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By Russians With Attitude

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I delay actual reviews for another week to give further thoughts on the corruption of hotel, restaurant and travel systems… and the new mass-luxury economy that is its own type of sheep-shearing.

This is a follow up to the introduction to this series you can read here,

On top of the general scam-call-center nature of the everyday economy in America since at least the 1990’s, there’s also the parallel phenomenon of a glut of new rich, flush with cash but not sense, who live to get rinsed by whores and whore-a-likes in the supposed luxury-purveyor sectors.

Since at least the year 2000 marketing to “the rich” has been a scam. Why is it possible in most of the world to rip off those who want to spend money or on occasion splurge? Tokyo is the world’s largest luxuries market. For a people with relatively good taste sharpened by centuries of obsessive attention to high crafts, good food since birth, and decades-long prosperity, frauding someone on a luxury-price-tier carries real costs there. Bad restaurants go out of business fast. Selling a false luxury product at premium-tier price makes Japanese outraged. At the least you’ll get flooded with bad reviews. And you might get a brutish old short-haired Japanese matron chimp at you…the Japanese can also act out in public. But anyway, you go out of business fast: the restaurant and hotel market there is brutally Darwinian for sorting price-quality relationship. This can be confirmed by various blind taste-test experiments. A friend took his visiting American parents to a charcoal-skewers robata-yaki-style restaurant and accidentally ordered a premium fish, the ayu. This is a much-prized seasonal river sweetfish, slightly bitter innards. And then while eating it he was surprised to find it was one of the best and most distinctive fish he’d ever had. Then he saw the bill…$40 for one small grilled fish. He had ordered it by mistake, but it paid off; similarly you can buy one of the $100-$200 melons or mangoes in the Shinjuku Isetan department store, sneak it in on guests without saying anything, and be assured they will appreciate as a perfect and distinctive fruit. In Japan even if a higher price will be a product that sometimes lets you down per personal tastes, it will always in some way be justified objectively. This is why Tokyo and very few other places in the world with similar traditions of good taste—Paris, still—is somewhere you can reliably splurge and not feel cheated. But in the rest of the world this isn’t usually true.

About the Gypsoid-rich for who the spending of money is the psychological ritual or display final aim, nothing can be done. I’ve known a few Balkanoid greasers and boasters who have very brutish manners and tastes indistinguishable from various Third World slum dwellers; such types are still found in civilized post-Europe. This is the type who married a neurologist wife and so came in to what he thought was “money”; then he brag about spending $3000 for a hotel room per night. There’s no helping such people. Andrew Tate caters to a large sector of mostly mystery-meat males who need to spend a lot of money on e.g., bottle service for $1000 vodka at the club out of insecurity or, at best, the practical but false belief it will get them puccy. Above these there are newly rich tech and cryptocurrency lottery winners and such who are truly wealthy, decamillionaires and up. Many of these may feel this same way or they may just not pay attention to price anymore at all…either way they then get grievously taken advantage of by variety of “luxury” product and service peddlers…they too finish by paying exhorbitant sums for Lady Gaga-edition gold-leaf cappuccino pudding in a Dubai mall cafe and feeling they’re now “ballers,” in the language of their people.

I don’t write to reach such people but the problem is that there are so many of them now and they’ve thrown around so much money that their creeping anti-taste, their stupidity and naivete have greatly distorted the rest of the economy, and now spills over to others. Entirely normal people who now want to splurge for a rare special occasion are at risk of getting caught up in the tow of one or the other of these fraudulent economic biomes. I am greatly disturbed by the possibility of a young couple going on their honeymoon, a husband or wife wishing to celebrate a special occasion for their spouse, a son wanting to treat his parents to a special vacation getting defrauded and ending up with bad memories.

Ideological manias cause other types of review distortions. In the United States the racial hysteria that’s been simmering for decades and had a recent outburst in the “woke” moments of 2020 has made booking a “five star” hotel especially risky. I’ve never tried staying at nice hotels in America myself but I’m told that most of the independent “grande dame” signature hotels like the Palmer in Chicago are entirely staffed now by aggressive and contemptuous sheboons who will make your stay miserable. I heard stories of incompetence from the Mandarin Oriental in Miami as well: bags lost and gangbanger-affect maitre’d doing the obsequious shuck-n-jive, “Imma do you good you hear, Imma find it for you, Imma offer you credits for afternoon drink in the bar knowmsayin, bottle service Chandon” and such. Google and other ratings sites are ideologically distorted here too: they will simply not allow negative reviews of “properties in underprivileged areas,” or hide them. I assume Conde Nast and similar travel and lifestyle magazines are also regularly lying now for ideological and sensitivity-ethics reasons, and that LLM’s are probably trained to do the same as well.

And again this all takes place at the same time that social media and influencers constantly promote images of enticing luxury, and while the big-brand luxury houses have become democratized and mass-produced. In the recent decade has been introduced the absurd idea of the big-brand as requirement of feeling a citizen: many girls are trained to think if you don’t have one of the big fashion names for clothes or sunglasses, that you must be a piker. The idea that a reader’s hard-earned vacation is ruined because they’re expected to stay and splurge at a five-star hotel, or their bitch girlfriend demands it…and they don’t know what they’re getting into…again, this upsets me…

Pedestrian corruption is the most frequent reason reviews are false. In some cities Google maps reviews of restaurants are relatively accurate in the sense that something with many votes of long-standing 4.6 and above will be quite good. But if you rely on these in, say, Paris you could have a bad meal every day of a brief stay there. There are many ways Google and other “crowdsourced” reviews can be frauded, but it’s without a doubt a big problem in Paris and also often in parts of Spain. These could be farmed out to a social media sweatshop in Manila, for example; it could also be the Sri Lankan owners or staff of many of these places getting their 300 cousins in Colombo to updoot, but I’ve had terrible meals especially in Paris when I went to restaurants with Google maps ratings even of 4.8 and 4.9. In Paris and most European cities, the Michelin guide is a requirement for good eating consistently, and they have a pretty good app now with locator and such. The problem is that outside of Europe Michelin is famously inaccurate and possibly corrupt (and this may be the case also in the periphery of Europe like in Athens). In a place like Rio de Janeiro there will be some good restaurants listed but also many bad ones that clearly paid the reviewer or are his friends (I will give reviews of restaurants in future posts). There was an old article or blog post from the 2000’s that made clear how much of a scam the Michelin guide is in Tokyo:

There are some very good restaurants listed on Michelin Tokyo, but also many others that are well below the quality of any average mom-and-pop izakaya drinking-snacks casual bar there.

