The Trump-as-Caudillo theory revisited: Fighting Third Worldization through another form of Third Worldization?

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Shortly after the 2024 election, I proposed the term “Trump Caudillo Strategy.” (“Revisiting the ‘Sailer Strategy’ after the Trump-2024 victory”; see the section at the end of that essay titled “The Sailer Strategy vs. the Trump Caudillo Strategy”).

Now, past the one-month mark of the Donald Trump second-term, I ask:

Is Trump ruling as a caudillo?

If so, what does that mean? He ran as a caudillo, and marketed himself as one (which appealed to Hispanics and others). At this point ,he is governing as one–albeit with certain personal twists. It is a path littered with danger along the waysides.

Some are excited by Trump’s “U.S. president as caudillo” strategy. They see, or think they see, good things being done. I see a certain sluggishness on important things. I see a less-than-promising outcome compared to the what-could-have-been dreams of 2016.

In certain isolated respects, we can say 2025 is better than 2017. We also see demagogic frenzies over less-important things. We see much willy-nilly antagonism of allies without apparent purpose and other troubling things.

This man’s entire political movement was a great cry-in-the-wilderness political moment (long moment, now) to reverse Third Worldization. That’s the only reason he exists, politically. In ruling, he has adopted what really looks like a Third-World-like regime. (Remember much-mocked line somebody is reported to have said in 1968: “We had the destroy the village to save it.”)

The Trump-II administration moves are nominally to reverse Third Worldization. At least so his supporters believe and hope. It’s not at all clear what degree of commitment there is to this goal. That is a real problem. Without fierce moral commitment to a coherent agenda, it is a bad, bad thing indeed to have a government run by a narcissistic caudillo.

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The term caudillo is from Latin-American history. A caudillo is a paternal-autocratic leader. He is common throughout Latin-American history. Most Latin Americans recognize him readily. Many of them like him. He is tough, after all. He is a Big Man.

The caudillo‘s power, or let’s say his “regime,” is based heavily on personal networks and on charisma rather than disinterested principle. He is less on the common-good than we’d like from any government.

This term caudillo is readily adaptable to Trump and the way he has positioned himself politically, organizationally, culturally, and more, between the mid-2010s and mid-2020s. The term is apt given the turn towards rising popularity among Latin Americans in the USA, especially in the early 2020s. Hispanics, as well call them, turned towards Trump in some number despite the core-base support-layer rooted in White-ethnonationalism.

People have occasionally used this term, caudillo, to apply to Trump since the 2016 campaign. It is not a term that had ever previously gained much stock in U.S. (English). The fact that it caught on, is remarkable, suggesting its aptness to the situation.

Early in the Trump-I period, we saw this: “Trump is the U.S.’s first Latin American president,” by Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2017. (I took the graphic accompanying this essay from that article.)

More recently, a star Chilean journalist named Daniel Matamala has been writing and speaking about the Trump-as-caudillo topic. He recently titled an analysis of Trump-as-president thusly: “El Caudillo Del Norte.”

Geopolitical commentator Peter Akuleyev wrote this one week after the November 2024 election:

“[Trump] is extremely Latino. Many of the things about Trump that read as strongly effeminate to old line Anglo-Saxon men, such as his make-up, Liberace like taste in furniture, weird little hand gestures, speaking in superlatives instead of a calm recitation of facts – read to Latino men as caudillo behavior.” (end quote from Peter Akuleyev)

All the way back in October 2015, the longtime Steve Sailer commenter Twinkie, of East-Asian-origin, had his finger on the pulse when he wrote:

“If elected, [Trump] would be the closest thing to a populist-corporatist caudillo we will have seen north of Mexico.” (end quote from Twinkie)

Dave Pinsen had similar thoughts in January 2016, writing:

“Trump would do better with blacks and Hispanics than Romney did. Trump has been the subject of rap songs. His lifestyle and unapologetic wealth will play better with average blacks than any of Rand Paul’s warmed over Kempism. Average Latinos are also likely to respect him as a caudillo.” (end quote from Dave Pinsen)

At the height of the Republican-primary campaigning, in March 2016, a commenter named Astorian wrote:

“Surely, of all the people running [for the Republican nomination in 2016], Donald Trump is the only one who has the look and feel of a Latin American caudillo” (end quote from Astorian)

Longtime Steve Sailer commenter Reg Caesar wrote, in response to Astorian in March 2016:

“He may be a caudillo, but he’s nuestro caudillo.” (end quote from Reg Caesar)

A few weeks later, in April 2016, still in the Republican-primary season, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative, wrote:

“Donald Trump is clearly running to be an American caudillo, not the president of a constitutional republic, and his entire campaign is a cult of personality” (end quote from “Give Us a King!” by Ross Douthat, New York Times, April 30, 2016)

