Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi)
I have to quibble with your calling Kamala Harris a Boomer. I think that rather than treating generations as having hard temporal cutoffs (“she was born in 1964, Wikipedia says that’s the final birth year of the Baby Boomer generation, checkmate!”) we should instead consider cultural affinities and, also importantly, the individual’s actual relationship to the American post-war Baby Boom. Kamala Harris’ parents were not Americans. Their happening to conceive her on American soil while in between academic positions doesn’t mean that they should be considered part of the American baby boom. Culturally as well, Harris is extremely Gen-X in her demeanor, her points of reference, and her visible youthfulness relative to the cohort you’re lumping her in with.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
GenX is as close to race-blind as an American generation ever got
This is only true of white Gen-Xers. A substantial share of black Americans never stopped caring deeply about race; add in the fact that Harris is the daughter of two leftist academics and her opinions become entirely typical of highly-educated black Americans of pretty much any generation since the 1960’s.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
Me: [looks at photo of Natalie Winters] “I would let her press my correspodent until my whole house is white, if you know what I mean!”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
22d ago
b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though.
I mean, “Vance Luther Boelter” is absolutely not a common name. No component of the name is remotely common; I can’t comment on the probability of this guy being wrongly accused/apprehended, but the odds of him getting mixed up with another individual with the same name are vanishingly low.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
Audrey Hale’s “manifesto” has been released. It was never more than a rambling diary. The reason its release was delayed — which was hinted at by law enforcement at the time and has since been made explicit — is that it repeatedly refers to Hale’s personal relationship (and unrequited obsession) with a local public figure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
23d ago
I mean, is that an example of “brute force violence”? If those American hostages had been captured by, say, ISIS, we would have seen high-definition videos of them being decapitated, set on fire, etc. Instead, the Iranians released all of the hostages unharmed. The only casualties from the entire incident were caused by the American military’s own incompetence in Operation Eagle Claw. (Obviously if Kenneth Kraus had been killed instead of injured and subsequently released, the story would be different, if only slightly.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13d ago
And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
I don’t think that this is honestly much of a factor; my understanding is that Jennings has been very consistent and very vocal about his politics for many years before anyone was considering him for a major media role, and before those specific beliefs were fashionable. The guy genuinely is an old-guard Gen-X progressive, and I don’t see any evidence that he’s either played up or played down those opinions based on any mercenary career concerns. Nor do those politics appear to have had much bearing on his selection for the Jeopardy! hosting gig; he got the role because he was already an extremely well-known institution on the show, and because he genuinely earned it over a long period of time. That’d have been true whether or not his political commentary was frequent or sparse. (Although obviously his specific opinions didn’t actively harm him, which wouldn’t have been true if they’d been significantly right-of-center instead.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
30d ago
You’re eliding two very important questions:
- Which Americans are getting replaced?
- Which immigrants are replacing them?
For example, in Los Angeles, Latinos have totally replaced blacks in many neighborhoods. This process has not simply been a matter of numbers; there have been many instances of actual racial violence, in which Latino gangs have intimidated blacks into moving away. As David Cole has extensively documented, this has been an overwhelmingly positive development for the city. Even foreigners who speak broken English are, on the whole, preferable — in terms of their crime rates, their effect on civic life, their contributions to the economy — to native English-speaking black Americans.
Are Mexicans the population group I would ideally prefer to take over those parts of LA? No. Obviously I’d prefer a million white Danes, or a million Japanese. I don’t personally want to live in a heavily Mexican neighborhood and listen to awful Mexican music at 2 in the morning. But the Mexicans are undeniably a step up from what was there before, even though they were undoubtedly a foreign population replacing a “heritage American” ethnic group. The fact that blacks have some ineffable historical “claim” to be a long-standing part of the fabric of American culture is of very little importance compared to all of the observable material aspects of day-to-day life.
