1. Extension du domaine de la lutte

The reptiloid and emotional reactions provoked in America for a long time by all talk of interracial sex and natality almost ensure that what I write in this essay will be misinterpreted, distorted and minstrelized, especially as I am known or seen as part of the “far right” or new right. Writing this essay I know the risk that what follows will be caricatured as yet another excrescence on the corpse of the far right regarding age-old clownish preoccupations on Miscegenation and Black Male Sexuality. I will then unintentionally maybe contribute to the burgeoning moral panic partly manufactured, partly organically developing toward the tail end of the Trump years, and which I myself am writing this in large part to warn against. Nevertheless I am publishing this for those interested in unusual facts and ideas I see no one else willing to address, and also because this “problem,” or specifically the reptiloid hysteria in discourse has broken its prior containment to zones like America and Brazil, and is now part of worldwide online discourse. Some may attribute this to the internationalization of American culture or the increasing homogenization of world discourse under influence of the internet. But these theories only go so far because, for example, very important American cultural past-times like baseball, American football, etc., have found very little popularity abroad, and more important things like the Anglo-American superior temperature and measurement systems, or Anglo-American style rule of law and neutral third-party contract enforcement even less so. Those aspects of American culture that have easily spread versus those that don’t may tell their own story.

Here the most triggering possibility would be, as a character in Houellebecq said somewhere, that in the modern interconnected world the struggle between men has become global and therefore racial and postnational; but not being really political or carried out by organized groups, under the zoolike madhouse character of the modern states, this struggle takes place instead in the form of men conquering and cumming in the pussies of other races’ women, who are now and for the foreseeable future worldwide “liberated” to choose. I don’t know how much truth this provocative image contains, but it seems a frequent enough subterranean opinion that whatever’s actually going on, the brutish human brain sometimes certainly interprets things that way…

In my recent article on unusual natality phenomena in the United States of early 21st Century, many were struck by the figure that of the 20-24 age bracket for white nonhispanic mothers with some college credits in Los Angeles County, there were only 293 births total in the year 2024. Some tried to deny it altogether, while others claimed that with all these qualifications, this must be a very small population sample. To repeat, this represents a minimum of 60,000-70,000 individuals, larger than many American towns. The birth rate rounds to about zero. This number isn’t surprising if you remember this group has very strong cultural hesitations on childbirth at this age, and especially if you think through the type of young white woman with some college involvement who ends up in a big city. And the Los Angeles County number is reproduced in every other big American city. From the point of view of natalists this need not be so dire, because the bulk (in fact almost all) of nonhispanic college white female fertility occurs ages 27-34. Thus it could just be delayed rather than eliminated fertility. There is a recent trend where this seems to be moving upward in age, and considerably lower in number. But again, fertility has declined for all groups since 2008, and for black and hispanic women even more than for nonhispanic white women.

While looking at such numbers in the CDC Wonder natality database, I noticed certain other striking and unusual figures that deserve their own special treatment. Here’s a very vivid case: if I were to ask what percentage of white female births at age 18 nationally in 2024 was to an Asian father (that is, of total number of births to white mothers 18 years old in the United States, what percentage were fathered by an Asian male), I’ve found that responses vary by my interlocutor’s intuitions and prejudices, sometimes right, usually wrong. Note that in this question I don’t distinguish between white Hispanic vs nonHispanic, married versus unmarried (though the number of white married mothers of 18 is probably low today anyway); therefore capturing the very broadest possible demographic bracket. The answer is that nationally in 2024 there were twenty-four births to white 18 year old mothers by an Asian father…not percentage but 24 total births in that year of this type. This confirms some people’s intuitions but shocks others. As in the Los Angeles figure of births to the 20-24 college-tinged demographic mentioned above, many of the things I will say in what follows will confirm some stereotypes, quite starkly so, but maybe upset and surprise others. What concerns me however isn’t the testing of expectations, but the overall trends in the United States and possibly some parts of the rest of the world, which seem to me to be significant and accelerating. The bare numbers I see could without exaggeration be one of the biggest shifts of our time. And yet it all remains subterranean and mostly unmentionable.

This article is a brief summary regarding the current state of interracial births and to a far lesser extent, sexuality, in the United States, to which I intend to add later. For ease of reading I include mostly only the results and some commentary; I leave out a more detailed considerations of numbers and anomalies, to which I link here separately for those interested in testing my conclusions:

https://www.bronzeagepervert.yoga/p/appendix-to-sexual-race-war-numbers

I relied on queries to the CDC Wonder archive regarding birth certificates in America for the years 2024 and 2016. The measure I use is the percentage of total births to women of demographic X by men of the various races, in those years. For additional information I also relied on queries to the ACS census survey for years 2024 and 2014. Here I asked regarding women of demographic X with reported children 0-4 years old in their households, specifying for the race of these children, i.e., where it differed from the mother’s race. You can run these queries too. I won’t hide the fact that I’m a polemicist and entertainer primarily, and demographics isn’t my specialty. But unlike others in the commentary sphere I was I think extremely careful and modest about the numbers, their accuracy, the rightness of the methods I used. I ran these numbers by professionals in demographic and economic research and I welcome others to challenge and test my numbers and conclusions. I purposefully picked the simplest measures and numbers so as not to make overclaims.

Quite aside from interpretation or conclusion, the percentage-by-race of total births to any particular demographic of females in a year is a number very significant and also simple. Maybe the simplicity aside from potentially uncomfortable associations have stopped demographers from writing about this.

My main findings are as follows: white males are “wiping out” or “reproductively assimilating” the Asian population through interbreeding with Asian females. Asian females are outbreeding asymmetrically with white males at rates comparable to a rapid post-conquest situation by outgroup males. Black males are at the same time reproductively assimilating or absorbing the non-Mexican white Hispanic population on the eastern seaboard and upper midwest, and also to a lesser extent significantly altering the proletarian or “noncollege” white nonhispanic population in parts of the United States, again by asymmetric female outbreeding rates comparable to post-conquest situations. The white “noncollege” population is furthermore “breaking down” demographically quite aside from this, with recent massive reductions in overall fertility; again, of which black males are providing an increasing share of the biological paternity.

The reference here to “conquest” is in regards to numerical patterns, not to underlying motivations, or the actual phenomenon today. That said, this analogy regarding asymmetric breeding is not just sensationalism…however different the modern mechanism, the only other pattern where such asymmetries appear in history are in post-conquest situations.

2. Asian Fertility in America

The Asian case is both clear and fascinating. In America, Asian female fertility takes place more than any other racial group’s within the bonds of marriage. Asian girls are very “traditional” this way. However, they are highly exogamous. (I think words like endogamy and exogamy are technically wrong in this context, but I’ll use it instead of writing “same-race” “other-race” and so on; I don’t consider a Sicilian marrying a Swede, a Japanese marrying a Korean, or a black American marrying an Igbo to be “endogamy”) In 2024, 17.4% of births to Asian married mothers with some college credits and up were to white males. However they had a significantly lower fertility than their white female college counterparts. Whereas white college nonhispanic married women have a TFR at 2.6-7, well above replacement rate, Asian females have carried over the East Asian low fertility to the New World, and are probably in the 1.4-1.6 TFR range. Asian married women at the 20-24 age bracket are entirely or almost entirely endogamous—no doubt a relic of immigrant conservative network effect—but the rate of outbreeding with white males steadily rises with age. A huge 25% of Asian female births at higher ages are to white male fathers. (For purely East Asian females it is even slightly higher than this)

As for babies by black males, the figure for this Asian female group is very small, all of 232 births nationally of this type to college Asian married females. [NOTE: I am leaving this number as it is even though it’s probably not correct, given the CDC suppression of “small cell” data, i.e., counties where number of births fall below 10 are suppressed in the overall count; the real number is probably several hundred, or high hundreds…still remarkably low] All of these exist solely in the 30-39 age ranges, in other words younger nonhispanic married Asian mothers give zero known births by black male fathers. The general trend here wouldn’t surprise many I think, but the starkness of the specific figures might.

It’s unclear what happens to the “left over” Asian males, as this situation is not at all symmetric. The rhetoric of the liberal optimist is that racial mingling and mixing will take place but that the results will be generally random and therefore more or less equally distributed, as you’d expect if “color-blind” behavior was the norm. But the results are obviously unequal, have always been, and everyone knows this. Asian males aren’t for example “exchanging women” with white males as would happen in a traditional fusion of two peoples (by contrast, the Jewish subgroup is being significantly eliminated through mutual and mostly symmetric intermarriage, although both hardcore Jewish ethnic activists and the rabbinic Jewish denomination known as antisemites are trying to stop this). White women aren’t having babies with Asian males at any significant rates, married or unmarried. About 97% of births to married college white mothers are by white fathers. Of the remaining 3%, about 1% each is to Asian males and to black males. The asymmetry by which Asian males are excluded from this exchange, whatever its causes in a modern context, is numerically characteristic of historical conquest and reproductive displacement by introgressive or elite outgroup males.

An adjacent interesting question is the use of these natality numbers as a very imperfect proxy for sexual contact outside of marriage or the bearing of children. At moment I can only see the natality rates as an honest marker for measuring this, however distorted and delayed. Surveys are completely worthless here, for too many obvious reasons…the self-selection bias on who would answer such surveys, the dishonesty in self-reporting on anything that has to do with sexual behavior, and so on. Girls especially will lie even on “anonymous” surveys about their sexual behavior or preferences. Sometimes also their understanding of themselves in words doesn’t match their behavior. As a pervert with relish, I’ve had girls in context of both friends and affairs confide in me things about themselves they’d never even tell their husbands, once they saw I wouldn’t judge them and was interested in their lives. Most would never say on a survey, nor take one. Here very useful would be dating app data, but Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and so on keep race information hidden from the public regarding match and response rates. There is an old study about OKCupid match rates but it precedes 2015, and I think things have changed since then; furthermore OKCupid would have captured a different phenomenon than the newer dating apps. Until I have this data—and some has been promised to me in confidentiality over the next year—the birth rates and so on are an imperfect and much-filtered but at least a very certain proxy for revealed preference.

Especially in the case of, say, highly prudent and anxious college Asian females, birth rates are a significantly distorted marker for sexual contact, filtered through many other decisions. This is why, when I mentioned to friends the 17% actual interracial natality rate for Asian women, some expressed surprise that it would be so low. In my last article on fertility I remarked that the life path of the Asian female as a group is in one sense very “conservative”: they are highly prudent, have children almost only within the bounds of marriage, go to college, prepare for jobs, are not on drugs, have negligible criminality rates. They’re not bohemians, delinquents or rebels and desperately want not to be part of an underclass. In college though, and living in a professional urban setting as a single woman, they are hardly celibate, maybe even the opposite; and probably date white males at rates considerably above 17%. How one measures “sexual contact” here is another interesting question: ranging from, say, one-time experimentation, to an option on her menu occasionally invoked and maybe not consciously processed, to habitual, to preference, to near-exclusive preference. But at some combination in many urban and college settings the intuition I’ve found among those I spoke with from America is that a third to well over half this group in some locations would have some contact within that range of behaviors with white males. If this is correct the actual child-bearing rate would be a significant undercount. So when looking at this you must consider contraception and many other options and decisions…in general in modern contexts if 17% of a female group’s births are to fathers of other group X, that’s probably a big undercount of sexual contact with that group.

Where Asian males are left in all this is an uncomfortable question. I think an entire visible, economically prominent and relatively small group’s males being significantly displaced from reproduction and sexual affairs is a somewhat serious problem in a “free society.” At the very least it is cause for the worst kind of racial resentment or wish for revenge, subterranean or not.

As to why Asian parents would choose to emigrate to nations where their sons are outcompeted to this extent, or for other reasons left out on this important metric, I don’t know…except that maybe they don’t know about this, don’t want to think about it, think it won’t happen to their son, or value material comforts and “status” and “career” above this aspect of life.

3. Interracial Natality of White and “Hispanic” females

For white females the situation is very different because this is a much larger and more heterogenous group. At the national level among nonhispanic white women only about 3% of their births in 2024 were to black males. A slightly higher percentage than that—maybe 5-6% although it’s hard to measure—was to “white Hispanic” males if you consider that a separate race. But on the CDC birth certificate queries these appear to be classified as white fathers. Other male race groups besides black captured negligible shares of white female fertility within both married or unmarried groups.

The 3% national figure of black paternity to white female births is in my opinion highly misleading. It includes vast swathes of America where there are no or almost no black males, for example. What concerns me here in’t an overall national statistic, though that is important for different reasons; my question is what happens when the potential for mixing is applicable, and then how and in what directions. The demographic engine of white America is the group of white college-educated married mothers: these have a TFR again well above replacement rate and are the source of the bulk of white babies per year. And yet this is a self-selected group that is smaller than people think. Then also the fact that a 35-year-old married white mother in suburban Wisconsin has a second child that gets recorded as part of the overall shares of births in the year 2024, while important and interesting for other reasons, is not as relevant to the question I’m approaching here and actually obfuscates it. White female fertility patterns vary widely by subgroup, whether geographic and especially sociological and it’s worth tunneling into this for a moment to see also what the trends are.

Among nonhispanic white women, 25% of births in our time are unmarried. This share has risen since the 1990’s, when it was only 10-15% or so, even while the raw number of unmarried births has drastically declined. There’s some sociological “cope” on this point: some say that the rise in unmarried mother classification among whites isn’t strictly the stereotypical “single mom” in distress but refers to cohabitation and simple lack of a marriage certificate. I think this is wrong, and that sociologically, cohabitating couples in e.g. Brazil or Scandinavia would be married in the United States. The “unmarried” group continues to be highly dysfunctional in America, and it’s growing for whites—a fourth of births isn’t nothing, although considerably still less than the 50% and 75% illegitimacy rates for Hispanic and black women respectively. But important to remember: the “unmarried” demographic category for white women is also larger than the married category, even controlling for age, that is, there are more unmarried than married white women over the age of 18 or even 22 I think; the fact they only produce 25% of births for white females overall is because of a very low birthrate among this very large “group.” But here also remember that all groups in America—including blacks, hispanics, etc.—have had much reduced fertility since 2008 (arguably black females have lower fertility currently than white, or at least much faster-declining). The decline in numbers of babies to nonhispanic white mothers since only 2016 has nevertheless been very great: there was a 16% decline in total number of births for white nonhispanic married mothers with some college involvement. This is the group still with the highest TFR in the white demographic—but 190,000 fewer births in 2024 than in 2016. And a considerably bigger 25% decline for the unmarried white mothers in total numbers of births.

Given a lower absolute number of births, especially among unmarried women, the racial structure of these remaining births is also changing, in some cases quite fast. When it comes to outbreeding there is a big difference first of all between Hispanic and nonHispanic white women. It’s worth looking for a moment at the fertility of “white” hispanic women (whatever you may think of their true racial or ethnic classification).

The Hispanic group is divided between those of Mexican background and other groups like Puerto Rican, Dominican, etc. women. The Mexican group is much larger and lives in a vast part of the western United States where contact with black males is often minimal. They also tend I think to live still more often in “traditional” ethnic networks. Among unmarried “white hispanic” mothers in that Mexican or Mexican-adjacent group, only 2-3% of their births are to black males. But among the (mostly non-Mexican?) group living in a huge corridor from the eastern seaboard through the upper Midwest, the share of their births to black males is often astronomical. In certain cases like Bronx County, for example, about 14% of this group’s overall births is to black males where race is recorded, and about 20% in the younger age bracket of 20-24. This is again as a share of those births where the father’s race is actually recorded on the birth certificate, but there’s a huge component in this and most other locations in America now where the father’s race is marked as “unknown.” Both for numerical and sociological reasons that I address briefly at the link above, I believe a disproportionate share of “unknown race” fathers in many locations in America are in fact black fathers. Depending on how you measure this, I would estimate that in reality 30% or even close to 40% of the births to unmarried “white Hispanic” mothers in Bronx County in 2024 were to black male fathers. While this is at the upper end, I’ve found very high figures in nearly all the counties of the eastern United States: regularly 14-19% of known-father-race births were to black males with the true percentage (accounting for share of unknown) possibly anywhere from 25% and up. This is among unmarried white hispanic mothers but…again, 50% of their fertility is unmarried. Among younger age brackets these percentages are even higher (which appears to be a swift change from the situation in 2014-6).

Based both on this and on the enormous rates I found on the ACS Census survey, where in the households of white Hispanic unmarried women, up to 29-30% of children aged 0-1 were coded as involving some kind of black classification, I have to conclude that in most of America’s east coast cities at least, the “white Hispanic” group is being reproductively absorbed by the black group at a rather fast rate.

For unmarried nonhispanic white mothers, I found the following. With a few very telling exceptions which I will address in a moment, in most of the top 30 (and in fact top 50) counties by total unmarried white nonhispanic births, about 10-15% of the known-race births to nonhispanic unmarried white mothers are by black fathers. There is notably a 9% floor on this share almost nationally. It doesn’t matter if it’s the northeast (Massachusetts is actually a very active contributor, including in formerly “endogamous” working class cities like Fall River), the sunbelt, Florida, San Antonio Texas, Cold Springs Colorado, the southeast, the upper midwest—Ohio and Indiana counties are again very consistent “contributors”—this floor holds regardless of region of the United States, and is present equally in almost all poorer and wealthier counties that include some minimal black male presence. There is furthermore a second “floor” at age bracket 20-24 where this percentage normally shoots up to 19-22%. Again these are the known numbers only, without taking into account the composition of the “unknown” race-of-father component. This holds in America among unmarried white mothers wherever a minimum threshold of 5-6% black male presence is reached: again county borders are hardly “real” but it’s the measure I had and it appears that any minimum of 5% of county male population as black will generate these numbers regardless of region or city.

Furthermore in most of these counties there are zero CDC-recorded other-race fathers to this demographic. In other words, it’s an entirely bimodal phenomenon, where the known race of the father is either white or black, but no other race.

Adjusted for the likely disproportionate share of “unknown” fathers that are black, the percentage in question shoots up to a regular 20-30% of all births for all age groups in these higher-contact counties—again this applies to unmarried white mothers only, who in turn only produce yearly 25% of white female fertility. But the trend since 2016 among this demographic is steep and seems to be accelerating. The known black paternity rate for this group has risen nationally from 6.7% in 2016 to 10.3% in 2024, which represents approximately 54% relative increase in eight years. That’s a near-doubling and if you tunnel into the numbers, it’s bigger than this in actual contact areas because again, this includes parts of America where there is minimal black male presence. Furthermore it’s almost all driven by the other significant shift: the “second” floor I mentioned regarding the 20-24 age bracket. In most of the top 30 counties by number of unmarried white mother births, a fifth of known-race-father births was to black males at ages 20-24 in 2024 (the real percentage is likely higher)…but this was not so as recently as 2016, when it was on average half that, around 9-10%. What happened in Richland County, South Carolina is an outlier in magnitude and may seem like a small-n anomaly, but it’s not anomalous in direction and is in some ways just a stark representation of this trend: in this location unwed white mothers at ages 20-24 had 9% of their births to black males in 2016, but by 2024 this had jumped to 28% in this age group—small-town South Carolina (one should not imagine these are SEC University of South Carolina sorority girls bearing children) converged in less than a decade to the situation of bigger cities like Charlotte.

I need again to emphasize that in these last two paragraphs I’ve been referring to known percentages and not addressing the huge “unknown race of father” category that is very large at these ages in particular (births 15-24); so I’d guess the actual and true percentage of black paternity to this group is often higher than 20% and could even approach much higher in some locations.

Some will now say, “You, a Pervert, are making a big thing out of nothing at all, and something that’s been known for so long it’s become a stereotype and a joke: yes, the single mom with the black baby is a fixture of Americana in the sense that it’s lower class, uneducated, obese urban lumpenproles or rural hick girls doing this. It’s long been a part of joke-stereotype repertoire. This group you are studying as you yourself said only encompasses 25% of white female fertility, and it is furthermore an atypical and pathological subset. You can’t draw any conclusions from their behavior to generalize to that of middle class and upper middle and so on white girls…and you yourself said married white women exhibit near-total endogamous fertility. You speak of unwed motherhood at ages 20-24 but the vast number of white female fertility takes place ages 27-34. You’re talking about essentially fat crack-ho single moms, I mean what did you think the data would show? This is not important.” I think the claim that I’m studying a pathological subset of white girls is an important counterargument so I’ll address this and some related matters.

