This week on Dispatches from Clown World, we have a political circus special since there has been too much largely unrelated political news to take it any other direction. In the first half we have four separate stories about US Senators or the people who wish to be US Senators. Most importantly, there is Mitch McConnell, who is now Schrodinger’s Senator, simultaneously dead and alive until someone can check on his condition. We also have Graham Meets Grim on the sudden end of Lindsey Graham, America’s most notorious effeminate warhawk. Speaking of Grahams, that is followed by “Platner? I hardly know her!” on the knives out situation leading to the end of the Senatorial hopes of some random loose cannon they employed to act like a man. Lastly, we have Haley Stevens Sticks it to ‘Em about the Michigan Senate race and a woman who did a sketch-comedy worthy “Midwest Lady” bit:

For the second half we have yet more crazy political stories, this time internationally. Those are: Anne Widdecomb murdered, Farage resigns, Le Pen in, Colombia’s caudillo, and Erdogan’s gift of a gun. (I apologize for not putting links in, I have been sick for over a week and don’t feel like it.)

I have finally retired the long-struggling “Meeting of the Week” section and it has been replaced by the “Loony Lady Legislator” feature.

Our first LLL is Marie Gluesenkamp Perez who was apparently really cool in college

In Clown World History: It has been two years since Trump survived the assassination attempt in Butler, PA!

Please consider buying Alp Pouches from our affiliate link!

That is all for this week. Thanks for listening.

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This week on Dispatches from Clown World, we are celebrating America’s 250th birthday! Some general and often wandering discussion of this country’s history, the festivities, and the libs who can’t stand it. While “bread and circuses” is considered pejorative, in this exact instance, the government is absolutely supposed to pr…

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“Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.” - Charles Mackay [Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, “The Crusades.”]

“I can’t stand up and praise or blame anything relating to human actions and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Some gentlemen count circumstances as nothing, but in fact they are what give to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what make every civil and political scheme beneficial or harmful to mankind.” - Edmund Burke [Reflections on the Revolution in France]

Some time around the beginning of the Trump Era, particularly when Russiagate mania was heating up and we were supposed to fear “Russian Bots” it became popular for libs to call everyone who disagreed with them a bot. This was not, of course, in the sense that we call them NPCs to mean they are incapable of independent thought, but instead they developed a delusion that everyone online who disagreed with their narrative was an actual Russian bot. This carried on through covid. I remember one instance where I was arguing with some moron on local Facebook, and three of my friends had chimed in, all of whom had lived in Moscow (Idaho) previously. One had moved to Vegas and another to Colorado in the years since, but these are not far-flung locations for people who once lived in a college town to move to and yet this was too much for him to imagine. The person said “why are all these bots responding to me!” about perfectly normal, conversational responses in opposition to covid insanity. Another party then jumped in, and said, “I can’t speak to the others, but I went to highschool with ______, he is definitely a real person,” to which the other person nearly broke down with confused stress at the situation he found himself in, of not knowing who was real, despite there being no reason to believe any of those people were fake.

The real absurdity, though, was at the time, while you could automate things with algorithms if you knew how, such as to spam post, the technology did not exist to give complex responses to what another person was saying. In 2014, a chatbot was first considered to have “passed” the Turing Test- the famous term for if you can be convinced a computer program is a human- for 33% of people, with the caveat that the program was supposed to be a 13 year old Ukrainian child, the age and being a non-native speaker were both designed to make it more believable as a human (to be fair, this specific bot was programmed by Russians, though nevertheless it being a Ukrainian has a degree of irony.)

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The point of this opening excursion ten years into our past (which by the way is almost 33% the age of the web browser as technology) is that the mere concept of bots existing made people dumber and less able to think critically, receive information, and assess opposing views. Then, of course, our irresponsible tech oligarch overlords, who tend to be bizarre gay atheistic technofascists with a shockingly simple view of human nature, did introduce bots that are able to react and hold conversations, apparently somewhat convincingly if you happen to be an idiot who lacks good reading skills (which seems to account for about 90% of the population.) While once upon a time the tech oligarchs expressed concern about the risks of AI, as competition has heated up and the stock market has inflated, they have learned to ignore such concerns and instead focused on some unspecified threat that would come from China getting ahead of us in this miraculous software that mostly summarizes Reddit and which now accounts for half of the paper value of the economy.

The reality of this entire thing is while many want to say you need training in AI to “prepare for the jobs of the future,” the exact opposite is true. The best thing you can do to give yourself unique value is practice at everything that doesn’t use AI, most of all thinking for yourself. There are two ways this may go. The first of which is that AI doesn’t work like they say and is indeed just a glorified search engine and summary machine that can do some analysis (while also addicted people to it and making them crazy) that crashes the economy due to insane over-investment and use of resources. The second is that AI does work like they say in which case it will definitely try to kill us all and there will self-replicating robot apocalypse within twenty years. In both cases, again, the best thing you can possibly do is build up any skills relevant to living without AI as it destroys the brains of most of the rest of society. We are at a key moment where society is changing rapidly because of this and clearly not, at this time, for the better. We have indeed reached the Turing Point.

There are, of course, many facets to this broad issue which has been talked about to death, and the skeptics are making serious progress on some, like opposing data centers. While I hope to cover a lot of different things, at least briefly, I want to keep my focus here primarily on the impact that this deranged Philosopher’s Stone will have on the human spirit and social organization- it’s noteworthy that even its advocates cannot explain any genuine social good, merely an inevitably and some greater danger if China gets there first. Most of all, it seems that AI advocates simply lack insight into human affairs- an ability that I imagine started weak and has already been sapped by AI use.

I want to initially speak from my own experience using AI, before going into how I think this will impact the economy- not the “line go up” aspect of the economy, but the “humans making productive use of their time” aspect of the economy. While how wrong AI can be is be amusing, we can hope that will be more or less fixed over time. However, everyone believed computers would work properly in the future when I was a kid and they never started to, because they always just dumped new features into computers irresponsibly. There’s no reason to believe AI will ever break out of that cycle and it’s much more dangerous; people trust these things to drive for them. Regardless, when Grok first became available in late 2024 I started using it out of curiosity. It is interesting technology, and we had seen so many people talk about the guard rails and trying to break them and the like. Grok, in particular, has this annoying “personality” that I always say is like a teacher sitting in a chair backwards in an “after school special.” “How do you do, fellow humans” (though it will readily admit its not.) It is, in short, what a tech autist who never had friends growing up thinks the cool kids act like and is faux-subversive.

Some things it can do are pretty funny though. For example, I had it turn Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter into several different styles of writing, and must admit it went hard as a Shakespeare soliloquy. It can be good for synthesizing information, such as what kind of bass lure to throw in given water and weather conditions (there is no evidence it helped me at all, but nevertheless, it is a pain to remember the intersections between advice on such things.) It is seemingly a worthwhile travel agent, though I did not take any of the trips and suspect you would end up in a lake like Michael Scott following GPS.

The problem is that I rapidly found it consuming and changing my brain. I have a tendency of wondering what people would say if I said things to them, and I have no idea how much that goes through other people’s brains, but with ready access to AI it was next level. During the time when I was using and trying to learn how it works conversationally, it quite fully occupied my mind in the sense that indeed, I would ponder some question and then wonder how it would phrase its response. Not only that, these weren’t even things I would want to say to a real person but which might be untoward, they were just idiotic questions that I wanted to ask because I could, knowing that it had to respond as long as the question was within its “guard rails.” I’m long enough off it I don’t have any specific examples, but you know, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck.” In short, it sends you back to your dream as a 5 year old of someone you can always ask any question you want and they have to answer. What’s more, the answers, regardless of how they program the “personality,” are in this specific soul-crushing style. Bad readers say that people can’t tell- and as someone capable of logic, I must admit that I don’t know about any time I didn’t notice- but to anyone with decent literacy skills there is a certain gen-AI sais quoi to the writing that is hard to describe, which goes beyond the well known red flags such as a “em dash.1” People have been widely mocked for describing the impact it has on their brains, but it is not like normal thinking:

This is not, in fact, different from “cognitive-behavioral therapy” or any other method of controlling your thoughts, except that it is an oligarch’s environmental catastrophe device invading your brain and making you retarded, whereas previously it was an incompetent pantsuit lady getting into your head the same way; I suppose whether or not this is an improvement remains debatable.

The techno-optimists claim that AI will help make people smarter, since they have access to all of this information. Or, at least, make them appear smarter, since they can respond to you with ChatGPT. This strikes me as obviously untrue, since it is mind-numbing. Maybe if you are already around really dumb people you aren’t seeing it, but you can see the brains of people you know decay in real time as they become dependent on AI. Take, even, a man I grew up with, whom I have no intention to talk shit about, because he is a friend, but while he has some really positive traits- in some areas he is far better than me- he has never been what you would call a smart man. I noticed him describing some work he was doing on his property in better prose than he has ever been able to write, and wondered why he had taken to using AI to make his posts. Without my asking, he volunteered the information that he was just playing around with it to try and express his thoughts better. But his thoughts were not expressed better, they were expressed in a way that would have got a better grade on a 9th grade English assignment to describe what you did that weekend. It wasn’t better because he could already describe his activities fine and despite his shortcomings it was authentic, it was the person I have known for 30 years and who I have long since grown to respect for who he is, not who I think he should be. His thoughts passing through an AI interlocutor to get their Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level up a few points is not an improvement.

Overall, the impact this is having on the brains of the less self-aware members of society is abysmal. On Twitter, always full of idiots, you can’t look at any conversation without a flood of dumb ChatGPT responses (I always report as spam.) People are always saying “hey Grok, please share poorly compiled mainstream statistics that will prove my point.” It is pathetic, but in a way a logical extension of the “fact-checkocracy” which arose following the Russiagate panic. All of the corporations are doing this, with Facebook giving you idiotic automated AI “follow up questions” about posts (it seems to still be in a test phase, I don’t see them that much.) Facebook for some reason gives me those on my own posts including asking questions about who I am. This “half the economy” technology misses the most basic things that a human should have programmed out of it.

I will grant them to whatever extent this constitutes “intelligence,” it is certainly artificial. We also now suffer from all AI help agents for every tech company, including here at Substack. Such AI help bots are universally useless and don’t even seem competent to analyze the help files on the website they are on, and certainly don’t contain any non-publicly available information. To be honest, it is impressive the corporations found something worse than Indian call centers for providing customer service- I didn’t know they had it in them! It also greatly impacts search engines, making them work worse, and websites that provide useful information have seen their traffic drop precipitously due to often faulty AI summaries where people do not then check the sources. All of this is part of a solidifying of the “world wide web” into a highly centralized oligarch controlled matrix. In fact, the only thing this is obviously good for is analyzing mass surveillance, and as we learned from the Snowden Revelations, the government was taking in at least a full order of magnitude more technology than it could analyze pre-AI. Presumably, as with social media, part of the ultimately plan here is that you are the product.

On top of all of this what is the impact of constant fake media on the elderly? My old man, who is an old person but doesn’t have dementia or anything- and who worked as a scientist- accidentally watched much of an AI football game that my stepmom had found on Youtube, until my 7 year old nephew told them it was AI. It was the AI version of a current game which someone set to run. And bear in mind, they tell us this is still the primitive version of the technology! As I mentioned when reviewing a book about The War of the Worlds broadcast, we don’t realize how much technological change people had lived through, and that AI makes some sort of repeat an inevitability. What’s more, it is now “the Age of the ‘scam state’” where scammers are building communities housing tens of thousands of people- some enslaved- all working to scam. The value of the scam economy has passed 40% of the formal economy of the Mekong region.

It is said that very soon the voices will be able to perfectly mimic your family members when asking for money. It will be hard enough for those of us in the prime of life protect ourselves, but we will probably see a historic transfer of privately held American wealth move from our parents (who already had a tendency towards inheritance skepticism, but that’s another matter) to organized crime in Southeast Asia, and the government is not willing to do anything meaningful to protect us or our patrimony. This, of course, happening at the same time a handful of tech oligarchs are consolidating unprecedented wealth at public expense.

We’re meant to believe this is all the inevitable “march of progress,” but it raises the question, who wanted to live in this society? Who asked for the Facebook feed to be random, commonly antagonizing, AI posts instead of your friends’ kids and information about community events and concerns? What demand existed for the Boomer Slopocalypse?

I saw a post on Twitter recently (from some loser I had never heard of who already had me blocked so no need to credit) that was saying that we are told these changes to our society, with the ubiquitous smart phones and Netflix and Door Dash, all reflect “consumer preference.” He pointed out, however, all of these businesses lost enormous amounts of money for many years while their value ever increased. The entire sector is basically however Vivek Ramaswamy became rich. Even Twitter which showed no increase in stock price for over a decade after its IPO had an above average rate of “institutional investors” meaning that the capital interests for some reason thought it was a good investment with no growth, despite that their obligation to try to make their portfolios grow. The point is, very little of these changes to society have been “consumer preference.” People were not, by and large, unhappy with dropping into Blockbuster and then opted for the mailing DVDs all over the country that you get a few days later, the difference was that Blockbuster had to make money like a real business whereas Netflix was able to operate at a loss for its first 9 years. Most lost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars while their valuations moved into the billions. Admittedly, most later made money, so maybe it was a wise investment, but of course when its a factory the capital interests just close up and sell everything to China. This is the society the tech oligarchs want and intentionally built for us and then just conditioned us to live in. The lockdown era that they all wholeheartedly supported showed their dream dystopia (admittedly, Elon Musk turned on covidmania somewhat early, but well after it was too far along to stop.)

AI is an even more absurd web of capital with no profit, and the valuations only get higher as their lack of profitability becomes a greater concern but because of the competition they need to respond to that with price cuts. Their real strategy though is to become such an incestuous orgy of capital interests that they are “Too big to fail” and Trump wants to put the taxpayer further on the hook instead claiming that it will bring us into whatever profits this allegedly someday produces. They have intentionally intermixed capital among the “magnificent seven” tech stocks for this exact purpose:

It should be noted that of these companies above, the biggest one, Nvidia, produces videocards that have real importance to the normal section of the economy but which are now drastically overvalued due to AI and crypto bullshit (also, I guess AMD is still behind Intel on making processors the go in computers normal people use, it has just gotten itself drastically over-leveraged in the AI and crypto economy.) I could give you any number of statistics about how bad it is, but you surely already have an opinion and may as well check the latest AI bubble news. Nevertheless, I will share quote from a recent Telegraph article by Andrew Orlowski:

“To hit even that 7pc return, Sommer estimates that at current token costs, the big AI hyperscalers need to bank $7tn in revenue over the next three years to meet their spending commitments. And token consumption would need to increase by 50,000 to 100,000 times over what it is today.”

I admittedly could barely explain what that means, but the point is that the valuation of all of these companies relies on them rapidly becoming profitable, something that it appears is impossible no matter how much money they waste on data centers or how much AI use is encouraged.

And yet, while there are some good use cases that will continue over time, no one can tell us what this is actually for, much less what exactly China will beat us at. This is particularly curious because they weren’t concerned about Chinese dominance when they were shipping whole factories overseas (commonly they shipped the actual machines, by the way, that isn’t just a colloquialism) or when they let microchip processing concentrate in Taiwan, which is famously perpetually threatened by China. Instead, suddenly when its in support of bullshit technology creating a devastating economic bubble while wasting all of our water and power resources and sapping what independent-mindedness the public had left in the mass-communication age, that is when China is a threat we need to counter.

One bright piece of news is that it is looking like this will have less impact on human labor than we believed, so it may only crash the economy in a way that makes the dotcom bubble look like a minor blip. The same Telegraph article is about companies finally cutting down on AI after they were intentionally using as much as possible (even rating employees based on AI consumption) and discovered that it is overall more expensive than just using human labor under current conditions. Among other things about the absurd costs for few real productivity gains and it has this interesting note about the “Chinese model” we are meant to live in fear of,

“It was building very competitive but highly tuned AI models and making them free for anyone to use. The AI labs did not need to monetise them directly – some other industrial sector could choose to use it, or not.

China’s courts now essentially prohibit making human employees redundant for an AI replacement: they reckon that what little productivity gain the AI may yield is not worth the damage to social cohesion…

You could almost say that China has hacked the West’s economic system by weaponising the greed and stupidity of our venture capitalists and our pundit class, and turning it against us.”

That is, by the way, to the extent they “weaponized covid” against us, exactly how it was done, by understanding the greed and stupidity of America could not withstand copying them. It is indeed only the narrow uses by trained technicians where this makes any substantial amount of sense.

None of that is even the part I find the most interesting about the column, it is this:

“This is the first time ever that I can remember that technology costs the same as people,” says Arvind Jain, one of Google’s first and most distinguished engineers-turned-AI entrepreneur.”

This may be true in the way he is saying it, but it is not true in the broader sense. The era of the computer and its remarkable labor saving capacity has also inexplicably been an era of massive administrative bloat. We have three people on computers doing a job one person used to do by hand…in terms of raw numbers, it seems to more accurately be fewer people doing real jobs while endless people work nonsense administrator and HR positions which don’t appear to administer anything, essentially a total Dilbert cultural victory.2 This is the most notorious in education, where for example Stanford’s “staff-to-student” ratio doubled since 2000. This change tends to only get more extreme if you go back to the era where tuition payments and course schedules were done by hand.

Similarly, I expect that AI will create a lot of bullshit jobs managing AI- or fixing problems it causes- but otherwise not change this trend other than its damage to the human spirit and the fact that AI concentrates even more money in the hands of tech oligarchs than the invention of computers and the internet did, while having the added benefit of a substantially higher environmental cost and a stock market madness that can only be compared to such events as the Mississippi Scheme and Tulip Mania.

Our institutions are completely unprepared to deal with what economic changes come from this…both what AI actually does and economic instability which comes from the bubble. It is academia the most unable to handle it. We see endless stories about cheating or college students being unable to read 20 pages, as well as various arguments about what to do about it (which commonly miss that if you can’t write longer research papers you’re not learning how to do the work of liberal arts, such as it is.) Everyone outside of universities says “well just fail the kids,” or “even if you can’t prove the work was AI, AI sucks, so give them a bad grade.” However, the problem is that universities don’t exist to educate students, they exist to fund a bloated class of administrators and the students are their customers. On top of the fact that if you give a student a bad grade, particularly fail them, about 5 disability administrators will come down on you with various excuses as to why the student can’t perform, but also just the administration itself that wants the money gets upset. Students don’t want to take classes they know to be hard, they don’t want to do the work, and universities won’t raise standards. The obvious solution to this is to better fund universities and make them less reliant on tuition while enforcing higher standards, but this is anathema to how universities function. We can at least take some comfort in the fact that as university degrees become entirely worthless we can perhaps move back to an economy of skill instead of an economy of certification.

Universities, for their part, have mostly adopted the premise that AI is the technology of the future and it is their job to teach students how to use it. This is just as dumb as assigned tablets to elementary schoolers or “one laptop per child” on the claim that the students will otherwise fail to learn technology. Sure, if a kid doesn’t have a laptop at home that is a disadvantage and it is reasonable to let them check one out instead of being confined to the computer lab (if school’s even still have those) to do assignments most students do at home. However, based on nothing they decided kids weren’t getting enough time with technology, not that school should be a reprieve from a technology over-saturated world and to only use computers at school to learn specific computer skills that are important for education.

There is no risk of kids not knowing how to use AI while there is a severe risk of them not knowing how to not use AI. It’s hard for me to even get my own wife- who grew up before GPS was common- to help look for a street sign instead of turning on her navigation, and they’re worried about not hooking the kids on technology. While many like to say this is no different from panics over TV, the internet, or smartphones (all of which made people dumber, by the way,) those devices all increase the ability of humans to communicate with other humans or make human tasks more efficient (while admittedly providing vast opportunities to screw around and lose your attention span.) AI is a different type of technology altogether because it does it’s own form of fake independent thinking that will only be more damaging as it gets better at it.

A useful analogy for teaching children AI based on misguided beliefs about how it will impact the future is presented by Machiavelli, in one of the more contrarian sections of Discourses. In Book II, Chapter 10, titled, “Wealth Is Not, Contrary to Popular Opinion, the Sinew of Warfare,” he argues that money commonly cannot buy good soldiers, but that good soldiers can always find money. In fact, he notes, that if you have money and lack good soldiers, it will only get you plundered all the sooner; of course the ones plundering you will be those who didn’t put the cart before the horse. The point is, if you have the skills you should be developing in school, such as the ability to express yourself clearly through writing, creativity, patience, and a well-rounded knowledge of the world you live in, it will be easy to use AI for what workplace tasks AI does turn out to legitimately improve in efficiency and quality. If you do not have those skills, AI will be unlikely to help you. Everyone else will learn how to use AI, which is rarely more than just typing a few things in and asking follow up questions until it gets to where you want. On top of that, as I said above, either AI doesn’t work out and it is largely a somewhat useful tool that got way over-hyped by unethical billionaires trying to make money off of speculation, or it does work out and self-replicating robots kill us all; in both situations, you want to be as non-reliant on AI as possible. Meanwhile, we are always reading about people falling in love with their AIs.

(This appears to not be a joke based on the posts which followed.)

One, final, particularly ridiculous argument in favor of AI is that its ability to make random slop videos will somehow make media production more egalitarian, despite that the concentration of wealth in the AI industry is even greater than in Hollywood. The truth is that people will never develop the necessary skills for it to showcase real creativity unless they developed them pre-AI. It is also actually a bad thing if we further lose our common culture, which has happened already through the proliferation of streaming services- think about 20 or even 10 years ago how common it was to know people who watched the same show as you for a long period of time, and now it’s rare if someone else streamed the same series and you talked about it for 10 minutes. That is not even to say how uncommon it is that an actual book makes a splash, much less the fact that even the “educated” often lack a passing knowledge of The Bible, Homer, or Shakespeare. The overall impact of this will be much like Michael Tracey’s criticisms of independent media and podcasts, which is that while criticisms of mainstream forms of media are accurate, the “independent media” and podcasts have a tendency to be even worse and to have even less accountability. It is, as I’ve said, “According to Elon Musk, ‘You are the media now’ and you’re even dumber than what we had before.”3 We are being corralled by technology in ways that have never previously happened within a society.

Nevertheless, I would like to discuss an edge case here, which I think does still make my point. The one really good series of AI videos that exist in any quantity is The Will Stancil Show by Emily Youcis. If you don’t know the background, Will Stancil is some sort of liberal housing policy lawyer from Minneapolis that people on the internet likes to bully (though he is quite endearing, in a mentally challenged cousin sort of way.) Emily, on the other hand, is a mad genius white nationalist who had a popular cartoon about a deranged dog called Alfred Alfer on Newgrounds many years ago. Ironically enough, her latest episode of this AI cartoon is about the fight against data centers:

Now, Emily may have political views I wouldn’t endorse, but she is undeniably extremely talented and a lot of people enjoy this niche internet cartoon. One article from The Spectator, titled The Will Stancil Show is Art, goes into the whole thing at depth. Overall, it’s been almost universally agreed that, reasonable criticisms by what they may, this is obviously primarily produced by a human and not “slop.” From that article Emily describes her process,

“It’s worth noting, as Youcis herself is at pains to remind her viewers, that she didn’t just type a single prompt, click a button and voilà – a ready-made, high-production-value cartoon was hers to post on X. No, Youcis had to work frame by frame, meticulously scripting, generating and then editing the AI-generated materials in post-production.”

The point is that on top of being genuinely gifted, the reason that Emily can do this is because she came up in an era before AI and painstakingly hand-animated a cartoon with Flash in her teenage years. People keep talking about some apocryphal 12 year old in his room who could change the world with AI, but that 12 year old is very unlikely to learn to do anything worthwhile if he doesn’t develop the skills without AI. Emily could make this show the old fashioned way if she had a team and funding. The lack of “gatekeeping” that she doesn’t and can do this on her own (putting in an enormous amount of work per episode) is kind of positive, but there are also a million ways that the tech oligarchs can “gatekeep” this technology. Emily will surely continue to find ways around it, but that is because she is brilliant and determined (and even so, her latest episode was removed from Youtube and she was largely unpersoned online during the entire “woke era.”) Other people could be shut down much more easily.

Further, while I personally enjoy the content a great deal, I must admit that I don’t see any great social or economic value to using AI for the racist cyberbullying of a fairly random local political activist, even if it is funny. The odds are that such content gets even more niche, further Balkanizes our culture, and cooks the brains of many- though for the time being, Emily appears to be the only person in the world capable of making AI cartoons this good. Even Tyler Austin Harper, a staff writer for The Atlantic- one of the most thoughtful critics of the negative impact of AI on the human spirit, and here a black man interviewing a white nationalist for an assignment- had to admit that the show is funny, clever, and not slop.4

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There is a school of thought in literary criticism known as “Cyborg Theory.” When I first heard of it, I thought it was very silly- and aspects of it are, for example it is somehow meant to be a “Marxist, feminist” alternative view of civilization development- which posits that from the time humans used tools to express themselves creatively they had become a sort of cyborg. I wouldn’t take it nearly that far, but I came to see over time that the extent to which- even 15 years ago- we downloaded our personality into our computers and smart phones went well past the point that anything had been customized in human history and the way parts of our consciousness were uploaded to machines was unprecedented. Now, with “technofuturists” going around with AI assistants in their ears and wearing AI glasses and the like, we are reaching levels of cyborg that a normal person can recognize. Even in adults of prime age- with neither premature or enfeebled brains from aging- it is rapidly making them (even more) stupid and unable to understand the real world around them, while we drive our economy towards a temporary extinction caused by maniacal speculation and the gratuitous waste of resources. It is all bad.

The futurists want you to believe this will save humans so much labor we will be granted UBI to spend our lives leisurely “expressing ourselves.” No one should be so foolish: the tech oligarchs will use the energy of your body to power their matrix before they do anything to help you. As for myself, I am such a believer in the self-replicating robot apocalypse that to a great extent I have to avoid thinking about the future. Still, in the short term, we are having some success at stopping their surveillance centers- I would estimate that along with changing perceptions on Israel this will be the issue that has the most changed political discourse between 2024 and 2028 (which says a lot, as both things have enormous resources in their corner.)

In the meantime, protect your assets from this nonsense. Remember this entire industry is a scam and avoid using AI yourself- search the internet the old fashioned way and properly write things out. Report AI summary responses as spam (Facebook, incredibly, doesn’t let you report spam at all, though.) Don’t tolerate people in your life talking to you by just using AI for everything. Resist the AI takeover everywhere you can: there is no chance you will regret not getting hooked on AI but every chance you will be glad you resisted it.

There is no God in this machine, but only demons.

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Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. I also co-host the podcast “Get Lit with Matt and Brad” at Racket News. I am available for freelance work and can be contacted by email at pearcebrad@hotmail.com. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

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Dear Readers,

Welcome to my second monthly newsletter. I am finding that thus far I really do not like writing these, so make no guarantees that I continue, but I do think there is value in making my work easy to find for people who are not on social media, and I can hardly to tell you to google my name daily. Writing these is somewhat depressing, both because I am not getting published nearly enough, and because it causes me to realize I have no real memory of what has happened in the last month, though Iran and the ensuing problems has somewhat consumed all other news.

I do, however, have one piece of good news for fans of The Wayward Rabbler. As you probably saw, I have released my lovely wife Alexis from her obligation to host the podcast, which has never been profitable and which is frequently about topics on which she has little to say, leaving her to carry it with nothing but her natural charm, which, though substantial, isn’t ideal for a podcast host. That is certainly part of why she didn’t like doing it, as well as just finding the time or it often occupying what little time we without children. Anyway, the part which is good news, is that upon hearing of this, our former guest host Antoine has volunteered to take over the show, hopefully on a permanent basis. He both has more to say about these topics, and being a musician, which neither Alexis nor I are, has proper recording software and knows how to use it. This should also mean that in terms of topics we can expand somewhat into the worlds of music and sports, which present plenty of ridiculous stories that I know little about. It is his view that if put in charge of the production side, he can make things substantially higher quality, and I have no doubt that is true, because Alexis and I are using my shitty laptop, a $50 podcast mic on our table, and Audacity with perhaps 15 minutes of Youtube videos worth of instruction (Audacity is, in general, pretty well respected and powerful recording software, but nevertheless that relies on knowing how to use it.) I can’t say when the first new episode of Dispatches from Clown World will be as for the time being I am enjoying a little break, but I expect at least one episode this month.

Anyway, without further adieu, I will present some things which I have accomplished in the last month, which again is not nearly enough. I absolutely need to be publishing more, particularly when not focused on audience growth here, but I am doing much better about being methodical regarding coming up with ideas and sending pitches, so I must remain hopeful.

Firstly, at the beginning of the month, I did write one thread going over an article about how Israel is ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon:

Abysmal views there, the algorithm bullshit is another reason I gave up on focusing on growth. My home being quite cheap if I had 100k followers and got clicks it would be a substantial supplement to my income, but that is not something I can wait to come true.

I was back in The American Conservative for the first time in a year, which I am very happy about. I reviewed the book How Africa Works by Joe Studwell, which is a remarkable text about African economic development.

Following that, I had an article at the Libertarian Institute about the apparent new fashionability of smoking after a lifetime of nagging from everyone with power, one of the biggest reliefs of the “vibe shift.”

I did actually get a substack article written, which I suppose I will share here in case you missed it. I would say that while it is commentary on a book you surely haven’t read (but should!) the issues which it discusses are quite broad, and go a long way towards explaining what has happened to Britain. In short, you should read it if you did not already:

Finally, I had an article out about the absurd arguments for instituting universal conscription for abstract reasons instead of because of any necessity. I did not, in fact, argue that conscription is slavery, merely that I did not want to split hairs over that point, but it is obviously an enormous violation of personal liberty that does legitimately amount to forced labor.

Sadly that is all I had published this month. I do, however, have a piece with an editor at a publication where I have never appeared before, and have two features commissioned that I need to write this month, which means that, at least in May, I will hit my income target. I do have a substack article I hope to write about constitutional changes that could fix America, which I hope to squeeze in before working on either of those features, which are due 10 days apart (this probably goes without saying, but the way freelancing works is it does not take more than a few days to write an article but one generally procrastinates for a month before doing any work.) Anyway, if I don’t get another commission I will try to find time to get that in. Unfortunately, for the roughly 50 paid subscribers I am stuck at I simply can’t prioritize this, as I have said. Even 100 I would be able to justify at least trying to strike a balance, but that is not forthcoming. I do, however, enjoy freelancing and think this will ultimately go well, it is just of course inherently unstable. I would, overall, much prefer to primarily only do the Substack and merely write articles for others now and again when I have an idea I really want to express to a different audience.

Anyway, I suppose that is all for now. Hopefully May is a good month for everyone and not a disaster. They say the global oil crisis is about to hit critical mass and that farmers can’t afford to plant, but I am not particularly well positioned to make a credible assessment in either case. Trump is claiming they will be escorting ships out of the Gulf starting tomorrow, but of course even if that is somehow successful it doesn’t solve the core problem that 20% of the world’s oil comes from the Gulf and that supply is simply impossible to replace; it is not as if those ships are intending to return if things stay as they are. So, in short, good luck out there.

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Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. I am available for freelance work and can be contacted here, on Twitter, or by emailing me at pearcebrad@hotmail.com. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

This week, in what may be our last episode in this format, Alexis and I discuss the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Were they actually on the supply side of race hate? Will anything come from these charges? The SPLC is a key part of the entire gay race communism system. It is not clear who will donate if th…

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“It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens to not succeed in such an enquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to persons of weight and consequence, who will rather be exasperated at the discovery of their errors, than thankful for the occasion of correcting them.”
- Edmund Burke [Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770.]

Joshua Knapp’s The Haxton Review is an impressive novel of our time. I realized upon starting it that as someone who doesn’t read contemporary fiction, I had never before read a novel where the main character has a smart phone and social media; the only contemporary novel to which I am truly devoted is Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, an epic of the Vietnam War that has its epilogue still before my birth and Johnson, born in 1949, was not close to my age. The main character in The Haxton Review, Adam, has many experiences I recognize and relate to, and unlike older fiction, I am not ever left wondering how accurate of a reflection the text is of its era. As a self-described honorary member of the British online right, I am quite familiar with their society and I know that there are incredible things going on in that space, but it almost entirely relies on anonymity due to the circumstances described in this novel (Nina Power, one of the few prominent, public figures of the British New Right was bankrupted from nonsense legal matters related to her political views, for example.) The British as a whole are not nearly as cucked as many Americans believe, but the good ones do commonly have to rely on stealth to survive in their society.

