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Politics • Spirituality/Belief • Culture
Tommy the Savage
From Rod Dreher's Diary
August 06, 2024

Tommy The Savage

When Speaking Common Sense Is Outlawed, Only 'Outlaws' Will Dare To Speak It

 
 
Tommy Robinson from documentary ‘Silenced’

Last night I had dinner with a middle-class English couple who are in Budapest for a visit. Friends of a friend. Naturally the conversation quickly turned to the riots in their home country. At one point, I said that I had recently started listening to Tommy Robinson, someone whom I had dismissed earlier as a thug, based on his extensive history of what you might gently call “dodgy behavior.” (Seriously, look it up.)

“Did you watch the Jordan Peterson interview with him?” asked the woman.

“I saw half of it this afternoon,” I replied. “It’s shocking.”

“It is,” she said. Then she went on to say that despite the messiness of Tommy Robinson’s life and record, she supports him because he is more or less the only prominent person who is willing to stand up and say what’s happening in Britain is wrong.

“I am friends with a couple who lost their daughter for a while to a grooming gang,” the woman began. Then she told the story. I noticed that she fought back tears as she gave me the details. At one point, she struggled for words to describe what the Pakistani men had done to this 14 year old girl. The details of the deeds were too much for her to articulate. She stammered finally, “The police had to collect DNA from the child. I hope you understand what I mean.”

I did.

“In the end, the police did nothing,” the woman continued. “The poor parents, my friends, had no idea what to do. There was nowhere to turn, not if the police don’t care.”

By the end of her story, this gentle woman in her late fifties was visibly suppressing rage. I could tell that she is not the sort of person to whom rage comes easily. But there it was, and it was entirely justified by the story she had just told me. I understood perfectly well why a nice, educated, middle-class lady like her would have become a partisan of the rough working-class bruiser from Luton: because all the nice, educated, middle-class people have surrendered to the violent dispossession of the British in their own land.

It turns out that she and her husband are in Budapest looking for ways to migrate here. One of them has Hungarian ancestry, and therefore a way in. I mentioned to them that in his recent Tusvanyos address, PM Viktor Orban said that Hungary can expect a rising inflow of Europeans who want to live in a “Christian national country.”

“That’s us,” said the man.

Yesterday at The European Conservative, I published an interview with my Budapest friend Mark Bollobas, the UK-born son of two refugees from Communism, who in 2010 moved to his parents’ homeland because he saw no prospects for himself in Britain, the country of his birth. Excerpt:

[Mark Bollobas:] … I had enough of an experience in London from before, from the years I spent there studying and working, to know that it’s again a place I really probably couldn’t live as good a life as I can live here in Budapest. That includes everything: safety, public transport, religion, the feeling of culture, a sense of pride in your nation, these are things that have been eroded. So if we look now at the United States, people are not happy with the way America is. If we look at how things are in the UK, there is massive disillusionment, especially among the youth, people looking towards the future going, “Well, how am I going to survive? I just don’t know how to.”

When I was looking, more and more I began to think of Hungary. I thought of Hungary not only because I could go there, as the son of Hungarian immigrants, but also because it’s a nice place, it’s a beautiful place, it’s a kind place. And there are values there that are still important—family values. It was 2010 [the year Viktor Orbán was elected prime minister], and I knew a huge change was coming to Hungary. And I got here before it arrived. For me most of all it was a feeling of coming home, which is strange because I wasn’t born here.

It’s difficult to describe because I wasn’t brought up here, but I always felt at home here. And here, unlike in the UK, where I was always asked where I was from, here in Hungary—well, I’m obviously not from here, and I have a thick accent in Hungarian, but I’m Hungarian. I fit in and I’ve been accepted. I felt then that the U.S. was burning out while I knew in Hungary the best years were ahead of us.

Last but not least, I wanted to get married and start a family, a family based of the values and traditions I hold dear. And for that I knew I needed a Hungarian woman, whom I’m lucky enough to have found.

It is striking to me that you migrated to your ancestral homeland not looking for economic opportunity, but rather for a place that felt like home. This seems to be something that both liberal and conservative elites all over the West cannot comprehend. Why not?

Most people don’t agree with my decision because they are wearing blinders. These blinders, made in the Cold War, tell them that everything east of the former Iron Curtain is terrible, and everything west of it is wonderful. The world is nowhere near like that anymore.

I still find it strange that is a white Christian male who speaks English with a British accent that I was not welcomed into UK society. But now, having lived outside of the borders for a few years, I realize that this is the case with everyone. Either you’re a white European and you go there as a guest worker, or you go there as a person of color from a Middle Eastern country or African country, and you end up living in an atomized community or a ghetto made up of only your countrymen, paid for by the state. 

I think when it comes to the sense of home and how important it is, the West has forgotten that what made the West great was its culture and its traditions. And they came to this from a position of power and wealth and success. They didn’t really need to fight to protect any of these things, because the power that came from economic power did it for them.

But as the world changed and other countries became more wealthy, and in many ways England became more poor, the UK became more poor, this skill of protecting your nation, your culture, your history, taking pride in yourself, it never came back. It never came back. I don’t know whether it’s from the schools, or whether it’s definitely in colleges, because academia is—well, it’s not very pro-British culture in any way. But even among the people it sort of disappeared. The sense of community sort of disappeared. It became much more important to make money, to be a success, to be the person you want to be. To be an individual.

Those are very, very important things to do when you’re in your twenties and thirties. But then you get to a point where you have your career, but you need a family, because family is what life is all about. After you have children, that is your droving force. And we’re now at this appalling stage where we have lots of individual success stories of people who’ve forgotten, and don’t know how, to make time for having a family. Worse yet, they’ve been educated to believe that having a family isn’t important, that you can get as much joy out of work. And that’s just not the case.

This is a really, really, really big problem. I have too many friends aged 35 to 45 who are single and lonely, who want a family, yet don’t have the skills needed to create one. Yet professionally they are all success stories. Worse yet, so many people tie materialism to happiness that when the money gets low—and globally we are all about to experience a recession—this means more and more people will become desperately unhappy as their wallets become lighter, and life becomes harder.

I’m not sure whether Hungarians know something different, I think they didn’t twenty years ago. But through a combination of luck, as well as solid political leadership, we have kept family as the most important goal in life. That’s a huge plus for us. In the early Eighties, Hungary led the world in suicides and alcoholism. And although there was Communism, almost everyone had a side hustle. Or two or three. But that has changed, those times are behind us. Now when I think of the nation that is doing terribly in similar categories, namely drug overdoses and suicides, while pushing a culture of relentless side hustles, the U.S. comes to mind.

I hasten to say that this has nothing to do with why I moved to Hungary. As you’ll recall, it had to do with personal circumstances of my divorce. I also was thrilled to move here because I think what is going on in Hungary politically and intellectually is fascinating, and important to the survival of the West. But I was not and am not alienated from America the way Mark is from Britain, in part because the ideological and cultural situation in the US, for all its problems, is not nearly as dire as in Britain.

Over the course of the evening, we talked about all kinds of things. The woman told wonderful stories about one of her ancestors, a celebrated historian remembered now for work he did to preserve a particular cultural tradition that was fading away (I’m speaking vaguely because I want to protect this couple’s privacy). On the way home last night, I thought about how she spoke with such affectionate pride in her country, and her ancestors, and what they accomplished. This I contrasted with the high emotion she had expressed earlier in the evening, thinking about the suffering of her friends whose daughter was turned for a while into a sex slave of Pakistani men, and how the police did not care to help, and how the British establishment doesn’t care either.