Regarding the “teen mom with mulatto baby” joke stereotype, it’s important to remember that such things were not the case some decades ago: in the 1980’s there was a “teen moms” public scare and much handwringing over the rise in “teen moms.” The numbers of “teen moms” peaked twice, in the early 1980’s and then 1986-1991, driving a lot of the moral panic around this at the time. In those years roughly half a million teen births per year were produced in America, of which a substantial number were white girls. Most of these births were also unmarried (although in many cases especially ages 18-19 it led to shotgun marriages). These births were not 20% and probably not even 2% to black males: the vast majority took place in parts of the country that had minimal black presence in fact, in Appalachia, parts of the Midwest, in white Southern towns that were still at the time socially and sexually segregated, and so on. For comparison, the number of unmarried teen births among nonhispanic white girls was in 1986-1991 many times the number of today’s unmarried teen births among the same demographic, but didn’t involve any substantial black paternity. So while it’s true that the stereotype of “single mom with mulatto child” has existed for a long time in the United States as a cautionary morality tale and a type of joke, it’s important to realize it was a relatively rare phenomenon…but is not today. Today the number of unwed white-white especially teen pregnancy has been drastically reduced.

The exceptions to the pattern of unmarried white motherhood in our day are very informative too. I will speak of Queens County, New York, and Miami in Florida side by side because I think they don’t hold to the national pattern for similar reasons—each has black paternity to unwed white mothers only at the level of 2-3% of total births. There’s significant black presence in both places, so it’s not for lack of proximity to black males. But the whites residing in Queens are disproportionately “ethnic whites” and I think include many recent immigrants, including from the ex-Soviet sphere. White girls residing here giving birth to a black baby may come under more disapproval than elsewhere because of increased “community surveillance” on this matter, or for other reasons. In a similar way in Miami whites or white hispanics of Cuban origin live in a relatively integrated community with its own culture and again, interracial births may mean some type of “community disapproval” or sanction. I imagine that fathers of white daughters in these places would like to take the credit for this “difference,” but on the “restraint” side I would attribute it much more to friend network effects and their opinions regarding having a mixed baby. While for Mexicans living still in relatively linguistically, culturally and more important, financially segregated communities in the vast west of the nation I would believe that something closer to “community control” and “paternal oversight” may hold, I think in Queens and Miami what’s going on for white unmarried mothers is something similar to the life path for urban and middle class white married mothers, which is that the general friend and community effect, as well as similar life-path expectations, substitute for middle class prudence and “education” on this point.

Another maybe even more important explanation for this difference on why unmarried white motherhood looks so different in these counties is the fact that their white male peers come from a similar background where they have not been in a sense demoralized or rather forbidden by law and custom from impregnating an 18 or 20-year-old girl. A Cuban or Latvian or Russian Jewish youth may well be more willing to knock up his 18 year old girlfriend in a way that his white American (meaning…assimilated into white liberal SWPL or Red State evangelical American norms) counterpart may not, and may face less consequences for doing so. I’d say this “positive” or permission-to-their-boyfriends element is more important than the other.

Another notable and relevant exception is Nassau County in New York. Nassau has a decent n for white unmarried mothers at just over 600 births in 2024. This portion of Long Island is 11% black residents, and in any case it’s right next to New York; neighboring Suffolk County is 8% black. As per the national pattern, Suffolk County, with 1322 unmarried white NH births, hits the 9% floor of births to this demographic by black fathers (it is likely quite a bit higher, as the unknown-father-race rate on birth certificates is high here). But unmarried white mothers in Nassau county have only 4% of known births to black fathers. Furthermore and very atypically for America in 2024, there are zero recorded black-fathered births to this demographic at the age brackets of 20-24 and 25-29. But something is special about Nassau County—it’s very wealthy, one of the wealthiest counties in America. This part of Long Island also has a certain established character and its own lore, and is unlike neighboring Suffolk county even. Unmarried white motherhood to residents here is upper middle class or in some cases upper class and is very different from the phenomenon in other parts of the country. If I can speculate, having known more than one upper-class girl who serially has babies out of bounds of marriage, they tend to be a certain type that’s different from the “single lumpenprole mom” stereotype, and generally will have babies far more often with white males.

White girls likely to have out-of-wedlock births residing in Queens, Miami, and Nassau are continuing an old pattern of unmarried- and teen-mom reproduction that remains endogamously white, which was common in America in the 1980’s.

The “noncollege” white female demographic regardless of marital status, whatever it actually is, seems to be in a process of rapid transformation. It’s important not to overstate what these demographics are; they’re not actual “groups” in many cases. An unmarried white nonhispanic woman at 25 may well be a married one a year or two later. These are huge and heterogenous groups. Noncollege white may include working class, lumpenprole, whygger and many others including Amish and Hasidic Jewish and so forth. Now, married noncollege white females are on one hand very “endogamous,” with negligible black paternity (again other races of men besides white and black, at least as recorded by the CDC queries, are not in play anyway on these metrics). But although the total pool of college and noncollege white women is maybe similar at around 14-15 million each, college married white women produce just under 1 million births per year or so, and noncollege married women far less, at around 200,000 per year. That’s in part because the marriage rate among noncollege white women is collapsing but also because married white women with no college degree actually have significantly lower fertility than their college counterparts. Among this group, unmarried motherhood is rising and black males are capturing an increasing portion of that fertility, even while the absolute numbers of unmarried pregnancies is also fast declining. Taking a step back, if you were to look at rates for “noncollege” white women regardless of marital status—lumping in married and unmarried on the CDC numbers and simply looking at the “college” factor—there are very high rates of black paternity for example all over the South, and also in many other places where there is actual social proximity with black males. It’s not in my view plausible to attribute this to simple “wokeness” or “antiwhite propaganda,” as some would claim, because, again, it is only black males and not other races of males who are introgressing into this fertility…which is to say, these shifts may very well be in part a result of some type of propaganda, and later in this essay I will explain what this is. But it’s not merely “antiwhite,” it’s specifically pro-black-male, which deserves its own explanation.

Note on the Foolishness of Conservative Media:

Oddly enough in the end, the bulk of (endogamous) white nonhispanic fertility is to college-educated women. I say oddly enough because this is at odds with the latest conservative fixation that college “morally corrupts” young people, and the constant advice to their (relatively small, thankfully) white audiences to drop out of college, stay away from college, become plumbers and live a “traditional lifestyle,” etc.; quite aside from the massive across-the-board decline in both marriage and fertility that all members of the noncollege group exhibit, the lifestyle would indeed be traditional, but it wouldn’t be Amish-Anabaptist-type traditional, it would be Akan-Ghanaian-adjacent traditional, in the sense of representing a situation analogous numerically to conquest by Akan males.

Again I don’t think college is the cause of these numbers any more than the supposed institution of marriage is, but that these correspond as “brand markers” to certain types of life-paths and sociological groups. But the middle-aged conservative and “new right” claim that for example “AI” will end “girl-bossism” or that careerism among the upper middle class female contingent is “thankfully ending.” Or the separate claim I’ve heard that think tank and Heritage Foundation and Natalism types are currently trading among themselves, that “generation alpha and zoomer girls” are foregoing career and college to have “handsome husbands, religion, and traditional families” is an exquisitely twisted delusion: mostly older movement conservatives are hearing what they want to hear from their younger interns on the make, and don’t understand that at scale “no college and no career” for females translates into “downwardly mobile”…and with this downward mobility and economic stagnation, an enmeshment in a social sphere that produces, again, a “traditional” arrangement they may not expect.

In the late 1980’s to 1990’s, nonhispanic white “teen moms” produced more babies per year than the married noncollege nonhispanic white cohort as a whole does today, and certainly more white babies.

4. Some Further Reflections on Asymmetric Breeding and Sexuality

In this essay I’ve referred at times to “conquest-analogous” outbreeding numbers: the post-conquest analogy refers obviously only to per-generation rates of asymmetric outbreeding and not to the underlying motives. In much of Latin America the paternal lines are European and the maternal are native. This is more extreme in some regions: in Colombia’s Antioquia province, 90% of paternal lines are European and 90% of maternal lines are native. That particular situation may have been triggered by a very extreme asymmetric scenario in the years immediately following Iberian conquest, maybe including massacring the local men or most of them. But female outbreeding with a smaller male outgroup even at only 15% per generation can compound over generations to achieve a similar effect. (Thus “elite dominance” can in fact resemble “population turnover” in the genetic record, at least without further investigation). We could call a 15% asymmetric outbreeding rate (meaning each generation 15% of births to females of group x are fathered by males of group y, but not vice-versa) typical sustained post-conquest situation. But even a 10% rate is very high and likely to cause enormous demographic shifts if it’s kept up over generations. In fact a simple “hypergamy” asymmetric outbreeding rate, where within the same people or nation commoner women will outbreed asymmetrically with upper class men, sometimes producing bastards, is I think historically only at around 2-5% per generation, or at the lower bounds of that, maybe just 2-3%.

In these historical situations there is often coercion involved or significant financial incentives that trigger these asymmetries, besides the often-now-remarked-upon “hypergamy” or “female hunger for status or for powerful men.” In our time the racial mixing is consensual and there’s no overt force coming into it, but it’s the resulting percentages that interest me as a matter of analogy, not the cause. Historically women didn’t have sexual or reproductive selection freedom in the vast majority of cases, at least not sanctioned. I am trying to think of exceptions. One could be premodern north Europe: in England there may have been complaints from Saxon men about Saxon women preferring Norse settlers and outmarrying or simply cheating with them at rates bad enough to persist as a common rumor and complaint. In the record of John of Wallingford from the 13th century there’s the famous mention of Danish settlers’ popularity with the local women. Because of their physical attractiveness, clothes and hygiene the Norse introgressors attracted married women and even reduced the daughters of local noblemen to their “concubines.” (This is written some centuries after the supposed phenomenon but it’s still interesting for all kinds of reasons…it obviously persisted as a sore rumor, and the chroniclers accurately preserve Scandinavian (and early Indo-European Bronze Age) male grooming practices). Modern-day assumptions on historical total male control over female sexuality are unwarranted; especially in north Europe as in Rome and possibly Sparta, etc. women had considerable freedom. Even in sequestered-marriage situations such as at Athens, women had plenty of opportunities to cheat: see Lysias 1 court speech. Then of course there is the beginning of 1001 Nights, the event that triggers that whole tale, which is also relevant to my point). In ancient Greece women were sequestered but by classical times in many cities upper class girls at least had the right of veto over the father’s choice of husband. This may also have had some effect in a racially heterogenous society, though as yet this is unstudied; and given the upper class practice of cremation by that time, not easy to investigate.

One anomaly that interests me is among Polynesians. Polynesians are a varying mix of Austronesian navigators from Formosa and southeast Asia, and Melanesians. They spread out to the broader Pacific after mixing events, probably multiple, in Fiji and elsewhere around Vanuatu. There is higher Melanesian component in Tongans and Samoans, and higher Austronesian in the Tahitians and Hawaiians, but all are Austronesian and Melanesian at one ratio or other (Guam may have been unadmixed Austronesian prior to Spanish arrival). One thing I find odd is that the paternal lines are more heavily Melanesian and the maternal Austronesian. I wouldn’t have expected this given that it was Austronesian ships and sailors introgressing into more primitive Melanesian territory as explorers and settlers. And places that have close to 90% Melanesian component, like Vanuatu, still speak Austronesian languages. I don’t know what accounts for this oddity and don’t want to make assumptions until I know more. I suspect that in this case it was a warfare phenomenon where the two peoples had comparable military technology and the Melanesians outcompeted on this basis; Vanuatu appears to have been a megacidal event. There was also differing susceptibility to disease: the heavily genetically Melanesian areas are affected by malaria much more than the Austronesian-leaning areas. Melanesians have innate evolutionary immunities that Austronesians do not, with Papua ancestrally a malarial zone. It’s anyway interesting to compare historical stereotypes among European explorers on the differences between the Tahitian Polynesians versus the Tongans and Samoans.

But it’s hard to think of many other historical examples of “consensual outbreeding” simply because again consent in anything like the modern sense, or rather freedom of female sexual and reproductive choice, was not usually in play. Modernity seems to be running an unprecedented experiment, at least at scale. In this last claim however must be included a strong reminder that it isn’t even an environment of true sexual freedom, free choice, or free competition, because quite extreme anti-young-male social and cultural restrictions have been erected by older generations in the last ten to thirty years. It’s no longer really the 1960’s, though at times both the conservatives and the left find advantage in pretending it is. And these recently-imposed restrictions may severely distort any supposed freewheeling “sexual market.” On which I will comment more at the end of this article.

One can only speculate about whether the starkness of the unmarried white female fertility figures in high-contact counties translates into sexual access patterns as well. I have to guess that the rates of sexual contact with black males among whatever sociological subgroups of white females that produce these fertility numbers have to be considerably higher than the actual interracial natality rates. As to whether this generalizes to the college-educated and middle-class white female population, or to what extent, I don’t know and you can’t really trust anyone’s word or personal observations on this, not only because this highly “psychologically triggering” matter is likely to be distorted in people’s perception no matter what side of this they fall on, but also of course because girls lie. The college-educated white girl population’s reproduction is almost totally severed from their sexual behavior so their low percentage of interracial births in my opinion can’t be used as a proxy to claim they have a low percentage of sexual behavior with black males. Births in this group are almost entirely zero overall in the age ranges 20-24 and very low even 25-29, with the vast bulk of their fertility at 30-34. So not much can be directly deduced about their sexual behavior at ages e.g. 18-25 regardless from these numbers. Without access to Tinder or Hinge data (especially the response rates would be even more relevant than the match rates, etc.) this answer will have to wait. But my instinct is that while the decision not to use contraception at younger ages, or to forget to use it, or to go through with an unplanned pregnancy at those ages, or in particular to go through with a pregnancy at any age by a black male…these are all for various reasons mostly probably yes, much more prevalent among lower- and working-class white women; that is, the reproductive choices and so on, which bear on life, financial, and career path. But my guess is that it’s harder to argue their social and sexual behavior is that different from their middle-class-and-up counterparts. America is simply not so segregated by class as some still think when it comes to tastes and habits. The internet has in any case homogenized much of American (and world) “culture.”

Suggestive here is the geographic ubiquity of this phenomenon: these birth rates among unmarried nonhispanic white girls are again universal in America wherever there is a minimum 5-6% black male presence, regardless of “regional culture,” whether in the south, northeast, upper midwest, etc.; suggestive also is the sharp upward direction of these interracial birth trends since 2016 among younger age cohorts, which is a remarkably short time for these types of changes. While it’s probably true that middle class and college white girls have different sexual behaviors than noncollege, working and lumpen-class ones, I don’t know how far this difference goes. I suspect it’s not as little difference as fetishists and black power advocates imagine, and not as much as others on the other side think. Again, I’ll have to wait for the dating app data.

5. Note on Black Female Fertility Structure and Outbreeding with White Males

Superficially there’s an “exchange” of wives between white and black demographics in America. Anywhere from 3% to 6% of known-father-race births to black females were by a white father in 2024, depending on whether you look at nonhispanic only, or count known or ambiguous Hispanic status. Either way, this rate is similar to the national rate for white females with black males. But there are a few problems with concluding this is a symmetric exchange. First of all the structure is very different. Remember that for black females 70% of their fertility at least is unmarried. For black females, the births with white male fathers take place in higher proportions at older ages. Although the overall percentage of outbreeding with white males has risen since 2016 (though at a lower rate than that of white females with black males), this rise has taken place almost exclusively at birthing at ages 30-39; for the 20-24 bracket, there’s actually been a 12% decline of births by white fathers since 2016. This is the opposite pattern to the white female-black male change, where there’s been a sharp increase (really often at least a doubling) in the unmarried 20-24 age bracket, where it’s now around a constant minimum 20% among that category in most of the top 30 and top 50 counties, and higher in many urban low-n cases.

Foreign-born black women with some college education, who are not part of the black American community or identity, and who I had expected to cross over in marriage and fertility to other races more often are in fact far more racially endogamous than American-born black women. The rate of “unknown” among such groups is much lower, the rate of crossing over to white males falls from 6% known (among American black females) to under 3%; they have a much higher known black male paternity than their American-black counterparts.

There are zero recorded births to Asian males in 2024 for this demographic of foreign-born black females. There is no emerging professional-class Igbo-Han hapa in America at least.

More important in judging superficial percentage symmetry versus asymmetry is the relative size of these populations. At 13% of American population, the size of the black group is much smaller than the white, so these “equal” rates within each of the female groups’ fertility in fact are misleading and represent a per-capita black male introgression into white female fertility several times the size of white male introgression into black female fertility.

On the other hand, it may also be that not many white males want black females either for sex or for babies. I think it’s important to remember this part of it too. American black women maybe because of the severity of the obesity and unpleasantness crises in that community being especially unsuitable to many male tastes, if these should be even in the slightest selective. In 1976 it was normal to see a movie like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, by John Cassavetes and starring Ben Gazzara. The main character in this film refers to his “beautiful black girlfriend” who is “black and beautiful.” That was a time when thin black American women still existed in number. In many racially mixed countries thus black and mulatta girlfriends and mistresses have a good reputation sexually among the men of other races, who seek them out for affairs especially. The obesity bomb (and concurrently the unpleasantness revolution) has eliminated this option of a black girlfriend for white working class men in the United States. America is a long way from 1976. So it’s important to remember this here, that a lot of “conquest-analogous asymmetries” may simply be the result of abstention and refusal in this sense on the part of one group’s men. But…it’s not my intention here to flesh out the reasons for said interracial symmetries or asymmetries. The numerical analogy to “conquest” in the case of the white male-Asian female or the black male-white-Hispanic-female interbreeding asymmetries was just that…an analogy to historical numbers, not so much to causes. In this case there seems to be a not-as-severe asymmetry as there is in the other cases; the white-black asymmetry could maybe disappear if white males preferred black females at higher rates (or got over hesitations at knocking up fat white girls at higher rates)…I don’t know. I will be attacked for this by both sides but in America’s case I don’t see how the persistent problems caused by the black minority can be solved aside from somehow reproductively absorbing this minority. As an internet wit long ago said: “End Racism. End the Black People”—meaning, through love. (Of course America’s understanding of race and racial categories would have to change to something similar to what existed in pre-20th Century South Carolina as well, where an octoroon could be considered legally white; the “one drop rule” is of Northern origin, and it’s necessarily socially-defined, as no genetic or even blood tests existed at the time of its inception; many fully-biologically-white individuals were discriminated under this rule simply because of who they associated with.)

But in any case it’s true that the black female crossover to white males doesn’t trigger people as much, for whatever reason. I suspect though I can’t prove that part of what gets to people in the white female-black male case isn’t so much the interracial fertility, which although striking and rising is still limited, but the possibility that it’s a more significant undercount as a proxy in terms of the sexual situation in many parts of America; where possibly something that was mostly limited to lower socioeconomic status and fat white girls no longer is. But again, I have to wait for the dating app info for this, if even that should resolve it.

In 2024 there were 1200-1400 births nationally to black females of any type by an Asian male father, representing at most 0.25% of all black mother births. There were 265 Pacific Islander-father births, and 700-800 Native American-father births to this group. [NOTE: initially I had 113 Asian-fathered births here…that is indeed what a county-level CDC query returns, because cells under 10 individuals are suppressed for privacy reporting guidelines; these add up nationally…so real number is higher than what I initially wrote here. Still freakishly low for these groups though…] I think Steve Sailer suggested that as the two most sexually excluded groups in American society, black females and Asian males would have a reason to pair up, but I think it won’t happen and it’s probably a crazy idea. The figures here comport with a stereotype held by many, but I was unaware just how stark it would be. The idea that in a nation of hundreds of millions, in big cities where two groups over-represented in those settings and come into frequent contact…that it would lead to 113 births total, nationally, between two major racial groups…is objectively remarkable.

6. Cultural Reception of Interracial Sex and Fertility

It’s interesting to think about the possible ways these various sociosexual shifts are filtered through discourse, opinion and rumor. The two biggest overt complainers in American society are those you would expect, Asian males and black females. These are groups heavily affected by asymmetric sexual and reproductive shifts, and left with few other options. “Asian masculinity” forums, the flooding of 4chan and other boards with various kinds of sexual neurosis by Asian males both from the United States and China, and the incessant whining and complaining of black women in American media, academia, and society at large are all old news to any internet addict. White female resentment over Asian females and white male resentment over black males is also relatively common: the former is not enough appreciated for how amusing it is. I’ve met completely liberal college white girls who sounded as deranged about Asian girls as online white nationalists are about black men; yet only the latter are considered fair game for jokes. But the white population is still of very large size, and when it comes to any sexual-market displacement, both white males and females have considerable other options especially sideways (and occasionally abroad) that Asian males and black females do not. Thus although antiracists want especially to press on these trigger points to “pwn” “white racists,” it is the complaint of the black female most of all that is loudest on this in America.