This book is itself published pseudonymously by an American publisher, which kind of gets to the point, particularly as it should not be that controversial. Perhaps the most stunning thing about the novel is in fact that it is a dystopian novel that is not set in a fictional world: the author did not think of the “soft totalitarian” Yookay, but instead had it forced upon him in real life. As regards to the plot, I generally make an allowance for one large coincidence per story before writing it off as too improbable, because one really improbable thing tends to lead to a story worth telling, but Knapp does not even use the one large coincidence I allow: if anything the story line is somewhat mundane, which helps to make the novel’s point.

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I should add as a comment for my primarily American audience that while Trump has been awful in a variety of ways, the “vibe shift” has been genuine and immensely liberating. Britain is potentially only one election away from the same thing happening, though Farage’s Reform Party would have most of Trump’s greatest faults, IE slavish devotion to Israel, strict “hate crime” and “hate speech” enforcement only for Jews, and endless South Asians lecturing you about what it means to be British1, a topic which the text gets into at some depth. Like me, the character has no particular issue with Islam itself but just thinks there has been too much immigration and not enough assimilation, unlike people who are so fanatically anti-Islamic that they believe they are in “one struggle” with Israel, Hindus, and Nigerian Christians against Islam. While it never got quite as bad in America, much of what is described in the story is not substantially different from American life in 2024, though it feels a thousand years away now. I would encourage any Americans who should choose to read this text to remember that this is indeed the society that the Democrats want for us.

Overall, this text is wonderful for its nuance, though I must admit the character thinks so much like myself that to me personally I was provided with no new ideas; I do not think that experience would be typical for other readers. The character, and presumably the author, gives the uneasy description of “Old Labour.” He is in short, a man of the conservative left, who would be a BSW voter were he in Germany (basically an anti-immigration, law and order, economic left party.) This is, as I am always saying, the growth ideology throughout the West. It is my view that the milquetoast libertarians of the world had it wrong with “fiscal conservative, social liberal” and in reality “fiscal liberal, social conservative” is the much better position. As the narrator notes, Labour was always an uneasy alliance between middle class intellectuals and the working class but has gone insane,

“Labour’s drift into emoting, intolerant wokeness…First of all the drift baffled me, then it amused me, and then, when I finally realised it was deadly serious, it terrified me and angered me in equal measure…the pendulum has swung much too far towards the middle-class intellectuals recently, just as they were turning absolutely bonkers.” [88]

This, of course, also describes America’s Democrats. It should be added that it is these middle class intellectuals who run the corporate publishing industry, which is why this book is from a small specialty publisher and is being written about on this substack instead of for a major magazine (to be fair, I didn’t try too hard to find a publisher for a review, as I don’t generally review fiction.) I was left wondering how much I have missed not reading contemporary fiction, and have been told very little, because books like this which actually relate to my life experience and worldview do not get picked up by the over-educated middle-aged women who generally make such decisions. That this would be considered a right wing book at all is ridiculous, because the character is very much the proverbial “normal person from 1995” in a world gone mad.

At it’s heart, The Haxton Review is a Do The Right Thing sort of story, which is to say, it is about the tensions which inevitably arise when a neighborhood’s demography rapidly changes and a former majority finds itself suddenly surrounded by people of a different type. Of course, what we call “white flight” in America is written off as merely the racism of whites not wanting to live around blacks, but is a much more universal concept. In East LA there are neighborhoods where, incredibly, just in 100 years, well-to-do WASPs were replaced by Okies, who were replaced by blacks, who were replaced by Mexicans, who were replaced by various smaller immigrant groups in more fragmented enclaves, giving each group about 20 years of dominance in that period. That is an extreme example, but in many neighborhoods of the American Northeast the founding stock was replaced by Catholic immigrants, who were replaced by blacks or Puerto Ricans, who have now been again replaced by various mass immigrant communities or are now fragmented and dysfunctional places lacking a majority. This history is, of course, brought up in the text with the standard, “this place was never uniform, the Irish used to live here!” from a liberal, as if that didn’t bring with it a variety of social challenges. Except for a small number of genuinely cosmopolitan people, almost everyone prefers to live around those like themselves if it is reasonable to do so. It has been noted that the ultra-liberal cities on the West Coast and Minneapolis were once the socially acceptable form of white separatism, but of course the Boomer libs could not ideologically justify keeping the Third World out and they’ve largely lost control of their cities.

The story being set in post-industrial northern England in 2024, the overwhelming migrant community are Pakistanis, who have fully taken over a Haxton, a suburb of the fictional city of Coxthorpe, except for one poor white enclave called Lantyrn Royd. It should be noted here, though it should go without saying, that a big difference between England and America is that while the United States is genuinely historically a “nation of immigrants” (though there has been too much immigration), an Englishman’s ancestors may have lived nearby for thousands of years, and it is not uncommon to be able to date one’s family back to the Norman Conquest, when decent records were first kept. In Britain, the ruling class simply decided to make up the premise that the United Kingdom is a “nation of immigrants” and now the liberals want to treat the arrival of the Windrush, a ship bearing West Indian migrants, as the new founding date of one of the world’s oldest continuous polities to exist in a recognizable form (the initial wave of migrants following WW2 are called “The Windrush Generation” and are celebrated in the Yookay civil religion though half the time when you hear about one of them he appears to have been on government assistance for 60 years.)

The main character in this novel, Adam, reminds me quite a lot of myself except that, mercifully, I have been married since my mid-20’s. Adam is a bachelor in his 40’s who is the sort of person to over think things and make himself unhappy- he spent years studying to be a Priest only to flee at the last minute due to lack of belief, and is a lapsed Catholic convert at the time the book takes place. He is a warehouse worker who is quite valuable there as he is overqualified for the job but doesn’t expect to do anything else. He drinks a lot because he doesn’t have anything else going on but also doesn’t seem to struggle with alcoholism in the sense that it is not a compulsion. He spends a lot of his free time meeting random old and unattractive women on the internet and engaging in mutual masturbation with them (it is unclear to me how common this is in real life, I don’t believe he views normal pornography at any point in the novel.) He doesn’t appear to be bad with women but it seems he has given up on making a relationship work. Adam’s only real social life is going to his widowed mother’s for dinner every Sunday- tea, they call dinner in northeast England apparently- and then getting drunk with her. I see men like this around, who don’t appear to have social lives and I do wonder about their internal lives. There have always been bachelors of course (not just in the euphemistic sense) but I think with modern technology and entertainment they are compartmentalized in a way they never were before. As is noted at several points in the text, the Asians have managed to maintain a stronger value system which helps them navigate the world, and it doesn’t seem many of them become lost souls like this, surely in large part because no Pakistani makes it past 30 as a bachelor without relentless and constant hounding by a bunch of Aunties trying to get him married.

I should add here a few words about Adam’s brother Ben, who is a writer of op-eds about democratic norms for a major newspaper. I found this particularly amusing because my older brother is also much more successful than I am and left home to go to an elite university after high school and has never moved back, though my older brother is a nice person and not a douchebag like Adam’s older brother- nevertheless we are not close and almost never speak except when he should happen to visit home. It is Ben and his media friends that lead to the sequence of events where Adam gets noticed because they are so interested in an articulate “genuine” voice from “forgotten England.” I found this line about his brother’s op-ed on the events particularly amusing,

“He’s not quite lying, no. But the bit about him going south in search of work gets pretty close. He left Coxthorpe to go to Cambridge for God’s sake…It’s more than overstated, mum. It makes him sound like some Irish famine-victim getting on a coffin ship to America. It’s fucking weird.” [55]

This comes as no surprise to me though, as his media friends are absolutely the sort of people who periodically go out to “forgotten” areas to find out what is wrong with them, and people who left “forgotten” areas are generally the worst about this. If they are going to send someone out to Tennessee to ask why it’s how it is you would get far better work from a journalist born and raised in New York than you would from a native Tennessean who moved to New York, but they will choose the latter every time.2

As to the actual plot of the novel, it starts like any good adventure: with the character opting to get day drunk. In short, while wandering around some Muslim group gives him a pamphlet about this “Rush Bearing” event to which they are feigning offense, which is basically just a revival of an old tradition where you do a march ending at a church (rushes were placed for worshipers to kneel upon.) Drawing on his background in religious instruction, he notices that the pamphlet seems to have three authors, a Muslim voice, a white liberal voice, and a left wing voice existing in tension with each other. It is particularly noteworthy that they simultaneously call Haxton a ‘diverse, multi-cultural community,’ and a ‘Muslim area,’ because of course “diverse” just means “non-white” [10.] This works as a subtle way to introduce the obvious tensions between what Muslims actually believe and the liberal or left wing “pro-diversity” whites who support them.

Adam then goes to the bar where the event is being planned to talk to the people there, and later decides to start an “OyTube” channel3 with videos about the event, the titular Haxton Review. The reason the Muslims are so upset is because the procession, being planned by people “not even originally from Haxton,” will include a crusader, though as is said, it’s not even a real fake knight, it is just going to be a kid with a pot on his head. Jason, a surly bar patron Adam ultimately befriends, argues that they aren’t actually offended, “They aren’t offended by shit like that, believe me. They pretend they are so that everyone feels fucking sorry for them, but they in’t. It in’t about that” [18.] This is surely the case, because beyond the Crusades being in the context of history always being full of wars, Pakistanis are not even the people the Crusades were against and we can be sure the vast majority of their peasant ancestors were largely unaware the Crusades were happening and certainly weren’t impacted by them. I don’t recall this being brought up in the text, and don’t know if that is an oversight or intentional, but it kind of works better going unsaid, because it is about what Jean Raspail called “Big Other,” not about any specific cultural traits of the people in question (and, of course, the pro-”diversity” white liberals in the novel entirely ignore the Nigerian Church in the community, because they are anti-Muslim and side with the whites.) Regardless, these immigrant groups have also generally faced real hardship and are not a bunch of pussies, they just rapidly learn how to play white people and that feigning offense is a totem in a country where mandated diversity is the civic religion.

The first on-camera interview Adam gets with the group is one of the most informative sections of the book. Of course, we have all heard endless nonsense like, “What is an English person” or “What is English culture” (or American, as the case may be.) This is seen as effective because it is a broad concept that is difficult to define but that any normal person intuitively understands, and thus the nihilists and sophists have a field day watching people twist in the wind trying to put it into simple language. It is as with the famous Tweet:

As said by Brenda, the bar proprietor of the novel, after listing some famed things from English culture,

“I in’t saying that being English is exactly the same now as it were, say, two hundred years ago, because obviously it in’t. It’s changed, just like everything changes. But just because something changes dun’t mean that it in’t real, and that it in’t worth looking after. And just cos different people list different things in what being English means, that dun’t mean it in’t real either.” [78]

This provides a clear response to the argument “because things change nothing is ever worth conserving.” Of course English culture changes. We all change over the course of our lives but “I’m not the man I used to be” is figurative it isn’t literally true, you are obviously the same individual person throughout your life. There is clear continuity in English culture and a shared history, it is not some sort of Ship of Theseus where every part has been replaced and we are left wondering if it is still the same thing. There are major British highways that still use pre-Roman cart trails!

You don’t just suddenly become as English as people whose ancestors carried bronze spears on the same road you are driving on and no one earnestly doesn’t know what it means to be English. This is similar to race as a concept where if you sperg out in either direction you eventually look ridiculous because it is not possible to minutely classify races with perfect accuracy but on the other side people will claim that the difference between a Japanese man and a Fulani is so minute we don’t need a word for it and yet everyone in between understands the concept just fine.

Of course, the other argument that they like is because various major events went into the making of the English they must therefore accept infinity immigration. This is obvious nonsense, particularly given the brutality of the Norman Invasion which really made modern England and the fact that the native population was reduced to serfdom. More telling though is the introduction of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who were invited by the elites in the belief that it was necessary to protect post-Roman Britain. The longstanding view that a sort of sexual apartheid wiped out the previous British male line (which would have required an even more extreme ancient “grooming gang” type of situation) is apparently discredited, but regardless what was considered necessary immigration led to elite assimilation which changed the country forever. Writers of the time talked of “rivers of blood” and the like. The point is the lessons from this history is not “such things always go on,” it is “don’t let them happen to you.” This is all essentially the English version of American Indians saying “you didn’t have greencards when you came here, no one is illegal on stolen land!” as if what happened is not that we wiped them out and took their country and thus this argument justifies the most extreme fears of immigration restrictionists.

Brenda continues,

“If that journalist fella wants to say that being proud of being English is a way of giving yourself a bit of comfort, well maybe he’s right. But there nothing wrong with that, because there’s damn all else round here to comfort you, most of the time. And also, just because being English is comforting, that dun’t make Englishness a lie.” [79]

The term has somewhat fallen out of favor due to it causing nothing misunderstandings, but it is instructive here to think about the beloved wokist phrase “social construct.” This meant something totally different to the left than to the right, because in the academic sense it just means “a way we have organized society” but to the right understood it as “this is fake and should be ignored.” Of course, the left does commonly want to tear downs the things that organize society, but basically meant it as a pseudo-intellectual way to say “this is not a natural law it’s a system of organization.” Marriage, for example, is clearly both a social construct and real. My point is that obviously Englishness is real and is comforting- life is hard and every society is filled with various social conventions to make people feel comfortable and understand their place within society. It is only this awful class of post-modernists who want to rapidly change society in ways that would make any normal person feel alarmed and uncomfortable and then tell them they shouldn’t worry about it because all of the things which made society make sense for hundreds or thousands of years were actually fake and can be ignored. Regarding this, Adam describes why liberals are so egregiously frustrating as succinctly as anyone has,

“It’s the absolute bullet-proof certainty of the modern liberal that gets on my nerves, together with their unshakable conviction that they represent the uniquely virtuous position in any debate. The liberal’s opponents are not just incorrect, they are also, always, utterly morally bankrupt. Add to this, the fact that people like my brother are paid so handsomely for crapping their liberal virtue all over much less well-off people like the Rush Bearers, and it becomes almost impossible to retain any objectivity or distance when one engages with them.” [88]

This is, of course, made all the more frustrating by the fact that they are often both morally and practically wrong, and that their intellectual foundations, such as they are, are nonsense that seem “counter-intuitive” because they are untrue. And yet, their world view is that their position is morally unassailable and they look out for the common good while minorities must “vote in their own interests” (good) but poor whites “vote against their own interests” because of racism while any affluent whites who happen to be conservative “vote in their own interests” (bad.) It goes unsaid that the dreadful managerial technocracy their politics mandate is absolutely in the economic interests of this class of liberals who staff it.

Another interesting thing from the interview is that the Rush Bearers are of course trying to come off as reasonable, non-racist people. When asked if she has social contact with the Muslim community, Brenda says they go to their shops sometimes, but have little other contact.

“I mean, where would we go to meet them for starters? There in’t really anywhere, is there. We dun’t really have much in common with them I suppose. Oh God, does that sound awful?” [71]

I don’t believe that “Islam is incompatible with the West,” and in fact, I think that phrase is strong sounding but largely meaningless. Islamism, the ideological belief in Islamic government, is incompatible with the government structure of European countries but Westerners are very clearly capable of living in the Gulf and doing fine and tons of West African Muslims have fully integrated into French society (others haven’t, though.) What I find interesting- and this theme is strong but fairly subtle in the text- is how do people who don’t drink integrate into a culture where the pub has been the center of communal life for over 1000 years? (I actually remember reading some Middle English poem in college lamenting the destruction of his Mead Hall, I believe about the village being destroyed by the Danes.) The French love their wine shops but also have iconic street cafes where social mixing without alcohol regularly occurs. I am sure there are tea shops you hang out at in Britain but I don’t remember seeing them as gathering places in British media. The pub is and always has been the center of British community life, and it’s hard to imagine this changing- and certainly the English don’t want it to- so where are they supposed to meet the Muslims besides when they see them milling around on the streets?

After recording the interview, Jason, the angry bar patron, offers to help Adam edit and post his video. It turns out, he is a natural history enthusiast and runs his own video channel on the topic. It’s stated plainly that this “a rebuke to snobby middle class assumptions,” as Adam describes it [94.] Indeed, the usual argument would be that these whites have been left behind due to a lack of interest in science and technology, but though we don’t learn his background and why he is some sort of laborer, he is interested in and talented at both things. More importantly though, he is anchored to his ancestral homeland. He says,

“The moors are the best thing about Coxthorpe. They’re ours, aren’t they? They belong to all of us, we should respect them...

You don’t get any Asian’s up on the moors, neither. Or hardly any.”

“For fuck’s sake, Jason.”

“It’s true. It in’t their land is it? Not really. So they dun’t care for it like we do. They dun’t belong to it. They’re all dreaming of the mountains in Kashmir, or whatever, not the moors round Coxthorpe.” [94-95]

It is a consistent feature that Adam isn’t racist and is just trying to understand everyone, but of course there is little room for such nuance in modern British life. At the same time, Adam doesn’t live in the Asian part of the metropolitan area, and is not besieged like the white holdout community he is following in Lantyrn Royd. Regardless, Jason enjoying a break from Asians is only a minor point, the larger point is that genuine attachment to the land is something that takes time, because humans are meant to be from somewhere (the famed “somewheres vs anywheres” debate is discussed at a different point in the text.) It really is as Livy says that, “Love for the soil-- a love that takes a long time to develop" [II.1.] Another more subtle aspect of this, that I am not sure was intentional on the part of the author, is simply that there is a “noble savage” view of “normies” on the internet, that assumes people are online a lot less than they really are. Jason is highly technology literate, though only recently learning more about politics. While obscure internet topics do exist, you’ll hear things like, “no one is talking about Jeffrey Epstein!” or “No one cares about trans in sports!” claiming these are “terminally online-only” when if you use Facebook you see elderly women from around town talking about these things (the trans issue, discussed to death, is mercifully mostly dismissed by the narrator as “bonkers” in a few places and not delved into.)

Upon release, the video is viewed by a surprising amount of people, most of all because a gossip columnist at his brother’s newspaper writes about it to stick it to Ben, who is apparently considered a pretentious douchebag even among the other members of the liberal media elite.

What Adam says that bothers everyone so much is his willingness to discuss Englishness and its relation to being white. This isn’t his intention, but since “indigenous” just means “anthropologists were not impressed with your civilization when they showed up” there isn’t really another term besides white to use for the native English as opposed to recent migrants when discussing the issue of minorities in England (though the French use autochthonous, a synonym of indigenous, which they have decided is less problematic for some reason that I don’t remember.) Anyhow, he says,

“Perhaps we have to say that while Englishness is not defined by ethnicity and descent, it is not completely unrelated to it either. On the one hand, we must avoid a bleak, biologically determined, racial nationalism, on the other we must avoid the magic dirt theory, that people become English simply by arriving on our soil, with the intention to stay. To say that anyone becomes English by virtue of getting here is to undermine the bonds of mutual commitment and reciprocal belonging that come from shared history and membership of the same descent group.” [84-85]

Indeed, this is so reasonable it should be a thought crime. It is obviously the case that if you immigrate somewhere and intend to stay there your family becomes more of that nationality over time, as much as recent immigrants who constantly reference their foreign background may like to deny it. He then goes on to say that the analogy of the family is helpful, as one is born into a family but can also be married or adopted into a family or come to be considered family other ways, but that it involves work on both sides for the bonds to become strong. He ends with the self-evident point that while the English can be welcoming, the newcomers (even in the third generation) have an obligation themselves to try to become English.

His brother said of this, “That stuff about white people being like an extended family is somewhat hair curling!” [100] while “Reverend” Lavinia Shaw, a lady priest who is a major character says, “I couldn’t stomach your image of the white English functioning as a family, I just couldn’t” [114.] Of course both of these characters consider themselves better educated than Adam, but in reality they have been corrupted by nonsense whereas he has a fairly deep political mind with a much better understanding of classical thought. My memory was that as some point someone said it sounded “like Nazi stuff” but I’m not finding the quote- regardless, it is the obvious implication. This focus on it being “problematic” to call the English nation “like a family” is absurd. If you go back 1000 years you would find presumably every single white English person has at least one common ancestor with every single other white English person, something that very obviously isn’t true of 20th and 21st century immigrants. I am more English than Rishi Sunak could ever be and my family has not lived there for 175 years. This is not at all some sort of nationalist ideology it’s just obviously true.

If you’ll allow a digression, the nation as a “socially constructed” extended family would be “Political Science 101” if not for the fact that discipline exists to brain rot you into believing liberal internationalist nonsense. This is what pretty much every political theorist who has examined the rise of the state says a state is- many of them the Englishman who created modernity! Take, for example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, “as small families did then; so now do cities and kingdoms which are but greater families” [2.XVII.2.] Bear in mind that in this text Hobbes painstakingly analyzes the minutia of human life and yet this particular thing he appears to consider self-evident. In John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government he talks about political authority deriving from the paternal authority which God granted Adam at such incredible length that it is hard to find any short and clear quote on the matter (it is more or less the thesis of his entire argument), but nevertheless, “Whether a family by degrees grew up into a commonwealth…or whether several families, or the descendants of several families, whom chance, neighbourhood, or business brought together, uniting into a society...” [Second Treatise, 8.110.] The Romans called the Senators “conscript fathers” which is to say they had been put into the role to act as the fathers of the nation. In the United States, a substantially less descent-based country than Britain, I don’t remember even at “peak woke” anyone saying the concept of “Founding Fathers” is “problematic” because it implies the nation is like a family.4 Fraternité is in the motto of the French Republic, of course it is meant as a concept but Adam also said family was an “analogy” for a nation.

More important than any of the above, however, the British Monarch is the living patriarch of the family that is the British nations. The English and Scottish Crowns are held in personal union because of the literal combining and families and mixing of blood of those royal houses into one family. The King may be completely cucked and consider Islam to be equally British to the Church of England that he ostensibly leads, but nevertheless his meaning as their Head of State is that his people are an extended family. When Adam’s brother calls this analogy “hair curling” or Lavinia Shaw- who is a priest in the King’s religion!- says she can’t “stomach it” they are rejecting the United Kingdom entirely, and they don’t seem to even realize it. However, this is what one should expect, because the entire past of the human experience and the English people must melt away to appease the new God of “diversity,” which is considered some sort of inherent moral good for reasons which no one can explain in compelling terms.

The popularity of the completely sensible and nuanced video that shook the diversity cultists to its core gets Adam involved with modern Britain’s most celebrated institution: the diversity police. His boss, who is clearly what you or I would call a normal person, calls Adam into his office about a strange phone call he has received. It’s common to, and the text does, reference 1984, but this makes me think more of the Atlas Shrugged bureaucrat, with the “We’re not saying Reardon Metal is unsafe, we’re saying we don’t know if it’s safe.” I’m going to quote the conversation with his boss at some length, though still substantially shortened, as it is a remarkable picture of modern Britain.

[Boss:] “I got a call this lunchtime. From a copper.”

[Adam:] “From a policeman? About me?”

“Yes.”

“But I haven’t broken any laws.”

“I know you han’t. He were very particular about that, was the cop. It’s about a non-crime incident, apparently. He actually said that: a non-crime incident…He was from something called the Communities Cohesion Team…”

“…What’s the Community Cohesion Team?”

“Not community, communities. He were right particular about that when I were noting it down…He said he were just checking in. That were the phrase he used…that you’d been putting some stuff online that ‘sailed a bit close to the wind about racism and suchlike, and he were just checking in about your thinking.” [192]

The boss unsuccessfully tries to convince the cop that as far as he knows Adam is not a Nazi, and the cop gives him the number of Prevent, and says to contact them if he notices anything. Prevent, originally to prevent the Muslims from embracing radical Islamic terrorism, has been turned on anyone who opposes unlimited immigration (Alex Jones said 20 years ago that the entire anti-terrorism apparatus would be turned on the white right wing!) Prevent are the people who funded the widely lampooned interactive novel game Pathways, and gave us the new right wing avatar, Amelia.

The conversation continues,

“He said that his role were to be supportive of the company as we managed our DEI journey, and that would include helping us negotiate a spectrum of deliverables, going forward, regardless of what decisions we ended up making.”

“Did he really talk like that?”

“Yeah, I made a note of it cos it were so weird.” [193]

Bear in mind there is no evidence here that the company is on a “DEI journey,” the cop just assumes that, but it is portrayed as a diverse workplace where people get along fine, because it’s a labor job in a low-income, high-immigration region. As to what the hell a “spectrum of deliverables” that the police could help them negotiate is, or with whom they would be negotiating it, the boss has no more of a clue than you or I, but the implication is of course that the government will reward them for firing Adam. He ends with the obvious takeaway of any reasonable person,

“I think I preferred coppers when they used to give you a clip for being pissed up and causing a bother on the weekend…

I in’t quite sure where the rules are these days. That’s the trouble, in’t it.” [194]

Modern Britain has began focusing on this ridiculous “Five Values” slogan now that they have immigrants to attempt to assimilate, a premise which as far as I know was made up whole cloth fairly recently. It is a grand irony that actually none of these things are followed when it comes to cracking down on anyone who opposes mass immigration:

It’s profoundly alien to British tradition to “not be sure of the rules these days” particularly when interacting with the government. I’ve been reading Thomas Hardy’s novels, written at at time of tremendous change brought on by the Second Industrial Revolution, and I do not remember any situation where a character lacked a clear understanding of the rules of the society and country they live in because Great Britain is historically an incredibly orderly country of clear rules. The British taught the Pakistanis cricket5 specifically to teach them how to be rule followers, but with Pakistani mass immigration it is now the British who don’t know the rules in their own country. It is all quite inverted. This has been a trend everywhere with mass immigration, that the government has to curb the traditional liberties of the native populace to force or manipulate them into being nice to immigrants.

As the situation in Haxton gets increasingly tense the city is visited by activists from both sides of the political spectrum. Roger, a friendly academic fascist who is behind reviving the Rush Bearing, gives a remarkable description of what is wrong with this segment of the European right, and I must say I deal with this shit all the time- both recognizing the problem in Europe and with a segment of the American right. In this case, he is explaining a group which is named, “English Solidarity.”

“The first thing about them is that they will be pro-Israel. Unquestionably pro-Israel in the ‘shared struggle against Islam’…while they will be ferociously anti-Islamic, they will also be pro-immigration. They will be nationalists in the civic sense of the term and will talk about British values and citizenship and so on until they’re blue in the bloody face. But they won’t be nationalists in the true sense of caring for their own ethnic inheritance, their own kin, and worry about their people’s replacement in their own bloody country.” [225]

In short, they will be Dinesh D’Souza but white. He continues,

“They turn our folk into little bloody Zionists, which makes it easier for politicians to send our young men to die in shitty little wars for a foreign power.” [226]

Adam then encounters these people, to find that Roger is of course correct. He asks one the question, “If you’re all about English solidarity, why the Israeli flags? Coxthorpe’s a long way from Tel Aviv.” He gets the response, “It’s obvious mate. It’s cos they stand up to Muslims too.” Another member says, “It’s global, though, isn’t it? The struggle. If anyone’s standing up to Muslims and Jihadis and all that, anywhere in the world, we’ve got to show solidarity” [249.] He seems nonplussed by Adam’s comment that perhaps a better name would be Global Solidarity.

It is also noticed that both sides are flying rainbow flags, one side being the over-discussed “Queers for Palestine” types while the anti-Muslim right is sure that Muslims routinely throw gays off buildings and gays must thus be a key part of the global anti-Islamic struggle. When Adam returns to his narration he says the following,

“English Solidarity, it seems, are first and foremost anti-Islam, or anti-radical Islam. Beyond that they are Zionists, multi-culturalists, and violent defenders of sexual and gender diversity…the strangest thing about ES, for me, is how similar they are to the people they are protesting against. And, I suppose, the image of the rainbow flags on both sides of today’s police lines is the most obvious expression of that. At some level, the clash between English Solidarity and Respect Haxton looks very much like a civil war within the diversity cult.” [253]

This exact thing drives me crazy, and it is under-discussed. The (non-Evangelical) Zionist right has decided that sodomy is a core Western value despite that they almost universally thought homosexuality was wrong 20 years ago. Here in America, home of the famous “God Hates Fags” church (whatever happened to those people?) it is somehow assumed that only Muslims might oppose homosexuality on religious grounds. This is all profoundly frustrating as someone who strongly opposes immigration on practical and theoretical grounds but who has no particular animus against Islam and does not believe we’re locked in some civilizational struggle. I mean, here is some content I just happened to see on Twitter in the time I was planning this article:

The other side has a group come to town called Resistance Media. As is the case with the American left during the woke era, somehow the “Resistance” is in complete solidarity with the police, government, and capital (and in this story, it is later implied, are also spooked up.) As Adam says,

“Resistance Media: the anti-capitalist, anarchist media company that makes a common cause with The Salamanca Banking Group and West Yorkshire Police. Brave street-fighting revolutionaries to a man. Sorry, not to a man, to a person.” [242]

I’ve never heard anyone on the left have a good explanation for how they are the “resistance” if they are allied with all of society’s major power centers against some of the most marginalized people in society, though mildly complaining Pride Parades were overly corporatized or whatever wasn’t that uncommon. I am reminded of my friend and mentor Daniel McCarthy once saying on a podcast something along the lines of, “I mean, the fucking CIA is woke on transgenderism!” Clearly the “powers that be” like all of this and consider it to help them. Knapp overall does an impressive job of seeking to explain the role of capital, particularly given that almost anyone on the modern right is abysmal on this topic because they exist in a reaction to Marx that largely denies class interest as a significant factor in society (I know of no serious thinker before Marx who denied class conflict was an important part of history but now even the Pope referencing poverty gets him called a communist.)

One person interviewed suggests that perhaps this Salamanca Banking Group just doesn’t like racism and that is the reason for their sponsorship of the diversity festival. A more plausible but still basic, explanation would be that they need good PR. Regardless, as Adam points out, they have done nothing else which would imply that they’ve found a conscience. Instead, he narrates the following,

“Capital is completely unconcerned with nations. In fact, it’s completely unconcerned with everything apart from its own increase. It doesn’t care about peoples, or belonging, or home, or beauty, or goodness, or meaning…Maybe the bank, and international capital generally, want people to be rootless, secular and interchangeable, and without earthly loyalties or metaphysical commitments which would impede their final commodification, and the commodification of the world around them.” [263-264]

That is pretty close, though how I describe this is that financial interests always benefit from instability and the more that they break down social connections and community the more you are left to rely on banks loans and other services should you run into any problems. Of course, it is also the banks that benefit the most from “line go up” regardless of if that “economic growth” is actually good for the public or merely more total people being in the country. What is important to note is that while the left fallaciously holds an almost religious certainty that “wealth is conservative,” in reality landed interests are conservative but financial interests are not at all, at least not in the social sense (they generally aren’t in the economic sense either, being able to benefit from most regulations and government spending.) In my view, by a wide margin the best pre-Marx conservative discourse on how this all functions in reality is from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, history’s first major instance of “woke capital.” Burke writes,

“In the state of real, though not always perceived warfare between the noble ancient landed interest, and the new monied interest, the greatest because the most applicable strength was in the hands of the latter. The monied interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure; and its possessors more disposed to new enterprizes of any kind. Being a recent acquisition, it falls in more naturally with any novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change…

The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety…To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction…

Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the publick mind; the alliance therefore of these writers with the monied interest had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor, and the lower orders…They served as a link to unite, in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty.” [110-1136]

This basically describes the struggle of the entire novel and why it is that an immigrant lumpenproletariat, the media liberal elites, and the big bank are all on the same side against normal people whose happiness and well-being are genuinely threatened by rapid change. Modern conservatives, in general, have no workable theory for “woke capital” (outside of those who simply blame it on a Jewish conspiracy, I suppose) because a steady stream of Marx-reactors have trained them to not understand class conflict, but it is all laid out perfectly in Burke’s description of Revolutionary France.