In Tokyo Google maps reviews are also frequently wrong in both directions. I often use instead Tabelog, the local reviews site, which is much more accurate. I tried an old ramen restaurant that appeared well below a 4.0 on Google Maps but had a high rating on Tabelog. The Google maps number was obviously wrong…this place served excellent intense-flavor classic Tokyo ramen. I supposed the owners nuked their own ratings on the foreigner-preferred site to keep out non-Japanese. Regardless, the new casino rip-off internet extends the fake-ratings problem also in this other negative direction on matters far beyond hotels and restaurants: very recently for example the Oasis app specializes in apparently entirely fraudulent negative reviews of sometimes good brands, damaging the legitimate businesses of many probably hardworking and decent people:

In this case this is done for attention agitation. It’s also a way of gaming apps rankings on app stores through contrived controversy. This tactic is an extension of the broader “exposure” style of accusation that’s also at the bottom of conspirashit posting psychology. People get a pornographic rise out of slander of others and the feeling that they’ve been betrayed. The same psychology is behind the style common both to establishment “high human capital” media outlets and the new “dissident” media biome: both focus entirely on accusation, insinuations about their target’s personal life or associations, historical genealogies of words in question…a calm discussion of ideas and facts almost never enters into it. See the threads just linked regarding the “Oasis” app: it appears to be the same PR-style of sophistic and intemperate accusation, taken to product reviews…

The many corrupt financial and psychological incentives for bad reviews from both directions, and the subsequent worthlessness of all modern review systems—crowdsourced or professional—calls for a new publication. There is needed a genuine high quality review magazine with a few intrepid writers of developed good taste and a record of impeccable honesty. Until then I will try to provide in my own way this same kind of information in this travel & leisure series of the Magenta Notebooks.

“Rising world wealth” and the social-media aspiration environment that possibly also contributed to global falling birth rates are distorting luxury prices and opportunities from another direction. The big luxury houses have mostly themselves to blame for the present democratization and I think future collapse of their brands. The Hilfiger and Courvoisier phenomena will now be replayed globally as new Global South rich chase status allure and smear good things with airport terminal feels…but the big fashion names didn’t have to ramp up production to meet this demand. Even in cases where that’s not possible though, like for certain cigars and wines, I take this opportunity to wring my hands on a dystopian side effect of “rising global living standards.” In 2021 you could get certain Cohiba cigars for $20-$30 or so, but now because they’ve become a mandatory Chinese Instagram status statement, the minimum price is $70. Cohiba is still very good but in my opinion only a fool pays this much for a cigar. The Chinese have genuinely no taste for it and buy it only for social media display…they buy it by the caseload and have also bought out the Cohiba company itself from the Spanish (it’s now based in Hong Kong). They’ve similarly distorted the wine market. Burgundy can be great, but because of Chinese trend-seeking attention, all the winemakers in Burgundy are now insanely wealthy with production for the next 20 years already bought up at astronomical prices. I’m not a wine connoisseur myself, but those I know who are say the current price of a good Burgundy bottle is completely unreasonable and you can get a comparable product from e.g., Piedmont for much less. My favorite wines lately are Spanish dry sherries—oloroso, amontillado and palo cortado styles. You can find an ultra-aged bottle at $90-120 that is maybe equal in quality to certain French wines five or more times that value. My fear is the Chinese will “discover” these at some point. It’s a fear that now accompanies any good luxury product (I’m concerned about the price inflation, not the associations, although I imagine that for people who care about clothes that’s an important consideration). A friend told me an anecdote about a French billionaire who met a Chinese counterpart and talked to him about wines. The Chinese billionaire told him that he owned 4000 bottles of Cheval Blanc Bordeaux wine: this is by our time very much a “finance bro” bottle used at steakhouses to celebrate closing deals and such. The French billionaire asked, “Well that’s wonderful. That’s a great selection…you must have an amazing cellar…what other bottles do you have,” and the answer from the Chinese tycoon was that he had no other bottles, that he’s only ever drank Cheval Blanc. Nothing else but the best will cross his lips! I know that many nations that just come into wealth have newly rich who go through a “growth process” and refinement over a generation or two. I fear something else…something bad with no end is happening here. I fear that for the foreseeable future this is the fate of “luxury.”

Europe and Japan as the remaining ancient taste-developing and taste-making regions of the whole world are I think in a special danger if indeed the Chinese and Global South “upper middle classes” continue to grow. The dystopian effects of this are displayed in the Houellebecq book The Map and the Territory. The financial incentives to rest on these “ancient strengths” will only intensify. Europe then risks becoming an organic-biodynamic theme park for rich Arab, Russian, Chinese and other “high class” tourists who come to sample the cheeses of the various local terroirs, the aged hams and artisanal pates. European man can then be reduced to a high-class restaurateur and sommelier lovingly developing authentic traditional crafts and goods to connoisseur standards. Small-producing wine, champagne and even beer makers could regularly become multi-millionaires as a global “mass luxury” producing class. Europe itself will be an “authentic” open-air museum and wildlife preserve. Many cities would be reduced to modern Dubrovniks, museum-exhibition of “classical architecture” with armies of cruise ship olds flooding the streets at all times of the year; other smaller pristine, preserved “walkable cities” and state-of-the-art $40K-per-head truffle-hunting safari and the like will cater to higher-tier customers. In some ways Europe is such already, but there will be temptations to move further in this direction. This would be a terrible fate for that continent even if all permanent migrants were to leave. White nationalists, the new right, the American right, the left, and the religious could all easily come to agree on the reduction of Europe to such a reservation-province in the not too remote future.

The contribution of “dissident intellectuals” with their taste for tradition and classical beauty will I think have contributed to all this in a bad way. As my friend Mr. Star remarks, this all smells of late-Qing-dynasty pretensions to superiority over barbarians and the uncultured on account of your supposedly superior taste and attention to the fine differences between past ceramics, sensitivity to special seasonings, and aesthetic enjoyment of old lacquer designs or what. This kind of antiquarian affectation in a time of technological and cultural stagnation, where nothing new, exciting or great can be believed to take place, must be combatted in good old Futurist form, with a vitalist and confident barbarism. I’d rather all museums burned than live this way.

Coming next week, if I am in mood I will review some of the worst scam places I’ve been to recently, to show you in vivid image this problem of fake reviews and corrupt travel magazines.

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The United States is a sheep-shearing operation and one of the easiest ways to see the giant fraud is to look at hotel prices in other countries. This includes countries developed or not…or even just compare to the expectations of common sense. In 2015 or so you could get a very basic but decent room in central Madrid, a few blocks from the opera house, for about $30 per night. This was your own proper hotel room, with private bathroom, daily cleaning and so on, not a hostel, in one of Europe’s most pleasant cities. I’ve paid in the past even less for a room with private bathroom in a “pension” outside the central plazas of Lisbon. Around 2000-2005, you could get such a room for $5 a night. They had at the time a freaklike beggar with elephantiasis outside the Praca Figueira in the center, besides African idlers by the subway stations selling posters with a map of Angola. Prices are a bit higher now in the gentrified and happy Lisbon that’s a refuge for American tech and crypto professionals.

