamic extremism, predominantly at the hands of its African and Middle East-origin population, many of whom aren’t French citizens.

There’s no downplaying the state of France at the moment. From fellow Substacker Matt Goodwin:

Foreigners make up 8% of the French population but account for 24% of prison inmates. They committed 77% of rapes in Paris, 54% of street crimes in Nice and 40% of vehicle thefts, and 38% of burglaries and 31% of muggings across France.

And in recent months, the stark reality of mass immigration, the glaring lack of social integration, and, to be blunt, what happens when Western nations import people who hate who we are has been further highlighted by a series of shocking atrocities.

Like the stabbing of babies in Annecy by a Syrian asylum-seeker. Like a vicious attack against a 76-year old lady in Bordeaux and her 7-year old grand-daughter that was perpetrated by a homeless man of African descent with 15 previous convictions (warning: graphic content). And like the beating and rape of a 12-year old Jewish girl by 3 boys aged 12 to 13 in an attack inspired by the Hamas pogrom of October 7th.

It’s really that bad. Thankfully, us in the United States don’t need to deal with this, yet, though we’ve got some serious problems of our own. More on that later.

The success of the “far-right” in the French elections isn’t the result of effective propagandizing. It’s the logical result of the reality the French have been living in for decades, backed by data and fact. But as I also often say, the Left doesn’t trust the data any more than they accuse the rest of us of not doing so. Moreover, none of us, regardless of political persuasion, view the world through a data-driven lens.

So why not hear it from the French themselves? How about a woman, since a man’s perspective is considered suspect in this day and age? An account from French woman living in France made the rounds the other day on X; originally written in her native language, it has been translated:

“I am 26 years old, blonde, with light eyes, and I have always lived in the 6th arrondissement of Lyon, which is thought of as the poshest area in Lyon, and my daily life has become unbearable. I write this because, ten years ago, I could go out with my friends in the evening, at any hour, without being bothered, insulted, followed, or stabbed.

I mention stabbing because, three years ago, my boyfriend, along with two of his friends, on their way home, were approached by a group of men. They surrounded them, stole one of their cell phones. They tried to fight back, and my boyfriend, in spite of being a strong rugbyman, got stabbed, in the arm--while protecting his neck, which was the target. Someone tried to cut his throat.

As for myself, on a regular basis, men follow me, insult me because I refuse to talk back or because I say I have a boyfriend. One day, one spit on me. More and more, I am whistled at like a dog, or “ksksks”’d like I am a cat. Acts of this nature have happened to me perhaps thirty times in the past year.

Six months ago, we adopted a puppy. One evening, my boyfriend went out to walk him at 9pm, and three men tried to steal the puppy. Since then, we only go out in the evening as a couple, and I always carry pepper spray in my purse.

In our neighborhood, just in our block, there are three drug dealing spots, which work constantly. Day and night. With everything that entails: watchmen loitering outside our house, milling about, shouting, getting high and bothering people, especially women.

Every single one of the actions I mentioned (and they are only a part of what we have gone through) is the fact of men of sub-Saharan African or North African origin. A white man has never behaved towards me the way they have.

Is it racist to call out what my daily life has become as a woman, because of immigration? Is my reality, my daily life, racist? Am I not as legitimate as any other person to call out traumatising acts of violence, just because they are done by foreigners or immigrants?

To be clear, I am not talking about men in general, but specifically men, sometimes underage, who are of immigrant background.

Now, and for about four years, the way I live my life has had to change to live with this constant insecurity. Now I live with a pepper spray outside my front door, a taser, and a false pistol, after an attempted break-in. We have had an extra lock added to our door. We have a security camera in our apartment. In my purse, I carry a second pepper spray, as well as brass knuckles on my keychain. I never walk into a building without checking both sides of the street, in case a man is following me. I never make eye contact with you-know-who. I constantly cross the street. I no longer leave my home on my own after 9pm. I no longer use public transport for obvious reasons. I am afraid when I am alone at home. I am afraid when outside. Now, I am always afraid.