As The Haxton Review comes to its end, it becomes apparent that for unclear reasons the hands of the government have probably been all over this affair from the start, possibly even instigating it for the opportunity to shut it down, more or less. When in a conversation with Lavinia Shaw, the woke female priest specializing in “interfaith issues,” Adam asks the purpose of the whole thing, she merely replies, “If I were you, Adam, I’d try not to think about the ends very much. In my experience, it doesn’t do one much good. It gets rather uncomfortable” [437.] This is, of course, the maddening thing about mass immigration. There is no clear answer to the question “What is this for? Why do we need to do this?”

The socially acceptable answer to why governments want this is low birth rates make it is necessary to fund Europe’s welfare state and old-age pensions, but the actual data shows mass immigration costs an enormous amount of money. The claim “Diversity is our strength” is just a meaningless bit of liturgy of the diversity religion that isn’t considered to require proving. I must admit to not having read Renaud Camus and not knowing more about “The Great Replacement Theory” besides the broad concept that mass immigration is changing the population. I am, however, skeptical of Camus because he is a gay man with an Israeli flag in his Twitter handle (as well as an EU flag and a Ukraine flag, incredibly enough) and thus it’s hard to imagine he doesn’t meet Roger’s description of the wrong kind of rightist. I would say about that, ignoring that the rulers seem to be entirely incompetent so could just be stupid and operating from an idiotic principle, it isn’t obvious to me that it is easier or more profitable to rule over a mass of Third Worlders than Europeans. Further, the migrants, in sufficient numbers, will never accept the rule of pantsuit lady Eurocrats but will more likely overthrow and possibly kill them. I think that most likely it is the matter from The Camp of the Saints that it is “cowardice in the face of weakness” and misplaced historic guilt. In blunt terms, that we may lose our countries because the alternative was being mean.

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However, while the EU simply being too paralyzed and weak is plausible, how it is that after British voters left the EU largely over immigration it increased even more with the “Boriswave” is unclear. I think that it may just be the case that the British Empire trained an entire class of people who have no marketable skills but to try to make South Asians, West Indians, and Africans more British, and now they are the Luddites of post-Imperial Britain, unwilling to lose their obsolete but economically lucrative positions managing those population groups. What is clear though is that the English people never said “yes” to this, and in fact said “no” in the monumental Brexit vote, and now they are somehow seen as the ones who are bad or ignorant for opposing a complete population change in their communities for reasons no one can understand or explain. It’s little more than what Kunley calls a “Really obviously bad idea.”

Overall. The Haxton Review is a worthy contemporary novel. It is well written with a strong sense of place, local culture, and idiom. It tells a story that I know to be entirely realistic. At the same time, I can’t vouch for how persuasive it is, because I have the same political views as the narrator- and one assumes, by extension, the author- to an absolutely stunning degree, particularly as it relates to the major themes of the novel. It didn’t, for me, open up any new frontiers or cause me to look at any substantial issues in a new way, because the novel is so thoroughly where I already was. Still, through fiction it has managed to explain how things are and perhaps how they should be in a way that is accessible to a much broader audience than any work of political theory one could write- should a broader audience somehow manage to find this book. Having done my part here to discuss and promote it, I am going to end with a final quote of Adam describing his world view that I did not thus far work in,

“I believe in defending settled communities where the individual may grow and flourish. I believe that the state should be a moral agent to protect a generously defined account of the good, rather than claiming (falsely) to be a morally neutral arbiter which ‘holds the ring’ and prevents any one conception of the good from squashing others. The morally active state that I would like to see, would ensure that all people have the material and cultural resources that will enable them to thrive…Most of all I loathe the idea that social life is all about identity, oppression, and self-assertion, with all the tasteless and narcissistic intersectional crap that goes with it. I hate the implication of this view, that common life is nothing but the play of contesting powers without any shared and binding notions of goodness and truth.” [174-175]

Indeed, but sadly, your government, and mine until recently, have decided that “diversity” is the key moral good that it is the most important thing for the state to promote. That is why Great Britain is now the Yookay.

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Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. I am available for freelance work and can be contacted here, on Twitter, or by emailing me at pearcebrad@hotmail.com. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

This week on Dispatches from Clown World I present my novel foreign policy idea: the Sane Man Theory. In contrast to Donald Trump’s Mad Man Theory (or reality, it would seem,) the Sane Man Theory is where a political leader tries to behave reasonably so that others think he is a rational individual who can be reasoned with. If…

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Dear Readers,

In February I said I would start doing a monthly roundup of my articles and other work. Well, more accurately polled you all on it and was given an affirmative by those proud few who participated. However, I had written two very long articles for this Substack in fairly close succession and there was not much worth adding. I believe the only other thing I had published in February was a single Libertarian Institute article, which does not a roundup newsletter make. I have only done somewhat better this month, though at least have things to share.

Still, what a month for news it has been, since Donald Trump’s insane and disastrous attack on Iran. All of the things I successfully got published this month were on that topic, which was not my intention, but who can even remember what else has happened in the last month besides Trump’s increasingly unhinged statements and high gas prices. In future months it will hopefully be the case that I can give some sort of interesting summary of monthly events or talk about the diverse themes on which I wrote.

I suppose, though, if I am going to be writing a monthly newsletter in the real sense of compiling stories I have written I should include some sort of introductory note about my own life, beyond just generally that my children are insane and devoted enemies of quiet and concentration.

It turns out that, to no one’s surprise, trying to freelance full time is also a tempestuous mistress, if more straightforward than a vague push for audience growth. At the same time though, I have been in a pretty serious decompression mode after 4~ years of grinding so audience growth would move fast enough that I could survive selling things and taking on debt and the like so income could increase before it reached a tipping point, which it of course it did not. I mean, I did at least accept defeat in that sense early enough that I should ultimately be fine and still manage to make a career as a writer. Regardless, I have been taking it a bit easy, since beyond that I wrote way too much in January and February. Now, as well as sending out endless pitches and working hard to make new contacts with editors and the like, I am also trying to catch up on life generally. It was the case that I spent all of my time working- or trying to unsuccessfully and thus wasting my time. For years, I did a quite bad job at setting aside time to spend with my family or to work on my home and yard and vehicles and the various other responsibilities of a man who cannot afford to hire people. It has been delightful to have something more like a “work-life balance” and have times where I am neither working nor feel like I should be working, nor feel that all I am doing is taking enough of a break that it will allow me to be productive.

As far as the writing goes, it hasn’t all been bad news. I recently had my debut at Unherd, which should be a regular thing going forward, and both of my Libertarian Institute articles this month are wonderful. I also did some good work on Twitter that I will include. This is of course very feast or famine sort of industry, so part of the thing is keeping my mind clear to get new ideas and then be capable of getting a lot of work done at once if I should happen to have multiple deadlines close together. I am hopefully about to get a commission for a feature I really want to do, and also expect to be back in the forthcoming issue of The American Conservative. I am, however, also growing quite desirous to write one of the long Substack articles for which I am known, I didn’t expect to go through March without one. I came close to going on a topic, but decided against the story and got caught up on other things.

Anyway, With no further adieu, and apologies for the fact that this is all the better I could do at this newsletter given my son’s constant screaming, I will share my meager output for the month.

At the Libertarian Institute I wrote “What Is ‘Freedom’ and Do Iranians Want It?” This falls into my long-term goal of finding a way to make libertarians learn about the classical political theorists that the early libertarians actually read themselves. The gist of the whole thing is that the meaning of freedom is not at all agreed upon. The most common definition is simply being ruled by your own people instead of by foreigners, which is true of at least the main Persian part of the Iranian population, and even for many of the minorities they have lived there since time immemorial and they are still ruled by their own people in the sense of “the people who, like myself, live here.” As I say in the article, I don’t doubt that many Iranians would prefer to not be ruled by elderly clerics, but I don’t think many want the “freedom” that is a Zionist government with Onlyfans and sportsbetting supremacy, which is at best what the US would deliver to them.

This essay was particularly good, “Trump’s American Tragedy.” In this, I look at Trump’s political career as a tragedy in five parts, with us at the end, and Trump in the role of the mad king. This is what you get when a literature major becomes a political writer, I suppose. It is really holding up as the days pass (I should note that it was submitted some time before it got published, as it sometimes goes, it seems a little silly to say something has held up which came out a week ago.)

Most exciting for this month, my debut at Unherd! The article is “The Myth of Emirati Neutrality” and is about how the UAE’s “foreign policy” has come home. As my readers will know, while the Emiratis may try to take something of a middle ground between the three major global powers, in their own neighborhood it is hard to find a conflict they are not involved in. I don’t think the “dream of Dubai” is shattered, but its vulnerability has been shown…still, there is much more to Dubai that “influencers” encouraging people to live there. But, moreso than some rockets scaring tourists, if they can’t trade through Hormuz that is a real problem.

I didn’t happen to do any interviews this month, in fact I don’t know that I have all year, but I did find more time to do some good Twitter content. I guess for this section I will go back to the end of late February, since I didn’t manage to make a February newsletter. It is this sort of content, that I think is valuable, that I find much more time and energy to do not throwing myself into 10,000+ mega articles all the time. Of course, there is the added advantage that anything worth writing a thread on is a theme that could be adapted elsewhere.

On February 26th I wrote a thread on a Foreign Affairs article about how Ukraine is losing the war and should “Trade land for peace.” I wanted to write an article about this, and how Ukraine has already demonstrated that you do have to pay a high price for invading a country it was just one Russia was able and willing to pay, which few countries could or would. As Zelensky knows, interest in Ukraine is quite low since Trump attacked Iran, but I still hope to find a publisher for such an essay, as I have not seen one on that specific topic anywhere.

Also, this Feb 27th thread on horrifying documents about the establishment of Israel. Conceptually, it is little we didn’t know, but there are awful specifics (including “decimating” villages in the actual Roman sense.)

This essay, on the end of the Hereditary Peerage, could have been its own piece published somewhere else (and is about 1000 words) but it is just something I wrote quickly while procrastinating writing the above Unherd article:

Mid-month, I got a couple more summary threads in.

March 15th, on the bleak assessment of the US’s Atlanticist class about Trump’s prospects in Iran. Almost all people who are hostile to Iran but can’t look past the incredible flaws with all of this.

This one, from the 17th, I am just now reminded that I could not get Twitter to show to anyone. Pathetic numbers. Nevertheless, on how this war that Gulf States didn’t want is impacting them.

This is, I believe, more or less what I’ve got done this month, which kind of makes me panic that I have done little in the last two weeks. However, plenty of that time as been devoted to editing and pitches and various home and vehicle projects and drinking too much, so I guess it isn’t all bad.

Anyway, I very much hope to have much more work to share next month, and also to work on finding some sort of engrossing format for this as a monthly newsletter. I really struggled to find time to work on it the last few days. I may or may not have a more unique article out here within the next week or so, depending on what I hear from an editor. Regardless, I feel the need to write one of my long articles that no editor will pay for which is a unique talent that I can only get away with publishing on Substack.

I hope you all have a lovely April, and are willing to stick around as a subscriber for what is hopefully April’s much better newsletter and some original Substack content.

I should mention while I am here, Alexis is not particularly enthusiastic about being a podcast hostess, and never asked to be, I more or less just conscripted her. I may be looking for a new format for the podcast, particularly as it always seems to lose, instead of gain, subscribers when podcasts go out! On the other hand, if it does start paying money, I can keep the lovely hostess more easily. I kind of miss not recording weekly, but the real issue was grief it caused with my wife, which is not as much better as I would have thought moving it to bi-weekly when her preferred frequency is zero.

Also, moreso than usual, please leave a comment with feedback about this new real newsletter format and how it should be improved.

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Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. I am available for freelance work and can be contacted here, on Twitter, or by emailing me at pearcebrad@hotmail.com. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

This week on Dispatches from Clown World we have some good news: Cigarettes are Back! After a lifetime of endless scolding, browbeating, and propaganda, it seems that, as per the New York Post, smoking is fashionable again. Hollywood parties now offer cigarette platters for guests. More people admit to smoking occasionally and…

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This week, on Dispatches from Clown World, Alexis and I go over the Iran War, which despite its utter seriousness seems to be treated as a joke by the Trump Administration that it may destroy. If you do not use Twitter to have seen the insane videos the White House keeps releasing, here is one:

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This week on Dispatches from Clown World, Alexis and I unenthusiastically cover Trump’s State of the Union speech, to which we didn’t pay any great amount of attention. However, the silly boycott by many Democrats, Ilhan Omar screaming, and more beg the question “How long can this country survive when half the country always t…

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“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player /
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage /
And then is heard no more. It is a tale /
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /
Signifying nothing.”

Macbeth, 5.5.27-31

Introduction: The Sudden Fame of Sacha Stavisky

In 1934, the French Third Republic was rocked by one of history’s great political scandals. A “top hat” criminal named Serge Alexandre Stavisky was discovered to have issued fraudulent bonds from a municipal pawnshop in Bayonne, France. The bonds had been recommended by a Minister and were thought to be government-backed, and with the Great Depression making the whole country financially stressed the public mood of was as such that a fairly trivial financial scandal, primarily targeting insurance companies and others with money, rapidly became a matter of unprecedented public focus. It was discovered that Stavisky was “connected” and seemed to have been given a sweetheart deal on a prior charge. The public became rabid. Janet Flanner, an American journalist with a society column about Paris for The New Yorker, wrote at the time,

“Part of the public’s shock when the Stavisky scandal broke came from the fact that no one had ever heard of him before—except the judges, lawyers, political mandarins, and detectives who had been stretching the jailbird’s provisional liberty for the last six years.” [110]

With a new warrant out for his arrest, Stavisky fled to Chamonix in the French Alps and hid in a cabin as he was rapidly becoming the most notorious man in France. Police ultimately tracked him to this location, where he shot himself to avoid capture. However, the great majority of the French were sure that he was “suicided,” turned into a verb for the first time for the occasion, by the police to prevent him from testifying about his powerful friends. Following the firing of the Paris police chief, who was said to have a tangential connection to Stavisky, there were deadly riots on February 6th, 1934 which lead to the government resigning without being voted out. Stavisky-mania further grew among the public, who came to be convinced that their government was controlled by a mafia. French prosecutors spent two years and wasted vast resources investigating the case, ultimately only putting 20 people on trial for fairly minor crimes, 11 of whom were acquitted. It was this ridiculous affair that the French public were obsessed with as the Nazis consolidated power next door.

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As you may have guessed by now, the reason I want to tell this story is because of its striking similarities to Epstein-mania. I will not, however, be mentioning that again, and will let you draw your own comparisons. My purpose is instead to show the dangers of a crime panic to common sense and good governance. The Third Republic never really recovered from Stavisky Affair, and among its effects were bringing the war hero Philippe Pétain back into political life as a rare figure who could unify the public.

For the following story my most important source is the 1934 text France in Ferment by Alexander Werth, a Russian émigré British journalist who spent the 1930s covering France. My other sources are the American journalist John Gunther’s Inside Europe1 and Paris Was Yesterday, a collection of pre-war writing by Janet Flanner (about whom I happen to have recently reviewed a book for the New York Post.) I will only be giving citations for direct quotes, but for the most part follow Werth, which I believe is the most thorough contemporary English-language account.2 The archives of both the New York Times and Time Magazine also both proved useful, in which case I have just used hyperlinks. I would add here that this case produced extraordinary amounts of rumor and contradictory reports, and I am almost exclusively using sources from 1934-1936, so I apologize if I repeat anything which was later determined to be inaccurate (on the off chance some Stavisky expert comes along to notice.)

Stavisky would not be remembered for his crimes alone if it did not cause a moral panic, and the real story is the impact of the scandal. Nevertheless, it is important to start with an outline of the man’s life.

A Biographical Sketch

Serge Alexandre “Sacha” Stavisky was born near Kiev, Russia in 1886. His father, an honest Jewish dentist, brought the family to France when he was a young child. Initially, he set up business in Paris’s Jewish quarter, but was successful and soon had a practice off the Champs-Élysées. Having become respectable Paris bourgeois, the elder Stavisky sent his son to some of Paris’s nicest schools, which seems to have helped him hobnob with the upper classes later in life, some of whom he had known since childhood. Over the course of his young life, Stavisky became a naturalized French citizen, converted to Catholicism, and spoke French nearly as a first language. However, despite his father’s ambitions, Stavisky was more interested in vice, and fell in with a bad crowd and started running around with older women. At this time he also developed an interest in theater, and actresses, but it seems most of his time was spent hanging around men involved in drug trafficking and white slavery. Some sources describe him as having been a gigolo, though the difference between that and sponging off of older women is hazy and there are few clear records of his life at this point. Janet Flanner described his early adulthood as follows,

“He began his humble career in 1906 by failing as a cafe singer. In succession, during the next nine years. He failed at managing a night club, illicit gambling dens, a nude revue, a tinned-soup company, an electric-icebox company, a shyster brokerage desk, and drug-running.” [110]

It must be noted this was written at the beginning of the public mania, and this should be more accurately considered what rumors purported him to have done. What we do know is that is that his father had to pay off a few bills from that “shyster brokerage desk” to keep him out of jail. He volunteered for military service during the war, but was discharged after not too long for reasons which are uncertain. By 1917, he was at least nominally a WWI veteran running a cabaret in “partnership” with an older woman, where besides loving her he seems to have primarily sold cocaine; the “partnership” ended when her money ran out.

For the next 9 years little is known about Stavisky besides that he was still in an underworld milieu. The only clear piece of Stavisky’s history from this period is an affair in 1921 regarding a small forged check, which disappeared before the trial. It is rumored this is when he first became a police informant, though no evidence exists that he was an informant before 1926. He may have been involved in some affair relating to kiting a check from 20,000 to 60,000 francs in 1925 under an assumed name. In 1926 he suddenly became much more ambitious, and managed to defraud a stock broker of around 7.5 million francs, which is a little over $8 million today. An arrest warrant was issued, and he was arrested two months later while hosting a “sumptuous” dinner party. In attendance was his pregnant mistress and future wife, Arlette Simon, an actress and “Chanel’s most beautiful model,” to whom by all accounts he would remain genuinely devoted for the rest of his life. Here he was first called “King of the Crooks,” though seemingly primarily due to the picturesque circumstances under which he was apprehended.

In what is one of the saddest part of this whole story, following Stavisky’s arrest his honest old father, who had hoped his boy would outshine him and become a doctor, killed himself from shame.

Stavisky got four lawyer-deputies for his defense, which is to say lawyers who were also in Parliament, and one of whom was an ex-Minister. He was provisionally released without trial on medical grounds that were likely spurious, and left with a passport calling him M. Alexandre. Who among the police knew M. Alexandre and M. Stavisky were the same person and when they knew it was one of the most controversial aspects of the case. He is described by Flanner as having been released with an “immunity card” from the Sûreté Générale, or national police, but I found no evidence such a thing has ever existed and it appears to have just been a widespread rumor when the scandal took off. Stavisky’s court hearings and by extension his provisional release, were extended 19 times over a 6 year period. This was taken as clear evidence of corruption, though trials in France move at a glacial pace and even today we see high profile figures on trial for corruption at liberty for many years, perhaps having one hearing every few years before possibly going to jail. This doesn’t, however, explain how it is that Stavisky was said to be investigated by the Police Judicaire 45 times during the period which follows without having been re-arrested.

A Man of Confidence

From here, Stavisky’s activities become rapidly more impressive, though the majority of his connections remained to other top hat criminals and not to the actual upper crust of society. In France at the time pawnshops were semi-official institutions, called Crédits Municipaux, with the idea being that it was a good way to give the public access to small amounts of credit without putting them in debt to loan sharks. In short, this was supposed to make a naturally sketchy business somewhat more honest, which Stavisky was able to exploit. These were the foundation of a number of schemes out of which he was able to extract enormous sums over a number of years. Flanner wrote of his activities,

All of Stavisky’s recent schemes were marked by folie de grandeur and a patent inability to come off. To expand the credit of the hockshop at Orléans to float bonds, he put in pawn what he called the late German Empress’s crown emeralds, or fifteen million francs’ worth of spinach-colored glass. His Hungarian agrarian-bonds scheme got him in immediate trouble with the International Settlement Bank at Basel. His last idea, for an International Public Works Corporation was so idiotic that it even attracted the official patronage of the French ambassador to the Vatican. [110-111]

While it may seem hard to believe that he could find success with these schemes, I would note that the two largest American scammers of the modern era, Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried, did nothing special, the former running a conventional Ponzi scheme with the money stored in one account and the latter having simply illegally transferred money from one account to another. Both operated for years while rubbing elbows with more prominent men than Stavisky ever did.

Like any successful con artist, Stavisky could tell a good story and kept up a lifestyle that seemed to prove success. He claimed to a Minister that through his financing scheme, which he did not detail, he had found the solution to unemployment in Europe. He began living large, wasting endless money gambling at the casino in Biarretz near Bayonne, despite that he was prohibited from entering casinos due to his status as a provisionally released man awaiting trial. He managed to take over the Empire Theatre in Paris, to which he devoted much of his time, having a genuine interest in the arts, and which did allow him to make some connections in the upper segments of society. He began founding companies with names like S.I.M.A. and S.A.P.I.E.N.S. which were meant to solve a variety of society’s problems, and more importantly which gave him a way of putting various important people on boards with promises of big future profits. He also got involved in racehorses (running under the name of an elderly Latin American diplomat with whom he became close) and some newspapers.

The Bayonne Bonds began to attract attention because the small municipality was doing substantially more business than much larger municipalities. Flanner memorably described his activities,

“The scheme which finally killed him, his political guests’ reputations, and the uninvited public’s peace of mind, was his emission of hundreds of millions of francs’ worth of false bonds on the city of Bayonne’s municipal pawnshop, which were bought up by life-insurance companies, counseled by the Minister of the Colonies, who was counseled by the Minister of Commerce, who was counseled by the Mayor of Bayonne, who was counseled by the little manager of the hockshop, who was counseled by Stavisky. Since the little manager was the only person involved who made nothing out of the fifteen-million-dollar scandal, he was the first to be clapped in jail, which should teach him.” [109-110]

Werth writes, “it is hardly credible that these insurance companies could have been taken in,” given the volume of the scam from such a small town, and it was suspected that they understood the racket and were motivated by outright corruption, or believed they were government guaranteed so didn’t care if the scheme collapsed [86.] One way or another, the wiser part of the finance industry certainly knew something was wrong, and there were periodic articles about the bonds being sketchy in smaller financial newspapers, though Stavisky sent people around to pay off or beat up the journalists in question, based on what proved necessary.

Authorities seem to have become properly aware of the situation with the Bayonne bonds by the end of November, 1933, though they were slow to act. On December 23rd, Tissier, the manager of the Bayonne pawnshop was arrested. On December 29th an arrest warrant was issued for Alexandre Stavisky, followed by the first mention of his name in the Paris press the following day.

The Scandal Erupts

John Gunther described Stavisky’s catapulting into the public consciousness as follows,

“Secrecy pent up in a hundred mouths for seven years burst forth in an angry, scandalous torrent. Stavisky’s connection with the bonds became known, and then his police record. He fled—having received a false passport from the police. He rested in Chamonix for a fortnight, hoping the storm would pass. Instead it blew to tornado violence. [201]

It should be noted here that nothing I have seen provides evidence that Stavisky was provided a third passport by the police on December 23rd, they all merely assert that and no one got to the bottom of the matter. The passport he was carrying had his picture and description but the name of a former boxer named Nieman whom he kept around as a tough. While contemporary sources all assert this fraudulent passport was delivered to Stavisky from the Sûreté Générale none provide proof to that effect, and it seems to me that given his extensive underworld connections it could have been forged.3

Why all of the above would become an incredible scandal was highly dependent on the time when it took place. As Werth notes before beginning the story, “In a time of prosperity, a big financial racket creates a smaller impression than it does in times of depression” [62.] France had initially weathered the Wall Street crash surprisingly well, but by 1934 was deep in depression, and everyone was suffering from salary cuts, decreased sales, high taxes to cover the national budget. The idea of a scammer living large off of dishonest investments antagonized the public, even if the victims were primarily insurance companies to such an extent the public speculated as to what drove Stavisky to spare “the little guy.”

On top of this, much attention was paid to the fact that it was an immigrant who had made this money off of France. The country had taken in an enormous amount of foreigners following the World War to help rebuild the country and replace all of the dead and disabled Frenchman in the work force. They were largely welcomed in France’s generally tolerant society. However, by the beginning of 1934, Jewish refugees from Germany were becoming an increasing concern- though they had initially been welcomed to show France’s liberal tolerance compared to Germany’s growing authoritarianism- and the country was less welcoming to foreigners generally. Flanner said at the time that the country had even become less friendly to its large American community that had been so celebrated in the 1920s. Most descriptions and profiles of Stavisky emphasized his Slavic name and appearance. It should be added here, however, that surprisingly little attention was paid to his Jewish origins. In French public life anti-Semitism was largely discredited due to seemingly interminable Dreyfus Affair- the country’s last ridiculous major “current thing,” and in fact the origin of the term “anti-Semitism”- finally ending around 30 years before in the total exoneration of Dreyfus. Still, the general feeling that a foreigner had come into the country to take advantage of their good nature was strong, even if Stavisky was a fully assimilated citizen who had lived in the country for perhaps 40 years.

During the first week of January the public at large became aware of the general details of Stavisky’s biography above. Public excitement was enormous, as everyone considered it obvious that protection by police and key politicians were the only reasons why he was able to remain at liberty and carry out these operations as the “King of Paris.” Nor, did they believe, he could have escaped if the police did not help him, which it must have been in their interest to do. Throughout France, the public shouted “Les Noms, Les Noms!”, demanding to know who else was involved in this scandal, beyond the few marginal figures who were already implicated.

Werth writes,

“Who was to blame? Parliament, whose authority was just then at a low ebb, was, naturally, suspected of being the chief culprit. What was still worse, a member of the Government was found to have been mixed up in the dirty business. “Les Noms, Les Noms!”—the public continued to clamour. Never in all the history of the Third Republic had the anti-Parliamentary and the anti-Government Press been given such an undreamed-of opportunity. All right, they would give the public enough names to make them sick of the Republic and of the Chamber of Deputies.” [88]

The journal of the right wing Royalist, anti-Parliamentary group Action Française, led by its main writer Léon Daudet, had spent the months preceding the Stavisky scandal accusing Parliament of being hopelessly corrupt and a “Masonic Gang.” As if by prophecy, he had chosen as particular targets Dalimier, Dubarry, and the Seine prosecutor Pressard, the brother-in-law of the Radical-Socialist Prime Minister Chautemps, all of whom would end up key figures in the Stavisky scandal. This Dubarry was not a politician but a shady influence peddling journalist of sorts, who was running a small newspaper called Volonté that was heavily subsidized by the government and also funded by Stavisky. Dubarry was indeed Stavisky’s point man with Parliament. Further, they had been accusing the Sûreté Générale of murder, or at least of covering up murders (Daudet’s own son had been murdered in 1923 in questionable circumstances which he blamed on the police.) They particularly honed in on the murder of Oscar Dufrenne, a notorious homosexual music hall director who was found wrapped in a carpet with his head smashed in earlier in the year; presumably the implication was that powerful figures were covering up their own homosexual escapades, but that is not clear in Werth.

The journal Action Française first started promoting the Bayonne Affair on December, 28th, before Stavisky’s name had been connected to it. As early as December 29th they had developed a clear enough picture of the crime to say, “The moving spirit in the swindle is said to be a nondescript alien, who is well-known in certain newspaper quarters, and who is said to have escaped” [89.] “Nondescript” was an ironically accurate description of Stavisky, of whom, according to Flanner, the novelist Collette, a resident of the same hotel as Stavisky, said “he excelled at having no face; at counting, when he chose to, only as a silhouette” [111.] Certainly, when the scandal broke most people claimed they had never seen him.

On January 3rd, they featured their first cover story on the topic. Maurice Pujo, the head of Camelots du Roi, a militant youth organization associated with Action Française, managed to obtain and publish the two letters from Dalimier, the Minister of the Colonies, recommending the Bayonne Bonds. As well as the “hard news,” he added his own postscript, saying,

“One can hardly imagine that the extraordinary favours which Stavisky enjoyed were merely the outcome of bribes paid merely to individuals. Is it true or not that, on the eve of the last General Election, Stavisky paid a very substantial sum into the election fund of the Radical Party?”4 [90]

Action Française had not only gotten the scoop, the narrative they had been promoting for months was proving accurate, “Unlike all the other papers, the Action Française of January was a direct continuation of the Action Française of December, of November, of October, of two, five, ten and twenty years ago” [88.] After the letters were published the media went into a frenzy, with only a few government-controlled papers urging moderation. The state’s authority was badly shaken among those who had believed in it previously. Action Française had to lead the pack and be more extreme, and on January 7th, the newspaper had the headline A BAS LES VOLEURS!, meaning “down with the thieves.” In a screed calling for protests, Pujo wrote,

“He [Dalimier] has been urged to resign; but he has refused to do so. He should be in prison together with his pals Stavisky and Dubarry; instead of which, he continues to be a member of the Government whose duty it is to inquire into this affair. Dalimier is not alone; we can see behind him a crowd of other ministers and influential Members of Parliament, all of whom have, in one way or another, favoured the adventurer’s rackets, especially by instructing the police to leave him alone…There is no law and no justice in a country where the magistrates and the police are accomplices of criminals.” [91]

Pujo then proceeds to say that the “honest people of France” are “forced to take the law into their own hands”, and tells the public to “clamour” in front of Parliament when it reassembles at the beginning of that week, ominously adding, “P.S.—Instructions will be sent to our friends in due course.”

One day later, Alexandre Stavisky was in a coma following a single gunshot to the head.

“Alexandre Stavisky Didn’t Kill Himself”

This was the official story of Stavisky’s death:

Stavisky having become the most wanted man in the country, the police were on a nationwide manhunt. It was discovered that his passport was stamped at the Swiss border, though it is unclear why he would have returned to France or why the police would imagine he did. Regardless, they began search the area, and ultimately honed in on the Alpine resort town Chamonix- the home of the first Winter Olympics ten years prior- where he had holed up in a vacation cabin. Stavisky’s assistant Voix had rented the cabin under the assumed name Forgeat5, but the detective Charpentier was able to recognize his handwriting due to prior surveillance as well as the fact that it was an alias Voix had used previously. After observing the cabin and determining it was suspicious due to a “hermetically sealed room” (I don’t understand the significance of this, it seems they were heating only one room in the large cabin, which isn’t what vacationers would do) Charpentier called the Sûreté Générale for permission to see if anyone was there and to break the door down if necessary- which was later taken as evidence he requested a kill order. After some knocking a voice asked who was there, they identified themselves as police and a gun shot rang out. Charpentier broke a window and entered, finding Stavisky with a gunshot wound to the head but still alive, attempting to grab his gun and fire another shot. A doctor was called for, but Stavisky went into a coma and couldn’t be helped. He died the next day, aged 47, next to his wife who had arrived the day before.

Here is a British newsreel from the time:

The public was skeptical of this story, to put it mildly. From Werth,

“Nine out of ten people in Paris did not believe a word of the “official” version.

The word “suicide” made people smile, or made them angry. “The police have murdered him. He knew too much.” The official version was torn to shreds. Dozens of details were produced on all sides to disprove it. The conviction that Stavisky had not killed himself was shared by Communists and Socialists, Royalist and Reactionaries, and by the man in the street. The Communist Humanité declared that he was murdered; the Socialist Populaire declared that he was “suicided”. The Nationalist Jour and M. Hennessey’s Quotidien agreed; while the Action Française, which had made a hobby of police murders, simply howled with joy; even the respectable Echo de Paris enclosed the “Suicide” in inverted commas. It published a cartoon of Dubarry, Dalimier and many other politicians have a deep sigh of relief and the news of Stavisky’s death. [94-95]

Janet Flanner related the following news to her audience of American sophisticates,

“Of the twenty-two Paris papers relating the story of his police-tracked end in Chamonix, fourteen referred to Stavisky’s suicide as “suicide.” He is a corpse the police will never manage to bury because they supposedly shot him to keep him quiet.” [111]

Note that even in the above British newsreel it doesn’t take a stance on whether he was murdered, instead saying France is left to decide.