To be conservative you can say getting a room for under $100 a night in most of the world’s major top tier cities still is possible. You hear horror stories about Hong Kong, sometimes literally: a very successful Hong Kong movie, Dream Home of 2010, is a slasher tale about people literally killing for overpriced and rare private apartment space. You’d expect hotels to be insanely priced, but first time in Hong Kong I stayed in a big beautiful room in Wanchai, right in middle of a Blade Runner-hyperurban setting, with a great view of the mountains and skyline behind, for less than $90. And now on Hong Kong island itself, not Kowloon, you can still find Best Western or ibis genuine hotel rooms with private bathroom for less than $80 in very central locations as of spring 2026, decent size and with views. In Tokyo, supposedly the highest-price-per-square-foot city in the world, the first time I stayed in a central business district and paid about $65 for a small but perfectly reasonable, clean and modern room with good breakfast of various rice balls pickles roast fish soup and such. The Japanese-ultranationalist-owned APA chain is something I can high recommend for beginner travelers: clean, modern rooms in central locations, at times available for under $100 (for example in the decent Ueno neighborhood), and for only somewhat above $100 in very central areas like Roppongi. By contrast in 2015, which was the last time I spent any serious time in the United States, it was basically impossible to find anything for less than $100 on a January or February iced Tuesday night off the highways outside lovely New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven and Hartford are some of the premier “garden cities” of America, by which I mean it will give you autoimmune disease to live there from the stress of horrid Soviet post-industrial, “postracial” ugliness of the place. Any suggestion of finding a decent hotel to spend the night in a major city like New York for less than $100 registers as absurd to the average American because he’s a sucker used to being financially abused.

You are sometimes told that the reason medical expenses in the United States cost many times the same procedures in even highly developed foreign countries, for example in Japan or Spain, is because these latter are free-riding on American innovation in the pharmaceutical and medical industries. Thus supposedly the American has to pay a premium on MRI’s or blood tests because this extra money goes to careful Research & Development costs that are located in America solely and benefit the whole ungrateful world for free. Whether this explains why for example at-home nurse visits to draw blood for a routine exam are available to the upper middle classes in Europe and South America and Asia, but not at all in America, I don’t know. Maybe you can make that case. But I don’t understand the amazing American innovation expenses regarding everyday car rentals, which cost many times more in the United States over Europe; or the research-and-development angle on roadside possibly-bedbug-haunted motels run by the Patel family, that cost as much as a 4-star resort in parts of Japan…that justify fleecing the American consumer and making everyone there from the working class trucker to the recent-crypto-decamillionaire all into freiers. (Maybe it is the extra kilotonnage and horselike charm of the average American female today, average weight 170 lbs and BMI 29 including at ages below 30, that plays to male desires for more stuff and triggers in ambience such elevated cross-industry premium prices.)

A hotel as a mere place to spend the night is to me unreasonable over $40 or $50…even that seems somewhat too much if you think about it. I’ve often felt cheated on road trips where I had to blow $50 for a stay in beige-feel hotels when I had to pull in nondescript rustbelt-style South American or East European town only because night was coming. As a long time traveler I have contempt for the Neo-hippie types who spend their money in hostels smelling each other. At times I’ve visited hostels myself especially if I lived a long time on my own in a new city. Sometimes it gets lonely not speaking English in person…and I would just go to a hostel to get a drink and talk to people, tell them stories about hidden messages in phonebooks and so on, and then be asked to leave under suspicion of schizophrenia. But aside from this use, hostels are to be avoided as a scam of their own. Above all I can’t take the stink of other disgusting ape huemans…and to be made to share a room where sleeping you have to smell their dirty socks or hear them snoring; I’d rather take my chances sleeping on a park bench or the beach. At times driven by a righteous fury, I’ve composed, in ornate and official Spanish, letters to the Mexican and Colombian heads of the federal and civil police forces, begging them to shut down the hostels as affronts to taste, public hygiene, and political security.

But consider the cost of it; you can rarely get a hostel for anything less than $15 per day or usually $25 per day almost anywhere you go now, and it’s been like this for some time. For almost this price per day you can rent a cheap car, or in certain countries you can buy a used but working old car for mere hundreds of dollars. There’s also the cost of gas of course, but you can use such cheap car to drive around the hinterlands and countryside, and reach towns where tourists don’t normally go…this is by far the superior way to see a country. In Brazil in the early 2000’s you could drive to the interior where they had never seen an American; as a 22-year-old a carnal bonanza and celebration awaited you wherever you entered, besides enjoyable talks and parties with locals. You can also sleep in this car at times and avoid spending any money on “hotels.” With a cheap mosquito net in the summer or temperate weather, you hang that by the open window and can use the car to rest. I’ve had friends who did this even in dangerous countries like Zimbabwe…he slept in the parking lot of a casino in Harare. Sometimes you pay a bribe to the guard or a roadside cop. But hostels now are often filled with mystery meats and not always hot young Americans or Europeans. Then, outraged by the costs of hotels in the United States and unwilling to pay $100 for a night at a Gujarati-owned dump motel in apocalyptic Connecticut, I did this over there too, at times I slept in my car in gas station rest stops. But I had bad nightmares and was afraid.

You must realize in all that follows in this review series that unless you’re talking about taking measures like sleeping in your car or on the beach or such, if you do enter the normalfag “hotel market,” you can get cheated at $150-200 per night more than at $800-1000/night. There are, as I will show in time, certain hotels especially in Asia where you won’t feel cheated at $500-800 per night…and if you appreciate location as a theatrical display, you’ll maybe have a signature experience you’ll always remember…

My first times at really nice hotels in Asia finally changed my mind on this: a week at the Ritz in Nikko, ten days in the Upper House and a week in the original Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong made me realize these are not just places to sleep a night…they’re without exaggeration immersive crafts and architecture experiences. For something like the Upper House in particular, or anything by the designer Andre Fu, there’s something in the actual physical energy of the place that doesn’t fully come out in photos. Upper House looks very nice in pictures, but it comes off somewhat generic, even “corporate”;

Upper House HK bathroom harbor view; my own photo

I stayed there on the very high recommendation of a friend I trusted and I wasn’t let down. In person it’s something else, it does feel magical, and it’s worth the $500-$1000 per night you’ll spend on the room. I’ll give a much more detailed review of these places later.