The comparisons kept coming, independently from other commentators, somewhat steadily, as the 2010s drew to a close. Sailer commenters Inquiring Mind and nebulafox wrote in January 2018:

“Mr. Trump is a very Latin American-style president. Not every Latin American leader is left wing. You got your left wing leaders and your very, very right wing leaders and all of them are “flamboyant” by U.S. standards? So could people consider that having Mr. Trump is a consequence of making the U.S. so much more Latin American, both in the intended as well as unintended ways? For the Open Our Borders to Latin America advocates, be careful what you wish for?” (end quote from Inquiring Mind)

“I personally think of Trump as the American Berlusconi. But I could see him as a right-wing Latin American leader-albeit of the corrupt, bombastic plutocrat type, not military caudillo kind.” (end quote from nebulafox)

Steve Sailer himself, who never endorsed Trump or turned himself into a pro-Trump propagandist een at th have, propitious possible moments when he could have, characterized Trump and his appeal thusly in December 2021:

“Trump [is] the kind of blond caudillo who appeals to the Latin spirit[.]” (end quote from Steve Sailer)

What each of these observers meant, exactly, by “caudillo” (or similar terms) may differ from case to case. Overall, though, it’s remarkable how prescient this commentary was. A great deal of the 2015-16 commentary remains applicable about a decade later.

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The point with the “caudillo” comparisons is not that Trump is supposedly a “populist.” Nor even that he is an “authoritarian,” “anti-democratic,” or other such buzzwords often heard. The specific strength of this term is that he is a Latin-American-flavored “strongman”-type leader, one whose approach, appeal, and philosophy are captured delightfully by the term.

The United States has never quite had a figure like that in the presidency. To find comparable figures one can only look to the annals of the history of the various Latin American republics.

When I proposed the term “Caudillo Strategy” in November 2024, I used it in a narrow sense, to refer to what Trump was doing in the 2024 campaign (and to some extent back to the 2010s). I used it to refer to the kind of appeal he was making, which was especially appealing to Latin Americans. This explains how he got more Nonwhite votes in 2024.

The “Caudillo Strategy” I contrasted, at the time, with the “Sailer Strategy.” The Sailer Strategy was the long-made argument that a White-Midwest-centric electoral coalition was the best path to win victories. In other words, appeal to marginal White-Christians and scoop up victories in the critical swing states in a Midwestern belt between Pennsylvania and Iowa.

The Sailer Strategy was demonstrably true, correct, the key, to the 2016 and 2024 victories. I argued so at the time. Despite being used imperfectly by Trump-2024, he still won with the Sailer Strategy. His victory was despite his actual neglect of the White-appealing Sailer Strategy, as he actually used a White-unappealing “Caudillo Strategy.” The momentum of Trump and the shock and outrage that someone like Kamala was being pushed forward as a plausible “President of the United States of America” was so outrageous that Trump was elected.

In November and December 2024, a lot of commentators made the wrong call, took the wrong lesson, in their various declarations that the Sailer Strategy was dead and that a Multiracial, Multicultural, Tough-Talking Caudillo Strategy was clearly-and-demonstrably superior. (Few if any commentators used these exact phrases; these are my own, but get to the heart of the thing.) I addressed this question of the Sailer Strategy’s correctness in 2024 in the essay “Revisiting the ‘Sailer Strategy’ after the Trump-2024 victory” and won’t do so further here.

In any case, the Trump Caudillo Strategy succeeded only because the Sailer Strategy was already in place. Call it piggybacking; or more negatively, if you wish, call it a degeneration of an original model.

The next step, however, was running the same sort of strategy when actually in government. That came in the early weeks of the Trump-II administration.

Whether it’s a good thing or not is a question we should be asking right now. We, as Western people, are committed (in principle) to a Western tradition of good government. We are committed to not tolerate Third World-style banana-republic politics and overt-nepotism and government-by-celebrity. The dilemma is, how to dislodge the problems of the USA in its postmodern, Third-Worldizing era. Problems, there are many. Is a caudillo the solution? Is this particular caudillo the solution? I know many are willing to give an unqualified “Yes,” to both. I cannot join them.

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Caudilloism, or Trumpist Caudilloism, as a defacto theory-and-practice of statecraft is simple and direct. As a theory of governing — that is to say, of running a polity — of reshaping the institutions of state, of the purpose of the state itself, of the role of a state’s leaders at home and abroad, it leaves much to be desired. Still the supporters are with him, because of implied promises of reversing Third Worldism, which there is little guarantee that he will pursue with any sort of sense of moral-mission.

The first month of Trump-II is full of signs of Caudilloism nestled into place. It’s not necessarily been effective, although we shouldn’t make judgements at this early date. We do know that Caudilloism, is by nature, not very effective. (See the “Sailer Strategy vs. the Trump Caudillo Strategy” for more discussion on that.)

