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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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I really wish people were more capable of noticing, let alone publicly agreeing, that the presence of substantial numbers of blacks is just generally a social catastrophe. How many prominent men in American history had great compassion for the negro and despised slavery, but were straightforward in their belief that sending them back to Africa was best for everyone because an integrated society could not possibly work out? Have they not been thoroughly vindicated? And yet the position is so far outside the overton window that afact it's literally unimaginable to most whites. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to propound it here without any amount of pussyfooting. But in this case I think consensus is appropriate.

At some point we need to be prepared to call a spade a spade.

And the social damage whites inflict upon ourselves as we struggle to reconcile our high-minded optimism with reality is likely even worse. I'm in mind of Dan Carlin's point about how 9/11 was as a flea biting a dog, compared to the unbelievable amount of damage the dog then did to itself tearing at the itch.

I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US. We simply cannot be ourselves with them here, and they're not going anywhere. I don't think segregation was long-term viable either but golly it sure did help!

What now? I guess at this point every thought experiment gets derailed by the AI wildcard, and bracketing that out for the sake of conversation seems masturbatory. It's just so unbelievably tragic, how this has all played out.

IDK, if you think I should be more nuanced about this by all means let me know.

I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US.

Even granting, arguendo, everything in your first paragraph, by what mechanism do you see the presence of a large number of blacks in America dooming the entire West, including in Europe, South America, the Commonwealth, etc? It seems to me that the West either committed suicide in 1939–45 or failed in more recent decades (whether due to Communist influence, a superabundance of empathy, etc.).

That's pretty straightforward to me. The main point is that given a Northern victory in the civil war, America was overdetermined to become the cultural and economic pole of the Anglosphere and the West in general, simply due to geography.

America's institutions, however, were designed for Anglos. American schools, communities, politics, etc. simply go to pieces when blacks are admitted en masse as presumed equal members.

I think there were four options:

  1. Send them back
  2. Keep them separate and establish separate legal codes
  3. Treat everyone equally under the law and be prepared for disparities
  4. Try so hard to hammer Western society into a shape that generates equal results that it breaks

I think 1 would have been best. 2 was tried, but long-term untenable due to inevitable social forces. 3 would have been my preference given the failure of 1 and 2, but also proved untenable due to social forces.

That leaves 4, and I think 4 is both unrecoverable and must inevitably metastasize given US cultural and economic hegemony.

Obviously the 'social forces' I'm talking about here are key to this, so I'll take a swing at what I mean.

Perhaps it starts with the strain of Puritan idealism that led to so much popular support for fighting the Civil War to 'end slavery' in the first place. Whatever the elites actually thought they were doing there, this was the popular justification for the war, and it didn't go away once the war was won. Blank slatism/egalitarianism became firmly embedded in polite American society. This continued to serve as a guiding principle throughout the decades and, once the US had won WW2, became a perennial casus belli for justifying intervention across the globe. Needless to say this was only massively amplified by setting Hitler up as the polar opposite of American values.

I just don't think it could have gone any other way.

Wokeness originated in America, largely as a response to the black underclass, and then infected Europe and the Anglosphere through the universities and social media. Is it a coincidence that you saw Black Lives Matter protests in the UK?

Thanks, that's pithy. I went into a bit more detail in other posts.

I feel like the vagueness of your pronouncements here ("social catastrophe, "we" cannot be "ourselves", lack of imagining a counterfactual to some of the historical gestures you're making) weakens this to the point that it's hard to reply.

Very fair. I'm badly underslept and overheated atm.

social catastrophe

The decline of our cities, communities, culture, educational system, academia, politics, etc. -- all ruined by black presence or poisoned in reaction to the horror experienced when black outcomes are observed. Thus, we cannot be ourselves.

Imagine a US where ~all the blacks had been sent back. Where the great cities of the East and Midwest are still glittering beacons of civilization. Where Academia never caved to blank slatism. Where young couples promenade in the town square in the evenings, unconcerned about violent crime. Where people still felt invested in their communities and the 'bowling alone' effect never kicked in. Where our schools pursue excellence instead of dumbing themselves and everyone else down in pursuit of equal outcomes. Where politics isn't influenced by a racial spoils system.

Can you imagine that? I can't, even. We never got to find out what America might have been.

We cannot be ourselves.