As a “Ghana-rich” idler with a show that makes me a lot of cash, no responsibilities, and a life of constant travel, I get to enjoy luxury airlines, restaurants, and hotels at will and so nothing much is lost if I stay gamble on a bad place once in a while. But even for a very wealthy man with a demanding job who takes his family maybe once or twice a year and wants a memorable time, a fraudulent review can turn into a wretched and dark thing, a missed opportunity, a spoiled year and time that’s forever gone—there should be grounds for lawsuits for such fraud.

This series of my Magenta Notebooks will cover hotels, restaurants and airlines as they occur to me from my past and present travels, with no specific order but only what I feel about writing on that day. The select audience I have, I got and kept from always telling the truth as I see it. In a time of proliferating fake luxury and fake and corrupt review sites, I hope to do a service for my readers and also those who are just searching properties or restaurants on Google or LLM and find these notes…let this be an aide to save you from bad decisions, or better, to help make good ones.

For me this means a location or hotel that excites you in a physical and direct way and makes your chest pound. I’m talking about places that, absent any freak accidents, will consistently deliver not just a good time but a near-magical experience that will linger for the year—such places are found almost only in Asia for a few reasons. Consider the famous hotel featured in Lost in Translation, where it plays as big a role in the setting of that movie as the city Tokyo itself, and for good reason. The recent renovation of the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku, Tokyo was undertaken as per Asian standards, where a five star is expected to go through a renewal at least once every twenty years. In this case the renovation was completed I think in December of 2025. Almost all the hotels I’ll recommend in this series are going to be in Asia. I haven’t tried hotels of this type in the United States, and I hear mostly bad things, but in Europe and South America it’s mostly not worth it. (There are notable exceptions, and in time I’ll review all that I’ve found). But even Europe’s “signature historical hotels” like the Hassler in Rome, where Prince Charles stays, or the Hotel Kamp in Helsinki…the most one could say about such places is “it’s a nice hotel,” but nearly all lack the absorbing magic of the new Asian palaces. In the case of the Kamp, which is legendary among Finns worldwide, it barely compares to a decent four-star hotel in Tokyo. There’s almost no relationship between a stay at the Aman in Tokyo or Kyoto and the extremely famous and overhyped Hotel George V in Paris…you stay at the latter only to say you stay there or to show on Instagram as a Chinese-style “status” luxury consumption marker. In Europe you will pay at least twice as much as in any Asian city, for a smaller room, annoying “official” and insincere displays of hospitality, and more important…for no feeling of enchantment. Again, from what I hear it’s even worse in the United States.

The basis for this feeling of genuine enchantment with a building isn’t necessarily so otherworldly—it starts, for example, with the use of very high-quality materials. Consistency on this changes the feel entirely. Hotels like the Capella in Singapore, the Raffles in Bali, the Kyoto and Tokyo Aman, etc., the Upper House and Mandarin Orientals in Hong Kong, have paid attention to the details of everything from the guardrails, the lamp fixtures, the curtains: everything is meticulously obsessed over to be (or at least to appear to be) only of the highest quality…the kinds of tropical wood that are used, the way these woods are treated and cured before use, and so on. Big-name and especially “historical” hotels in cities around the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Rome, Paris, Madrid, Simferopol, or wherever will coast on their reputation and their supposed sense of grandness, and try to impress with scale, but you will be very let down…something will irritate you, slowly, unconsciously and build up; then you look closer and you see why…they used cheap, light materials for the metals, aluminum even… the upholstery on the furniture looks like it’s from a government social security office, the carpets are bleak, sanatorium-feel and worn out in some places, and so on. This is true both for new modern-looking hotels and for “classical” design places that try to appeal to traditional tastes. A lot of the reason people have bad associations with “modern” architecture is merely that “recent construction” uses cheap materials whereas older buildings that have lasted were built with the best available at the time. But it’s very possible to build “classical” traditional buildings with second-rate ingredients, and then the fraud feels even more painful. A lot of the best “modern” architecture is in any case merely slight variation on Japanese aesthetics or principles…but this style only does well with the use of the highest quality matter. I will have occasion to comment in detail in the future on distinctions between hotels on this point.

A huge problem of all review sites and established magazines is the unjust lack of consistency that leads them to award equal praise to hotels vastly different in quality only because they think they have to find the supposedly good places in every location. So a once-in-a-lifetime memorable stay like at the Upper House in Hong Kong (at least as of a few years ago) gets the same types of words as a merely passable comfortable business hotel in Lisbon or a mediocre outworn wreck in e.g., Argentina falsely presented as an “art hotel.” The vast majority of “nice” hotels are just not worth it, but magazines like Fodor’s, Conde Nast and many other similar will obfuscate on this, whether out of democratic ideological convictions or just the need to serve perceived customer demand for “information”; or maybe basic corruption. The same is true for their restaurant ratings. Michelin was supposed to avoid this by simply refusing to rate cities that aren’t up to a consistent standard, but that time is long gone…a Michelin plate, or star or smiley face or whatever will just not mean the same thing in Paris as in Tokyo or Buenos Aires. The uselessness of these ratings systems has then called me to step in and assume responsibility!

My favorite hotels are the following: Capella and Raffles in Singapore, the Ritz in Nikko, Japan, the Mandarin Oriental and Upper House in Hong Kong, Raffles in Bali, Waldorf Astoria in Osaka, the now-closed Sinner Hotel in Paris; Casa di Langa in Piedmont gets a special mention for now. In time I will review all of these and more, but I can recommend them without any hesitations and almost promise that you’ll have a special time at any of them. In Tokyo, though I haven’t stayed there myself, I’ve visited friends staying and I can highly recommend also the Aman and Park Hyatt Shinjuku. A stay or even a visit for afternoon tea (famous at the Aman among elite Japanese ladies) to one of these palaces equals or exceeds a visit to a major well-known temple in Tokyo; at their best, the modern top hotels are immersive aesthetic experiences minus the “cultural outing” pretense and the obnoxious tourists on their enrichment hour.

Reviews to follow shortly…

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Next part coming soon on Soviet Union in the 1980’s the end of communism and the brief time of wild freedom anarchy in Russia of early 1990’s.

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The case I made here being true deserves to be repeated, and updated in light of events since 2023. Some smart friends maintain that October 7, 2023 was a far more important event for American social and political life than even the pandemic. I haven’t thought through if this is true, but it’s certainly driven a larger portion of the American media, government, cultural and otherwise “elites” more nutty than the pandemic did.

The matters of Israel, Palestine and associated concepts like “antisemitism” seem to be far more important for the so-called “elite” than for the American people. Polls show that Israel-Palestine were not at all high-priority matters in the most recent 2024 election, falling far behind matters of the economy and immigration; although in the year leading up to it, many pundits and “influencers” on both left and right were insisting this was the most important matter of our time and of the election. (It’s also interesting that the transsexualism controversy, though so important for “opinion-makers” in legacy media and online, hardly registers as at all a priority for American voters.)