I do not want this future for my children who, fortunately, are not yet here. I do not understand people who do not see that France is turning into a cradle of insecurity because of immigrant men. Insecurity to women, but to men as well.

Therefore, for your future, and those of your children or your children-to-be: cast the right vote.

She’s not alone. Many other French women have since come forward with similar accounts. It was once taboo to speak out on this sort of thing, but not anymore, at least not in France:

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French women are taking their own safety into their own hands, arming themselves the best they can, to the extent the law permits (gun ownership is highly restricted in France):

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Ask yourself: are these women suffering from moral panic? Or are they responding to real-world conditions? If you need a hint, know that women throughout the U.S., Canada, and the rest of the Anglosphere will talk about how threatened they feel by men daily, but few of them will arm themselves, at least to the extent you see the French women above. Actions speak louder than words. Nor will American women say they feel threatened by immigrants, but more on that later.

Everything you see happening in France is because things have gotten that bad. With the victory of National Rally, it’s made it easier for the French to speak more openly about their problems. Other countries throughout Europe, namely Germany, are starting down the same road. The only question is how far gone France really is at this point, whether there’s any way to peacefully change course. I’m not sure there is.

Back in 2021, following the uproar caused by anonymous retired French military officers penning a letter warning of civil war, an active-duty French Army officer was interviewed by the Telegram channel Gallia Daily. He was asked whether it was too late to avoid armed conflict.

He said:

The time window was 1990-2000. It has already passed. Now it is too late. Some speak of “Remigration”, others dream of “reversing migration flows”... The truth that no one dares to affirm is that we can no longer deal with the problem peacefully.

The foreign mass on our soil is too deeply implanted; the crazy ideas of guilt are too deeply rooted in the brain of our abused people. It is too late. Much too late. I was 5 years old when it was already too late to act upstream. Our current situation is only the logical extension of these choices (or non choices). Today, it is too late to make the choices we should have made 30 years ago.

So the question is no longer “how can we act to avoid the breakup of the country / the division / the partition / the civil war?”. The only question is, “When will this breakup come and how will we triumph?”

I must point out that this is my biggest disagreement with the generals: they think that civil war must be avoided. I do not, as the vast majority of my fellow soldiers.

If there were a way to avoid war AND to solve the problem peacefully without concessions, I would of course support it. But I have explained why, in my eyes, the solution can no longer have a peaceful solution [ too many, for too long, with the help of too many 'traitors'].

From there, wanting to avoid civil war at all costs, even though there is no peaceful solution, is de facto a capitulation a priori. That is to say that we are going to ask the French people to submit to the demands of the other side in order to try to satisfy our antagonists and avoid war...

Marine Le Pen, leader of National Rally and, according to some, the next president of France, speaks of remigration and reversing migration flows. According to this anonymous French Army officer, however, it’s too late for that. They could try, but it won’t work. There’s just too many of them here, the political opposition too powerful. Judging from the protests and riots seen in response to the election results (how democratic of them!), I’d say that any serious remigration effort and immigration restrictionism would cause tremendous backlash, maybe even a revolt.

There’s also something else the active-duty Army officer said that’s back on my mind as of late. When asked to speculate on how a French civil war would start, he offered the following scenario:

In our scenario, France is in the middle of an election period, the debate is raging and copying the recent American election, racial tensions are at their peak, anti-police sentiment as well. A police check degenerates, the images are broadcasted on social networks like SnapChat, several cities are rioting, left-wing politicians indirectly encourage tensions trough their media relays, by organizing demonstrations, by calling high schools and university students to block their schools.

The situation degenerates into a nation-wide riot, the city centers are the scene of riots and exactions, the infrastructures (buses, metro, streetcar, ring roads) are regularly blocked, reducing the economic flows.

Groups of civilians organize to defend themselves against rioters.