A matter so far not much discussed is the response of the white Hispanic males to these shifts in their societies. By what I see in the natality numbers, this group seems to be by far one of the most affected, to the point that—let me be sensationalistic without being wrong—they seem to be significantly reproductively and probably sexually displaced in many locations by black males; and it is not idle sexual dalliance in youth without consequence in this case…the non-Mexican, non-Cuban white hispanic “communities” are likely to be almost completely reproductively assimilated by black males in America over the next few generations. Their “silence” on this could be explained in part by the fact that of all groups in American society, though the Hispanics have enormous numbers and demographic weight, they are almost completely absent from American media, “culture,” and discourse. A prominent Hispanic actor like Oscar Isaac is a good example of the difficulties here: an alpha male celebrity like this is untouched by this phenomenon himself, and is too different in his background and situation from other “hispanics” in America to speak for or even understand their situation. In any case he would obviously frame discomfort with this sociosexual shift in language directed against whites somehow, or framed through broadly liberal-left assumptions.

A possible notable media effect though is the online “community” wrongly called “groypers” (a term that DC conservatives illegitimately appropriated from a very different online organic right wing sphere that was banned in 2017-21 and never returned under that name, which they consider spoiled at this point). Where these are real posters and not the sock accounts of DC GOP consultants and the SPLC, they seem to be Mexican, mestizo, or mixed-Latino young males. There’s also a considerable Indian (subcontinental) and Pakistani male component too, on which more in a moment. Much about this “community” can be explained as a reframed discourse around this unnameable shift: their embrace of “incel rage” combined with exaggerated “Catholicism” and insistence on “community.” These last are then misread by white nationalists as solidarity regarding immigration from the Global South, or opposition to the left, or are embraced by “ex-gay” or closeted gay portions of the “religious right” and the new GOP for their own reasons. In my opinion, unlike the typical American suburban white, these would be mostly males from recently urbanized Latino and mestizo communities in the process of dissolution, or themselves first-generation white-Latino mixed, facing identity uncertainty. They are living in “white hispanic” urban and especially suburban biomes where the sociosexual shift of young females toward black males, but also certain other sociosexual shifts are especially pronounced.

The other shifts I speak of in this case concern the matter of sexual competition with white males. In this case as well many Central American, Mexican, mixed-Hispanic and other recently-suburban Latino males are also at a considerable disadvantage. (This is very similar to Brazil where native and white-native mixed males feel themselves at a considerable sexual competitive disadvantage with respect to both white and black males in the big cities and areas of contact). They would then maybe have a direct view that others do not: they see the more closed, more religious and traditionalist Mexican communities remain “immune” to a two-front sexual-reproductive displacement.

Though this group does often implicitly and sometimes explicitly refer to their keenly held assumption that sexual competition with black males is not possible, in my opinion their attitudes toward this situation among their female co-ethnics are reframed into attacks on what they see as the “ultimate cause”: the dissolution of religion and their communities, which they see as the only ways to enforce female “race loyalty.” And therefore the culpability of an external villain—less often Liberalism, Capital, Protestant modernity, but now especially and finally the Jew—as the cause of the dissolution of their perceived reproductive-sexual shield (communal life and solidarity) against “outgroup” white and black males.

The psychology of this group, torn between various identities and social crises, is incoherent as often happens when sociosexual resentment (a displaced but impotent imagining of revenge recast as noble indignation and the desire for justice) is the witches’ brew motivator. It’s interesting to study, and I can only comment on it briefly now especially because this essay is primarily about birth rates—that’s where I have unusually precise numbers in the American case because of American birth-certificate-documentation-practices. On matters of sexual differential success and competition I can only speculate for the moment, and I do so now only as an incidental tangent that’s fascinating to me. But anyway, competition with white males, although on closer analysis the more sociologically close and imminent matter for this diffuse group of Latino and Latino-adjacent males, and probably the triggering phenomenon, is often reframed by them into a double rhetoric regarding blacks and Jews. On one hand, very much like mid-century Jewish urban males who also felt keen sexual rivalry and competition, or rather an inferiority complex with respect to white nonJewish males (apparent in movies and TV shows well into the 1980’s, 1990’s, etc., e.g. very prominently the work of Philip Roth and Woody Allen), Latino youth in the process of “assimilation” recast this instead as an exaggeration of the sexual and physical attributes of black males (who in some markets of exposure also crowd Latino males out, thus leaving them assailed from two sides). Second, as they see themselves as white or white-aspiring, anti-Jewish polemic becomes a method of passive-aggressive displaced hostility at white males in general, but also at the same time a way to seek a basis for a new solidarity with whites, as an identity plausibly, in the realm of polemical rhetoric, victimized by the same sociosexual-historical forces.

This has to remain speculation for now, but it would explain a lot about this “media phenomenon,” and why it includes primarily white-identifying Hispanics. There is also a variety of other minority males who are possibly also significantly displaced by black males in urban as opposed to suburban environments (in particular the Andrew Tate demographic of indeterminate-race urban males who get bottle service at the club only to see black male success in these environments with their intended female targets, but without similar spending or efforts; this would include more the urban as opposed to suburban Hispanics, i.e., whites of Caribbean descent, many Middle Easterners who have difficulty passing for white, and other various neoAmerican mixes).

Furthermore and most tellingly, among the new “mainstream online antisemitism” community wrongly called “groypers,” there seems to be also a significant Indian or Pakistani male element, especially in universities. I think the causes of this are similar to the Hispanic “white” males. The “Asian Indian” female in America is an outlier among “Asian” female groups in that only 3% of her fertility is to white males, with the rest remaining endogamous. The vast majority of these, however, I would guess are living in still-strong ethnic networks and although they do arrive in America through H1B programs and college-associated activities, they remain mostly an unassimilated society apart. They rarely come into friendly sustained social contact with other races and are not involved in “elite” or prestigious professions but the equivalent of spaghetti-code sweatshops and similar lumpenprofessionalism. These Indians would not be part of public life at all in this form. Almost all their fertility is after the age of 30. For what I’m about to say I rely on my own observations only, which I’ll retract if other evidence appears but: this national fertility result is not reflected in the sexual behavior of Indian females in the top colleges in America, where discourse is actually generated. With zero exaggeration I say that I’ve never seen an Indian college girl who hasn’t had a white boyfriend, and sometimes exclusively so. I don’t know what “elite”-school Indian girls are doing regarding fertility and marriage later in their lives, but I’m willing to wager with anyone on this observation regarding their college and urban youth professional years. Indian males in “elite” settings, then, who are as highly verbal and plausibly as effective at public discourse as Ashkenazi Jews were, nurse a similar grievance at white males. They may end up as the socially respectable marriage choice, but…

[NOTE: as there are numbers of comments I am guessing from Indian males who are triggered that their women may love to fuck white men in college, I am adding this clarifier; my claims were about Indian women at top schools where discourse is generated, I don’t claim to know what Indian ladies at vocational H1b programs or who work in call centers get up to, nor does it matter as that group isn’t really part of American society. I will grant you that they (for now) live under the thumbs of their husbands or such. That said, as there is no survey I trust on these matters and as CDC data restricted to top 20 or top 50 school degree holders is not available, I did a proxy for PhD and professional degree holders. Here Indian females have the same outbreeding rate as the Asian group overall 16-17% so…

I’m sorry if this offends you by the way, life in a free society may not be to your taste.]

The extreme animus of East Asian and Indian subcontinental males at being sexually excluded from American society is usually not directly expressed. More often, like ethnic Jewish males in similar situations in the 20th Century, this discomfort is reframed as an over-exaggeration of the sexual success of black males with white females. This is a subterranean form of “revenge” against the hated white male who is displacing Asian males in sexual and reproductive access. Again in many cases lately Asian males redirect their ire specifically at Jews as well.

Midcentury Jews at times at least sublimated this resentment into often competent comedy, slapstick and poking fun at themselves. It remains to be seen if the current crop of “newcomers” to America in response to similar frustrations have within themselves anything other than poorly-understood and parvenu speculations on test scores, IQ, “HBD,” credentials, etc. on one hand, and angry rants about religion, ethnic community, and various conspirashit on the other. Not to speak of the endless leftist-identitarian mobilization of minority lumpencollege classes.

The reception to interracial dynamics for blacks themselves is amusing. It isn’t only the black female that has a persistent grievance here. Whatever does exist of black male sexual success threatens to be undone also by the internal structure of this within the black people themselves. Statistically blacks are disproportionately affected by obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Childhood obesity is more common among blacks than whites. I think their group has also been affected by a general decline overall in physical culture and the same taming- or captivity-process that degrades all contemporary male populations. If something will end black domination of American culture and possible disproportionate success in sexual competition, it won’t be any contrived reaction-invention like “white boy summer,” but the internal degradation of the black community. This seems well under way: being “an anime nerd who can’t get pussy” will kill and is killing all black preeminence.

But I mean to say that the accelerant of black male allure dissolution is its structure: black male success so far is concentrated only in a small minority at the top. In fact though e.g. obesity has long been widespread in that group, it is a “cope” to focus on that, because it isn’t the average black male that drove any shifts. I think the sexual and to some extent the reproductive shifts are and were driven by the top 10-20% of younger black males, who are maybe at most 1-2% or so of the American population (and even less if you consider how many are jailed). This obviously leaves out a huge portion of blacks who may actually feel their exclusion from this dynamic is especially painful, as it shatters expectations or delusions. My guess is it is many of these who then express their pain, together with black females, in politicized and ideological racial-grievance language, including absurd complaints about the “fetishization and objectification of the black male,” in which they are not included, and so on. (A similar phenomenon takes place with Indian subcontinental males who absurdly try to pretend that the cultural sexual allure that attaches to black males in American society transfers to them—by “direction of hue” I suppose—and react very badly when they find it does not; the recent much-publicized and apparently fraudulent lawsuit by an Indian white collar employee against a female Albanian JP Morgan executive for “sexual harassment” with exaggerated and delusional statements about his own sexual attractiveness and potency, and with references to his imagined “college basketball” career, is an exquisite piece of present-day Americana). But few things are more unattractive than this constant whining and complaining. It is thus the blackcel, left out from the dynamic in question, who ends up smearing by association also the image of the top and shrinking 10-20% of black males; and over time degrading their cultural importance.

The 2020 George Floyd riots, whatever their operational origins in the political activity of the left, may nevertheless have been given such broad support in American and west European society because of ambient sympathy for otherwise culturally-salient black males specifically. This would have been not purely or even primarily for their status as victims, but because of cultural, athletic and other sociosexual allure. But at the same time this could have marked a high-point of this admiration: these demonstrations but even more the so-called “woke” post-academic media agitation just before and after 2020 would have tainted that entire group with the stink of grievance-victimization and strident unattractive Activisms. The front-speakers and faces of that grievance movement have simply brought to public media consciousness the hysterical and uncool bigger “under-demographics” of the black social structure.

Contrary to what some white nationalists and neoreactionaries believe, neither the knowledge about the high criminality and incarceration rates of black males 16-24, nor the constant (and self-defeating) warnings that “they will beat and abandon you” would in any way be demotivators for most girls of whatever race; in fact these things, as well as similar other complaints would and do greatly add to the glamor of this group in our overdomesticated and boring time. But the presence of a loud, vocal, very visible and extremely annoying blackcel anime-watching whining class certainly is.

America is a wonder: an egalitarian project on paper, in ideals, and in all public and often private wishes and language; in practice, a place where cholos will ethnically cleanse historical black areas like South Central Los Angeles of all blacks through low level organized violence, while black males sexually genocide Boricua men on the east coast.

Meanwhile “White hispanics,” college Indian males, and other recently-American racially indeterminate males led by gay social media influencers respond by blaming Protestants and Jews for their loss of sexual position to black and white men, and are then applauded by gay and hag DC “conservative intellectual movement” Catholic converts for representing a “religious revival.”

Some portions of the far left and various ethnic lobbies or ethnics applaud meanwhile these racial and demographic shifts without fully understanding either their scale or nature. Some of these in particular celebrate black male sexual success as a sensitive exploitable trigger point and also out of their own long-standing sexual inferiority complexes regarding white males, “white fratboys,” and the 1980’s movie blond bully. They don’t see that in ten or twenty years, the situation resulting from these shifts won’t necessarily benefit them politically or socially.

But I’ll add and leave for later elaboration that the far left has for now by far the superior “propaganda” position on this trigger point, can use it to manipulate the new right into self-implosion if it wishes, and probably doesn’t even need to…but can wait for this self-destruct process on just these related matters to play out internally to “the right.” Unfortunately the conservative/white-nationalism-lite synthesis emerging as the public face of the right at the end of the Trump era gets filtered through to mass society and especially to unmasculine, unsexy white conservative males as a catastrophic and self-defeating preoccupation on this point. It seems that Elon Musk, quite aside from whatever this represents for the American right, is himself preoccupied by this matter and has long been; and is deliberately stirring it up and accelerating it into broader discourse because he can’t tell apart his emotions from effective political messaging.

It’s easy for vast public-facing swathes of “the right” to spiral quite organically into a vortex where it would appear at least that the Civilizational Dangers of Black Cock are and always have been its primary concern and motivation. Consider the alternate possibility where some impish individuals on the right would have been able to paint the public image of the far left, of feminist women, or finally of the stereotypical leftist white female, as seething losers seeking revenge against Asian females for sexually or culturally outcompeting them. If it were possible to do, that would result in a generational discrediting of the left as a type; and this is where by analogy I think Elon Musk’s Entirely Sincere Intentions are pushing or facilitating “the right,” unfortunately. And anyway quite some time before this, the shift to earnest, strident empty-headed blonde girls angrily repeating nationalist hysterical boilerplate to a camera for boomer men functioned already as a kind of pornography for rage-consumption that was leading inevitably only in one buffoonish direction. These media figures were already walking caricatures and it isn’t hard for far leftists and transsexual Antifa to make interracial porn edit videos of their all-too-serious tirades. I think this is rhetorically effective with broad audiences and discredits nationalists for any intelligent and impish viewers in particular. And they need internet energy of a certain type if they’re not to devolve into Facebook spiritual geriatrics banging a cane on the floor. As I said, there is at present unfortunately no convincing response to the left pressing on these triggers. Elon & co. have helpfully banned and censored any of the few accounts that might have been able to mount an effective and humorous counter-response.

Finally regarding media and literary reception of these phenomena; on the white male side of complaints, this dynamic could have also produced the prime texts that gave rise to “red pill” and “manosphere” discourse, the early essays of F. Roger Devlin. I don’t want speculation on the motivation or genesis of these essays to take away from their content. I think they’re genuinely excellent and, whatever triggered their composition, they speak for themselves and are applicable to many cases outside of whatever originated them. They explain for example also the collapse of the black family in America, among many other things. Entirely sexually successful men of any race would do well to read them carefully. But I heard comments-boards rumors and from friends, that Devlin came out of the society of southern gentry, which seems to have been especially affected by this shift. Which is to say, the entire world of Southern debutante environment, cotillion, presentation balls and the whole structure of the fraternities and sororities in the big southern universities and the SEC schools was an elaborate and powerful matchmaking set of institutions. I hear they still sort of are. But as the sports teams became predominantly black, there developed a double world where the overt social institutions still existed but in reality much or at least a significant portion of the sex lives of the sorority girls in college shifted to the black athletes. The contrast then would have been very heavy: still-existing social traditions and institutions, pretentiously overseen by naive and delusional boomers, that in fact had been hollowed out of their original purpose and now served only as a hypocritical and humiliating public playact while in fact sexual competition had shifted to an entirely different field of combat. This would have strongly affected the feelings of any intelligent participant, especially one maybe naturally shy and entirely dependent on those formal traditions rather than his own social abilities. This doesn’t need to be as universal as either white nationalists or fetishists imagine it to be to lead to such reactions: if black athletes captured 15-20% or even less of total sexual encounters with white sorority girls, that would be enough to significantly displace or at least negatively affect the lives of the more shy and less-socially competent white participants in that system of matchmaking. It would be a sufficient enough disruption to have them view the entire set of institutions and rituals as a humiliating sham transmitting fundamentally a lie, a kind of pretty traditionalist lie on top of a sordid reality that is swept under the rug by social conservatives and the religious especially.

I’m not saying this to take away anything from the final insights of Devlin’s essays, because in my view these insights apply to modern society and its institutions as a whole: not having to do with any racial dynamics at all, but because of analogous dynamics in actually every existing country and community, what I just said regarding the hollowness of public morality describes the meaning of still-existing traditions, religions, institutions, group-identities, and nations.

7. An Underground Phallic Cult?

Since the year 2000 black preeminence in American culture seems almost absolute, and it’s mediated almost only through black males. A majority and in some cases supermajority of the most popular American sports are black athletes. Sports in America will continue to occupy prime cultural weight and so long as blacks do so disproportionately well in sports, it’s unlikely that America’s fascination with and to some extent “political and social protection” of black males will ever stop. Rap or hip hop have almost completely replaced any other kind of music especially among younger audiences; furthermore, black argot and slang has almost completely transformed youth slang by 2020. I’m amazed to hear clueless conservatives refer to the “traditional” and Sober generation Z or alpha, when between themselves and out of the ear of authorities or older people, zoomers switch to entirely black intonations and slang. These trends have always existed in America, but have accelerated since 2000 and crowded out almost everything else.

(I am aware of recent claims that the popularity of “hip hop” has much declined in the last two years. But these supposed changes are partly the result of how top songs are measured due to internet streaming versus other kinds of sales, etc.; and blacks are still very prominent in the music that is currently topping charts. The worldwide cultural impact of hip hop and black cultural forms is still very great. Also, it’s only familiarity with this fact for quite a while now that makes it seem “normal”; but it’s about as remarkable as if Balkan folk songs of the territories of ex-Yugoslavia had a 30-40% share of whatever music worldwide youth listens to. Insular Japan’s recent takeover of a large share of youth culture is also objectively remarkable. Anyway, any supposed changes in the cultural prominence of black males would be quite recent, explained in part by what I said above regarding the Covid-era hissyfits and revelations, and wouldn’t affect the rest of what I’m saying in this section).

Then there’s pornography and the internet. Internet porn has become ubiquitous and easy to access, including by youth, in a way that was not the case before 2000. “Blacked” appeared in 2014 and has since then gained a big share of porn viewership—I don’t know the exact figures here, and in any case I don’t really trust demographic audience analysis regarding porn, but Blacked and copycat “high production value” interracial sites have certainly risen rapidly in popularity and constitute a considerable portion of traffic now. Blacked has also achieved pop culture penetration, with offhand mentions in all kinds of venues, shows, movies, etc., widely disseminated internet memes and real-life jokes and so on. Associated mass trends on TikTok and elsewhere about “bbc” and casual mentions regarding black male sexual or physical prowess are also frequent by the 2020’s…most are meant as provocations and jokes but also serve to normalize an expectation, and function as massive PR in my opinion. Recently on Kick among streamer girls and in other parts of the internet, this trend as of 2026 is also fast accelerating as a way to generate outrage engagement. (In Europe where I live most of the time and where the unpleasant aspects of black public behavior and American black women are mostly never a part of everyday life, these American-media “exotic” promotions are even more powerful; there’s much less of the bleak everyday median counterweight to contradict it). It’s unclear to what extent younger generations born after 2000, and then those born 2010 and after have their sexual imaginations or tastes affected at formative years by increasingly prominent interracial porn: I think it’s easy to overstate this and get hysterical about it, but it likely doesn’t have zero effect.

In particular, the entry point to men’s psychological interior empire has always been potentially through pornography. And now with the advent of the internet, it probably is the key to the inner world of men. This may not be a direct or easy relationship, as the interpretation and reaction to porn of whatever kind widely varies among individuals. But because certainly conservatives and then also “right wingers” and religious “dissidents” see porn as something Degenerate and immoral, worthy only of blame and censorship, they de facto abandon this very potent psychological tool to others (any pretense to banning porn is technologically illiterate and could only be half-achieved by restricting all youth access to the internet. This would also deliver the young entirely into establishment educational channels and Teacher-approved friendship pathways, which both Europe and Red State America seem to be speedrunning now).