Very young people won’t remember, and oldtroons have every reason to obfuscate on this point, but the Israel-Palestine hysteria of our day (among, again, chiefly “elites”) is not at all new. It repeats on every intifada cycle. The last time, around 2004-5 there was a similar wave of hysteria in media, protests, etc. Whether this current iteration is actually more significant because of its actual “content,” or whether it’s simply internet-amplified hysteria, I don’t know. Social media and online life has largely replaced real life after 2020 anyway. That’s an interesting matter for someone else to look into.

In the 2019 article on Israel linked above I made the point that there isn’t just one Israel in the same way that there isn’t just one Jewish people. The idea of a unified Jewry is a rabbinic fiction both in Israel and outside. But regardless of identity and group formation questions, on the purely political front, the hysterical polarization on the matter of Israel makes it possible for bad actors to pretend that there are no internal divisions within both Israel and the non-Israeli Jewish press and lobbies (which includes the Evangelical lobby) at large. This of course would mean that there are no exploitable internal divisions and fracture lines in those broad camps, which for some is very convenient. Both the Zionists and the antiZionists vehemently agree on this point and with the greatest emotion object to anyone who points out that the political unity either of Israel or of Jews is a fiction. (It’s part of what allows, e.g., Biden or Newsom, who are themselves Zionists of a different hue, to be cynically portrayed in press sometimes as brave critics of “Israel.”) Although almost never directly addressed, the pretense of an identity between Israel and the Jews also allows polemicists on both sides to play bait-and-switch on many fronts, and in my opinion significantly weakens any reasonable critic of posture toward the Middle East over the last few decades.

As I indicated in my 2019 article, my opposition to Israel is mostly the same as my friend Menaquinone4’s, who reminded me of this point—my opposition isn’t motivated by the plight of the Palestinians. The image I painted in my 2019 article of a peppy ethnonationalist Ashkenazi state de-shtetling the Jewish people, wanting to become a European outpost, and building orange groves was charming I think. It charmed some of the English too. Israel won the 1967 war with French, not American weapons, versus Soviet weapons, and collaborated with the French and English in the Suez Crisis when America intervened to “stop European colonialism.” But that state is long gone now. Under the domination of piledriving bearded old rabbis in dirty robes, Israel has become very much a “multiethnic religious nationalist” state where the original Ashkenazi population is now down to 35%; its secular nationalist and military ethos is all but swamped and suffocated by the same tedious and contrived religiosity that is embraced elsewhere, including by Christian nationalists in the United States, and Muslims and Hindu nationalists as well. In the United States the Tucker-Fuentes-Owens neo-pundit branch makes copious use of this same kind of religious signaling. The reasons why are obvious: religiosity is a group identity and moral bludgeon that anyone can claim and whose veracity nobody can disprove. Anyone who does claim it can therefore be assumed to have an otherwise weak or empty position. It’s the perfect tool of the new “elites” that seek to replace the exhaustion of the old liberals with a more thorough-going bankrupt assertiveness of their own.

But it’s unclear from the point of view of the nationalist or racialist right, however defined, how “taking” any side in the Israeli-Palestinian matter is profitable. Let me even be more precise: if, as I do, you value the idea of specifically European, meaning white civilization, with at least Europe and the Anglosphere included as self-confident as majority-white countries (defined racially) as an ideal and ultimate aim, then I don’t see why or how taking a side in this conflict is of any use.

Aside from the problems internally with Israel and the change of face it’s experienced over the last few decades which makes it a now distasteful place, there’s the obvious problems of who the “pro-Israel” pundits are in America. Cheering for Israel because it is a “nationalist healthy state” doesn’t have a winning aspect to it, for reasons I said in my article from 2019, and beyond. It’s not just any nationalist state, it is one that increasingly understands itself as opposed to the history of Western (broadly, west Europe and the Anglosphere) civilization. Yoram Hazony understands Israel and Jewry as something inherently against the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the thrust of Western identity which is indeed explicitly universalist and imperial (nationalism, especially Hazony’s kind, is also universalist, but just mendaciously so). Mark Levin, Bari Weiss, the American Zionist Organization and any number of such individuals and groups others will be glad to list, aren’t actually allies of European or American nationalists and provide nothing in return for theoretical cheering.

Sociologically many of the pro-Israel propagandists are from families that migrated directly from the Pale to the United States with no intervening period of European assimilation or aspiration. They seem to me uniformly hostile to the things I care about, and they’ve worked over the years relentlessly in various ways to sabotage even the small access to an audience I and my friends have had. They try to modulate, lie about and otherwise silence and smear our general complex of ideas. From my point of view as a mere humorist and popularizer of the true understanding of Nietzsche that was suppressed after 1950, I see them as hostile to this especially, without exception. In much of this they aren’t motivated necessarily specifically by their Jewish or pro-Israel orientation, but as part of being part of the highly compromised world of the conservative punditry which is the same in its “Christian” or nonJewish specimens like George Will, Robert P. George, etc.; it’s unclear what there is to gain from making common cause with the “pro-Israel commentariat,” who ultimately see me and my friends with more hostility and revulsion than they do the left.

Regardless, the pro-Israel people in the United States support deleterious policies in the West and seem under no urgency to change course even now after October 7. But in the few cases where some do, it’s irrelevant. They are frankly powerless to help “the right” or Western nationalists in any concrete way. Many of the positions they take now they do because they also have to, because of the libtarded general establishment morality that would brand them racists if they were “consistent nationalists” and advocated for the West what they advocate for Israel. A trial in this direction was ventured recently by the odious transJew Laura Loomer, who under conditions most favorable to her cause, still lost her election by a large margin. Libtarded morality gives them license to some extent to advocate these things for Israel and not be considered racist or fascist, but would absolutely ostracize and marginalize them if they did the same for Europeans, Americans, etc.; one can come up with a not trivial list of pro-Zionist commentators who “crossed the line” and tried to advocate also for pro-American identitarian positions and were then canceled. So actually they’re unable to help even if they wanted to. The more important question here would be why the dominant liberal morality in America makes this exception for not only Israel, but for any number of other designated minorities that are encouraged even to be cartoonishly nationalist when it comes to “they own people.” That’s a much bigger question.