Note: You will recognize here a scenario very similar to what the USA experienced in 2020-2021... Yet, it is a scenario that was written and played in November 2018... The French readers will be able to recognize here elements quite similar with what has been imagined by many authors of fiction too.

Three years after that interview took place, France is now in the middle of a heated election period. In summer 2023, a police check degenerated, leading to over a week of fierce rioting. The scenario the French officer proffered has manifested in its own unique way. Is France finally on the verge of civil war?

Time will tell. But the warning signs are flashing all around. Look at how the French vote broke down by age group:

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This isn’t the place for a deep dive into these results, so Professor Eric Kaufmann’s analysis will need to do:

1/3 of young French voters back Le Pen's RN, but nearly half (48%) of them voted for the far left.

The young lean further left than older voters, but are also the most polarized.

Expect rising polarization in the future around cultural issues (immigration, Islam, woke).

Rising polarization in a country seeing escalating levels of violence. Tell me how this doesn’t culminate in some form of violent conflict.

One last bit before moving on. France may be ahead in the timeline, but they’re not alone in its struggles with demographics and immigration. I’ve already mentioned that countries like Germany and Sweden are now confronting the consequences of the decision, made most un-democratically, to open themselves to the entire world. This is hardly a European problem, however, not alone.

In Turkey, a country at the crossroads between West and East, riots broke out in recent days after a Syrian migrant allegedly raped a Turkish minor. Bordering Syria and Iraq, Turkey has been dealing with mass migration for years, including from as far away as Afghanistan, bearing the direct impact of hundreds of the world’s worst.

From Al-Monitor:

ANKARA — Turkish authorities detained nearly 450 more people Tuesday over anti-immigrant riots that started Sunday night in central Turkey and spread to other parts of the country in the last 48 hours. 

Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said 447 people have been detained after "provocative" protests against refugees living in Turkey. Following riots that targeted Syrians in Turkey’s central Anatolian province of Kayseri on Sunday night, ultra-nationalist protests filled streets in several other provinces, including Istanbul, on Monday night.

"Following the unpleasant incident that took place in Kayseri, provocative actions were carried out against Syrians last night in some cities across our country," Yerlikaya wrote on social media platform X.

The riots in Kayseri, which broke out after a Syrian national allegedly sexually abused a minor, saw the burning of dozens of businesses and vehicles belonging to Syrians in the province. Of the more than 3.5 million Syrians who have fled to Turkey, roughly 80,000 live in Kayseri, according to official figures.

The results of the rioting were devastating:

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Turkey is a Muslim country. Most of the migrants there are Muslims themselves. It still isn’t enough to bridge a yawning cultural divide between the worlds.

No matter what one thinks of all this, there’s no denying reality: no society, Christian or Muslim, Western or European, wants to be replaced, their lives disrupted by new arrivals. No society wants their women and children murdered or raped. Sympathize with the plight of migrants all you’d like, but the reaction you see from the French or Turkish is no different from your own body’s autoimmune system. Hating it is like hating your body’s ability to fight diseases and foreign organisms.

What we see in Europe is a crisis that’s not going away any time soon. The aforementioned Eric Kaufmann notes in his book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities:

Ninety-seven per cent of global population growth takes place in a tropical belt from Central America through Africa and into West Asia, where TFR [Total Fertility Rate] is well above the 2.1 level needed to replace the population.

In other words, the entire world’s population growth is occuring in the poorest, most under-developed, most violent, war-torn regions of the world. Not to mention the hottest, most humid places on Earth. The geopolitical situation in that tropical belt isn’t going to get any better during the 21st century; don’t you think some of those people are going to seek better fortunes elsewhere? Hard as it may be to fathom, we may be at the beginning, not in the middle, of a great demographic and migration crisis.

It’s not just a numbers game, either. It’s about culture, identity, the very sense of who we are as a people. It’s about lives, our continuity as families, communities, and as a collective. It’s about “enrichment” or “vibrancy,” both of which are proving to come with very high, often deadly, price tags.