A caudillo-like regime has been forced upon the U.S. executive branch, and as so often with classic Latin American caudillos also heavily influencing the legislative branch (most Latin American caudillos nominally led republics with nominal legislatures). It has all been done in an exciting or dramatic way: the Trump Show, per usual. It includes lots of anti-Wokeness sloganeering along the way. This sloganeering is exciting to many (and a quiet-relief to many more). A lot of the successes of the early weeks are reflective of Caudillo Trump’s marketing-savvy and decades as a hype-man for his own brand. Not all caudillos, historically, have done that. Many have. This one does.

Trump and his people have him as a tough-guy, big-man caudillo with centralized power, which flows through a patronage network around himself. There is a spirit of running roughshod over other nexuses of power, whatever they may be. He naturally wants flunkies. Characteristically for Trump, he sees in other demagogues and big-talkers — as long as they bend the knee to him and flatter him — a kind of spiritual-kin. One direct result is the large number of television personalities now nominally heading government agencies.

The big problem is this: He is running this Caudillo Strategy of Government without a core moral-ideological center. “He just makes things up as he goes along” is a common comment. That comment generally seems the best answer, a lot of the time. His consistent principles involve empowering his family and a taking-credit-and-moving-on maneuver he uses often. He doesn’t care about whether the thing he’s taken credit for was actually accomplished nor whether the accomplishment is a positive good for the ethnocultural core of the nation, nor of something as abstract as Western Civilization generally.

A caudillo regime (or Caudillo Strategy), if totally divided from a firm moral-ideological commitment — an ideology that is coherent and honorable, and which makes sense beyond slogans, personal whims, and close-in patronage networks — can become a little ridiculous, can sometimes turn dangerous, and eventually always undermines the state and civic culture. It’s generally a bad thing. Government on a basis of demagogic drifting along feelings-of-the-moment is a bad thing per se. White-Western people have known this for centuries. The tendency against this sort of rule might be said to trace back to prehistoric ancient times and the emergence of Western Man millennia ago (which is the argument of the political philosopher Curt Doolittle).

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Caudilloism is not a solution to Third Worldization. Caudilloism is Third Worldization.

The unlikely Trump victories of 2016 and 2024 (and the disputed-but-nominally-near-to-being-a-victory election of 2020) were votes by the White-Christian political-center against Third Worldization. U.S. developments for decades have included a kind of bottom-up, soft Third Worldization (actually a high-low coalition; that’s another story). Caudilloism is a case of overt-and-shocking, top-down Third Worldization.

Under Trump-II so far, we have seen the Caudillo Strategy in practice. We’ve seen people cheering or jeering. Predictable people cheer; predictable people jeer. A few dissenters have popped up, so far not enough to matter much.

Who does the cheering or jeering at the Trump-Caudillo moves of early 2025, and how loudly or committedly, depends on their chosen side. Their chosen side, that is, the politics-as-spectacle, politics-as-consumer-item cheerleading contest in this era of systematized “infotainment.”

(The term, infotainment, incidentally, was a jocular one when it was introduced in the mid-1980s. It referred to a light mixture of news or commentary with entertainment. “Infotainment” as a term or concept was still so-understood its heyday around the 1990s and early 2000s light items, fluff, not to be taken too seriously. By the close of the 2010s, the term “infotainment” had become almost obsolete as a concept: most everything that was nominally “information” or political discourse now resembled something more like the proposed “infotainment.” This is certainly true of a huge share of the consumption of political material on the Internet. It’s even true of many leading political figures: their m.o. resembles something like that of the characters from professional wrestling.)

It is largely White-Christians (along with a fair number of dual-citizens with Israel) who are the new heads of government departments and thus the face of the Trump-Caudilloist administration-regime. These faces do not change the spirit of Trump-Caudilloism. In classic Latin-American caudillo-type regimes, it was also often the White element that ran the state with “based brown guy” allies.

Today, we see the same: the White-caudillo rich-guy element and the base-brown-guy helpers like Vivek Ramaswamy. But here in the 21st century it is de rigueur to include also a lot of attention-seeking MAGA-women. Tulsi Gabbard, it’s just been reported, in her first week as “director of national intelligence” has studied the matter and decided there is too much sexism in the intelligence community. She has identified 115 males to terminate, on grounds of sexism. These men were not fired under Biden; they have been swiftly dumped under Trump/Tulsi! (Interesting! “MAGA are the real feminists”?)

Those cheering on the pro-Trump side, who remember the campaign-slogans and think they are real policy being determined with a fiery determination, they may still be right. I am not making any final judgements at the one-month mark of a 48-month presidency. I just don’t yet see it. A lot of people, U assume, vaguely think illegal-migrants are being deported because of a video clip they saw or a headline or two (media management). They’re so far not being deported at any abnormally high rate.