I find it also on a personal level impossible to make common cause with people like Ben Shapiro or Bari Weiss or similar, whether or not you could claim they are actually influential in American life. Even aside from the numerous personal issues, such as their repeated attempts to dox and deplatform me and my friends (at times through their fake “antisemitic” “far right” proxies, mass reporting, passing on information to Antifa, etc.), just on the merits of their own content and arguments, they are the utmost in vulgarity and mediocrity. It’s pure “Hillel community center advocacy” with zero historical knowledge, wit, or content beyond opinion spouting. American conservative public opinion seems determined by Hillel community center types, after-school Church social types, and prayer breakfast types. It’s intolerable to have anything to do with this biome of pious piledrivers. They owe their positions entirely to politically-motivated patronage and artificial corporate appointments, not any organic audience interest or any original intellectual stimulation or ideas.

Whatever the ultimate causes of the pro-Israel pundit’s hypocrisy may be, in the end they are so very loose with principle that they can only be seen as temporary and conditional fellow travelers by any American nationalist. And there’s the senselessness of the argument here in the end. For the online right to start advocating for Israel there would have to be some sort of understanding with these types that in return, and to escape the charge of hypocrisy, they would become advocates for white American interests, or at the very least for some type of race-based immigration restriction (under whatever polite pretense). I don’t see them being able to do that for any number of reasons. Nothing is stopping them from doing this now...they’re not, and I don’t see what can plausibly change that. It’s been ten years since 2015-6; if they haven’t changed on these orientations by now, I don’t see what hope there is of shifting them.

So I don’t see why talking about Israel in this direction or advocating for its interests is profitable or a benefit. There is also an “optics” issue here: Trump ran as the opposite of Bush-era GOP. In 2016 he even if I remember right criticized the Adelsons by name. By now in Trump’s second term there has already been a strike on Iran and it feels this week like there’s build-up or threats for more escalation. No matter how successful and professional that first strike was, this is all a symbolic disrespect to Trump’s original supporters. Trump wasn’t elected either in 2016 or 2024 to attack Iran, but quite the opposite. Americans are tired of entanglements in that region generally.

On the other hand to take an anti-Israel position also brings no benefit to the right. First consider the “undue force” question around which all anti-Israel sentiment has centered since October 7. The settlers in the West Bank believe the Netanyahu response to October 7 has been too restrained. If indeed the purpose is to root out Hamas as an “Islamofascist” terrorist government, you’d have to inflict World War II-level pain to induce surrender. The fact that Netanyahu has been unwilling to do this is the problem from the Israeli point of view. The settlers and hardliners in Israel have called Netanyahu a cuck from the beginning of this conflict. He was apparently unwilling to do even things like flooding the tunnels in Gaza, let alone inflict the type of scorched-earth pain that would drive their enemies to unconditional surrender. I’m not a war correspondent so I can’t comment on the details of military operations, just what the Israeli “far right” actually wanted. Certainly Israeli soldiers didn’t engage at close quarters, nor were willing to sustain casualties in their aims.

From the point of view of the West as I defined above, let’s say again the Anglosphere plus Europe, the problem is the unwillingness to do even what Netanyahu did to the Palestinians to its own black-brown-beige Third World minorities—let alone what Netanyahu should be doing. The problem in other words is the very opposite of what all this hysteria is about. From a “right wing” point of view, the ideal case would be where e.g. France responds to the Bataclan massacre by means of a mass state-supported pogrom or state-led operation against its browns (not just Muslims, but using the Muslim threat as a pretext), followed maybe by mass deportations. One could counter that the political aim of remigration doesn’t and won’t require such measures. There’s room for argument here. I think the only scenario in which it wouldn’t require such measures is one in which the opponent believes you capable of them. If in a game of chicken they know you’ll swerve first due to “humanitarian commitments,” remigration is a nonstarter, as leadership of migrant communities can simply escalate and resist at every turn. Remigration can actually be entirely peaceful in my opinion, and a gradual and civilized process over a generation or two. But, again, that’s only possible if migrant “communities” (meaning their leaders and ethnic entrepreneurs) know you won’t blink.

For sake of argument let’s say I exaggerate and that no great and spectacular force, nor the threat of it, will be necessary to remove migrant populations from the West. Still, you are seeing in two recent developments the bad effects of the particular form that anti-Israel hysteria took on the cause of the right in the United States. When you’ve spent months or years declaiming against excessive Zionist state force against brown protesters, “occupation tactics,” and the whole host of humanitarian-centered concern for Palestinian suffering or “genocide,” it’s very hard not to take the next step and condemn Trump and ICE (and potentially any other Western government) of using what look to be similar tactics against migrants and their defenders. You’re seeing this unfold now in the crisis regarding Minnesota and who knows where else next. People, especially Americans, don’t like to feel hypocritical so if they’ve been primed on that moral path, they’ll want to be or appear consistent. So they’ll condemn the ICE raids, which is what we’re seeing now from the vast majority of the Israel-Palestine-obsessed “new right.” They’ll also condemn the Venezuela venture on similar grounds: it looks again too much like Ziobullies oppressing virtuous brown people for no reason. This is morally consistent, and the agitators on “Palestinian genocide” who sided with keffiyeh-sporting chimping about excessive force and exploitation on that conflict can in fact be justly asked why they don’t also oppose the ICE raids. The two situations aren’t the same in crucial ways, but from the point of view of humanitarian morality, which was the main thrust foolishly taken on the Gaza war, they mostly are. And so those whose life has been humanitarian morality now are either stuck with that, or have to explain why it’s a concern in Gaza but not in Minnesota, California, Paris, etc.. The effect as we are seeing from major voices like Tucker and others is to strive to be morally consistent. Therefore a large portion of the “new American right” is now functionally pro-migrant, all thanks to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Adjacent to this “humanitarian hysteria” is the upcoming “climate crisis” or “disease crisis” that in my opinion is only a matter of time now. Millions or tens of millions of Africans and others will face starvation or worse and the calls on all sides will be to let them in. Populist theories about secret cabals or the dark specters of Capital or Neoliberalism profiting cynically from mass migration will at that point be revealed as entirely impotent. The claim will be that if you don’t let them in you’re as heartless as the Israeli Zionist vampires. Then heartlessness and (“passive”) “genocide” will be necessary, or else being flooded. It’s important to note that even now these theories are just inadequate: by such tactics some hope to convince native populations who believe in welcoming refugees for moral reasons that they’re being tricked by mysterious forces and therefore have false consciousness. But I’ve spoken to antifa who knew the big financial interests had their own reasons for welcoming migrants, and were just OK with that. In the face of “climate catastrophe” such arguments will truly be irrelevant: only the supremacy of the morality of the heartlessness of genocide and exploitation will matter.