At least in Europe, it’s a civilizational clash, a war of worlds, as it were. It’s why so many insightful, well-informed voices out there see a civil war coming to the West. It’s just difficult to see how this all ends any other way.

Clash Of Civilizations Over There, Clash With A**holes Over Here

I’m on the record as saying that the U.S. itself is headed for civil war, going so far as to lay out a detailed scenario for how it might play out. Though America is arguably the centerpiece of the West, the reasons why the world’s last remaining superpower is headed for civil war are different from why Europe is headed for the same, even as there exist similarities. Let’s first discuss what they do have in common.

Recently, a video filmed by Lizzie Marbach drew some attention on social media. She echoed many of the same concerns of our counter-parts in Europe:

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The video has since been removed and her account has been placed into protected mode, a suggestion of how fierce the backlash to her remarks were. A lot of it was the boilerplate “nation of immigrants” nonsense you hear from the Left these days, coupled with the equally predictable accusations of racism and xenophobia. Marbach has ties to both the Republican Party and the Trump 2020 campaign, possibly amplifying the criticisms of her. But is she wrong?

If there’s anything both sides agree on, it’s that demographic change is happening. What they disagree on is whether the net impact is positive or negative. The fact is, nobody likes being displaced or replaced, no matter your race. Just as nobody loses sleep over the fact their communities aren’t receiving enough newcomers, nobody looks at changing demographics all around them and thinks, “Well! It’s about time I became a minority!” This is how people actually are, including leftists; I don’t make the rules. Praising diversity is a “retcon”; retroactively bringing lived experiences in line with personal politics.

Of course, even a legitimate racist/xenophobe is going to keep their feelings to themselves as long as the arrival of newcomers creates as little friction as possible. It’s when the arrival of newcomers brings with it wholesale cultural and lifestyle changes that conflict arises. If you’re a leftist, you don’t need to like what I just said; it’s reality and your feelings won’t change it. If you have a problem with it still, look outside America; find me a moment in history where the arrival of newcomers didn’t cause conflict. I’ll either show that, in fact, it did, or the lack of conflict wasn’t because the dominant groups or natives just decided it was better to go along to get along.

All this is to say that three things can be true at once: change is the one constant in life, change can be good, but change can also be bad. Being obstinate and refusing to adapt to inevitable change is unhealthy, but so is the other extreme: because change is constant, change is good and must be implemented at all cost. In its most benign form, this is the essence of the “Great Replacement.”

Immigration is obviously a hot issue and it’s the issue which, in many ways, defines all others. However, I contend that while that might be true, immigration is secondary to the real trouble roiling the U.S. It’s just that immigration happens to be the national-level issue emblematic of America’s true ailment. Immigration is also an especially potent fuel inflaming a blaze that would exist, even if immigration weren’t a problem.

What might that blaze be? Longtime readers know what it is, but for the new readers, it’s the increasing level of disorder in the country, along with the state effectively throwing up its hands in the face of crime, while still insisting we all still pay our taxes and observe all laws to the tee.

From Oakland:

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Of course, there’s nothing the police can really do once the damage has been done, aside from track down the perpetrators and arrest them. Even that’s become a tough task these days. The real problem is that it happens at all. This is something, until recently, you didn’t see much outside the U.S., though it’s increasingly being seen in other areas throughout the West. That said, this disorder is, I think, the real problem this country faces. A state and society that cannot prevent this from happening is a failing state and failed society.

The disorder in America is reaching a point where it’s not a good place for either natives or immigrants to live. The problem with immigration here takes on a different character than that of France or Europe, which, again, is more akin to a civilizational clash between peoples of wildly divergent cultures and values, America’s problem with immigration is a question of whose land this is and whose rules need to be followed. In many ways, the U.S. is being fought over as though it were still unclaimed land for the taking. Only immigration isn’t at the root of the problem; it’s the political and social values which animate modern life today, along with making life disorderly and everything, including social interactions, overly complicated.