Then it hit me: this woman has been humiliated. Deeply humiliated. She has been humiliated by mass migration. She has been humiliated by the violence some of these migrants bring with them. She has been humiliated by the authorities, who expect people like her simply to suck it up. And she has been humiliated by a ruling class that has for some time been teaching young Britons to hate their country and their people, and to accept that their rightful place in the world is to live as second-class citizens in the land of their ancestors.

If I were her, Tommy Robinson would be my hero.

What a terrible thing, to come to late middle age, and to face the prospect that leaving your home country for a land where you don’t speak the language is possibly the most sensible thing you can do to protect yourself in old age. I mentioned to this couple the interview with Mark Bollobas, the part where Mark said that raising kids in Hungary, it is a blessing not to have to worry that his boys will be taught in school to hate their country and its people, and to think that they (the boys) might actually be girls.

She shot a glance at her husband, whom I had met on his last trip to Hungary. “It’s okay,” he told her. “He’s safe.”

It turns out she is a practicing Christian. She said she can’t understand how it is that even many of her Christian friends now accept transgenderism, not as an allowance society should make out of compassion for people who have gender dysphoria, but as a positive good that should be celebrated. The subtext of her quiet commentary was: so many of my countrymen have lost their minds, and I don’t understand what has happened to us all. That she needed assurance from her husband that it was okay to express skepticism of the trans revolution in private conversation told me something important about what it must be like to be a middle-class Briton today.

I tell you, living in Europe, and seeing more closely what mass migration has done to its countries, and also seeing the flat-out lying (either by commission or omission) done by the ruling classes of these countries (in government, media, academia, and so on), has really opened my eyes. As I’ve told you, over and over I meet people from the UK or western Europe who come to Budapest for a conference or a holiday, and hear them inevitably remark that being here reminds them of their own cities twenty or thirty years ago — before mass migration and the crime and disorder it brings had shredded the fabric of public life.

Last night I told the visiting British couple about a conversation I’d had over wine recently with a young American who had just moved here from Germany for language instruction. He told me that the difference between German cities and Budapest is striking to him. Having lived in Germany for the past two years, he said you just don’t see easygoing life on the streets like you do in Budapest. He marveled at how many people in the Hungarian capital are out and about, sitting (as we were) in a street cafe, or late at night, even young women walking to and from the clubs, not having to worry for their safety. In Germany, by contrast, he said Germans seem to have withdrawn from the public space into private life, to avoid the risk of criminal encounters with migrants or their adult children. This is especially true with German women, who run real risks just living their lives in cities where migrant men are a significant presence. And yet, he said, the Germans have neutered their own sense of self-worth, such that they seem to be under a spell that tells them they deserve what they get. How refreshing it is to be in Budapest, he said.

If you move here, I said to the couple, you will be astonished by how overwhelming, and how effective, the media propaganda is that causes people back home to think of Hungary as some kind of quasi-fascist hellhole. They laughed. The woman said that one of her relatives, hearing that they were off to Hungary for a holiday, said, “Are you going to be okay? That Orban is something of a dictator, isn’t he?”

In the future, historians may look back on this era in Western history and marvel at the psyop the ruling classes used on their nations to render peoples incapable of defending themselves and their own interests. People become self-policing, too, afraid to say commonsense things out of fear of being called evil. Are there any peoples on this earth, outside of the West, who loathe themselves as a people as much as Western liberals and progressives do?

The philosopher Matthew Crawford has a great Substack piece today in which he reveals that the UK government has long employed a psyop strategy to keep the public quiet in the face of violence that could cause them to question the dogma that Diversity Is Our Strength™. Excerpt:

One is not supposed to notice the downsides of mass immigration. In fact, such noticing has to be actively suppressed, and the present civil disorder in Britain reveals a breakdown of the UK government’s longstanding program to psychologically manage its own peoples’ response to demographic upheaval, ethnic conflict and violence.

As it happens, it was at the 2012 Olympics that these techniques were first put in place, in anticipation of a possible terrorist attack. The summer before, there had been riots across the UK that badly spooked the government, and Western leaders were watching the Arab Spring with a view to both the hazards and the opportunities for population control presented by social media. By 2019, the publication Middle East Eye was able to report that the British Home Office prepares for terrorist incidents “by pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks.” The point, of course, is to have candlelit vigils, flowers and impromptu expressions of mutual love between “communities”, rather than riots. This story is worth telling, as it parallels the US government’s re-purposing of information warfare techniques, developed in the War in Terror, for managing internal political dissent.

Read the Crawford piece for details about this operation. He continues:

All this unrest comes in the wake of the Olympic games’ opening ceremony, in which Da Vinci’s Last Supper was repurposed as a grotesquerie of sexual unfortunates, expressing hatred of the normal and healthy disguised as defiant self-love. That is what it means to “queer” this or “queer” that (in the sense made popular by Judith Butler); it is an instinct to attack all that is settled; anything that makes feel people at home in the world. Any sense of a common culture or owned space.

In 2024, the Olympics feel like a “survival” (as the anthropologists would say) that has been turned to the purposes of what right-wingers like to call GloboHomo, that confluence of corporate-state liberationism and replacism. As Machiavelli said, a wise founder-prince will keep up the old forms, emptied of content, to make his “new modes and orders” go down more easily. As my friend Ethan put it to me, the Olympics now serve as “a remnant vector of legitimation to be exploited until it no longer means anything to anyone, just one more instance of the strip-mining of our material and symbolic order for the benefit of whatever higher interests profit, however ephemerally, from the operation.”

I believe some intuition like this, and not just the immediate issue of immigration, lies behind the rage of the Brits.

Yes, this is exactly what I encountered last night in that quiet dinner with the English couple. Migration, Islamic violence, and the hatred the British state has for its own people, dominated the conversation early on, but the bafflement the woman had over how the moral order in which she had been raised had been overthrown, and the new order accepted without protest by otherwise sensible people — this left her angry, confused, and … thinking about leaving her native land, which doesn’t feel like hers anymore.

Here is a 2022 essay that Crawford has ungated, about love of one’s own people. Excerpts:

National character grows among a people from shared experience. They speak the same language and pray to the same gods; their fathers fought in the same wars; their grandmothers tell stories that convey how one ought to feel about familiar things. They are likely to have a persistent stock of nursery rhymes and drinking songs; a repertoire of gestures, subtle facial inflections and emotional tones peculiar to them. Mutually recognizable to one another, they enjoy a form of social wealth that accumulates among inhabitants of some bounded territory that has been inhabited continuously for generations by the same people. Such an inheritance is far from universal; it is enjoyed by peoples who, often for reasons of geographical accident, have been spared conquest, colonization and dispersal long enough to form a nation, for example the “First Nations” of North America (as the indigenous tribes are called in Canada). The word “nation” shares its root with “native” and “natural”, and indeed a nation may claim an autochthonous origin for its ancestors — as though the earth itself, or rather their small part of it, were the original mother or father of their common lineage.

Crawford goes on to talk about how nationalism — political consciousness of oneself as a member of a nation, of a distinct people — is, to modern liberals, the source of all our problems. He quotes here the French political philosopher Pierre Manent describing “humanitarianism” as the successor ideology to Christianity. According to Manent, the cosmopolitan ruling class thinks that:

Peace and unity belong to the natural condition of mankind; its fragmentation into separate political bodies solicitous of their independence is the toxic fountainhead of everything that is wrong in human circumstances. Thus the right thing to do, the worthy enterprise, is to bring about the pacification and unification of humanity through the erasing or weakening of borders, the acceleration of the circulation of goods, services, information, and human beings, the fostering of an ever stronger and wider fellow-feeling among countries and peoples. Accordingly, looking at human things from the perspective of one’s own community — its common good and the peculiar content and quality of its education and way of life — is intrinsically wrong because it amounts to turning one’s back on the rest of mankind. Looking at human things … without the least preference (and even with a tad of healthy dislike) for what is ours — is intrinsically right and “progressive.” [Italics added]

And, conversely, to think and act with preference towards one’s own — that is wrong and regressive. This political psychodrama is why for some time now, the UK’s ruling-class institutions have been psyopping the British people into accepting their own displacement. This is exactly what Renaud Camus means by “the Great Replacement” — not only the replacement by foreign peoples, but the erasure of one’s own culture and history.