Similarly, if a million Vietnamese immigrants streamed into West Virginia and displaced the native hillbilly whites, West Virginia would be a better place to live for anyone who remained. There would be a short-term culture shock, as those immigrants’ English fluency would be low, their customs unfamiliar, etc. But within one generation, educational outcomes in the state would likely skyrocket as a result of the introduction of a conscientious and academically-diligent population, in comparison to the “founding stock” who had been there before.
Now, obviously, the outcome would be different if instead of a million Vietnamese it was a million Afghans. Appalachian white trash are a quite dysfunctional population, but they’re still way better than Afghanistan. (I am speaking, of course, in term of population averages; there are, of course, plenty of Appalachians who are good Americans, and plenty of Afghans who are good people.) I’d even rather live among ghetto blacks than among Afghans. Speaking about “replacement migration” as a pure negative is misguided.
Now, this is all separate from the question of whether or not it’s legitimate for elected political representatives to consciously think and act this way about their own people. It’s all well and good for me, a private citizen, to opine about how my black fellow citizens should get run out of town by Japanese foreigners. But if I had actual power to effect these changes, wouldn’t I owe some debt of care to the current constituents over which I serve? Can a purely elitist technocratic government, shorn of any sense of obligation to the people it rules (however imperfect and suboptimal those people may be) truly be said to have any legitimate mandate?
Ultimately that is the great political question of our time. To what degree is populism (however attenuated) simply a mandatory obligation of a government? How much do the elites owe to the least functional, least successful elements of their own society? (And how much can they realistically get away with, if they decide not to take the desires of their constituents into account, before it all comes crashing down?)
Playboy magazine’s path to profit wasn’t selling subscriptions, it was setting the organization as a prestige knower of what made a hot woman hot, which it then as an organization certified and sold.
Sadly, this is where Hef is directly complicit in one of the great crimes against an entire generation: the promulgation of bolt-on tits — volleyball-sized, perfectly spherical breast implants — as the beauty standard preferred by the great unwashed mass of late Boomer and Gen X men. All three of the women featured on The Girl Next Door had them, and of course Hef’s greatest victim (though he was far from her only victimizer) was Pamela Anderson, who was turned from a girl-next-door with a gorgeous face and a natural figure into a dead-eyed plastic simulacrum of a woman. I thank God every day that we are finally free from the volleyball-titty, Living Barbie Doll era of female sex symbols — the specters of Jenna Jameson, Carmen Electra, and Anna Nicole Smith no longer haunting the boners of virile young Americans — and can, instead, just appreciate a tasteful set of naturals, like Hef could in the 70’s.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
22d ago
It could also be that his motives are non-ideological, or only tangentially mapped onto anything resembling a “Red vs. Blue” split. He could have been motivated by a (real or perceived) personal or professional slight which he blamed on the individuals targeted.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
I’ll commend you for cleverness, inasmuch as you added enough new material/adaptation to the modern American context to the 25 points of the NSDAP to prevent them from being immediately recognizable to people who weren’t already in on the joke.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15d ago
You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
The problem is that you led with the claim that “Iranians are more friendly to Western civilization than Israelis [are].” This claim strikes most readers as extremely bizarre, given the many ways in which Israel’s culture (at least in their major cities) is manifestly more in-line with Western cultural norms than Iran’s is. (Israeli women can dress however they please, gay sex is tolerated and even mildly celebrated, they both happily consume Western media and produce media which is easily legible for Western audiences, etc. Many Israelis are originally from Western countries, and fluently speak Western languages.)
Therefore, for your claim to make any sense, it has to be about how Israel’s government is supposedly unfriendly to the West. This may or may not be true, but it’s at least a legible claim. If this is your claim, though, then it stands to reason to also interpret your claim about Iran to also be about the government. And the claim that Iran’s government — which openly funds organizations which have attacked Western shipping, committed terrorist attacks against Westerners, etc. — is more Western-friendly than Israel’s strikes a lot of observers as, again, bizarre.
Are you now saying that your original claim should be read as “Iranians [the people, not the government] are more friendly to Western civilization than Israelis [the government, not the people] are”? Or are you genuinely sticking to the claim that the average Israeli citizen hates Western civilization more than the average Iranian citizen does?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
Personally, I'd only wish success to someone banning Disney, rap etc.
