domain:alexberenson.substack.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
That same article also claims "Immigration officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
At some point according to this paywalled CNN article, DHS (in the person of assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin, not anyone from ICE) said the arrest was for "alleged assault".
I'm not offended, but will note that I have a lot of smart friends who have argued over this with me time and again, and have convinced many — but never, ever the ones with mixed-race children.
I don't actually know that about you for sure but will guess. And apologies if that seems crass; I think it's both pertinent and illuminating.
KMC
4hr ago
I didn't claim the whole continent, my forefathers did, and then asserted that claim.
They, and I, are native sons of this land.
I think Mexicans and Canadians would disagree but screw them, right?
You forgot to attach the yes_chad.jpg. Or maybe it's yes_james.jpg.
I don't particularly feel the need to respond to the rest of the flanderization of my post. I'll simply say that progeny doesn't mean pure blood progeny, but if you have 0 ancestors in the british colonies in 1776, or no ancestors in the United States in 1789, when that document was written, then I don't consider you American in any way.
ADOS and the Indian tribes are also native, but they are not American.
Pongalh
4hr ago
"a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances..."
Yep, all kinds of casual rule-breaking and callous behavior in the past. My dad stole cars (to this day he says "I just borrowed them (because he did in fact return them)" and went to juvenile hall but still went on to have multiple marriages, kids, long career. Dealt with alcoholism, saved by his marriage. At one point one of our cats had an unexpected litter and I shit you not he just put them in a bag and dropped them in a well. My mom was furious. (In pop culture, the first season of Mad Men depicting Draper's family littering after a picnic was also quite accurate.)
Hard to see all that happening today for a man and it still turns out ok. For one, women aren't as interested in rescuing you from yourself, as my mother did for him. You need your shit together early and on your own.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
A lot of people, when asked for example of when something happened, do not immediately reach for an example where there's no information available whether something happened or not, and present it as their example of something happening. Because if they do it, other people might conclude they really do not have any better examples.
since ICE hasn't commented at all on it
I guess this report from CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/cannabis-farm-worker-in-california-dies-day-after-chaotic-federal-immigration-raid.html saying:
George Retes complied with federal officers when he arrived to check on friends and colleagues who might have been affected by the raids, but instead he was arrested on suspicion of assault, according to immigration officials.
is just my hallucination? Or they lied claiming immigration officials told him that? Why, in your opinion, CNBC would lie about something like that, and what is your source for accusing them of lying in this case? How do you know ICE hasn't actually commented even though CNBC claims they did?
What we know is that India was a rich nation turned destitute over centuries of colonialism. India suffered from preventable famines that killed millions in a few decades. Famines of magnitudes that the nation hadn't seen for centuries prior.
Pardon me, but I don't think we do know that. I would be surprised if we have such complete and accurate data about famine in pre-British India that we can confidently state that they didn't have famines that were as bad as the ones they had under British rule. Furthermore, do we all know that these famines were preventable? I don't.
Finally, did British rule actually cause India's economic growth to slow down? Because if so I was also not aware of that.
Naively, I would assume that being ruled by one of the earliest countries to industrialize (Britain) would mean that India had better access to the technologies of the Industrial Revolution than a country outside the British sphere. Since industrialization turns every other variable into a rounding error, I would expect early access to British technology to similarly drown out any damage the East India Company or the Raj were capable of doing. Bear in mind that the number of British people on Indian soil was always tiny, and for the most part the British were just occupying the top rung of a pre-existing power structure that was, and remained, populated almost entirely by Indian people who were carrying on day-to-day business as they always had. I would be surprised if such a small number of people could have a significant impact on India's economic growth.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
we descendants are native to this continent
You aren't, that's not what the word "native" means (and awfully bold of you to claim the whole continent, I think Mexicans and Canadians would disagree but screw them, right?). But at least I can see what you mean now. OK, so Trump is not a "white native". Too bad for him I guess, but that's at least some solid foundation to start with. A bit of a problem you'd have is not only Trump ends up out of the game - you'd end up with about 10% of population of purebloods, and the rest of the populations would be mudbloods - descendants of people who immigrated after 1776. Since you are further qualifying it as "white" the percentage is probably even less - you will need to eliminate anyone who had non-white blood - and mixed marriages, while not common, weren't exactly out of the question. Since anybody who came in after 1776 must be deemed irreversibly insidious and affected with inborn desire to plot to overthrow the "white natives", which can not be overcome - I don't think your case is looking good. The "demographic replacement" that you are so afraid of happened long, long ago, and you are not the American people anymore. I don't know how to call this group other than "purebloods" but being such a tiny minority it certainly can not pretend to represent "we the people" as a whole. The best you could hope for is a protected minority status.
