I’m about to piss you off no matter who you are. By the time we’re done here, we will show that the lady who got shot today is definitely an idiot, the cop that shot her is very likely guilty of manslaughter, the Republicans and Democrats have both been assholes since at least the 1992 election, which by the way was stolen with game theory mathematics, and the dude least responsible for any of this is Paco at the Taco Stand. To make this long, twisted case we’re going to have to go all the way back to a 1990s Texas businessman with big ears. But first let’s get the shooting analysis out of the way.

The January 2026 ICE Situation

There are good cops and bad cops, and the bad ones tend to cluster around other bad ones on an agency-by-agency basis. Some of the worst bad cops, worse even than the ATF, are the Enforcement and Removal cops of ICE, who must be selected for having the sort of personality that is neither friendly nor helpful. Their entire job, which is a legitimate and real and necessary job, is to throw kids in cages and yeet them back to their nation of origin with metaphorical trebuchets. They’re like repo-men, but for humans. We’ll discuss how this is a legitimate and necessary job, if obviously very not-nice, in modern societies later.

We only had a few thousand of these guys a few years ago, but Trump hired twelve thousand more to try and meet a one-million-man deportation quota he imposed on himself which was impossible to meet because he did such a good job of shutting down the border. Biden’s deportation numbers are always going to dwarf Trump’s because Biden’s borders were open and his deportation rate was propped up by a vast catch and release program within fifty miles of Mexico. Trump shut that down, the deportations collapsed, and he couldn’t meet his artificially high quota so he hired a bunch more ICE enforcement and removal guys without time to properly train them. Lots more. And this created a highly dense concentration of the worst of the asshole cop types in the same organization. Assholes seeking employment to do asshole things.

Then Trump sends two thousand of these guys to Minneapolis. Why Minneapolis? Certainly not because it’s a border city overrun with Mexicans, because it’s not. Certainly not because it’s disproportionately a drug smuggling or gang crime focal point, because it’s not. He probably sent them there because Minneapolis is a haven of neoprogressive wokes and he wanted to fuck with them and fuck with Minnesota’s neoprogressive governor who ran against him nationally the last election cycle.

But the neoprogressive wokes love this, because Minneapolis is the beating heart of the Black Lives Matter riots, the largest and most destructive protest movement since Rodney King, responsible for more damage to the country than a category 2 hurricane. And the neoprogressive woke virtue system is all about fighting fascism. Their hobby, panacea, and life goal is to become an Instagram Martyr by getting abused, beaten, or killed by a fascist cop while all their friends film it on their cell phones to try and move the political needle, and then they can carve “almost as cool as MLK” on their gravestone. Who needs Jesus when you can farm virtue from the likes and shares, and ink yourself a corner office in Woke Heaven, or at least a little bit of Blue Hair Strap-on Strange?

So you have this concentration of several thousand poorly trained masked fashy plain clothes S-tier asshole cops and an equal concentration of ideologically monolithic NPR addicted bad-cop-provocateurs in one location like a kind of a Manhattan Project Demon Core, but substituting nuclear fissile material for political anger. There is no universe in which we build that monstrosity and someone doesn’t eventually get shot.

Shooting Controversy

In the obscure and erudite lore of the online rationalist community, there’s a story by Scott Alexander called Sort By Controversial, which tells the fictional tale of an AI named “Shiri’s Scissor” built to generate maximum controversy. If the video of the cop shooting the protester lady showed her obviously trying to ram a cop then the blues would shuffle away from this argument. If the cop walked up to a protester and shot her in the back of the head the reds would say “yeah uhh, we’re out.” This shooting had the exact right mix such that everyone can watch the same video and use it to buttress their own preconceptions about the thing. It’s Shiri’s Police Shooting, the shooting to create maximal controversy. Here’s the best video I’ve been able to find, which has been reposted by both blue and red sources:

This is another angle that’s worse:

There’s a third vantage point I’ve seen which seems to show the cop getting bumped more than either of these, but I can’t find it anymore.

As some of my regular readers may know, I’m a writer focused heavily on gun rights, and pursuant to that I’ve absorbed a fair bit of knowledge about the nuances of gun self-defense law from my time sitting around with John Correia of Active Self Protection in the media room at SHOT Show. I won’t claim to be an expert, but I’m more expert than many of this blog’s readers, and this is my take, which for the record may very well end up exactly the opposite of John Correia’s in which case you can presume I’m wrong.

While the car was technically “accelerating,” it was basically unmoving when the cop drew and shot. We know that the cop was never in danger of being run over because he could easily step aside the car. We know this because he literally did exactly that. Then after he fired his first shot through the windshield he followed that up with two additional shots into the window of the car when he was not even in the car’s travel path, both from a distance of only several feet, at a lady strapped into her vehicle with a seatbelt. It is incredibly likely that shot two or shot three blew bits of her vascular system into the passenger seat and that’s what killed her.

There is a very marginal case, but admittedly possible, that the first shot was justified because he was in the travel path of the car. That marginal case will be difficult because the car was going slowly and he was obviously able to step out of the way, but even that case may not matter. A talented prosecutor might kneecap that case by pointing out that shot two and shot three were taken when the cop was completely safe from harm, and that those are the kill shots, and that those were bad shots. There’s no argument that it’s okay for cops to shoot civilians through the open window of a moving car from the side at point blank range where a miss could end up plugging a bystander. The defense will then say that once you start shooting you just kinda sorta keep shooting because that’s your training, and then people will argue about how long it takes to change your mind about whether you should keep shooting, and so forth.

For me, it’s open and shut. If you feel strongly in the opposite I don’t hold that against you. That’s just more evidence that this is indeed Shiri’s Police Shooting, a shooting so obviously correct or incorrect that it tears social groups apart. I think if Trump were smart he’d throw that guy under the bus as fast as possible, but he’s not smart, so he won’t, and we’re going to tear ourselves apart for a few months over this until we move on to something else.

But it is worth pointing out that the dead lady is dumber than Trump is. Did she deserve to get shot? Probably not, in as much as most people don’t deserve to be shot, but that doesn’t necessarily demand sympathy. Nobody deserves to get mugged but if you wear ten thousand dollars worth of gold chains and a thong and prance down the Bluffs in West Atlanta and get your shit stolen I don’t have any sympathy for you. Trying to cut off a bunch of asshole ICE cops with your car in protest is only a few clicks less stupid than protesting AMTRAK by Snidely Whiplashing yourself to the train tracks.

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Running around trying to interfere with dudes with guns who we all know are assholes while your spouse films you getting shot is the dumbest hobby I can imagine. It’s much more dangerous than model trains or Warhammer 40k or reviewing lip gloss on Tiktok, and while it might be slightly less dangerous than base jumping wingsuits in the Alps to farm social media clicks from your adrenaline antics, it’s obviously far less cool or interesting.

It seems like a clear indication of egregores in action to me, but that’s a story for another day.

In the last 12 hours I’ve plumbed all my contacts in the blue and red camps for their impressions of the shooting, and it’s not necessarily blue/red that causes people to interpret these videos differently, nor is it affiliation with guns or gun culture, nor whether you like immigrants, nor even knowledge about self defense law. The differentiating factor for whether you think the cop murdered the lady or not seems to be purely whether you like cops and whether you are fed up with protest wokery.

And the whole reason we’re in this predicament as a society is because we made fun of Ross Perot’s ears. Let’s follow the chain of events backwards to the 1992 presidential election.

The Long Chain

There is no country on all of planet Earth, as far as my research has been able to glean, which simply allows illegal immigrants to stay indefinitely once they’ve been identified. Not one. Some are just better at enforcing immigration law and border patrol than others. Deportation is a fundamental feature of all modern nation states, and anyone who says that “deportation is fascism” is saying “every nation on Earth is fascist” by proxy.

The illegal immigrants here are almost entirely here to work, make money, and take it home to central and south America to feed themselves and their families. If the line to get in moved, they’d deport themselves and go stand in the functional line, but the line to get in is either nonexistent or it takes a million dollars and a Major League Baseball contract. Illegal immigration is caused by immigration law being too strict and government bureaucracies being too slow and too stupid.

Immigration law is too strict because of the “They Took Our Jobs” crowd, by which I mean American labor. They don’t want to have to compete with poor folks who want to work, so they do their best to keep them out so they can keep the cushier job.