Matthew B. Crawford, who has a Substack of his own, recently adapted an entry for an essay published in Unherd. It’s probably the single best distillation of what America’s own civilizational crisis amounts to; unlike Europe’s it’s not quite as dramatic. It’s actually quite mundane and it concerns the question of whether any of us get to live in peace and harmony, you know, the thing we’re told by the Joe Bidens and Gavin Newsoms of the country that we pay taxes for.

Crawford talks about the issue of noise disturbances created by those who own excessively loud cars, and how certain local governments have decided it’s just something we’re all going to have to live with, like smash-and-grabs:

Mr Hudson told a reporter at The Seattle Times in March that the city needed to focus its attention on other problems. “There are way bigger issues than a black man with a nice car who makes noise occasionally,” he said. His car is indeed nice, if by nice you mean expensive. It lists from $97,000-111,000. “No disrespect, but I feel like I’m doing my thing,” he told the officer who stopped him and recorded the interaction on his body cam.

The city has been super understanding of Mr Hudson’s need to do his thing. To watch the bodycam footage of the cop who pulled him over is to get a window onto Blue America, 2024. It is like watching a Hindu farmer trying to coax a sacred cow out of a rice paddy, without laying hands on it, speaking harshly to it, or otherwise running afoul of the Brahmins who insist on the cow’s protected status. The cop is real chummy. “Remember the last time I pulled you over?” He tries to ingratiate himself with the entitled twat by informing him that he is an ASE certified master mechanic, as well as a policeman. It appears to be an attempt to establish common ground: I can appreciate your car. Essentially he offers a change of jurisdiction, from that of the public authority to that of a shared subculture.

But this gesture is lost on our sacred cow, who can only repeat that he has 700,000 Instagram followers for his exploits. The cop tries to cajole him into perhaps taking his car to a race track. “I’m just saying… Just consider it, bro,” the policeman says. The cop’s deference is nauseating. At no point does he rise to the occasion and speak with authority on behalf of the common good. It turns out you don’t need to defund the police, you just need to delegitimise the idea of law itself, if by “law” you mean rules of civilised behaviour that apply to all.

If you didn’t follow, reckless driving and excessive noise isn’t being dealt with because it’s just too much trouble enforcing the law against a Black man. That’s literally it. So much for White supremacy, but that’s a different talk for another place and time.

Crawford loops France into the discussion:

The French writer Renaud Camus, known for his controversial “Great Replacement” theory, also coined the term nocence to capture what is going on here. Removing the negative “in-” from “innocence”, he left a word that meant nuisance or harm. He went so far as to form an “anti-nuisance” political party called In-nocence, making explicit what we all know: that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space. This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest.

Camus’s concept of nocence responds to the French experience of mass immigration, crime and intimidation. He draws attention to the emotional labour required of the French in urban life: essentially that of not-noticing. In the cosmopolitan cities of the West, the field of petty harms is allowed to expand due to a code of propriety that requires suppressing one’s awareness of patterned behaviour, as well as a good-natured readiness to surrender one’s own claim to public space. Such readiness is a point of moral virtue for liberals, but it creates a vacuum into which more aggressive energies rush. This process of displacement is ultimately a spatial phenomenon, so it is perhaps not surprising that a geographer should be the one to spell it out.

Whatever the specifics, whomever those involved, the same thing is happening here and abroad: our public spaces are being taken over by those who think the rules shouldn’t apply to them and are willing to use violence to have their way. Civilization is supposed to have a ready-made answer for this, but ours doesn’t. If anything, it’s decided the answer is to do nothing about it and use the power of state and society to force us to not notice, since noticing would damage the Regime’s legitimacy.

Crawford explains the contradiction inherent in this dynamic:

One might suppose that the coincidence of such ecological harms with demographic upheaval is a function of transience and diversity. Where there is no common culture, there is little sense of a common good. On this view, the same people who act anti-socially while living in a place they do not regard as their own would likely not do so in the communities they came from. English tourists are notorious for public drunkenness, for example.