And, of course, I am not aware of any intent for the Founders to adopt this stance - that only purebloods are considered true Americans (or "natives"). Otherwise there wouldn't be such thing as "naturalization" which confers the same legal status on an insidious mudblood as previously was available only for purebloods. Why put such things in the Constitution if they thought like you are? There's no reason. Because they did not. They saw it as a political and social project, which anybody who identifies with the goals of the new nation, its laws and its customs, is welcome to join, not some breeding exercise. And they certainly did not think anybody who didn't jump in by the time the United States was formed is forever an insidious enemy of every American.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4hr ago
I'm not buying it. To your one example of what you're calling 'face,' this is a cultural phenomenon noy a linguistic one, and to suggest it's related to some inherent (as opposed to learned) trait seems the opposite of Occam's razor. But your world weaving is entertaining.
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
In what way does Pelosi's comment have any bearing on that?
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
I'd argue that you're indulging in word games more than I am - in this case, comparing Koreans to weeds while implying that resources in Georgia are scarce, or that the presence of Koreans reduces prosperity for others. I think this is a misrepresentation of the scenario. Is the state of Georgia like your garden bed? Are the Koreans choking out native Georgians? That's not clear at all.
It's not even clear how race or ethnicity is relevant - if the issue is that Koreans consume more resources, wouldn't it also be a problem if native white or black populations increase? All people consume resources. We just generally don't view this as prohibitive because Georgia possesses ample natural resources (nobody is starving!) and because people produce resources as well.
The metaphor you're making just doesn't make any sense.
Part of the problem here is that most research upon any such lines is explicitly verboten.
Yes, every crackpot will tell you this, but for good reason. It's objectively the case.
Many databases of information which might be used for this purpose are accessible only to researchers who will accede to strict Data Use Limitations (DULs) and Data Use Certification (DUCs) which specifically do not allow for, e.g., 'comparisons across ancestral groups'.
Surely we must all admit that if truth is of any value it's a real problem.
But for your specific question, here's one clue.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0610848104
Now, I believe that this was revisited and a weaker correlation was found, and none for microcephalin, but I haven't dug deep into either study. It's kinda beside the point. I would bet huge money that if real, high-quality studies were conducted they'd find not just this but innumerable similar phenomena.
I am always reminded when I read this kind of thing of the blue eyed, blonde white daughter of two friends of mine, a girl raised from infancy in Japan, who speaks, reads and writes Japanese better than many Japanese.
Yes, and I speak much better English than almost anyone who grew up with it as a first language, if I do say so myself. Joseph Conrad is also this way, and Ilforte, PBUH. General intelligence is a key that opens many locks.
But — and chapter 11 gets into this a lot more — just because you can speak someone else's language, and they can speak it back to you, and everything seems mutually-intelligible, it isn't, necessarily. A great example from Japan (where I also spent many years) is that of face. An American can go a long, long time thinking they understand what it means, using it correctly in sentences, and so on; but do they really? The equipment we use to make sense of symbolic language is evolved, yes? Which means that it can differ among populations, yes? Or do we suppose that all evolution on this front ceased before humanity's Last Common Ancestor? I think that's preposterous.