For decades, the Democrats played multiple sides of this. They told the unions they were on their side against the mean old corporations, and then they told the voters they were going to raise the minimum wage, and then they also fought against deportation because they felt bad for the illegal immigrants. They took all three of these positions because they practice “Vibe Governance,” where they just choose whichever policy signals the most virtue and call everyone else meanies.

But those policies don’t mix. You can’t claim to help the working class by raising the minimum wage while simultaneously facilitating the importation of an entire group of subjugated second class citizens explicitly to work for less than the very same minimum wage you’re trying to raise. It’s nonsensical, and the folks at the butt end of the nonsense are American Labor. So eventually they revolted, left the Democrats permanently, and the election maps did this:

Every time Trump won, he won the rust belt. Immigration turned into the current shit show because this is what the rust belt wants, because their jobs got offshored, because of free trade.

I like free trade. I think it’s cool. I get a warm feeling in my belly every time I buy a Mexican zucchini or a pair of Chinese ice silk underwear on Amazon for a tenth the American made price. But I realize my predilections kill jobs an hour northwest of me in Dalton Georgia as their textile plants get offshored.

GIANT SUCKING SOUND

In the salad days of 1992, when intellectuals were still in charge of political discourse instead of it being a social media shitpost war between twelve year old boys and twelve year old girls, there lived a man named Ross Perot. Perot was a curious Texas businessman who attempted to buy an election by representing an underrepresented group of traditional conservatives who he identified had been abandoned by the party system. He was campaigning primarily against the North American Free Trade Agreement. (NAFTA) Ross Perot saw all this coming, and warned us, and he was the first guy to really grab the “they took our jobs” vote.

For some people, the purpose of the economy is to provide jobs so they can work and earn a living and provide for their families. Their job is their “way of life.” For other people, the purpose of the economy is NUMBER GO UP. The NUMBER GO UP people like to say that the rising tide raises all ships, and when the number goes up there will be other better jobs for the people who lost their jobs from the bad jobs being shipped overseas for poorer people to do them more cheaply. But in practice the jobs it creates aren’t the same as the jobs it kills, so it exacerbates rural poverty, and so forth, and all these trends we’re experiencing now were kicked off initially by NAFTA.

But Ross Perot had big ears so nobody listened to him, and he split the Republican vote which gave the election undeservedly to Bill Clinton, and the Democrats laughed about it, and third parties were permanently booted from the system because everyone saw how game theory worked. And then over the thirty years that followed, Democrats abandoned the unions entirely, becoming the new NUMBER GO UP party, which allowed Trump to win the unions and the rust belt.

Viola.

Shitshow.

And the whole thing comes to a head in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent is the tip of the spear for the Rust Belt Revolution’s counterattack, and the Vibes Governance white women offer their bodies in ritual sacrifice as the first line of defense for the NUMBER GO UP coastal banking elite’s offshoring operations, and someone gets shot.

It really is surprising it took this long for a protester to get shot. It was predictable, the markets should have taken bets on when and where, and the Danse Macabre continues because few are smart enough or have the will to ask what the heck is actually happening, and whether it should it be happening, and how to change it if not.

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Bullshit aside, I recently became aware that at least one HWFO article was being specifically blacklisted, or “delisted,” by Google. It got delisted because a culture warrior flagged it, and a Google employee reviewed it and decided it disagreed with a “medical consensus” that never existed. And in so doing, these two actors leveraged the monopoly power of Google in the global transgender culture war. This is a single anecdote, only one webpage, but the anecdote scales and is important to understand in the 21st century culture war virtual battleground.

Let’s start today’s effort by providing background on the article in question, providing a brief summary of the “U.S. vs Skrmetti” Supreme Court case last week, highlighting some of the media discussions about it, and then drilling specifically into how Google corporate safety policy is being leveraged by culture warriors within the transgender culture war.

Trans Kids TERF War Background

There have always been transgender folks in the United States, and some of the ones who undergo hormone treatment and surgery wish they’d undergone it sooner so the gender expression changes would work better. From their point of view, not being able to transition early is a harm. But the fundamental discussion regarding youth transgender medical interventions is about weighing harms against other harms.

Sometimes when kids undergo transgender hormone replacement and teen or preteen gender surgeries, they regret it because they were making the sort of hasty decision a kid can’t really be expected to make, and in those cases the medical intervention itself is a harm. And inside a “woke” moral framework where more virtue is granted to the more marginalized, some number of imprudent kids choose transgender due to either peer pressure, or virtue climbing, or social contagion, leading them to harmful life decisions they may not have otherwise made. Sometimes these decisions have additional parental support because the parents also accrue woke virtue from their peer group for having a trans kid.

The fundamental argument is about how to weigh those harms. And to my knowledge, only one person has ever attempted to quantify those harms numerically and weigh them against each other in an apolitical way that’s sensitive to all points of view in an article vetted by several transgender people before publication.

Me.

Here, in 2022:

Are there others attempting to do the same thing? If so, I certainly won’t find out about them via Google. And I don’t know if my blacklisting was in response to U.S. vs Skrmetti or it happened before.

U.S. vs Skrmetti

On June 18, 2025, the United States Supreme Court decided that Tennessee’s “SB1” bill, which prohibited healthcare providers from giving puberty blockers or hormones to minors for the purpose of enabling them to identify as the opposite gender to their birth sex, didn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States.

The plaintiffs argued that allowing these treatments for other medical reasons such as precocious puberty or disease, but prohibiting them from being used for gender dysphoria, was sex based discrimination. The Supreme Court ruled “no it’s not,” and a good summary of the argument on both sides can be found in a dialogue between Jesse Singal and Slate’s Mark Joseph here:

Singal-Minded

Here’s My Exchange With Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern About ‘United States v. Skrmetti’

Last week I expressed some frustration with the response, from liberal legal types, to the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s SB1, a ban on puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery as treatments for minors with gender dysphoria in that state…

Read more

9 months ago · 122 likes · 83 comments · Jesse Singal

For the record, this discussion is easily discoverable on Google with very simple search terms that can be found in the article title:

One interesting thing to shake out of the court proceedings, is the left slowly admitting that much of the argument for youth transgender medicine was founded on a universally accepted falsehood that went viral in their social media echo chamber. HWFO talks about social media echo chambers quite a bit, so it was surprising to see Helen Lewis point this one out in The Atlantic of all places.

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine—a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

[…]

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

[…]

Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

Every progressive liberal I know firmly believes that medical gender transitions are a life saving procedure that reduce or eliminate future suicides. This universally held belief is entirely foundationless, concocted from thin air. But it spread because of how useful it is to shut down discussion on social media. The Atlantic article goes into more details, but if you’re a long-time HWFO reader you’ve been able to identify this sort of media behavior since at least 2018. Bad outcomes from media echo chamber behavior is mostly what HWFO is about.

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What’s interesting about the admission above is not the admission itself, because people outside the progressive bubble have been screaming it for decades. What’s interesting is it’s in The Atlantic, a very liberal rag which makes its money playing to the progressive echo chamber. This means the misinformation wall around the progressive transgender social club has finally started to crack.

For the record, The Atlantic’s article is also easily searchable on Google:

Google’s Thumb

Usually when I write articles, the good ones anyway, I’m trying to get a fully formed idea inked and archived so I can pull it up later in discussion. It’s my entire raison d’etre as a writer. When my “Unnecessary Mastectomy Math” article referenced above came up in Skrmetti conversation this week I hopped over to Google to find a link to it, and discovered to my surprise that doing so was impossible. Google pretended they'd never heard of it.

I have searched this article before on Google and it has appeared. It was written in 2022 well after the Cancel Culture wokeness peak, and not too far before Elon bought Twitter and cracked their censorship engine. And yet, it’s not searchable. Try it yourself.

Maybe Google can be forgiven so far because it’s confused HWFO for some medical search term and the AI is getting in the way.

Here the search finds four articles on the Substack you’re reading now, so it’s not like it’s never heard of HWFO. Those four articles link the article we’re looking for, and the AI even tries to speculate what’s in the article based on the context around the links, but the article itself doesn’t appear in the search.