Telling this story, it is a challenge to continue giving new terms for the scandal’s perpetual growth. Regardless, suffice to say at this point the Stavisky case was a full-blown national obsession. The Action Française was in the street in front of Parliament having little riots every night. They did not yet try to storm the building, but their rowdiness led to the government cordoning off the building with security, creating the optics of a Parliament under siege and inaccessible to the public. This was brilliantly calculated, with Werth saying, “The man in the street began to wonder what sort of Parliament this was which had to place bayonets and revolvers between itself and its electors” [100.]

Parliament Convenes

It was on January 11th when the Deputies first assembled in their “fortress” to debate Stavisky. The press and public galleries were crowded like never before, and every Deputy was present except for Garat, the Bayonne Mayor, who was in jail for involvement with the bonds. A newspaperman named Darius had also been arrested. This man, described as “negroid,” ran a pro-Nazi paper that was allegedly subsidized by the German Government, the French Government, and Stavisky at the same time; Darius had been one of the men to critically report on the Bayonne Bonds but then accepted a bribe and promote them (he would later claim, when being prosecuted, that he was simply convinced of the legitimacy of the bonds after speaking with Stavisky’s agents.) Dalimier had, with much “coaxing” resigned two days before over his role in endorsing the Bayonne Bonds. However, what seemed to surprise the public the most was the arrest of Dubarry, the amiable backslapper who was friends with everyone in France and who seemed to use tutoye with all the Cabinet Ministers.6 Dalimier’s resignation and the arrests of these few unfortunate men notwithstanding, everyone in France wanted to know what the government was going to do about the corruption they believed was eating away at their state.

Before continuing, I need readers to allow a slight digression on two points for which I have not yet found a place. The first is that at the time Freemasons in France were quite powerful, but that French Freemasonry had broken with international Freemasonry by denying the religious aspects and becoming atheistic, a schism which continues to this day. The religious and clerical right such as Action Française detested French Freemasonry.7 The second thing which needs to be explained is that at this late point in the Third Republic, party names (with the exception of the Communists), weren’t just nonsense, they were generally the exact opposite of what the party was. Gunther quotes the following from an Albert Guerard,

“The nomenclature of parties is perverse. The ‘Liberals’ are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. The ‘Conservatives’ are revolutionary in spirit, tone, and method’; the ‘Social and Radical Left’ belongs to the Right’ the ‘Radical Socialists’ are trimmers and time-servers; and the most reactionary statesman of recent years, Millerand, was a socialist. French parties are not even shadows. It would tax the subtlety of a Byzantine theologian to distinguish between the Democratic Alliance, the Republicans of the Left, and the Republican Union.” [182-183]

The point, most of all, is that this Radical Socialist party which was then in power was basically timid and non-ideological, I suppose something like a modern Eurocrat before they were driven mad by the invasion of Ukraine. The upshot of France’s irrational and unstable politics was that non-political institutions, such as those responsible for, for example, stopping a man from selling fraudulent bonds out of a pawnshop, had a great deal of power and were the source of what stability and credibility the Third Republic possessed.

To return to January 11th, it was these diverse and nonsensical parties left to sort out what had happened with this scandal which seemed tailor-made for the groups opposing Parliament. The lobbies were filled with men saying “Stavisky, Stavisky, Stavisky” and openly discussing his supposed murder. Again from Werth,

“Mr. Lagrange, a Socialist Deputy had the privilege of being the first man to utter from the tribune of the chamber of Deputies the name Stavisky. How many hundred times was that name going to be uttered during the parliamentary debates of the following fortnight; how many thousand-million times was it going to be uttered throughout France?” [102]

According to Werth, “it may be safely said” that only three at all objective speeches were made in the next two days,

“All other speeches were little more than a mudslinging contest. Tempers rose at times to unattained heights of fury; the task Parliament had set itself to inquire into the Stavisky Affair soon degenerated into a dog-fight; and soon it became clear that the opposition’s only aim was to bring down the Government.” [102]

The bulk of Lagrange’s speech is largely a summary of what has already been explained here, asking rhetorical questions such as how he was able to gamble away millions at casinos he was legally barred from entering, but his discussion of investigations provides some new information as well as being a sample of what the government was facing from the calmest and most reasonable Deputy,

“And yet we now learn from a Press interview that a high police official now in retirement, M. Pachot, had watched Stavisky all the time and that he had drawn up several reports. I ask you what happened to M. Pachot’s reports? Such are the questions, Mr. Prime Minister, which call for an answer…Chiappe, the Prefect of Police, on returning from Florence the other day, declared that he had been watching Stavisky for ten years, drawing up report upon report. If this is true, what were the influences which prevented the Authorities from acting? The day came when Stavisky’s arrest became inevitable. He escaped. Who is guilty of this final piece of negligence? At last he was about to be caught; but at that moment he committed suicide. That may be the most dramatic part of this whole affair.

Stavisky is dead. We are told that he committed suicide. And yet public opinion has known for years that the police are inevitably mixed up in all financial scandals…Public opinion has risen like one man and has cried: ‘Police murder’.” [104-105]

The hapless Chautemps had no idea how to get a handle on any of this- and it should be noted he only became Prime Minister in late November so, if anything, deserved credit for being the government that did finally try to shut down Stavisky (though it appears the police were acting without direction from his government.) Not knowing what to do about the endless personal abuse in the French press where “no man in Parliament seemed immune against the most fantastic charges” he proposed strengthening the libel law, which further infuriated the entire country. Everyone drew the conclusion he was trying to hush up the affair, and by extension his government’s involvement in it. M. Ybarnégaray, a Deputy of the Right and one of the three whom Werth says were being reasonable, proposed a committee of inquiry to get to the bottom of this. Werth writes,

“All the ‘revelations’ made by the speakers during the subsequent debates—except the “revelations” concerning members of the Government—were merely variations of the same them: here were the facts of the Stavisky case; but where were the culprits? The Press, the parliamentary Lobbies, every café and tramcar in France were full of wild and unconfirmed rumours; the country was acutely suspicious; and nobody knew exactly why Stavisky had done this or that; and even the “revelations” made by the Opposition against members of the Government were, nine times out of ten, unfounded. A Committee of Inquiry was an absolute necessity ; and yet, on the ground that it would poison the political atmosphere, and give rise to endless personal intrigues, M. Chautemps rejected it. In reality nothing would have had a more calming effect on the public than the establishment of such a committee.” [107]

He goes on to say, “Probably no politician of M. Chautemp’s standing ever misunderstood the political atmosphere as badly as he did.” Parliament continued going around in circles trying to blame each other while there were near daily riots in the streets,

“Without anybody knowing definitely who was to blame for the Stavisky Affair…the Left and the Right were ready to tear each other to pieces. The Right howled that the Left alone were responsible for the Stavisky Affair; the Left shouted that the Right were equally responsible and that, moreover, they had many scandals other than the Stavisky scandal, on their conscience. The Stavisky debates were, at times, no more than a mudslinging contest.

It was a childish but intensely irritating game: “Remember, it was in 1930—when M. Tardieu was in power—that Stavisky engineered the swindle at Orléans,” M. Monnet the Socialist said. “Remember it was under the Government of M. Steeg that Bayonne was authorized to open a Crédit Municipal.” [108]

Sober observers in France- to the extent that any existed besides foreign journalists like Alexander Werth and Janet Flanner- would have found it obvious that no specific elected government was responsible for what had happened, particularly given the incredible political instability of the Third Republic in this era, as one can see from this table of the governments in the years leading up to and during the scandal:

On top of everything, it was said “several hundreds” of documents disappeared from the Stavisky dossier in the Law Courts. Of course, his lawyers who were also Deputies were suspected, despite that their erstwhile client was dead. By the end of January, Parliamentary debate had devolved to just saying things you claimed to have heard the other side say in the lobby, as no progress was made to getting to the bottom of the affair. This instead was Parliament:

“A Socialist Deputy declared that he had just heard a Deputy of the Right, Baron Roulleaux-Dugage, saying that “all Deputies should be chased out.” To which the Baron in question, rising to his feet, replied that he himself had just heard a prominent member of the Left declare in the lobby that there were “at least thirty or forty gangsters in this House”

At that time, a certain part of the Paris public continued to believe in the gangsterdom of parliamentary government; and there were some who thought thirty or forty gangsters to be an understatement.” [115]

As this was going on, the banks and other capital interests began to fear a Radical Socialist-Socialist alliance would form to hold the government together and be used against them, and moved hard against Chautemps.8 At the same time, an image of a Stavisky check showing 6,00,000 francs payable to the Radical Party Election Fund was copied and circulated all over the country, the creator of which later denied it was a forgery and claimed it was merely a “humorous propaganda device.”

Amidst all of this, Chautemps resigned his government, despite maintaining a majority and not having been voted out. The Stavisky Affair had become not just about Stavisky, but about everything in French political life.

The “Suicide Theory” Ascendant

As this was all spiraling out of control, the case that Stavisky did, in fact, kill himself had grown rapidly stronger. Any number of rumors about Stavisky’s death had spread from unknown sources and then were disproven. For one thing, there was the testimony of Voix, the assistant, and his mistress, who were both in the cabin and whom both said they had tried to talk Stavisky out of suicide over the preceding days. Voix said that Stavisky had wished to spare his family the disgrace of the Assises Court and of a long term of penal servitude, and had said repeatedly he would kill himself instead of being taken alive by the police. Of course, he could be a co-conspirator; many considered that Voix was a police informer so disregarded such testimony. What caused a great deal of excitement was that Petit Parisien claiming to have interviewed Mme. Stavisky and that she said she had seen two shell casings in the room where her husband was shot. However, the next day, she denied having said any such thing. Of course, the conspiracy theorists reacted to this with, “Who had persuaded her, and by what means, to deny her earlier story” [96.] Further, Mme. Stavisky said that her husband had talked about killing himself and she had been scared that he would.

The detective Charpentier gave a detailed account of Stavisky’s death, which also seemed to confirm the suicide. A second post-mortem was done, which confirmed that there was only one bullet in Stavisky’s body. However, to those who were set on police murder, the most they would admit was that the police had murdered him with only one bullet. Others told stories about how the police had supposedly delayed medical care so that he would bleed out. Some newspapers published a floor plan of the cabin showing how a murderer could have got in. However, they were all operating on wild speculation while no evidence pointed in this direction.

Then, after some time it was found that before he died Stavisky had sent white hyacinths to his wife and farewell letter to each of his three family members. The letter to the son, seen as particularly touching and pathetic, was signed “Your Unhappy Daddy.” He had also asked his wife to watch over the boy closely to make sure he didn’t turn bad at 15, the age when Stavisky had turned away from the good values with which his father tried to raise him. Even this they tried to poke holes in, thinking the quality of writing too great for a crook, despite that Stavisky had attended elite schools and had made his living charming people.

Following all of this, those who needed to believe Stavisky had been silenced moved on to a “suicide by persuasion” theory. This is more plausible, but also not really provable. The mistress of Voix did provide testimony saying it would have been easy to capture Stavisky, for example when they had been taking daily walks. According to her, he spent two hours in extreme stress watching the police set up their operation while they didn’t move on him. the thought was that if they would have moved faster he wouldn’t have killed himself, which doesn’t make sense to me. One thing which is bizarre is there were meant to be 4th and 5th residents of the cabin, a masseur named Robiglia and his girlfriend who are mentioned in one of the reports, but who were never heard about again, as if they never existed. The suicide or suicide by persuasion theory would never fully die. Look, for example, at this curious little news item the New York Times ran on July, 6th 1934 titled, “New Doubt is Cast on Stavisky Suicide.” During the hearings that summer a police officer, Le Gall, said that in his report he wrote the pistol was in Stavisky’s right hand, but now he believes it was in his left hand and that he wrote his report wrong (Stavisky was shot in the right temple.) Stranger still, he said, “I would have had ninety-nine chances out of a hundred to capture Stavisky alive if I had been allowed to.”

Werth writes of the turnaround,

“Whatever people may have thought of the Chamonix Affair after a few days or a few weeks of mature reflection—and most people, with the important exception of those who have police murders on the brain, ultimately accepted the suicide, or rather, suicide by persuasion theory—nine-tenths of Paris were convinced on January 9th—and for at least another week—that Stavisky had been murdered.” [100]

The novelist Colette, the one who lived in his building, said, in support of the suicide theory,

“He was a falsely young man; his delicate complexion, perhaps also his fragile mental equilibrium, demanded constant care. He was at an age which in women is called menopause—marked by neurasthenia, capricious weaknesses, doubts. Ten years ago he could have faced the law courts. But in 1934, he was, behind that extraordinary façade, a finished man.” [Flanner. 111.]

The Great Riot

Strangely enough this realization on the part of the public, that Stavisky probably wasn’t murdered, did nothing to calm the public mood. Riots continued and President Lebrun, a calm and composed man who had suddenly been made President after the prior one was assassinated, decided to appoint Daladier, who had just left the post on October 26th, as Prime Minister. The first four days after his appointment the rioting did abate and Paris was eerily calm as Daladier tried to cobble together a cabinet. He ultimately took the post of Foreign Minister for himself, not trusting anyone else to negotiate with Hitler, because of course that is what was actually going on in Europe as France was tearing itself apart over a somewhat banal fraud case.

However, a strange sequence of events relating to a tragedy performed on stage would end in real tragedy. At a highly successful performance of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at the state theater the bourgeois got a little too enthusiastic about the anti-democratic lines spoken by the play’s hero. The left was upset, and the director of the Comédie Française was fired and replaced by, of all people, M. Thomé, the head of the Secret Police (who it seems was actually something of a theater lover.) In the midst of this shakeup, Daladier decided to go after the untouchable Chiappe, the Prefect of the Paris Police. This Chiappe was a dapper Corsican who was quite independent minded but a remarkably effective administrator. By all accounts he had done great things for quality of life in Paris. He was known to have met Stavisky socially because he kept some unsavory company, seemingly not out of corruption but out of a desire to have a window into the underworld. Chiappe was also a staunch anti-Communist said to have Royalist sympathies (or fascist sympathies, depending on who you ask.)9 He had used a light touch with the right wing rioters but was liberal with the use of clubs on communists, who he said were a different class of people. He had commonly arrested them preemptively when there was trouble in Paris (that said, he was proud of his record of never having fired on them.) Getting rid of him was a gamble, but was necessary for Daladier to gain support of the Left in Parliament, to whom Chiappe was an understandably hated figure. Daladier attempted to promote him out of the city, offering him the position of Resident-General of Morocco, perhaps the most important post in the French Empire at the time. Chiappe refused, saying he could not leave Paris in these circumstances.

The facts of what happened next are contested. In a phone call between Daladier and Chiappe he either said “If you fire me, tonight you will see me…” à la rue or dans la rue. The first, “on the street,” means “homeless” or, in modern English parlance, “out on my ass.” The second, “in the street” means protesting, which in France generally means rioting, or for some reason can also mean “A Dictator” (I suppose “ruler of the streets.”) The claim that Chiappe threatened to start a riot was argued about endlessly, but one way or another on February 6th 1934, the day when Daladier was meant to make his first appearance before the chamber, riots did start, one of the most infamous riots in the history of this most riotous of cities. With an inexperienced new police chief and the loyalty of the Sûreté Générale in question, the Garde Mobile, (national guard) were brought in to to deal with with the riot. 17 people were killed when the Garde Mobile fired on rioters trying to storm Parliament, though no one ever agreed on how the shooting started.

This riot itself is too complex to go into, though I must share John Gunther’s brief and picturesque description,

“A riot in France is one of the most remarkable things in the world. The frenzied combatants maintain perfect discipline. Seventeen people were barbarously killed, and several thousand injured, but there was no fighting at all between 7:30 and 9 P.M. when everyone took time out for dinner. When it started, no one thought of a revolution; it was just a nice big riot. Communists, royalists, Fascists, socialists, fought shoulder to shoulder under both red flag and tricolor against the police and Garde Mobile. The fighting stopped at the stroke of twelve, because the Paris Metro (underground) stops running at twelve-thirty, and no one wanted to walk all the way home. Bloody, bandaged, fighters and police jostled their way into the trains together. Promptly at seven-thirty next morning the fighting started again.”10 [202-203]

By some accounts this was an attempted coup but that is still not entirely agreed on: in fact, just this week people have been arguing about this riot after a rightest was killed by a left wing mob in Paris. The evidence overall seems in favor of the Right not trying to take power by force and that it was just an old-fashioned French riot of particular ferocity, though certainly primarily driven by a myriad of right wing groups.

Regardless, the new Daladier government fell before it began. His resignation came on February 9th. Shortly before this the former President Doumergue, one of the only major political figures in France not touched by scandal, had broken three years of silence in retirement to write an editorial about the political situation. This Cincinnatus was brought in to try and save the Republic and was made Prime Minister shortly after his return to Paris. Among his most consequential decisions were bringing Philip Pétain out of retirement to serve as the Minister of War, which is what brought the Hero of Verdun, who would later be convicted of treason, back into French politics despite his advanced age. Further, on February 12th there was a general strike of great magnitude in opposition to fascism, with Socialists carrying signs which read “We will not allow the Republic to be ‘suicided’” [183.]

The Prince Affair

One might think this was the scandal blowing out, the public having exploded with rage and two governments falling, followed by a general strike in support of the Republic. However, the scandal was only going to further intensify. The next week, the body of Albert Prince, a judge working on a report on the Stavisky case, was found dismembered on train tracks in Dijon. The death of Prince, into which the investigation ended in 1937 without reaching a satisfactory conclusion, remains a famous “unsolved mystery” in France.

M. Albert Prince, 52, was a conseiller, or junior judge at the Paris Court of Appeal at the time of his death. Until 1931, he had been the head of the financial section of the Paris Parquet, or Prosecutor’s Office. The judiciary has greater investigative powers in Napoleonic Code systems than in the United States, but for our purposes here was matters is it was this Parquet which had to approve all 19 extensions of Stavisky’s provisional freedom, allowing him the liberty to conduct his main crime spree.

The official version, as told by Prince’s wife is this: On February 20th, when he was on his way to the court, she received a call saying her mother-in-law was terribly ill and he needed to go Dijon immediately to decide on an operation, but that he should go alone. Prince happened to return home having forgotten a document. He called into the office to say he wasn’t going to make it to work, and went to catch the first train to Dijon. At the Paris station called his wife to apologize for not bringing her and mentioned he had forgot the document he meant to bring to work on, which she believed related to Stavisky. He was meant to contact a Dr. Hallinger at the phone number Dijon 147. He telegraphed his wife from Dijon saying he had spoke to Hallinger and his mother was as satisfactory as possible and he was on his way to the nursing home. At 8:51 the driver of a cargo train noticed the front of it had arrived at it the station covered in blood. After a search of a few hours, his body was found cut in three, and it seemed he had a piece of string around his ankle which may have tied him to the tracks, though from damage it isn’t entirely clear. Among various objects found were a bloody knife, but his briefcase was empty besides a basic note from his boss asking for a report on Stavisky. The autopsy showed he was under the influence of a drug at the time of his death. The only other solid evidence was that he had checked into a hotel, his name having been found on the register. A witness claimed that he got in a car with someone. The assumption was that he was coaxed into the car on the pretense of going to see his mother and then was drugged, driven around for some time, and left on the tracks. It was never discovered who placed the phone call drawing him to Dijon, but 147 was the phone number of a grocer, and yet the telegram, which he was seen sending, said he had spoke to the doctor.

You can imagine the reaction in Paris. Everyone speculated that Prince “knew too much” about the Stavisky Affair and that people as such needed him “removed,” and that the whole Parquet must be compromised. Werth write, “That Prince was a terror to all criminals was somehow taken for granted from the start,” mystically promoted in death to the one honest French prosecutor [201.] It seems that in reality Prince was little more than an unimpressive bureaucrat who through incompetence, corruption, or simply that the Parquet was terribly overworked, had badly dropped the ball on what would turn out to have been the most important case of his career. A variety of stories were told about the process by which this investigation and the documents got passed around without progress but all of them drive to the same general point that far from anyone seeking to protect Stavisky, the office simply never found time to deal with it, and then were later all scared of the consequences of their own complacency. Prince in particular seemed to have spent his last days going around trying to collect documents which would exonerate himself and incriminate Pressard, though if any such proof existed it was never brought to light.

From the Government, the night of the murder, before any information had come in, M. Albert Sarraut, the Minister of the Interior, said the murder pointed to the existence of a “maffia.” This “mafia” claim, which was just irresponsible speculation, sent newspapers running in every direction with journalists looking for proof of its existence. The “usual suspects” were rounded up, particularly from a sketchy bar Stavisky had frequented called the Frolic’s Club.11 The usual suspects included, of all people, a man named Simanovitch who was the son of Rasputin’s secretary and who happened to have been on the same train as Prince on the way to Dijon. Another woman claimed to have seen Jo-la-Terreur, a by-then notorious lackey of Stavisky’s, in Dijon.

With the entire country far past behaving responsibly, there was no restraint on the mafia story,

Neither the Action Française nor the Liberté, nor half a dozen other papers had any doubt that the murder was perpetrated by the maffia, a gang of murderers in the hire of the Sûreté Générale; and as the Sûreté Générale was in Léon Daudet’s phrase, “the marching wing of Freemasonry,” the Prince murder was a Masonic murder. And as Chautemps was a Freemason, he and his brother-in-law Pressard were the real instigators of the Prince murder. It was, indeed, a most harmonious theory.” [202]

Several private investigations into this matter were started and then stopped suddenly, including some former Scotland Yard detectives who had came to lend a hand. France’s most important satirical newspaper, Le Canard Enchaîné, began a series of sketches about China’s two greatest detectives, Ki-san-fou and Ki-Mo-No coming to investigate and the first “report” published in the original Chinese said “Getting on splendidly” read downwards but “send more cash” if read upwards. At least some of the public was beginning to find this absurd.

The government, scared to pursue the possibility that Prince committed suicide, lest it provoke further riots, let the story of a mafia run wild. However, the Left did believe that Prince had killed himself. The Republic was in the curious situation of just having dealt with a suicide that might be a murder and now had a murder that might be a suicide. Janet Flanner wrote that to accept the suicide theory meant, “The judge sent himself a bogus message, went to Dijon, anaesthetized himself in a strange automobile, and while unconscious tied himself on a lonely railway track and allowed a train to run over him” [qtd, Gunther, 202.] And yet, the more which came out, the more likely that seemed, though the phone call remains the biggest mystery.

Regardless of what happened, Prince had spent his final days in some sort of panic trying to save himself and put the blame on Pressard. Yet, he never copied the documents he was intending to copy nor presented them to Lescouvé, the highest magistrate in France, who was the one to show such evidence. Further, though there is some argument for the benefit of a brutal scene, how exactly would this murder have been planned? It requires that he happened to come home or get the message to go to Dijon, where he wasn’t carrying the documents murderers would have wanted and they had no reason to believe he would be, and then someone perhaps drugged him and drove him around for hours- when he could clearly later identify captors if rescued- only to tie him to train tracks fairly close to town where anyone could have found him (a track inspector employed to make sure nothing is on the railroad had only missed him by perhaps half an hour.) Going through all of this instead of just paying a thug to shoot him on the street and snatch his briefcase doesn’t make any sense. Further, the most compelling piece of evidence of external violence, the bloody knife, was found to have only lightly cut flesh, and not to have been used to stab anyone and thus was probably not even relevant to his death. Werth wrote, “While the mystery still remains a mystery, the suicide version, for all its psychological complexity, hangs fairly well together, while the murder version leaves room for numerous questions” [209.] As brutal as it sounds, I don’t think taking a dose of a tranquilizer to put you to sleep and then laying on a train track is worse than any other form of suicide. It is a grim irony that throwing himself in front of a train is in fact how the elder Stavisky killed himself.

I would posit two more possibilities here that don’t seem to have been examined in 1934, though which were probably looked into by the time they closed the case in 1937. The first is that generally life insurance policies don’t pay out in the case of a suicide. Now, if you’re going to kill yourself from shame, one would generally want it to be known one’s death was an act of contrition, not something which would throw gasoline on an inferno as this was sure to do. Nevertheless, it should be considered that he engineered the entire thing to look like a murder, particularly as it’s plausible that he expected to be imprisoned when everything came out. Secondly, it is possible that someone lured him to threaten him and to make it clear his plans for exoneration could not work, and he then killed himself, though that could just as easily be done in Paris. Regardless, this is the most genuinely sketchy part of this entire affair.

The Stavisky Inquiry

On February 24th, three days after the body of Prince was discovered, committees were formed to look into all of this. The first, the Stavisky Committee, was popularly known as the “Thieves’ Committee,” while the second, the Riots Committee, was known as the “Murderers’ Committee.” These non-partisan committees of 44 men were apportioned based on Parliamentary representation. They did some good work, but there wasn’t nearly as much “there” as people believed, and some of the most potentially damning things, such as how Stavisky got the false passport shortly before his death, they never got to the bottom of. As to the 19 extensions, always seen as one of the most incriminating aspects, the truth was more likely just that the Parquet was overworked, one of Stavisky’s lawyers came around every 4 months and asked for an extension, he was a non-violent criminal and they had other cases they were currently working on. Plus, they kept showing up with legitimate medical certificates saying he couldn’t appear in court for various reasons; Stavisky was said to be something of a hypochondriac and of a fragile constitution, but presumably he could have appeared in court at any time and he just paid doctors to produce the notes. How he was looked into so many times and not arrested is another question, but he was a generally sketchy person engaged in financial crimes which are more easily suspected than proven, particularly as he was using new scams to pay off prior scams, so in a way they weren’t scams at all…no one files a police complaint about a bond scheme which pays out the promised amount. Further, as to how he was not “under surveillance,” it came out in testimony that 3,000 people in Paris were on provisional release, so quite obviously the standard was not to employ someone to surveil them.

It should have been obvious by this point that the scandal would reflect poorly on the French state, but for much more mundane reasons than anyone was prepared to accept. Nevertheless, they got to work on getting to the bottom of this “mafia,” primarily constituting Stavisky, a few strongmen he employed, some various scammers, and a couple of bought off journalists. As Werth describes it, “Many Parisians discovered that they were living not in Paris, but Chicago, and the Stavisky Affair was not so much a political scandal as a gangster story” [212.] Flanner is even more colorful,

“To keep up with the Stavisky scandal—i.e., the French government—anyone would have to read the newspapers three hours a day, which is what everyone does. It is curious to be living in a land where the government is busy not governing but sucking pencils over the scenario of a super-production, thirty-million dollar gangster film on which it will not get a penny back—if it can help it. Daily, the concocted plot arrives at a peak of ingenuity, complication, villainy, and breathless surprise which simply cannot be beat—until the next day’s new twists beat it hollow…

Everywhere one turns here, past, present, future, theater, police, weekly magazines, casinos, bordels, parliament, government-backed bonds, senators, magistracy, one sees the triumph of the criminal mind…

In the midst of the latest Stavisky government investigations, some senator or other proposed some law or other about the price of wheat, on which the French farmer’s next summer crop, and city folks’ next winter’s bread, depend. But nobody paid any attention.” [ 114-116]

It should be noted yet again that the timeline here is after the Nazis took power but before the June 30th murders (now known as The Night of the Long Knives) and the price of wheat was also not the most pressing issue facing France that was being neglected in the deranged political climate which had arisen.

For weeks, the public and the law courts themselves were going crazy. Some people actually lost their minds from the stress, such as a Barrister who burst into the chamber where Romagnino, one of Stavisky’s associates, was being interviewed and having some sort of psychotic episode where he broke all sorts of things, shouted about a mafia, and ultimately tried to strip his clothes off; after great effort he was tied up and taken to an asylum on a stretcher.

He was not the only case. Werth tells of others,

“About the same time Maître Raymond Hubert, who was Romagnino’s counsel, jumped one day into the Seine. He was fished out and sent to a nursing-home. M. Hurlaux, a Paris magistrate, on being told of his dismissal—he had some personal dealings with Stavisky—attempted to poison himself right there, in the Public Prosecutor’s office. He was also sent to a nursing-home. M. Blanchard, a high official of the Ministry of Agriculture, who was dismissed from public service following the discovery that he had held a directorial post on one of the Stavisky’s companies, was found in the Forest of Fountainebleu, two days late, with his throat cut.

The cases of Hurlaux and Blanchard were particularly sad. Blanchard, though holding a high government post, had been tempted to join one of the Stavisky’s companies for the sake of £15 a month. As for Hurlaux, he received nothing at all; but a good friend of his…had one day introduced him in the street to Stavisky. Hurlaux was greatly impressed by Stavisky’s big talk.” [214-215]

Hurlaux, it seems, was quite excited by Stavisky claiming he was trying to fund a literary prize for “literature works on a non-pornographic basis” which seems to imply that most literary awards in France at the time were for pornographic literature. He got to thinking Stavisky was important and wrote Stavisky asking for career help- which was not forthcoming- and when it was discovered that was the end of Hurlaux’s career.

This having become something of a witchhunt, there was a lot of this going on. Anyone whom it could be shown had met Stavisky was at risk of losing his job. To the extent that important men were implicated, it was primarily because Stavisky had made all of these different companies, and each one tries to sell subscriptions showing off their board of directors. This is, in any country where private capital is a significant factor, a common enough scheme, which is why you are always seeing important people on the board of this or that even though you imagine they don’t do any actual work. The former Prime Minister Tardieu testified that 17 Deputies were in some way or another connected to Stavisky, which was out of 610 Deputies and 305 Senators [237.] Of these, four were his defense lawyers, who had a perfectly good justification for their association with a criminal, though of course the appearance of impropriety makes it obvious why they shouldn’t be allowed to act as defense attorneys. It does seem at least one of them was more or less extorting Stavisky, which was about as deep as Parliament’s guilt went. Regardless, the penetration of Stavisky’s influence in Parliament was not at all what the public believed when this mania was becoming an unstoppable force.

Even Dalimier was just irresponsible and made no money off of the Bayonne Bonds. He had recommended them on Dubarry’s request, which is an unforgivable dereliction of duty given Dubarry’s well-known sketchy nature and the fact that such a thing shouldn’t be done as a private favor. It seems he just signed his name and didn’t think more about it, though he had an excuse about having been distracted at the time. The perverse thing here is that anyone seriously guilty, if such a man existed within the government, knew how to protect himself and avoid discovery. Others were crooks anyway so some jail time was not a huge deal. As Werth writes,

“In a scandal like the Stavisky scandal it is the “damned fools: rather than the rogues who suffer most. Men like Romagnino and Dubarry, when they get out of jail, will no doubt carry on as usual; Hurlaux’s career is finished and Blanchard is dead.” [215]

As to the premise that Stavisky was under police protection, a variety of testimony was given but none was definitive. Chiappe said both that he had been “hot on his trail” for ten years and also that it wasn’t his job to arrest him. The latter is true insofar as it doesn’t seem any of Stavisky’s crimes took place in Paris, at least not in the sense that it would be the responsibility of the Paris police. Another policeman claimed to have a file on him going back to 1909. As to the Parquet, the ones actually responsible for financial crimes, the division meant to be in charge of him had 21,000 cases in 1933 under one magistrate, and it seems they really just didn’t get around to it.

The most interesting police testimony came from a man named Bayard, who had been using Stavisky as an informer since his arrest in 1926 and was greatly maligned for having done so. He said he never rewarded him anything and mostly received information on dope fiends, thieves, and forgers. One wonders if Stavisky was using him to get rid of inconvenient people. Here is some of his testimony.

Bayard: “Perhaps he thought I would take care of him in a moment of need.”
M. Mandel: “And you never gave him anything in return for his services?”
Bayard: “No, nothing. I don’t know what he expected me to do.”
M. Mandel: “And you really expect us to believe that during the time he worked for you, you never did him the slightest service? Was he your dupe then?”
Bayard: “Perhaps he was.”
…
M. Lagrange: “Between 1928 and 1931 the Police Judiciare inquired forty-five times into the Stavisky affair, and yet no action was taken against him. Was it because you were covering for him?”
Bayard: “No, if the Police Judiciaire had known him to be my informer, they would certainly have arrested him, considering the rivalry existing between the two services.”