To those who think an unprecedented mass-deportation program is underway, the criticism of Trump-as-caudillo and why that’s bad is probably simply not comprehensible. Most people are low-info; but others are deeply morally committed to “confirming their priors.” This is definitely true, also, of the other side. (I’m reminded a bit here of the catastrophe of 2020 when the Pro-Panic coalition triumphed and held the whip hand for two long, dreary years. They never admitted their mistake.)

What are some of the immediate fruits of Trump-Caudilloism? A lot of really hardened demagogues with questionable motivations and clear non-suitability to power of a nominally-Western and White-Christian state are in, with consequences that cannot be foreseen. This includes the demagogue “Kash Patel,” and too many others to name. It also includes, frankly, Elon Musk.

These staffing decisions bear much in common with Trump’s reality-television background. A 21st-century media-guy’s variant on traditional caudilloism. Most of these people wouldn’t be there if their presence were based on strict judgement on experience and qualifications. They are where they should be based on personal-loyalty to the caudillo.

Normal functioning of the system, along with competence, are clearly secondary considerations. This often happens with caudillo-like regimes. The popular goal was the revitalizing White Middle America, of demographic stabilization and reversing inroads by non-Western immigrants, giving dignity back to Western Man, and giving the cultural-civilizational initiative back to Western Man, at the last in our own countries.

The typical classical caudillo, however, dealt with a substantially different reality: A White element was present in a typical Latin American society in which an old-style caudillo would rise to power. That White element was often not large, and intermarriages over generations undermined its integrity and the size of the full-White pool. The Whites in this kind of society and regime were often surrounded by Nonwhite elements of various shades and conditions. The landowning and other elite classes were often full-White with the occasional “Castizo”; as the generations went by, in many places a true full-European element was almost impossible to find and the quasi-White “Castizo” became replacement Whites for practical purposes.

By the way: see also the previous essay on the rise in the ideology of so-called Castizo Futurism on the dissident-Right. It grew directly from MAGA in the late 2010s, and found a place for itself happily within early-2020s MAGA. This movement, Castizo Futurism, reinforces the thrust of my Trump-as-Caudillo argument. (See: “On Caudillos, ‘Castizo Futurists,’ and a ‘steady de-Westernization of the USA under a right-wing banner’ scenario,” in “Sailer Strategy Revisited,” Nov. 2024.) (There are variants of this all over MAGA, such as J.D. Vance’s pride in his “Nonwhite sons,” who are in fact instant members of a high-caste Hindu global network.)

The typical caudillo of yore was interested in maximizing upper-class wealth and managing the rest. The typical caudillo regime was really “a tyranny of low expectations” in many ways. Is that Trump? Stripped of the bluster, the big-talk, the stage-managed theatrics, and the hype. Is it a tyranny of high-drama plus low expectations? He just wants to be let alone to declare victory and move on, and then be widely praised. Besides the consolidation of power around himself and an inner circle, what is his goal?

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Many-a caudillo would snap back and some of these criticisms made in this essay. They’d say: Hey, it’s the other guys who were/are the problem. Often, this means predecessors. They are the real ones who were unqualified! They ruined the country! Trump rarely neglects to blame Biden or others even when so doing is irrelevant. It’s a demagogue’s tactic. It’s also “weasel-wordy” and even dishonorable. Trump constantly engages in weasel-wordery and other forms of blame-shifting and buck-passing. It may even be a form of laziness, although few would use that word to describe Trump. A better word may be uncreative.

Not all demagogues are aspirant caudillos. Definitely not. Many demagogues are, in a sense, harmless. Many of them are comparable to con-men, out for money or attention. This type of demagogue has developed a skill in how to get those things through big-talk. Conversely, not all caudillos are demagogues. Many caudillos shun demagogic big-talk and prefer to be silent and handle things with a veil of dignified silence. Trump, however, has the instincts of both the demagogue and the caudillo.

Trump has gotten very lucky: His opponents were often quite ineffective (and were demagogues themselves in many cases), and his own demagogic skills tapped into a huge reservoir of decades-in-the-making White resentment against their orchestrated dispossession. This in addition to his pre-existing celebrity and the political-cult that developed around him, was enough for his unlikely-and-undeserved string of victories.

The problem with elevating such a figure as this became clear soon enough: His demagogic instincts are turned against friends and allies. White-Western institutions are undermined and made into a bit of a farce. His fans will still cheer, but I cannot join them if I see so much less commitment to such things as reversing Third Worldization, encouraging large-scale removals of illegals, and a firm demographic-stabilization policy. Does he really seek to fight Third Worldization by turning to another kind of Third Worldization (Caudilloism)? Alongside “based brown-guy” allies and girl-power-MAGA allies?