But also, norms of behaviour differ across cultures, and one can transgress without meaning to. When the “ugly American” goes abroad and shows that he is culturally obtuse, we rightly censure him. To apply this same censure, however, to foreigners on our own shores — indeed merely to use the word “foreigner” — is to risk scandalising liberals. To be a good liberal requires interrupting the natural symmetries of hospitality.

The problem is that such unilateral hospitality tends to inspire contempt in peoples that don’t share the West’s preference for out-groups. And this introduces something new. Quite apart from being obtuse or not caring about local norms, making a nuisance of oneself may feel good as an expression of both personal and cultural aggression.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all supposed to make society better, but in practice, the laws of nature still apply: the strong prevail over the weak; the violent over the peaceful. If anything, the rules of nature apply even more bluntly under such an order. This same order also not only picks and chooses who needs to follow the rules and who doesn’t, but it also works only if people are sensitive to the perception of transgression. Americans and English are highly sensitive to being regarded as anti-social and boorish, making the rules easy to enforce against them. Those of African and Middle East descent in the West, by contrast, are far less sensitive to perceptions about their public image (since they’re perpetual victims, after all), so appeals to common culture and good aren’t as effective with them.

Crawford incorporates his own locale - San Jose, California - as an example of how even less tumultuous demographic change, over time, brings with it a whole host of baggage. This is another key difference with France: the impact immigration had in the U.S. was far less abrupt, more of a slow boil, but in the end, it becomes a battle over who gets to make the rules.

Crawford starts by saying that he, like most Americans, doesn’t hate his foreign neighbors and gets along with them quite well, actually. He also speculates on why America’s problems with immigration haven’t been quite as fiery as that of France:

My neighbourhood is mixed and largely Hispanic. I am on good terms with my neighbours. I let the little dog who lives next door shit on my Astroturf lawn because there is nowhere else for it to go (their yard is paved). I live across the street from a tire and suspension shop. The owner, Javier, speaks just enough English that, combined with my paltry Spanish, we can conduct basic transactions. But the guys working for him don’t speak a word of English. This has not been an impediment to good relations. Several of them have done me small favours and expressed their regard for my own automotive projects, which tend to spill out onto the street. I have been known to do the occasional mini-burnout in front of their shop in my hotrod VW. It is probably amusing to them, compared to 30-yard patches of rubber they lay down with their deafening V8s.

The challenges of immigration in the US are quite different from those in France, where a thousand-year-old clash of civilisations has been revived. It is often said that immigrants from Catholic Latin America are culturally on the same page as the West  — not long ago you would hear people on the Right express hope that Latin American immigrants would be a force for cultural conservatism. There is something to this. Most immigrant parents seem morally healthy, relative to the decadent “luxury beliefs” of white progressives in the Bay Area.

You have to wonder, though, if America’s own more welcoming attitude, while allowing for easier assimilation, is also exploited by newcomers, in the end:

But also (and don’t blame me for noticing), extremely loud muscle cars are popular here primarily with Hispanics. It is clearly a macho thing, out of step with the retiring character of progressive white masculinity.

There is certainly an Anglo (or rather, Scots-Irish) version of vehicular nocence, as exemplified by diesel pickup trucks “rolling coal” (that is, deliberately belching clouds of black soot) such as you encounter in the South, where I lived for many years. This is a political gesture. I take such trucks to express a simmering hatred, perhaps tied to fantasies of a Confederate reconquista against the “rich men north of Richmond” and their Prius-driving janissaries. That is, against those viewed as colonisers who prevailed in the War of Northern Aggression (as the American Civil War is sometimes referred to in the South). Like Mr Hudson with his Hellcat, they are applauded by their followers on social media.

But in the South Bay where I live, the cacophony of unmuffled V8s has its own context and meaning. Around Cinco de Mayo (but not only then), you see big Mexican flags flown from vehicles, reminding me of the Confederate flags I would sometimes see flown from trucks in Virginia. You also see a lot of billboards for Modelo beer, which have a consistent theme — they are for the “fighting spirit”. The role model for Anheuser-Busch, on the other hand, is the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney . Unsurprisingly, Modelo has replaced the American brands as the number one selling beer.