If I search for a specific text string in other HWFO articles Google works fine:

But if I do the same thing with a text string from the target article, Google is completely blank:

The simplest Bing search returns it as the top hit:

As does DuckDuckGo:

We know the entire HWFO publication is not banned from Google. We know that the text strings related to trans medicine aren’t banned from Google. We know that the article is not banned from any other search engine. And we know that the article does not, in any way whatsoever, appear in Google searches, which must mean Google specifically targeted that article to be “forbidden knowledge” and therefore delisted.

How does that work?

Google doesn’t delist articles lightly. It usually happens because someone is sharing plans to make terrorist bombs or doxxing politicians or peddling child porn or, the worst offense of all, doing SEO the wrong way.

But it turns out anyone can flag a webpage as being abusive, and make a claim, and after a human review they might delist it. Here’s the button:

And then this:

And then this:

Somewhere buried deep in a dusty three ring binder of policy decisions, Google has made the corporate decision to delist anything that “contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence-based best practices in medical topics.”

So when an angry neo-progressive Tumblr queen read my article, and clicked “feedback,” the article fell onto the desk of an angry neo-progressive furry at Google. They in turn decided the article ran contrary to the false medical consensus discussed above, and then Google delisted HWFO’s article on the topic.

That’s the mechanic.

Is the Google organization some towering avatar of wokeness hell bent on scrubbing the internet of wrongthink? I suppose that’s possible, but the case of my censorship doesn’t confirm it. My censorship does confirm, however, that the tools Google uses to “make people safe” are used by culture warriors to war, because to a culture warrior, no culture except their own is safe.

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1. “Direct Action” by experienced and funded progressive (formerly BLM) agitators to create “Decision Dilemmas" for cops which turn into great media fodder,

2. Empowered TRT juicing cops without the overall cloud of 2020 media fear completely falling for the dupe and behaving poorly on camera with rubber bullets, tear gas, or whatever other new toy they’ve been shining up the past two years,

3. Blue media using the Decision Dilemma camera fodder to farm for sympathy/outrage clicks and Red Media farming clicks by bitching about the Blue Media doing it,

4. Trump grandstanding and trying to feed his own desperate need for attention,

5. Someone looting an Apple store under the cover of anarchy,

6. Nobody anywhere trying to frame the riot from a mathematical perspective.

When I do the last thing that nobody else does, it leads me to the conclusion that the whole thing is being faked up as an attention economy play, and if you’re not a subscriber there’s a good chance you’re reading this article because you too fell for it. Let’s begin.

Riot Quantification

After the dust settled on the Mostly Peaceful 2020 Summer of Love, HWFO proposed a quantification system to truly establish how horribly bad or relatively inconsequential a given protest, riot, or civil insurrection actually was, and developed a mathematical scale for them. We call this the “MPS20.”

You can follow the link to the methodology if you like, which is of course arbitrary like all indexes are, but I’ll summarize briefly. Using 2020 behavior as our benchmark index of relatively bad things we state that a protest with 5000 demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrests, two billion dollars in insured damages, and an average of $100 worth of insured damages per protest participant, scores a “100” on the MPS20 scale. From this we can say the 2020 BLM protests scored “100,” the Rodney King riots scored a “91,” the January 6th “insurrection”(?) scored a “3,” the Troubles in Ireland scored a “3673,” and Hurricane Sally scored an “89.” We even developed an online calculator, which you can find here:

Google sheet, don't break it please

If I run last weekend’s LA thing into the calculator, based on the best estimates I can make from multiple media sources, these are the results:

Damages per protester are pretty high, owing to the new creatively lazy tactic of summoning an automated vehicle to your location and burning it instead of spending the effort walking around to find something to burn, but nothing else on the list remotely approaches 2020. The net score of 0.2 on the MPS20 scale is so low you’d need five hundred of these in a row to match 2020, and Trump was President then. Which brings up an interesting point.

National Guard Mexican Futbol

The political use of the National Guard has been all over the place the last half decade, so it’s worth going through a review. I detailed how a president or governor could use the National Guard in an enforcement action for Open Source Defense in early 2020 here, in an article about Virginia’s failed threats to seize guns in their state:

https://opensourcedefense.com/blog/collateral-damage-race-and-the-virginia-gun-control-bill

Let's be clear, this is not going to happen for several reasons. But first let’s look at the case that it could. This is the case as I understand it:

If a soldier in the Guard refused to follow orders, they’d be likely subject to Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) action and would face court-martial, dishonorable discharge, and suspension of benefits. Everyone in the National Guard leadership up to and including the state Adjutant General is a commissioned officer and subject to similar UCMJ action. The Adjutant General reports to both the Governor and the Secretary of Defense. I am very unclear on what he’s supposed to do if he gets conflicting orders.

As I understand it, the Adjutant General of the California National Guard doesn’t just report to Hegseth, he reports in equal measure to Hegseth and Newsom. So how does that work exactly?

Under Title 32 control, which is how the National Guard normally works, governors issue orders to the Guard that get rubber stamped by the Secretary of Defense. In a difference of opinion, the Secretary of Defense can assert Title 10 control and override the governor, which people like to call “federalizing the Guard.” The National Guard has been variously used, threatened, misused, or intentionally not used when they arguably should have been used, quite a lot in the past half decade. Here’s a timeline.

• January 2020 - Virginia state representatives threaten to use Title 32 to seize guns from around 100,000 Virginia citizens, but the ban law tanks after a peaceful and clean 50,000 person protest which the anti-gun media calls “terrorism.”

• May 2020 - Tim Walz waits three days and eventually uses Title 32 to stop the Minneapolis Floyd riots after half a billion dollars of “mostly peaceful” riot damage.

• 2020 Summer of Love - Other states activate it variously using Title 32 but in mostly a symbolic role, and never for riot control. Cuomo in New York opted not to use Title 32 despite $115 million worth of damage, which makes some sense because NYPD actually outnumbers the entire New York National Guard by about 2:1. Other states used it for the security equivalent of distributing sugar free juice boxes to the cops.

• 2020 Summer of Love - Trump chooses not to use Title 10 for any of it.

• January 2024 - Governor Abbot of Texas uses Title 34 to close the border to illegal immigrants with Operation Lone Star.

• January 2024 - The Biden Intern Brigade with support from various Democrat leaders threatens to use Title 10 to open the Texas border to more illegal immigrants by seizing control from Abbot and opening the border back up.

• January 2024 - Twenty five other states use and/or threaten to use Title 34 to send their own National Guard to the Texas border to help keep the border closed.

• January 2024 - The Biden Intern Brigade backs off.

• June 2025 - Trump jumps straight to Title 10 during the LA anti-immigration riots after Newsom opts not to use them.

Using Title 10 is very unusual. Threatening to use Title 10 it is not. Using Title 34 is not. Threatening to use Title 34 is not. We’ve even seen groups of states use Title 34 to scare the Feds away from using Title 10 to override another state using Title 34. And notably, we’ve seen several states choose not to use Title 34 for riot control even when portions of their cities laid siege to federal buildings for months on end or declared independence from the United States.

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There’s no objective rhyme or reason for it, as near as any third party could surmise, other than simply going for whatever the echo chamber might cheer at the moment. It does seem, however, that the National Guard will probably be used repeatedly in the future by politicians of various stripes to enforce their various thing they want to variously do.

Kayfabe

Kayfabe is the practice in scripted “sports” such as Professional Wrestling of building a narrative of conflict for entertainment purposes that isn’t actually true. Growing up in the 1980s in rural North Carolina, I can assure you that the modern understanding that the WWE (then WWF) is all scripted was not dominant then. We believed it, or at least some of us did, while swapping WWF trading cards in the baseball dugout. The public slowly became aware it was all made up the more absurd things got.

I believe the US is in that 1980s phase now with our politics, where we’re wondering if it’s real or not, and the details of this weekend riot provide good evidence of the latter.

It’s clear in the mathematics that the relative size of a protest has no bearing on whether the National Guard gets activated. Oregon and Washington State in 2020 gained share in the attention economy by not using them. Walz in Minnesota would have caught local hell at the time for using it when it mattered, but caught hell later in the national election for not using it until too late. Trump didn’t use Title 10 in Portland or Seattle in 2020 for the same reason he is using Title 10 now. Not using it then gave him ways to gain share of the attention economy, but using Title 10 now gains him share. And so forth.