One more bit from Crawford:

The rise of populist movements has been fueled by a spreading recognition that this diversitarian turn, both in its moralistic expressions (humanitarianism as described by Manent) and in its material facts (mass immigration above all), is inextricably linked to an oligarchical development. Diversity is Our Strength, yes, but whose exactly? The political economy corresponding to humanitarian moralism and mass immigration is neoliberalism, an explicitly anti-national agenda for the globalization of labor markets, whether by the relocation of jobs to foreign shores or the opening of borders to foreign workers. Humanitarianism has been called “the sentimental justification of inhuman scale.”

Ethnomasochism is no psychological mystery, then. It serves a function among Western peoples as they adjust themselves -- or get adjusted -- to a post-national framework of government and economy. In such a framework, the proprietary pride of the citizen can only interfere. There are to be no citizens, only an undifferentiated mass of “human resources.”

I am reminded of Chapter 17 of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If you’ve read my book Live Not By Lies, you know that I believe we have largely missed the totalitarian aspects of contemporary culture because our idea of totalitarianism has been formed by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, Huxley’s model of a totalitarian dystopia is closer to what we have. It’s a dystopia that achieves total peace not through violent coercion, as in Orwell, but rather by lulling everyone to sleep, symbolically, by promising them a life of constant pleasure and entertainment to drive away anxiety.

You can read the entire text of Brave New World online. Chapter 17 begins on page 99. Here is an excerpt from the dialogue between Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Europe, and “John the Savage,” a dissident who has been raised outside the system, on an Indian reservation, reading nothing but the complete works of William Shakespeare:

[Mond:] "But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning." "You'd have a reason for chastity!" said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words. "But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices."

"But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …"

"My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears — that's what soma is."

The oligarchic Davos class wishes to create a utopia in which there are no nations, no borders, and the frictionless movement of people and capital. George Soros is one of the prime supporters of this vision, but by no means the only one. This is the World Economic Forum’s general view. Recall that at the WEF meeting in January, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said that the No. 1 challenge facing Europe is “disinformation” — which I take her to mean in large part publicizing facts and opinions that challenge the elite worldview.

Viktor Orban has made himself hated by these elites because he has dared to notice what they’re doing, and to oppose it intelligently and effectively. Tommy Robinson is no Viktor Orban for a variety of reasons, but I see in him something similar: that the kind of courage it takes to stand against these powerful consensus-enforcers in the national and international ruling class requires a character that doesn’t always play well with others.

Why does it fall to rough men like Tommy Robinson to say the things that ordinary Britons ought to have been saying in defense of their communities? Answer: because when speaking common sense is outlawed, only outlaws will speak common sense.

Here is a link to the X page where you can watch the Robinson documentary Silenced.

 

It’s well worth seeing. It details a famous case from 2021 in which Jamal, a Syrian refugee teenager, had water poured on his head in a playground incident. It got puffed up into “waterboarding,” and went viral internationally as an example of racist abuse. But it was a sham story. This kid, in fact, was a violent bully. Robinson shows how local authorities compelled teachers and others who knew what happened to sign non-disclosure agreements, and how the media, the judiciary, and the government conspired to silence the truth about the case, even though it destroyed the life of the kid falsely accused of “waterboarding” Jamal.

I think you’d have to have a heart of stone and a head of cheese not to sympathize with Tommy Robinson in all this. Is he a hot mess? You bet. Rough working-class lad. But at least in these matters of urgent justice, in which British people are being made to suffer, are being humiliated, are being dispossessed by foreigners and the actions of their own ruling class, which hates them — well, Robinson is one of the few prominent people in Britain who lives not by lies. You don’t have to agree with his politics, or make him into some kind of saint, in order to respect the hell out of him for speaking what millions know is true, but are too afraid to say.

Remember: When speaking common sense is outlawed, only outlaws will dare to speak common sense.

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Nihilism in our time (More Rod Dreher)
And: Order VS Chaos

Nihilism In Our Time

And: Order Vs Chaos

 
Aug 29, 2025
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Robert “Robin” Westman, failed man

This Minneapolis shooting turns out to be much darker than I realized yesterday, when I first wrote. The killer was quite clearly possessed, I think. I mean that literally. This story from the New York Post details some of his chaotic, anti-Semitic, hateful beliefs, which seem to have no ideological core. His transgenderism seems to have been not so much at the core of his identity, but rather one manifestation of a malignant, radically disordered mind. Here is the 11-minute video he left behind, before the shooting. It is a horrifying glimpse into the mind of a madman.

This page from his journal jumped out at me when I saw it yesterday:

 

The Russian says:

 

Again: possessed.

Let’s not forget the valorization of revenge violence among trannies. Watch this. And look at this:

 

Peter Savodnik takes the measure of this lunatic. He goes through the various “explanations” people have offered, in an attempt to make sense of Westman’s heinous act, and concludes:

All that finger-pointing obscures a deeper point: Westman seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truthjustice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed.

Nihilism is not some obscure academic notion. It stretches back to the 19th century—early Russian radicals were called nihilists—and it has waxed and waned across the past 150 years. Today, you can feel the nihilist impulse coursing through America, which has been mostly stripped of its faith and a shared national culture and has seen once-great institutions—universities, corporations, churches, nonprofit organizations, the media, the military—become engulfed in scandal and politicization.

It is an understatement to say America is struggling to infuse young Americans with a sense of purpose.

Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.

If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves.

If we are dealing with true nihilism, then we are all in for a hell of a ride. There’s no way to counter people who want to murder and cause havoc simply for the pleasure of doing it. Last week at the Midwestuary, I heard lots of talk about the spread of nihilism among young American males. This is the far fringe of victims of the Meaning Crisis. Max Remington texted me overnight:

America's Years of Lead are going to be driven by this kind of nihilistic violence by people of all ages. America has so many lone wolves, I wouldn't rule out the possibility it could collapse the country, honestly.

I don’t know the extent of this problem in the US, nor do I know if Europe has a similar problem. But see, this is the kind of thing that David Betz is talking about when he raises the prospect of “civil war”. It will almost certainly not be anything well-organized, he says, but rather random acts of killing, violence, and sundry mayhem, committed by people with different motives, or no motive at all other than destroying a society that they believe has failed them.

The great contemporary literary critic Gary Saul Morson explains the nature of 19th century Russian nihilism, which is not the same thing as what Robin Westman might have instantiated. Excerpt:

“Nihilist” and “nihilism”—terms typically attributed to novelist Ivan Turgenev—originally referred to a group that arose in Russia around 1860. Today we often call people nihilistic if they extend no hope that conditions can improve. Unqualified pessimists, they regard all grounds for optimism as illusory. We also use the term “nihilism” to describe extreme relativism about the bases of human knowledge. Science, in this view, is just another ideology, based, like all ideologies, on the interests of a ruling class. Accepted knowledge is nothing more than power made into a philosophy justifying it. This kind of nihilism often interprets various philosophers—Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Feyerabend, and others—as justifying the claim that one can build on no certain “foundations.”