To react to your bailey, @The_Nybbler haven't many in this community opposed this government and arana imperii, ascribing modernity's ills to it?
See, I knew this was coming. There is a consistent bait-and-switch deployed by defenders of the proposition that rogue/irredentist regimes such as Iran are actually secretly friendly to Western culture/interests. The initial claim is always “No, they’re not actually trying to ban Western culture or actively harm Western governments.” And then when someone brings up examples of those regimes explicitly opposing Western cultural imports or waging covert/proxy war against Western countries (particularly America), the claim switches to, “Okay yes, they are opposed to the West, but that’s good, actually, because the West is degenerate and its cultural imports deserve to be banned.”
Yes, I have issues with much of the lyrical/philosophical content of hip-hop music and the culture around it. I agree that much of Disney’s recent output is of questionable artistic quality, and that some of its messaging is insidious. However, if there is such a thing as “the West” (and I’ve expressed my skepticism that such a construct refers to something real and consistent) then surely one of its defining factors, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, is that it is extremely reticent to ban entire categories of art. As an American, I can effortlessly find the intellectual and artistic output of countries and cultures which are openly hostile to my own; I can follow Russian nationalists and Iranian mullahs on Twitter, and I can watch ISIS videos online without needing a VPN lest I risk imprisonment. Only a very insecure and consciously-insular regime would ban the output of its critics, either domestic or foreign. That the Iranian regime does so is a sign that it is not friendly to the spirit of Western-aligned cultures. (It is also, of course, openly very hostile to the political, economic, and military interests of Western-aligned nations.)
I agree with you that the Persian people have no inherently adversarial relationship with me and mine. They are one of the great historical cultures of human history, and I long to see them returned to their former glory. This would not be possible under an Islamic hard-liner regime with revolutionary and anti-Western sentiments baked into its DNA. A proud and high-IQ people deserve better than these incompetent, blustering, grubby mullahs. My problems lie almost entirely with the people on top in Iran, and not with the people who have to live under their boot.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
23d ago
This is the same question I have: how many sustained humiliations can a government endure and still maintain a sufficient level of popular support? Like you can only blame the perfidy of the Great Satan for so long before the buck eventually stops with you. I’m seeing that Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out. If this sort of thing happened to the American military, I have no idea how the government could continue to stand.
Is the fear of what regime collapse would mean for the country so pervasive that the Persian people will continue to tolerate the status quo? Perhaps I’m just a naïve American, wildly overestimating how much power the people of Iran have to effect a regime change even if they wanted to. Are the traumatic memories of life under the Shah, fifty years ago, really still so fresh that the Iranian people will continue to roll the dice on the Ayatollahs?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13d ago
For what it’s worth, I was fairly neurotic about this before my trip to Japan; my number one concern was to not be the careless foreigner causing offense or giving Americans (even more of) a bad name. I got over that anxiety pretty quickly once I was there; since almost nobody speaks English and I could barely communicate with anyone, and because I quickly intuited that they would not honestly express their offense even if I caused some, I determined that it was a fool’s errand to continue to micro-analyze every action of mine to try and figure out if it had offended someone. I just decided to avoid making any obvious faux pas, to keep my voice down as much as possible, and to otherwise just act naturally and count on the majority of people to interpret my actions in a spirit of good faith. Which they mostly seemed to do! (Although, again, they could have all found me unbearable, and I’d never know!)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
Right, that and the fact that, as I understand it, the Iranian regime strictly bans Western music and most other Western cultural output, to the point where their people have to find bootleg version of American artists’ music. Yeah, very “friendly to Western culture.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20d ago
I very much am in the process of investigating it. My big concern with it right now — and this may just be a result of the strenuous efforts of Freemasonry’s modern public-facing advocates to massively downplay its esoteric beliefs and emphasize its compatibility with normie Christian-inflected liberalism — is that it seems to demand a commitment to hardcore Enlightenment ideas of universal human equality and the centrality of the liberated individual. Since I think a lot of these ideas are wrong/incomplete, I’m wary of committing myself to an institution which treats them as bedrock axioms. I’m still doing my research, though.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15d ago
while declaring in-kind criticism of Jewish identity to be a Crime against Humanity.