A reality-TV-inflected variant of the Caudillo Strategy is a troubling thing. It’s troubling for all the classic reasons that we in the Western tradition have tended to hold the caudillo (as type) in disdain, as a sometimes-necessary-evil at best. I see it as a tragedy that it was Trump who ended up in the role he did.

Yes, it’s the fault of the Woke Left, for they gave fuel to the fires kept burning for years by the various smaller-time demagogues in this new Trump-Caudillo world. Yes, Wokeness did need to be confronted and reversed. In system terms, we can say the fault of the inability of a non-Woke Left to suppress their wackos (as some on the Left have been saying lately). To stop there, though, is to fail to meet the issue of the day.

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The persistence of “high trust” in Europe west of the Hajnal Line and the future of Western uniqueness in the 21st century

What is the West? What is the source of Western success? How are Western people different from others (“the Rest”)? What is unique about the West?

Many volumes can be written on these questions. A large amount, however, is captured in the sociological concept(s) of High Trust versus Low Trust. The West is relatively high trust. This one metric, “trust,” symbolizes a lot of things, good things at social scale, if you can get and keep them. High trust both reflects and creates functional institutions; it is associated with positive feedback-loops. As the political philosopher Curt Doolittle has written:

“What is Europe? It is a civilization defined by heroism, excellence, beauty; by sovereignty, reciprocity; by capital-t Truth and duty. It is “truth before face, regardless of cost,” which is something that only heroes can bear.”

Within Europe, however, we see a definite gradient towards a Western “core” and a “periphery.” The core is northwest of the “Hajnal Line”:

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Quantifying the West’s super-power: social trust

My goal here is to present some findings and observations from a recent look-through I did through the latest World Values Survey. One question in particular (Q61) shows the Hajnal Line division so starkly that it begs close consideration. I give the matter its due with this medium-long essay (7500 words). We stand at the cusp of the “mid-21st century” — the year 2025 being year-one of the second quarter of this century of ours — and the direction of the West is an evergreen topic.

The most-recent round of the World Values Survey (WSV) had seven questions asking how much respondents trust various sorts of people. Respondents are statistically-randomly selected respondents in dozens of countries. The WSV employs the best in statistical sampling methods and is long considered a gold-standard for international apples-to-apples comparisons of this kind.

Much sociological work has been done from the WSV results, including this famous cultural map:

Here are the World Values Survey questions related to trust: Q57.) agree/disagree “Most people can be trusted”; Q58.) Trust in your family; Q59.) Trust in your neighborhood; Q60.) Trust in people you know personally; Q61.) Trust in people you meet for the first time; Q62.) Trust in people of another religion; Q63.) Trust in people of another nationality.

Looking at the results of Q61, “Trust in people you meet for the first time,” we see a really remarkable variance across regions of Europe. The highest-trust by a good margin is Northwest Europe; parts of western- and central-Europe is mid-to-high trust; while far-eastern Europe, southeastern Europe, the Balkans, and parts of the Mediterranean-fringe are low trust.

Here is the raw data for Q61:

Sorting these responses from highest-trust to lowest-trust divides sharply and clearly along “Hajnal Line lines” (see List 1, List 2, List 3 below); just how much this is so, and what it means for past, present, and future of Europe and the West, will be the goal of the rest of this essay.

Revisiting the “Sailer Strategy” after the Trump-2024 victory: Whites cast 80%+ of Trump’s votes, but some call the Sailer Strategy obsolete–Why?

The Sailer Strategy, proposed in the early 2000s by Steve Sailer, argued that the Republican Party’s focus should to maximize its share of White votes, and specifically on Whites in Midwest states. Appeals should be made to the White voters there, not goose-chases to chase Nonwhite votes across the map in a blunderbuss approach.

The Sailer Strategy implicitly said that the R side should shift towards policies White-Midwest voters like, amounting to a message of: We are for you, the other side is for Third Worldization. This was a rather radical proposition back in the 2000s. But by the 2020s, it’s seen as a kind of self-evident truth. The Big-Blue coalition dislikes this strategy because they have seen, now, twice that it works:

A large majority of the attention in the 2024 election focused on exactly the states Sailer pointed to twenty years earlier. Some have called Steve Sailer a prophet of the Trump-MAGA movement, or at least the Trump electoral strategy, for that reason. Trump implemented the Sailer Strategy implicitly, to greater or lesser degree. And twice won with it.

The idea with the original Sailer Strategy was: if even a limited number of Whites in those states could be persuaded to defect to the Republicans, the states would tip like dominos and assure Republican victories: a stable and winning electoral-coalition strategy, all hinging on improving the White vote-share by the Republicans. This sounds like an obvious strategy, but was not really being used in the 1990s or 2000s at any scale. Certainly not in any of the presidential campaigns.