The “right wing” task would then be to have the West have the confidence and willingness to do what Israel is doing, and in fact much more. So I don’t see what the winning rhetorical or political move here is in condemning Israel and its exploitation or genocidal cruelty toward the Palestinians. For sure Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro and many others like them are hypocrites and inconsistent in their double standard where they become ferocious ethnonationalists for Israel, often with exterminationist rhetoric, but claim that any equivalent policies, words or feelings even for the American people are racist and retrograde (I prefer the simple “American people” instead of the foolish “Heritage Americans” or even “white people,” because as an immigrant to America I’ve always known real Americans look and act like Robert Redford and not like others; Weiss and Shapiro are guests and should behave). But I don’t see why it would be good for them to be “consistent” and not hypocritical in the direction of condemning all nationalism, including Israeli, as Glenn Greenwald, Norman Finkelstein, or others of the Jewish left do. These people, and not those like Ben Shapiro, are the principal pushers of mass migration and “civil rights” antiwhite agitation in America for decades. The Jewish right is a kind of rump phenomenon and mere conduit for funding conferences (it’s all that Bill Kristol and now Yoram Hazony ever were), while the Jewish left is extraordinarily influential. But I don’t understand why “white genocide with antiZionist flavor” is good merely because it’s morally “consistent.”

There’s in general confusion on the right among those who believe there’s benefit in making common cause with the antiZionist left or associated ethnic lobbies. If questioned, there’s sometimes a claim that the worldwide open borders agenda is somehow run out of Israel, coordinated from there, or wouldn’t exist without crucial Israeli aid. There’s never any evidence presented for this, beyond a couple of newspaper editorials from Israeli press, which are then assumed to be also the voice of the Israeli government or policy as such. Contrary copious evidence, such as the fact that all firmly left wing antiZionist parties in Europe and factions in the USA are also the most pro-migrant and pro-refugee advocates, is ignored. Even so it’s unclear what the solution offered here is: as I’m not aware of anyone arguing these things who believes Israel will be destroyed or has thought through what the effects of that would be (migration of six million Israeli Jews to America and west Europe, to begin with….) In fact most seem to advocate for somehow “restraining” Israel, that is, the policy of perhaps the Bush 1 or Obama administrations, in different flavors. It’s not clear in that case why or how the “Israeli” coordination of mass migration would stop.

An associated argument is that Israel is “causing” mass migration because of its wars. Some migration because of war is plausible. But what are the numbers on this? This is an extension of the leftist excuse for mass migration, the false claim that migrants come to Europe because of war in their home countries. Leaving alone the fact that this would mean that Israel’s Middle East activities are also causing migration from subsaharan Africa or India, it’s also simply untrue: migrants come to Europe because of the economic benefits they are offered, and most come from countries with no wars whatsoever. Arab newspapers regularly publish lists of economic and welfare benefits available in the EU to migrants. Migrants to Scandinavia from supposedly war-torn countries will pass through 6-7 intervening countries with no war to arrive there. According to the EU’s own figures, 70% of the migrants recorded come due to economic incentives, and nothing to do with the political or war situation of the home country. Of the remaining 30% I don’t think that’s constituted by “war” either—some portion is arguably from war, and a portion of that from wars in the Middle East. Even in that case, the solution, rather than permanent peacekeeping a la Bosnia, would seem to be some form of understanding with both Israel and the Arab countries that refugees not spill over into Europe or the United States. But the entire species of argument that focuses primarily on conditions in the home countries in fact is gravely mistaken, because even if there are no wars, and even if the birth rate in the Third World falls (and it is falling), the supply of potential migrants is functionally infinite because of the living standard differential between even second-tier Europe and most other parts of the world.

In any case, from the point of view of the right the aim would be to extend to other nations in the civilized world (and specifically to greater European civilization) Israel’s exception under the “postwar international order.” It is this “exception to Nuremberg” that allows Israel a unique position among civilized countries to practice a form of ethnic, racial, or religious nationalism (define it how you will) that others are not morally or politically entitled to, because of its supposedly unique historical sufferings. A species of this would be to get rid of the framework of the “postwar order” and the entire “genocide” morality entirely (and who was it who came up with the modern concept of “genocide” by the way?) I don’t understand how it would be a win to go in the other direction and also have it be applicable in the case of Israel while keeping it in place for every other civilized country…unless your aim isn’t strictly political, but to feel emotional satisfaction at “just desserts.”

Of course the question of how to change this moral orientation is well beyond almost any “pundit” of our time, and as far as I know, I’m one of the three or four writers to seriously address it at all. Most wouldn’t even know where to start, so….

The Palestinians indeed have largely replaced the Jews as the object of current-day “Judaine,” to use a Nietzschean coinage: the preferred victim group exhibiting utmost suffering, on behalf of which all “exploitation” and in fact all sovereignty, and even eminence are supposed to be condemned. Thus “Israel killed six gorrilion in Gaza” is supposed to replace the “six Gorillion at Auschwitz-Golgotha,” with a variation that maybe it is King Leopold who ate six gorrilion black livers in the Congo. How aligning with the campus keffiyeh-sporting Palestinian-worshiping left, many of who are themselves Jews like Greenwald or Chomsky, is supposed to help the right achieve its aims is again never made clear.

There’s a lot of bizarre self-flattery in all this, where some on the right assume they’re either already dictators or else big city party bosses in a position to “make alliances,” as if they lead a faction or political bloc. You can certainly cheer on Amy Schlickowitz of the Union for Palestinian Rights because as a virtuous (and morally consistent!) Jewess she is cheering on the Palestinian cause, but it’s unclear what you’re getting in return from Amy …or for that matter from Glenn. One would think critics of the fake American-Israeli “alliance” would be sensitive to the fact that real alliances are supposed to be beneficial to both sides. I ask again, what does the “right” get? Do you have a single case of convincing these leftists and their ethnic auxiliaries to support border restrictions, or even to stop hating white people as such? Everyone knows they only hate Israel because they consider it a white colonial state, not because they hate Jews, whatever the objective virtues of that position. But again, I ask, what do they give the right?

As I hinted in my 2019 article it would have been fruitful for the online right to cause dissension and strife within the various factions of the Jewish press and Zionist world on this point, and to egg on an “establishment civil war.” It was the only move that ever made any sense: we are tiny and powerless, while those others, in their many manifestations, have a near-dominant position. To publicly declaim and align with their already-caricatured far leftist and ethnic opponents a la David Duke never had any plausible winning path. It’s a move entirely motivated by emotional indulgence of the feeling of indignation and for public display of it, which is why stupid facefag influencers always go for it. But the only tactic that would have made sense is the one I said in the original article and which was the special talent of the frogs: create false sock accounts (impersonating both the Jewish left and associated leftist ethnic lobbies, and also on the other hand the Jewish and Christian “conservative” Zionists) to introduce confusion, trolling on both sides of this staid debate, and destabilize it in spirit of humor and buffa. (But…people who could have done this were banned starting in 2017 and following Elon’s takeover of X, the actually radical and creative right I’ve called the Animejugend was utterly eliminated on the “free speech platform.” What was left was the angry coalers you see now, promoted by mass media as the face of the right because they are strident and stupid caricatures.)

