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Since reading the above piece several years ago, I have seen more than sufficient evidence to conclude that this description is roughly representative of the mindset of Blue Tribe in general. I have spent much of the last ten years arguing in detail specific examples of how this is a really serious problem that impinges on every facet of modern life, from education to taxation to lawmaking to law enforcement to the academy, national demographics, immigration, warfighting, industrial policy, economic policy, entertainment and putting rockets on Mars. And you are telling me that none of this matters, because the people doing it speak the same language as me, and heard the same bedtime stories as me, and share my ethnicity. Can I not see that we are as brothers?
You may recall that Cain and Abel were brothers.
I agree that they are white people from those countries, descended from other white people also from those countries, who speak white languages and are members of European-descent cultures. So what? To the extent that they are ideologically committed to my destruction or immiseration, they are my enemies. In what specific ways does their genetics or their family history or the language they speak or the culture they grew up in make them less my enemies?
Note that I am not arguing that demographic security is an unreasonable goal, for either Americans or for Europeans. I am not even arguing that it is negotiable. I think that if a hostile political class mass-imports voters in a bid to permanently win the political game for their side, the proper response is to coordinate meanness against them until you are confident that they will never, every be able to do that again, while at the same time informing all the imports that they will immediately return to their points of origin or their blood shall be on their own head.
What I am confused by is your belief that the very people deliberately mass-importing foreigners for the explicit purpose of more efficiently stamping on your face are somehow less of a problem than the foreigners they are importing. If a bullet flies two inches past your head, is the problem the bullet, or the fact that someone is shooting at you? If someone is shooting at you, is it less of a problem if they speak the same language as you?
How many deaths in America are directly attributable to Democratic policies? The floor of that number is at least four digits higher than all the murders and all the violent deaths attributable to Muslims or Muslim policies in America. Can Muslims selectively nullify rule of law? Blues can, and have, repeatedly and with vigor. Can Muslims plausibly threaten political closure? Blues can and have through multiple avenues, and continue to do so. You may well be correct that Blue rule would be better than Muslim rule, though I absolutely would not concede such an argument given the history of Blue Rule over the last century. But it hardly matters, because Blues aim to rule now, and have a plausible path to securing that rule now, and Muslims are, at worst, a small and relatively ineffectual part of that plan. Blues do more harm, by far. Blues threaten more harm, and more plausibly, by far. And at no point have I ever seen the supposed racial or cultural or biological solidarity you repeatedly appeal to improve this situation in even the smallest or most insignificant way.
How do they get here? Who is importing them? Who is dedicated to preventing all attempts to remove them?
How would they get here? Who is demanding we let them in? Who has bent every organ of the state to facilitate their arrival? Who has undermined the actual laws we put in place to keep them out?
If they are Christians in any meaningful sense, then I share more of significance with them than I do with the average white European Progressive. I can meaningfully appeal to the principles and values of Christianity to someone who is likewise a Christian. On the other hand, to the degree that they do not in fact share a reverence for the principles and values of Christianity as I understand them, then I have only mistook them for a Christian, and am open to being corrected.
If there is a way to meaningfully appeal to the average progressive, I have not found it in a decade of looking.
Let us be speak clearly here. Is your claim that the majority of non-European immigration Australia has experienced has been driven by ZOMG BASED Lebanese Christians, and not white progressives? What percentage of non-European immigration to Australia do these Lebanese Muslims represent, presuming that your account is accurate? Because you seem to be arguing that Christian solidarity would result in worse results than white "solidarity" with progressives... but if, as I strongly suspect, Progressives have in fact been directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of non-European immigration to Australia, that would make your argument pretty damn stupid, wouldn't it?
You mention Bilal Skaf, who I had previously not heard of. Why is he still alive? My understanding of Western values holds that he should be dead. Why is he not? Who made it happen that he is not?
This sentence has no meaning to me. "Belong here", specifically, is an empty phrase. I share no loyalty to Blues. I share no common allegiance with them. I share no binding history. I share no values, no traditions, no ties of brotherhood, no common sympathies, no aims or goals, no interests. There is, at best, a sort of inertia generated by trillions of dollars spinning in a circle that seems to be perceptibly slowing, and a series of scams that the slowest among us have not yet caught on to. It is difficult to say that there is even a "here" where one might meaningfully belong.
I gave you four specific examples of blues explicitly saying that they think people like me being murdered is a positive good, or in one case instinctively and enthusiastically celebrating a murder committed in front of them. There are many, many more where those came from, but we could also dig in to the colder policy side, where statistically-foreseeable, endemic murder is routinely treated as an acceptable cost for the pursuit of blue ideological goals. It seems to me that if you don't see this, it's because you don't want to see it.