They’re all just using the Applause Meter, without any objective threshold for how and when to use or not use military riot control. And when you’re a master of manipulating the attention economy by being a paid actor in a conflict, the applause meter is all that matters. Just listen to the crowd.

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The current Russo-Ukraine war is not a “fair” one, and Ukraine would have lost long ago if not for direct foreign military aid. Direct military aid to Ukraine flows almost entirely from a small number of European border countries and from the English speaking west, mostly the USA. When Europe says they “stand behind Ukraine,” that is a mathematically testable claim.

It is objectively true that Donald Trump has misrepresented repeatedly the nature of the NATO alliance, when he says that they “don’t pay their bills,” “dues,” “NATO fees,” or that they “owe us a tremendous amount of money.” That’s not how NATO or any other alliance works, and the fact checkers are right on that account. But Trump’s overall point - that NATO is a one-way alliance with the United States pulling all the weight, while the rest of NATO members hide under our security umbrella and ride our coattails - is also a mathematically testable claim.

When these claims are tested, we discover that most of Europe doesn’t give a singular fuck about Ukraine and that non-US NATO members are collectively a trillion dollars in the hole on their NATO spending obligations. Europe is in a predicament of their own making, and is lashing out at the United States like children refusing to eat their vegetables.

Let’s crack our knuckles and visualize some data.

The NATO 2% Shortfall

At the Wales Summit in 2014, every NATO member pledged to spend approximately 2% of their real GDP on military readiness. The guidelines are specific, they define “readiness,” they mandate certain ratios be spent on hardware and other specific elements of readiness, and NATO tracks progress towards these targets on a year by year basis. The 2024 report can be downloaded here. While the NATO website claims that NATO members have been continually increasing their spending to reach the 2% target, that’s not at all what the data looks like when graphed.

In this graph each line is a NATO member state, and the red blob is spending below 2%. With a few exceptions such as Poland, Greece, the US, and the UK, basically every country rode most of the last decade below the line. While there is a trend upward in the spaghetti graph above, the trend only starts in 2023 after the Ukraine invasion. Prior to that the trend was basically flat or irregular for almost every member nation, and most of the countries over the 2% line in 2024 only barely reached it with a brief two year spending spree.

These prolonged stretches of thumbing their noses at the 2% target can be easily seen when you take the decadal average of NATO defense spending as a percentage of GDP.

Only the UK, Poland, Greece, and Estonia are pulling their relative weight. The NATO total is borne almost entirely on the backs of US spending. But Luxembourg being light in the wallet probably doesn’t affect Europe much, so to see the real impact you need to look at real dollars. To find out that number, we would need to take the percentage each country is short of 2% on any given year, multiply that times their GDP for that year, and add all the years up to produce a total representing the entire decade of shortfalls. The data to do so is all within the NATO 2024 report, so I saved you the time.

Adjusted for exchange rates to millions of USD and inflation-normalized to 2015, these are the countries responsible for the real shortfalls:

Over the course of the last decade, NATO members are short 992 billion dollars, which translates to well over a trillion when we tack on nine years of inflation. Germany’s quarter trillion shortfall alone constitutes 23%, with Italy, Spain, and Canada each clocking in around 13% to 14% of the total shortfall. The top four are responsible for two thirds of the shortfall, and the top nine are responsible for 88% of it. Germany is responsible for more shortfall than the twenty four lowest countries combined. The only European NATO country with a trillion plus dollar GDP pulling its own weight is the United Kingdom, and all the other major European NATO powers are completely taking advantage of the US security umbrella.

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3%

After watching the Trump highlights on Twitter over the weekend, many European leaders got together to figure out what they would do if the US umbrella folded up. French president Emmanuel Macron suggested they bump the 2% spending obligation to 3%, which is a bit funny considering France only managed to make it to 2% last year. If achievable universally and immediately, the excess 1% spending would compensate for the last decade of foot-dragging in around four years. That would be positive for them.

But they only achieved 2% because of fears around the Ukraine war. Absent that war they wouldn’t have hit the 2% target until 2030, and wouldn’t hit Macron’s new 3% target this century. At pre-war spending trends they wouldn’t make up for the historical shortfall until around the year 2050. Trump was probably trying to say that when he made improperly worded claims about NATO not “paying their bills.” Prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO powers were effectively using the United States military as a national security credit card.

If the European countries hadn’t been bailing on their military responsibilities for the last decade, and had more robust military assets in place right next door to Ukraine, then they might have more to throw Ukraine’s way today.

If they wanted to, that is, but it appears they generally don’t.

Ukraine

The Zelensky-Trump fiasco last week truly kicked off at the four minute mark of this video.

Zelensky makes the case that the United States will “feel the effects” if we do not stop Russia in Ukraine, which leads Trump to get oppositional for the first time in the exchange. Vance was a little spicy before, and probably should have stayed on the sidelines given that VP is a worthless throw away position, but Trump only initially steps in to oppose the assertion that Putin winning in Ukraine would be bad for the USA. And in this moment, Trump is unassailably correct. Americans won’t notice if Ukraine falls to Putin, because we barely noticed back when Ukraine’s government was under the thumb of Russian soft power in 2013, and we barely noticed Russia’s invasion of Crimea. We were all reading about Michelle Obama doing the #BringBackOurGirls thing in Nigeria while the Russian military was settling into their new Crimean digs. We didn’t care then and we won’t notice now.

Zelensky needed to make this case to Europe instead, because Europe could encounter major changes if Ukraine falls to Putin. Ukraine is Europe’s breadbasket, a location of rare earth elements, and contains the two most important pipelines to Russian and Middle Eastern oil since Ukraine (probably) bombed Nord Stream. Most Americans can’t find Ukraine on a map, but Europeans can take a train there. Is Europe contributing to the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression? Not significantly.

One year ago HWFO did an analysis of the relative contribution of different European powers to the defense of Ukraine, and showed that military aid by a percentage of GDP was very high by countries within Russian striking distance, but basically nonexistent outside of that window.

I redid the entire graphic today to check on the trends, and see whether Europe outside the little orange box has changed their opinion about the invasion of Ukraine over the past year.

They have not.

Keep in mind these are based on percentage of GDP, so as to not discount Estonia’s noble contribution of 2.02% of their entire GDP towards the cause of Ukrainian weapons. In real hardware, the US still constitutes half the foreign direct military aid.

Europe has a huge gap to close in terms of weapons supply and funding if the United States pulls our support. Most of Europe has not contributed meaningfully to this war even though they’re the ones who stand to lose the most, and we stand to lose nothing.

Mathematically Testable Claims

When Trump infers that NATO is a raw deal for the United States, that NATO countries are piggybacking off of our security, and that they aren’t pulling their weight even though the real security threat is to them instead of us, his claim is mathematically correct.

When Europe says they “stand behind Ukraine,” that claim is mathematically correct for the United Kingdom and countries within about 650 miles of the Russian border, and a complete lie for the rest. Furthermore, the outlays they do have fall tremendously short of the aid necessary to prolong the current bloody stalemate, which means they’re basically standing behind the USA standing behind Ukraine - a hollow gesture which will completely evaporate if we walk out the door.

In my experience, Americans fall into two general camps when it comes to NATO funding, Ukraine backing, and similar issues. One camp doesn’t see what they gain from backing Ukraine, nor from NATO, neither individually nor as a country. If you are in this camp, your grievance is real and has been left unanswered and unaddressed.

The other camp feels a moral obligation to defend both Europe and Ukraine from Russia. If you are in this camp, your primary grievance should rightfully be with Vladimir Putin, but your secondary grievance should not be with Trump or your neighbors, it should be with Europe and Ukraine’s neighbors, who obviously don’t share your moral obligations to defend Ukraine, nor to even defend themselves.

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The graph shows that murder rates in the USA were low by our standards for the first 19 years of this century, but that changed in 2020 with an unprecedented spike. This spike was the steepest ever recorded, thankfully plateaued around our century average, and was then followed by the steepest ever recorded drop. 

This spike was entirely due to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. I could use the historical context to make the case that the spike wasn’t actually that bad, but it was certainly bad for anyone who died in it, and was especially bad for black folks. How bad? Solid and easy mathematical analysis shows that the behavior of the Black Lives Matter protesters, and parallel media behavior, killed approximately 8,682 black people over a four year span. 

Let’s begin.