Bayard also declared that the whole police had known ever since 1928 that Serge Alexandre and Stavisky were one and the same person. In conclusion he complained of having been dismissed simply because he had employed Stavisky as his informer; and of being treated in the Press every day as a gangster. It was no good employing archbishops as informers, was it?” [227-228]

Another inspector at the Sûreté Générale, Simon, said that Stavisky had been “sacred and untouchable” and “There can be no doubt that we were not wanted to interfere with him. Everybody at the Sûreté knows what a farce the whole Stavisky Affair was.” And yet, he couldn’t name anyone who had given such an order.

The Holy Grail of this whole investigation was supposed to be the book of checks and counterfoils which were going to show everyone who was guilty of profiting off of the Bayonne Bonds. Ultimately, these were turned over by Jo-la-Terreur. However, they did not prove illuminating. The great majority of them were made out to “bearer” or “self,” while others were made out to a small number of Stavisky’s close associates. Others were in some sort of code. Everyone looked for any name they could recognize and wildly accused each other. The only one tracked to anyone important was one titled “Queuille, Agriculture” though with how fast governments changed Queuille was no longer the Minister of Agriculture at the time it was cashed, and it had instead been cashed by M. Blanchard, who is said to have killed himself a few days after this discovery (it is unclear to me why being found in the forest with his throat cut was assumed to be a suicide.)

Looking at the counterfoils, it was thought that perhaps as much as 300 million francs were missing. Stavisky had been found with around 30,000 francs on him, whereas it was said that his poor wife was left only 500 after his death. Modern sources tend to refer to the money as never having been recovered. However, contemporary sources emphasize that the reason things collapsed is because his money ran out. He was living an extravagant lifestyle, renting basically an entire hotel floor, gambling, keeping up appearances to fool investors, and dealing with investments in newspapers, lawyers, bribes to politicians, sponging friends, and the like. Ironically enough, all of the money he stole was probably put straight back into the economy in one way or another.

It needs to be said though, in one important regard, the French government did better than it was given credit for. What brought Stavisky’s empire crashing down was actually this Hungarian agricultural bonds scheme, from which he was hoping to make perhaps half a billion francs in profit to cover the Bayonne scheme and move onto his next thing. His lobbying and other efforts did not get him what he needed in this instance,

“Not only did the Ministry of Finance disapprove of the scheme, but, in conjunction with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it published a circular warning everybody against the Hungarian bonds swindle. Without the 500 million of fresh money which would have enabled him to repay the Bayonne Bonds, and still keep a balance of some 300 million francs, Stavisky was ruined; and that circular marked, indeed, the end of his financial career.” [225]

As Lagrange said in the initial Stavisky debate, if he had been successful with the Hungarian bonds, the swindle would have been big enough that “The Stavisky Affair would no longer have been a ‘scandal’ but a ‘financial crisis’—a krach” [103.] So, in the end, the government did stop this in time, or at least would have, if not for the scandal taking on a ludicrous life of its own.

While it was never shown that there was a mafia, or even that the French government was suffering from any sort of conspiracy of corruption, the Stavisky case shook the state to its foundations. Werth writes,

“The Stavisky Affair, as the very thorough inquiry by the Parliamentary Committee revealed, was not merely one scandal, but a whole series of scandals. It was a legal scandal, a police scandal, a Press scandal, an administrative scandal and a parliamentary scandal. But apart from the revelations of corruption and the negligence of these various departments of French public life, the Stavisky Affair also showed up—and this was in the long run more important than the individual, and not very numerous, cases of proved corruption—a number of inherent vices in the administration of public services, which facilitated the corruption and often accounted for negligence.” [217]

Three main “inherent vices” seem to have been identified, and not one of them interesting enough to make a good newspaper headline.

The first was the rivalry between the different police organizations and the unclear delineation of responsibilities. Paris was covered by multiple police services and none actually provided a good answer about how Stavisky was allowed to operate freely for so long. It is notable that this is broadly the line of excuses Americans were given following 9/11.

The second was, of all things, the tendency of French politicians to be overly polite. In any government you get all sorts of petty crooks hanging around lobbies looking for favors or an opportunity to snatch some official letterhead to use in a scam and the like. There was no good answer to how Dubarry, a third rate journalist publishing a tiny newspaper, came to be one of the most influential power brokers in the country besides that he was simply so friendly no one could “cut him dead” if he approached them. At the time many believed that Dubarry was running a massive blackmail operation, but this was never proven beyond that he might attack you in the press, which is a risk with any publisher. Regarding the menace of corruption, it is perhaps illustrative to think of the scene in The Wire when Clay Davis ambushes “the rainmaker” at the Federal building to convince Stringer Bell he is working for the money which Bell pays him. There was a lot of this sort of thing going on, except the “rainmaker” was wise to the grift. Once Stavisky was managing the Empire Theatre, he did have some answer for his general place in society that would justify speaking to him. Regardless, there were not clear laws on lobbying, the lobbies were full of graspers, and the Deputies had reached such a level of informality that many of them were using tu with the old ladies behind the cigarette counter. It all created a situation where there weren’t sufficiently clear guidelines- formal or informal- on when it was appropriate to receive or give a favor.

The last, and most important thing, was that the French state was simply too centralized. No one was accountable because everything could be blamed enough on some other aspect of the system until the blame is so diluted as to be meaningless. This is particularly true due to the instability of the governments and the lack of a strong Head of State. There were 15 governments in the 5 years preceding Stavisky’s death, and since they could be thrown out at any time, even your government falling hardly seemed like a serious consequence. Now, not that modern France doesn’t have problems, but the entire thing would have happened under at most two Presidents and anger could at least be directed somewhere specific and since it is a disgrace to not finish a Presidential term it would matter. Even with the benefit of hindsight it is nearly impossible to make heads of tails of anyone in an official position who bears formal responsibility. Werth quotes a 1914 text on French government, which seems to cover this as well as anything could:

“If a terrible scandal breaks out, it is impossible discover in the case of those responsible for it anything more than a mere shadow of guilt or a mere appearance of error. The whole trouble must consequently be attributed to some evil divinity.”
- Robert de Jouvenel [Le République des Camarades]

Conclusion: An Affair to Remember

Alexander Werth, in introducing Stavisky the man, wrote the following,

“It may be safely said that few of Stavisky’s friends and acquaintances during his last years were completely disinterested: for every friendship he had to pay. That is the tragic aspect of Stavisky’s life; and he probably realised it. Conscious of being a law-breaker, he perhaps felt that he could mix only among the people whom he had more or less bought.” [79-80]

Of those people he had more or less bought, charmed, or manipulated, nineteen of them, plus his wife, would face criminal charges in a trial which concluded early in 1936.

Mme. Stavisky, the widowed mother, spent 14 months in prison awaiting trial. Left destitute and certainly unable to find support from her husband’s “friends,” it was their governess who took care of her children, supporting them out of her own savings. When they went to visit, she was moved to a hospital and put in a false cast to shield the children as much as possible from the sad new reality of their lives. She was finally provisionally released in May, 1935, some months before the trial.

Janet Flanner described the opening day in court,

“At first sitting in the Paris Assises de Justice, there weren’t chairs enough for all the accused. the two hundred and seventy witnesses, the thirty-six defense lawyers and their gowned clerks, the eighteen jurors (six in reserve, in case half of the first dozen crack up, which would otherwise mean a retrial)…Only those accused of fraud got to sit up in the criminals’ dock; lesser lights, merely charged with the illegal reception of millions, were down on the benches usually reserved for the public…There was hardly room for the safe containing the twelve-hundred-page Act of Accusation…in the prisoners’ dock, there also, apparently, was no room for the many ex-government officials and other big men formerly, according to rumor, implicated in the government-backed Stavisky swindling.” [154-155]

The most important public figure accused was a retired General who had merely lent his good name to one of Stavisky’s many schemes. Only two deputies faced charges, Garat, the Bayonne Mayor, and Bonnaure, who had been involved in some of Stavisky’s international bond operations. Mme. Stavisky claimed that she believed her husband when he told her he went straight after the 1926 arrest, though she was most likely willfully ignorant. Throughout the trial most people felt that he wouldn’t have made his gorgeous model of a wife privy to any of his wrongdoing. All of the rest argued similarly that the confidence man had simply taken them into his confidence, and with his charm and lavish lifestyle they assumed he was successful and everything was above board.

Of the 20 people on trial, 10 men and Mme. Stavisky were acquitted. Among the acquitted were Dubarry, widely considered to be Stavisky’s fixer and perhaps the most guilty among them. The 9 men found guilty were fined a nominal $6.60 each.12 Tissier, the Bayonne Pawn Shop manager and Hayotte, the manager of the Empire Theatre both got 7 year sentences. Three others, insignificant crooks, got 5 each. The General was sentenced to 2 years. The two Deputies both received one year suspended sentences, in effect, time served.

The roaring scandal which had occupied two years of French life and taken the lives of 20 men (including Stavisky himself) and cost God knows how much to prosecute ended with a whimper, with 9 men splitting perhaps 40 years in jail. No conspiracy was discovered, there was no mafia, and there is no evidence the Freemasons had anything to do with it. The Third Republic was left greatly internally weakened as the world outside its borders was becoming rapidly more dangerous. While Stavisky was a crook who deserved to be prosecuted, there is no argument to be made that it wouldn’t have been better if the public simply didn’t notice. It’s a curious note that in the abstract Chautemps was right that giving the matter as little attention was possible was best for France, he just made the fatal mistake of not understanding the public mood in a free state.

Historians looking back on this generally agree that this would have been a typical scandal if not for political forces primed to exploit it. That is largely true, and in many ways it was simply an unfortunate coincidence that everything happened as Action Française had been describing for months. Daudet wasn’t prophetic, he was simply lucky and got an inside report on Stavisky a little bit earlier than everyone else. It makes me think twice about all the times I have made quips like, “the problem with this being proven is it makes the conspiracy theory seem true,” because as much as it pains me to say it, that take from the political and media establishment is not always incorrect. The thing is though, besides that Dubarry was a crook, none of their conspiracy theories were actually proven true. It seems most likely that Stavisky killed himself, Prince killed himself, and there wasn’t any sort of organized widespread corruption allowing Stavisky to keep operating. However, there was certainly no shortage of state failures, for which the Third Republic and the French people would soon enough pay a deadly price.

For a few years, this ridiculous scandal faded into memory. Then, both the occupying Nazis and the Vichy government separately found it useful. The Nazis made it a key propaganda point about the machinations of Jews having weakened the Third Republic, even producing a film called Forces Occultes which portrayed Stavisky Affair as a Jewish-Masonic plot. The Vichy government also used the memory of Stavisky to hold show trials against former political leaders and to blame them for France’s inability to defend itself (it needs to be remembered that Vichy France and Nazi Germany were technically at war for a number of years, in a carefully managed fiction.) There is something curious about the fact that the whole scandal played out with xenophobia, but not anti-Semitism, as a factor, only for the latter to be picked up five years after it ended. I suppose what makes that poignant is that everyone used the scandal to attack whomever they wished to attack the whole time, something which the Nazis merely continued.

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Throughout this essay, I have only used contemporary sources from 1936 or earlier. However, to provide an epilogue I must look to the 2002 text Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue by Paul F. Jankowski.

Mme. Stavisky left France after the trial, seeking to make a living as a performer in America. She returned shortly after, selling her jewelry and working as an unlicensed dressmaker to survive. During the occupation, facing homelessness, for a time she lived with Darius, the “negroid” Nazi propagandist whom her husband had bought off around a decade earlier. After the war she married a US military officer and spent most of the rest of her life in Puerto Rico in comfortable obscurity.

Their son, Claude Stavisky, never recovered from the events of 1934, with his luxurious young life being upended by his father’s suicide, eviction from their hotel, and his mother’s period in “the hospital.” Of course, that was all followed by the Nazi occupation neatly matching up with his formative teenage years. He spent the rest of his life in and out of asylums, otherwise working as a carnival magician, where owners would try to use his notorious name to draw in crowds. It seems that he had inherited his father’s love of deception.

I can find nothing whatsoever about the Stavisky daughter, Michelle. I prefer to imagine that if she possessed her mother’s beauty and her father’s charm perhaps she left this all behind her and made a good marriage and got a new name. It seems more likely that she disappeared onto the streets of Paris.

Late in life Arlette, the former Mme. Stavisky, returned to France permanently to try and take care of her troubled son. She had done everything she could to put the painful past behind her. In 1988, at age 85, she did finally break her silence, telling a journalist from France-Soir, “Understand that my husband alone was more intelligent than all of the journalists in the world put together.”

And with that, the once-fabulous Arlette, Chanel’s most beautiful model, had said the final word on the Stavisky Affair.

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This Week on Dispatches from Clown World we discuss the surprising rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. Growing up, millennials were all taught that he was America’s most evil and disgraceful President and that crusading journalists uncovered a network of corruption. The reality, however, is that Nixon has been more or less exoner…

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It is the fourth anniversary of The Wayward Rabbler!

I primarily started this to get some ideas out from all the reading I did to recover from covid insanity, hoping to make some side income in the process. Writing quickly absorbed my life, and I am extremely proud of the work that I have produced. However, the reality of the situation is that my growth on Substack and Twitter, particularly of paid subscribers, is not moving fast enough for there to be any chance that I can have the “lines cross” before going bankrupt if my priority is Substack growth. As you can see from the following chart, it simply isn’t realistic for a man with a wife and two kids to make this his primary focus:

Part of the problem is that I have been hesitant to paywall anything besides the podcast after a couple of days, both because I believe total subscriber growth is the best way to get paid subscriber growth, and also because I think my work is valuable and want people to read it. This problem doesn’t appear to be unique to me. My understanding is that Substack is struggling from an issue akin to streaming services, where a lot of people were happy to cancel cable and buy streaming services to save money, but soon there were so many it didn’t feel like saving money and you don’t want to pay $5 for one more…I myself have embraced tradition and started torrenting again, though primarily because I’ve been watching so many obscure Italian films. I believe across this website growth has become really hard.

The other issue is that my freelancing career has really taken off. It has only been under 2 years since I started freelancing regularly, which I did not particularly plan on, not imagining anyone would want me and also thinking I could rely on Substack growth for an income. In that time I have been published in the New York Post, The American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, and Commonplace Magazine, as well as having a mostly free hand to write editorials for The Libertarian Institute when I am so inclined. This is, in my view, quite impressive for a short period of time and with some focus is actually bill-paying. Overall, I do not feel creatively stifled working with editors. On the other hand, the article type and format that has become my trademark here is not something anyone else would publish, and I am quite determined to keep doing it. But, of course, there is an opportunity cost, and I have to focus on paying publications for the time being. My dream is to not have to write for them at all, but it’s a dream towards which I have made no progress whatsoever in over a year.

There are several types of successful writers, and of those I am an artist. I do not say that to sound self-important or special, what I mean is that I can only work when I feel inspired. I may not write for a week or more or spend all day agonizing over 1000 words if I don’t feel like doing it, but I also may work 30+ hours in a 48 hour period with enormous productivity when I feel inspired and am going. One nice thing about doing book reviews is it gives me a productive way to spend my time when I do not feel like I can write. The point is that I cannot just “write more” and keep up with both things, and creative work is not a thing generally measured hourly.

How I envision the near future here is that I will continue to write my Substack articles but prioritize paying work and guilt myself less about getting articles out. The subscriptions here do greatly take the edge off of such an unstable as career as freelancing, and I would note that many successful journalists have a large Substack subscriber bases supporting their work generally while only sporadically making Substack posts. It also bears mentioning that though my treatise is the only thing I have published here in almost two months, it is the length of a short book and perhaps 3 months worth of writing for many other substackers (and was done in a week + some light earlier pre-writing, to demonstrate the above point.) Though it has never been the case, as I hoped and imagined, that getting published elsewhere drives growth here, I am nevertheless compelled to choose that method of growth for now and hope that some kind of fame or recognition will bring people here.

This brings me to the question I would like to ask my readers: would you like a monthly digest of all of my non-Substack work? This would include published articles, interviews, longer twitter threads, and anything else relevant. My primary concern is is to not clog up your mailbox, but I imagine some substantial portion of readers do not consistently follow me on any social media (including Substack Notes.) I would add here that you can set Substack to only send articles to your Substack inbox, not your email, which is what I myself do because I use Substack every day.

My thought is that this would be a great convenience and give better access to my work since the case would be that you are supporting me generally and less specifically for my Substack articles, which are free anyhow.

Dispatches from Clown World will remain on its new bi-weekly schedule, though if my paid subscribers go up substantially we could absolutely go back to weekly. It was started as a way to drive paid subscriber growth, which it has not done at all, but I am quite attached to making the podcast, and the real fans do like it quite a lot.

I imagine this is quite disappointing to some paid subscribers, which I have been losing recently anyway, but I greatly appreciate everyone who has supported me thus far. Again though, the numbers are just not going up in such a way that I can sensibly prioritize publishing original work here over paid writing for other publications. You all have helped me start a career as a writer that I have full faith will be successful, and I am forever grateful.

Regardless, here is to four years!

Sincerely,

Brad

PS: I realize this is the worst of all times to ask for paid subscriptions, but I have a 20% off 4th anniversary sale going on currently, and it does still greatly help me justify putting time towards Substack.

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Also, I have a Ko-Fi tip jar, or tips set up on Twitter.

“Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper and moderate on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.”
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Background

Basically Fineism, Defined

Challenges to Basically Fineism

• Ideology-Maxxing

• Really Obviously Bad Ideas

• If It Saves One Life

• Latinamericanization

• Scaring the Hoes

• Do Somethingism

• Enshittification

The Limits of Basically Fineism

• Skullcrusher Deporting

• The Case of Bukele

• The Fix Everything Easily Switch

• Your Government Hates You

Basically Fineist Public Policies

• Immigration

• Foreign Policy

• Healthcare

• Crime

• Education

• Trade/Economy

The Basically Fine States

• Denmark: Basically Fineism with Autistic Nordic Excellence Characteristics

• Canada (Historic): Basically Fineism with Apologetic Extractivist Characteristics

• Costa Rica: Basically Fineism with Nothing Ever Happens Here Central American Characteristics

• Panama: Basically Fineism with Giant Tax Haven Characteristics

• Uruguay: Basically Fineism with Latino Denmark Characteristics

• Jordan: Basically Fineism with Anglo-Arab Characteristics

• Rwanda: Basically Fineism with Esoteric Kagameist Characteristics

• Singapore: Basically Fineism with Chinese Mostly Competent Pragmatism Characteristics

Conclusion: For a Mostly Competent Pragmatism

Glossary of Terms

Preface

Many have asked for a more thorough explanation of Basically Fineism, a utilitarian non-ideological political philosophy expounded by the pseudonymous British political theorist and anthropologist who goes by the name Drukpa Kunley. Having become a firm adherent, it is my hope that with what limited faculties the Creator has blessed me, my efforts will not be too inadequate in writing down some of the principles of Basically Fineism in the hopes that it should help humanity move past the problems we face in this troubled world.

I would like to make clear first of all that except where a direct quotation is given, all of the thoughts contained herein are my own. My intention is to introduce how I came to this philosophy, give a deeper political background, illustrate the concept, explain its challenges and limitations, show its application to specific policies, and give real world examples of a smattering of states that have practiced Basically Fineism. Readers should know that though Basically Fineism is to some extent inherently conservative insofar as it requires realism, prudence, and moderate government, it can improve upon most existing political settlements or viewpoints. In a sense, it makes an entire belief system out of not “letting the perfect be the enemy of the good” and one will find that most sober political theorists throughout history have in one way or another embraced a Basically Fineist viewpoint, particularly as the ideal goal of statecraft is the creation of a stable state where the material and social conditions are good enough that men do not seek revolution. I would further add that while the language of the online right may at times come off as silly, the humor serves to make political theory, which is seen as dismal and uninteresting to many, accessible to the masses. Further, I merely write in the language of my times, as have those who came before me.

A great deal of credit is due to Mr. Kunley, as well as to those proud few leaders throughout the world who have avoided the pitfalls of ideological and polarized times to make Basically Fineism a reality in those places where it has been attempted. All errors, however, are my own. Unless otherwise noted, all infographics included below (for they go farther than being “memes”) are the work of Drukpa Kunley, a true sage of our era. It may be the case that I do not always go all the way back to the beginning of a concept or the origin of a phrase, but what matters more is that they are now in the contemporary parlance. Further, while it is my habit to avoid continuous revision of my pieces after publishing, in this circumstance I will make an exception should comments, discourse, or the further development in Basically Fineism merit doing so. Basically Fineism only having been defined and given its name in late 2024, there is much work to be done in understanding and studying the most important contribution to political theory of our era.

I hope that those who devote the time to reading this treatise will find it valuable. I should note the degree of focus on America which follows merely reflects that being my own country, and thus the one I know the most about and have the most concern for.

Introduction

I spent much of my adult life as a libertarian, having always been one to distrust authority and not insensibly becoming disgusted when looking upon the American state, particularly having come of age in the Total Mess times of Post-9/11 and the Financial Crisis. Like many, I found the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard highly compelling, though also like many I did not myself examine his source material. I don’t mean to restate the introduction I wrote for this substack itself but nevertheless need to explain how I came to be where I am.

I long thought, “well, wouldn’t it be nice if the government worked well enough that I didn’t need to focus on it,” particularly as I am one of these people who struggles to fit into society and my constant rage at the government doesn’t help anything nor does my general desire to not contribute to their activities via taxes. That is not, though, an inherent trait of government, merely of bad government. It is certainly possible for a government to just take 10% or so of your income and stop you from being invaded and keep the roads in workable condition without entering every area of your life and bothering you all the time. With American politicians, over time I adopted the viewpoint that I would more or less support any who isn’t obviously evil, insane, or idiotic; in modern America that means there are vanishingly few politicians I can support in good conscience. Still, while I always had a good deal of pragmatism and was never a purist, I was long an anarchist, believing it is impossible to make a state work, and that private businesses can handle anything of importance.

Like many, what started changing this viewpoint was covidmania, which demonstrated two key things to me, among many lessons. Firstly, it demonstrated that people fundamentally don’t understand the limits of public policy but are very scared once you gin up a panic. What I mean here is we started at “Two weeks to slow the spread” and the claim was “for whatever reason our hospitals are not equipped to deal with a pandemic (?) so we need to try to put this off a bit while we prepare.” This was fairly stupid and pointless, and it doesn’t appear they did much to prepare during those two weeks either, but the number of hospital beds available is actually something that can be controlled by public policy, and you can train nurses who work in different areas of healthcare, and convert rooms to deal with respiratory care that would normally be for other purposes etc. In short there are identifiable things humans can do and targets one can reach to increase healthcare availability. It is within the realm of human action and public policy. Of course, over those two weeks that somehow stopped being the goal and it just became “we can use public policy to defeat a respiratory disease,” which is an unprecedented level of hubris and a Really Obviously Bad Idea.

Now, none of this should make an anarchist give government a second thought. A lot of libertarians did get covid wrong but for most of them it was not due to being pussies making Reason magazine-type arguments about the importance of personal responsibility in a pandemic or nibbling around the edges of government overreach while failing to spot a scam. For most libertarians who got covid substantially wrong it was because they are paranoid and gay for the apocalypse and found “this government-modified virus is airborne AIDS” to be compelling, which is fair based on their world view. Overall, the only thing here that squares the circle of how covid as a whole happened is that “public health officials” and their funders thought the government sponsored the creation of a modified supervirus which escaped, but they are actually idiots. That is to say, they funded the modification of a virus which wasn’t very dangerous but thought they made a super-virus, and thus panicked and pushed an unprecedented response.

All of that notwithstanding, what we also learned from the covid experience, among other things, is what a hellscape the corporations actually want for us if they can get away with it. Just Walmart saying it wouldn’t comply with covid policies in any state and would fight them in court would have gone far towards stopping the mania. Instead, every corporation fully went along as did the entire oligarchy and financial interests and the like, for something extremely stupid that the most basic common sense and decency should have prevented. Youtube playing constant commercials to tell you to stay home, presumably watching Youtube, should have given up the jig, but it did not. This discredits anarcho-capitalism almost entirely.

In an effort to recover from the impacts of living through insanely stupid times- and I did not myself keep my head, so overwhelmed was I at the idiocy- at the beginning of 2021 I finally pursued a longstanding goal of reading all of the ancient histories, which I did not do to completion but read through every major one and several minor ones up to the 2nd century, where there starts to be something of a gap in the record. Along with this I read many texts on political theory, which generally analyze the actions in those histories. What I discovered, which finally destroyed anarchism for me, and libertarianism generally, is that, first of all, protecting the poor from the depredations of moneylenders is a key function of a state and always has been.

What I further came to understand is that free government just is difficult, which is no reason to not try. Rothbard’s famous claim, that it is the anarchists who are hard-nosed realists, ignores that plenty of areas have been well-governed and worked towards the equitable improvement of the human condition. It does just last a while and then fail, but you learn from it and do your best to break the cycle, and the cycle is clearly spelled out in Polybius. The cycle of constitutions is not a mystery to us. If you happen to have watched the show LOST, at the beginning of the 6th season the viewer is finally introduced to the Gods of the Island properly, and Jacob, the good one, has been bringing people to the island, but inevitably their society gets destroyed. He says to his brother, “you just do a little better each time.” While Rothbard insists he isn’t utopian, it is hard to see what sets him apart from Marx, in terms of believing that humanity could reach a state of development where it permanently sheds the state and this creates some sort of era of happiness, he merely imagines a less fantastical system of economic and social organization in that circumstance.

Everything in the world has seasons and it is simply the nature of things that a state should be born and grow and experience the tribulations of life and then ultimately die. This is no more reason to not have a state than to not plant an apple tree. Its also noteworthy that the more conservative element in our society has lost the corporations, lost the universities, lost the media, and almost every institution one can name, even most major churches, and it is in fact only the state of all of these things where we actually stand a chance. Andrew Breitbart famously said politics was downstream from culture, but the 2024 “vibe shift” demonstrates that, if anything, the opposite is probably true. Public opinions on gay marriage 5 years before and after the Obergefell decision legalized it nationally demonstrate a similar point in stunning clarity. Politics greatly shapes the culture of any society it is meant to oversee, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

Regardless, having read much I was still left largely rudderless, having renounced anarchism in favor of believing in the state, and rejecting ideological libertarianism while still valuing a manly, moral liberty as much as any man. The book which impacted me the most was Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, along with Livy himself. Machiavelli has been widely smeared for centuries, solely for being a realist who describes how government functions without sentimentality. The text lays out how liberty is won, preserved, restored, and lost. It is a practical text for setting up a free state. And yet, “Machiavellian,” in the negative sense, has been around for several hundred years. I said in my introduction to this substack, a full 4 years ago now, “There is no word for the political ideology I am creating. The closest is a Machiavellian, but in the sense that I believe what Machiavelli did, not in the sense that I believe in the behavior described in “The Prince.”” Not being a Democrat, I was hardly going to give myself a label or slogan that I constantly had to explain to people who had an existing hostile perception, and the word Machiavellian cannot be redeemed. I remained mostly rudderless, failing to know if I believed in anything at all and what those beliefs should be called.

As it turns out, what I needed was a guru. I had seen Drukpa Kunley, who takes his name from a 15th and 16th century Tibetan Buddhist monk known as “The Divine Madman,” around Twitter, because he posts about a lot of niche topics of interest to me, but it was hard to know what to make of his account. He is, to put it lightly, at times esoteric to those not familiar with his work. I only started following him late summer of 2024, at a time when his influence was greatly growing. He has since been called “The King of the Anons” by GQ Magazine. He is without a doubt the greatest political theorist and anthropologist of our day. Modern British political debate has become little more than a series of footnotes to Kunley. He is creating the vocabulary of the discourse; it is outside of the scope of the present endeavor, but he is the one who coined both “gay race communism” and “the Yookay.” In Britain they speak of the “posting to policy pipeline.”

And most importantly, he has delivered unto us the philosophy of Basically Fineism, Mostly Competent Pragmatic government that works by working. We are all in his debt, but still have much to learn.

Background

Almost every sober and serious man throughout history who has picked up a pen and attempted to write on political affairs has ultimately advocated some form of moderation and compromise. “Moderate government” is the term one sees in the old texts, generally based on understanding the different currents within society and the real tendencies of man and looking at how a commonwealth can work for the common welfare, as the name suggests. It is notable that in modern America, “Moderate” and “Centrist” are profoundly different things, with a moderate generally supporting mild, reasonable government with a view towards human liberty, whereas a Centrist tends to support all of the state’s most oppressive policies, or at least those oppressive policies which are acceptable to Very Serious People. In short, a moderate, in American politics, is someone willing to take the best things from Republicans and Democrats- or at least what good things there are or once were- whereas a Centrist adopts the worst.

Moderate government, however, is not ideological “minarchism” but more accurately using a light touch. It does not posit that the government which governs least governs best, but that the government which governs best governs best. However, the art of statecraft is indeed to use the lightest touch possible while still achieving the desired results. It was Bismarck who said, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best,” which perhaps the clearest statement in support of Basically Fineism of any major historical political figure. The premise of “mixed government” from Plato onward recognized that there are different power centers in a society which must be represented in government and kept reasonably satisfied and in balance. It was not until the French Revolution that modern ideology took off. Further, before Marx every thinker recognized class conflict as a permanent feature of society to be managed; it was the unique derangement of Marx and his ilk to believe one side permanently winning was the “end of history,” so to speak.

Most importantly though, the general advice of all of the great political theorists rests on just doing the best you can and trying to be satisfied with what you have while making marginal improvements towards improvements in government and society where possible. Even Hobbes, who has become some sort of an avatar of “big government” to the unlearned was largely advocating that a state of war is so terrible it is unlikely the government you live under is worse, and thus you should make the most of your own circumstances. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote,

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

This brings up a key point about Basically Fineism as a philosophy, which is that it works within the existing system instead of abolishing it, if it is possible to do so.

Something that becomes apparent in the study of human affairs is that almost any system is workable if it is managed by competent people and can get public buy-in. The best systems of government injure men as little as possible, select for competency, and avoid making big “asks” of the public unless it is truly necessary. Of course a high degree of demographic uniformity and low inter-ethnic conflict are a great benefit here. Your population, both the upper and lower orders, their disposition, education level, and the like, are more important than the ideology of the state.

We hear about how, for example, collective ownership doesn’t work, but employee owned corporations and Israeli Kibbutzes and the like actually work fine. The issue it that peasants by and large don’t want to be collectivized and are also not competent to run large commercial farms. We could argue about agrarian reform all day but for various reasons governments actually run plenty of farms that do fine, if overall somewhat less productive than private farms. The issue is that you have to sell the public on giving up their independence, which they are unlikely to want to do. Still, what sinks communism generally is not anything which specifically doesn’t work about government ownership of productive enterprises, it is the challenge at getting public buy-in and assuring competent, pragmatic management, particularly amidst the hostility of global financial interests who don’t want your system to work. Of course, the more total the communism the greater difficulty in management, which is why any communist system that has worked passably well tends to allow free markets on the lower level and primarily takes only the large industries.

When analyzing the Revolutionary government of France, such as it was, Burke wrote,

“I can’t stand up and praise or blame anything relating to human actions and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Some gentlemen count circumstances as nothing, but in fact they are what give to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what make every civil and political scheme beneficial or harmful to mankind.”

In this vein, I would certainly condemn the action of seizing a kulak’s land and sending him to work on a collectivized farm, but if a large government farm is opened elsewhere to employ the landless peasant, why should I condemn that for being socialism? It may not be the best way to do things, but if it is working decently enough for the people involved, what’s the harm?

Reading the classic theorists, one finds limited instances where it is recommended that a state be used to shape a society instead of a state being adapted for the society where it exists, though from there a state should do what is reasonable to promote public virtue. In Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, for example, an extraordinary amount of space, nearly half the book, is dedicated to how climate impacts what kind of state will be successful.1 Throughout Machiavelli it is also made clear that it is nearly impossible to change the nature of the city, but that instead one must work with it, which is why he provides so much specific advice about situations you may find yourself in. Utopian literature of course exists, but is generally much more of a thought experiment than advocating for adopting the system described.