Neither understanding of nihilism applies to the original Russian nihilists. Far from despairing, they believed that they knew just how to build the perfect society, which, they also held, could be realized in a few years. Regarding “science” as a set of infallible (and mostly metaphysical) dogmas, they deemed their favored social theories scientific and therefore utterly beyond doubt. As their critics observed, these science worshippers missed the whole point of science, openness to contrary evidence.

The group’s leader, Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), exercised immense influence. His utopian fiction, What Is to Be Done? (1863)—the question was anything but rhetorical—became the most widely read book among the intelligentsia before the Revolution. Lenin credited it with making him a revolutionary, and the Soviets hailed Chernyshevsky as a thinker in the same league as Marx and Engels. Tolstoy, on the other hand, referred to him as “that gentleman who stinks of bedbugs,” a loathsome figure who has persuaded his followers that “to be outraged, bilious, and spiteful is a commendable thing.”

In his novel Demons (sometimes translated in English as The Possessed), Dostoevsky illustrates and condemns the nihilism popular among young people of his era. His character Verkhovensky is a political nihilist, aiming to disrupt society for the sake of creating a utopian future. By contrast, Stavrogin is an existential nihilist, who truly believes life has no meaning, and who lives to channel his despair into destruction.

I have this sense that we are living in a culture accelerating towards a general calamity. Recall that when an audience member in a screening of Live Not By Lies asked me earlier this year if I thought the threat of soft totalitarianism was waning because Trump is in power, and pushing back on woke, I said no. All the conditions that Arendt identified as conducive to totalitarianism are still very much with us: mass loneliness and alienation, a loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies, a love of transgression for its own sake, a willingness to believe that “truth” is whatever satisfies one’s desires, and so forth.

We know very well where wokeness take us. I am particularly aware of how wokeness validated racial identity, and privileging racial identity. The right-wing version is now emerging ferociously. The very right-wing demons I warned many years ago that wokeness was summoning are now here. God only knows how this ends. I’ve always had a superstitious belief that the Jews are a canary in the coal mine of society: that anti-Semitism is a sure sign that a society is giving itself over to radical evil. Now we see that rising on both the Left and the Right.

Last night in Rome I was at a social event with some people from all over Europe. A couple of British interlocutors expressed extreme worry for their country. There’s the migrant crisis, of course, but also the economic crisis, about which I knew little. They talked about how the cost of living is becoming unsustainable, and how the government is barreling towards a fiscal Armageddon. Last week, the Telegraph reported that the government might be forced to appeal to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. If that happens, my British interlocutors said, there’s a very good chance that the IMF simply will not have the funds to cover Britain’s debts. And if it does, the IMF will demand radical reforms, including either the slashing of pensions, the gutting of the National Health Service, or both. These are moves that the Labour government cannot politically do. So … what, then?

Britain is a post-Christian society. What holds it together, and prevents it from descending into chaos and violence should the economy collapse, particularly at a time of increasing racial and religious tension?

Notice that after Nigel Farage’s deportation speech, Reform has surged in popularity to the point that it has more support than the Tories and Labour combined! Has that kind of thing ever happened?

 

What if the same fiscal disaster happens to France, which is facing its own fast-approaching day of fiscal reckoning? Francois Bayrou, the prime minister, will have to resign in the days to come over the budget impasse. He appeared on French TV this week to say bluntly that the core problem is the Boomers’ pensions, which are politically untouchable.

I also talked to a German woman, who said that her own country is headed towards fiscal disaster. She told me that she used to fear and loathe the AfD (Alternative For Germany), but after seeing how extreme the German establishment has been in trying to crush the AfD, she now sympathizes with them. A German man earlier in the evening told me the same thing.

A German court has banned an AfD candidate for running for mayor in a German city. You’ll never guess why:

The exclusion began when incumbent Mayor Jutta Steinruck (formerly SPD) contacted the SPD-controlled Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Interior, requesting information about AfD candidate Joachim Paul from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The SPD-led ministry had already made headlines by announcing that civil servants expressing sympathy for the AfD would be excluded from state positions.

The resulting 11-page report claimed “good reasons to doubt Paul’s loyalty to the constitution,” citing:

  • A photograph: Paul posted an Instagram photo of himself with Austrian activist Martin Sellner, who was banned from Germany for advocating the deportation of migrants, including those with citizenship who fail to “sufficiently assimilate.”

  • The concept of “remigration”: Paul gave a November 2023 lecture titled “Immigration: A Matter of Destiny—Why Remigration is Necessary and Feasible.”

  • Literary references: A 2022 article by Paul in the Austrian magazine Freilich referenced Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, stating, “Tolkien’s entire work reflects a conservative mindset of particular value to contemporary conservatism … The protagonists fight for a cause greater than themselves: their homeland, the survival of their culture, a just order, the defense against a global threat.”

  • Cultural interests: Paul’s appreciation for Wagner’s Nibelungenlied, which the report claims holds significance for him in terms of “national pride.” The report notes he offers video seminars on the medieval epic.

For Germany’s liberal and cultural left, all of this undoubtedly smacks of “Nazi.” But in a democracy, the question of what to make of Paul’s ideas and associations should have been left to the public. Paul might not have won—some polls didn’t favor him despite the AfD’s strong February performance in the region, where it came a very narrow first with 24.3%. But the establishment wanted to take no risks, knowing full well they have lost the public struggle on migration and national values.

The dude likes Tolkien and Wagner. Clearly a Nazi!

Meanwhile, the Chief Imam of Ireland would like you to know that it was sad that an asylum seeker raped a Dutch woman and later murdered a Dutch girl the other day, but society is also to blame for :::checks notes::: not telling him that rape and murder is wrong:

 

Poor marginalized asylum seeker. How was he to know it was wrong to rape women and murder them?

Somehow, I think the Irish, like many other Europeans, are in no mood to be talked to like this.

‘We Murder To Dissect’ — Wordsworth

A great visual representation of the Medieval versus the Modern:

 
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Another Day, Another Killer Tranny (From Rod Dreher's Substack)
And: Europe's Dimming Lights; 'Meno-Divorce'; Cosmopolitan Reactionaries

Another Day, Another Killer Tranny

And: Europe's Dimming Lights; 'Meno-Divorce'; Cosmopolitan Reactionaries

 
Aug 28, 2025
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In Minnesota — designated in law by Gov. Tim Walz as a “trans refuge state” — tranny berserker shot up a Catholic church full of children — children! — at mass. Does it get any more demonic than that? That photo above is from a video he posted before massacring the kids.

His mother used to work at the school. The shooter had once attended there. Earlier, Mom had signed off on her son changing his name to reflect his chosen female identity.

 

Notice the rifle superimposed on the LGBT omniflag, with the slogan “defend equality.”

I wonder how the Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, photographed below, feels today:

 

She probably feels no different than she feels yesterday. I woke up in Rome this morning seeing social media full of liberals and talking heads blaming Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and others for asking for prayers for the :::checks notes::: Catholic children shot and killed while at prayer! That, and urging people not to blame transgenderism, on account, I guess, of transgenderism being a religion of peace, or the usual bullshit.

I’m with Wes Yang:

 
 

You will recall that the Covenant School shooting in Nashville was also carried out by a female-to-male tranny who had once studied there. I have a friend who was part of the Covenant community. The devastation of that evil event on the lives of the parents of kids there is unspeakable.

Transgenderism is a form of mental illness. People with gender dysphoria need compassionate psychiatric help. What they don’t need is the “affirmation” that our sick culture gives them.