The difference between the Hispanics and Scots-Irish is that the latter keep their customs confined to the area of the country where they predominate. Unappealing as their practices may seem, they’re not something you see outside rural areas, either. It seems the Scots-Irish understand where the lines are drawn, whereas the Hispanics don’t, or more likely, are drawing new lines. In that sense, there’s no real assimilation happening; America is just ceding ground. And why not? Unlike France, there’s plenty of it here. But what happens when that ground runs out? Better yet, what happens when the citizenry starts insisting upon basic order, more civilized behavior, and for public spaces to once again become places to congregate, not avoid? Does anyone honestly believe control of those spaces will be given up just as easily as we gave it up?

Crawford’s essay is well worth the complete read. The lesson is that while sharing is something we’re taught as children to be caring, in the real world, it’s a good deed that goes punished. The same with tolerance. Tolerance of belligerent, anti-social behavior never creates a better society. Why would it? To think otherwise is to deny that humans respond to incentives. If you reward bad behavior, what use is good behavior? The safest, most orderly places on the planet all have one thing in common: they don’t indulge bad behavior.

This is all a long way of saying that America’s internal conflict isn’t as much a struggle over identity and values than it is a struggle over whether we even get to be a civilized society or not. It’s less dramatic than France’s problems, but it’s also more fundamental. There’s no “clash of civilizations” here; instead, we have a clash between the rule-followers and rule-breakers, bullies vs. victims, decent vs. assholes, as Matthew Crawford put it. The “Great Replacement” is as big a problem as it is in Europe, but for America, the “Great Destabilization” is the more urgent matter. It’s through the destabilization of society the Regime can fully implement its ideology, to include replacement.

The political dimension isn’t just about anarcho-tyranny, either, as serious of a problem it is. The bigger problem is centralization: anarcho-tyranny wouldn’t be anywhere nearly as pressing an issue if the administrative state didn’t have as much power as it did at all levels of governance. It’s a topic to table for another time, but when you get down to it, most of America’s political conflicts, including the struggles of today, comes down to this singular question of how much power the central government should have, or whether there ought to be a central government at all. It’s a question which goes all the way back to the English Civil War. Compare this once more to France, where the government’s role in daily life is largely something taken for granted, accepted as a fact of life, with the question of what’s the business of government and what’s the business of the private sphere more or less settled by this point.

Perhaps owing to the fact the U.S. is a relatively new country, these are questions we’re still trying to sort out. But the one thread that connects us across the Atlantic is how much deviance, how much dissimilarity, how much of a departure from the norm we can tolerate before it completely undermines civilization. France appears to nearing the answer. The U.S. is still in the middle of finding out.

France Makes Its Choice

As I conclude this piece, extraordinary events have occurred in France. Contrary to the results of the first round, it appears, in the second round, the French Left has defeated the advance of the Right:

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How did the left react to this victory?

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It’s amazing. When they lose, they riot. When they win, they riot. As someone else said in reaction, it’s like no matter what happens, they’re committed to the destruction of their society. But don’t you dare call them unpatriotic!

Once more, this isn’t really the place for political inside baseball (

Rod Dreher

had a great analysis of the election), but I still want to share a few brief thoughts on the outcome.

First, France is well ahead of our own timeline. Despite the differences between us and them, it’s for this reason France serves as an example of what to expect in our politics going forward. One of the reasons why I push back so hard against talk of collapse and “delegitimization” is that regimes, when under fire, fight back. That’s what you saw in France and it’s what you’ll see in America, along with the rest of the West. Anyone who think the Regime is going to simply roll over and die is sorely mistaken and peddling a dangerous fantasy. When you’re at the top, you’re going to fight like hell to stay there. A collapse may still be coming, but that means it’ll make whomever is in charge that much more cunning, that much more lethal.