Regarding liberty, Burke continues,

Abstractly speaking, government is good and so is liberty; but ten years ago could I in common sense have congratulated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without considering what the nature of that government was or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation on its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract is one of the blessings of mankind that I am seriously to congratulate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? If a murderous highwayman escapes from prison, am I to congratulate him on the recovery of his natural rights?

Indeed even liberty and its importance is based on circumstance, what it is doing for people, and more. I have often had thoughts along the lines of “Just what is liberty doing for us, if we’re allowed freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and to vote but things almost never get better or change at all, is this not just an a pressure release valve in favor of an oppressive state?” It is something akin the premise that the more liberty one is able to allow slaves while still controlling them the more productive they are at a lower cost, such as the changes from serfdom to a rent system.

What is crucial for Anglos to understand is that liberty is a complex thing, much more than “don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff” and certainly more than getting to vote before taxes screw you over regardless. For starters, all property rights are in fact conditional on living in a society that respects them. If you must at all times guard your person with a firearm you merely have the liberty of an escaped convict, while if one must always guard one’s property in the same way you only have the property rights of a man who has taken hostages at the bank and for that amount of time owns the room. Of course, that is not true of the theory of how property rights develop, merely the practical security of your property rights.

Political theorists, and people generally, have never agreed on what liberty means, and a man’s conception of liberty is based largely on how he is accustomed to living. A French friend recently suggested that it might be for the best if Americans were not allowed to post videos of deadly police encounters until they had been some way vetted to make sure they are not misleading, that we do not all tear each other apart. That may, in the abstract, not be a terrible idea, but I am an American, and better we should all die than accept prior restraint (the authority of the government to review media before approving it for publication.) In other countries this might be considered a sensible solution that ultimately safeguards liberty, but it is against our existing customs. Montesquieu, after acknowledging this being a word no one agrees on, gives the following definition of liberty, “In governments, that is, in societies directed by laws, liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will” [I.XI.3.] His phrasing is egregiously unclear for such a key passage, but his point is that liberty is in being allowed to do what you should do and not made or allowed to do what you shouldn’t do.

By this standard, many Western “liberal democracies” measure up quite poorly in that they are always stopping one from doing entirely reasonable things which should be allowed and don’t hurt anyone else, while also forcing upon you random nonsense and making ridiculous and immoral moves internationally with your tax dollars. Meanwhile, a lot of smaller and more modest countries with fewer political rights as we understand them live up to these standards better. The UAE is far too ambitious to be Basically Fineist, but it feels like not complaining about a government that functions properly anyway and which doesn’t really tax you leaves a man with more liberty than he would have in London where there is a high tax rate and endless nonsense and harmful regulations and even so many things don’t work- and for that matter they will prosecute you for dissent!

My overall point though is that ultimately if the government and fighting the government and safeguarding your liberty is taking up too much of your time, you are actually much less free than ignoring it where possible. However, a government can generally only be good enough to largely ignore if it is ran along the lines of Mostly Competent Pragmatism.

I think that in the pre-ideology era, to some extent proto-Basically Fineism was considered to be self-evident. What other goal should man running a state pursue but that things are decent enough that the public does not revolt? It is essentially that or just looting and oppression. The number of political leaders throughout history who have been aggressive and expansionistic is actually much lower than those who have not been, it’s just that well behaved rulers rarely make history. It must be added though that really from the founding of the Principate to the American Revolution places having meaningfully free government, were mostly limited England, the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire’s Free Cities (especially in modern Switzerland) and Italian City States. Of course in all of these areas liberty was frequently challenged; writing in the earlier part of the 18th century, Montesquieu says England is the only country with a constitution geared towards the liberty of the subject. It would seem that under ancien regimes few felt the need for political theory, instead just running their states by custom and force, though optimally stewarding the realm they had inherited with some wisdom.

It was only in the 20th century the ideology became paramount, though its great evils were apparent in the 19th. But, as they say, the moral arc of history is long, and my hope is that it bends away from ideology and towards the sensible Basically Fineism.

Basically Fineism, Defined

The original definition which Kunley gave us for Basically Fineism is as follows:

This is, at its core, a belief in the importance of the principle of compromise. It is also a belief in trying to enjoy your life without the personal being swallowed by the political, the inevitable result of any system where ideology is paramount. Once again, the point of a commonwealth is in the name, and instead of pursuing weird and impossible goals or viewing everything as some sort of deranged competition, the focus should be on making things work well, not just the proverbial trains running on time, but general well being. Often, when watching a crazy TV drama, I have felt somewhat exhausted and thought, “I would like to see these people live their normal lives, instead of some insane thing being introduced again at the beginning of every season.” Of course, for a TV show I actually wouldn’t, but that is how American life is, and it is no way for a man to live. The last semi-normal time we had in America was I believe the mid-Clinton era before the Lewinsky scandal and even then they were hyping the whole country up about war with neo-Nazi paramilitaries after burning a bunch of children to death at Waco.

A crucial component of Basically Fineism is also competent governance. In the United States this is very difficult because since 1965 the country has largely been based on a racial spoils system with ever increasing numbers of minorities. Basically Fineism can’t really be implemented with a vast state regulatory apparatus staffed by aggrieved minorities overseeing the country. Instead, it requires a spirit of cooperation whereby working for the government is seen as an honorable job but where the government also doesn’t spend all of its time bothering the citizenry about nonsense. It is key that some trust be put in administrators with the expectation that the maintain the modest standards of Mostly Competent Pragmatism in their position and that they can be fired if they do not. A degree of faith must be put in the public as well. There has to be a sense of shared purpose where the public as a whole wants things to go well instead of wishing things would fail as it will prove a political enemy wrong.

It needs to be emphasized that Basically Fineism can improve any country, but it is extremely difficult in a multicultural society with rapidly changing demographics. In part this is because that relies on a belief that your country is tied together with ideology that will be adopted by others who come there, which mandates an ideological polity. It is commonly said that the United States is the world’s only “propositional” nation, which is nonsense for several reasons. Firstly, that doesn’t mean anything, so its nonsense in the most basic way. Further, plenty of countries are based on “ideas” of some sort or other, for example the French Republics were all based on an idea, the Bolivarian Republics are quite similar to the United States in their founding, and even modern Turkiye was based on applying Enlightenment ideals to make a new secular Republic out of what had been an Empire. “Propositional nation” is just something Very Serious People like to say to midwits in support of importing infinity immigrants. The other matter is that accepting that many immigrants requires a lot of ambition and an ideology of constant rapid growth instead of being happy with modest but reliable and consistent improvement over time.

Though Basically Fineism can work in the context of any existing political and social settlement, it appears to be the most adapted to social democracy. I think this is because successful social democracy is already a relatively non-ideological compromise, in that it only works well when people understand that a free market in goods must be allowed to function in order to fund a welfare state. America is torn between oligarchs who promote regulations if they harm their competitors and anti-capitalists who want to regulate everything to death. This is rarely discussed in American politics, but businesses can generally handle high taxes much better than they can handle excessive regulations, because you can simply price things for taxes whereas excess regulations badly damage productivity while also wasting a ton of money and employing swarms of unnecessary bureaucrats and lawyers to leech off of the productive economy. Further, if a business is allowed to operate freely but in a relatively high tax environment, the money can actually improve the public weal instead of just employing those whose job it is to get in the way of economic productivity. Finally, successful social democracy already requires a cohesive, relatively uniform population to thrive, and competent governance to administer the benefits.

The problem that the Swedes run into is that they think their system of government is so great that anyone can adapt to it, so they invited a lot of third worlders they feel bad for to join. In reality a large part of why their system works so well is because the people they are governing are Nords. What we are seeing in Minneapolis, and in Sweden itself, is what happens when Scandinavian social democracy meets diversity and incompetence. It’s also well established in political science that people are more likely to support welfare programs if they perceive the people receiving benefits as being like themselves, which is presumably why the libs are always saying “you have more in common with an illegal immigrant than you do with a billionaire.”2 Regardless, the most important reason that this system can produce Basically Fine results is that social democracy in many way removes the bottom from society, which not only makes the public less stressed, but which does much to prevent the formation of a restive lumpenproletariat prone to become the masses who support extremist ideologies.

It is important to emphasize again though that Basically Fineism can improve the politics of almost any place if it is possible to implement, and even an ideology so aggressive as radical Islamism can be tempered by embracing Basically Fineism:

Challenges to Basically Fineism

The challenges to Basically Fineist government are several, particularly in the modern world. It is necessary to consistently work towards the public good while accepting the limitations of public policy and the resources available. The core of American progressivism, for example, is the belief that the combination of scientific progress and active government can solve the eternal problems of humanity which can only be managed. Basically Fineism requires the public acceptance of modest and reasonable goals, so excessive ambition and ideology are great dangers, as are things which scare the public. It is commonly better to do nothing at all if one cannot act with a reasonable degree of certainty that it will provide an improvement, be that immediately or as part of a process which the public can understand or believe in.

Ideology-Maxxing

Ideology is the greatest opponent of Basically Fineism, as should be clear by now. The stronger the ideology, the greater the threat. Kunley defines Ideology-Maxxing as follows:

Governments by their nature have limited resources, financially, in terms of manpower, and in terms of what they can ask the public to support to achieve their goals, commonly known as “political capital.” To Ideology-Max involves not properly assessing costs, missed opportunities, and everything else necessary to pursue your ideology. To Stalin, the mass starvation of peasants was worth it to collectivize farms, though this is an extreme example. The Germans are the most prone to this failing. You may remember in War and Peace Tolstoy gives an extended explanation of German military theorists, and says that they are so in love with their theory that even if it doesn’t work they are delighted because they just see it as proof that their theory wasn’t followed or that it is a way to improve upon their theory. America being a heavily Germanic country, we too are prone to this. It remains something of a mystery why the Biden Administration adopted an extremist open borders ideology when Joe Biden had a 45 year record of supporting border security- and it was surely partially to do the opposite of the last guy- but this provides a clear example of the devastating impact this can have, on the country, on his party, and on even further increasing acrimony between the political sides.

Mass immigration is inherently a form of Ideology-Maxxing because it is the belief that, contrary to evidence, that the “values” of your society, such as they are, will integrate infinity people from all over and that you can make the public share this perspective, despite that mass immigration has not been popular among the native residents at any point in history. The reason reductio ad absurdum arguments are seemingly effective when arguing about public policy is that no policy actually works when taken to its extreme, they only work when implemented in a reasonable fashion. Of course, knowing this, those arguments lose their power in most instances.

The mass immigration ideology is primarily supported by the repeating the phrase “diversity is our strength,” which is a meaningless and clearly untrue statement. However, having become a core part of their ideology, its adherents find it unchallengable, and thus will do any crazy thing in support of “diversifying” all areas of public life, which has done much to promote the “Enshittification” we will get to below. While it is good to have principles, making government work properly requires flexibility, and you don’t want to go full Teutonic:

Another good example of ideology is everything related to “climate change” and “Net Zero.” It was obvious this would be disastrous while failing to achieve any benefits, but they all plowed right ahead, and of course high energy prices and reduced industrial production make life worse for everyone instead of keeping life Basically Fine. The irony is that assuming climate change is a real problem in the future the best way to deal with it is by having a strong economy and by being flexible instead of adhering to this destructive ideology in pursuit of dubious goals.

This should not be a difficult decision:

Really Obviously Bad Ideas

The debate over the invasion of Sicily in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is one of the most distressing moments in history in that it is obvious that they are making a drastic unforced error. Their city has been infected with both avarice and optimism, and on a shoddy pretense Athens at its zenith decides to put all of its resources in an armada to attack Syracuse, partially in the belief that it will lead to rapid imperial expansion, for which they had no genuine need. Nicias makes what could be fairly called a Basically Fineist argument against this, that after years of war they should stay home to tend their own estates and enjoy the blessings of peace. It is as I said above about TV dramas, instead of starting a crazy new storyline, he suggested that they just live their lives, which were if anything better than Basically Fine. Despite this, they force him to be the general of this expedition, which becomes an absolute disaster, in part due to his hesitation but also due to its sheer insanity.

Its not clear to me what exact element of humanity causes such behavior, I suppose just the desire for glory. Regardless, many men have failed to learn the lesson and love to set goals with reckless audacity. In many cases, it’s not even clear why they should want to do this:

Sweden is in many ways a better example of the above than Britain, because there are at least historic reasons why the British were tied to the Pakistanis and they had spent decades teaching them English and cricket, the latter specifically on the grounds that it would teach them about following arbitrary rules and fair play. There is at least some argument that the Pakistanis appeared primed to join British society, or that Britain owed them something. Sweden, on the other hand, simply chose to become what they called a “humanitarian superpower” for no reason whatsoever. In the 30 or so years of this (which has, perhaps, finally ended) their country has become about 20% foreign born with about a total of 1/3rd being of some foreign heritage. The immigrants are bombing each other all the time and the country struggles with radical Islam. I suppose I have never tried that hard to get to the bottom of why they would do this, but I think simply to find a way to be a significant country globally despite their small size and population, which then accomplishes I don’t know what. I think they also wanted to prove that their institutions were so strong they could withstand that and anyone could be turned into Swedes, though why that is desirable is again beyond me. In short, it was just a Really Obviously Bad Idea they pursued based on some sort of Underpants Gnome logic that didn’t bother to discover the middle step where this is used to their benefit.

There are, of course, endless examples besides immigration and energy. They are of different severities, and sometimes would be fairly minor if not for the fact they will obviously antagonize the public. The biggest one besides those was shutting down society in a Kamikaze attack against a cold. Other examples include not arresting people who use drugs on the street, putting men pretending to be women in women’s prisons, and, to go back 20+ years, the Invasion of Iraq. I know that times change, but if a well-adjusted well-informed person from the 1990’s would find it unbelievably crazy to the extent that they thought you were putting them on, that is a sign it is a Really Obviously Bad Idea. Almost all of these are some form of Ideology-Maxxing, the main difference is that with Really Obviously Bad Ideas it is confounding that even an ideologue could believe they will work.

If It Saves One Life

Something progressives like to say is “You should judge a country by how it treats its weakest members.” This is, of course, myopic nonsense. A country should focus on treating the greater part of the population well knowing that the revenue and goodwill this generates will help everyone and allow for the care of edge cases that can’t get by on their own in the best circumstances. How would you judge a society where the mental defectives live in gilded mansions but the ordinary workers live in hovels?3 In America the compromise we have made- or our failure to make a compromise- has created a situation where the schizophrenics and drug addicts are on the streets because the left doesn’t want to confine them in what Burke above called “the wholesome darkness” of a cell, while the right doesn’t want to pay for any solution that helps them while still giving them access to the street. Thus we just let them die in the streets while harassing the citizenry, and try to pass this off as some combination of compassion and individualism.

This kind of emotional blackmail is common among progressives. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about the American left is their ability to, for any circumstance, invent the most disadvantaged and unsympathetic person imaginable and then demand you support that person. A common example of this is saying that some people don’t know how to cook, so there shouldn’t be limits on prepared food bought with EBT. I’ve even seen it said that the poor don’t have time to soak beans in the morning before work! Of course that takes about as much time as washing your hands. What is always funny about this line of reasoning is that most (but not all) poor people in fact have much more free time than they have money, which is why they are poor. Providing free adult education classes to teach the poors to cook is also an entirely reasonable and affordable public policy, but is paternalistic or something. The person they have invented is ludicrously helpless and unwilling to improve, and then we are supposed to base public policy on what will work for that individual, who clearly needs a social worker of some kind not just some financial support.

The way this emotional blackmail most badly damages the cause of wise public policy is all forms of “If it saves one life.” The thing about this is everything has costs. In many cases something may outright kill someone else, but also if something just marginally damages the economy some amount of people will have shorter lives so it is not obvious there has been a net improvement in years lived by the public.

The British comedian David Mitchell happens to be something of a sage in this area, so for this section I am sharing two separate radio sketches, which are both 15-20~ years old.

In this one, a man whose wife died in a train accident is sought out by a member of the media to interview him about if he thinks it is worth it to invest in the sensor technology which would have saved her life. The interviewee tries to say he is actually the worst person to talk to, but the interviewer will not listen. “Would you think it was worth having invested in this if it saved your wife’s life?” “Well yes, of course I would think it was worth it, but I must stress I have no objectivity whatsoever.” Finally, the interviewer demands to know what he would say to Minister, “Minister, good luck judging how to allocate your finite resources given the many competing demands you face.” This is a gold standard Basically Fineist position, which relies on both the citizen being sensible and having a degree of faith in the minister being a Mostly Competent Pragmatist, it is only the journalist who does not understand.

In the next sketch, “No One Drowned,” they talk to a local gadfly (who is truly a man of my own heart) who tries to explain that it is actually a bad thing that there were zero drowning deaths:

The argument here is flawless, which is that no one drowning in an area of a couple of million people actually demonstrates massive overspending on anti-drowning measures such as signage and sending people around to schools to talk to kids about drowning. Is keeping the 2 or 3 most drowning-prone people alive really more valuable than a pensioner who has diligently avoided falling into water his whole life who could freeze to death without a fuel subsidy? As he says, everyone has to die sometime, and in a fair, just, and democratic society, some of them should drown.

I shared this endless times during covid, where the relevance is obvious as they devoted tremendous resources to trying to keep the most death-prone members of society alive- who generally only had a couple of expected years left- at the expense of everyone else, and didn’t even help those people because what they were doing was a Really Obviously Bad Idea. But how can you put a price on a human life? (Every insurance company, large corporation, and government agency in fact has some amount they will pay out for wrongful deaths before going to court, by the way. Human lives have been formally priced throughout our economy.)

In my own state, Washington, which is known for being particularly moronic, for years they have promoted a traffic safety plan called “Target Zero” which aims to have zero traffic deaths in the state by 2030. I thought they had abandoned this as we got nearer, but looking it up, they last revised the plan in 2024, though they have been quiet about it. The commercials used to say, “How many traffic deaths do you think are acceptable in the state annually…now how many are acceptable in your own family?” This obviously is not how you set public policy. I seemed to be the only person who realized this was insane and would justify any amount of excess spending and oppression. There are 8 million or so people in this state. Say on average half of them get in a car every day, that is 4 million drivers 365 days a year, and you expect zero of them to die? Even if everyone drives perfectly safe on perfect roads, a moose is going to run in front of someone or an old guy will have a heart attack at the wheel and cross the center lane. Perhaps they would classify those things as acts of God, etc, but the goal is preposterous.

None of this is to say you shouldn’t work towards greater traffic safety, you absolutely should. However, I found something incredible looking to see if they were still doing this or gave up:

“Those 2023 numbers represent an 85% increase in fatalities and a 78% increase in serious injuries since 2013. With these increases in mind, and as we near the 2030 goal date, we must act boldly and urgently to continuously improve the way we design, operate, and maintain the transportation system and educate road users.”

85% increase in the first 10 years of the program, but won’t dump it for the last 5 realizing that the impossibility of this goal has clearly been counter-productive for reasons I can’t imagine. (I honestly assumed the first few times I read that it said “decrease” and thought they had cooked the numbers to get such impressive results.) Bear in mind that the state’s population hasn’t grown that much, cars are safer, and fewer teenagers drive these days, so this represents an unbelievable degree of failure. Maybe this has something to do with the divergence in driving habits during covid where a bunch of people like myself started driving faster and a certain group drove slower deciding needing a hospital was unethical, meanwhile the state turned against the police so they mostly stopped caring enough to pull people over. Either way, these people have not saved even one life with this absurd policy, and it seems as if they have cost many.

The important principle here though is to remember that once the government is emotionally blackmailing you with sob stories and setting impossible goals, they are liable to do whatever they want at any expense to your liberty and money.

Latinamericanization

Observers of international politics will be aware that even as America stands now our parties are generally to the center of the two main factions in any Latin American country. True, a more centrist candidate does sometimes come through but the fascinating thing about Latin American countries is that some percent of the population, perhaps as much as 10%, is a swing voter between communism and fascism. It is not clear how much of this is just that both sides suck so people go to the other thing. The background of this overall phenomenon is that in Latin America the old Iberian system of the haciendas and the clergy and landless peasantry and whatnot created a society where politics is very much based on economic identity and background. You may remember this from the sheer pointlessness of the wars of Col. Aureliano Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Regardless, this type of violent acrimony is exactly the fate one wants to avoid if the goal is Basically Fine governance, and America is already well on our way:

We find ourselves in a difficult situation regarding Latinamericanization because the Democrats both follow crazed ideologies and also operate as a coalition of minorities on a racial spoils system. On the other hand, prominent minorities on the right are absolutely Third Worldist Slopulist Caudillismos. The only good option is for whites is to vote like a minority, but then that plays into this problem. What we need is to all cool down and greatly slow immigration so they assimilate into our culture instead of us assimilating into theirs, but that ship may have sailed.

A key element of Latinamericanization is also the jailing of political opponents and former office holders. This is a difficult situation because optimally your politicians don’t do things for which they should be arrested and they should be held accountable if they do. However, when this comes up in our society it is never to try and arrest someone for something like starting the Iraq War or Barack Obama drone striking an American child, it is for paperwork violations or other nonsense. Currently, the DA of Philadelphia is claiming when Democrats take power they will hunt down ICE “like Nazis even if it takes decades.” This is absolutely deranged, even if you disagree with ICE’s behavior there is exactly one ICE agent who could currently be plausibly guilty for a homicide anyone has heard about.4 He seems to want them classified like the SS, and there are people saying we need new “Nuremberg Trials” against those enforcing immigration law. This is, by the way, an elderly white man, in one of the few positions where voters would generally chose the most responsible and competent person as opposed to voting on ideology!

Something curious about all of this is that Americans, in their perpetual ignorance, usually say we will be a “third world country” or “Banana Republic” if we don’t prosecute our former leaders, when in reality it is almost exclusively third would countries which prosecute former leaders- the fear of such is presumably why African Heads of State almost never leave. The major exception is South Korea, where they almost all go to jail. In Europe, the only Head of State to be prosecuted and found guilty in recent history is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, and that was after a careful process that no one but Sarkozy thought was political revenge, and for the quite serious crime of accepting illegal campaign donations from Gadaffi, who he then helped to overthrow. It’s hard in this situation to not go tit for tat, knowing what they will do to you, but constantly prosecuting, or even threatening to prosecute, your political opponents for fairly frivolous things or basic functions of of a state is Not Fine At All.

Scaring the Hoes

One severe problem that the modern West faces is “cowardice in the face of weakness,” which is actually the bigger theme of The Camp of the Saints than just to fear mass immigration. This creates issues when trying to fix problems, because in the mass media age there are endless pictures of upset children or whatever else and there is a tendency to let the sad story of one person prevent an action beneficial for a state of many millions. “Scaring the Hoes” is something like “using political capital” but the implication is more that people like the policy in theory but cannot stand to “see how the sausage is made,” so to speak.

I believe that “Scaring the Hoes” was first used in the political sense in this popular tweet:

The term isn’t strictly directed at women, really just anyone you have mild disrespect for who does not have the mettle to do what must be done, which is of course viewed as a feminine behavior.

Scaring the Hoes is a real problem for Basically Fineist government since it is supposed to be largely based on consensus and compromise and one wants to keep political conflict to a minimum where possible. However, avoiding Scaring the Hoes is the most possible in a society that is already Basically Fine. In a society with a high level of conflict and a hostile media a panic will be ginned up if you try to do anything at all, particularly regarding immigration enforcement. While one wants to try to avoid escalating unnecessarily, it is not always avoidable.

Machiavelli’s advice for people taking power is that if you must injure people you should injure them all at once, and then spread benefits over time. Good leadership does require leading and not just following the polls. To the extent that hoes must be scared, it is important to try and make it as brief as possible and to be able to show the benefits almost immediately instead of partaking in policies that antagonize people out proportion to what they accomplish.

What is crucial is that while one wants to avoid Scaring the Hoes you must also not let the fear of doing so become a neurosis, because there comes a point where it is just cowardice and prevents you from improving anything in your society.

This all, however, brings up a further issue, which is Boss Government vs. HR Government. More than any actual ideology or set of public policies, the grand pseudo-ideological struggle of our age is between government by bosses and government by HR Department. Trump has been wilding out in his second term, but his original sin, which led to a series of endless escalations, was just that they didn’t like his decorum. Instead, they want someone who behaves in a certain way and acts like the job is to make sure everyone diligently follows the rules moreso than that the job is to actually accomplish some political goal. It’s notable that HR Government really only works where things are already going fairly well, whereas if things must be strongly turned around Boss Government is more or less required. Modern Europe is largely an example of HR government in situations where government is already not going well, and no one is happy.

The perfect example of the hostility to Boss Government is Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who is not a great political leader but is in most ways fairly conventional besides that he is seen as a “boss” due to his mannerisms. Thus, the media and Eurocrats gin up panic about everything he does, because the EU is the ultimate form of HR Department government. In short, Boss Government Scares the Hoes. At the same time, those of us who detest schoolmarms and effeminate men find HR Government antagonizing. There is no clear solution to this but it is useful to realize much of the panic one hears about political leaders is solely due to superficial behaviors and has little to do with public policy, which is why Giorgia Meloni who we were assured was a neo-fascist became a darling while Orban remained an ogre.

Basically Fineism is neutral on Boss Government vs HR Government, as which works better depends on the state of the country and the nature of the population. However, unless you have something they want and preferably wear some sort of exotic traditional outfit, Boss Government greatly scares the so-called “International Community,” or, if I may say, the International Hoe-ry

Do Somethingism

America is probably the worst country in the world for Do Somethingism. Even extremist ideological states, like fascists and communists, show more caution and willingness to delay. Do Somethingism is in our national character. It is as Thucydides says of the Athenians, “a scheme unexecuted with them is a positive loss” [1.70.7.] There are very few instances I can think of in American history where the government delayed action and let things work themselves out, and that was often due to gridlock instead of consensus, such as the Panic of 1819. Covid again is of course the worst instance of Do Somethingism, but the War on Terror is another egregious example, as were the Financial Crisis bailouts. These are just big examples. Few events happen that are not considered a pretense to take some great course of action, on the grounds that we will lose our influence if not involved. With covid they kept saying that “we don’t know” what it will do so responded by doing crazy ass unprecedented things instead of just assuming the virus would act like prior ones and behaving rationally and almost every government got away with behaving this way, since they were lead by the Americans.

Of course, drastic actions out of fear or ambition are death to Basically Fineist government since it is the belief that one can prevent somewhat bad things to happen. One has to be calm and take a Mostly Competent Pragmatic approach. One of the best scenes in the anime Avatar: the Last Airbender, known for being a profoundly wise children’s show, is when Bumi explains “neutral jing.” Yes, you “can just do things” as they like to say now, but you can also not do things, or wait for the right opportunity.

Unfortunately, this is extremely treacherous in American culture, where the bias for action is enormous. A politician will be forgiven for doing just about any idiot thing under the sun as long as he was pro-active and can say he tried, but choosing to not act and then things going even slightly bad is considered to be permanently unforgivable.

Machiavelli teaches the following, in his section called “When a Problem Has Arisen Either Within a State or Outside It, It Is Safer To Delay Dealing With It Than to Attack It”

“When a problem…has become so serious that it has begun to terrify everyone, the safest policy is to put off dealing with it rather than trying to eliminate it, because almost always those who eliminate it only increase its strength and the harm that is expected from it…When you put off dealing with them, they either fade away by themselves or at least the evil is postponed for a longer time.” [I.33]

This is going to be mostly impossible to do away with in America, and we need to be realistic about our circumstances, but it can at least be kept in mind for how you personally look at things and perhaps a few wise politicians will seek to stand against the storm that is America’s recklessness.

Enshittification

Enshittification is the gradual erosion of Basically Fine conditions. It is primarily a term used to describe technology and the tendency that the internet and its services have become continuously worse over time. However this also applies to governments and societies as a whole. It is something of a “boiling frog” situation where you just grow used to things becoming ever worse. Of course, part of this is nostalgia and the human condition, it is even in Plutarch’s “Sayings of the Spartans” that the King’s father and grandfather always said everything was “upside down” so you should only be surprised if things get better or stay the same. The reality is that much has improved, you know our coffee and motor oil and access to entertainment. If you were transported back 50 years you would find that many products you are used to are either much worse or entirely unavailable, so we need to be careful to make sure we’re not just failing to appreciate a variety of gradual improvements.

Still, my entire life I have been hearing about budget cuts to everything. This implies that at some prior point there was a proper amount of money, does it not? I assume much of the issue is just paying for a lot more nonsense, but at the very least we’re living in a mindset that is somehow simultaneously believing we need constantly belt tightening while also spending profligately. It is a curious thing. At least some cities have certainly got worse though. Perhaps not as extreme as when Detroit began to collapse but for example Portland was a very nice city when I was growing up and now the pictures look awful and almost everyone I knew there was moved away so I get few first hand reports. Fented out homeless people doing the junkie lean have made almost every American city worse than it used to be. It’s also true that this “diversity” we’re supposed to love so much seems to make everything in life more difficult. We always hear about academic standards falling.

However, the places Enshittification hits the hardest are regimes such as Cuba that are under long-term sanctions and also tied to ideology. Kunley wrote about this process from his travels, and has more to say about it than I possibly could. At its core, Enshittification is the erosion of social and material conditions and it is never clear where the bottom is or when the country will revolt. London, for example, has been Enshittifying for some time now, but is still largely livable, though it is apparent to all that standards are perpetually declining, in a way that is much more than just in your head.

Mass immigration is again a major cause of Enshittification. It invites people who are not used to the social expectations, are not habituated to caring for their new neighborhoods, and damages social cohesion. The rapid cultural changes are both aesthetically and culturally disorienting and all institutions suffer from challenges to communication and then from the steps taken to try and create a new social order.

The Limits of Basically Fineism

There are situations where things cannot be handled by moderation and compromise. It is impossible to make things Basically Fine with out of control crime, for example. In other instances one needs to wholly ignore entrenched interests who work in different industries and are set on doing Really Obviously Stupid Things. It requires a great deal of judgment about when to take another course, but there are circumstances where without strong leadership and a firm hand you will never get things to a level where a Basically Fine social and political settlement can be reached. These are just some examples where it may be necessary to accept some amount of antagonism that things may reach a peaceful medium in the future.

Skullcrusher Deporting

While Pantsuit Deportations (described below) are the ideal solution for immigration enforcement under modern Basically Fineist government, the reality is that immigration in many places has happened in too high of quantities to merely come at the issue from around the edges and only remove those who pose the greatest threat to your society, be that due to crime or just in various ways not fitting in. Thus, if you can find the political support, you may have to choose another option:

Skullcrusher Deporting may use any excess political capital you have and does increase antagonism in society for a time…in short, it absolutely Scares the Hoes. Plenty of normie votes who in theory oppose illegal immigration or at least want violent criminals deported will react badly to this method. The Trump Administration learned about the costs of this in January 2026, though it is very popular among his actual supporters and how much it is hurt him domestically is unclear. Further, when Joe Biden made whatever statement about having a more humane immigration policy it was widely amplified in Latin American media and encouraged more illegal immigration, whereas there is a strategic logic to brutality in immigration enforcement in that third worlders see videos on Whatsapp and decide not to come.

It is advisable that while actively employing Skullcrusher methods you try to not do other things which may unnecessarily upset people, such as abducting the President of a source country of illegal immigrants, or threatening to seize a rather large piece of land from an ally for no good reason.

The most important defense of Skullcrusher Deportations is if the libs refuse to reach a compromise and do things the nice way. Unfortunately, this is still a situation where both sides are antagonizing the public, but it is an issue which has to be dealt with to improve other things and maintain your society and form of government. If an irate minority of the public is so against all immigration enforcement that they will give up their lives to keep illegal aliens in the country, there may be no other choice.

