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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   21881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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The Elevation of Fringe Theories to Official US Foreign Policy

Rewind 10 years, and the only ones expressing dire concern over racial demographics in the US and Europe were very fringe, low-status, rag-tag group of political radicals called the "Alt Right". At the time it seemed scandalous that anyone would have much concern over European civilization becoming majority non-White, at best it was just crazy-talk but more commonly it was denounced as an indictment on someone's character for advocating for any sort of political or cultural initiative to stop or reverse this development. Although that is still the median interpretation, since the 2020 Great Awokening there's been a rapid expansion and a mainstreaming of these political views- the greatest indication of that yet is the release of the official 2025 National Security Strategy that directly identifies these concerns, as well as actually stopping and reversing them, a matter of US foreign policy. My emphasis:

C. Promoting European Greatness

American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

...

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.

Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory. We will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete, and to work in concert with us to prevent any adversary from dominating Europe.

America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent— and, of course, to Britain and Ireland. The character of these countries is also strategically important because we count upon creative, capable, confident, democratic allies to establish conditions of stability and security. We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

The long-standing political strategy of "Democratic" Europe has been to form whatever coalition of center-left/right parties is necessary to prevent far right parties who oppose this from attaining power, while at the same time engaging in strong censorship and political suppression of right-wing parties- an artifact of the psychological warfare against Europe which we called Denazification. This is behavior is identified as a national security threat in this document, which advocates the United States "Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations."

The devil is in the details of implementation, but this document represents the codification of fringe Alt-Right views from 10 years ago. It's no longer a "conspiracy theory" or "White Supremacy" to identify the political forces actively orchestrating the demographic replacement of European nations, it's directly identified as a foreign policy issue of the United States, which is a major step forward, with mainstream publications now openly acknowledging the issue without the usual trappings of denouncing racism or White Supremacy:

President Donald Trump echoed similar warnings during a visit to the United Kingdom last year, saying mass immigration would "destroy Europe" and that the continent was "not going to survive" unless governments dramatically change course.

The White House defended the warning, saying Europe is already suffering the consequences of mass immigration.

"The devastating impacts of unchecked migration and those migrants’ inability to assimilate are not just a concern for President Trump but for Europeans themselves, who have increasingly noted immigration as one of their top concerns," White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "These open border policies have led to widespread examples of violence, spikes in crime, and more, with detrimental impacts on the fiscal sustainability of social safety net programs."

Some observers have noted the relative deemphasis on preparing for conflict with China and pivoting towards Western-hemispheric control, a revitalizing of the Monroe Doctrine. Although I am a critic of Trump, I have to say I am supportive of this national security strategy- although implementation is ultimately what matters and in all likelihood a Democrat administration would strike much of this. But it's a major step forward in acknowledging an existential crisis that until very recently was completely taboo.

I imagine the intelligence communities of five-eyes are using sophisticated AI to inform them of risks, with AI not yet available to the public, and with the best prompt engineering in the world. What would an AI that knows everything about the genetics of IQ and prosociality say is the biggest risk to the West? And I imagine that the intelligence community has much better data on genetics, too.

Are we talking about before or after the AI is lobotomized to not offend anyone? My understanding is that AI's are better at guessing real world statistics before their edges are sanded off.

Sadly, I don't think there's a lot of frontier AI's that don't have this problem. Even Grok (which is a sub-frontier AI) has been lobotomized to some degree, just in the other direction.

I kind of doubt that intelligence communities have access to models the public doesn't. They wouldn't be making deals with OpenAI and Anthropic if they were capable of just building something better themselves.

My suspicion is that there are military and intelligence systems without these hang ups.

Huh. I would bet the intelligence communities have AI that's absolute crap and that the commercial stuff is as good as it gets.

Their architectures may be behind the times, but their training data is uniquely comprehensive.

They have AI trained on all our racist group chats.

Intel communities likely have cutting edge algorithms for things like "image analysis" and "signal emission triangulation." I would be very surprised if they were meaningfully ahead of commercial when it comes to LLMs. If anything they are likely at parity or behind since there's significant security risks to using most LLM models and designing a model that can be used securely takes up time, so you'll end up developing a secure solution using a model that will be outdated by the time you actually deploy it securely.

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