I don’t believe that this is what he meant by “anti-Semitism”! I believe he meant a far more quotidian antipathy towards individual Jewish people as a result of their religion or ancestry. I believe that his frequently-expressed opposition to Israel is part of his larger opposition to the reification of unchosen identity groups. If “Jewry”, as you’re using it, means “Jews cooperating and seeing each other’s fates as inherently tied together, in both past and present, on account of their shared inherited identity,” then yes, I think he pretty clearly wants that to stop.
What I think you’re either ignoring or failing to recognize, though, is that as a leftist he believes it’s important to prioritize. Leftists believe in tackling the very big problem (the centuries-long privileging of fair-skinned people over dark-skinned people, which is still ongoing and still profoundly negatively impacts the latter’s lives) right now, and then later on down the line, once that’s been done, future progressives can start working on dissolving the other, less currently-powerful unchosen identity groups.
Again, why would Ignatiev waste his time writing books and giving speeches about “abolishing blackness” when he knows full well that this would simply introduce massive friction and mutual recriminations within his political coalition? Just to prove to you that he’s not a hypocrite? It’s not like you’d hate him or oppose him any less if he did so. So why should he care about appeasing your sensitivities?
One possible answer is that it makes white people feel bad and defensive when he fails to do so, and that this is bad — either because it is a priori bad to make people feel bad about their race, or because it’s politically counterproductive and unnecessarily makes enemies of a numerous and powerful group. And certainly the latter, at least, is a good reason to not to what Ignatiev is doing, even if one shares his philosophical priors. I was precisely one of those white progressives who got scared off by the explicit anti-white antipathy expressed by guys like Ignatiev, and who discovered a positive white identity as a result. (I’ve since lost some of the enthusiasm I had about that identity at the time, but it was sufficient to ensure I could never again be a leftist.)
Still, there are, demonstrably, plenty of white people who are comfortable with the proposition that whiteness could be fully deconstructed, without that having any serious negative impact on the material reality of their lives. That the hegemonic culture centering whiteness could be dismantled, and that instead of another group taking up the whip hand and using it to take their own turn as the hegemonic oppressor, everyone could just all agree to be deracinated self-inventing individuals. You and I both agree that they’re wrong about this — that there will always be a hegemonic culture in any given polity, and that such a culture will likely always have something to do with unchosen/inherited identity groups. But that’s a testable claim, and committed leftists really do believe that, in the fullness of time, they can stop that pattern from recurring. And given that belief, I think it’s fair to say that they are anti-Whiteness™️ without being anti-White People.
Their main problem is that they are, unwittingly or otherwise, politically allied to vindictive non-whites who are very consciously committed to simply changing which group(s) will be the next up to hold the whip. I see Ignatiev as more of the naïve idealist who really believes this time will be different and we can finally defeat racial identitarianism for real. You appear to see him more as the consciously-vindictive aggrieved minority who wants to be the next one to hold the whip hand. Is this an accurate characterization?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15d ago
Again, I’m not saying that Ignatiev’s beliefs are good — I oppose pretty much every aspect of his worldview — but simply that they are sincere and internally consistent. They’re not hypocritical. He doesn’t appear to want any special carve-out for Jewish people, nor does he seem to have any special affinity for Jewishness on account of his own personal ancestral background.
Like, yes, many Jews, Ignatiev himself, are hardcore believers in deracinated progressive abolishment of blood ties. So are many non-Jews! If you want to oppose their beliefs — and I do! — it is a useless distraction to try and smoke them out as secret Zionist special-pleading hypocrites. We can just oppose their actual stated beliefs, which are bad enough, instead of grasping at straws to call them liars.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
As I have pointed out many times, Yglesias’s colorblindness politeness norms for white liberals will inevitably come crashing against the rocks, as they always do, the second that BIPOCs refuse to get with the program. All of this handwringing about how to execute a delicate social dance to obfuscate universally-understood truths, and it’s all taking place without the input, and without the buy-in, of the core group being spoken about.