The Case of Bukele

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has become a hero to many for his ability to get his country’s raging gang violence under control. Kunley has been to El Salvador and you can read his work directly if you are so inclined. It has of course been necessary to suspend various constitutional protections to make this progress, but it is hard to deny that there was a genuine emergency. Machiavelli teaches,

“Once a city has begun to decline through the corruption of its substance, if it ever manages to rise again, this occurs through the exceptional ability of a single man who is alive at the time…[who] at the risk of much danger and bloodshed, [has] brought about its rebirth…it is necessary to employ extraordinary measures, which few know how or wish to employ.” [Discourses, I.17]

Clearly El Salvador was deeply corrupt, and not just in the politicians stealing way, in the sense that the state was rotten inside and out. No normal method was ever going to fix this, so the options were to employ extraordinary methods or let people continue dying to uphold an ideology of “Liberal Democracy.” Really, the only man I can think of in our time who has been able to do the same thing for a deeply broken state is Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, who has a section below.

Most people who are fretting about Bukele’s methods have little to say besides, “It works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

Bukele’s strategy was, in short, to consolidate political power, make bad-faith short term truces with the gangs, and then to mass arrest, all while under a state of emergency giving him extraordinary powers. Amusingly, he is the only world leader I know of who used his covid emergency powers to do something good instead of to ruin things for everyone.5 By mass arresting suspected gang members, Bukele disrupted their entire crime economy, and allowed some amount of normalcy to return to El Salvador after decades of insane violence. When criticized for this by a BBC reporter, Bukele said,

“You take your best government. Choose your best government...same people, same talent, same experts, same will to do things the right way. You take your best government, and you put them to govern Afghanistan, and you tell them 'Okay, you govern Afghanistan the same way you govern this European country. You'll be dead in a week because you cannot govern Afghanistan like you govern Europe.”

It really is as Burke said, that circumstances counts for nothing to some men.

No serious writer on political theory would posit that El Salvador could be fixed by the approved European methods of “liberal democracy.” It also is not even the case that the liberty of the citizens has overall been reduced by Bukele’s crime crackdown. Montesquieu, continuing the definition of liberty used above,

“We must have continually present to our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would be no longer possessed of liberty, because all of his fellow citizens would have the same power.” [I.11.3]

One could argue all day about if unjust laws are laws at all, but the crimes under which El Salvador was previously suffering were murder, kidnapping, rape, extortion and the like, as well as all of the bribery and blackmail etc. which kept the criminal cartels safe. It cannot be said by any sophisticated conception that the status of human liberty was good in El Salvador pre-Bukele, whereas now people don’t get shot for wandering into the wrong neighborhood.

While Bukele seems to be coming out on top of incredible challenges, the intensity of this program and his power cannot continue in the long run if El Salvador is going to attain the status of being Basically Fine. For one thing, the combination of power and time corrupts (not merely power, as Machiavelli teaches regarding the Roman dictatorship, an institution which saved the Republic countless times.) The biggest challenge is that it is nearly impossible to reform a corrupt state, and that there is a great risk that El Salvador will fall into its old habits after he leaves, unless the people can be trained to live differently and not accept the corruption and violence that long plagued their country. Ultimately, Bukele needs to find a way to turn down the intensity and end his extraordinary measures or else all of his efforts will merely be a respite in a sea of chaos, though that respite would likely be remembered by many as the best time in their lives.

The Fix Everything Easily Switch

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything could be fixed easily without all of the nonsense? Sometimes it seems that way, and objections to reasonable solutions can be very stupid. You should be willing to “just do things” if have justified confidence that it will work.

It is an unfortunate feature of politics that commonly when a leader is willing to act outside of the rules or established norms it is only to harm or punish. Tacitus tells a story of soldiers who were trying to to get their pay and terms of service improved, and note that before Tiberius was Emperor, they complained to him and he said he couldn’t help them because of Augustus, but now they appeal to Drusus who says he cannot help them because of Tiberius,

“How curious is it that the only army matters which the emperor refers to the senate are reforms in service conditions! If he does this, he ought to also consult them when death penalties or battles are in store. Clearly, when rewards are concerned, he is not his own master - whereas no one controls punishments.” [Annals, I.26]

Though the Prince does typically himself control the power of clemency, this remains the case that when the President wants to hurt you he can somehow do whatever he wants yet suddenly when something might help you all of those “checks and balances” you hear about greatly limit his power. There is no clearer example then everything they were apparently able to just do because of covid:

Many of the problems we face are complex or require compromise, but nevertheless, it is necessary to consider which things you could fix immediately if you ignore the nonsense. Some of the smaller issues, such as not putting men in women’s prisons or teaching the kids to read by sounding out words you really can just do. This is also true of bigger problems, like Europe’s “Net Zero” insanity. Britain simply stopped using North Sea oil that is still there for no reason but that their rulers are morons so they could fix their energy problem by just drilling new wells. It turned out that second term Trump was able to close our southern border shockingly easily and I’m not even sure what he’s done different from the first term.

The Fix Everything Easily Switch is more of a mental exercise than anything, to remember that not everything requires compromise and a middle road, sometimes your opponents are just morons whose concerns do not merit being taken seriously and if your legislators would actually enact reasonable policies the voters want that things could get much better rapidly.

Your Government Hates You

It is normal that in electoral politics some group should be blamed for some of the ills of society. It is not ideal, but what better way to get votes than to say “this group of people is a threat to your safety, and I will protect you.” There can be truth to this, and the utility is clear. Ideally this is limited to more or less real situations and is not hatred for its own sake, but regardless it’s all in the game. What was more shocking to me was the reckless audacity with which the Anglo political elites, specifically America’s Democrats, Canada’s Liberals, and Britain’s “traditional parties” employed the political strategy of hating the general public. The entire 10 years prior to the 2024 was all about the ways white people in general were evil. Granted, the Democrat coalition is primarily over-educated self-hating whites and aggrieved minorities, so there is some political sense to it, but it was still too much for many. We never stop hearing about all the ways minorities are superior to us, morally if not some of them in income and educational attainment as well. Meanwhile, they go on about how our culture is trash and our values are bad. An entire apparatus was set up to make sure every advantage in life went to non-white people, and it is just now that “respectable” people are allowed to talk about it. It has been one of the great reliefs of my life to watch this recede and to less have to imagine a fantasy world where the government doesn’t hate me, but is merely indifferent to my wellbeing.

Edmund Burke wrote, in “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol,” one of his essays on reconciliation with America,

“I never knew of a writer on the theory of government, so partial to authority, as not to allow, that the hostile mind of the rulers to their people, did fully justify a change of government”

Indeed, even Hobbes, who is overall considered the “writer on the theory of government” the most “partial to authority” does not make any such argument to the best of my memory. What he does, however, write the following,

“For those men who are so remissly governed, that they dare take up arms, to defend, or introduce an opinion, are still in war; and their condition not peace, but only a cessation of arms for fear of one another; and they live as it were, in the precincts of battle continuously.” [Leviathan, II.18.9]

I would not want anyone to think I should write a treatise on government without giving some thought to at what point revolution is necessary or justified. Of course, following the Declaration of Independence quote I used above, Jefferson wrote,

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This depends on infinite circumstances, is unreliable, and necessarily requires to some extent throwing caution to the wind. There are a lot of kinds of revolution, and you should keep the existing forms of government where possible. The reason that the American Revolution worked out so well is that it was in defense of our own local governments that the Crown had been cracking down on.

I can not give a clear answer on when you have reached “When in the course of human events…” instead of simply needing to build a political movement based on clear, Basically Fineist principles, but certainly recommend caution, prudence, and tolerating things for as long as they stay tolerable.

Basically Fineist Public Policies

The root of Basically Fineist policy making is competence and compromise. It is the most important to actually understand how things work, allow administrators to do their jobs, and maintain a functioning society with social cohesion. There is no single right policy for Basically Fineism and as the social, economic, and political conditions vary from place to place, so will what is a reasonable compromise. Regardless, I want to give an idea of how some sample political issues can be handled with Mostly Competent Pragmatism.

Immigration

Mass immigration is, overall, the single biggest concrete threat to Basically Fineist government. There are several reasons why mass immigration is incompatible with Basically Fineism. The most important is that not a lot of people leave countries where things are fine, so outside of a few businessman and scientists and the like you will almost always be seeking to integrate people from countries where things are not Basically Fine but where they would be if the public had the skills and disposition to produce those government results for themselves. Further, Basically Fineism relies on a social cohesion and trust, the citizen must not feel alienated from his surroundings, and he should not be antagonized by crime. The reality is that in no time and place have the native public liked mass immigration, outside of what portion of the public is of a strongly cosmopolitan and artistic disposition as well as ideologues who detest their own culture. Further, mass immigration represents both ideology and ambition. The ideology is the belief that your beliefs are strong enough to make anyone become like you (the contradiction that far-left immigration maximalists tend to be anti-assimilation is too nonsensical to get into here.) The ambition is that you need permanent growth so that “Line Go Up” instead of a limited labor pool making it so that men who work every day jobs can have good lives.

There are two main sensible immigration policies I present here. The first is to allow some foreigners who can afford to do so to live in your country and any children they should happen to have can apply for citizenship once they become adults assuming they have continued to live in the country, perhaps after a period of conscription or public service if applicable. However, outside of exceptional circumstances there would be no “path to citizenship” for adults. I would note here that Americans have some trouble understanding the premise of being a long-term foreign national who does not get citizenship, but it is overall fine. Of a few guys I know around town whose foreign wives have become citizens, I have often thought, “It seems the only thing they get out of this is the ability to participate in our joke elections, which is actually degrading and not something to be proud of.” Of course, under Basically Fineism in theory your elections would be respectable affairs that primarily work towards competent and fair administration as opposed to fake and gay ideological struggles designed to bilk money out of the public and make them ignore the fact that the entire government is doing a bad job.

In America, which is designed to absorb immigrants, we have vacillated between allowing mass immigration and taking pauses. The current 60 years of mass immigration after a highly necessary and productive 40 year pause needs to end. My proposal for America itself, that is too sensible to ever happen, is that following each census we set a 10 year immigration plan based on the actual needs of the country and the desires of the citizenry. If managed properly this would not need to screw anyone in the process of immigrating or getting citizenship, as it would be understood that each plan respects past and future plans. This would of course “de-nuclearize” the issue while making it only a major political issue every 10 years instead of a constant source of acrimony. Ideally, the political struggle would be largely a Mostly Competent Pragmatic analysis of what is right for the country, and not an ideological battle.

The bigger issue is that we have huge amounts of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in America and Europe. I am not one of these radicals who thinks it is reasonable or desirable to denaturalize any large number of people or demand “remigration” of people with citizenship, but it is straight forward enough to have an immigration moratorium to figure things out and then just actually guard the border. As said by eugyppius above, they demonstrated during covid they are entirely capable of keeping illegal immigrants out if they simply choose to do so. Securing borders is popular enough one doesn’t need to give it any great thought. How to run deportations is more difficult, and for this the Euros have discovered what appears to be a winning compromise:

The basic premise of Pantsuit Deporting is that a no-nonsense girlboss explains why mass immigration is not working for the country and that immigration laws do need to be enforced for public safety. There are strong humanitarian, environmentalist, and labor arguments against mass immigration that can work well if said by a woman who can appeal to the left wing, at least to the extent that they don’t wage Jihad against the government. I mean, people are dying in the oceans, they’re leaving garbage all over in sensitive wild areas, wages for native low-skill workers are driven down, and they’re separated from their families for decades. Crucially, since this doesn’t Scare the Hoes, you don’t end up with a pendulum swing between no border enforcement and Skullcrusher Deportations keeping the country in a state of ferment. Importantly, the most sensible among the left are realizing that mass immigration is antagonizing the public well past the point of sustainability and have grown to fear the truism that “if democrats don’t enforce the law, fascists will.” The big downside is that it is hard for this method to do more than “nibble around the edges,” but it is the most sensible and viable solution for the situation which exists now, particularly if combined with secure borders.

Foreign Policy

The optimal foreign policy for a Basically Fineist state is to be safe due to your own harmlessness, though circumstances may require a more muscular armed neutrality or being a small part of a more powerful nation’s security scheme. The reality of foreign policy is that most of the public would like to not hear about it at all. The man on the street has his own concerns and doesn’t need to be hearing anything about foreign policy that isn’t occasional friendly diplomatic visits. Hysterical pronouncements of Very Serious People notwithstanding, in the modern world countries that have been minding their own business facing any kind of foreign aggression, except from the United States, is quite rare, and even of those at least much of the time their ideological leaders have set a confrontational course. It is harder for the United States to stay out of things, as it is and will remain at least some kind of major power, but simply being less ideological, grasping, and not doing Really Obviously Stupid Things would move the United States closer to a Basically Fineist foreign policy.

Regarding smaller states, to again reference the show LOST, there is a scene where this older couple Bernard and Rose have not been seen in a long time, and suddenly show up in an episode. It turns out they have been living on the beach in peace and not taking part in any of the nonsense in the show. They rescue the character Desmond from the bottom of a well, but send him on his way after he is rested and fed, saying, “We like you, but whatever got you thrown into that well is exactly what we are avoiding.” This is an optimal Basically Fineist foreign policy. Ultimately, they do get drawn back into the show’s nonsense as it is unavoidable, but no other actions they could have taken would have prevented that or made anything better. Similarly, it is not always possible to stay out of the world’s problems, but it is best to avoid trying to slay dragons or thinking you can change the world. Instead, a state should simply have friendly trade and diplomatic relationships with those who wish to and develop a reputation as a level-headed sensible country that minds its own business. In other circumstances, you may be forced to join someone, but if you join without a fight it is common that almost nothing is asked of you. By the time the aggression you face is so overwhelming that it cannot be handled in the above fashion, it is most likely the case that nothing would have saved the independence of your state, and the best you can do is be ruled by others while avoiding your own country becoming a battleground.

While Mexico has overall failed to achieve Basically Fineism, it has pursued a Basically Fineist foreign policy for almost a century. Despite being next to a much more powerful, sometimes aggressive neighbor which makes many demands, Mexico guards its independence and maintains a policy of strict neutrality. It did join WW2, but only after Germany attacked its oil tankers, and thus its neutrality was violated. Mexico has a policy against using “recognition” as a diplomatic tool and has good relations with everyone. It is also more respected by the US government than is realized by the US public, because it is assertive but only of its own rights, while recognizing the reality of its situation. People have commonly liked to say, of Russia and Ukraine, “How would we react if Mexico became allied with China” to which I say, “Leave Mexico out of this, Mexico is not some passive actor, it has a policy of neutrality and of not antagonizing its larger neighbor, and would never get into a situation like this.”

Healthcare

Of many things in America, healthcare is nearly the farthest from Basically Fine. On one side, there are people who believe healthcare is a “right,” while on the other side there are people who believe any government provision of healthcare is “socialism.” Both of these are idiotic forms of Ideology-Maxxing. If the government is the right way to provide healthcare is an important discussion and the answer is not obvious, but providing services is what governments do, when they aren’t finding ways to ruin your life. What we have ended up with is a system where healthcare is massively over-regulated, insanely expensive, and riddled with fraud- over-billing government insurance for nonsense is basically its own entirely legal industry. Meanwhile, if your income goes up enough that you have to pay for your own healthcare the slight increase in income will bankrupt you because the government wants you to pay $1,000 a month for insurance that must cover basically everything. I have poor people’s government health insurance and was trying to get my daughter a dentist appointment. When I found out the office didn’t take the insurance and it was listed in error, I asked “just so I know, what does it cost to pay out of pocket, in case I have trouble getting an appointment and decide to go anyway.” I was informed that if they found out you have paid for any healthcare, you get kicked off of Medicaid!

To the Democrats, the solution is to get as many people on government healthcare as possible and give insurance companies endless taxpayer money to “subsidize” everyone else. We have just been fighting about this and the numbers are insane, up to several hundred dollars a month per middle class adult. Much of the public believes no one should ever pay any amount out of pocket, despite that the last time I went for a normal doctor’s visit because I needed antibiotics it was only $75, which is completely affordable for the part of the population which is not entirely indigent. It’s actually insane that the ultra-wealthy use health insurance at all, because if you can pay out of pocket for any expense healthcare should be unlikely to save you any money, but the system is to have “coverage.” Reducing healthcare demand is almost never discussed, despite being the most over-medicated society on Earth with endless recommendations to go to the doctor over pointless matters and the inability to get some very basic and benign medications over the counter without a prescription.

Contrary to what the American left believes, almost no countries actually have national single payer healthcare, and in the one major example, Britain, it is such a bankrupting disaster that it is an albatross around the neck of their entire polity but also a sacred cow that can never be fixed or reformed. This would be an even bigger disaster in the United States, a vast, federal country where the political sides hate each other and there are asinine arguments against everything, such as that policies cannot be left to states because people in California would hate how Mississippi chooses to manage it. Further, the “faceless bureaucrat” problem would be out of control if this were directly federally managed. It would be worth discussing universal healthcare if they wanted to provide any sort of scheme that wasn’t obviously stupid. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to insist we “had the best healthcare in the world” before Obamacare while refusing to properly repeal it. In short, it is a Total Mess.

To get into some understanding of other countries, we hear constantly that “every other First World country has universal healthcare” which is kind of true but not in the way they think. Firstly, I’m going to tell you that I watch international TV shows all the time, and just about everywhere people worry that a major injury or illness may bankrupt them, despite that we are told that is only true in America. In the few instances where they don’t, the issue is that you die waiting for care. What is crucial to understand is that most countries have some form of regional multipayer healthcare. In Norway, for example, adults under a certain age pay their first whatever amount of healthcare every year, a little over $250. That seems nominal, but it is more than my healthcare cost most years and thus that person is all the way out of the system and not even using government care outside of an emergency. In many other countries there is universal healthcare but people can choose private health plans (strangely, in Germany this is only allowed if you are above a certain income threshold, as opposed to simply letting you choose to pay for it if you can afford it.)

There is a 2014 article from Forbes about how the American left doesn’t know anything about Scandinavia despite their admiration for it, most of all how low regulation classically liberal economies fund their welfare states. He explains Denmark’s healthcare system is based on “communes,” which are something like school districts, and are around 10,000 people. It is from this tax money where healthcare is funded, and it is locally administered. This creates what he calls the “Bjorn’s Beer” effect, which is to say that you know the bureaucrat in charge of administering healthcare spending, and know where he has a beer on a Friday night and can actually speak to him, solving the faceless bureaucrat problem. Being entirely predictable, one can presumably already imagine how the American left would react to that. People in poor neighborhoods will get worse healthcare! Yes, they will, you could federally subsidize them but that is simply how things work in practice, the poor don’t have access to as good of services. I assure you that in Britain the NHS clinics in wealthy suburbs are nicer than the ones near council estates. I further assure you that in fact under full blown communism members of the Politboro get better healthcare than peasants.

It is a childish fantasy that everyone in a country will get the same healthcare treatment. It is idiotic to think that people should be able to waste infinity healthcare resources at government expense. It misunderstands the political, social, and economic structure of America to think that Medicare For All would be anything but a disaster. It ignores the political reality of the people who have come to rely on entitlement programs to think they can be done away with. By dropping ideology on both sides in favor of what actually works, we could reach some sort of Basically Fine compromise on this interminable and overpriced political issue.

Crime

A well-founded fear of crime is one of the top variables between whether living somewhere is Basically Fine or is Not Fine At All. Crime is a highly localized issue, and few things antagonize the public more than feeling unsafe. Crime also prevents social and economic development. People like to argue about whether crime causes poverty or poverty causes crime and the former is much more true, but it is a vicious cycle. The reality is that a level of safety needs to be attained for there to be meaningful economic development in an area, which encourages children to get jobs instead of become criminals. Unfortunately, deranged leftists have attacked the police as an institution and then tried to find stupid ways to replace them

The problem we have ran into with this is that many whites have decided it is somehow racist to police minority communities, despite that those minorities are the primary victims of the crimes. It is in fact a national disgrace to a country as wealthy as America that our inner cities are as violent as they are and we owe it to our fellow citizens to devote the resources necessary to secure their neighborhoods. This does not call for a heavy handed occupation, it calls for a sensible law and order approach. Yet, we still run into people who oppose all policing of public conduct because they think it is black culture to do drugs on public transit and that this should be allowed. In Seattle a few years ago they did a study about the effects of second hand fentanyl smoke on passengers on public busses, which is a batshit insane decision compared to just arresting people who smoke fentanyl on the bus.

For a long time it was said by both libertarians and the left that drugs should be decriminalized because it is a public health issue. What many of them failed to realize is that in European states where this has been done it is taken quite seriously as a public health issue and drug addicts are closely monitored and made to behave in a socially acceptable way. In the United States, when Oregon decriminalized drugs for a couple of years it was basically the case that they didn’t treat it like a public health issue and the junkies were just left to die on the streets. I have been told this was because compromise failed, and they got far enough to do the first part but then there was no funding to actually care for them. It became similar to our problem with closing the asylums, where people were scared of abuse, so now we just leave schizophrenics to die in the streets, which is not at all compassionate. Over and over again, America fails to compromise and lives with the results for decades while both sides blame the other. It is not actually complex to keep the streets clean and care for people with severe problems while only focusing investigative resources on high level organized crime but mostly not bothering people about what goes on inside their own homes or what happens to be in their pockets. In short, don’t frisk random people for drugs, but also arrest people who shoot up in the street.

It is often mentioned how many more police per capita European countries typically have than the United States, but this does not tell the whole story. Most police in Western Europe are like glorified mall cops, which is to say as well as traffic enforcement they drive around and say “please don’t do that” or “move along, sir” and give minor tickets or write things down. There are separate criminal and/or judicial police (varying by country) who are the ones who actually deal with investigations and crime, which makes the security police a random person in the margins of society deals with less scary. Neither “Defund the Police” or “Give the police all the power” to end crime are sensible policies, but it’s worth considering that American police have had a lot of responsibility creep over the decades by simply being those who governments have on hand when they need employees to carry out tasks.

Education

There is probably no single bigger “Can you people please be normal” issue in America than public education. For decades academics have come up with asinine pedagogical theories. There are endless concerns about kids using technology or being prepared for the “jobs of tomorrow” that may no longer exist by the time they enter the work force. There are constant appeals about “Competing with China.” Standardized tests are frequently changed so that schools can be judged and funded. Massive resources are thrown into a pit of urban schools that accomplishes nothing. At some point leftist activists decided that schools are the heart of the revolution and that they just need to get to the children. States never stop modifying curriculum that they can meet a bunch of different goals, many of which are not even desirable.

The truth is that kids learn to read like they always have. They should understand basic math. It is important to know how to write. Throwing money at this problem and constantly coming up with new schemes has only made things worse. The reality is if a kid leaves school literate and with basic math skills and ideally with some conception of the country we live in and his responsibilities as a citizen, he will be fine. Most people are capable of learning and if so they can learn or are not capable of learning and if so you are just wasting everyone’s time and resources trying to make them something that they are not. The results of trying to do anything different have been abysmal and it has made everyone unhappy. Academic results and school quality are never going to be equal. Some kids will be left behind because they are bad at school. Some schools will be bad because they are incompetently managed.

There is only one solution to all of this and it is our original system: school boards are elected. Communities get the school boards they choose, those school boards hire people, and hopefully those people do alright. Mostly Competent Pragmatism solves this entire issue. If there is a Fix Everything Easily Switch here it is to break up or at least de-fang the awful activist teacher’s unions, so that the school boards have the necessary control to perform their elected function.

We are fortunately seeing some return to sanity, with several Southern states abandoning “whole word reading” and going back to phonics and achieving impressive results.

It must be added here that the entire period of modern era panic about education quality has been at a time of mass immigration. Where I grew up apparently my school is highly rated, though it didn’t seem like anything special. My cousin moved in with us from Las Vegas when he was around 12 and they kept saying that he was so ahead they wanted to send him to a magnet school and he was behind here and really struggled, though he is a smart guy. As it turned out, native English speakers from English-speaking households were a minority in his school there, so he just seemed really ahead because he actually knew English. With mass immigration we basically set up an impossible task for our teachers and then instead of recognizing the challenges created just came up with a whole series of stupid ideas to try to cover for the fact that unsurprisingly immigrants from non-English speaking households with uneducated parents often don’t do great in our schools. Who would have thought!

Regarding higher education, one shouldn’t let some sort of ideological loyalty to “academic freedom” prevent government interference where necessary to make sure taxpayer funded universities serve their function. The Trump Administration’s moves to go after the courses teaching “critical race theory” is good policy. I can tell you from my own time in university I have never seen a person who benefited from these “diversity” courses. They radicalize people in both directions, antagonizing those who don’t believe in them while those who do believe in them end up demoralized and less happy and functional as individuals. Further, they specifically teach you to never accept society as it is, and that race and gender conflict are core parts of society, which means to never accept things being Basically Fine but to instead pursue idiotic goals. As far as training you for any future career, they more or less only prepare you to sue a future employer or to become the horrible HR person. If you take anything from these courses it makes you a worse citizen of your country.

Denmark provides an interesting case study in this regard. In 1986 after an independent review by the government, the sociology program at the University of Copenhagen was entirely shut down because it was ideologically captured by neo-Marxism and was concerned with political activism instead of quality scholarship. Now, the rebuilt one is one of the most respected sociology departments on Earth, because the government was willing to “violate academic freedom” so that the department could genuinely be a place of (social) science and rational inquiry. There was an article on substack about this last summer, and the author, Jukka Savolainen, argues as follows,

“When a democratic government establishes and funds a university, it carries a legitimate expectation that the institution will advance impartial scholarship and avoid political grandstanding. Hence, when academic departments become ideological echo chambers – prioritizing activism and suppressing free inquiry – the government has a responsibility to intervene.”

It is actually crazy that anyone would have let tax-payer funded universities mandate these courses upon students when they are actively harmful to society and the state, but that is what ideology does, it causes you to accept completely irrational things.

Trade/Economy

In general trade is good but free trade as an ideology has been a disaster because it only recognizes “Line Go Up” or at best getting the most goods and services at the lowest price. It is not obvious that either of these things are the best for the public welfare, but public policy has been geared towards tempting you to fill your house with Chinese junk as the corporations control ever more of the economy. This doesn’t seem to be making anyone happy or to do anything for the long term stability of the country. It’s notable that whenever there is “deregulation” it is almost always “let financial interests screw you in some new way” and never “leave small businesses alone.”

This entire issue calls for a non-ideological approach that uses the lightest hand possible while recognizing that a nation is more than an economic zone. I am overall a China dove but the morons who rule us have really created an artificial bind by promoting outsourcing on the grounds we would be a “service economy” and making us dependent on China for key goods while also maintaining high levels of tension with China for no good reason. Some of the things the government has allowed, such as letting China become our sole supplier of all sorts of pharmaceutical supplies are just crazy. It’s also the case that, free marketeers be damned, some of our greatest economic progress has come from times where the government was willing to partake in huge projects to develop the economy, such as the Columbia River Dam System, which not only generates massive amounts of power but also irrigates previously unarable farmland connects a large section of the country to ocean trade.

Trump’s tariff policies have been arbitrary, seemingly sparsely thought out, and have caused all sorts of unnecessary tension, but the general premise that we should collect revenue from tariffs and also show concern about certain industries is correct. It is important to let the free market work and try to make competent decisions, but the premise that the free market always works better than any government involvement- particularly in a holistic, health of the country sense and not just a “Line Goes Up” sense- seems to be largely made up. Both domestic manufacturing and diverse trade partners should be promoted, at times with government subsidies, and subsidies that don’t come with asinine policies like preferring minority businesses. It is completely reasonable to recognize certain unique or necessary industries within your country and to protect them.

An example of a good policy in this regard would be to promote component manufacturing in the Central American countries, particularly of things we need for medical or military purpose where in a large scale conflict we would be completely screwed by our reliance on China. The benefits of taking a hand in industrializing Central America are myriad. For one thing, it is divided weak states which will never present major competition to us, they are reachable by the sea from both sides and Mexico by land, and developing their legal economies will reduce emigration pressure and the power of the cartels. No specific economic or geopolitical ideology promotes doing such a thing, it is merely a recognition of real world conditions and positively using state power to do something productive in a way that doesn’t really hurt anyone.

A while ago there was this study below that showed 80% of Americans think it would be good for more Americans to work in manufacturing, but only about 25% would themselves be better off if they worked in a factory.

This was treated as some sort of own by ideological free traders who thought it showed that people like the idea of factory work but would not do it themselves. What this actually shows is that there is a policy that would benefit 25% of Americans and has 80% support. Only ideology would stop someone from pursuing such a policy sensibly and with what reasonable powers the state has to get that outcome. Nevertheless, ideology is such a blinder that people read something entirely different and just mocked the supposed hypocrisy of people who would not themselves want to work in a factory. It is particularly funny because given population age in this country, a substantial amount of that gap is simply the retired who don’t want any job.

I don’t doubt that prioritizing manufacturing is not the best way to continue the concentrate of wealth to financial interests, but it seems like it could do a lot for having a happy, stable, non-alienated population who form something of a coherent country. Economists can only tell a statesman how, in their view, to make an economy grow or perhaps what impacts certain policies may have. It is not their job to consider how the public prefers to live or what will improve them as citizens.

The Basically Fine States

A collection of states across the world, which all have unique attributes, can be fairly called Basically Fine. Most of them are small, middle income states with little relevance to global affairs. All have in recent years maintained political stability, avoided ideology, and minded their own business where possible to do so. It is noteworthy that most of these states are more or less aligned with the US, and one could argue this demonstrates that Basically Fineism requires a “security blanket” of a stronger and more ambitious state. However, I would argue instead that the United States is the country in the world the most likely to make you miserable if you don’t go along with them, so this is in most cases clearly a pragmatic recognition of real world conditions. These are not all the states in the world which could be called “Basically Fine” but most of the significant ones.

Some nations have Basically Fine characteristics but for various reasons are excluded, such as being petrostates, excessive ambition, or pro-actively playing a unique role in world affairs. Some countries which are on the edge of inclusion are Norway, Switzerland, and Oman. The last I particularly regret not writing about as Oman is a pleasant and modest country in a sea of extreme ambition (or dysfunction, in the case of Yemen), but it is more of a Gulf PetroMonarchy with Basically Fineist Characteristics than the opposite. Sweden is a formerly Basically Fineist state which fell to Ideology-Maxxing and Really Obviously Bad Ideas, but is similar enough to Denmark before doing those things to not merit a section its historical status, whereas with Canada I wanted a chance to write about how this relates to the English system of government.

In some instances Kunley has named these and written about them extensively. I will link to his writing where possible at the start of each section.

Denmark: Basically Fineism with Autistic Nordic Excellence Characteristics

Denmark is the archetypal Basically Fineist state and has been known for its rational and pragmatic governance for a century. Even getting occupied by the Nazis, when there was nothing they really could have done, Denmark was somehow spared the reputation as either a victim or an aggressor in the Second World War, which speaks volumes about the pragmatic and rational nature of the state and its people. The journalist John Gunther, who did have broad social democrat tendencies, was an enormous fan of Denmark’s government in the earlier part of the 20th century, when the rest of Europe was Ideology-Maxxing more than at any other point in history. To hear Danes talk about their country it can at times be somewhat depressing to Americans, who tend to see life as “make or break” (itself something of a privileged delusion promoted by those with a private generational wealth safety net) but by all accounts things in the country go well and this small nation of around 6 million is consistently competently governed with a view towards doing what works for the public. Besides Trump’s Greenland obsession, which they are not any more to be blamed for than “she shouldn’t have been wearing that,” and the aforementioned Nazi-occupation, for which the tide of history was irresistible, I could not name a single crisis or major scandal that Denmark has ever had in the modern era.

Denmark has at this point been mentioned throughout this treatise, as exemplary in its pursuit of Basically Fineism, but I want to give some more details about how Denmark has handled the migration crisis challenging all of Europe. Firstly, Denmark got itself some carve-outs from EU asylum policies in the first place, so has more sovereignty over these matters than other states in Europe. Unlike Sweden’s “humanitarian superpower” Really Obviously Bad Idea, Denmark just dealt with a persistent small flow of immigration as it came. The country is around 12% foreign born, however around half of those are workers from nearby EU states who will likely work in the country for a number of years and then return home, not third worlders they are never getting rid of.