More broadly beyond porn there may be some type of acclimation to general media and social environment involving casual and not casual glorification of black male prowess. This shortcircuits overtly political and ideological angles of life in ways that I think leaves conservatives of certain types speaking irrelevant nonsense. So another way in which traditional conservatives are clueless in this sense, and in this they are joined by “redpilled,” “aware” and “noticing” white nationalists and neoreactionaries, is again in their excessive focus on black male criminality and violence. This is obviously a problem in American (and other) societies, but it’s very foolish to think it would be in any way an obstacle to the trends I’m talking about. In fact a reputation for violence and danger probably is a considerable boost to young black males in competitive sexual and social environments. Quite aside from the fact that it often enhances a man’s allure to many women to be perceived as dangerous, in this case in social situations where in fact violence wouldn’t actually be on the table, this reputation can still act as a significant confidence-booster as well as intimidate potential competitors. Thus the conservative, white nationalist, and neoreactionary common fear of black male physical danger and the perception caused by this that there is an actual domination of “the streets” or public spaces or social situations acts as some of the best possible PR for young black males. This reputation for danger turbocharges the mass media, music- and sports-domination, porn ubiquity, and social media dynamics into something that I imagine is psychologically very weighty.

The loserish standpoint from which the “critique” of this is effected is remarkably myopic: from 2000-on, and increasingly so after 2008, building wealth through a corporate career has become far more difficult, and the entire career-educational middle-class path part of life is for good reason experienced as especially unpleasant and onerous by anyone taking part in it. Young people especially are either shut out of normal career paths, or, more important, they experience corporate life and the arrogance of employers as especially intolerable today. Maybe more so than at any time in recent history. In this of all times the conservative as well as the other “right wing dissidents” think it’s good copy to present yourself as the Tiger Mom office-job race, and black males as to be “denounced” for being untamed, alluring, hypersexual disruptors of this. To be clear, I don’t myself share this judgment—I’ve said before that black people are a dependent population which is being financially and legally handheld. They act entirely in a kind of ward-of-the-state sandbox-delimitation of actual life. But black males certainly in the modern media biomes have the image of freedom, and the most foolish possible response is the white nationalist type that has been adopted from Jewish male-Asian male messaging that, “they are dangerous stupid bad boys, while we are the dutiful, studious janitors of society.” In our time when corporate and office life and its “virtues” are almost entirely discredited, and maybe for good reason, this all has only one possible outcome.

The most impotent of all things in this situation then is to try to refer to charts and graphs about “black male criminality” or IQ, or to “warn” young white women that they will be beaten, impregnated and abandoned by truant black gangsters if they “consort outside their race.” The phrase “race loyal” is beautiful in its provocative and presumptuous stupidity, and obviously encourages the opposite in modern societies where legal and extra-legal power of male mate-guarding coalitional groups is nonexistent. The idiotic refrain “13 do 50,” referring to the fact that 50%+ of homicides are committed by 13% of the population, for example. To which one could answer, it would be only the male part and those 16-30 years old maybe; so by then you could say, “3% do 50%”; however, this again is not at all a demotivator to women on its own—and can easily be turned into a meme with a very different meaning. And when I see the pathetic remnants of “the right” melding with hoary and geriatric conservatism and turning almost entirely in that direction I want to remind the reader that I’m not conservative, never was…and also that I’ve never considered myself part of the Altright, the dissident right, the new right, or any of the other names generally used for what’s emerged as the public face of what had been happening on the internet before 2016, but with which in fact it shares very little.

In response to everything I’ve said so far about the image of young black males, the standard response from both large swathes of the right and left is that it is a “psychological operation.” Much of the left would say similar, but referring to the “fetishization and commodification of the Black body for consumption,” instead of theories about racial corruption, replacement, or the pushing of miscegenation by media Jews or the CIA or others. In Alex Jones’ telling, the CIA “invented” hip hop to corrupt or destroy the black community. But I think that any marketing or PR has to be at least plausible. For a variety of historical, cultural-educational, and I believe yes partly also biological reasons it’s very likely that the type of blacks in the New World, in particular in the United States and parts of the Caribbean, would possess, at the right-hand tail of their population distribution, a significant stack or suite of traits that compound to make this kind of media amplification plausible and not just a fantasy or an invention. Regarding the biological side of it, it would account for a “fatter” far right hand tail compared to most other broadly-defined populations of men. This could be explained in my opinion by the Gold Coast origin of American blacks, and maybe even more so in certain subpopulations of that part of Africa—not anything else like subsequent experiences of slavery, etc.; the deep history of some non-Bantu populations on the Bight of Benin, who went through the highest pathogenic load probably of any location in the world, could maybe explain some of this distribution, but I’m not sure.

In my previous article on fertility, I tried to understand the natality crisis among especially intelligent younger women as a result of their anxiety relating to the “life path” expected of their demographic. I pointed out that historically humans got past (often justified) female anxiety through an irrational glorification of the male sexual instincts and of male sexual allure, as it is only this—in combination with significant financial or material incentives—that can overcome innate anxiety. This has been historically the foundation of fertility in traditional societies as well. The role of religion here is precisely this: that is, historically religion didn’t function as “restraint” on sexuality except in the rare cases of ascetics, mystics, and priests in times of ritual, or other religious elites…but it acted in the average case precisely as a male-glorification and sexual-intensification amplifier for women. I didn’t make my proposal in any serious expectation it would be adopted (though I think it would work) but to show the poverty of the current-day debate on natality, its faulty assumptions, and to demonstrate also the very absurd “solutions” proposed by others.

It turns out however, that America does have its own semi-subterranean male-glorification “phallic cult.” As to whether it works, please refer to the numbers in this paper: it works to the extent that, in a condition of overall fertility decline for all groups, young black males, even when demographically a super-minority and even when a good number of them are at times in jail during child-producing years, punch at orders of magnitude way above their numbers, achieving significant penetration of other groups’ female fertility. This is to the point where some cases and locations resemble colonial-transformation asymmetric breeding; while for others, especially white Hispanics, it represents something like post-conquest analogy situation in the numbers, with likely demographic transformation within a few generations.

This is a much-filtered and somewhat parodic proof of concept of the phenomenon in my first fertility article: that natality numbers are significantly affected by the sexual presence or image of the target males. Natality numbers follow on the glamorization of male potency, as haphazardly and inconsistently as this is being demonstrated in postmodern America.

I only add in closing that this could be replicated for males of other groups, if they were allowed freedom. Unlike some others I don’t claim that the image of black males is entirely a media invention or “fetishization”; it has plausibility because it’s based partly in fact. But there quite a few other groups who have similar or higher numbers of impressive males that could also provide the factual ground for a similar amplification. In this remember that the numbers described here are being propagated by a small minority of black males. And especially when it comes to the more “charged” question of any sexual-behavior shifts among the broader population, I would estimate that it is the “top” 5-10% at most of blacks driving that, if even so. If this phenomenon as I describe here is happening, it doesn’t do to deny it, ignore it, not talk about it, or to blame women for their choices or insist they behave or must behave in a more “moral” or “loyal” way (no convincing reasons are ever given for this). Or to pretend it is entirely a “psychological operation.” But conversely, transsexual youth also have generated recently a “cool” subculture that is quite attractive to other youth and is able to generate new forms, though this is unknown to the right and might be denounced as demonic (it is terribly misunderstood by conservatives who imagine the transsexual thing is merely top-down directed by teachers or authorities). The reason they have been able to do this is just that: they have been allowed to secede and to some extent “rebel” without a boot coming on their neck. This isn’t true for most other groups though.

I leave it for others younger to document the facts of life presently in e.g. American high schools and colleges. It is basically illegal for a white 17 year old to knock up his girlfriend—he will get expelled. Ditto, completely racially-selected application of Title VII, Title IX and many other rules, often illegally made-up by administrators, which target white male youth and make, e.g., approaching a girl basically forbidden in many contexts. There is a simultaneous cleansing from elite paths and institutions of intelligent white males who display any traditionally manly attitudes or behavior. This is often most viciously enforced by female religious and social conservatives in these settings. The Trump era has not put any stop to this but arguably intensified it.

I can’t emphasize enough that it is young white males in Red States or conservative America who come under some of the most severe legal and social pressures and restrictions. I think maybe people over 30 of whatever political persuasion are ignorant of the facts on this. This will be for others to document but what I am describing are e.g., 16 and 17 year olds who are given felony records for the smallest infractions, including speeding 15 miles over the limit, and whose lives are regularly delimited and ruined in ways that are hard for outsiders to imagine. The demographic of bossy evangelical conservative women represented by e.g., Erika Kirk who has now been elevated on the right beyond criticism, and their craven orbiter husband-males, are some of the most vicious enforcers of restrictions on life and culture in America…and I say without apology that it is conservative America that is squeezing out the life of its young men as much as liberal America is, in a different but as noxious a way as the Tiger Mom culture of East Asians is utterly destroying that group.

It is worth it to consider then why and how the image of males of other groups has degraded, and to what extent that is or isn’t based in fact, and what types of cultural or legal shifts could resolve that. Not that I’m saying, again, that such shifts could be in any way engineered or centrally-produced: nor can this be any artificial or self-conscious response. Whatever such “amplification” arises will happen organically as a result of a substantial shift in the way of life of other male groups, at scale, or rather their ability to generate attractive countercultures. But not shackling youth, taking the boot off the neck of male youth, lessening the consequences for “rebellion” or more broadly, for life itself, is really the only political or legal thing that could allow for genuine countercultures to flourish.

This is a discussion of the numbers I used in the article “Sexual Race War in America 2000-2030,” which I put here separately for ease of reading. The main article can be found at: https://www.bronzeagepervert.yoga/p/sexual-race-war

I relied on queries to the CDC Wonder archive regarding birth certificates in America for the years 2024 and 2016. The measure I use is the percentage of total births to women of demographic X by men of the various races, in those years. The query site is here, https://wonder.cdc.gov/natality-expanded-current.html …various queries can be run.

I also relied on queries to the ACS census survey for years 2024 and 2014. Here I asked regarding women of demographic X with reported children 0-4 years old in their households, specifying for the race of these children, i.e., where it differed from the mother’s race. Their query site is here https://usa.ipums.org/usa/

I discussed most of the findings in the main article so I’m reserving this for some discussion of details, some anomalies, and some further striking numbers:

The “Unknown Race of Father” problem on the CDC Wonder Natality archives

Concurrent with the rise in unmarried motherhood over the last few decades has been upward shift of another natality phenomenon, the “unknown-race-father” category for the CDC. How one treats the “unknown-race” father classification is a matter of legitimate argument. You could assume this is a recording or administrative matter only and that the proportions of the unknown-race paternity are similar to the known. I actually think this is sometimes true and that “unknown” doesn’t mean the same thing in all places in the United States: it probably means one thing for, say, a college-educated married or unmarried nonhispanic white mother in Orange County, a non-college married white mother in Oregon with vaguely “hippie” or weird pretensions, versus unmarried 23 year old nonhispanic white mothers in Philadelphia, Memphis or Atlanta, or white Hispanic mothers in the Bronx or Massachusetts. The “unknown” rate of 18.8% in Orange County is almost surely not masking any substantial black paternity, but the upwards of 50%+ unknown rates in places like Nashville, Memphis, and Philadelphia almost surely are. But the latter is by far the most frequent case for the “unknown” category.

There are first of all circumstantial but very suggestive numerical reasons for suspecting that the “unknown” category is disproportionately, and maybe substantially, a signal of black paternity:

There’s also a 2008 study (Ma, Sai. “Paternal Race/Ethnicity and Birth Outcomes.” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 98, No. 12 (December 2008)) that shows the outcomes for “unknown-race father” are statistically considerably worse than for any other group, including for known-race being black, which would be the next-worst signal of outcome. Sociologically this tracks with black paternity. Ma himself I think tried to argue that the reasons this group of children had such bad outcomes were not race-dependent, and he may be right that this is a particularly “pathological” subset of births that cut across races, but for obvious reasons one would expect black fathers are overrepresented in this group.

In minute cases I’ve looked at, the “unmasking” of the unknown rate also numerically suggests black fatherhood at considerable rates. In cases like Henrico County, Virginia—incidentally one of the oldest settlements in the United States, or Indianapolis, Indiana, a reduction in the unknown percentage from 2016 to 2024 unmasked substantial increases in black paternity…I will mention these examples with numbers below.

Whether the “unknown-race-father” category is just slightly above the known percentage of black or much more so is for now impossible to tell, and again it probably varies by location and situation, but I think that given all this, a substantial attribution is defensible. It changes results quite a bit whether you think 30% or 50% or 70% of the unknown category is in truth black fathers, but I will present in what follows both the raw percentage, the percentage of known-race fathers, and the adjusted speculative “true” percentage under what I consider a conservative 30% portion of the unknown category assumed to be black. I actually think 50% of the “unknown” category being black, and even above that, in many regions of the United States is very defensible, both because of the already-mentioned sociological correlations and numerical suggestions, and because of a known differential in black-versus-white paternity attribution.

I think even if working-class white males have substantially adopted “black deadbeat father” wigger type behavior, the 30% composition of the “unknown” group being actually black is still conservative. But I remind the reader: the known race percentages in what will follow are still remarkable. Furthermore the findings of the ACS Census survey, which is a separate data set—with its own methodological shortcomings and noise—mostly support my ideas here.

Under a 30% reclassification of the rising “unknown-race-father” category as black in areas with large numbers of unmarried white births, the national percentage of black-fathered births for white mothers overall changes from 3% to about 5%. This seems low until you remember that even a 3% asymmetric outbreeding rate is at the very higher range of baseline female class hypergamy rates, and 5% takes it into the range of historical colonial-outbreeding patterns. Even without further alterations and with a baseline sub-replacement TFR, such a rate would have substantial demographic effects over a few generations.

I need to emphasize, however, that this would in any case be a national number which includes vast portions of America where there is minimal cross-racial contact. I’m presenting this national figure because it is important on its own. But as for the questions that I address in this essay, of what happens regarding natality numbers in situation of cross-racial contact in the 2020’s, for that you need to look at high-contact counties or at least counties with at least some minimal black male presence.

If you look at particular counties in America there are cases where the percentage of births to unmarried white mothers by black fathers is zero or close to—but these tend to be places with few or no black people at all, and with very small numbers of births to unmarried mothers overall. There are other counties where this percentage is “science fiction enormous”—Richland County, South Carolina (location of University of South Carolina, though almost surely not describing female students there) hits 28.0% black among known fathers over all age groups, and 37.7% at age 20-24. Baltimore city reaches 35.9% among known fathers, 42.3% at age 25-29. Norfolk city, VA is at 24.7% with zero unknowns at all. Prince George’s County in Maryland is at 40.0% among known, and at age 25-29 literally 100% of known fathers are black (with 67.6% Unknown). In Minneapolis, around 20% of known-race fathers to unmarried NH white mothers are black overall, but reaching about 35% of those of known race to age bracket 20-24. Again these are not “adjusted” rates regarding the “unknown” portion, but the percentage of known-race births: adjusted for the likely black share of “unknown race” paternity, these percentages are very likely close to 50% or I would guess above. That said, these are very-low-n locations: for example in the case of Minneapolis the numbers are striking enough but, similar to cases where there are 0% recorded black-father births, we’re talking about dozens of births only. In Richland, South Carolina the CDC records a somewhat higher number, but still only about 200-300 births to white unmarried mothers in both 2016 and 2022, and for Minneapolis for age brackets 20-24, there were only 119 births in 2024 to this demographic, of which only 76 were known-race; similarly in Charlotte, North Carolina where also in youth bracket of 20-24 NH white unmarried mothers you have a striking one-in-three of known-race births to black fathers, nevertheless that’s only about 34 out of 101 known-race births, with only 137 total births.

Top 30 Counties by female Unmarried White nonhispanic births

To get past this problem of noisy and possibly misleading low-n samples I decided to look at the top 30 and top 50 counties in the United States by total number of births to unmarried nonhispanic white mothers. I don’t want to just go through long lists of descriptions so I’ll present this chart below and describe the main findings.

I say this also in the main article but I repeat it here for just these two paragraphs:

For unmarried nonhispanic white mothers, I found the following. With a few very telling exceptions which I will address in a moment, in most of the top 30 (and in fact top 50) counties by total unmarried white nonhispanic births, about 10-15% of the known-race births to nonhispanic unmarried white mothers are by black fathers. There is notably a 9% floor on this share almost nationally. It doesn’t matter if it’s the northeast (Massachusetts is actually a very active contributor, including in formerly “endogamous” working class cities like Fall River), the sunbelt, Florida, San Antonio Texas, Cold Springs Colorado, the southeast, the upper midwest—Ohio and Indiana counties are again very consistent “contributors”—this floor holds regardless of region of the United States, and is present equally in almost all poorer and wealthier counties that include some minimal black male presence. There is furthermore a second “floor” at age bracket 20-24 where this percentage normally shoots up to 19-22%. Again these are the known numbers only, without taking into account the composition of the “unknown” race-of-father component. This holds in America among unmarried white mothers wherever a minimum threshold of 5-6% black male presence is reached: again county borders are hardly “real” but it’s the measure I had and it appears that any minimum of 5% of county male population as black will generate these numbers regardless of region or city.

Furthermore in most of these counties there are zero CDC-recorded other-race fathers to this demographic. In other words, it’s an entirely bimodal phenomenon, where the known race of the father is either white or black, but no other race. Adjusted for the likely disproportionate share of “unknown” fathers that are black, the percentage in question shoots up to a regular 20-30% of all births for all age groups in these higher-contact counties

I found the regularity of this pattern striking on its own: although the unknown share varies by county, in almost every county the known share of black paternity to unwed white mothers plus attributing around 30% of the unknown share also to black males, will add up to around 20-30% of births. If the black male share of “unknown” is higher, as I suspect it is, obviously the adjusted “true” share of births will go up too.

What happened in Indianapolis is typical for much of the United States during this period. In 2016 there were 2605 total births to unmarried nonhispanic white mothers in this county and by 2024 there was a 50% decline in total births to this demographic (married white women—and everybody else—also experienced a significant fertility drop since 2016, but not quite this steep). The percentage of known-race fathers that were black to unmarried white mothers in Indianapolis in 2026 was 14.9%. In 2024, this percentage had risen to 18.8% of known-race father births. But the unknown percentage declined by 8 points: from 32.5% in 2016 unknown to about 24% in 2024 unknown. (I don’t know if it’s legitimate to treat this as an instance of the “unmasking” of the real composition of the unknown category in parts of America, and I actually suspect this isn’t the whole story, but in this case unknown % fell by 8 points and the black-father known percentage rose by 4 points). In Indianapolis in 2016 the phenomenon seemed to be concentrated in single mothers over the ages of 25 or 29; only 12% of known-race father births in Indianapolis to the 20-24 age bracket were by black fathers. By 2024, this had doubled to more than 20%. The acceleration in this phenomenon since 2016 in almost all of America is almost entirely due to the younger age cohorts. This is true even in Fall River, Massachusetts, a white ethnic working-class city in a county with only about 5-6% black population and surrounding counties that rise to no more than 8-9% black. But by 2024, 15% of known-race father births to white unmarried mothers were to black males, and among the younger cohorts, in the 20-24 age bracket, although this was under 10% in 2016, as per the national pattern this percentage than doubled to over 20% by 2024.

There are certain other notable but genuinely freakish examples I could bring up. Henrico County in Virginia in the suburbs of Richmond is one of the oldest settled places in the United States. It’s now roughly 29.7% nonhispanic black, about 49.5% white, 9.4% Asian, and quite segregated. Among unmarried nonhispanic white mothers, the black-father share of known fathers went from 5.2% in 2016 to 19.5% in 2024—nearly quadrupled—while the unknown category actually fell from 17.7% to 12.9%. It appears in the data set as one of the most dramatic accelerations outside Richland County, SC. The raw absolute count of black-fathered births roughly tripled even as total births declined. This isn’t a tiny county, but it’s not a big-number county…we’re talking about 300 or so births total and black-fathered births in the dozens.

But the directionality here as well as in the ACS survey, which I address below, is what matters. Even in cases where there was a small number of births overall, which you could dismiss as anomaly or noise…the fact is that all these small-n counties trended in one direction only. So they add up, and using error confidence intervals, as I do below RE the ACS census reports, reveals a likely very high rate of black-fathered births for this demographic regardless of noise.