The political-prophet Steve Sailer (b.1958), a California native, had witnessed California tip into a strange mutant of a once-classic-American region: a “D-supermajority, high-low coalition, political oblivion.” Sailer knew the importance of rallying Whites before, as it were, “it’s too late.” It may have been “too late” for California already in the 1980s. Enough people didn’t quite realize it until the 1990s, well past a point-of-no-return. The big fight of our time involves a national-scale version of California. (The D side and the Regime know it well.)

In any case, now that Trump has won the U.S. presidency for the term January 2025 to January 2029, we have time to re-assess. People are scrambling to figure out what it all means.

The question of the day, in the mid-2020s, is whether the higher number of Nonwhite votes that Trump secured running in 2024 against Kamala, the worst candidate in U.S. history, whether that indicates that the Sailer Strategy is obsolete. I say it is not obsolete, but this is a problem that needs to be walked through, a bit. And so in this essay I “revisit” the Sailer Strategy. I am hopeful that the man himself will soon get around to writing a full-form appraisal of the career of his own eponymous strategy. I have a feeling he will.

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On the metapolitics of Israel and Jewish ideological-power relations with the West: Dennis Dale on “blood libel” mythology and Israel’s wars

The State of Israel’s neverending supply of wars, confrontations, terror-bombings, mafia-like assassinations, blackmail, occupations, and ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations is a useful jumping-off point for a deeper ideological-political discussion that needs having: The psycho-political and ethno-political aspects to relations between the Jews and the West.

After all, we Westerners are the historical host-population[s], and current-day patrons (as some would call it), of Israel today. We cannot dismiss the nuclear-armed mafia-state of Israel and its neverending aggression and destabilization as something distant, something of which we can wash our hands.

And the Jewish intellectual-tradition, so influential and successful in the 20th century, casts a long shadow. We still tread here in that shadow at the cusp of the mid-21st century. Discussions that need ‘having’ stare on from just beyond the veil, waiting to be had.

Dennis Dale delivers, in excellent form:

Israel Slaughtering Children, Jews Hardest Hit

Dennis Dale writes without fear or favor, in the best tradition of the essayist. In other words, he is no toady and no coward. He thinks, and allows himself to write, from an uncompromised, uncompromising pro-Western position. That also with discipline and thoughtfulness.

Mr. Dale’s essay “Israel slaughtering children, Jews hardest hit” (October 2024, Dennis Dale Untethered blog; see also Substack-mirrored version) is not actually primarily about Israel. It is about Jewish-Western relations and the course of civilizational history. In other words, it is a big step above merely scrapping over the headlines.

Ideas are power: The concepts of Jewish moral-superiority and White-Christian moral-inferiority, and how these translate into power terms, matter. There is no way to understand Israel and its wars, and the West’s strangely-passive-patron positioning, without these ideas. The exact same applies to the West’s wider civilizational course. But the middle-of-the-road Westerner — certainly the middle-of-the-road North American — never ‘sees’ these things discussed directly. He lacks the power, therefore, to even think about them. A useful purpose is served thereby, by the side that orchestrates this conspiracy-of-silence.

Kamala Harris and “female solipsistic-narcissism” in the realm of the political, in early-21st-century USA

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Peak Stupidity suggested recently that Kamala “may have never expected to get this far up in public life” (emphasis mine).

The short response to this is: This would be a valid observation if Kamala were a male. But with Kamala, we enter a world of female solipsism.

An understanding of “solipsism” as applied to the political is key to understanding Kamala. It is key to understanding applied feminism, Wokeness, and really our politics and culture generally in the 21st-century.

In women and people of non-Western origin, there is a tendency towards believing in magic as regards their personal situations, in their personal worlds. You see it even in relatively-high-IQ, high-functioning people. It is solipsistic narcissism at work. That’s Kamala.

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(This ‘meme’ is at once satirical and non-satirical.)

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“Too many preachy females dominating the culture of the Democratic Party,” said longtime Democratic strategist (and White-male) James Carville in early 2024. Many more such commentaries came out in late-July and early-August 2024, comparing the Democratic Party’s latest attack on White Republicans as “weird,” for being a sign of a fully feminized party, a “Mean Girls” tactic. This from a syndicated column by Daniel McCarthy, “Kamala Harris and the ‘Mean Girls’ election,” July 30, 2024:

“Immigration, foreign crises, inflation — Harris is faced with all the failures of the administration she shares with Biden, without having his decades of experience to draw upon. So instead of making issues her signature — other than abortion — she’s conducting her campaign like it’s a deleted scene from ‘Mean Girls.’ 

Like cliquish teenagers bullying their classmates, the Harris team has taken to labeling their rivals ‘weird.’ Campaign statements and social media posts brand Trump ‘old and quite weird’ and his running mate, J.D. Vance, ‘weird’ and ‘creepy’.”