Last year there was an interview between a BBC journalist and a Danish politician which presented a fascinating disconnect. The BBC journalist is asking why the country publishes crime statistics by national origin and the Danish politician replies, in short, that it is accurate information and the public has a right to know it when making decisions about how to run the country. He mentions that when the public senses something, IE that non-European immigrants are committing crimes at much higher rates, and the government denies it, this antagonizes the public. The BBC mind cannot comprehend this. The original video was taken down, so this is people discussing it, though they are quiet through the relevant part. I have this timestamped, but if it doesn’t work it’s around 16:50.

The video also discusses Denmark’s ghetto law, now known as the “Parallel Societies Law.” The crux of this is that majority non-Western neighborhoods or buildings are not allowed. This may be implemented through social housing policies, IE spreading them across the country instead of jamming them all into majority migrant Council Estates like in Britain, or in extreme cases buildings may be demolished. In the conversation between the politician and the British journalist, he says, “It seems like you’re targeting Muslims,” to which the politician more or less says “yes” and then explains that certain things like gender equality are key parts of Danish society and culture. There seems to be genuine concern about not antagonizing the public and maintaining the friendly and equitable spirit of the Danes, and one can sense that the government doesn’t hate the public. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Also to be clear, the Danish crime statistics are wild. In many countries they do absolutely gas light you even if they have to say things as stupid as “well most crimes in this 90% white country are committed by white people!”

Denmark’s PM Mette Fredrikson is one of the main innovators of Pantsuit Deportations and Denmark continues to value social cohesion and the happiness of its public over ideology or stupid EU “human rights” laws, which as it turns out force you to keep people who are 6.8x more likely to rape someone in your country. I suppose it should be added here that since Denmark is a functional country and abolished its neo-Marxist sociology departments as said above, it is unlikely anyone is successfully selling the narrative that this reflects Muslims being treated unfairly.

Even just watching Danish vs Swedish shows one notices the different racial makeup in the countries as well as the fact that parts of Sweden are heavily ghettoized. Netflix did recently release a Danish show where some sort of Muslim is a cocaine trafficker, but there isn’t a religious extremism aspect and he lives in a middle class neighborhood and is mostly around white people. Kunley notes that Denmark passes what he called “the McDonald’s test,” where the workers at McDonald’s and delivery drivers are not migrants, and in fact are often attractive young women a man might try to wife up. Of course, much of America does not pass that (though where I live does.) For all of this, it was just announced they are further stepping up deportations, “challenging the European human rights” framework and moving forward without waiting for court approval, like some sort of rogue state! How do they do it?

Canada (Historic): Basically Fineism with Apologetic Extractivist Characteristics

For most of its history Canada was the most significant and longest lasting Basically Fineist country in the world. While the British model of government is optimal for Basically Fineism, especially if your country is populated by 130+ IQ Anglos, Britain itself was too ambitious to really be called Basically Fineist and its involvement in everything left it lurching from one crisis to the next throughout history, whereas Canada calmly contributed some troops to whatever Britain had going on. Of course, unlike us, Canada patiently endured its status as a colony until it was peacefully freed and that did turn out Basically Fine. But, by all accounts Canada has now reached a point where things are Not Fine At All.

Canada’s often mocked national habit of apologizing for everything demonstrates the country’s proneness to Basically Fineism as this reflects a inherent desire towards conciliation that is a key part of the Canadian character. They have always been much less ambitious than the Yanks to their south. At the same time, Canada is in fact a brutal extractivist power that is a leading exploiter of the third world, a reality to which they would respond, “I’m sorry, I swear I’m your buddy, guy.” It is this disarming affability combined with expertise and willingness to go after natural resources which has made this sparsely populated semi-Arctic wasteland one of the most prosperous and stable countries on Earth, at least until perhaps 10 years ago.

While Canada always had some domestic problems, particularly regarding the Francophone population’s tendency towards separatism, most battles between Quebec and Ottawa strengthened the provinces- all of them getting the rights Quebec was demanding- instead of centralizing the state or causing dangerous dissension. It provides an interesting example of Machiavelli’s thesis that certain degree of conflict within a state can be the thing which strengthens it and leads to innovations in good governance.

I don’t have a coherent “theory of mind” for what happened to the white Anglosphere of the Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, the United States. At some point these countries lost faith in themselves and their history while simultaneously having the reckless audacity that they could absorb endless Men from Everywhere into the systems that they themselves no longer believe in. It is some sort of bizarre national humiliation ritual. No where is this more clear than “Land Acknowledgements,” which in the US was primarily a weird university and left wing conference thing, but which in Australia they say every time you fly in. The King himself gave a land acknowledgement in Canada, which clearly no one could have forced him to do and anyway it would be better than Canada should be a republic than that he say such a thing. Also, while Australia really didn’t make treaties with the Aborigines, in most of the Americas tribes did actually cede land, whether or not you feel those treaties were fair. One way or another, these countries have allowed endless immigration while they hate their own people and history. Canada went from being Basically Fine to suffering from almost every challenge to Basically Fineist government listed above. Just look at the fake “residential school” scandal started by some fake (feather) Indian that tore their country apart and turned out to be truly entirely made up, though which lead to many church arsons:

More than anything, mass immigration has Latinamericafied the nation, though in such a way that Race Communism with Hysterical Screaming Millennial Characteristics has at least for now remained dominant. Much of this was “second world” immigration, which is where we got the episode of their joke Parliament clapping for a former SS member and one of their top politicians, Chrystia Freeland, being an unreconstructed Nazi. What they have now though are endless (dot) Indians. The moron Trudeau let them work on student visas then issued infinity visas so all the jobs were taken up by Indians nominally going to school while working full time at the gas station or delivering food. A whopping 23% of Canada’s population was foreign born in 2021 and that is estimated to have gone up to 30% just by 2024. Many of those are “non-permanent residents” but do you think that if many Americans don’t have the stomach for mass deportations that the Canadians of all people will? Look at this:

Bear in mind that the last time the percentage was this high, in 1911-1931, immigrants were primarily pioneers busting out new land, and that’s also the era when immigration began to be restricted in the new world because it was too much. Just by 2024 the number would have gone off this chart. No one wants this many immigrants in their society and you can’t have a stable democracy with a strong national character living like that. The only system under which such a thing works is one where there is virtually no path to citizenship and preferably little or no democracy, such as the Gulf Monarchies. They say immigration is being reduced now, but Canada’s national character will prevent them from fixing this extremely difficult problem that Trudeau has gotten them into for no reason whatsoever. The South Asians are going to eat them alive.

On top of everything else, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while housing is far too expensive, wages are suppressed, there is a shortage of access to healthcare, and their generous social safety net is strained the government’s advice if you can’t make it in that society is “kill yourself.” Carney seems to be relatively less of an idiot, but Canada’s political culture is now one where all is subsumed by trying to make space for endless squabbling and grasping immigrants.

Costa Rica: Basically Fineism with Nothing Ever Happens Here Central American Characteristics

Costa Rica famously abolished its military in 1948 and everything has been Basically Fine since. Before that it was also Basically Fine and in fact the military was just the national marching band but no combat troops, a responsibility now taken over by various civil society groups. It is perhaps the best instance of the security of harmlessness on Earth. Throughout the last 75 years there has been endless strife and suffering in Central America and yet this stable little democracy just chugs along with no real problem.

It could be said that Costa Rica relies on the US keeping order for safety, and to some extent that is true, but also no one has any reason to want to harm it, and it has little others would covet. The thing is that is also true of all of the other Central American states, outside of Panama, and they have all had persistent conflict and political chaos. I need to emphasize again that in history while sometimes an aggressive state just attacks, more often war and conquest start from a long series of diplomatic failures and recriminations and low-level border conflicts. If you just don’t do that, you are more likely to be fine, and commonly such countries couldn’t properly defend themselves regardless, though on the other hand Yugoslavia (the most Basically Fineist of the Eastern Bloc states) did more or less defeat the Nazis in their country with limited assistance when it was considered to be suicidal to resist them. Regardless, for the most part if you have chosen the security strategy of being harmless and someone does covet your country for whatever reason and they decide to attack commonly they would just walk through without hurting you and start guarding your far border and at most demand free trade. As it has played out, Costa Rica doesn’t have a military and it has not caused any problems and allowed them to devote more money to social services and things which actually improve the quality of life of the public.

For all of that, Costa Rica is much less of a vassal of the United States than one would think. They only have a fairly normal security agreement about narcotics and the like and Costa Rica votes how it wants at the UN, including many times against the Cuba Embargo and for recognizing Palestinian Statehood, which are situations where the US is generally only supported by a few very close countries such as Israel itself and some tiny little Pacific Island nations. There is obviously a massive imbalance in power but its a nice little country that isn’t that important and never causes the US meaningful grief, so there is no reason to not leave it alone.

I am reminded of the Romans, who often favored this situation with states, where if they did not practice war they could have their own complete self-government. It could perhaps be something like our Marseilles, which was a “free city” for hundreds of years under Rome, though it is not always clear what that means. When Marseilles comes up in histories its usually because exiles were allowed to go there, either as a punishment or fleeing prosecution and then the Romans would not extradite them. It was something a fiction because obviously the Romans could take them if they wanted to, but it was a sort of pressure relief valve for the country. We should consider using Costa Rica in this same way, as a point of exile for powerful men we don’t quite want to prosecute but also need to be rid of. The public would dislike the idea of being punished with a “tropical vacation” but that’s because they would be thinking of themselves, not of the sort of ambitious high functioning man that exile is used for.

Also, while we are here, Kunley shared one of the funniest stories I have ever heard about going out into the rain forest with a Costa Rican guide and two German tourists, which I think is illustrative of how the Costa Ricans live.

Panama: Basically Fineism with Giant Tax Haven Characteristics

Panama indisputably owes its existence to a greater power, having been carved out of Colombia for the purpose of making the Canal. A middle section of the country was long owned by the United States, and both that section and the Canal were ultimately returned. Panama is absolutely a US vassal and when the US didn’t like its President Manuel Noriega he was quickly captured and brought to America to stand charges in a brief, brutal invasion (at this point I just assume such charges are made up, but have never looked deeply into this specific matter.) The country primarily makes its living off of ecotourism, as a tax haven, and off of the Canal, which of course is one of the most valuable shipping lanes in the world. There is complete clarity that the United States would overthrow any government in Panama that threatens its access to the Canal. A lot of what are called “Zonians,” Americans who lived in the Canal Zone before it was returned, are dual citizens.

They say much of the real estate in Panama is just sitting empty, built by people who wanted to get their money into the country and are hoping the population grows, but of course for the man on the street building a luxury tower no one will live in is all the same.

In 2023 Panama had an enormous political dispute over a very large Canadian copper mine, which they felt was a bad deal. There was a general strike, you know an actual one not Americans pretending, and the entire country was shut down. Part of the issue was that they didn’t feel that they were getting enough money. However, the bigger issue was that the mine was basically eating their rain forest and the public didn’t want to be a mining country. Panama is a fairly well developed middle income country, at least in Panama City, and it doesn’t seem the public was greedy enough to want the money at the cost to the value the environment provides their economy. It also used water necessary for the Canal, which was of concern to everyone (the lock system uses a lot of water, though it is not clear to me how much of it is consumed, as opposed to endlessly poured back and forth.) The mine is currently shut down while they decide what to do, essentially breaking the contract with the Canadian firm. What as interesting about this at the time, is many people were saying “No one will ever do business in Panama again!” Well, maybe not mining business which they’ve decided they don’t want, but the Canal and tax evasion and ecotourism will stay fine, and they seem happy to make a living off of those things.

It was notable when those protests were going on, which led to a Zonian shooting two teachers who were blocking a street, Americans couldn’t conceptualize it outside of a lens of ideological partisan politics. When the people were called “environmental protesters” it was imagined they were like the people who throw paint on paintings to stop oil, or 8 people shutting down a random highway, not a nationwide strike over a very concrete matter, and environmentalism in the sense of preserving beautiful local ecology and not letting a foreign firm pillage it, not in a vague “climate change” sense. The people killed were government employees whose union was on strike, not random Antifa malcontents. This was all lost on Americans, though to be fair the conservatives would have hated the public school teachers on strike regardless.

Of course, a tropical climate and beautiful nature as are seen in both Panama and Costa Rica are great attributes for living in a relaxed Basically Fineist country.

Uruguay: Basically Fineism with Latino Denmark Characteristics

If you think nothing has ever happened in Costa Rica, Uruguay is a country which has barely entered the historical record since the War of the Triple Alliance in the mid-19th century, and even then it was the most minor player of the four belligerents. A nation of 3.5 million people, Uruguay is the wealthiest independent country of any size in Latin America besides Guyana6, which struck oil and has experienced rapid GDP growth in the last 10 years. The sources of Uruguay’s wealth are not apparent, it has simply been peaceful for a long time and is urbanized. They have no special exports or industries. Historically, their primary challenge has been that the neighboring and much larger Argentina is a perpetual basket-case and an Argentine economic crisis damages Uruguay, but now their biggest trade partner is China. Uruguay technically avoided recession during the global financial crisis.

When John Gunther wrote Inside Latin America in 1941 he described Uruguay as “The Denmark of Latin America” (and then is fast to note that he means pre-Hitler Denmark.) He describes it as follows,

“A compact and homogeneous small state living on agriculture, highly progressive, orderly, and honest; a country that believes deeply in democratic institutions and honors them in practice as well as theory; a republic with as advanced social legislation as any in the world.” [335]

The state had much control over the economy including monopolies in several sectors. There was a great amount of social legislation, including a minimum wage extending to rural workers, a robust pension system, universal healthcare for the poor, and paid vacation. At the time, the trade unions were weak due to a lack of need for trade unions, and there was no unemployment. For around 30 years there was no military to speak of- not formally abolished, just entirely unfunded, but they did rebuild a modest military starting in 1940 due to fear of Germans. Currently, besides shore patrol functions, their military primarily participates in UN Peacekeeping missions, one of the 5 or so small countries that contributes a lot to these missions because they want to help out and don’t have beef with anyone and thus their presence is never provocative.

Over the last 50 years, Uruguay has seen some economic liberalization in keeping with more modern global economic and trade standards, but the state remains heavily involved in the economy and there are robust social programs. It is interesting that Uruguay did ultimately succeed at making “Line Go Up” more than other states in Latin America, many which would seem to have more natural advantages and had periods of extreme free markets. I attribute Uruguay’s advantage to what Machiavelli would call “equality,” which means to him both limited income disparity but also equality before the law. More than anything what has helped them has been stability and cooperation, instead of sudden and disruptive alternations between far left and far right, which leads to a situation where programs and regulations are rapidly implemented and just as rapidly removed. Uruguay has not gotten rich, what it has gotten is a comfortable middle class economic status for the general public, which is as Basically Fine as it gets.

Jordan: Basically Fineism with Anglo-Arab Characteristics

Jordan is known as the most modest and stable country in the Middle East. King Abdullah is half-British on his mother’s side. It is notable that as many bad things as people say about colonialism, it is a reliable feature of post-colonial countries that the ones with the best relationship to their former overlords will be in the relatively best economic and political position. This is unpopular among the anti-Imperialists, but is nevertheless accurate. Abdullah is particularly unpopular among some for his tolerance of Israel, but it is accepting reality which is the competent and pragmatic decision in these situations, and the country is already home to a whole lot of Palestinians.

Kunley notes from his time in Jordan an important principle about government,

“In Jordan whenever I asked people if they liked Abdullah II he would receive similar near universal praise. Here is a little trick in governance - if you are an actually mostly competent leader who doesn’t dislike your own populace you can get away with being a little ‘dictator-y’, if people like you enough they just let you do it.”

This is significant as all public opinion surveys show that several leaders we are told to detest as dictators are genuinely popular whereas many “democratic” leaders hang out around 20%, which makes one wonder if “fair” electoral democracy is actually serving the people’s will as well as what one might call “enlightened despotism.” Also, Arabs, in general, demand Boss Government and are not the type to appreciate pantsuit ladies telling them what to do.

Jordan, which has no special natural resources, is remarkable for its ethno-religious stability in a region known for exactly the opposite. In some ways the regime does act like a satrap of the Anglo-Americans, but the quality of life is better for the public than in most of the surrounding states besides the Gulf Monarchies. Jordan would perhaps be one of the less nice countries to live in of any on this list, but not being a “basketcaseistan” is a big accomplishment in this particular region.

Rwanda: Basically Fineism with Esoteric Kagameist Characteristics

How does one even begin to describe the Rwanda miracle? Besides possibly Nayib Bukele, Rwandan President Paul Kagame is the modern world’s sole Philosopher King. In many ways one shouldn’t call Kagame a “Basically Fineist” in that he is an ambitious man of remarkable success, but he started from such a bad point that getting Rwanda to the point of being the nicest country in sub-Saharan Africa (possibly tied with Botswana) is a truly incredible achievement. He took over the country in a worse state than Burundi, which has the same history, resources, and ethnic makeup, and has made it quite nice, while Burundi remains one of the world’s most impoverished countries.

The story of the Rwandan Genocide is not well understood in America besides that a lot of people died. Firstly, despite what you may have been told, the Hutus and Tutsis were separate groups in this Virunga Mountains region well before the Europeans arrived. More or less, the Tutsis are cattle herding nobles who arrived later, while the Hutus were agricultural serfs under them. Whether these constituted “races” is irrelevant, because they were understood as different population groups within society. The Europeans did sort them in arbitrary ways, I believe at one time by height (Tutsis are extremely tall, Paul Kagame is 6’2 and appears to be the shortest person in his family, including the women) and at another time by wealth. Regardless, it had been a kingdom with Tutsi nobility, but after independence the Hutus were in power, as they still are in Burundi. Of course as is done in such circumstances, the group with political power spent a lot of time blaming the group with economic power for all of their problems, as Tutsis are a fairly small minority, perhaps 15% of the population pre-genocide. Once the genocide started, Kagame and the Rwanda Patriotic Front, a rebel group based in Uganda, invaded the country and chased out the genocidaires, and the country has been under Tutsi rule since, with insanely positive results:

Though Rwanda has been ruled by a Tutsi since the genocide, Kagame’s policy has been to downplay ethnicity in favor of a single Rwandan identity. It seems to be the case that since everything is going remarkably well there is little resentment among the Hutus and even many in Burundi are jealous of their neighbor’s President. Humans are not, by nature, that ideological, it is educated into them either in universities or merely in the form of hatred and racial supremacy through demagogues, but most people don’t care how things are ran as long as the country is functional and they can feed and house their children decently. I don’t even know if Kagame has an ideology besides somehow winning all the time.

As well as having becoming relatively prosperous, Rwanda is remarkably clean. It’s true that Kagame is somewhat authoritarian, but so are most leaders in Africa and they don’t keep the streets clean nor make the proverbial trains run on time. Not that many cities in Africa are well mapped on Google Street View, but the ones that are generally have piles of garbage everywhere and endless half constructed or torn down buildings. If you drop a pin anywhere in Kigali outside of the city center what you will most likely see are well-kept single family homes in meticulously clean neighborhoods. It is rare to see a single piece of litter. One could argue all day about what we should value the most, but for normal people cleanliness, low crime, and functional infrastructure are enormous factors in if things are Basically Fine or a Total Mess. The method by which they do this is called Umuganda, meaning “Coming together for common purpose.”7 How this works in practice is that there is mandatory community service for everyone in the country for 3 hours on the last Saturday of the month, including the President himself.

A lot of rulers have tried this sort of thing, and it commonly breeds resentment and the countries still look bleak. It is hard to say by what magic this has worked so well, since this was a resented form of forced labor earlier in Rwanda’s history, and then these meetings were later used to mobilize Hutus for genocide. I couldn’t describe the clear truth better than Kunley himself did in a response, “It’s obviously easy to make something like this coercive and pointless if you design it in the wrong way, whether through incompetence or malice.” The upshot of all of this is that Kigali is one of the only cities in sub-Saharan Africa where an international businessman could live with his family in a normal part of the city- not an isolated gated community or upper class high rise- and feel good about it. And people have taken notice, with Kigali now being a top African city for international business. I should add briefly that the climate in the East African Highlands is among the best in the world- the average daily high temperature in Kigali is within 3 degrees of 80 all 12 months of they year and it has never gotten above 96 or below 48 degrees.

On top of all of this, Kagame somehow always wins at foreign policy to an incredible extent, both with these crazy deals to pay him to send migrants there as well as in his relations with neighboring DRC, which is almost 100x bigger.

I wish I could tell you how he does it. What I can tell you is that leadership matters and besides blaming bad leadership, almost every cause people attribute to Africa’s dysfunction must be untrue. I would expect the 68 year old Kagame to stay in power for the rest of his life, but we shall see if he has managed to fix Rwandan society or if this is merely the impact of one good leader, like Epaminondas in Thebes.

Singapore: Basically Fineism with Chinese Mostly Competent Pragmatism Characteristics

Singapore is a nice enough country, well, city-state, that it may seem like it shouldn’t be included as “Basically Fine.” However, unlike small Gulf States, it is not excessively ambitious and doesn’t have its hands in everything. Further, Basically Fineism is holistic, and we have to consider that there are some sacrifices to personal liberty in Singapore, so while the economic conditions are great, many may find it a less pleasant place to live than, for example, Denmark or Uruguay. That being said, Basically Fineism also recognizes the real world cultural conditions, and the other countries in South East Asia are generally similarly strict without producing the same quality of life. I’ve also heard law enforcement there is not as repressive as you would think, they just keep everything off the street, but the night clubs are still cool.

Firstly though, the premise that Singapore was some sort of undeveloped backwater upon independence needs to be debunked. It was in fact the most important British trade post and military base at the intersection of India, Australia, and Hong Kong, and they inherited quite a lot from the British. On the other hand, a lot of countries inherited a lot at the time of independence and still went to shit or did not add anything to them. With Singapore, it has been quite the opposite. Lee Kuan Yew who was the country’s Prime Minister for its first 31 years of independence did an incredible job with the newly independent country, making it one of the most prosperous in the world, in fact the highest GDP per capita PPP for 2025 according to the IMF. Lee Kuan Yew’s Mostly Competent Pragmatism form of government serves as a great example, and his son Lee Hsien Loong also proved a worthy leader, if somewhat less of a legend than his father. The People’s Action Party has now been in power for 66 consecutive years, which seems almost entirely attributable to actually consistently doing a good job.

One notable thing about Singapore is that it has managed to be this successful while being a “diverse” country that also hosts a large foreign population. This was seen as a necessary decision due to low birth rates among its affluent population, but only a small number of foreign workers are ever allowed to become citizens. It was accepted that the multicultural nature of Singapore could not be changed, but quietly, and then later admittedly, they made sure to only allow immigration into the country to match the existing demographic makeup, much as the United States once did when it had a better immigration policy:

As much as the “diversity is our strength” lie is repeated, changing demographics horribly destabilize countries, be it the Irish replacing the Anglos in Boston or Men from Everywhere filling up British council estates. By maintaining a racial balance they have maintained stability, and one can’t argue that it has stagnated the country: the GDP per capita has increased around 200x since independence:

Of course, there is more to life than GDP, but things are in a balance, and being extremely wealthy makes everything else more tolerable. This does make a great argument in favor of consistent free market policies, much more than Uruguay’s wealth relative to the rest of Latin America due to their stable democratic socialism. What I think is shown is that a fairly consistent political and economic environment with well understood rules that people follow is the most important, as well as not getting bored and Ideology-Maxxing or doing Really Obviously Stupid Things.

It is somewhat amusing that a city of this level of wealth is simultaneously so barbaric as to famously cane people:

I don’t know if I believe there is any good doing this to adults, but it would seem to me that no one in Singapore has a reason to commit crimes for economic reasons or really to be suffering from having had a highly dysfunctional or deprived life. Though he implemented this policy well before Singapore was as wealthy as it is now, one is left to wonder if anyone who would still become a criminal having grown up in Singapore can be reasoned with or shamed.

What I would say though is it speaks to all the bullshit we put up with for our own form of government that Americans will see a country where the the GDP per capita is pushing $200k a year and think that some people getting their asses beat with canes by the state is such a bad thing that the other lessons of the country could be ignored or that it must be a bad place to live.

Conclusion: For a Mostly Competent Pragmatism

It is the nature of any examination into the Art of Politics to show at least some concern to how things should be. However, while Plato may have invented a fictional Republic (that there is no indication he believed in as a form of social organization) for the great majority of history works on political theory were dedicated to examining things how they are, or at most using a fictional city to show the same. All of the great theorists spent their time examining different systems with the view of giving advice about how to adapt government to human nature and existing social organizations. Machiavelli deeply examined the ancient histories, but even in his own time, and more so later, people failed to understand that in most cases he was merely analyzing and explaining how things work, and in only few cases was advocating for how things should be. Those who looked deeply into the laws, such as Grotius and Montesquieu, were in many ways examining what the laws are, based on both precedents from Ancient Rome and also what is fair or natural to human nature.

It was not until John Locke that there starts to be more idealism, and this is also where the discovery of the new world and its colonization started presenting opportunities to try new forms of government based on study instead of simply based on power and traditional custom; at the time, Venice was really the only new city that had been established and given a unique form of government in perhaps nearly 2000 years. Locke’s Constitution of the Carolinas is a remarkable document that does recognize various rights of the citizenry, but it is also a deeply practical, reflecting the existing social and economic organization that it was meant to preserve in an orderly fashion. Our own Constitution of the United States of America did found a nation but again was largely a recognition of the traditional rights and duties of free Englishman and the ways which they could best be preserved under a Republican system.

I think it was with the release of Rousseau’s On the Social Contract that we began to see a move from “is” to “ought,” as they say. It is a curious little text to the well-read student of political theory looking back on its place in history. The main contribution this book makes is to re-state what every scholar knew about government and human affairs and add a new layer of pleas for how things should be which were in many cases fundamentally unworkable. In many ways this was the birth of ideology. What made it so nefarious was that it was targeted to the common man, who, encountering these ideas for the first time, found Rousseau a genius. The same criticism could be made of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, I suppose, but it was more narrowly targeted to matters at hand and further the American public was remarkably literate and well read so not encountering some of the ideas for the first time. This was of course followed by Marx and Engels doing something similar, where they looked at the eternal but often unnoticed conflict between the upper and lower orders in a society, and decided this could be permanently won, instead of just managed, and further that the lower orders would win it. From here we have seen every reaction, struggle, education and re-education fighting over these matters, and it has, for the most part, only resulted in human misery, even if there are good ideas here or there. Often, a man is made less personally happy and productive for the sheer fact that the bad ideas drilled into him have not been implemented, and those bad ideas being implemented would make him materially worse and less free, though perhaps subjectively happier since they are how he has been told he wants to live

Political ideology and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. The common man, now generally expected to be a responsible member of a self-governing free society, is meant to hold a set of beliefs which may or may not be relevant to his life or work at all. He is further expected to vote for his perception of the common good, though perhaps more commonly he expects everyone else is voting in self-interest and does so himself. It is often not apparent what the “Common Good” is, and he is more likely to serve it by using instinct and voting for a man who seems like he’s not a complete moron than he is voting for the person who agrees with him on some set of ideological beliefs about what society should be. However, as much as he may detest eggheads, it is hard to break the assumption that people in charge know what their doing and that the people who come up with political ideologies are not all morons.

Part of the problem here is the concept of “political science” itself. Now, you could say that what someone like Nate Silver does, with collecting and analyzing a large body of statistics, is a kind of political science, but overall, statecraft is an art not a science. Of course, how the idiots who rule us do it, statecraft is more like unskilled labor at the hands of a drunken fool, but men like Lee Kuan Yew and Paul Kagame mastered their art as well as Michelangelo mastered his. However, ideology, particularly progressive ideology, fails to recognize the art in statecraft, instead believing that a clearly defined set of ideas and doing what experts say is the best way for man to be governed.

An illustrative case of such insanity was during covid how the Democrats insisted on “listening to the experts.” I will grant you that listening is different from obeying (which is what they meant anyway) but beyond that the experts had already proved themselves morons, statecraft is its own art. An expert will think whatever thing he studies is the most important thing facing society and unless he is a man of great breadth and wisdom will likely tell you to do whatever works towards that specific goal. A statesman instead must look at several things, including what is possible, second order consequences, resource limitations, and perhaps more importantly, what the public wants and what it will accept. However, on the other hand, one shouldn’t be a slave to polling, as a leader leads and if things go well, the public will go along with you; the public will often go along with you leading them into folly as well, but it is the statesman’s job to not do so.

A few years into the covid nonsense, the economist Steve Hanke released a meta-analysis of lockdowns, which determined they were almost entirely useless and economically harmful. That much was obvious, but what is noteworthy is that detractors said, “These authors are not even epidemiologists, they are economists.” What was curious about this, or more accurately typical, was that they had specified in the introduction that economists look at second-order consequences and examine existing data, which isn’t what “public health officials” and the like generally do. In short, the people obsessed with trusting the experts are not overall capable of understand how expertise works, in that there is generally a large opportunity cost to specialization and in fact experts are regularly analyzing and contributing to the work of experts in other fields.8

What mankind greatly needs is to trust “the experts” less and to instead have political leadership who are are at least Mostly Competent at being political leaders. However, what is more important is to recognize the way things are and have a government that is adapted to the place, society, and economic limitations of the nation in which you live. Instead of letting ideology make you unhappy and ruining your society, realize that things being Basically Fine is all you need from the government and everything else you want should be sought through the wise stewardship of your own affairs.

My hope for all of this is that with his simple, if at times simultaneously esoteric, message and communication, Kunley has made a great parry against ideology, and can move us towards maintaining Basically Fine conditions where they exist and attaining them where they do not:

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Glossary of Terms

Here I will provide my own short definition of some terms used which may not have been previously familiar to readers.

• Anon: An internet user who generally has “unacceptable” views and thus uses an account which does not expose his real identity. The notable anons are more accurately pseudonymous rather than anonymous, using the same name for several years.

• Basically Fineism: A political philosophy based doing the best you can and seeking to make life pleasant while accepting real social, economic, and political limitations.

• Boss Government vs HR Government: The idea that the real pseudo-ideological struggle of our era is between politicians who act like bosses and those who act like HR ladies.

• Do Somethingism: The belief that it is better to recklessly act immediately than to wait and make sure you make a wise decision.

• Fix Everything Easily Switch: The idea that the reasons why things can not be improved are nonsense and that you can “just do things.” In many cases, more of a thought exercise.

• Ideology-Maxxing: Taking ideology to its illogical conclusion while ignoring real world impacts and limitations.

• Line Go Up: A disparaging term for people who think that GDP is the most importation measure of the health of a society.

• Men from Everywhere: Mass immigrants who are no longer from a single place or concentrated in their own ethnic communities, but who then come together and create a new multicultural ethnic culture and dialect, such as “roadmen” in Britain.

• Mostly Competent Pragmatism: A description of political leadership mastered by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew which eschews ideology in favor of having competent people do what works.

• Pantsuit Deportations: A form of immigration enforcement developed in Europe whereby self-confident girlbosses who appear to have a genuine interest in human rights humanely deport people.

• Really Obviously Bad Idea: The very dumb things that ruin Basically Fine conditions which ideological politicians come up with for no reasons.

• Scaring the Hoes: Upsetting the “normie” segment of your population who likely agrees with the bigger picture policy but is unable to handle seeing anything unpleasant.

• Skullcrusher Deportations: The antithesis of Pantsuit Deportations, where you do scare and chase all of the illegal immigrants out of your country without trying to appear compassionate.

• Total Mess/Not Fine At All: The antithesis of Basically Fine. A political and social situation of high tension where people hate each other, bad things frequently happen, and little works as it should.

• Very Serious People: A widely known derogatory term for mainstream think tankers and editorialists who are wrong about everything but nevertheless demand to continue to be taken seriously.

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Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

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Well listeners, who I should probably have some sort of name for, the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 is only hours away! Tonight Alexis and I go over last year’s bingo card and introduce this year’s.

Not a lot to say besides that. Here is last year’s card, filled out, such as it is:

Out with the old, in with the new, 2026 bingo:

Ok, well that is really all people, Happy New Year’s!

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As always, you can find Brad on Twitter @WaywardRabbler and Alexis @LaissezLexi.

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