Otherwise, the only plausibly effective position is again what I argued in my article from 2019, that both of these sides suck and that total disengagement from the Middle East should be pursued on common sense and national-interest justifications. These are the types of justifications—and not humanitarian sentimentalism, solidarity with the Palestinians and “indigenous brown people against colonialism”—that could maybe appeal to a moderate and reasonable center of American public opinion. It is most interesting to ask which of the current “sides” in this debate support or competently argue for actual disengagement. Most of this debate isn’t in fact about American policy, but about self-positioning against perceived rivals in political intrigue or “media market share.” I don’t know what either Tucker or Shapiro for example advocate other than to act as conduits for various factions in the American government that in my opinion are equally ineffectual. Neither of them will determine USA policy anyway, which will swing between support for either the Likud branch or the leftist branches of Israeli government, representing different patronage networks. The maximal Israel-skeptical position American government seems to be capable of is James Baker III, which was hardly the end of the “special relationship.” Disengagement and cutting Israel as well as that entire wretched region loose was and is obviously the way to go. But the hysteria over Palestinian baby BBQ makes this a tedious position to argue now.

There’s also the fact that I’m a contrarian and will never join in mob hysteria. I’ve heard stories of men who entirely didn’t care about this conflict who had drinks thrown in their faces in New York arthoe bars when they merely said this after being pressed… “I don’t care.” So basically I’m supposed to now join in “with my own critique” cheerleading the campus left that’s really the dominant view of libtards and leftist media both in the USA and Europe, but is pretending to be edgy or Dissident because Zion Don and a few Evangelicals or Chabadniks supposedly are extraordinarily powerful ZOG bullies. Anyone who’s attended university in America or has lived in liberal society knows that antiZionism is a mainstream position in those quarters and carries no cost in that world. The cost for criticizing Israel, such as it may be, is real only if you ascend to the level of my 2019 article and imply Israel is a quasi-National Socialist state while you aspire to be part of mainstream discourse in the sense of wanting to be an anchor on the main TV networks, a congressman, etc.. In those cases being a critic of the “special relationship” can carry costs. The existence of things like the Canary Mission dox industry to target critics of Israel has in my opinion a very dubious justification in a genuinely free society. That said, the consequences are not remotely comparable to being suspected of holding racist or racialist views for example, or, in academia, even admitting you were an admirer of Ernst Junger or Celine—well before 2015 by the way. To accept the pretense that Noam Chomsky or the sclerotics of the Jewish communist left, who are all quite vocal and even hysterical anti-Zionists and are firmly placed in American academia and various institutions, are edgy rebels is to be a tool for the same leftist establishment that has implied through Hollywood for decades that shadowy rightist WASP mafias and Big Tobacco controls the United States in smoke-filled rooms.

Piledriving dinosaurs like Finkelstein or Greenwald can then pretend to be “edgy” only to the ignorant on X (with a heavy presence of users from the Filipines or Bangladesh) while in fact never incurring any cost in their lives over their opinions on this matter. To participate in this farce with the pretense that you’re a brave truth-teller because it offends GOP orthodoxy and other kinds of fossils and dinosaurs like Lindsay Graham, is one of the slimiest shtetlbilly tactics I’ve yet seen, no matter who employs it. This is a repetition of entirely boomer debates from 2003-7.

My own solution has been to ignore this matter. I can show you articles from well before October 2023 by people I assume were Bari Weiss’ friends insisting that everyone must talk about the Jews and Israel. Actually in all this they’re making a play that I think will pay off for them, which is that if you center discussion on the Jews and Israel and force people to take sides primarily on this, that things will tip their way in an American context. I happen to think they’re right, at least insofar as the GOP is concerned. In other words the GOP actual base (as opposed to what you see on X, or TikTok, which is something else entirely) is philosemitic and loves Israel or rather hates Palestinians. If you force this discussion the effects will be to exile the MAGA and anti-interventionist or anti-neocon faction as pro-Palestinian “leftist” kooks, etc., which is largely already a done deal in my opinion. Any “pro-Israel” sentiment in America that isn’t Evangelical comes from “redblooded” American men who will never align with the Palestinian keffiyeh screaming thing, as they find it odious not just politically but personally. To persuade these it would have been necessary above all to avoid looking like a campus leftist whining about “genocide,” and sounding like the Brown University Latinx studies department. This just hasn’t yet been tested in an election, but once it is, this question, which is ultimately a question of fact, will be clarified (so far the antiZionist candidate in Florida, Fishback—oddly enough last year a promoter of Bari Weiss, which raises not an eyebrow among “investigative journalists,” who seem also not interested in Nicholas Fuentes’ or Richard Spencer’s long-running relationships with Hannah Gais of the SPLC or Ezra Levant, nor how Candace Owens actually began her career as an escort on an Israeli-owned talent site, nor prominent “““antisemite””” Lucas Gage’s actual recent past—is polling at 1-2%, which is less than the 3% I assumed such a campaign would get).

The only solution here would have been to entirely avoid this discussion, because it’s not winnable. The French right tried this already if you look up the Soral-Dieudonne fiasco (which I will cover in another article soon) and this ended in disaster for them under conditions much more favorable than in America. France has no evangelicals, never really liked Jews, doesn’t like Israel, etc., but this still ended in electoral disaster…I mean the whole David Duke 2.0 Tucker/Candace/Fuentes “we are all Palestinians now” multiracial antisemitic alliance thing. The solution would have been to remain calm and argue based on non-religious, non-emotional, non-Palestinian-aligned grounds that disengagement from the Middle East generally is good for America—”good wishes both to Israel and the Arabs, but they must have their own history now.”

If this matter is not soon resolved, it’s very possible that China will use this as a vehicle to delegitimize the Western world order. There are obviously bad things about this order, and especially its current elites that have bungled on migration and a few other things. But if this delegitimization is externally forced by China and leads, e.g. to a loss of the West’s dominance of financial markets, the “reform” we all seek will look a lot more like inexorable decline, degradation, and finally the West’s own “century of humiliation.” It’s therefore important to extract oneself from the Middle East very soon and in a profitable way…further involvement with either Israel or the Arabs is not possible given the current moral and political configurations within America. Some time apart is necessary. It’s not worth it to worry about China or Russia “moving in”—let them try, and bleed there themselves for a while. Russia tried it already in the Cold War…it didn’t work out so well.

There’s nothing much exciting or of interest in the Israeli project for men of taste anymore, as it becomes another Mediterranean hive of hairy greasers howling about their superstitions. A new West can wash its hands off that whole region clean and fret and worry instead about looking to the stars and the development of the oceans.

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