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Notes -
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:
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:
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.
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.
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