In places like Louisville, Kentucky, where the unknown percentage actually substantially rose since 2016, the increase in known black paternity among births to this demographic also increased, albeit not as dramatically. But in Louisville as of 2024 over 50% of births to unmarried white mothers are by “race father unknown”; with an 18-19% of known-race births to black fathers (22.6% at ages 20-24) it’s methodologically sound in this case to speculate on the true rate of black paternity to unwed-white-mother births being anywhere from 25% to 50% of their total births by 2024. This was not the case in 2016, let alone in the 1980’s when the number of unmarried-mother-births were dramatically higher. America’s unmarried “teen mom” birth rate fell very steeply since the 1990’s at the same time that an increasing and possibly very large share of present-day unmarried white nonhispanic births are by black males.

The ACS Census Survey Study

The American Community Survey is a survey run by the Census Bureau continuously every year. They send questionnaires to roughly 3.5 million randomly selected households across the US…and it’s mandatory by law to respond. The household fills out a form covering everyone living there their age, race, ethnicity, education, income, relationship to each other, marital status, and so on. The fact that it’s mostly mandatory is very good because it gets rid of the self-selection problems on surveys. But this survey is small sample size at the local level…so it’s decent for national numbers but local figures can be distorted.

For this data set I queried (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/) on the presence of children 0-4 attached to households with mothers of various demographics…you can specify for race of mother and race of child, education level and marital status, etc.; so the query can return, if you specify, the race of the children, which can then be compared against the mother’s. This is self-declared by the mother herself.

There were various confirmations as well as surprises when I compared the results against the CDC birth certificate numbers. Some of these discrepancies I still can’t explain in any way that satisfies me or the experts I asked (the LLM’s are also confused by the way, and can’t find a good explanation for some of the things in the data set). To begin with, of the children 0-4 that Asian women reported in their households, 17.4% were white or white-connected (white-mixed-race), which almost exactly matches the CDC birth records of 17% of share of births to Asian females in 2024 to white male fathers.

The full picture from the ACS for Asian mothers for 2024, of the children they self-reported ages 0-4 in their households, the racial shares are:

73.5% Asian (single race, same group as mother)

15.4% White-connected multiracial (white father)

8.1% Asian-Asian or Asian-PI multiracial (different Asian group father)

1.5% White single race

0.6% Black-connected

~1% everything else

Although again the numbers are somewhat small on the ACS when you get down to granular level groups or locations, I also found the following: the interbreeding rate was much higher among Japanese and Chinese than among “other” Asians that are grouped in by the ACS (“Other Asian/PI,” the big bucket with Indians, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, etc.); 36% of Japanese mothers and close to 30% of Chinese mothers on the ACS reported having some type of white child 0-4 in their households. I think you can run another racial classification which would disambiguate the “remaining other Asian” category, which would be interesting, but which I’m leaving for the future. On the CDC form you can do something sort of similar, and there I found extremely high interbreeding with white males from Filipino females (over 30% of their births nationally at to white male fathers), but quite low overall for Indian Asian females (3% nationally). The problem with granularity on the ACS is that although interesting, again, sample size gets too small anyway.

For unmarried white nonhispanic mothers on the ACS, of their children 0-4, 20.90% of children are nonwhite, with 17.82% coded as two or more races. Of that 17.82%, 10.15% are black-involved multiracial, 4.96% Hispanic nonblack multiracial, and 2.70% nonhispanic nonblack multiracial (white-Asian, white-AIAN, etc.). Adding black single-race (1.52%), the total black-connected figure is 11.67%. This is larger than the CDC calculation for some type of black paternity, which I expected given the big “unknown race of father” on the birth certificates for this group, but not as large as I expected. But keep in mind that this is for the national figure and for what could be at certain local and unstable-household situations in high-contact counties, an undercount due to low sample size. There are further problems in self-identification involved here: it appears that in places like Fall River, MA, Cape Verdean males, or their children, may often unwilling to self-identify as “black” even on a census form and so forth. To get past some of these problems I tried to look also at the local level, more on which below.

I checked the 2014 ACS to run it against the 2024 to see patterns of change in the racial composition of this group’s young children. The black-connected percentage went from 9.58% to 11.67%, only a 22% relative increase. But this number understates what’s happening because of the age gradient. In 2014 the trend was declining within cohorts: ages 3-4 at 10.0%, age 0 at 8.8%. In 2024 it flipped to accelerating: ages 3-4 at 11.6%, age 0 at 13.0%. In other words the most recent births are pulling away from the pooled average toward higher-than-average black-connected identity for share of children to women of this demographic.

To get around some of the problems I mentioned above regarding the distortions of the national rate, which includes many parts of America where there is minimal black population, I did a couple of things…first of all a county-level aggregation by Black population threshold.

When I pooled counties by their black population share, the rates climbed sharply: >5% black counties showed 16.9%, >10% showed 18.6%, >15% showed 20.2%, >20% showed 20.6%. The curve flattened fast as you can see. You only needed 5% black male presence to see rates well above national. For the age-0 cohort in >10% black counties there is a huge 21.0% of children in the households of this demographic of white unmarried mothers with some kind of black identity. But here as in the CDC measures, a minimal 5% black male presence is enough to generate these types of numbers.

I also ran confidence intervals at county level. Individual county estimates were noisy (n=15-44 typically) but the direction was unanimous. Every urban county with adequate sample pointed above the national average, with lower bounds of the 95% CIs consistently in the 10-17% range. Columbus Ohio was the most reliable at n=44: point estimate 27.3%, CI [16.3%, 41.8%]. No county contradicted the pattern.

The reason I had to try pooling counties with some minimal black percentage and/or run confidence intervals (I used 95% CI) is because at the county-level the numbers on the ACS for this measure are often science-fiction astronomical. If I were cynical the way “demographers” online today often are, I would mention these numbers. For example in many counties in Virginia and elsewhere, on the ACS, 50% or over of the children reported in the “households” of unmarried white mothers are often black, with numbers regularly running over 30%. For the “never married” as opposed to the divorced category the numbers are also enormous at the county level, with 50% in some places in the south and numbers often at 30-40% in the midwest and such. But these are tiny numbers, with samples in the teens or under a total of 50. I’m sure that once others find these they’ll sensationalistically hype them and it would lead to amplification on social media. But it’s highly misleading because of the low sample size. This is why I tried some corrections for it…pooling areas with a certain minimal black population percentage, or running 95% CI …but the thing is, although these are small samples, they unanimously trend in only one direction, and often by very large margins.

For married white nonhispanic mothers, the two+ races bucket for the children splits into roughly equal thirds: black, hispanic, nonhispanic nonblack. Black is the smallest component. The total Black-connected rate for married is 2.86% versus 11.67% unmarried…a 4× gap. And the married rate is flat to slightly declining in the youngest cohorts, showing no acceleration.

But the really odd part here is that even for married white mothers and married college white mothers, the ACS is showing about 9% of the children living in their households as multiracial of some type. This is very different from the CDC birth certificate dataset, which showed these groups as having minimal nonwhite paternity: only 2-3% of fathers declared on the birth certificates for 2024 for white college married mothers are nonwhite. These groups had about 97-98% white paternity on the CDC birth certificate data set, nationally. That’s by far the more complete count, but the national level for the ACS, although smaller and therefore more vulnerable to sample distortions…it’s still a pretty big national sample. So it’s a 3x discrepancy when you then look at the ACS data versus the CDC data. I don’t really know how to account for this, but I tried to think it through.

The slightly larger “third” of that ~10% share of “nonwhite” children is some type of hispanic classification. This is a special category on the ACS and other census forms that is often marked by hispanics to indicate “other” or mixed race status with hispanic or hispanic-white characteristics. As is known many hispanics in America identify as white. A possible explanation here is that the father is marked as white on the CDC birth certificate, but later, when the mother alone fills out the ACS census survey form, she will mark down their child as mixed-race or “other”-race due to the father’s hispanic status. The racial classification system of the CDC birth forms doesn’t allow that kind of granularity, or the mother or parents may not know what to mark down. They may also come to think of hispanic as a “race” by the time they fill out the ACS survey. These are two possible explanations then, neither entirely convincing: that the father is marked as white on the CDC form, but the child as another (mixed) race on the ACS form, or that the forms themselves differ, with the CDC form being an older and less specific version.

This, however, wouldn’t explain the black discrepancy between these two data sets: for college white nonhispanic mothers who are married, the rate of black paternity on the CDC form is tiny, barely above 1%; it’s about three times that on the ACS census form. I’ve found no good explanation for this. Adoption as an explanation wouldn’t cover it. What might explain part of it is that white nonhispanic mothers who give birth to a part-black baby at the time of birth are unmarried, and therefore show up in the unmarried column on the CDC form, will be married by the time the ACS is filled out, and so will show up in the married column on this survey. There are also associated darker and more cartoonish explanations that can be thought up for this discrepancy.

Unmarried white Puerto Rican mothers went from 8.69% to 21.32% black-connected children in 2014 versus 2024…a near-tripling in a decade. For age 0 in 2024, or the youngest children, it was 29.7% black-connected identity…although very low n again so. But this is entirely in keeping with the CDC numbers for white hispanics in the eastern part of the United States.

For all these groups black paternity isn’t in the context of marriage, which is why “interracial marriage rates” are not really relevant for studying this phenomenon—it’s the measure actually that most past studies have focused on, and it’s very misleading. Even “cohabitation” is not in play here: 5.16% of unmarried white women with a partner are cohabiting with a black-connected man, but 11.67% of their children are Black-connected. The 2.3× ratio implies a large share of conceptions happen outside cohabiting relationships. For married women the gap is much smaller at 1.4× …still odd though. But these pregnancies by black fathers aren’t really taking place within any stable relationships that can be measured. I assume it’s not just casual sex or one-night stands. I think possibly these women go through with their pregnancies because their black “boyfriend” says he’ll stay with them but leaves at the last moment or around then. This disappointment in and bad feelings for their truant black “boyfriend” may also lead to these women not accurately marking the race of the father (or at all acknowledging his existence) on the CDC birth certificate and so on. But this is speculation.

Throughout this post I looked at a very basic figure that really isn’t studied much at all: the share of births/children of a given female demographic group fathered by various races of males in a society that has multiple races present; and I studied this in situations of high contact so I could observe relevant effects. This is an important figure regardless of trends or causes. But it may well be that the big thing here isn’t just a surge in black-fathered births, but a drastic reduction in overall births…with a faster or steeper drop in white-fathered births. This is indeed what seems to be happening. For white unmarried women, white-fathered births collapsed 24% overall, and 37% for ages 18-24. Black-fathered births dropped only 8-9%. (This in itself is notable and requires explanation). But here’s the other thing I found. In 128 counties black-fathered births actually grew in absolute terms; of those 128, only 15 also saw white-fathered growth. The other 113 saw white paternity declining by hundreds while Black paternity rose by tens. White-fathered growth occurred in only 47 of 540 qualifying counties (8.7%) versus Black-fathered growth in 128 of 363 (35.3%).

I remind the reader what I mentioned also in the main article: the total teen mom births by white fathers—again, not all-ages unmarried, but teen mom births—in the late 1980’s-early 1990’s, when social conservatives raised a huge panic over this…the number of those births was comparable and very probably larger than the entire number produced by white married mothers with no college education in 2024. The all-around collapse in fertility in America is not really a function of marriage or “family formation” in the end. I believe what I said in my original fertility article, that it is a much more serious psychological-sociosexual shift and is compatible with America being a much more sexually “conservative” nation now overall.

In fine, the ACS and CDC converge from different angles. For unmarried white mothers, the ACS age gradient (youngest cohorts highest) is explained by the CDC showing white births collapsing while black births hold steady or grow in the same counties. The ACS confidence intervals showing every urban county pointing high are confirmed by the CDC showing exactly those counties experiencing the sharpest white-black divergence. These are two independent federal data sets generally converging. The anomalies in the ACS are something I can’t yet explain though.

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Here is a recent example of an ongoing debate among liberals and conservatives over the meaning of populism, Victor Orban, Lee Kuan Yew, and government form:

At center of this debate ultimately is the meaning and direction of whatever it is you want to call the Trump Moment of 2015-6. What will come, if anything, from the changes he effected within the American right and possibly in American government? I think both Fukuyama and his populist-nationalist critics (or call them whatever they want to be called, “nationalist-conservative” I don’t care) are wrong on the meaning of Orban versus Lee Kuan Yew. But Fukuyama’s mistake is ultimately less damaging, because it’s merely defensive for his rather moribund faction…and less consequential. The more I’m reading about Orban and his government in Hungary for the last sixteen years, the more I see it’s been a bad thing for that nation and I suspect an even worse thing for the international right…it has consolidated and encouraged the very worst tendencies of the Western conservatives. Orban has unfortunately been very successful in effecting his policies. But so his tenure is a good example of what an ideal-case 2010’s Populist Success looks like. It’s a distortion and betrayal of the potential of the Trump moment in 2015. The misinterpretation of this turn encouraged by Orban and the operational and intellectual biome that has developed around him will result in decline and failure in the medium-term for critics of international liberalism.

Orban versus Lee Kuan Yew, Fake

Fukuyama and a few others like Fareed Zakaria and Max Boot have repeatedly praised Lee Kuan Yew while condemning Orban in ways that open them up to accusations of hypocrisy. In fact Lee Kuan Yew is the far superior statesman to Orban, and a good model for governance, whereas Orban is a bad one. But these men can’t make the real case for why, because they’re ideologically cornered, subservient to convention, and compromised maybe in front of those who are their friends and allies. They have to contrive continuous and invidious revisions of the meaning of “liberalism” and “liberal order,” to define who is or isn’t part of the “liberal order,” or who is a threat to it.

On one hand “you are praising one dictator as liberal while damning another as opposed to liberalism” isn’t such a good gotcha at all…and Fukuyama himself superficially has counterarguments to this. In the books and articles that made his name around the time of The End of History, Fukuyama presented actually Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore as a plausible alternative model and challenger to Western liberal democracy. He referred to it at the time as a kind of “soft authoritarianism.” Fukuyama but also now Zakaria make the case that in places like Singapore or Malaysia limitations of democracy in the name of liberalism are at the very least a positive transitional stage that is helping these nations. Progress in these nations could possibly be harmed by more vigorous expressions of democratic or popular will. I believe they also include late 19th Century Germany in this model—the National Liberal Party of that time led both to German unification and also promoted a model of rapid economic and technological development with considerable advancements in economic liberties assured by a soft-authoritarian dictatorship. (It happens also to be an excellent counterexample, along with Cavour in Italy, to the usual populist-intellectual piledriving about the “essential opposition between liberalism and national sovereignty” and think-pieces about how the evils of Locke are causing porous borders, or somehow leading by whatever genealogy to the present-day use of migrants by various political and economic entrepreneurs. In fact 19th Century Liberalism is in many cases synonymous with Nationalist projects, in the case of Germany and Italy actually uniting those nations.)

There’s a long tradition here of legitimate argument that a monarch, a semi-dictator, a “CEO” or some other type of strong executive is a better guarantor of liberal and individual rights than a democracy or even a republic is. Curtis Yarvin in our day, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in a different form before, and many others say things like this. Friedrich von Hayek apparently tried for this reason also to influence dictator Salazar of Portugal by sending him The Constitution of Liberty; Raymond Aron praised his salutary depoliticization of Portuguese masses (Fukuyama’s own intellectual grandfather Leo Strauss praised Salazar as a dictator in a letter, for different reasons…Salazar was in practice considerably more authoritarian than Orban ever was). Jouvenel made a similar argument in his main work regarding the opposition between medieval liberties and modernist absolutism regardless of democratic or dictatorial mere form. Carl Schmitt very clearly referred to this idea also in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and elsewhere…that “liberal democracy” only developed circumstantially as a unity, in response to absolute monarchy of 17th-18th Century Europe—and yet the liberals were opposed only to the “absolute” part while the democrats only to the “monarchy” part. As such Fukuyama would be on firm ground here to reject any charges that he’s being a hypocrite.

But consider the “liberal world order” NGO’s that score things regarding freedom, liberalism, democracy and government types: these certainly don’t agree with Fukuyama’s, Zakaria’s or Max Boot’s judgments on Orban versus Singapore. Freedom House’s 2024 scores both Hungary and Singapore as “partly free”…around 65/100 for Hungary and Singapore around 47–48/100; Hungary is thus rated freer than today’s Singapore, which is itself far freer than LKY’s. RSF’s 2024 press-freedom index has Hungary on rank 67, Singapore 126 of 180 (i.e., Singapore far more restrictive press freedom compared to Hungary). V-Dem rates both regimes as “electoral autocracies.” The claim “Hungary is a free society by the standards applied to Singapore” comes from the NGO’s dedicated to the study of such things. Here of course Fukuyama et al would do a bait-and-switch typical of the conservative establishment and try to present these NGO’s as crypto-Marxist and themselves as the true champions of freedom. But in their public criticisms of Orban and praise of Lee Kuan Yew they themselves invoke or hint at similar standards as used by mainline liberals…and not to the actual differences between LKY and Orban, which I will address below.

The problem then is that Fukuyama’s definition of liberalism, liberal democracy, and “illiberal democracy” is only defensible superficially…but ultimately incoherent and based on patent falsehoods and bait-and-switch. He attacks Orban especially as an example of illiberal democracy on grounds that apply entirely, on the terms that he himself uses, to Lee Kuan Yew as well. I think Fukuyama knows this because he has changed the kinds of words he uses for this government type: in the early 1990’s he referred to Lee Kuan Yew as a form of soft authoritarianism and a possible challenge or revision of the Western liberal order, but now both he and Fareed Zakaria refer to it as a kind of liberal authoritarianism and talk about Lee Kuan Yew as part of the liberal order, which they’re obviously doing because they want to rhetorically stick it to the Populists. It’s not just a question of semantics though: Fukuyama criticizes Orban primarily for his suppression of judicial independence and for the capture of the press and media by the state, or semi-coerced ownership by those close to it. The suppression of the courts and supposed or implied use of lawfare against opponents in particular is almost interchangeable with Fukuyama’s definition of “illiberal democracy.” In recent times he also has attacked Orban for his supposed ethnic “understanding” of democracy (without pointing to any specific policies or actions by Orban in this direction). Otherwise, to his credit Fukuyama realizes open borders and Merkel’s disastrous 2015 incitement of refugees into Europe contributed to the weakness and ills of liberalism; but he appears to see Orban and those like him as a pathological overreaction to this.

Here are examples of Lee Kuan Yew suppressing the independence of the judiciary and using the courts and lawfare against his opponents. In 1984 the opposition leader J.B. Jeyaretnam was accused of fraud and tried. He was later convicted in 1986. He appealed this to London, where the Privy Council acted as Singapore’s highest court of appeal: this court ruled in his favor in 1988 saying that he had suffered a serious injustice and had been punished for things of which he was obviously not guilty. The response in Singapore was to ignore this ruling and change the law eventually to eliminate the possibility of appeal to this final court. Jury trials were also abolished early in LKY’s tenure. Detentions under the Internal Security Act (ISA…a holdover from the 1948 British Emergency regulations, then held over in 1960 by Malaya; which Malaysia got rid of in the last twenty years but is still in force in Singapore) were deemed reviewable by Court of Appeal in December 1988 but Parliament amended both the constitution and the ISA within weeks to restore non-reviewable detentions by ministerial discretion, with retroactive force. Multiple opposition leaders were furthermore disenfranchised through a process of defamation lawsuits (that LKY never lost), followed by bankruptcy, which removed the right to sit in parliament.

With these various tools of lawfare, the following major opposition heads, among many others, were imprisoned and disenfranchised: Lim Chin Siong, LKY’s early chief rival, imprisoned some months before the 1963 election in Operation Coldstore along with other activists and held for six years without trial, then exiled. Chia Thye Poh, imprisoned for 23 years without trial, then house arrest on Sentosa Island for many years, longer than Mandela (Sentosa though is currently a haven for rich Singaporeans and site of nice hotels, most of all the amazing Capella Singapore, which is located in former British military barracks and exceeds the Raffles in my opinion in British tropical colonial charm and luxury). The above-mentioned J.B. Jeyaretnam who was main opposition leader in the 1980’s was first acquitted in Singapore, after which the case was reassigned to a more regime-dependable judge who convicted him. Francis Seow, head of the Law Society, which was itself stripped of right to comment on legislation after it criticized media censorship in 1986, interned for 72 days under the Internal Security Act, was prosecuted on trumped-up tax offenses, then exiled. This is just some of the main opposition leaders by the way, but there were many others—and there’s nothing comparable under Orban. For all of Fukuyama et al’s dark intoning about the tyrannical measures of Orban and his “control of the courts” for unspecified “illiberal” nefarious activity, he did none of this at all. Not one name like this can be mentioned because there isn’t.