Or, more naughtily, this is a pretty great tweet, if I've never actually verified it. Google, wikipedia, and the Academy certainly wouldn't be of any help if it were true, would they?
When I speak English, or Japanese, I do it through a brain evolved in a different semantic context.
Speaking of Ilforte, I believe he once suggested that Tolkien can only be fully appreciated by Englishmen for genetic reasons, and I think he's probably right about that. Though I do happen to be an embarrassingly-big fan of the fellow and his work.
I'm talking about something deeper than Sapir-Whorf.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4hr ago
Some of @WhiningCoil's stories are truly terrifying.
No higher praise do I seek.
most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy.
How far back turning the dial of time does returning to tradition mean? It's like a tradeoff between higher relative status for White males and lower standards of living, vs less status and the fruits of modernity. I think for the former category, there was more freedom compared to today. But also, I think people have a conception or idealization of a past that didn't really exist, when in reality things were pretty disorderly back then. If you read the biographies of artists and writers who grew up in the mid to early 20th century, when America was assumed to be more conservative and religious, a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances. it's like these ppl were in and out of detention and skipping school and smoking and drinking in their early teens, and no one cared that much. Nowadays, things are much more strict.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
Even when mostly assimilated, foreigners remain very, very foreign in ways you can't always see.
Yes, I must admit, I never understood Trump's love for greasy fast food. Those Germans and their Teutonic ways...
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
The concern about CPC influence is not racist and is reasonable, but that wasn't @NYTReader's claim. His claim was about "Asians" - which covers the whole continent (in UK, Pakistanis are called "Asians", and why not - Pakistan is in Asia), or, more charitably, everybody who looks certain way - whether they are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Laotian, Kazakh, Uzbek or none of the above, and ignoring when and under which circumstances they came into the country. I can't see it but as pure racism. And it never made any sense.
WisheyWashey
5hr ago
Would you agree with this in mind that immigration from India to the UK is probably not a good idea for the British?
That's because most people who write right-wing apologia are writing 'is' with some predefined 'ought' in mind. ... I'm not convinced 'ought' is the intent here, especially considering the replies to certain comments are done in the same way I'd make them for the same reasons I make them when I'm discussing social dynamics in this way.
I really appreciate this. No, I don't think there's 'ought' in any of what I'm talking about, except in certain abstract and circumspect ways which keep me up at night, horrified. There are little places which point to an ought, but I can't even begin to talk about that yet. Much foundation is still to be laid.
And I think this is why it's correct for me to write this book. I see, uh, idk what term we're using now, but let's say Nietzscheans blabbing about similar topics quite a lot, and I know that much of what I'm saying will be discarded by people who pattern-match me to them, but the difference is that they like it whereas I'm just saying 'hey we need to get our heads around this if there's to be any hope at all.'
Yes it's icky. But get a microscope sometime and observe the holocaust in every drop of water. (Tangentially, I find this video just incredibly sublime.)
Anyway it means a lot to me that you are able to distinguish, here, and grant me the courtesy.
If by "right-wing" one means "here is my ironclad justification to prefer cheap, raw base instincts over [more expensive] co-operation, and I want to bias towards current survival and risk-adversity rather than spend time and calories thinking about longer-term re-investment and optimization", then yes, it's right-wing.
Well, you know, Tidus is an axis, and I'm going to lay down a second one in book two, set in a very different world, that we end up with a sort of coördinate plane. Yes, I think everything I'm saying here is basically true, but it's far from the whole truth. Race... is what it is, but women! Can't say I plan to do a 180 on them exactly but there is certainly going to be a hard turn into a currently-untouched dimension, and I mean it when I say that what I have to propose about them (and us) is liable to break a lot of brains for a little while.
Suppose the world works only like Tidus. It doesn't! But suppose it did. What mysteries might become transparent from that perspective? And along the way there are so many cool little things I get to point out.