The blues I am around are pretty nice to me too, given that I am very careful to never, ever let them know what I actually think or value. I have heard personal friends and family speak favorably of blues murdering reds more than once. I've heard casual expressions of hostility toward reds too many times to count. But I'm not restricted to anecdotes; again, I can point to lots and lots of examples of Blues wielding both lawless and official political violence as a tribal weapon, and both securing their goals and suffering little to no consequences as a result.
The fact that it empowers the faction I hate so much is exactly why that faction is so hell-bent on importing as many immigrants as possible. They hate me, and likely you as well, and they see mass immigration of politically-aligned third-worlders as a way to make an end-run around democracy. The fact that they believe this should make them your enemy. If you cannot grasp the idea that people dedicated to inflicting unlimited harm against you are not people you can cooperate with, I'm really not sure what to tell you. I would have thought that ethnocentrism and quokkadom were mutually exclusive, but perhaps the perversity of Man is truly without limit.
Blue Tribe is pretty clearly not a "fake ethnicity". You can go to any media organization, any academic institution, any school, any court, or indeed Bluesky or Reddit and see them, live in the wild. They are a highly cohesive socio-political culture, distinct in a variety of ways, and not even slightly shy about expressing their beliefs to the world at large.
I do not think Racism, the real, actual thing, is correct nor particularly useful. I also do not think there remains any meaningful social benefit to policing it, given the givens. Where I oppose it, I do so on the grounds that it is stupid and counterproductive in some immediate, obvious sense. Here, I oppose it because it seems obvious to me that your appeals to racial solidarity are going to make your opposition to mass immigration less effective, not more. Progressives want mass immigration because they think it is a path to durable political closure against people like me. I believe they are mistaken to believe this; we can, should and will coordinate meanness on a variety of avenues sufficient to bypass whatever closure they achieve. But the fact remains that they will never stop pushing mass immigration so long as they see it in their interest, and they will always see it in their interest so long as their ideology makes them implacably hostile to the traditions and values of the West. If you do not want unlimited mass immigration, Blues, not immigrants, are your primary problem. With the Blues out of the way, you can simply deport the immigrants. With the Blues in the way, neither deportation nor indeed any form of large-scale net-positive cooperation is possible.
Yes. And they imported the rapists, and protected them. Why is that not at least as much of a problem as the rapes themselves?
You sneer at Rittenhouse, but there is a strong argument that his actions were the single largest contributing factor to the end of the largest campaign of lawless political violence America had seen in generations. By standing and fighting, and doing so well, he forced the system that had heretofore oscillated between tolerating and encouraging the riots to finally begin shutting them down, for fear of things getting out of hand in a way they couldn't afford.
In any case, as I've mentioned many times in previous conversations, the guns are not actually the point. The point is the political coordination that the guns enable and multiply. And the fact is that the political situation is better for me in America than it is anywhere else in the Anglosphere or Europe, or indeed anywhere else in the world, and that political coordination is why. We are doing better at rolling back mass immigration than anywhere else in the world. We are less inhibited in our speech than anywhere else in the world. Red tribe has better access to meaningful political power in the US than anywhere else in the world. I think it is obvious that our political successes have dragged much of the rest of the world away from coalescing Progressive closure. And if we are indeed swallowed, I think we are capable of cutting our way out of the beast's guts.
I will fully concede that we have done a very bad job for a very long time. I note that one commonality of all our historic failures was that, over and over again, we cooperated with Blues and operated off the assumption that such cooperation would be reciprocated. That assumption is dying a death, and the cooperation with it, and we are now doing much, much better than we were following the policies that you seem to be arguing for.
What accomplishments do you claim, by contrast? What successful opposition to immigration can you point to?
What do you make of the possibility/propensity for people to change their ideology, either with age, changing life circumstances, or in response to the changing world? I'm an example of someone who would have been your ideological enemy Blue at age 21, but already by early 30s would have been your strong ally (even if not fully 'tribally' baked Red). It seems like culture & ideology are a bit too sticky to assume almost everyone follows that track, but that stereotypical 'maximum leftwing posture in early/mid 20s that peters out' shift can't be uncommon. Or for ideological enemies, do you mainly set your sights on older people who are no longer likely to change?
I tend to mostly agree with your takes, although the way you neatly bucket 'Blues' does sometimes come across like it's a heritable ethnicity, with the die fully cast. Wouldn't a culture war victory look like a nuclear vibeshift where most blues change into reds (sheepishly or zealously, we've seen both psychologies), rather than a civil war with fighting or physical separation? (If you're amenable to the idea that mainstream normie women are largely the ones determining and enforcing social consensus, with many men then trying to follow and appeal to them, this would just look like what's politically 'correct' changing again, as it does). Maybe the argument is that your ancestrally-identical democrat neighbor who grew up reading the same bedtime stories could themselves (or certainly their children) lose their ideological difference and be your identical tribal fellow in a way that cultural immigrants just can't (at scale).
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