Second, during times of crisis, people become less radical, more conservative. I don’t mean in an ideological sense - clearly, the radical left were the biggest winners in France - but I mean in the willingness of people to try something new, to defy those in power. Despite everything the left is doing to destroy civilization, it’s at least familiar and predictable, compared to the uncharted waters of the hard right. Nobody’s really as radical as they think they are. Especially in an age where leftist values dominate, people are going to keep giving the leftist establishment every chance to make it right, even if it means enabling the very worst the left has to offer in the process. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, after all.

Third, trend lines, trend lines, trend lines. One of the biggest problems I see when predicting the future, especially on my side, is a total disregard for trends. This is because the trends often stand in contrast to the headlines, which capture moments that interrupt the norm. The results of the French election weren’t that surprising, given that the young people of France still mostly lean left. They lean even more left in the U.S. and UK. This means that whatever your personal conversations or some high-profile stories may lead you to believe, the masses still dictate the outcome. Conventional wisdom used to be that the “silent majority” was friendly to right-wing positions, but I think this has long since ceased to be. This is going to become more so the case as Millennials comprise a plurality of the electorate, Zoomers reach critical mass as a voting bloc beginning in 2028, Xers have peaked in their political impact, and Boomers and older really start fading out. Millennials and Zoomers are the two most leftist cohorts ever: what does that tell you about the future? Don’t get mad at me, this is reality.

Fourth and most important, politics don’t really matter, not as much as one might think. You can change out the leadership all you’d like, but when things have gotten as terminally chaotic as they have, there’s no escaping the inevitable decline. The time for the West as a whole to reverse these trends passed long ago. Nothing is going to reverse these trends in a year or few years. Information travels more quickly these days, but minds don’t change quite as fast. Whatever tumult is on the way is on the way, it’s only a question of how fast it arrives.

Has the Darkness Finally Arrived?

I want to leave you with two separate, but related thoughts from two different people. First:

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This is likely not the last time we’re going to be talking about France. It really is the canary in the coal mine for where the West is headed as a whole. As for the question of where the loyalty of the military lies, it’s an intriguing question. If you want a hint of an answer, check out the aforementioned interview with an active-duty French Army officer from 2021.

Last word is from Dr. Gad Saad, who’s been providing no shortage of wisdom as of late [paragraph breaks added for ease of reading, bold mine]:

I’ve said this before but it's worth repeating: World history is defined by the following simple rule. There are two groups on either side of a river. Each covets various resources from the other group. The only thing that stops a perpetual conflict between the two groups is the realization by each group that the other will respond in equal measure (or worse) if attacked.

Now imagine that the West has decided to throw away this defining dynamic that shapes this fundamental historical reality. Defending what is ours is rooted in our genes; it is a central feature of our human nature.

But the West has said that we are so progressive, so empathetic, so enligteneed that we are not bound by pediastrian biology. Hence, we will not defend our culture; we will not defend our heritage; we will not defend our religion; we will not defend our women; we will not defend our children; we will not defend our values.

According to our Western leaders, only barbarians worry about such defensive concerns. We are open, tolerant, kind, compassionate, welcoming. No amount of evidence can convince us that other groups might do us harm. And hence, we brainwash our children who become our politicians; we rejoice in the rape of our societies because this proves that we are kind.

It is a mixture of what I discussed in The Parasitic Mind and what I’ll be presenting to the world in my next book Suicidal Empathy. I frankly am running out of optimism; I’m bereft of hope. I fight every day at great personal and professional cost. But how can you change anything when your society is hellbent on committing orgiastic suicide?

Really - how do you save someone who doesn’t want to live any longer? It’s a question humanity has never managed to answer.

But what do you think? What are your thoughts on what’s happening in France? What are the similarities between the situation over there and the situation over here? Is France really a canary in the coal mine? Or are France’s problems theirs and theirs alone? What comes next for them? What comes next for us? What are your thoughts on anything else discussed here?

Talk it out in the comments.

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

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