Cincinnati And Our Civilization's FutureAt What Point Will We Take This Kind Of Thing Seriously? Before It's Too Late?
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:
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:
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:
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 Conservative. He 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:
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.” |