LKY’s not-very-liberal-named “People’s Action Party” (PAP—arguably a “populist” name) had 100% of parliament from 1968-81, Singapore’s biggest decade of growth. Like Orban and Putin, LKY had very much a pretense to elections and democracy, and didn’t present himself, as Fukuyama et al are claiming now, as an enlightened monarch who avoided democratic and popular-will legitimacy. He was a firebrand and charismatic speaker who repeatedly rallied the people of Singapore to his side during crises, with theatrical Big Man posturing at public rallies. The logo of PAP, a lightning bolt on top of circle, was identical in design to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which was noted upon its unveiling in 1955…and LKY’s answer for why, when asked about it, was an obvious Trump-like troll (“What else can a right-handed man produce?”)

The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act (1990) allowed restraining orders on politically active clergy…a sensible old-style Ghibelline measure to ensure secular control and shut the lying mouths of demagogues in black robes of various types. Also in 1987 in Operation Spectrum, Lee Kuan Yew wisely used the ISA to crush, discipline and imprison some two dozen liberation-theology “Catholic social justice activists” and Marxist busybodies in a Patriotic self-defense action of meritocracy that Fukuyama, Zakaria and Max Boot would no doubt denounce as vicious and insensitive Fascism had anyone else done it. But when you’re LKY they let you do it.

Lee Kuan Yew’s control over the media and free speech was also far beyond anything enacted by Orban. Multiple newspapers were closed in 1971 and in 1974 The Newspaper and Printing Presses Act placed most of written press under ownership schemes that guaranteed only approved regime hands would be in charge, with basically state monopoly by 1984 and foreign press severely restricted after 1986. TV broadcasting was entirely a state monopoly in Singapore always, with no private or free opposition TV presence at all. None of these things were remotely true in Orban’s Hungary, which had a robust opposition media including on TV, and which continued after Orban took rather mild measures against foreign NGO’s.

Fukuyama has criticized Orban for his supposed “ethnic” overtures to national identity and democracy, but aside from being friendly to Hungarian expats and letting them vote, I’m unaware of a single policy Orban enacted that could remotely be classified as ethnic politics. By contrast, Lee Kuan Yew certainly did pay lip service to a multi-ethnic society; but he enacted multiple ethnic-politics measures that were both highly illiberal by any definition, and also served to buttress and maintain the Chinese culture and supermajority of Singapore. Singapore was 76% various Chinese citizens in the 1970’s and remains roughly that percentage today. The ethnic ratios in general citizenry composition and in housing were preserved by state policy, and it’s a policy to which Lee Kuan Yew repeatedly referred openly, claiming that the ethnic-racial ratios need to be preserved to ensure Singapore’s economic development. A Chinese supermajority in the citizenry continues now in part because, e.g., in 1989 a residency offer with pathway to citizenship was made to 25,000 Hong Kong families to top up the Chinese share of the citizenry of Singapore, given falling fertility rates even at that time in East Asia. The analogy here would be if, in response to a contracting white population Trump were to offer green cards to 2 million Afrikaaner, Finnish, Dutch and Lithuanian families to preserve the white share of the American electorate. I imagine Fukuyama and other “liberal world order” advocates are salivating at Lee Kuan Yew’s tough (and in my opinion also totally justified) measures against various ethnic chauvinists and ethnonationalists—including Chinese by the way, in the same way that Putin persecutes Russian ethnonationalists; but in practice as opposed to speech, LKY very much was willing to use immigration policy to preserve the racial Chinese supermajority in his city state. Malays were also kept out of sensitive military or security roles, which both Singapore state officials and LKY himself later explicitly defended. Mandarin language was pushed as a matter of state policy.

Finally there is the matter of Lee Kuan Yew’s unabashed and explicit use of eugenics, including explicit language in favor of eugenic policies, and including negative eugenics. In 1967 LKY openly stated that those eminent physically and mentally constitute no more than 5% of a society and that slender state resources must see to their benefit for the sake of national prosperity and advancement (C.K. Chan, “Eugenics on the Rise: A Report from Singapore,” International Journal of Health Services, 1985).

Lee Kuan Yew, June 19 1967 Adelphi hotel speech RE Convocation of University of Singapore, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19670619.pdf

In 1969 during the Abortion Bill debate speech he claimed that subsidized housing and free education was allowing the less-gifted and less-economically-productive to outreproduce the rest, and that strong disincentives to their natality were necessary. The same year the Voluntary Sterilization Act was passed. This was followed in the 1970’s by multiple voluntary sterilization inducements directed at the poor, with preferential school access for the one or two children of poorer parents who decided thereafter to sterilize, as an incentive. At the 1983 National Day Rally LKY talked about graduate women under-reproducing, that these being left out of the “breeding pool” will produce a “more stupid society,” and complained about the less-educated women over-reproducing; saying furthermore that 80% of ability is inborn or heritable. This speech cost him and the PAP in the ensuing election—they won anyway but did much worse than expected—but LKY would not budge on such things. In 1984 children of degree-holding mothers were then given school priority access (this had to be walked back in 1985 under mass public outrage). In the same year there was a sterilization cash grant incentive: a S$10,000 housing subsidy for low-income parents without secondary qualifications who sterilized after one or two children. Also the same year, the government enacted a matchmaking program: the Social Development Unit (1984) like a Tinder for graduate singles…but there was also a separate lesser “App” for nongraduate singles, and the bifurcation of these populations, or herding into separate matchmaking spheres was the ingenuous design. In 1987 these efforts continued: “Have Three or More, If You Can Afford It,” and it included tax relief, but only for educated mothers’ third children. (And by the way it is without a doubt that primarily the Chinese-descended citizens, not the Malays or Indians, would have been the main beneficiaries of these measures). These are the kinds of things that contemporary ““““fascist”””” states like Trump’s America, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia are always accused of but have never remotely entertained, let alone enacted (nor, unfortunately, would want to enact).

This compilation of Lee Kuan Yew best moments makes for good watching, but hardly covers his statements on such things as eugenics, which to modern ears of all the things he’s done and opinions he’s held comes off as the most outrageous.

Orban versus Lee Kuan Yew, For Real

In less than one generation a swampy southeast Asian Conradian seedy port with a people who didn’t know how to use toilets transformed into a gleaming skyscraper wealthy garden city….and also happened to be the Chinese civilizational sphere’s only clean urban area that didn’t stink like a seafood restaurant garbage dumpster. This wild success story is well-known and explains why Lee Kuan Yew continues to receive good press in our time despite his open embrace of Fascist Aesthetics and Eugenics: winning is sexy. Deng Xiaoping was famously also influenced by LKY’s example (which in private LKY explained with show-and-tell eugenic reasoning: look at us and at Hong Kong to see what the Chinese race can do in commercial society once freed from Marxist orthodoxy). His success is all the more impressive given that the innate human capital of that region isn’t necessarily so impressive; it isn’t as such “high trust” at all—the Hokkien merchant of the straits was an unexpected human type for a city built on perfect mastery of logistics and guarantees against corruption. There was no history of intellectual or artistic eminence and I doubt that the city will produce anything impressive on that path for the near future. Lee Kuan Yew himself repeatedly recognized this and referred to the parvenu and peasant-migrant background of Singapore’s population, implying he had limited material to work with. It was divided by ethnic, language and confessional diversity that always carries the potential for instability, war, and interference by outside powers; it’s surrounded by bigger hostile states; it began in a crisis that involved the potential for Communist revolution. Even so, Lee Kuan Yew’s city-state averaged 8.5-9% growth for the duration of his premiership 1959-1990. It was actually double digits in the 1970’s but the average was lower because of the oil shock in that decade made it dip to 4-6% in 1974-5. From 1965 to 1990 Singapore’s economy expanded about 8x.

By contrast Orban’s Hungary averaged about 2% growth per year, with the top years 2014-2019 rising to a high of 4%, though it appears to have hit 5% maximum in 2018; the Hungarian economy expanded 40% for the duration of Orban’s rule since 2010.

You can say I’m not comparing like-to-like. Singapore started from a condition of great poverty, whereas the East European states in 1989 weren’t anywhere near as backward even after Communism (and in fact were well ahead of much of the Third World). Arguably no modern state with an advanced economy can do 9% average growth per year. But Lee Kuan Yew had significant governance challenges and foreign threats that Orban didn’t, and many other obstacles and crises besides. And in the end Orban didn’t perform as well as his neighbors, despite the fact that Hungary was especially well-placed to prosper at the end of the Cold War. Poland averaged about 3.5% for the duration of Orban’s tenure, and is a much more prosperous place than Hungary now. Hungary’s economy is one of the poorest-performing places in Europe since 2022, and inflation, maybe the worst inflation in Europe, as well as lack of investment in that country for the last few years is part of the story of why Orban lost so badly in the last election. Romania pushed ahead of Hungary in 2023. By contrast Singapore of course far outpaced its bigger, stronger neighbors for the whole of LKY’s rule.

“GDP” and “economic growth” are seen with suspicion on much of the right because these were pre-Trump GOP talking points. It felt hypocritical and stupid to see Paul Ryan types invoke this and Jack-Kemp-style language while living standards declined or stagnated and they funneled benefits to their cronies and chosen industries. Life expectancy itself was declining in America for the 2010’s, a signature metric of a nation circling the drain. So it’s worth it when you talk about economic growth and GDP in a healthy rising nation to see what it actually can mean… to look at the living standards of the people of Singapore for the 1970’s and compare it to Orban’s Hungary in the 2010’s.

If you were born in Singapore in 1965 your experience for the next 15-18 years would have been one only of constantly improving material conditions. Your family would have moved into a bigger and nicer apartment when you were 6 and probably a bigger one when you were 11 or 12. Your clothes, food, schooling, leisure activities would all have been getting nicer, with constantly improving streets, technology, and an accurate feeling that many opportunities for personal growth and wealth awaited you if you were smart and worked hard in this rising society.

This last matter of the feeling of growth and future is supremely important especially for the well-being and outlook of the intelligent and ambitious young, who themselves in turn are the group that sets the tone and character and culture of a society. Material privation in particular is pretty easy to take, and even the “relative privation” that so presses emotional triggers; but what is painful and even intolerable to the relevant cohort I’m talking about is the feeling that there is no future, that there’s no opportunity, that all prospects look like dead ends or bleak, that you’re trapped.

I’ve had friends in startups who in their first year worked 80-100 hours per week in shared apartments eating cheap Chinese takeout…but it paid off, and they had a good expectation during that period of heavy work and difficulty that it would pay off so they rather enjoyed themselves. Many employers today know this and try to hijack the startup-feel for jobs that don’t carry the same promise or rewards: I’ve seen call-center sales companies presume to have “showers” in their workplace, implying a similar workload for a very small salary with no real future potential. I consider these scams. And the GOP itself or other politicians, not to speak of the left albeit in a different way, seeing the example of places like early Singapore, or being told of this feature of human psychology, most prominent in those who are intelligent, capable and ambitious, would seek not actually to provide them with real opportunities for growth, prosperity, and freedom, but rather to hijack and scam them into hard work with no genuine expectation of rewards. I’ve had conservative older men in my limited employment experience react with outrage and wonder that I wouldn’t accept extra duties without extra pay or promise of concrete rewards. But where they miscalculate is this, that the gap between their own cunning and the intelligence of their presumed victims isn’t as big as they imagine it to be, and often doesn’t go in the direction they think; so these schemes never really work at scale.

This is part of why demands for dedication, labor and sacrifice feel like hollow shuck-and-jive in an anti-meritocratic country like the United States. If you were an intelligent and ambitious youth in 1970’s Singapore by contrast, Lee Kuan Yew’s state offered multiple paths for genuinely meritocratic advancement. From 1960 Singapore made an honest and thorough effort to rate and sort students by ability through their national examination system (the PSLE). A real cognitive-sorting exam is the best method plausibly available to modern states to advance individuals of genuine intellect, which is why the United States refuses to use such, and every day moves farther away from genuine examination (the current-day college exams are highly gamed and subject to multiple levels of corruption, which I leave for others to document). Separate tracks were implemented at ages 9 and 12 in 1979, with the further intention to identify and groom the top students. Later the state implemented an even more aggressive IQ sorting mechanism: the top 0.25-0.5% of each cohort was pulled into a separate enriched-accelerated curriculum. Lee Kuan Yew created in 1971 a modernized version of Chinese imperial mandarinate, consisting of the SAF Overseas Scholarship, added to the President’s Scholarship that had already been in force: top students of each year’s A-level results were sent to Oxbridge and the Ivies at state expense. They were then entered into the Singaporean government and fast-tracked to permanent secretary or general by their thirties. Under the “you get the government you pay for” doctrine, ministers and other high officials also had pay pegged to the top private-sector incomes (I’ve known more than one case of individuals of high ability foregoing employment in the American government because of the pay cut they’d have to take). Singapore also tried to act as Asia’s modern Athens, welcoming schoolchildren of high achievement from other states into its own pipelines, although this meant principally other Chinese from places like Hong Kong.

Speech by Lee Kuan Yew, July 7 1979 at opening of Singapore Polytechnic new campus on Dover Road

The above is just a brief introduction to Lee Kuan Yew’s structuring of Singapore as a “talent pyramid” and cognitive escalator: the Singapore military structure, the polytechnic and vocational school structure, all had separate selection mechanisms including IQ tests, from the 1960’s onwards. This method was refined over time to where by the mid-1980’s reproductive and pronatalist measures were directed specifically at the talented top 1%. And so an intelligent, ambitious youth of whatever socioeconomic background, who could prove himself in examinations, would experience life from 1965 onward as a series of continual improvements in his family’s station, the city’s looks and infrastructure and services, and reasonably large horizons of opportunity and advancement and wealth for himself, including state-supported scholarships at the best universities in the world (some would say this hurt Singapore in the long run because cadets brought back bad attitudes from academia in America and England, but that’s another story). Those not fast-tracked into the top layers nevertheless had less cause for bad feelings…their lives too were improving, as was their country.

The year 1979 was crucial in this respect for the whole of Singapore: in that year Lee Kuan Yew simultaneously erected several new educational-cognitive meritocratic programs and also enacted a momentous “wage correction” that lasted until 1981. The purpose of this wage correction was to kill the low-value industry and assembly economy…to eliminate most cheap-labor-dependent low-value production and force the entire economy upmarket. The entire “Chinese model” that Deng Xiaoping copied and that China itself is now shifting to depends on actually moving the economy away from producing, e.g., steel pipes, and toward high-value products and services as well as automation. Both national power and the lives of average workers are greatly improved if this is successful, as it was in Singapore. The people as a whole, and especially the top cognitive layers, experience life as a series of increasing opportunities for wealth and advancement.

The story behind Orban’s economy from 2010-26 is very different and makes the 2% per-year average growth and final years of inflation appear something much worse than mere stagnation. Orban’s legacy will have been one of brain drain, where the most intelligent and ambitious Hungarians had to leave the country; corruption, where sectors of the economy were redirected to himself and cronies for purposes of shoring up political power; and finally, the gradual transformation of the territory into a corporate slave realm. On the matter of corruption I’m not moralistic and expect that some corruption will take place in any state…but it’s one thing if you have Themistocles embezzling during a condition of bustling development and civilizational peaks, and something else if it’s a symptom of a sclerotic Cold War holdover who’s immiserating his labor force and causing the best to emigrate.

Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore looked to the future and the development of the youth, Orban’s economy was a stagnant scheme that looked to the past and to rewarding the based factions that really stuck it to the urbanites: subsidies to rural sectors through chosen party bosses, subsidies and pandering to pensioners, contracts to chosen cronies erecting a false “national bourgeoisie” based on clientelism and patronage. Then there were the cynical media manipulation schemes at enormous expense where under a program called Megafon, “web Influencers” were herded into state social-media campaigns for Facebook boomers…outspending every political party in the EU on Meta on this astroturfed meme mess. And most of all, special tax rates and benefits to attract foreign firms, especially the German car industry and provide them with a dependable labor force.

There’s nothing wrong with attracting foreign investment and getting industry to offshore to your country. You endlessly hear now that industrialization is a great thing and deindustrialization very bad, which as such is usually true; but look at what Orban actually did to Hungary to achieve this. There was first of all the 2018 “slave law” that allowed companies to force 400 overtime hours, supposedly “voluntary” but of course very much not so when these were the sole employers in entire regions of the country…this passed with over 80% of the country opposing it. The scheme not only expanded Hungary’s long-hours-for-low pay “package” for foreign firms, but also allowed these employers to pay for these overtime hours on a three-year delay (which could also be paid back in “time off” rather than cash).

Orban presented his vision of the good life regarding such schemes in 2014, where he introduced simultaneously a concept of “illiberal democracy” (possibly cribbed from Fareed Zakaria, but with the valuation reversed, and seen holding Fukuyama’s book—he really stuck it to them!) and a “work-based society.” The “work-based society” was buttressed by a 2011 change that dropped the age of compulsory schooling from 18 to 16…in principle this is a great thing, if it means that capable and intelligent youth are groomed and selected at age 16 and accelerated into leadership and scientific-apprenticeship or technologically advanced positions. Roman patricians were certainly given international responsibilities sometimes at that age. But that’s very much not the intention of this law: it was to herd and fast-track Hungary’s youth into cheap assembly factory work for German auto firms. The vocational track of Hungarian schooling was stripped of all non-practical content and then moved from the educational ministry to the “industry and innovation ministry,” with the curriculum under direction by the Chamber of Commerce in response to employer demands. This included a dual-training track with employers themselves in the form of apprenticeships. This last wouldn’t be entirely a bad idea on its own, but all these innovative efforts went only into transforming Hungary’s less-capable youth into a dependable corporate cheap labor pool. There were no corresponding efforts for other kinds of youth, nor any upward path of hopeful development plausible for the nation as a whole. Even before 2020 I was hearing from right wing young Hungarian friends that Orban had turned Budapest into a place for corporate slaves and that they and their friends had lost all faith in him as a leader of vision or future.

The rest of the educational system was gutted, and research and development funding in general minimized to well below the levels of even neighboring East European nations. The chamber of commerce leader, given control over Hungarian education, said in the 2010’s something to the effect that the nation needed welders, not philosophers; complained about too few young skilled laborers and too many “school loafers.” Of course that in itself is an invidious and contrived polarity that says more about the intentions of the Orban regime than the potentials of a modern nation.

This is the very opposite direction of where Lee Kuan Yew took Singapore. In 1979 he raised wages to kill off low-value assembly work and move his country up the production and technological ladder. He enacted, at great difficulty to Singapore and in many ways against the nature of the place, an educational and cognitive pyramid-escalator to identify and quickly promote high innate talent. Orban did everything to turn his naturally gifted people into a cheap slave labor force. When they didn’t meet these demands, and when much of the youth chose instead to emigrate, the hero of European Immigration Restriction and Medici patron host of Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Rod Dreher, and CPAC started in 2023 a guest-laborer program that flooded the country with Filipino, Indian and Vietnamese workers. “Work-based-society” be as it do.

Throughout his tenure Orban did next to nothing to cultivate or give a path or prospects to Hungary’s own intelligent young. He inherited a national talent program from the previous government that he apparently continued, which at least is something…but had zero new offers or ideas of his own to improve the opportunities, careers or path in life of Hungary’s considerably large talented youth population. There were no programs of cognitive selection and advancement similar to what Lee Kuan Yew erected in Singapore. There was no separate track to catapult Hungary’s economy into something genuinely advanced, only an intensification of its new identity as a place of cheap labor, a labor-rentier economy.

Orban gutted Hungarian higher education, universities and severed them from the European Union’s own universities and funding. Neighboring “illiberal” Poland did no such thing, and neither did Czechia. The Hungarian state is per capita one of the last countries in Europe in research funding, behind Malta and ahead only of Bulgaria and next-door Romania—which may well have a Cold War holdover security state elite even more backwards, venal and wretched than what Orban represented. It’s one thing to say academia is corrupted and captured by leftists, and that it often engages in bad scholarship or pointless research. It’s something else to eviscerate it entirely and replace this with nothing of your own, when you control the entire state and have plenty of opportunities over many years to do so.