All of which is to say that while I'm writing this, and will defend it, it's only a prelude; an exordium to what I actually think is going on.
that derivation remains so far (and, to a degree, I hope it remains) an exercise for the reader.
So what I'm really excited to show people is in chapter 8, because I think there's this enormous Truth staring us in the face about humanity and it's always been just outside the bounds of realization for pretty much everyone alive today, but I will show you, Mods willing and the creek don't rise.
In a sense everything up to that point is just foundation so that I can put something breathtaking on display.
Regrettably, it might be fair to say that the next two chapters after that amount to inchoate screaming. But they're there to explain why we haven't been able to see what I'm building up to in chapter eight. Unfortunately they're also, probably inarguably, exactly the sort of material which @netstack suspects.
But, for the record, I don't touch trans (or even homo) at all. There's actually one point in chapter 10, which might alternately be titled The Woman Question, in which I preëmptively clarify that I'm not going that way, just to clear the reader's mind a little. If I were doing what @netstack thinks I could certainly do a chapter on trans, and would, with relish, but as I say that's genuinely not the point here.
And, embarrassingly-enough, the target at which this book is aimed is answering a five-year-old question on reddit, from a poster I don't even remember, about why woke media is the way it is. Which I do, in chapter 11, and then, having gotten all this off my chest, I intend to propose something very, very different.
Thanks again.
Mottizens: do you have a good relationship with your parents? More specifically: do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you? Or do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
That's... a complicated question that requires a bit of a backstory. In the 90's when the USSR went tits up everyone had to find a new job. My mom managed to make a switch and made a successful career in accounting; she retired this year. My dad did not. He could probably have been a good physicist (he's a MIPT graduate), but long story short, this didn't work out and he started working for various federal agencies, first in IT and then in legal. I don't know why he kept working there.
Anyway, this affected me in two ways. First is my attitude towards money. My mom, being the breadwinner, was in charge of the family budget and she's... very careful with spending. The word "discretionary" didn't exist in our lexicon. This attitude has rubbed off on me. I've gotten better (mostly due to having to compromise with my wife, who's a complete opposite, despite growing up in a much more restrictive financial situation), but I still enjoy bargain hunting too much and obsessively compare prices even of things that should be below my level of attention, like food and random shit from AliExpress. Buying something substantial for myself still feels like some kind of kinky pleasure to me.
The other aspect is masculinity. My dad was the voice of random knowledge (stereotypes about men are true), but not the voice of authority. He was quite capable, as a former amateur boxer and a man with a badge, of defending us in a pinch, but I never considered this as something worthy of emulating. Once again, I don't know why he chose the life of a zoo tiger for himself. Perhaps I should ask him. I guess living in a zoo can sound better than living in the wild: you get free meat, free healthcare, the only thing you surrender is your freedom of movement. Cats love it! I never even realized he himself found it stifling, until I learned some things a few years ago at a family gathering. My parents patched it up, but I think my dad has been completely housebroken by the experience.
The session of impromptu psychotherapy over, where does this leave me? Well, thank God for small mercies, I am in a situation where my own masculinity isn't often called into question. My wife's father died before we met, my only son has developmental issues, I don't have to deal with his neurotypical friends and his fathers. I have a career where my leadership is backed by my experience. My wife is a homemaker. I just need to find the nerve to kick the next tradie that gives me lip out of the house. I fucking sound like Bob Slocum.
Oh, and speaking of values, not driving anyone too hard. My parents didn't try to exploit my precociousness by sending me to a magnet school, enrolling me into seven different after-school classes, or forcing me to get into the MSU or the MIPT. I went to a regular school and delighted every teacher, went to a regular university and delighted every professor, got a regular job and delighted every boss. Maybe I сould've become a greater version of myself via something like 57th-MSU-Yandex, but do you really have to go all-in if you've been dealt a good hand?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5hr ago
Cool story.