The feminization of the Democratic Party will also tend to empower solipsism, and its malignant psychological-political offspring, “solipsistic narcissism.”

Some psychological theorists state that “solipsism” is the default thinking-mode for women. They say this is, evolutionarily, necessarily so. It is vital that she who takes care of children care intensely about immediate surroundings, to keep the child(ren) alive and healthy. At social-scale, that same kind of solipsism, applies to the realm of ideas and policies, leads in bad directions.

The Democratic Party as ‘apparatus’ and as Regime-party; a reflection on how power works in the USA, one day after the anti-Biden palace-coup succeeds

Biden was removed in palace coup. The principal events of the coup played out over twenty-four days starting abruptly in late-evening June 27, 2024. The lessons for how “power” works in the U.S. system are there for the taking.

The coup-plotters were identified by many of us in late June already. Ann Coulter did so, publicly, on July 8; by many others, including me, in late June already. Biden likely also saw it, despite his administration’s top-heaviness with same ethnopolitical element that took him down.

This was what Biden said on July 8 when faced with the coup-plotting by Pharisees, and in an above-board sense there is no denying he has a point:

“Do we now just say [the Democratic-primary] process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say? I decline to do that. I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year. It was [the Democratic Party voters’] decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals… How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?” — Joe Biden, July 8, 2024

The pressure by the “press, pundits, celebrities, and big donors” was ceaseless, a nonstop deluge of propaganda resembling wartime disinfo-operations, fabrication of narratives, or something out of the early Corona-Panic itself. They had normally only run ‘ops’ like this against Trump. A lot of people noticed this and were uncomfortable with it; but the deluge never stopped, except for a few-day reprieve after the July 13 shooting of Trump.

Ann Coulter, on the same day as Biden made his strongest case for staying (July 8), said:

“The New York Times and the ‘donors’ are one-hundred-percent opposed to Biden… The Democrats will do anything to replace their candidate, if they think that candidate is going to lose… The only people standing by Biden are Black people. This entire fight [over whether Biden should be removed] is between the Blacks and the Jews. Those are the two most-important constituencies of the Democratic Party. We’ll see who wins. My bet’s on the Jews.”

That was Ann Coulter voicing a view that she (along with the betting-markets) had come to, probably already in late June . The early voices shrilly raising the bloody-shirt and demanding Biden be killed-off and dumped in the ocean were almost all members of the ethnopolitical group that Ann Coulter mentioned there. One can check the early names.

Of those releasing “Biden Must Go!” invectives within the first 36 to 48 hours, almost all the names match up; many are dual-citizens or have family-ties to the IDF, and the like. It was obvious to me, already by midday or so June 28 (<18 hours after the debate), what was happening, by whom, for whom. Here was a comment from June 28th at Peak Stupidity:

The British political-jailbreak attempt of 2024: Reflections on the attempt to destroy the Conservative Party

[4,000 words]

The British people are nearing a revolutionary mood, or so it seems. Such a mood they expressed, this year, on the day associated with the American Revolution: the Fourth of July.

In the British general election of July 4, 2024, the UK’s Conservative Party got its worst-ever result. A specter now haunts the land, a specter of a White ethnonationalist political-force willing to act in concert and punish those who betray it.

The new oft-ethnonationalist political-bloc is no single party, no niche movement. It is psychological. It has declared itself the enemy of the Conservative Party (and vice versa). The cordon sanitaire is broken. Just as we have seen elsewhere Western Europe. Britain, a late-comer to this game, has finally arrived. Welcome.

The results I give in popular-vote terms:

The table, my own, shows the magnitude of the anti-Conservative political revolt. The scale of vote-shift may not seem like a lot, but there are many reasons to take these results as a major milestone, as will become clear in this essay.

____________

Again to fall back to the “Fourth of July” connection: The UK’s Conservative Party has long carried the nickname “Tories,” the name as used by the pro-royalist faction of British politics in centuries past. In the 1770s-80s, the “Tories” were opposed to the independence movement by the North American colonies, and every American will have heard the term “Tories” in history class to refer, at least, to anti-independence residents of the North American colonies.

The July 4, 2024 election date was set by the Hindu-Indian-origin prime minister, Rishi Sunak. What an interesting alignment across time. The 1776 incident associated with that date was an anti-Tory revolt; the 2024 election back home, associated with the date, was likewise an anti-Tory revolt.

A study of White ethnic-dispossession and ‘replacement’: Maryland’s Prince George’s County, 1970s to 1990s

Last week, a Steve Sailer commenter named Colin Wright recalled a scene from his life, some years ago, in which he had helped a friend in Washington, D.C., move house: “[Every] night, dog-tired after putting in our twelve-fourteen hours, we’d get lost [on the way to our accommodations] and wind up cruising DC’s ghetto for an hour in the dark. I did not need that. Not with everything else.”