Orban’s only offer here was a single boutique institution, the Mathias Corvinus College, which acted as a loyalist and party cadre school. One assumes this place also occasionally catered some nice porkolt and lobster risotto for Dreher & co. and other visiting Platos and luminaries from the American Conservative Movement. I don’t know if it was these luminaries who encouraged Orban to give tax incentives and very favorable loan terms to tax-paying married families that remained in Hungary as a pro-natalist move. But this didn’t work. I suppose the “tax-paying” component of this offer is at least a minimal attempt at a proxy for quality, and should be praised. But absent other opportunities to advance in life, and actually in an atmosphere that’s hostile to talent and merit, these terms just aren’t attractive to anyone smart and capable. So they left, and the ones who stayed either didn’t deliver the desired fertility either, or….

A defender of Orban might respond that Singapore’s average age during the 1960’s and 70’s was maybe in the early 20’s. Hungary now and since Communism is unfortunately an aging society with poor fertility and not enough young people. But this isn’t a legitimate excuse for Orban’s failure. In fact this alone condemns him so much more because it means he should have fought desperately to preserve, cultivate, buttress Hungary’s most precious resource, its human capital and future. And unlike other Populists, he had managed to take the state’s institutions to an extent where he could at least have tried something. But that’s the whole failure, that he never tried. He never showed any interest whatsoever in this. His interests were to serve his preferred political factions, again, the pensioners, the rural voters in locations where the sole employers were party bosses. Others who benefited were his cronies and their clients who were to be the core of a “national bourgeoisie” through closeness to government grants, and then the foreign firms to which he lent Hungary’s youth as a cheap labor force until he decided to replace them with Cambodians.

This shameful decision to abandon Hungary’s future should be contrasted again to Lee Kuan Yew then who, by his own admission, had considerable human capital problems with a largely unintellectual and frankly illiterate “peasant population” base. Internal reports from the late 1970’s show anxiety and even desperation from Singapore’s ministers that there simply wasn’t the human material available in their nation to climb the very sound cognitive pyramid LKY had erected. (I know this goes against “HBD” orthodoxy of recent times, but most of the Chinese population groups just aren’t that bright by nature, and it shows when good-faith efforts at testing are made, let alone the civilizational scientific record of that sphere or its “achievements” over the last few decades since it’s embraced Western science.) This isn’t true for Hungary. Hungarians are very proud of the large number of eminent minds their nation has engendered, and have a right to be. Orban chose his nation as just a grim cheap-labor territory with European Union funds funneled to preferred individuals. He could have also tried to provide a well-funded and vigorous upward path for its own sizeable cohort of bright youth, proportionally bigger than what LKY had available…whether in technology, finance, high-value robotics, bioengineering, or whatever. It’s often said that big continental nations like America, India or China don’t have the luxury that Singapore does: to abandon low-value manufacturing entirely and move “upmarket” into high-value production, services and such. Maybe that’s true or maybe not, but Hungary’s population is only about 10 million, around the same size as Israel’s, which has made considerable efforts to promote science and technology startups on its territory. For example, Israel’s R&D investments are 6.3% of GDP, the highest in the world, compared to Hungary’s 1.4%. Israel promotes, buttresses, and sells its brains at world-level prices, Hungary’s offer was manual labor on the cheap. I leave for someone else a full comparison of Israel and Hungary and their trajectory 2010-26 as it would be supremely informative on its own. There are in any case many other examples of small nations who can do this. Iceland was a nation of poor fishermen until they decided to use their considerable natural endowments to become, in very recent times, rich financiers, and when that failed in 2008, extremely rich with various biotech and other innovative industries (including state of the art fishery and agriculture specialties). There’s no reason why such things wouldn’t have been possible in Hungary with vigorous and creative state incentives, which Orban was empowered to achieve.

The only plausible escalator of talent the Orban regime created was something called “TAO” and which consisted of allowances to corporations to convert otherwise taxes to donate to sports programs and sports stadium construction instead of to the national treasury. The Orban government expenditure ratio when it came to funding sports and stadiums and funding R&D and tech research was basically one-to-one. My audience maybe knows I love to post photos of athletes and that I admire physical achievement. But a regime of “jocks” is actually stupid and this ended up being mostly a way to enrich Orban’s friends. They built stadiums rather than promote national physical health or eminent physical achievement. Hungary continues to top the charts in obesity in Europe…fattest country in Europe and fourth actual country in the world behind only the United States, Mexico, and Chile (not counting the unfortunate cases of Pacific islands which contain naturally eminent specimens crushed by modern depression). 30% of Hungarians are obese, and 25% of children. The life expectancy for men is low at 72-73, a decade less than Singapore at about 81-2...it doesn’t seem like the “work-based society” is great for health or reversing life expectancy decline. Orban did try to enact a fast food tax, but this did nothing. There have been a few eminent Magyar sportsmen emerging in the last decade primarily in fencing and swimming, but disproportionate high achievement in various sports has always been the case for East Bloc sports programs generally…I’m not sure it was due to these lavish spending programs from Orban. I don’t know how this money was spent, again aside from enriching those close to his administration under the excuse of “big sports.”

Here was a man who, in the language of the post-Trump “Based” certainly “knew what time it was” and was ready to fully “exercise power.” But control and power and defeating your enemies isn’t actually a substitute for good ideas and an inspiring vision for the future. Your enemies are never quite as defeated as you think anyway. Lee Kuan Yew was a dictator but he did genuinely win majorities for many subsequent elections because the vast majority of Singaporeans benefited from his rule, had only improved lives with him, and saw only good prospects going forward. It is because of his petty vision, ideological imprisonment and reactionary resentments that Orban ended with the youth going 60%+ for his opponent in the last election, after a culturally and economically moribund 16 years—almost a generation—of his misrule.

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Orban and American Conservatism and Populism

As regards this ideology of Orban’s I see certain very troubling parallels to the direction American conservatism has taken over the last ten to twenty years. In my article on Milei and Argentina I pointed out that nationalists should beware of Peronism, a form of “Bannonism” on steroids. It always ends one way: if the common biggest enemy is the oligarchic capitalist Fat Cat and the spoiled university brat who doesn’t want to work with his hands, why wouldn’t your allies be the salt-of-the-earth illiterate Peruvian and Bolivian working-and-believing-folk who will put their rough shoulders into hard labor and also give you demographic weight against the effete upper classes? Thus Peronist-Kirchnerist Argentina, despite its rhetoric of economic nationalism, ended up busting open its borders to Third World mass migration. So goes the policy and desire of every similar “ethnic socialist” party in Europe. In particular I remarked on the bullying, arrogant attitude that a “workers’ society” can take toward the “avocado-toast-eating college students who want to write screenplays, not work with their hands, and are possibly gay.” Always again with the added realization at some point that the Paraguayan migrant day laborer could therefore be, will inevitably be your ally against such local do-nothings, loafers and reprobates.

There’s a right-wing version of this same attitude, that’s maybe more noxious and annoying…Orban seems to have been its recent champion. If the leftist universities and the urban young are the social base of your opposition, why not get rid of them? Why not funnel youth into “the trades” and get rid of that hipster gay high-falutin cosmopolitan education stuff? If industrialization is the highest good why not turn your nation into a cheap labor rent pool, devalue your currency to become “competitive” in wage labor costs, give employers unprecedented powers over your workers (to the point where they get free loans through free labor), and cut schooling short to provide an earlier entry into this virtuous “work-based-society”? The bullying language about “welders and philosophers,” the gay loafer university crowd, the virtues of “the trades”…all of this sounds very familiar. Then finally also the Bible-banging and Pharisaic public religiosity to make up for the fact that you’re constructing a bleak work-camp society…why not also the empty tax credit “pronatalist” policies that result in nothing…very beautiful historical reenactment buildings remaking Budapest into a historical theme park (forget that the Habsburg fin de siecle style was new when the originals were built in 1870-1914 and not merely a historical reenactment but included substantial innovations at the time)…jerkoff conferences about civilizational identity…higher prices for everything and maybe a lecture from Misters Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher on how if you complain about the price of mangoes you could possibly be a degenerate selfish modernist for liking luscious tropical fruit….oh how brunch!

Did you salute your obese wife today and pray together at the community center on the way back from your job at the coal mines, anon?

Those interested in the connections between Orban’s public messaging and the American conservative movement should study the Megafon program that the Hungarian state started (with plausible deniability as an independent foundation with unclear sourcing) in 2020. It was a massively funded media push, with, again, more money spent on ads than any other party in the EU did on social media. It contrived to mimic organic online excitement through the recruitment of influencers who pandered in premade ad-agency memes to boomers and spiritual oldtroons on Facebook and such. This push precisely matches in time the changes on the American “online right” since 2022 with Elon’s X and the like promoting in my opinion similarly contrived polarities that coincide with the ossified interests of the Daily Wire and other Cable News legacy conservative fixations. I can’t speak to any operational links and I find “follow the money” analysis tedious and overdone lately, but the similarity in content is very striking…it reminds me in many vivid particulars of the conservative co-opting of the online sphere in the United States, including promotion of fake and buffoonish opposition. Regarding the Orban side, it’s instructive that once the patron and funding disappeared recently, within weeks so did this entire “online” media ecosystem of influencing in Hungary…as it wasn’t after all really akin to online organic citizen engagement, but, like much of the new online right in the United States as well, contrived Cable News 2.0

For the intellectually and morally bankrupt character of present-day debates on the right, see, e.g., this:

American conservatives haven’t been able to protect even the bare minimum of a liberal society, equality under the law, meritocracy and non-discrimination. Faced with a generation of intelligent and capable men who are with few exceptions shut out of advancement in life, these conservatives haven’t shown interest in fighting for the drastic changes, de facto and de jure, that would be necessary to reestablish some form of meritocracy in the United States. This is unforgivable because it’s entirely within the sphere of mainstream American feeling and ideas, both center left and right, that discrimination is unfair and merit, intelligence and hard work should be rewarded. But since the Reagan administration, whenever the right has had power, it’s made only the most anemic efforts in this direction and gave up at the sign of first resistance. You are then left by America’s 250th anniversary with absurd statements from conservatives about the “American dream” thirty or forty years out of date, and practical life suggestions to “stretch your meat with refried beans” and “work at Panda Express” as instances of the Good Life.

I’m attacking a certain kind of establishment conservative here but I suppose I’m trying to hint, through the example of Orban, that their main media opponents aren’t actually that different. The “postliberals” and similar are in a productive media engagement with the pre-Trump GOP, but offer the same hopeless future, with a different ornamentation. I’m not aware of any serious efforts on the part of Populists and Populist-Conservatives and National-Conservatives or whatever to provide a genuinely inspiring vision of the future or of good life. More concretely they don’t fight to take on America’s wretched anti-meritocratic laws, regulations, and general corporate culture, nor do they appear to have any intention of doing so. (The changes Trump would have to make here, which would include taking on Female Privilege, would cause an outcry far bigger than his opposition to migration.) As far as I can see both Ben Shapiro and Tucker, and those “in between” offer varieties of humiliation-as-success.

I don’t think the meaning of the Trump moment is fully decided. What it is, what it could be, we will see in the next few years. There are many good people in this administration or adjacent, who could inherit the leadership of the American right and take it in a progressive, technologically and economically powerful direction. In particular, the economy could be reformed with vigor and severe measures to where some of the freedoms that existed in the dynamic America of 1890-1930 would be reestablished for individuals of ambition and intelligence. The virtue of Trump was never that he’d be a savior but a disruptor and dissolver of an ossified and bleak duopoly. The Orban reinterpretation of the 2010’s is penitential aesthetics to consecrate the closure of horizons appropriate to a boomer Cold War holdover regime whose principle is the taming of youth, the sealing of life, and taxidermy: pray, weld, stay, reproduce, don’t complain about prices. It’s important I think that the example of Orban, a conservative of low vision who sacrificed the future in the name of a contrived past, be rejected. Certain measures that Lee Kuan Yew introduced could be adapted, without coercion, to the American case: versions of the honest exam, forceful action against antimeritocratic discrimination in universities and corporations de facto and not just de jure; the bonded scholarship pyramid and talent selection measures; wage and employment inducements that kill scam-work; a return as far as is possible to the laboratory of states. Pathways and opportunity for real merit could be opened up again.

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Chris Nolan’s Odyssey is a pedantic movie undeserving of a serious intellectual, ideological or aesthetic review. But most of its right wing critics who try to claim it is simply a “woke” film are wrong and misguided. It’s woke in the same way mainstream conservatism in America and England became woke under Bush and the Tories. This doesn’t make it any better than if it were the far leftist agitprop its critics imagine it to be. It fails primarily as art for deficiencies of plot, character, and aesthetics, but in this clumsiness is included the great error of all didactic art, that it’s a forced homily-allegory for its own time. It speaks to Nolan’s narrowness as tedious commentary of the type that might be at home now in the social spheres that supported George Bush II and Karl Rove, or at least Christopher Hitchens. As the movie is unworthy of detailed reflection itself, I’m writing this to address various other tangents that interest me and also the controversy it generated.

Nolan’s Odyssey is a failure on multiple levels that have nothing to do with politics and that make it a liability to any views it supposedly “supports”: worst of all is the leaden artificial dialogue that is almost surely written by LLM. I was astounded to see for this director uncharacteristically here very much a “tell, don’t show” exposition style where characters basically face the camera to transmit their awareness on their own “historical age” as explained in academic books written thousands of years later, and which Nolan wants the viewer to see he dutifully read. He’s beating a probably ignorant audience over the head with very explicit Baby’s First Ancient History Educational hour. I generally like Nolan and think he’s a lot like Hitchcock in the sense he has an appreciation for narrative as mere visual excitement; he also has a similar attraction to dark mystery feel. In North by Northwest Hitchcock takes this tendency to an absurd limit, where the plot is rather ridiculous and the mystery is as usual a let-down and a nothing…but it doesn’t matter because the whole movie is an occasion for visually thrilling vignettes that have remained iconic decades later. I thought Nolan was very enjoyable in similar way in the Batman films, especially the first, and in Inception, which in moments carries some of the rush you get talking to real schizophrenics; his first American movie Memento is also good and manages to sustain an immersive mood of mystery and obsession. He hasn’t followed up here, although the story invites it and he could have made something very successful merely by showing the adventure stories of the Odyssey in greater detail.

Nolan’s concerns about justice and morality in his previous movies were artist’s vices incidental to his films, easy to ignore, and unnecessary to enjoy them…but he seems to have indulged these faults in his latest movie at the expense of what he’s actually good at. It’s possible he and Ridley Scott, maker of two recent execrable and actually-more-aggressively-woke movies, are co-students in the arts of chastity at the prodding of their wives (or whoever). There are just a few scenes on Odysseus’ exotic travels where Nolan is obviously truly enjoying himself, but he cuts it short just as it gets good. The Cyclops scene is almost perfect and the best of any on film so far. That’s what’s frustrating, because this could have been a great movie…all he had to do is just more of that. On two occasions, in the run-up to the events in the Cyclops cave, and in the ascent to Circe’s house, Nolan shows his special taste for Mediterranean biome and mystery feel, which he’s obviously relishing as something new for him on film…he should have just gone with this. Unfortunately instead of continuing to do what he likes and what he’s good at, Nolan kills these instincts in himself, doesn’t linger on such scenes…he denies himself and the audience this pleasure in order to inform you that he’s Really Concerned about Certain Serious and Political things in our world, and also that he’s very sensitive to the dignities of his wife and daughter. You can see him on several occasions caught up in his own orgasm-denial.

The other visual and “literary” aspects of the movie are very mixed. I found the many complaints from others about the coloring to be wrong: some scenes are vivid, colorful and beautiful, especially at sea. But the framing for IMAX doesn’t work if you see it in a normal cinema. The ending battle scene is unoriginal and a failure…as friend put it: “The ending is Kill Bill by torchlight, you never see a blow connect, just a blur, all of it closeup and medium. Also the editing is bad, hyperactive. It cuts from face to face every half second — this is how it is in every film now.” In visuals and dialogues this movie often trips on itself.

Self-conscious clunkiness and stumbling were also the problems with many recent historical epics, like Troy of 2004 and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. In Troy they got rid of the gods altogether and replaced Homer’s dreamy and alien world with a coarse and very-contemporary Realpolitik discourse. They took out all the poetic enchantment and adventure and plopped in the facile cynicism of college student “Geopolitics” piledriving sessions. Nolan does this too, having Odysseus intone darkly about Agamemnon’s wish to “control trade routes.” It’s Rand Corp briefs-policy-wonk-language of a man who has a bad conscience he doesn’t work in an office, instead of the sustained spell that this extremely romantic epic could always cast over someone who really loved the tales themselves.

On the other hand, the common complaints about Odysseus being wrongly portrayed by Nolan as inner-conflicted and brooding are also way off. Homer describes him many times as weeping, many-troubled and he’s at times treated as an outcast by others when they realize the gods hate him. He describes himself as comparably the unluckiest man. Gods also joke or pun about him in this same way, and he was seen in the ancient world also as a man of high troubles who must endure many evils. In Homer Odysseus doesn’t seem to have a lot of joyful amor fati about it either…he refers often to his own travails and misery, although he’s arguably not pestered by anything like modern guilt.

Most repulsive is the conservative commentary complaining about the literary “nonlinear” narrative of Nolan’s movie. What I hate most is this absolute ignorance of Walsh and others who think the film is some kind of dazzling experiment in newfangled hifalutin art gallery 3deep5you, and not good plain honest story tellin’. Homer was just a plain dealing folksy campfire story teller. What is “in medias res?” Why do I need to be “disoriented”? That’s unamerican. Joseph Conrad was also a woke hipster bullshit artist for telling highly irregular nested storylines that “jump around” too much, you see…

The controversy around this movie will be remembered more than the movie itself. The right broadly speaking, and for example Elon Musk and Matt Walsh, reject the movie instinctively because they believe the casting is motivated by the Woke desire to besmirch Western civilization, and to replace its historical heroes with those of different races. They feel this is done in order maybe to promote a kind of literary “DEI”-affirmative-action retroactively, or maybe to justify mass migration. I say instinctively because it can’t be based on having watched the movie; if you see it, this is obviously not Nolan’s intention. I myself went in expecting to be lectured at on those lines, but there’s nothing of this. Nolan obviously cares about and loves his source material, unlike Ridley Scott whose recent Napoleon and The Last Duel were both composed entirely in the spirit of butthurt and bitter opposition toward his subjects. The casting doesn’t feel motivated by what people are suspecting, isn’t emphasized on political lines at all, and I didn’t even get the sense he was trying to retcon the ancient Mediterranean as diverse (more on the actual history of this in a moment).

Ellen “Elliott Rodgers” Page’s casting as a literal male ghost devoid of life-force without the sipping of sacrificial blood is appropriate; when Odysseus speaks to her in the underworld she actually does come off as uncanny ghostlike wraith male shade, mouth smeared with blood and a raspy delivery that would have been too frightening on a biological male. I don’t understand what the complaint is here, and maybe I’d expect the complaint to come from the trannie-world instead, as typecasting them.

I laughed out loud when Menelaus, who plays Black Helen’s chud husband stand-in apparently for Andrew Tate-Donald Trump hybrid, says in a coarse New York-tinged accent tough guy growl “Look at dat! Da face dat lawunched a tousand chips!”…following this, the audience sees “a ghastly pitch-black witch doctor rolling her eyes around like Stepin Fetchit.” Helen has scarification of the Omo Ethiopians. I don’t know what the intention here was—I suspect it was Nolan cleverly trying to solve the problem of how you could ever cast one of the most beautiful women in history, and resolving at least to choose a face that would have been so out-of-place and distinctive in that world that it could have left a mark in myth (the very bad Troy of 2004 casts a conventionally attractive but unremarkable lady you could have found in the mid-2000’s at any bar or restaurant in Santa Monica waiting tables). But the effect on the viewer is that Lupita is being trolled and black women are being trolled. I think Nyongy’o was the wrong choice for this role anyway. She is Kenyan and maybe Bantu and has a rather plain American-black-woman face…and at least in this movie a clumsy and goatlike bearing. If Nolan wanted to do what I said in this paragraph regarding casting, he could have chosen a genuine alien-looking Nilotic beauty like Anok Yai. (I think his failure to do so isn’t incidental but again a result of deliberate moralistic self-denial.)