Note too that in the killer’s video, he wrote on one gun “Kill Donald Trump.” ABC News reported that he had “the name of President Trump written on one of the guns.” True, but misleading: HE WANTED TO MURDER THE PRESIDENT. One might suppose from the news reporter’s description that the killer was a Trump supporter.

I am beyond done with these people and their apologists, especially among media and liberal politicians. I want normality back.

Europe’s Dimming Lights

 

In other news about the cost of false compassion and sentimental humanitarianism, I was out for dinner in Rome last night. I met some old friends and new at my table, folks from all over Europe. We talked about politics for a while. All around the table, little to no confidence in their governments. Disgust with migrant and Muslim crime. Fear that civil war is ultimately coming, because people’s backs are against the wall.

A German at the table found out I live in Budapest. He had great things to say about Hungary, which he had recently visited. “Before I left, all my German friends told me to be careful in Viktor Orban’s country,” he said. “They were seriously worried. But then I got there, and it’s nothing like they think.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “we see that a lot. Older western Europeans usually end up saying that Budapest today is the Europe they remember from thirty years ago, in terms of safety and order.”

The German, who was on the younger side, said it really does make a big contrast with his country. (Remember, this is Germany we’re talking about, the land where nobody crosses the street against the light.) I told him about an American graduate student studying in Germany, whom I met last summer in Budapest. The American was shocked by how free and open nightlife is in Budapest, with the street cafes full.

I said, “He told me that back in Germany, German people are withdrawing from going out on the weekends, because they are scared of migrant violence.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said the German, sadly.

Similar stories around the table from all over Europe. How much longer can these people stand it?

In UnHerd, the distinguished German columnist Wolfgang Munchau delivers a despairing verdict on his continent. Excerpts:

If you’ve read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, you’ll immediately recognise what happened to the Europeans last month. They went into the Total Perspective Vortex. This is a torture device designed by a mad scientist which reveals your insignificance in comparison with the rest of the universe. Almost all who enter are annihilated. That understanding is just too terrible to survive.

More:

I have been a pro-European all my life. But a Europe of coordinated subservience is not one worth having. The whole idea of European integration was to address collective action problems. The EU no longer does that.

Instead, it set out on a path of no return. This has led it a place of low growth, high debt, and a lack of political majorities that support change. Large and increasing portions of European citizens live off welfare. They have no interest in reforms that will invariably lead to a cut in their income. Demography plays havoc with democracy. In Germany, for example, I cannot identify a single political party with a coherent agenda for reform. In the UK, too, there is not one political party that has given serious thought to a post-Brexit economic model. In their decline, European countries are astonishingly similar. The UK, France and Germany are all currently discussing wealth and property taxes as a last and desperate measure. If, and when, this is implemented, they will end up with even less growth. They are running out of ideas.

I hate this. As an American who loves Europe, I want Europe to succeed. It cannot and will not, not with the mindset and the leadership it has today.

‘Meno-Divorce’

 

A reader sends this infuriating story about women who hit menopause, and decide they’ve had it with their husbands. Excerpts:

Melissa McClure's husband asked if it was a midlife crisis.

No, she told him: "I’m wide awake to the possibility of what my life can be, and it doesn’t include you.”

McClure wasn’t sleeping well. She had hot flashes. Her husband’s loud chewing sent her into a rage. His negative attitude bothered her, and she no longer felt appreciated as a wife and stepmother.

They had been together for 14 years, but perimenopause made her realize she wanted a divorce.

“We spend our entire adult lives taking care of our husbands or partners and children. We give so much of ourselves to other people as nurturers that we lose ourselves in the process,” says the photographer, 44. “It wasn’t a midlife crisis but an awakening.”

Do I want a divorce or is this menopause? It’s a question resonating with women in midlife, when hormones are changing as their stress is increasing – kids moving out and parents moving in and careers often at their peak.

Though divorce rates overall are dropping, divorce among adults 50 and older is increasing. In 1990, almost 1 in 10 of all divorces in the United States were among adults 50 and older. By 2019, that percentage had grown to almost 1 in 4, according to a study by Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research. That coincides with a time most women go through perimenopause and menopause.

The "menodivorce" is on the rise.

(I feel it necessary to state here that this had nothing at all to do with my own divorce. So please do not jump to a false conclusion.)

As the reader who sent this to me commented:

The poor schmucks they were married to? Of course none of them are interviewed; they don't factor at all into this tale of women's liberation. It's all about how SHE ditched HIM to find her TRUE SELF - his feelings, the kids' feelings be damned.

While granting that there are certainly situations in which people 50+ are better off divorced, all I can say is I hope the "I gotta be ME!" ladies in this article find themselves abandoned at Thanksgiving by their children and alone at age 80, depending on some hired hand to help them out of bed in the mornings.

Into The Hawleyverse

 

A reader writes:

I don't know if you are a fan of Noah Hawley, but you might look into his shows. He's tapping into a number of the themes you write about, albeit from a secular perspective.

Hawley is the showrunner for the television series Fargo, and currently, Alien: Earth. As I have been watching new Alien:Earth episodes, I was reminded about this Reddit thread about seemingly human characters that are implied to be supernatural: about https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterTropes/comments/1mxewel/comment/na5pgk2/.

The comment thread refers to Hawley's television series, Fargo, and correctly points out that there's at least one character in each season who represents some sort of supernatural (usually evil) force. The Fargo series, if you don't know, generally refers to and expands upon the Cohen brothers' body of work. It isn't trying to be a reboot of the film. Each season is its own story, with characters and themes that are in conversation with the Fargo movie, but also the entirety of the Cohens' oeuvre.

This supernatural character is a common feature in Cohen movies; many have one or more characters with otherworldly qualities, meant to embody Satan or evil (Anton Chigurh in No Country, Sheriff Cooley in O' Brother) or good (Sam Elliott in Big Lebowski).

As noted in the Reddit thread, every season of Hawley's Fargo series has at least one such supernatural character, who is heavily implied to be an angel or a demon or some kind of pagan god.

Throw in some UFOs in Season 2, and we are in Diana Pasulka territory.

We are also in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy territory, where angels and demons are extrademensional beings, and where the Greek and Roman gods are actually good or evil beings that are servants of God (Mars and Venus) or fallen angels. I assume Hawley and the Cohen brothers don't use Lewis as a source, but their work reflects his ideas.

Which brings me to Alien: Earth. This is Hawley's newest series, currently streaming. I've seen most of the earlier Alien movies, and am enjoying the series, but what struck me recently is that in almost every Alien movie, and in this series, there is also usually a character that seemingly represents otherworldly, supernatural powers of good or evil. And these characters are not the murderous alien species, the Xenomorphs. The big baddies are usually the "synths," which are man-created androids. In the movies, the synths are almost always the reason that the Aliens are able to kill the humans. Especially, there is a synth played by Michael Fassbender called David, who is the Anton Chigurh of the Alien universe - a relentless and supernatural embodiment of evil. But David is an AI robot created by humans.

Anyway, this again reminded me of your and Paul Kingsnorth's writings about AI, especially the Basilisk, and your recent newsletters about ChatGPT. This, also, echoes That Hideous Strength, where the new technology is really just a mask for the demonic (and has to be defeated by the old powers of Merlin, pressed into service by the Christian God).

Even though the Cohen brothers are not Christian, I've always found their work to be brimming with Christian themes, and to reflect the kind of sensibility that you, Lewis, and Kingsnorth write about. Perhaps some of that is owing to their Eastern European Jewish ancestry. And Noah Hawley is picking that up, and also echoing Lewis (and you), probably without trying to. What this tells me, is that these ideas are swimming around in the zeitgeist - aliens and robots and angels and demons. But really just a return of the old gods, and the battle of good versus evil in an enchanted world.