AvocadoPanic
5hr ago
1850's?
TheDemonRazgriz
5hr ago
The author of the appeals panel's opinion autistically changed nearly every quoted instance of "cell phone" to "cell[ular tele]phone".
The image of him doing this is just killing me. “No colloquialisms in THIS court!”
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
Unfortunately, I think your is doing a lot of projecting.
When he (he?) says;
It’s a lie. We don’t believe it. I certainly don’t, and I don’t think anyone else really does either.
I think he's giving up the game a little bit. Simply saying, "C'mon, Man! You can't be serious" is a great way to get YesChad.jpeg'ed (I love that I keep getting to use that).
We are all still moderns. Our instincts are modern. Our instincts are, by any reasonable description, liberal.
Well, No.
Our instincts are base and crude. We all want the basics; sex, salt (broadly;food), and shelter. Any human who lives in a group larger than a 40 person extended family is also going to have a general interest in social esteem. Satisfying only these base instincts is actually the enemy of both the traditionalists and liberals.
For traditionalists, it's direct and obvious. The more you seek after yourself, the more egotistical you become, the more you reject God's laws to subdue your base impulses and live a life of virtue. Even the proto-monotheism of the Platonic philosophers pretty much agrees with this. Easy.
For liberals, it's a little harder. They want you to be able to enjoy your basic urges to an extent and with the precondition of some sort of consent; personal in the sexual realm, and societal in the everything else realm. Eat as much as you want! But, oh, wouldn't it be good if we were all healthy too? You can make a ton of money and be a famous rich guy! But, oh, shouldn't some of what you make go to the less fortunate? You can have sex with anyone you want! Who consents ... now and forever after. And, oh, maybe don't be a sex pest even though that kind of lines up with sexually libertine attitudes. I guess what I'm saying is be attractive and charming if you want to have sex - and then you can have as much as you want. Until we (who?) decide you can't.
You can tell which side I'm on, but I think it's a fair claim to say that liberals believe in liberalism until trade-offs enter the frame. Then, they sidestep the need for individual sacrifice for the sake of social stability, let alone metaphysical virtue. So we get this weird kind of social communism - do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, where "hurt" is never clearly defined and can change subjectively. This is how liberalism ultimately leads to progressivism. Too many people start to do what they want, and society suffers. Now, there's an need to "Do somEthinG!" Cue whatever moral panic is in vogue at the moment.
A lot of this goes back to the sleight of hand that took place during the enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking was first about science and the scientific method (note: not "the science"). The trick was that political and philosophical thinkers bamboozled folks into believing the same thing could be applied to, well, politics, philosophy, and morality. We could "investigate" our beliefs and through some sort of evidentiary "thinking" determine what was ultimately good or bad. There are still practitioners of this today - dedicated ones. Sam Harris' tedious podcasts are all actually honest attempts to define "good" and "bad" without a single shred of the Divine. It takes six hours and he ends up with the most wishy-washy definition you could imagine; "whatever promotes human flourishing." Wow, six hours to hit one level of recursion.
One of the best arguments for traditionalism is that it confronts categorization error head on. This is what the state does. This is what the church does. This is what the family does. There are some levels of interdependence, sure, but, to the extent that they exist, they're mostly fixed (or, at least, there's some tradition in their definitions). What is "good" and "bad." God told us. We can absolutely puzzle over why He determined they are good and bad but, in the meantime and, actually, for all of time, we should OBEY (to quote a cool hat I saw once).
I'll agree that there is some LARPing. Even worse, there's a lot of admiring the problem while only offering the most sketchy of solutions. Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option isn't much more than "Go to church a lot, only hang out with other people who go to your church, homeschool your kids." It isn't bad advice, but it also isn't some sort of systemic gameplan to RETVRN. There are also, yes, trads of all types who are still living in the matrix. I can remember a conversation with a young woman whom I befriended while temporarily living in DC. She was going through pre-marriage counseling with her local Catholic priest. She was bemoaing the fact that, on a questionnaire she had her fiancee had to fill out, it asked "who will be handling the household finances?" "Tollbooth!" She steamed, "What am I supposed to do? Just stand barefoot in the kitchen all day with a baby on my hip?"