The most obvious and cynical interpretation of Nolan’s casting choices is that he knew it would make Elon and his website get triggered, generate media controversy, and increase sales. The right then yet again acts as guerrilla marketing for the left, and in this exchange loses entirely. I’d bet that pretty much any viewer who goes into this film won’t feel he was lectured on race and ethnic identity in ways claimed by the right (you do certainly get lectured, and in very clumsy ways, but not on this). Very few people in any case identify with the heroes of Homer today as the origin of their civilization, let alone their ethnic identity or peoplehood. Far more often you hear from the religious that the mean and masculinist pagan godless heroes of the Greco-Roman world were given a stern and effective moral talking-to by the Books and Wisdom of Israel. The “online right” then appears in its complaints out of touch, oversensitive and paranoid.

An example is my otherwise friend Steve Sailer who I feel has made several mistakes in his messaging on this. Here are some of his tweets, a couple of which I retweeted before seeing the movie myself:

Here Sailer sounds plausibly right but is just wrong, for reasons I will now list. Let me say first that I do in the end think the casting by Nolan is stupid, ahistorical, and politically-motivated (although not in typical campus left “woke” way or for the same reasons an actually woke academic like Emily Wilson would cast the movie the same ways). Nevertheless, it’s just not true that Bronze Age royal courts would have been ethnically homogenous. They would also not have been representatives ethnically or racially of the people they ruled; it’s also not true at all that they would have had no guests or employees of other and possibly weird races. The fact that the Odyssey is partly a story about the dangers of sea travel is true, but another big part of the story Sailer leaves out is that Odysseus is uniquely hated by Poseidon. I posted recently a series of sayings from classical Greece—admittedly many centuries later with maybe better naval technology (although naval travel times stayed remarkably stable in the Mediterranean from antiquity to semi-modern times) comparing the failure rate of sea voyages to failure rate of marriages; from Athenaeus:

That’s a one-in-ten failure rate and maybe at the high end: there are speeches by Demosthenes also where naval voyage insurance contracts are described, and some have tried to reason back from that…and voyages were dangerous but not as dangerous as Sailer implies basing his claim on the unique examples of Odysseus’ troubles. Obviously Greeks built colonies all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and many were around people who probably didn’t look like them.

Indeed sea travel was very dangerous always…but on the very stormy Pacific, the Austronesians managed to colonize vast areas with stone age technology. These areas were populated by their descendants as mixed with racially-very-different Melanesians, and in the other directions, in Madagascar, with Africans; and in southeast Asia with all kinds of others. This was achieved by stone age peoples. In a recent episode of my show “Caribbean Rhythms,” I repeated Robert Drews’ very interesting idea that the Aryans arrived in India by sea, from roughly present-day Basra, after a sojourn in Mesopotamia. Whether that’s true or not, if that event did take place—not too long before the events shown in the Odyssey—it would have been a resuscitation of an indisputably real, then-dormant, but much older sea-path…some think the Harappan Indus Valley civilization may have been founded by Sumerians or such. They at least had heavy influence from a transplanted elite that had arrived by sea from Mesopotamia, and that sea route was known and indisputably active very long before the events shown in the Odyssey. It’s becoming ever more clear that sea, river and ocean travel always was by far the preferred mode for ancient humans. Despite the dangers, it’s much easier, safer and faster than overland travel, though it does require a certain intrepid character and some special intelligence. (A “computer AI” should really map out all the “easy” sea currents from likely launching posts in all coastlines, and likely plausible landing places, as I think this way we might discover previously unknown “connections.”).

When it comes to the Bronze Age Greeks themselves, I hold again to Drews’ theory that they arrived on the Greek mainland by sea from the Caucasus in the Middle Bronze Age, as an introgressive small military elite. Prior to this during the Minoan Thalassocracy of the early Bronze Age, centuries before the events depicted in the Odyssey, the regime at Knossos certainly did enlist mercenaries from the Caucasus to police their holdings and mines and vassal populations on the Greek mainland: the new “suite” of military technology including unique types of rapiers and especially the chariot warfare that was to be the foundation of the power of Bronze Age monarchies was a specialty of these mercenaries who came from very far away. These mercs in employ of the Minoan kings would have been very likely a quite different race from the locals as they hailed from the Trialeti cultural area, which was itself related to Catacombs Culture, and in turn both related to Yamnaya. The “basketball theory” of Aryan dispersals is funny in this regard, in that tombs in that area of the Caucasus around that time have yielded individuals of heights at 6’7 and 6’9; the earliest known Greek skeletons at Mycenae Grave Circle B are big…larger and different-built than the surrounding contemporary population, and present phenotypic differentiation consistent with genetic difference (the Greek government is so far forbidding detailed genetic testing of these Shaft Grave remains for obviously petty political reasons, and no one seems to care). In their tombs they have unique “wave-pattern” (swastika) designs that were only found otherwise in that same style very, very far away in the middle of the great steppe way north of the Caucasus (farther away and more remote from Greece than e.g., Nilotic Nubia). For a connoisseur of Indo-European dispersals, Sailer’s et al claims that racial heterogeneity was unusual to the Bronze Age courts (and before) is bizarre. And even if you were to dismiss my admittedly minority claims about Greek origins here by the way, the presence of southern-Caucasus mercenaries in the employ of the earlier Minoans is much more certain…and again, they would have sailed in from much farther away and on a much more hostile body of water than Odysseus experiences—the Black Sea is frightfully stormy and dangerous. Regardless, such voyages were routinely made with full certainty in historical times with similar naval technology.

Part of the material basis of the Bronze Age itself was tin mining, a specialty of the Phoenicians, who in order to mine this relatively hard-to-find metal had trading outposts as far away as north Europe and northern England, Spain and beyond…and who knows where else including most probably way down the coast of west Africa. At the height of Bronze Age monarchies in the Near East and among the Mycenaeans, there most probably would have been Nordic mercenaries, steppe mercenaries, and yes, subsaharan African mercenaries present in numbers substantial enough to leave a pictorial and other record and to enter in lore.

I would guess there would have been also occasional intermarriage with such “guests,” especially if they had elite status. Bronze Age society didn’t have a concept of nationhood in the modern sense of the nation-state—that’s arguably an Iron Age defensive development in response to the mass breakdown the beginnings of which you see clumsily depicted in Nolan’s Odyssey. Often as among the Hittites, the ruling class was certainly racially heterogenous from those they ruled and had no common concept of peoplehood with them…in the Hittite case they called themselves the Neshites and their language Neshili; and ruled “the people of Hatti,” which were a heterogenous patchwork named after the land, not their tribal identities. They had separate gods, traditions, and identities from the patchwork they ruled. Bronze Age monarchs regularly sought alliances and spouses from their counterparts in kingdoms very far away, with whom “they kept a lively correspondence,” as apparent in the Amarna letters. Nolan isn’t inventing the fact that it’s the first (known) interconnected, international civilization. Their inclusivity wasn’t based on modern ideas of tolerance. But to believe, e.g., that a Mycenaean or Mitanni king would have had “racial loyalty” to the people or peoples he was ruling, or saw himself as racially or ethnically related to them, is a bizarre and ahistorical conceit, as is in my opinion to insist that his court would have looked “ethnonationalist” (the later Jews themselves were in my opinion very much a heterogenous, even wildly heterogenous patchwork, and the Bible falsified only in post-Hellenistic post-Maccabean times a common national story). The Sea Peoples got their start precisely as mercenaries at the great Bronze Age courts. They were auxiliaries to the chariot tanks—the Sherden (or Sardinians?) at the court of the Pharaoh, who later attacked him. They didn’t look like the Egyptians.

Those complaining about a black queen may be forgetting that the wisest man in the Bible and supposedly the wisest in the world—though a thorough comparison of his wisdom with the sages of the Greeks has only been hinted at by some—Solomon, had a wife or consort or such that probably looked not very different from Lupita Nyong’yo. I know Sheba was “Ethiopian” but that meant sometimes something different in the ancient world: when Herodotus extols “Ethiopians” at Histories in Book 3 as the tallest, physically beautiful men and spiritual kindred of the Greeks in their opposition to Persian imperialism, these were obviously Nuba- or Dinka-similar Nilotics of some type. (It’s funny that, like Odysseus, the Nilotic/ “Ethiopian” king Herodotus describes presents a bow that only he and his men have the strength to string as a challenge to the Persian envoys to take back to their king.)

This is something else many miss in the “race incorrect” criticism of Nolan’s Odyssey. The Greeks uniquely had a wild taste for the foreign and the exotic, and the Odyssey is one of their earliest and strongest statements for this bent. Odysseus is admired in the opening lines as a man who saw the lands, cities, customs and hearts of many different peoples (this is largely in my opinion why Emily Wilson wanted to translate polytropon as touched with the meaning of “problematic,” according to a recent interview of hers, because in the modern leftist/“woke” understanding, it is the colonial and exploratory aspect of European or white man that is the greatest sin, and that must be provincialized; it is his observation, exploration and classification of others that is intolerable to them, for it makes him a historical center of progress. And wokeness is fundamentally a reactionary movement against freedom and progress). It is actually remarkable that the equivalent of the Bible for the Greeks would look with relish and admiration on such adventures. It’s a taste for exploration, for the foreign and unusual and away-from-home that’s transmitted to Herodotus and others later and arguably bequeathed, by twists and turns, to the European west as a whole.

I was so in war; but work was never loved by me,

nor care of the household, which rears gleaming children,

but to me always loved were oared ships,

and wars, and well-polished spears and arrows:…

(Odyssey 14.222…)

This is part of what made both the Greeks and the Europeans who shared this sensibility truly unique and I claim it is one of the emotive roots for freedom of thought and for philosophy and science also. In book Occidentalism you see instead the total lack of curiosity that other civilizations had about foreign customs and peoples. Gobineau emphasizes that ethnic parochialism is one of the main distinguishing marks of non-European peoples (and one of the markers of their spiritual and intellectual inferiority according to his criteria). This doesn’t mean that integration and equality as per modern models was practiced in the ancient world, or that such things inevitably result from outward-looking, exploratory attitudes, or that Nolan’s casting is legitimate or not politically motivated. It does mean that the premise of the online “right wing” attack on Nolan, that he errs for showing “diversity” in the context of Bronze Age courts because obviously they all practiced ethnic nationalism or because sea travel made different human types-transfer impossible before the age of planes…that these things are not just factually wrong, but misunderstandings both of Bronze Age monarchies and of what makes the spirit of the Odyssey itself unique.

(Genetic studies certainly do tell a story about the mass of ancient populations, which in general never really moved places. Most of the stories we have now from remote antiquity about migrations—the story of Exodus, for example, bear no relationship to the local archaeological record, which shows continuous settlement by the same populations, but were the charter myths of introgressive or symbiotic-dominant elites. These certainly could be captured in genetic studies if the fortuitous finds are approached: interesting would be mid-Bronze Age Levantine kinglets with obvious Aryan names analogous to what’s found in the Vedas…not Vedic, but preserving Proto-Indo-Aryan archaisms…e.g., Indaruta ruler of Achshaph, among quite a few others…but no bones found yet, etc., and this doesn’t show up at all in the mass population of the time and place.)

Helen herself probably shouldn’t have been cast as a subsaharan black, but in principle there’s nothing wrong with Nolan having a “diverse” cast in this movie…the problem isn’t this, but why and how he did it. He should have relished in the exoticism and somehow visually explained the presence of foreigners at these courts. He could have really dwelled on it actually, and explored the way these people would have been appreciated as exotic imports and specimens with their own separate rituals. In historical times in classical Athens there were according to Herodotus still prominent families of Phoenician descent with their own private home cults…there are film-makers who glory in displaying such things, e.g., Werner Herzog in Cobra Verde, where ethnographic and cultic oddities are visually enjoyed…python dances, or what. Film is the perfect form to enjoy this kind of “diversity.” That love for weirdness would have been a lot more interesting, and he could have indulged his taste for the uncanny and horrific: what he did instead actually comes off as defensive and boring. He plops in some foreigners with no context and gives the impression he is pandering to an American audience, to “make his cast look like the country” (a grimy terminal at DFW airport…with actors from Los Angeles, who act like white Angeleno actors of the 2020’s).

Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde 1987

In Emily Wilson’s recent review this is actually the aspect of the casting that she complains about: she feels that Nolan was too fetishistic and tokenist in his casting, that is, that he besmirched the actual principles of wokeness she holds to. As the “online right” is now largely senile and unable to read beyond 500 words, and has no knowledge of how the Woke and the New Left see themselves and what they believe, they celebrated Wilson for her “slamming” of the Nolan, who has been declared the week’s public Bad Guy #1. That they are willing to admire and celebrate a review that attacks him for not being woke enough is more evidence this “sphere,” whatever it may have been, has completely lost the plot and sunk into the irrelevance of an incoherent seal-clap gallery. This is an inner dispute among different liberal-left factions that could be exploited by “the right,” but is being mishandled.

Which brings me to Nolan’s actual political program in the Odyssey. Strange there should be at all a debate about this when he has characters look at the camera and explicitly verbalize it on multiple occasions. Nolan’s view is that the Bronze Age was analogous to ours in that it was a relatively international, relatively racially inclusive prosperous time based on global commerce. He also believes there was a moral-legal element as the basis for all this: he thinks the guest-host relationship was a rough precursor of the “postwar international order” and its own ethos of human rights or international law. He believes transgressions of this reciprocal ethical system in the forms primarily of warfare, covetousness, and abuse of hospitality led to the collapse of this civilization and the start of a new dark age. He openly references this new dark age at the end of the movie.

Over one third of screen time consists of the depredations of caricaturish-evil suitors. This is a lurid revenge-redemption story against their many offenses. This certainly isn’t the movie I myself would have made… I find the adventure aspects a lot more interesting and relevant. It’s a lot “closer” to the attention Homer’s Odyssey itself bestows on the suitors and revenge subplot, though much Greek-political intrigue finery is lost in Nolan’s retelling. But if he had wanted to make a “woke” film he might have underemphasized the revenge storyline. A classically “woke” movie would have been easy to make: Nolan could have shown Odysseus and his white explorer-colonizer men at length get “schooled” by “indigenous peoples” superior in hospitality, kindness, intelligence, and so on. The colonial, explorer, and settler aspects of the White Man are the prime targets of the “woke” understanding, and Nolan doesn’t at all take shots at these. As it is, he almost rushes past the travel parts, where foreigners are shown as mostly half mentally ill and half brutal, to dwell on the humiliations inflicted by the suitors on the household that welcomes them. Nolan’s apparent insensitivity to “indigenous peoples” is part of the reason Emily Wilson criticizes this movie.

This is an antiwar and also an anti-mass-migration propaganda movie: war and the abuses of the suitors are shown as destroying the basis of a proto-liberal international order. This isn’t some “esoteric” or “Straussian” device or message—a stupid, overused concept by the way (it’s almost never explained what the purpose of such “secret messages” in books or especially movies might be; such literary devices can certainly be employed, but I’m saying the references to these in commentary now is almost always imbecile). It’s the plain overt meaning that the average viewer walks away with, and he’s beaten over the head with it. Nolan is showing the story of a white nuclear family whose generosity and courtly kindness is abused by weak, selfish intruders of mixed origin. One of the worst suitors is a very-out-of-place and cruel as well as cowardly “diverse” African. They are there to take food, take welfare, harass the female waitstaff, and abuse the household pets.

Minus a couple of questions of casting or phrasing, this is also the movie Elon Musk and Matt Walsh would make. I don’t think Mel Gibson or Eggers would do much better either. It’s in the end a very plain Hollywood thriller with a ham-handed “moral” message compatible broadly with the desires of the conservative right. The casting choices everyone is complaining about aren’t motivated by anti-Greek or anti-white “woke” revisionism. They’re overtly a reimagining to buttress an aspiration common to the Anglosphere, present also in Starship Troopers, an imagining of virtuous Anglo liberal men leading a diverse tolerant union in struggle against global fascism. This was e.g., present in the work of Andrew Roberts on British colonialism in India and also existed in Victor Davis Hanson’s work, and was in this way the animating ethos of the Bush years. Left-liberals like Emily Wilson dislike this movie because in part they sense this is the thrust of Nolan’s intention. (While this isn’t my ideal, I don’t present this view merely to mock it myself: I think it could be a redemptive and aspirational view for America and its mission, and present already in Melville’s books as well as Calvinist sea-pirate self-conception. It requires more confidence, honesty and clarity than handwringers like Nolan can provide, though.)

The absurd and obsessive feminism of this film is not inconsistent with a broadly liberal-conservative political message. Much of the GOP world, whether the educated college Republicans in e.g. the Atlanta suburbs like Buckhead, or the social biomes especially of Evangelical and “trad” Catholic worlds out of which Erika Kirk or her Catholic analogues operate, are entirely run by bossy women who enforce a very strict feminism. I will not stop repeating that most men “on our side” who I personally know and whose careers have been destroyed or hurt, that this has all happened at the hands of such conservative women, and the social networks they control. One word from them, and careers, programs, etc., are blown up. Modern reactionary religious conservatism isn’t only compatible with feminism but largely dependent on a female-led world.

Nolan is obviously somehow in communion with his fellow Englishman “Sir” Ridley Scott, whose last two movies were conceived entirely as propaganda against “toxic masculinity.” I’ve never seen the kind of deranged effort Scott put into these productions entirely driven by resentment at the male presumption to want to be more than mere biology. (Some of this may not just be pure feminism, but a certain kind of literary and intellectual male’s impotent spite at the man of action.) Most scenes in Scott’s Napoleon and The Last Duel are about stupid male vanity…it was bizarre to see complicated historical sets that obviously took a lot of effort to make, then shown for mere seconds as the casual setting for Scott’s contempt and even bitterness at his main characters.

Every woman in Nolan’s Odyssey is complaining about her lot. “Circe scolds, Penelope scolds and feels slighted because she takes care of everything and is sickofitall, Athena condescends, Calypso is a behavioral psychologist. It’s a movie about women schooling those crazy brawling men” as my friend Yama Pain put it. The root of the breakdown of the International Order is shown by Nolan to be male desire, male vanity, male violence. Here as in the comically self-conscious dialogue and the clumsy references to historical and psychological texts (chiefly Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which Nolan possibly had an LLM summarize for his prep work), it’s a production where all the seams and springs are still showing.

It’s interesting to consider the immense effort that parts of the artistic-literary-media establishment are recently pushing into the controversy on all Greco-Roman things as well as their modern analogues. They hate Napoleon also as a representative of classical spirit and as example of a Classical Man…hence the bizarre fixation on him. But it is Napoleon who represented the higher hopes of so many of the great literary and artistic men of genius of the 19th Century. Napoleon as a man out of time who stands not even opposed to, but far beyond and above, the petty concerns and small-souled struggle between the bourgeois and the socialist, the traditionalist reactionary and the other reactionary going by the name of the leftist. Lurking in the background is this immense fear of the plain reading of Nietzsche, which was forbidden in media, press and academia for some decades—banning him was impossible, but a total distortion of him was promoted at every public-reaching level. The dispute here isn’t about the academic interpretation of one German philosopher though: the stakes are regarding a genuine secular, that is, real and objective, and intellectually energetic competitor to the liberals’ and left’s own system of values at its core. Something in particular that shows through image and example an entirely different and unusual mode of life.

A big part of the engagement and overturning of the values of liberalism and the left depends on the resuscitation of pre-Biblical Greek and Roman antiquity and lines of interpretation of these from the late 19th Century and 20th Century Europe that had been, again, for decades suppressed in both media and academia. I’ve had my own special contribution to this debate. I never tried to address a mass audience and am not known to most Americans...though also, I never tried to be. This was not especially out of elitism or snobbery, but because I started as a very small account and had no idea my book would be read by anyone but friends when I wrote it. And I never since tried to change my language or ideas or style to appeal to a mass audience. But I claim that the things I’ve written and concepts I’ve unintentionally injected into popular language are far more capable of seducing the types of intelligent people the liberal world depends on for its own self-replication than anything else now presented as an alternative. What is at issue is not temporary political-electoral overturnings, but what the next generation of writers of movies, books, music, etc., believe to be good. Both in revealing the prison-like character of our life and the limited ability of all other factions to address this, as well as in making again vivid an alternative that had been relentlessly smothered and distorted for at least 70 or 80 years or so, I think my book represents a potential for the seduction of their “children” because it goes, like the thinkers I admire, to the emotive and intellectual roots of the very meaning of the desire for freedom. It is for this and similar reasons that movies like Nolan’s and Scott’s and efforts like Mark Zuckerberg’s sister’s or Emily Wilson’s will continue to mount: a feeling among the various liberal and leftist establishments that they have lost the cosmic mandate to promise freedom and that in a revival of Greco-Roman antiquity lies spiritual mortal danger for them if left uncontained and undomesticated.

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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 particular fixations 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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