2020

Murder rates rose in the United States by 30% in 2020, which was the largest single-year rise on record. “Experts” have refused to take public positions on why, because they’re afraid of getting kicked out of their neighbor’s cocktail parties. We can easily infer that it was not due to the COVID pandemic, because crime and murder fell globally in 2020 in basically every other country impacted by COVID-19. The murder hotbeds of South America saw some of the greatest drops, with a 24% drop in Rio de Janeiro and a 29% drop in Cali Colombia. The USA was basically the only outlier, and our rate increase was massive.

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What else was going on in the United States in 2020 that could have caused the 30% year-on-year spike? Major League Soccer canceled its season, and Major League Baseball shortened its season to 60 games. That probably wasn’t it. 

There was an election, but we just had another one of those this month with no murder spike.

The weather was relatively mild, so that probably wasn’t it.

We had nationwide riots and protests against the police in the wake of the George Floyd killing, with 5000+ demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrested, $2 billion in insured damages, an average of $100 of insured damage per protester, at least one burned police station, the founding of an anarchist autonomous zone, and a several month long siege at a court building. This included a number of protesters larger than the entire population of New York State chanting “All Cops Are Bastards” and “Defund The Police.” This in turn caused the total number of people willing to be police officers to shrink for two straight years, only stabilizing in 2022. So that could have been it.

There is a known scientific correlation between increased police presence and decreased crime. It is impossible to prove causation for a murder spike like this because murder is a multivariate problem, but there are no other reasonable causes I can identify, and if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments. 

Excess Murder

To calculate how many extra murders happened due to the BLM movement, we first need a baseline, and the best baseline to use is the prior decade based on the graph above. From 2009 to 2019 the murder rate only exceeded 5.0 per one hundred thousand twice, in 2016 and 2017, and it dropped in 2018. The average across this span was 4.9 per one hundred thousand, so it seems reasonable to start there. 

Every year inside the decade prior to 2020, homicide rate fluctuated within 0.5 dead humans of 4.9 per 100,000. This was pretty regular, and you can see it looks fairly flat in comparison to the century trends in the first graph of the article. But when we add the BLM spike, the graph looks like this.

The two prior years had a homicide rate of about 5 per 100,000, so if we use that as the expected value of homicides for the following years then we can calculate excess victimization rate due to BLM, and from that, excess dead people. And from that we can calculate excess dead black people.

Let’s walk through this briefly. We take the measured homicide rate of the past few years, subtract 5/100k since we figure that’s “normal,” and get a number that gives us an estimate of what’s abnormal due to 2020 behavior. The population multiplied by that rate yields a number of dead people. That number times the relative ratio of black murder victims gives us the total number of black people killed in excess of what we expect should have happened with no BLM riots. 

Be clear about what this calculation says. 8,682 is not the total number of black murder victims - that number is much higher. This number estimates how many black people died purely because of the increase in murder that followed BLM. This estimate might even be too low. If for instance the main driver of the murder spike was police choosing to not work black areas of town so they don’t get filmed on Worldstar Hiphop and strung up by a media engine Jonesing for police misbehavior to feed their clickbait addiction, then the true number could be much higher than 8,682.

Implications

One out of every 5,500 black people in the USA lost their lives due to the excess murders from the protests over the four-year span above. For every 2,300 BLM protesters, one black person died because of the real world ramifications of ACAB and Defund. If you protested with BLM you shortened the life of a black person by 11 days on average. That’s the true magnitude of the impact of the Floyd protests on black lives themselves. 

If I were one of the people who promulgated this problem in 2020 I think I would look in the mirror, consider my own contribution to the deaths of black folk in the USA, and “do better” by not doing that again, and trying to keep my friends from doing it either. But I wasn’t. I do not know what we, as a society, should do with this implication, nor do I know anything I can personally do with it. Ultimately, the decision about how the protesters of 2020 will behave in the future rests in their own hands, and I hope they make less harmful life choices in the future. 

But I do know this. If I were a black man, and I saw a bunch of white college students marching down my street who looked like this:

I’d punch one in the face, in the name of Black Lives. 

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It’s a bit long, but if you don’t want to go back and check the details, I can summarize it briefly. 

Shiri’s Attractor

Our modern media maximizes for engagement. Political engagement is created by controversy. The most controversial topics, by the very definition of controversy, are ones which split the people 50/50. Therefore, over time, the political parties in a two party system must become polar, and must trend towards 50/50 splits. This is a mathematical system, and is independent of any given issue at any given time, because the “important” issues will evolve into the issues over which we are split 50/50, to maximize media engagement. 

I named the theory “Shiri’s Attractor” for esoteric reasons you can read about in the prior article.

This theory, like all theories, is testable by observation. What we observe, as the media has continued to evolve towards an engagement business model, is the popular vote margins collapsing over time. There are wide fluctuations in eras dominated by traditional media, but as echo chamber tailoring and engagement driven profit modes evolve, the trailing average of popular vote differential tightens up under 5%, and trends toward 0%. This figure from the prior article plots this trend up through 2020:

Is the theory true? It’s hard to know, but it certainly looks true. The 2024 election is currently ten days away and FiveThirtyEight projects Harris +1.5, which would push the trend line closer to the axis than ever before.

And this projection leads to a predicted Trump victory, because of how the Electoral College works.

Flyover

One can easily demonstrate that the Republicans have become the party of the dumb proletariat and the Democrats the party of the mentally ill bourgeoisie purely from data. Whether that is causal, or simply related to the modern differences in rural and urban living, has not been studied. 

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Hillary Clinton’s election team in 2016 famously referred to the Midwest as “Flyover Country,” and this moniker has since been applied more generally to all of the less populous states. Whether these states fell into Republican control due to neglect from the Democratic Party, or due to cunning Republican strategy, or due to the relative migration patterns inherent to intelligence and mental illness, or due to any host of other factors does not fundamentally matter for today’s discussion. What matters is this: “Flyover Country” gets a slight election boost, and it currently favors one party in particular. 

Our electoral system is set up such that each state casts a vote for every representative it has in Congress, one for each of two senators, and one for each member of the house. This means an individual’s vote in Wyoming is “worth” about 3.7 times as much as one in California towards electors. Most votes in the country are worth around the same amount, but the smaller number of votes in less populous states do have some outsized effect on the presidential election. It’s not a large amount, but enough to shift the line to win about 2.5%, as shown in the graph from Nate Silver below. While not intrinsically a Republican advantage, the Electoral College does advantage less populous states.

Projection

Let’s play with the HWFO graph from the prior article, throw out the current parties, and simply presume that one party dominates the urban vote and the other dominates the rural vote. Next, presume Shiri’s Attractor is real, with the media increasingly making its clickbait money by pitting rurals against urbans for engagement, such that the country trends towards zero vote differential over a long enough horizon. 

Trendlines that approach zero on the x axis are typically shown through exponential decay functions, which leads us to the conclusion that at some point in the future the rurals seize permanent control of the presidency due to electoral college advantage alone. If you plot this on a graph, the transition to relatively predictable rural control of the office of the president begins in 2028.

Let’s go through this graph’s conclusions in layman’s terms. Over time the country gets divided into more and more even splits in terms of population by the media seeking engagement. If trendlines hold, then the splits become less than 2.5% differential in popular vote in 2028, and continue to shrink. From that point on, the rural electoral college advantage controls the presidency. The media obsession with the culture war gives control to the rural states, and the party which eschews the rural states loses in perpetuity. Mathematically. The media obsession with monetizing culture war makes this inevitable.

This is all speculative bullshit. Even if it were true there’s no great way to “prove” it. The future is full of black swans and civil wars and foreign invasions and cults of personality which can throw any number of monkey wrenches into the mathematics. But in describing the intersection of media culture war dynamics with election mechanics, this theory seems more intuitively true to me than most of what I’m reading in the culture-war-soaked smooth brain media right now.

And if it transpires, the blues are going to really regret taking a huge steaming dump down the throats of the flyover states since NAFTA, whether you support globalization (as I do) or not. 

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I see liberals across the vast internet sea and within my own personal space aghast that anyone could vote for Trump, and similarly aghast that the Republican Party has been captured by psycho grifters and charlatans. These liberals seem entirely befuddled why anyone would support Trump in the 2024 election. Were these liberals to pause the media firehose for a moment, stop, and think from another’s perspective, I believe they might get it. Herein, let’s discuss why someone might vote for Trump, by first defining something liberals don’t think about.