Say it with me; YesChad.jpeg.
This was not a secular woman. This was a woman who went to the Latin Mass regularly, dressed drastically modestly (long skirts and high necklines in August DC heat - props, girl!) and was very interested in having lots of babies with her husband. Or was she? Even an innocuous pre-marriage questionnaire was enough to hit the "THEY'RE TAKING MAH RIGHTS" nerve in her (thoroughly modern?) brain.
On the male side, there are tons of LARPing trad daddies who aren't ready for the reality that when the bible says that a wife must submit to her husband, the context isn't clear -- it may mean that the submission occurs only after DaddyCath has gotten into full guard and worked a triangle choke .... metaphorically, y'all. These are young men in tweed jackets who don't have enough social awareness to STFU when the 60 year old with 35 years of marriage and 7 kids is giving actual marital advice. They are hopeless if they think they can manage a new bride behind closed doors.
So how rad can we trade without living a lie? On a personal or family level, I think it's pretty easy. I live in a weird rural spot now where the downtown of the "town" near me has pride flags everywhere. I drink in those bars often. When my drinking buddies - purple haired and all - find out I'm a young jedi in training novice trad cath, they've all hit me with some version of "So you think a woman doesn't have a right to choose?!" to which I will reply "The laws (depending on state) say she can. In my eyes, it's murder and she'll have a lot to answer for. I'd never advise it" The follow up is usually some version of "well, but like, I mean ... politically, though..."
And that's the slogan I'll conclude with - To be trad, you reject the premise that "the personal is political" (or however it's phrased). I get to act out and live my beliefs the way I want. When the state says I can't do that then, yes, there are issues. That's not (quite) the battle we're fighting today. Unfortunately, however, the front lines are definitely impacting kids. Some of @WhiningCoil's stories are truly terrifying.
My studies took me to Hawaii for a time. I was interviewing an authority on the (vast) lava tubes on the Big Island (incredibly-unique ecosystem) and asked him if the natives found them suitable for food storage. 'No,' he told me, 'Hawaiians didn't really ever develop a concept of food storage.' I found this shocking and so looked into his words on my own. They checked out, and part of his sentence has made its way directly into this post.
Their average IQ is 81. They're known for their sloth; for their placidity broken occasionally by bloodlust. (EDIT: They're also America's single most-likely group to be homeless, ref, more than twice as likely as blacks. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.)
If you'd like to look up more about the Cold Winters Hypothesis I wish I could help you better. Wikipedia seems to have deleted the article.
What really occurs to me here, though, is that you seem to be cattily implying that only those people (like me) could find this persuasive while you, an erudite sophisticate, obviously know better and can reject the idea out of hand, as any right-thinking person should. Maybe I'm misreading you.
I'm comparing people to plants and just like a plant where it's not wanted is a weed, a person where they're not wanted is a foreigner.
They can go back to their garden, where my kind of plant isn't allowed to grow.
The garden is the country or state. Citizens are both the plants and the gardener, just as man is both sculptor and marble.
Foreigners do suppress native birth rates, even more so when they are of another race. They compete for housing and employment, driving the cost of the former up and the wages of the latter down.
I can't force you to see something you're choosing to ignore. It's clear as day to me, as obvious as the nose on your face.
People like their own kind (kind as in kin).
If you want to grow a dandelion bed, then grass is a weed. If you want a lawn, dandelions are weeds. If you want a rose garden, both grass and dandelions are weeds. The problem isn't Koreans, it's grass in my rose garden, or dandelions in my lawn.
More options
Context Copy link