This is all news to me. Thoughts, readers?

Ed West: Cosmopolitan Reactionary

 

The excellent Substacker Ed West writes about how travel is correlated with becoming more liberal, but he, a frequent traveler, becomes more conservative the more he sees of the world. Excerpts:

There are plenty of cosmopolitan reactionaries out there: I’m probably one, maybe you are, too. For one thing, many conservatives rightly argue that visiting non-western countries brings home how unique our own society and culture is, how unlike the rest of the world. It also illustrates how fragile our own inheritance is.

Although Sri Lanka was filled with gorgeous scenery and wildlife, none of this would make for an enjoyable experience were it not for the immense kindness of the people, gentle, civilised and welcoming.

He goes on to talk about how beneath the pleasant surface, Sri Lanka is a country mired in violence, and ethnic and religious conflict.

More:

One might even say that travelling had reaffirmed my prejudices, but I do wish that policy makers, politicians and commentators alike, read more history beyond Europe in the 1930s or America in the 1960s. Many universalist beliefs rest on a strange lack of curiosity about the world, a parochial cosmopolitanism that ignores how unusual our own political stability is, and contingent.

On the other hand, travel can also open one’s eyes to how far our own country has fallen, compared to those which employ policies regarded as ‘extreme’. A visit to Japan can make us recognise that we don’t need to accept such levels of squalor or crime, even if that country is far from perfect (it’s dying, to be frank). Closer awareness of China, even further from being perfect, suggests that diversity might not be a sign of flourishing globalisation but rather the symptom of an empire in decline.

One added reason for the growing agitation over quality-of-life crimes is that more young Britons are visiting Dubai, which has recorded robbery rates about one-hundredth the level of London. After growing accustomed to not thinking about theft, or taking a metro without being harassed by drug addicts, it’s incredibly depressing and rage-inducing to have to turn on alert mode again. The spell of defeatism, that this is an inevitable part of modern living because it’s like that everywhere, comes to wear away with more foreign travel beyond the west.

I write in this space a lot about Europe’s problems with migration and crime. That said, every time I visit America — my home country, a country I love, and a country to which I plan to return one day — I am aware of how much better the quality of life is here in Europe. I’m not just talking about better food. The thing that always hits me about American life is how fast everything moves. That, and how car-centric everything is. Yeah, the car thing is not exactly news, but when you get used to living in a city where everywhere you want to go is walkable, or accessible by excellent public transportation, you come to value it.

Mind you, I’m spoiled, living in Budapest; my friends in Paris, for example, don’t like taking the metro anymore, because all that migrant diversity has made it more dangerous. In fact, importing to many non-Westerners has made European cities more cosmopolitan, in a trivial sense, but also much less livable. I was born in 1967. Over the course of my lifetime, London has gone from being around 90 percent white British to today, being 36 percent white British. It is the capital of Britain, but most people who live there today are not of British heritage. Isn’t that incredible?

Budapest has migrants, but it remains an overwhelmingly Hungarian city. When you visit Budapest, you know that you are in the capital of the Magyars. I like that. And if they ask me, an American, to depart to keep their capital more Magyar, well, good on them. Traveling within Europe, and seeing what mass migration has done to great European cities, makes me more reactionary. I don’t want Budapest to be like every other blob city in the world. What sort of person wants cities and nations to surrender their particularity for the sake of some sort of abstract ideal of “diversity”? It’s crazy.

I remind you that Renaud Camus says the ethnic dimension of the Great Replacement could only have happened because the country’s elites decided first that their native, traditional culture, with its shared history and habits, were a Bad Thing that needed to be dissolved. A people who know who they are, and who value their literature, music, art, and culture, will not surrender it. The elites had to first dislodge the culture that was there, in part by demonizing it as nothing more than racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, and the rest, and replace it with the soulless managerial liberalism and superficial cosmopolitanism represented by Brussels and the EU. Last time I was in Brussels, the strongest impressions I had about the city was that it was home to a bunch of Europeans who are fanatical about LGBT, and a bunch of Muslims who have no intention of integrating. The only thing really European-feeling about it was the architecture and the beer.

I’m a Cosmopolitan Reactionary precisely because I love Europe, I want it to remain Europe, and I realize how very, very hard it was for Europe to become Europe, over many centuries of suffering and struggle. And they’re throwing it all away, chasing a corrupt dream of sentimental liberalism. All those people from outside the West they’re letting in are escaping dysfunctional cultures, but many of them bring the same cultures that made their own native countries undesirable. What good does that do Europe?

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Cincinnati - Crickets in the news
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Cincinnati And Our Civilization's Future

At What Point Will We Take This Kind Of Thing Seriously? Before It's Too Late?

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Cincinnati, last weekend, knocked out by a black man’s punch

Heavy stuff today. Back in Budapest after a week in Transylvania, and I had some depressing conversations with some fellow foreigners at the end. I almost didn’t want to bring this up, because it’s just so awful to contemplate. But to turn away is morally irresponsible, and eventually we’re going to have to deal with it all anyway. These are the stories of our times. If you want to skip today, no harm, no foul. I feel like I’m being dragged to conclusions that I find hateful, but increasingly unavoidable.

I’m going to begin with a story I became aware of this weekend. But it touches exactly on the topic of an intense conversation with a young American conservative I met at the festival down there — a Christian who seemed to be as concerned about this stuff as I was, though less visibly shocked, because he’s been living in it.

The photo above is of a white woman in Cincinnati, the hometown of J.D. Vance when he’s not in Washington. On Friday night, she and a white male companion were assaulted by a mob of blacks at the Cincinnati Jazz Festival. Here is a link to a video of the assault, in which both black men and women participated in the pile-on. The white woman prone on the ground is shown on the video being punched in the face by a black man. The reason we have this video is a black onlooker (you can tell by his off-camera accent) filmed it with pleasure. He didn’t try to help. He just observed.

It went viral over the weekend online. The Cincy police chief condemned the attack on Saturday. Have you heard about this racist assault anywhere but online? Probably not.

  

The black conservative media personality Jason Whitlock linked to a video of one of the attacks, and said:

When you're at church today or in your secret place, say a prayer for this man and his wife. This behavior and lack of national outrage are unsustainable. It's unsustainable. The anti-white bigotry at the root of this behavior must be addressed. Sickening.

God bless Jason Whitlock! But of course our national media prefer us not to notice. Noticing is bad. If a white mob had done this to a black couple, it would still be making headlines, and our media would have been calling for a National Conversation. We all know this. We all know that we live under a double standard.

Speaking of, did you hear back in 2020, the Year of St. Floyd, about the black folks in Georgia who bought land to create a blacks-only enclave, to be safe from whites? CNN was among the many media orgs that covered it:

  

From the story:

The unrest that took hold of the country earlier this year after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, and closer to home, the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery while jogging outside Brunswick, Georgia, prompted the women to search for a new community, one they could start themselves.

“Watching our people protesting in the streets, while it is important, and I want people to stay out in the streets, bringing attention to the injustices of Black people. We needed to create a space and a place where we could be a village, again, a tribe, again,” Scott said.

Personally, I don’t care if black folks want to do that. It’s a free country, and as long as people who aren’t black are not forbidden by law from settling there, I’ll defend this kind of thing in principle. People wanting to live around people like themselves is natural. It’s why political scientist Robert Putnam found, to his great distress as a liberal, that the more diverse a community is, the less social trust there is. It has to do with human nature, and, if you like, evolution. We are hard-wired to be more trusting when our neighbors are like us. It’s not just a race thing. If I were Muslim, I would be more at ease living in a Muslim neighborhood than in one in which I was a religious minority (and that’s why I am not bothered by news of Muslims in Texas doing this, as long as there is no evidence of criminal activity, e.g., terrorism, going on there). Heck, I would feel more at ease living in a middle-class neighborhood in which I, as a white man, was a minority, than I would living in an all-white neighborhood that was poor and violent. Be honest: so would you.