The Regime

I don't think the labels "liberal" and "conservative" currently mean anything. It's Regime vs anti-Regime. I often find myself in dialogues which roughly approximate this:

Me: The Regime is a combination of neoconservative war hawks, the military industrial complex, populist socialism, and a veneer of pop star sparklepuss to obscure it and glue it together, and the Democrats have become the face of The Regime.

Them: That's all bullshit, prove your thesis.

Democrat Vice President Candidate Tim Walz: The Democrats are the party of Bernie Sanders, Dick Cheney, and Taylor Swift.

Me: …

Please be clear, I do not fault anyone for voting for The Regime. I think voting for The Regime is fine. There are many reasons one might choose to vote for The Regime, and since I don't actually think voting matters anyway I will never hold anyone's vote against them no matter their voting preference.

Trump Explained

The Regime picked Trump to run against in 2016. This was exposed by the Wikileak in Podesta's "Pied Piper Plan," which correlates exactly with the timing of Bill Clinton calling Trump and convincing him to run.

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The entire point of the Pied Piper Plan is to allow The Regime to elevate their own awful sock puppet candidates because the alternative is so much worse. This election represents nothing more than the slow played after-effects of the 2016 Pied Piper Plan. Hillary couldn't reap the reward, Biden sorta did, and now Kamala especially is. 

That explains the existence of Trump as a political node, but the reason he's so popular depends on which flavor of supporter to which you’re referring. 

Trump Support Explained

Trump support comes from three distinct groups.

1. There are a huge number of rural or rust belt folks who have been decimated by globalism and by the rise of Silicon Valley and the coastal elite banking centers. I support globalism, generally speaking, and I believe that globalism makes things better on average, in the following way. My tech friends make good money from developing online underwear buying internet contraptions, underwear factory pollutants spill into Chinese skies instead of mine, Chinese underwear employees are pollutant sucking wage slaves who have been duped by their party masters into believing they’re part of a grand communist program, and I get cheaper better underwear by buying Chinese Ice Silk on Amazon instead of Hanes garbage. And Hanes probably isn’t made in the USA anyway. Everything about this is good except for the guy who gets fired at Dalton Georgia Plant 6 down the street from me. That guy takes the hit, and no amount of welfare or minimum wage monkeying is going to make that guy’s life better, and if a rich coastal techbro Democrat mansplains to him that “he’s not voting in his best interests” Mr. Dalton GA Plant 6 will get very angry because he doesn’t want to move into a trailer. This is not a new discussion. We've been having this discussion since NAFTA at a minimum. Rich coastal urban Democrats almost universally got rich via some connection to globalism, and Trump is "fly over state" revenge.

2. There are a huge number of midwits who have been disenfranchised by politics forever because they're midwits, and Trump shaved Vince McMahon's head in the ring of the WWE, so he's someone they identify with and will vote for. This is not only democracy at work, it is no different than a black person voting for Kamala because she’s black, or a woman voting for her because she’s a woman. And if you dislike midwits finally voting then you must recalibrate your opinion of democracy itself, because democracy is rule by midwits.

3. There are a large number of people who just absolutely hate The Regime. This bucket has a lot of very smart people in it who aren't actually MAGA. The Regime called for cloth masks to stop an airborne blood disease when every nurse in the country knows only N95s work. The Regime tried to make a vaccine with a 30% efficacy rate mandatory after lying about its efficacy rate. The Regime closed the schools when all of Europe had them open. The Regime burned police stations and ACABed and sieged the Portland federal building and cut Texas barbed wire to let more illegal people across the border while Abbot was trying to stop them. The Regime gave the Taliban an air force. The Regime backs Israel in acts that half the world considers genocide. The Regime uses Ukraine as a make-work program for US weapons manufacturers and tacitly endorses the bombing of Nord. The Regime endorses 14 year old girls getting mastectomies in order to elevate the virtue quotient of their parents on Facebook by accumulation of 'stunning and brave' points. The regime docks Asians 200 points on their SATs for college applications. The Regime bans gas stoves. Whatever. I'm not going to argue at this time about whether any one of these things are true or false, or valid or not. I’m merely describing what they see. "Boo Regime," they say. "Boooooo Regime!" They see Trump as an incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad and they can think of nothing more pleasing than to have such a complete bozo in charge of The Regime for four years gumming up the Regime's activities, because The Regime’s activities are completely awful.

This is all the analysis you need to understand Trump support. The anti-immigration sentiment comes from Group 1 really and actually losing their jobs and from Group 3’s heavy skepticism about The Regime’s blatant efforts to boat in illegals. The pro tariff sentiments comes from the Group 1 really and actually losing their jobs and Group 2’s sympathy for Group 1. The anti-Ukraine stuff does not flow from Putin lovers like the left claims, it comes from Group 1 being jealous that funds are being used to prop up foreigners instead of themselves, from Group 2 not understanding what strategic value Ukraine has for the USA, and from the Group 3 wondering why The Regime is funding the war while half of Europe doesn’t seem to care. And so forth. Apply this analysis to every issue and the same thing will fall out. Of Group 1, 2, and 3,  most issues Trump campaigns on tend to have agreement among at least two of the three groups, if for different reasons.

As I have stated prior, I don't think any of this matters. I think The Regime is too powerful to be steered by any president. I don't think who is in the presidency today matters, nor in December. I don't think we even know who is making any presidential decisions right now because I don't think anyone's been making them since 2021, and I don't think anyone will be making them again until at least 2028, or perhaps never, and I don't care. As I stated, I view democracy as merely a façade and rebellion suppression trick, because it makes people think they have a say in what their government does, when in fact they do not. The Regime does. And because I’m not a fan of rebellion, I am tacitly ok with The Regime doing this until it’s time to shoot them. Now is not that time, yet. 

Your actual choice in November, or tomorrow, or years from now, is to go with the flow or not. I suggest going with the flow for now, no matter who wins, and keeping yourself out of The Regime’s crosshairs. That’s what I’m doing. Vote for whoever you think will be more entertaining. I also suggest preparing for a future when the façade fails. 

And finally, I suggest sharing this article with the moonbats on both sides who are screaming at each other over either Haitian Cat Eaters or mysterious bomb threats from supposed European MAGAs who flew to Europe to make prank phone calls about Haitian Cat Eaters and then few home for dinner. They both seem like they need a dose of reality.

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So when culture warrior Matt Walsh decided to make a Borat style mockumentary movie about being a white dude “doing the work” demanded by the Ideology-Formerly-Known-As-Woke (IFKAW) folks, I expected it to kick off a reaction in the culture war space mirroring my prior marital disagreement. 

This brief article is not an endorsement of the movie, but rather a pause to check the culture war scoreboard after the movie’s release.

The Movie

In Am I a Racist, Walsh takes on the role of a progressive white dude trying to become antiracist, and sets up a lot of scenarios and interviews where he can expose “woke” absurdities on the big screen. If you are anti-woke you’ll probably like the movie, if you’re part of the Ideology-Formerly-Known-As-Woke you probably won’t, and if you’re in the middle you should probably wait for Netflix at a minimum, provided angry Silicon Valley protestors don’t keep it off of the streaming platforms. Reviews I’ve heard range from “not too bad, it’s Borat but less funny” to “not too bad, it’s Borat but less funny.” Among those who got Boratted include:

• Robin DiAngelo

• Saira Rao

• Regina Jackson

• Kate Slater

• Wilfred Reilly

• And a bunch of other people nobody cares about

For the record, Wilfred Reilly is a pretty moderate and well-intentioned dude whose takes are worth paying attention to. 

The Reaction

We will skip the initial wave of social media folks claiming Walsh is a Nazi or whatever, and jump to the interesting snapshot of today, where the Washington Post has finally figured out their position on the movie. Their thesis:

If you don’t like the people he’s lampooning, it’s easy to convince yourself that he’s revealing something deep and important, just as I’ve heard progressives argue that “Borat” movies were laying bare the hateful underbelly of America. But what Walsh is actually revealing is two not-very-surprising realities of human nature: First, that every group has an awful fringe, and it’s easy to make that group look bad if only the fringe’s worst moments survive the cutting-room floor. Second, that the human instinct for avoiding confrontation is exploitable if you’re sufficiently willing to violate the social contract.