To this came a reply from Ennui, apparently former area resident of the area, with more tips. Ennui said that among the areas to “avoid” in the Washington, D.C. region was the entirety of Prince George’s County. That’s quite a statement statement given how big the county is.

That’s Prince George’s County, in the state of Maryland: 482.5 square miles in size (1250 sq km). eight times the land-area size of the “District of Columbia,” which it borders to the east. Here is a map:

Prince George’s County is a racial-political tragedy. Prince George’s County is the story of the perils of migration and ideology. It is a story of U.S. “race politics” in a sense, but it bears lessons for Western Man wherever he may be found. South African Whites will recognize the story, at a far-larger scale.

Prince George’s County was, within living memory, 90%-White. That was as of the 1960s. Today, the active population is something below 10% White, and many of those are elderly who’ve never bothered moving or otherwise embedded in all-Black environments in one way or another. Of core-population and the family-raising population, it’s far below even 10%.

Prince George’s County late-20th century story was a true, “Great Replacement. Whites, out; Blacks, in. How? Why? When?

Dennis Dale on Steve Sailer: the perils of success

Dennis Dale is a longtime, loyal Steve Sailer reader. He has, this past week, loaded up the catapult and blasted into the Internet an interesting Steve Sailer-related essay, timely and frank. His appraisal of Sailer, while not totally hostile, is certainly no hagiography. Any Sailer-reader of Sailer-interested person would do well to read it.

“I have come to bury Steve Sailer,” says Dennis Dale. “And to praise him.”

Here it is:

“Noticing and Nothingness,” Dennis Dale blog (also, mirrored on Substack), May 2024.

(DennisDale.com and Dennis Dale Substack).

Dennis Dale should be commended for producing such a valuable assessment of Steve Sailer’s work and public-profile, and Sailer’s place in our discourse as things stand in the mid-2020s.

Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston, believes “every human-being has the legal right to come to the United States”: Michelle Wu as a biographical-ideological study of the U.S. elite in the 2020s

A woman by the name of “Michelle Wu” is, for some reason, the mayor of the City of Boston.

Michelle Wu’s ideas on what America “is” and what America is “for” are worth some analysis and commentary, which is what this essay will be. The questions we seek to answer are: “Who is Michelle Wu, how did she get where she is, what makes her think the way she does, and what is she ‘up to’?”

Included will be substantial biographical-investigation elements into the origins and political-career of Michelle Wu, and what these things have to say about the state of the U.S. elite in our time.

Before adding another word of further comment, let me quote the remarks made about immigration-and-nationality policy, delivered by Michelle Wu on May 12, 2023. Quote:

_______________

“Every person, every human being, has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum, or shelter. Those policies have been in place for a long time.

…[As for the ‘process’ that allows for a] ‘pathway’ to stay, and/or work-authorization that comes along with that: when that process is so drawn out, people are stuck. They are looking to work, looking to contribute, looking to be in a safe democracy where they can raise their families.

We, at the city level, are now dealing with many of the impacts of the processes [that have] people ‘falling through the cracks’ at the federal level. We’re working very closely with the state.

This is affecting municipalities across [Massachusetts]. [We are trying to] ‘triage’ the situation, to create temporary housing so that families can get settled.”

[End quote from “Michelle Wu,” Mayor of Boston, on Boston Public Radio, May 12, 2023; see timestamp 14:48.]

While these comments might be called “tone-deaf,” they are better seen as a “triumphalist,” braggadocio-tinged assertion of a “post-American future.”

Who is responsible for the decline in family-formation in the U.S. and the rest of the West?

A few months ago, we presented George Gilder’s 1973 “Sexual Suicide” essay here at Hail To You. The essay was the forerunner of a hit book of the same name (Sexual Suicide). From it we get a snapshot of the status of the “opposition” during the genesis period of modern Feminism. It’s a fascinating document in that sense.

The Sexual Suicide book caused quite a storm at the time. Its arguments are still enough to “rile feathers” in 2023, as we shall see in the forthcoming discussion. Except the great bulk of the whole discussion is now a semi-taboo, so no feathers are ever presented for any ruffling.

A commenter here at Hail To You says that both Gilder (a “propagandist”) and those interested in his arguments (“know-it-all menboys who search for truth on slanted pages”) are immoral people who cruelly seek to harm others. (“Others,” namely, women; but also lots more members of historically-oppressed groups, perhaps.) But, if that be the case, what is the correct approach to the family-formation problem in which we seem to be stuck? What is the answer?

The question of family-formation, as such, is seldom raised directly in our time. The taboos against asking it are now strong. And, so, it doesn’t really have a place in U.S. political discourse…