“Alright, Nikole Hannah-Jones. I and the other white liberals have had a long conversation, and we’ve decided that talking about race is no longer acceptable.”
“Fuck you, honky.”
These social taboos have only ever gone in one direction. They’re a unilateral surrender by non-blacks. What mechanism does Matt Yglesias have with which to enforce his preferred taboos on black people? Black people, writ large, are not going to stop seeing themselves as a distinct group with an inherently fraught cultural relationship with White America! They’re not going to stop noticing disparities, nor are they going to stop thinking about the reasons for these disparities! And no white liberal, least of all Matt Yglesias, has ever demonstrated that they have any clout within the black community to even begin to promulgate any “colorblind” norms among them.
It’s not as if white liberals don’t know how black people think about them. White liberals obsessed about the film Get Out, which is a raw expression of the psychodrama blacks experience around white liberals and their labyrinth of strained politeness norms around race, which blacks see as hostile and profoundly dishonest.
Yet Matt believes that by writing Substack posts, he’ll not only be able to get white people to recommit to not thinking too hard about race, but that he’ll get black people to make that same commitment? It’s delusional.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
23d ago
What country has responded to urban aerial bombings with surrender?
The Serbs during the Yugoslav wars come to mind.
As long as Israel and their western support bloc shows absolutely no love or friendship for the Persian people, they're not going to throw the Ayatollah out and replace him with western moderates, they'll replace him with a hopefully more competent Ayatollah.
Possibly, yes, although it’s far from clear to me that a more competent Ayatollah is on offer. Furthermore, I don’t interpret the U.S.’s or Israel’s enmity toward Iran as an expression of enmity toward “the Persian people”; it’s pretty obviously the Islamist revolutionary government that is the issue here. Neither Israel nor the United States have resorted to significant bombing of civilian urban infrastructure within Iran, so far as I am aware. All of the Israeli strikes I’m familiar with have been extremely targeted at Iranian regime leadership, which is in marked contrast to the more indiscriminate bombing campaigns against the Gazans by Israel, or of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
I’m also working through the first book in Stormlight Archive! I’m alternating between that, Hegel And The Hermetic Tradition, and a book about the basics of Freemasonry.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
We're already systematically and explicitly oppressed based on group identity! That it's not naked slavery doesn't matter one lick.
This is the crux of our disagreement. I just think it’s manifestly untrue that white people are “systemically and explicitly oppressed” in any country on earth. There are at least some number of people who want us to be — I’ve even met a couple of them — but those people have vanishingly little power at this moment. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point them out and oppose them. It just means that you seem like a catastrophizing propagandist when you claim that those people are already actively oppressing white people right now, in America.
I don’t believe that having one’s culture disrupted/dismantled is oppression. I want very badly for many cultures in the world to be dissolved, including some within the United States. I don’t think it’d be oppressive at all for a government to do so. Mainstream early-20th-century white culture was one of the better and more functional cultures on earth. I want to preserve many of the remaining remnants of it; however even if we wanted to bring it back, it has been irreparably disrupted by technological advancements and the globalization of the world economy. That’s not inherently a bad thing.
What’s specifically bad is that, in the case of the United States, it has been partially usurped by a vulgar, consciously-hateful, anti-human gutter culture. Jews are by no means the primary creators of this culture, although many individual Jews have been influential in promulgating it. (Just as many Jews were influential in promulgating important parts of the previous American cultural era, the one you like; look up how many of the compositions in the “Great American Songbook” were written by Jews.)
I’m more-or-less fine with governments using heavy-handed tactics, including targeted population replacement, to change aspects of the culture(s) over which they have control. I just also want them to do so in favor of changes that are better for humanity, rather than worse. Smashing ghetto black culture should be a priority for future U.S. policymakers; they’ve already (probably not intentionally) partially achieved this in some major cities by facilitating mass Mexican immigration to those cities; the Mexicans have displaced blacks, taking over their neighborhoods and replacing their culture with a new one. There are plenty of things about Mexican culture I find grating, but it’s pretty much a wholesale improvement over ghetto blacks. This is one way in which population/cultural replacement can be a good thing.
