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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Americas Bad Cities are costing you

This is where Cremieux goes through the loss of agglomeration effects due to American cities being awful low density places. The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves. He then goes thru how white flight has mostly only occurred with black populations especially ADOS and occurs less with immigrants from Africa.

One of the things with woke is it made people think about ways to refute their ideas. One of them is that white people just hate black people so they did white flight. Turns out the data and original source material people started to look rediscover showed a rise in crime before white flight. People accepted those narratives for decades because we had already mitigated the costs and it was just easy to go with the old narratives. We also accepted a narrative that Americans just liked to live in the suburbs. The actual answer for the preference is crime was too high in cities.

The costs of mitigation Cremieux lists is likely not the full costs. It’s likely everything about city design has been done to allow for unofficial segregation. Often this has been done thru zoning to keep prices high. High home prices means high prices for everything in safe cities as your working class either needs to be able to buy housing in the community or compensated for a long community.

Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.

Today we talk about foreign migration and not domestic internal migration. Once you do mass migration you can’t unring tbe bell. You are now stuck with new demographics. In the case of the great migration I think it basically destroyed Americans urban environments. And now American cities suck. And we had to convince ourselves that we loved living in the suburbs instead of the suburbs being a mitigation for good schools/safety.

I am also open minded that the Great Migration led to increased American wealth because people opposed sharing economic resources and it had a macro effect of limiting socialism in the US and the political paths Canada/Europe went down.

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 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.

Yes, the US would be a considerably nicer place to live if it were all white. I imagine that the same principle would apply equally to New Zealand, or South Africa, or Nigeria. Was America herself not the birthright of savage peoples in the not-so-distant past?

You realize, the asymptote of your rhetorical line is the wholesale replacement of the non-white peoples of the Earth (plus or minus East Asians) by whites. Perhaps the natives, once reduced to a manageable population, might be allowed a few reservations in the interest of preserving the local fauna. Still, the beacons of civilization which now surround them would not glitter for their sake.

To be clear, I respect your clear-sightedness and I believe your position is the truest and most coherent on the right wing. I am, however, continually frustrated by others' seeming inability to follow the conclusions of their ideas and assumptions past the Overton window, even one as accommodating as here's. I plan on fleshing this argument/rant/sermon out more in tomorrow's thread, but for now I'll ask you this:

Do you wish to wage the race war?

You realize, the asymptote of your rhetorical line is the wholesale replacement of the non-white peoples of the Earth (plus or minus East Asians) by whites.

I'd be dishonoring you by flinching away from this, so I'll say yes, with a caveat. In fact other races do have a tremendous amount to offer, and my ideal ultimate human race is only directionally-white. I'm also not such a fool as to suppose that I know best here. However you slice it, opportunities for gainful admixture are very much on the table. But some things are better than others, and yeah, a good future looks comparatively white.

Perhaps the natives, once reduced to a manageable population, might be allowed a few reservations in the interest of preserving the local fauna.

It's a serious and interesting question and here again I don't suppose myself up to the task of answering it, though I'm pleased that someone has at least floated the topic. This is what we should be arguing about.

Do you wish to wage the race war?

Bear with me, because again I will not show you disrespect by pretending not to understand what you're asking. But I'll digress a bit because the frame just doesn't comport with my own.

The worst case scenario happened before either of us was born and the time for what you're talking about was long, long ago. At this point? Again we have to gesture at AI and remember that, in a sort of dark-mirror land acknowledgement, every conversation we are capable of having must necessarily be in obsolete terms. Again I say that, inasmuch as this is so, it's a fruitless exercise to try to chart any course into the future.

But if I were to float a best-case romantic fantasy scenario, it would be something like a medium-level collapse, balkanization of every mixed country, and the formation of something like the tribes in The Diamond Age, at which point white peoples would (and should) roll up most of the earth.

This should be with an open heart to the best of other peoples, and eagerness to accept them as our own. But you and I both understand this prospect to be marginal. Most cannot compete and so will end up failing to reproduce or in some kind of preserve, yes.

The question of what sub-Saharan Africans have to offer The Good is an interesting one. Should we let them have a place to rape infants and shatter the heads of bald men? Is that worth... anything at all intelligible to us? What does it look like to 'keep them around' but also curb their worst tendencies? Why would we do so?

I don't have clarity on any of this but, like you, I'm mainly upset at the lack of anyone to talk to about it. Oh and, you know, the awareness that clear thinking and good ideas aren't especially pertinent.