They’re talking, quite reasonably, about my wife’s impressions of the first Borat movie. Their conclusion:

DiAngelo and Rao and a number of others gained money and fame during the “Great Awokening” because decent people, genuinely concerned about America’s racial divides, were too polite to point out that they sounded like lunatics. Those well-intentioned Americans had their social instincts hacked, the machinery diverted into a continuous loop of unproductive navel-gazing, instead of the racial justice they were trying to achieve. That’s what left them vulnerable when Matt Walsh showed up to exploit the same bug.

Washington Post effectively says here that DiAngelo and Rao exploited the politeness of others in order to make money and fame off of a public racial morality outburst. They hacked politeness to profit off of the culture war. The Washington Post says Walsh is doing the same thing now, also to profit off of the culture war. 

I find this take to be relatively accurate, to be honest, but there’s a very important subtext that culture war observers must remember. The Washington Post did the same thing DiAngelo and Rao did, to even greater profits.

They even funneled money into DiAngelo, Rao, and others while doing so:

Now the Washington Post says DiAngelo, Rao, and by association the entire DEI movement is the “awful” “lunatic” “fringe,” while the worst thing they can seem to say about Walsh is that he’s a culture war profiteer. They’re not burning Walsh, but they are burning DiAngelo, and Rao, and DEI itself, and they’re doing so to protect themselves from getting burned. Which is what Walsh as a culture warrior wanted. 

Scoreboard:
Walsh 1 IFKAW 0

The Washington Post used DiAngelo and others to exacerbate racial hate and stoke the fires of a year long riot, equivalent in damage and death to a Category 2 Hurricane, and now that there’s no more money in wokeness they’re throwing DiAngelo out with the trash. 

If you’re part of the Ideology-Formerly-Known-As-Woke, this should alarm you. You have no more media front to hide behind outside of maybe Slate and Vox, and as the pendulum continues to swing anti-woke it could take you with it. Run for cover. 

If you’re ideologically anti-woke, you should probably stop, take a breath, and look around to be sure you know which bandwagon you’re on. If your anti-woke wagon stays in familiar “there is a such thing as IQ” territory, perhaps that’s fine, but if it wanders into the Hinterlands of the Fourth Reich you may need to jump off. Bandwagons sometimes travel farther than intended when these pendulums gain momentum.

And if you’re the Washington Post you’ve probably got nothing to worry about because the media lost its moral compass decades ago.

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The great culture war shitbag brigade this week tied itself in knots over the phrase “DEI Hire.” Particularly, whether various Vice Presidents count as one. The problem I’ve discovered while attempting to engage in this discourse, is nobody on either side seems to know what a “DEI Hire” even is. By some definitions, Joe Biden himself literally stated up front that Kamala Harris was a DEI Hire. By other definitions, she’s obviously not. And many of the people screaming at each other about DEI Hires are in fact screaming right past each other because they’re talking about different things. DEI Hires are either competent or incompetent or racist to use or racist to oppose, depending on your definition. 

Let’s talk about what “diversity” even is before we move on to what the phrase “DEI Hire” might mean, and speak about the implications on various Vice Presidents including Kamala Harris. But first, let’s get all the pandering out of the way.

Pandering

The truth of the matter is that VP picks aren’t jobs at all, they’re just placeholders in case someone shoots the president, which is a necessary position in the USA because we shoot our presidents quite a bit. But nobody picks their VP on the presumption that they’re going to get shot one day, because if they get shot then who cares anyway? Everyone picks them to try and change the vote counts by a half a percentage point in their favor, so every Vice President selection in recent memory has basically been just a magical pandering stick. “Kamala Harris is black and a woman, I’m a woman and/or black and therefore I’ll vote for her because of the most superficial reason possible” is certainly something most people don’t think, but a small percentage might, and maybe that makes or breaks an election in a tight race. It’s been this way for decades. It’s also why everyone thinks Kamala is going to pick a white man as VP, which we will discuss in detail later. She’s obviously not the only one. “JD Vance grew up poor, I’m poor.” “Sarah Palin has big boobs, I like boobs.” (I do in fact like boobs.) And so forth. Something about Dan Quayle and potatoes seems pertinent. But let’s pretend for a moment that a Vice President isn’t a magical pandering stick whose official duties largely amount to making vague speeches and staying alive longer than the President and pretend instead that it’s an actual job. To define “DEI hire” we would first need to know what the hell Diversity means.

Diversity

Luckily, HWFO figured that out (or not) several months ago. Variously, “diversity” either means “black” if the Starbucks barista is a jerk, or “not white” if you’re Hollywood or an Oregon school board, or “not white or Asian” if you’re a Harvard or UNC admissions officer, or “far from the national mean” if you’re autistic, or “the closest lingual approximation to the suburbs of Babel after the tower fell” if you’re a New York City journalist trying to squeeze white foreigners into the diversity calculation. More on that, with mathematical support, can be found here:

All of the definitions in the prior article involve race and gender, so clearly “Diversity” in this context means including race and gender among the factors when making a hire.

“DEI Hire” (1): A hire that promotes DEI

When the Google AI farms all its available resources and compiles them, it describes DEI programs like this:

Perplexity, which I think is a much better AI engine, thinks this:

I’m not huge on believing AI can answer a specific question with a specific answer, but they’re quite good at describing what most people believe because they developed their knowledge bases by farming large sets of data. Both of these summaries mention “hiring practices.” Google’s AI doesn’t give a reference, but the Perplexity reference states explicitly that hiring practices might include blind resume adoption to reduce racial bias, but also actively recruiting underrepresented candidates. Websites such as blackjobs.com and diversityjobboard.com serve this niche, and catering to diverse hires in order to specifically increase a level of diversity at a company must necessarily mean hiring more diverse candidates.

So if you have a diversity rate (whatever that means to you, see above) of 15% at a company, you implement a DEI program, and your diversity rate goes to 20% then 5% of the company, or 25% of the total number of “diverse employees,” are DEI Hires by definition. They must be, because they were hired as a result of a DEI program. It’s tautological. And they would be so whether their level of competency and technical expertise was poor or outstanding. 

You wouldn’t necessarily know which ones were “DEI Hires” unless a manager were foolish enough to tell everyone in advance they were going to post a job and say, for instance, “this job is only for a woman and I’m building a list of black women to choose from.” In the United States, that would be illegal. But if someone did do that, we would know with 100% certainty that that specific hire was a DEI Hire by the most basic definition.

QED. By the most normal, basic, and obvious definition, Kamala Harris was a DEI Hire for Vice President by default, according to Joe Biden himself. But is that really what the right wingers mean when they say “DEI Hire?” Maybe not.

“DEI Hire” (2): A hire that promotes DEI by hiring someone incompetent or uncredentialled

Rational resistance to DEI programs flows from the idea that introducing other factors to the hiring process unrelated to competence will necessarily reduce the competence of the team. For jobs which require a small amount of competence, a DEI initiative might not matter, but for jobs which require a large amount of competence, and for which there are not enough competent diverse candidates available, “DEI Hires” must reduce the net competency of a team by mathematical certainty. This fear may not matriculate for daycare workers or garbage men but might for brain surgeons, depending on the available number of diverse brain surgeons. But Vice Presidents are a special case, which curiously bends more towards garbage man than brain surgeon.

When right wingers use the “DEI Hire” phrase as an attack, they’re inferring that the hire in question was hired only for their “Diverse” qualities (whatever those are, see above) and not because they can competently do the job, or because they have the appropriate credentials to do the job. As discussed above, a Vice President’s job is mostly to sit around, make vague speeches, and wait patiently to see if the President gets shot. I could do that job and so could you, just as we both could be garbage men and neither of us could probably be brain surgeons, so competency doesn’t matter. On to credentials.

When you take a glance at the credentials for the Vice President candidates this century, it is a wall of Senators, House Representatives, State Governors, and one Secretary of Defense.

As a former senator at the time, Kamala Harris was just as credentialed as any other person to do the relatively easy job of Vice President. Therefore Kamala does not meet the 2^nd definition, of someone incompetent to be VP (nigh impossible) or not credentialed (she was).