The point I’m making here is that when blacks sought to build a racially exclusive enclave, it was a cause of celebration in the media.

Now, though, a group of whites who have established a whites-only community in Arkansas have become the target of a state AG investigation. Story here, from MSNBC. Quote:

Group co-founder Eric Orwoll recently garnered national attention for the segregated community he helped launch on roughly 150 acres in northeast Arkansas. And he garnered more attention this week after revealing that his group might launch a community in Springfield, Missouri, with his self-expressed motive basically amounting to racist, anti-diversity hysteria.

“Whites should have the ability to live among their own people if that’s what they want to do, and mass immigration is quickly making that nearly impossible in many Western nations,” Orwoll told KOLR-TV, the CBS affiliate in Springfield. “If individuals decide to live in multiracial communities, then they should be allowed to do so, but we don’t want racial forced on us in every aspect of life.”

Now, if these people are white supremacists, then I think they are wicked, and should repent of their race hatred. And if there is any potential criminal activity going on there, hell yeah the state should investigate. These do not sound like the kind of people I would want to live around.

But tell me, what is the philosophical difference between black folks wanting to build a private community to live around other black folks, for the sake of their own safety and comfort, and whites doing the same? This tweet:

  

I don’t know how much you American readers see of what’s going on in the UK (probably not much, unless you read X), but British authorities are actually harassing white English people for expressing pride in being English, no matter how innocent (e.g., flying the St. George’s flag, the standard of the English nation). Here’s a tweet from a patriotic British Sikh who holds the St. George flag high outside a migrant hotel, to stand up for England, which he believes is being betrayed by UK authorities letting in so many migrants. Britain is a sick, sick society, led by elites who hate it.

Why do I bring all this up today? Because at the festival, I found myself in conversation with a fellow American visitor, a conservative in his early thirties. I asked him if he followed the work of David Betz, the UK war studies professor who has been sounding the alarm all year over the mounting prospects for civil war in the West. I asked him if he had seen the latest interview Betz did with Harrison Pitt of the European ConservativeHe had not, but he said he agrees with the things I quoted Betz as saying. In this segment of the interview, Betz points out that the older elites — even Nigel Farage who (falsely, in Betz’s view) appears to be a counter-elitist — really don’t understand what’s going on at “the thwarted younger elite level, who have become effectively anti-status quo.”

Betz explains that the young feel that the things they have a right to expect from society are being denied to them. This is called the “expectation gap,” and the literature of civil war and unrest identifies this as key to revolutions and suchlike. (This is true; revolutionaries tend not to come from the poor, but from elites who are sick of the expectation gap. For example, the Bolshevik revolutionary leaders were not from the poor, but from educated classes. The poor were passive supporters.)

And in this clip, Betz observes that the mainstream conservative political and media figures find themselves tongue-tied when it comes to standing up for their own people. He says he doesn’t know them personally, but he suspects that this has to do with their fear of losing status within the system by appearing to be “nativist”. This, says Betz, is why the young don’t listen to them. They find them to be cowardly about facing the world as it is in Britain today, and speaking truth, and having “the conversations we need to have.”

Talking about the UK situation, Betz says that the country’s elites have created this situation over the years. Now both sides “want to fight.” Listening to this, I thought about how the Democratic Party in the US, and the liberal elites (media, academic, corporate), have for a very long time driven racial and ethnic resentment, and have depended (successfully!) on the deep reticence of whites, outside of the social fringes, to object. That has begun to change with Trump — who, let’s be clear, does not talk in parallel terms about privileging whites as the way the Left has talked about privileging non-whites, but rather speaks of a return to basic fairness. This, I think, is why he draws support from a significant number of non-whites.

(Before I get to my main point, I want to tell you that Betz says that if things kick off in the UK, the British Army is too small to quell the violence — and that the loyalty of the army to the state’s orders to suppress Britons fighting a system they find unjust is very much at issue. This is extraordinary! Betz says that the history of these conflicts show that if an army loses faith that the civilian elites are “competent” and trustworthy, then they are likely to fail to defend that elite and the order it has created.)

So, what does this have to do with the conversation I had with the young American? He told me that my generation of conservatives (Gen X), the Boomers, and many Millennials are mostly or even entirely out of touch with what’s actually happening among the young. He told me that white right-wing educated people are giving up entirely on the idea that we can rescue the old classically liberal order. What he was talking about is a recovery of the old MLK “content of your character” standard, on which I was raise, and in which I still believe. His argument — and to be clear, I don’t know to what extent this young man was describing the world, and to what extent he’s endorsing it — is that they no longer believe it works, or that it can work anymore.

I told him that in the 1970s, I was of a generation of Americans acculturated to the MLK standard — and that I celebrate that, in particular because I come from a part of America where white supremacy reigned. White supremacy is un-American, and certainly un-Christian. King’s victory was a great moral victory for the entire nation. But starting around the 1990s, the Left began to give up on King’s vision, despite lying about it. The Left, which controls and has controlled all the cultural institutions, has spent almost a generation dismantling loyalty to King’s classically liberal, deeply Christian principles, and instead embracing frankly wicked racialist rhetoric that cannot do anything but divide and create racial hatred. And the establishment Right has been largely ineffective in resisting it — probably, as Betz says of the UK Right, because they are too afraid of losing status within the establishment by opening themselves to being called bigots. (Same thing on LGBT issues, by the way.)

But here’s the painful thing for me, that I realized sharply in this discussion: I too have lost faith in the King vision — not in principle, but as an ideal that America is capable of living by. And it’s not merely a matter of elite rhetoric. It has more to do with crime and culture. Let me explain.

I told the young man that right-minded people of the Boomer generation, and mine, generally believed that the reason for black poverty and crime was chiefly racist laws. Remove those laws, and things would normalize for black Americans. We have had fifty years to test this theory. The results are mostly negative — I say “mostly” because there has developed a robust black middle class. But far too many American blacks live in a separate America — and I think at this point, it is primarily a matter of deep culture.

In the US, blacks are 13 percent of the overall population. Yet from year to year, they account for just over half of the arrests for murder; the numbers are similarly disproportionate for other violent crimes. You can find out more on the FBI’s crime data site. For example, here’s robbery for 2023:

  

Again, blacks are only 13 percent of the population, and whites almost 60 percent. Yet blacks, though almost five times fewer in number than whites, commit twice the robberies. Why?

Here are the FBI numbers for aggravated assault:

  

Again, the black 13 percent of the population commits roughly the same number of aggravated assaults as the white 60 percent. Why?

These are not new questions, obviously, though they have become a lot more “real” with the spread of smartphone cameras and the Internet. We can see every day things like blacks shoplifting; this new one shows a little black kid being caught shoplifting, and when the clerk asks the kid’s mother to bring him back to pay for the thing he’s walking out with, she gets hostile and profane. Most white people avoid confrontation. You never know when it might get violent. They just endure it.