Obviously this doesn’t mean that all mass immigration is good, or that every culture on earth should be smashed, or that every immigrant group will similarly be an improvement on what was there before it arrived. It’s pretty obvious that Sweden was better before a bunch of Somalis and Syrians showed up. (It remains unclear whether the counterfactual world in which Sweden did not embrace mass immigration, but also its fertility rates continued to plummet unabated, would be sustainable as a long-term project.) However, if, say, the Swedish government had invited in a bunch of Japanese immigrants, I think Sweden would have benefited quite a bit from that in the long run. Some cultural/population displacements are an improvement, some are a lateral move, and some are a downgrade. Smashing Appalachian hillbilly culture would also be a salutary goal of a future American regime, and that would potentially involve replacing white hillbillies with some non-white ethnicity. Depending on which ethnicity, that could be a strict improvement!
I’ve been a colossal fan of Jeopardy! (a long-running American trivia game show, for those unfamiliar) for most of my life. My enthusiasm for the show skyrocketed during Ken Jennings’ historic 74-game winning streak in 2004. A geeky, witty, self-deprecating guy, Jennings’ prodigious knowledge was matched by his appealing personality, making him a TV phenomenon and boosting the popularity of the show.
After returning to various Jeopardy! exhibition tournaments, cementing his legendary status, he got into the running as one of the potential candidates to replace the show’s iconic decades-long host, Alex Trebek, whose cancer diagnosis had been made public and who was nearing retirement. In 2021, Jennings was officially announced as the new official host of Jeopardy!. He has breathed new life into the show; while Trebek’s personality was aloof and almost enigmatic, Jennings is warm and jocular, frequently engaging in witty repartee with the contestants and helping to bring out their personalities. Jennings also clearly knows a lot of the answers to the questions without needing to read off the cards, allowing him to make more informed split-second judging decisions about the acceptability of contestants’ answers, and allowing him to make certain edifying clarifications and to add cool fun facts about some answers. In other words, he’s the perfect host for the show, the perfect ambassador for the brand, and the perfect steward to carry the show for decades to come.
His politics are also very obnoxiously woke. I try not to use that word very often, considering it over-used and under-defined, but I think it fairly encapsulates his public statements on politics, which can easily be found by perusing his Twitter and Bluesky accounts and, apparently, by listening to his various podcast appearances. He has the typical smug, sanctimonious approach of a guy who was the smartest person he knew for his entire youth, and who was used to winning every argument he came across due to pure cognitive processing power and verbal agility. Political dunks phrased as though they’re so self-evidently obvious that only a total dolt would fail to agree with them. A deep and abiding belief that “supporting” trans people, abolishing borders, and ending “mass incarceration” are the urgent moral responsibility of every good-thinking person.
This commitment to progressive politics has bled over into Jeopardy! itself; since Jennings took over hosting, there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists, and a Jennings has made several on-air comments (mild, but obvious to those who are attuned to them) which reveal his own politics. It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues, despite the ease with which the internet allows people with even a modicum of curiosity to expose themselves to the best arguments from the other side.
Now, I do hope/plan to meet Jennings some day; I have auditioned for Jeopardy! before, making it past the initial testing phase but never getting the call. I plan to continue to audition yearly until I eventually make it on the show, where I’m confident I could make a decent showing of myself and even win some real money. It crushes me to know that someone who’s something of a minor hero of mine would, upon learning my politics, want absolutely nothing to do with me, and may even not want me to be able to appear on the show, one of my life’s dreams. I try to studiously avoid hearing anything about Jennings’ politics, not wanting to further tarnish my warm feelings toward him. My single biggest fear about being doxxed, even above the effect it’d likely have on my personal and professional relationships, is the fear that it could prevent me from having my chance to compete on the show; I try not to think about whether Jennings would want me disqualified.
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