Yeah, I know: the algorithm promotes this kind of thing. But you know, there’s a reason now you can’t go to the drugstore in many parts of the US and buy things like razors without having to ask a clerk to unlock the bin. And, as I’ve mentioned here recently, back in 2012, when naive me asked a supermarket chain executive how he could justify the “food deserts” in poor black neighborhoods, he told me that the shoplifting is so bad in those places that they can’t afford to keep supermarkets (a low-margin business) open there.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a matter of “black skin makes you a criminal”. You want to see a white Appalachian family whose familial culture is criminal and self-destructive? I present to you the fascinating documentary about the White family (seriously) of West Virginia, who are known to their county as violent white trash — and the documentary shows why.

I think this is a matter of a defective culture. But — and this is the point — I am weary of trying to figure this out. I just want to live in peace. And I’m tired of being gaslit about this stuff by our media and politicians. Well, the young conservative festivalgoer I met said that in his generation, conservatives are openly embracing racist-tribalist views. They unashamedly — at least among themselves — talk of avoiding black people, because they don’t want the hassle of risking crime and all the rest. They look at older folks like me, with our MLK ideals (as attenuated as mine may be by this point), and consider us suckers. His discourse reminded me of the conversation I had in New York City earlier this year with a young woman — I’d say late twenties — who told me she had been a super-woke activist, until she was violently assaulted by a black man who lived in the projects near her University of Chicago dorm. She said that trauma drove her briefly into the racist far right, until she recovered her moral balance.

The point she was making to me was that many in her generation have lost the willingness to defer to the kinds of ideals my generation, and the Boomers, embraced. That’s what the festivalgoer I talked with was saying too, and trying to get me to see. And you know, I think a lot of it is the “expectations gap” that David Betz is talking about. They have grown up in a culture in which they cannot expect to achieve the level of material success of their parents’ generation. This is because of a variety of reasons, including structural-economic and technological, but it is what it is. And in this era of diminished expectations, they are sick of being told that they have to accept less solely because of their race or sex, because justice requires it.

Mind you, this was a friendly conversation. My interlocutor was calmly trying to tell me why his generation of educated people on the Right — tomorrow’s elites — is a lot more radical than my generation can comprehend, and why. He told me that the “civil war” thesis is not even controversial among his generation. They expect it, in America. Later, at the airport in Tirgu Mares, I ran into a young French scholar who had also been at the festival. I asked him about whether he expected civil war, in the Betz sense, in France. He didn’t flinch: “Yes,” he said, “and it might be better to get this over with sooner rather than later.”

Waiting for the delayed flight, I reflected, as I often do, on historian Edward Watts’s great book The Final Pagan Generation. As you might recall, it’s a book about pagan elites in fourth-century Rome, and how so few of them actually understood what was happening around them, with the Christian revolution. Based on their writings, Watts demonstrates that they were aware that these people called Christians had come into existence, and were growing in numbers within the Empire, but they had no real awareness that the Empire was moving to Christianity. As elites, they lived in a social bubble. They thought that because Rome had always been pagan, it always would be. Were the temples not open? Were we not still celebrating the pagan festivals?

They did not see it coming. But, Watts points out, their young did. The children of the Roman pagan elites — a generation that came of age in the 360s and 370s — were not willing to embrace their parents’ values. And they understood — as the pagan elite faithful of their generation also understood — that the peace could not hold. There was going to be a fight. David Betz, quoting that vile NSFW Bob Vylan song that caused such a stir at Glastonbury, says that the UK today is divided between those who say “I want my country back” and those who say “shut the f—k up.” So it was, to some degree, between the younger Christians and pagans of Rome in the mid-fourth century. Watts writes:

The fourth century has come to be seen as the age when Christianity eclipsed paganism, and Christian authority structures undermined the traditional institutions of the Roman state. Modern historians have highlighted the rising influence of bishops, the emergence of Christian ascetics, the explosion of pagan-Christian conflict, and the destruction of temples. This is one fourth-century story, but it is neither the story that the final pagan generation would have told nor the one that later generations told about them. Their fourth century was the age of storehouses full of gold coins, elaborate dinner parties honoring letter carriers, public orations before emperors, and ceremonies commemorating officeholders. These things occurred in cities filled with thousands of temples, watched over by myriads of divine images, and perfumed by the smells of millions of sacrifices. This fourth century was real…

I think that the 21st century of comfortable older conservatives and liberals like me is equally real. But it is becoming less so. We are headed, to quote the title of Tom Wolfe’s final novel, “back to blood.” As is crystal-clear in the UK, France, and Germany (and no doubt elsewhere in western Europe, but I don’t know as much about those places), the elites of both Left and Right are making it worse. In that Harrison Pitt interview, Betz says the violent clashes are moving toward us at great speed. Again, I remind you that Betz is in no way saying he wants this to happen! He’s a middle-aged family man. But he’s reading the signs of the times in light of what his academic training as a specialist in civil war-type conflicts has taught him, and he’s sounding the alarm.

I haven’t lived in the US for four years, so I’m somewhat out of touch. Anecdotally, I notice that even many of my middle-class white Christian conservative friends, people who genuinely hate racism, have quietly given up. They believe, even if they can’t fully admit it to themselves, that the noble King experiment has failed. It’s not because King’s moral principles were wrong; it’s because American society, for various reasons, has failed them. And, to put a fine point on it, the culture of lower-class black Americans has failed most of all. I told my interlocutor in Romania the story about the old white Christian man I knew back in Baton Rouge, who lived all his life in a neighborhood that had once been working-class white, but switched to black after the white flight of the 1970s and 1980s. He stayed, but finally left in 2020, when it became too dangerous. He told me that his friends were other black folks of his generation (he was in his seventies), and that they were the only ones left there who had any memory of what it was like to have an intact family. That matters!

The late, great Wick Allison, founder and publisher of D Magazine, the city magazine of Dallas, once wrote an essay there (I can’t find it online), talking about how when segregation ended in the city, there was a massive flight of black people out of black neighborhoods — black people who held what we call “middle-class values,” and who wanted to get away from the dysfunctional culture of the black poor. But we don’t talk about that. It complicates the Narrative.

Sir Kenneth Clark, author of the 1970s bestseller Civilisation, once said, “It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation.” This is where we are today. Do you have confidence in our civilization today? I don’t. Here in Europe, the ruling classes are doing everything they possibly can to suppress native populations from noticing the deleterious changes mass migration are having on their countries. It’s not going to work. I have more hope for the US, because we have the space and (for now) the liberty to move, to get away from the forces of destruction. But doing so implies, inescapably, a loss of faith in the American pluralist experiment.

All I know is that I am tired of pretending that things like that white woman knocked out cold by the punch of a black man on the street of Cincinnati doesn’t really matter, that it’s something we should not notice because that might comfort white racists.

Last point. After I got back to Budapest last night, I went to dinner at a friend’s house. One of the guests was a woman from a continental European country which I won’t name, to protect her identity. She told me two weeks ago, a friend in her home country was at a party held in a restaurant held in a small city there. They pushed the tables aside, and everyone was dancing to Latin music, and having a great time. Suddenly, a Muslim man came into the restaurant, unplugged the sound system, and began ranting at the crowd. He told them they were all “pigs,” and that the day is coming when they would have their throats cut. On and on he went like this. All the white natives stood in silence, afraid of confronting him because he might have a knife, like so many Muslim migrant men do in that country. Finally, one of the white men found the courage to attack the Muslim, and throw him out. The party resumed.

“This kind of thing happens all the time in my country,” the woman said.

The party will resume. Until it doesn’t. Then, the deluge. The Boomers, my generation, and the left-wing activists won’t see it coming. History teaches us that. An older friend told me he once shared a drink in New York with Alexander Kerensky, the exiled Russian social-democratic leader whose government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. He asked Kerensky why he didn’t just shoot Lenin and that lot. Kerensky replied, “Because we didn’t take them seriously.”

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