“DEI Hire” (3): legit racist dog whistle

A “racist dog whistle” is a left-wing term for words that seem normal but allow racially prejudiced people to be racially prejudiced without actually saying explicitly prejudiced things. I normally don’t bother chronicling these things here on HWFO, but during the Great Broken Boeing Jets Fiasco of 2024 I saw a lot of Twitter traffic, and then later right wing media articles, blaming “DEI Hires” for the broken jets. To my knowledge, no single employee or group of employees were ever singled out for having caused any given failure, so the gender or race of the failures is unknown. Could be white, black, yellow, or orange as far as anyone actually knows. The people who yelled “DEI Hire” first presumed that the jet failure was due to the workmanship of a DEI Hire by any of the above definitions with no actual knowledge of the fact, and further presumed that the same failure would not have happened without a DEI program which caused the hire. I’ve lived in the south my entire life, and “it broke so a black dude must have built it” is textbook racial prejudice, without visible justification or excuse. Effectively, they’re piggybacking on the rational statistical justification in “DEI Hire (2)” above to say prejudiced things to their friends or troll on the internet.

 Is some of that going on with Kamala? I’m sure.

“DEI Hire” (4): Brings viewpoint diversity to the team

A repeated theme among the DEI literature is the presumption that teams comprised of more diversity (see definition confusion above) have better results. Some studies support this presumption while others do not. The DEI folks take the first position, so a “DEI Hire” may mean a hire which “brings racial or gender viewpoint diversity to a project team,” presumably to extract these benefits. By this definition, which is supported by DEI literature, not only is Kamala Harris a “DEI Hire,” but the white male she will surely pick as her running mate will also be a DEI Hire.

And wouldn’t that be some shit?

As almost always happens with these culture war outbursts, the Schrödinger's Truth is that Kamala Harris, and perhaps her new very-likely-to-be white male VP pick, are at once both DEI Hires and Not DEI Hires depending entirely on the semantics.

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As someone with no real stake in most of federal government, someone who doesn’t care who wins, and someone who thinks that we all probably live in a protofascist oligarchy anyway and treats politics as nothing more than a game show, I love impeachments. They’re great. Deep down, I wish every politician was constantly impeached by every other politician all the time, because the entertainment factor would be unfathomable. That’s why I absolutely love Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s impeachment resolution of Clarence Thomas that hit today. It broadens the criteria for impeachment in several notable ways, and if used as a template could be used to impeach a large swath of the District of Columbia itself, including most notably the current sitting president Joe Biden.

It’s great. There are two main claims within it:

1. It designates “failure to disclose gifts” as a high crime and misdemeanor worthy of impeachment itself, without a need for any “quid pro quo” trail indicating that Thomas made a specific ruling because of a gift. That Justice Thomas failed to disclose gifts from the Crow family is enough, without evidence of any exchange of gift-for-official-act taking place, as is usually required by bribery law.

2. It states that Thomas should have recused himself from various Trump Election related trials because his wife was active in the “stop the steal” movement and a big Trump supporter. It hammers this home by saying that Thomas cannot claim ignorance of his wife’s views because his wife is his family.

Applied evenly and without political bias, this upends the two only remaining defenses of Joe Biden’s own influence-peddling behavior, which is that (1) any gifts he received were just gifts with no quid pro quo, and (2) Joe didn’t know Hunter was peddling influence on Joe’s behalf. Therefore, Joe Biden is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of impeachment by the framework presented in AOC’s resolution.

Let’s start by taking a look at the resolution in detail.

Resolution

Notably, she is not accusing Clarence Thomas of accepting bribes, merely of non-disclosure.

Similar law exists for the office of the President, which we will get into later. The resolution continues:

We’ll skip the wall of gifts, and accept as given that it’s a large sum exceeding the disclosure limit. It seems quite large to me, and smells quite a bit like gifts.

buy the author a jet, yacht, or resort

Article I ends by stating that violating the non-disclosure code constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor warranting impeachment. Article II gets spicier, when it questions Thomas’s impartiality because of his wife’s job. Stick around, each Article is spicier than the last.

The resolution states that Justice Thomas’s wife received money from the American Enterprise Institute, which Harlan Crow is a part of.

And so forth. So Clarence Thomas is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors for not recusing himself from any case for which a brief was filed by an entity with a money paper trail to his wife. The third article, as promised, is the most spicy.

The resolution lists several instances where the Supreme Court heard information about the January 6th “insurrection” and/or “mostly peaceful protest” depending on your point of view, fails to mention that Thomas ruled against Trump on some of these, says he should have recused himself anyway, and refocuses on Clarence’s wife’s behavior during the power transition:

It goes on to detail Mrs. Thomas’s activity during this time, and then drops the hammer:

That’s the real zinger. If Clarence Thomas didn’t know about his wife’s deeply held opinions and actions regarding the controversial power transition, then he was derelict in his duties to know, and being derelict in his duties to know is a high crime or misdemeanor worthy of impeachment. 

Biden

This line of reasoning quite honestly isn’t that bad. I rather like it. But what AOC fails to realize is this exact same line of reasoning applies to most or all of our elected federal government positions, and especially the current sitting President of the United States as of this writing. Let’s go through it.

Like Justices, Presidents are required to disclose gifts under the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act of 1966, and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. Unlike Justices, these disclosure requirements specifically require gifts to family to also be disclosed. There’s even a White House Gift Unit that’s supposed to process and log all these gifts to ensure they’re legal and publicly known.

Based on the framework presented within AOC’s impeachment resolution, any gift to Hunter Biden must be disclosed, and failure of Joe to know about a gift places him derelict in his duties as President and guilty of a high crime and misdemeanor worthy of impeachment. 

For instance, the consternation over Biden selling letters of recommendation to Brown University and using Hunter as the bag man fell flat because of two important things. The kid’s dad could easily just give Hunter a gift, and there’s no quid-pro-quo because writing letters of recommendation isn’t an official act of the President. It fell flat because doing that was legal. But according to AOC’s resolution against Clarence Thomas, failing to disclose it is an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor.

When Hunter sold influence to Burisma in Ukraine, or to Chinese business concerns, it was all smoke and no fire because nobody could point to a quid pro quo. According to the new AOC resolution, whether Hunter was telling his influence-peddling cronies that Joe Biden was “The Big Guy” literally doesn’t matter anymore, because Joe had a “duty to know what his family was doing,” and dereliction of that duty is an impeachable offense.

It’s beautiful.

Bloodbath

Upon realizing all of this, a blue might think, “Whoa, we have to reign AOC in or else Joe is going to get caught in the jetwash.” A red might think, “Whoa, we should crank out fifty of these impeachment templates and throw them at the blues, including possibly AOC.” A high-thinking red might realize that if they were to do Biden, and the blues then did a bunch more reds, and the reds then did a bunch more blues, then the entire District of Columbia would get caught in such an impeachment shitstorm that they could never “do the government’s work” of diverting taxes to whatever weird thinktank that’s paying them under the table. A plugged-in politician who’s making bank from the system might get with other politicians across the aisle and put a lid on the whole thing.

But I’m really rooting for AOC here. This impeachment is exactly the kind of “Drain The Swamp” hand grenade that the MAGAs wanted, and Occupy before them, and the Tea Party before them, and that Obama literally ran on. 

And it would be so, so, so entertaining.

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Sitting in Mary Mac’s Tea Room yesterday in downtown Atlanta with my girlfriend and her Beverly Hills grade school friend, I commented that Atlanta was the most racially diverse city in the country. They both balked, whipped out their phones, and pointed to a wall of articles stating emphatically that no, in fact New York City was the most racially diverse. Surrounded by black folks, eating southern food, with photos of MLK and Jimmy Carter on the walls, my incredulity could barely be contained. I whipped out my phone, pulled up data showing that Atlanta had over double NYC’s black population rate. Then I checked their articles and realized that nobody was telling anyone else what “diversity” meant, nor how it was calculated. As a word without a definition cannot be debated, I scratched my head, dropped the whole thing, and whipped out Excel this morning when I woke up.

I discovered that under only torturously stretched circumstances is NYC the most racially diverse metro area in the country, but neither is my home town of Atlanta except under a very narrow definition. I further discovered that the only way any major metro city in the north could be considered “diverse” is if you ignore basically all of the minorities in the southeast and southwest, if we go with “normal” definitions. As I dug further, I was able to peel apart exactly the sort of statistical chicanery required to place NYC at #1.  

For all our analysis today, we’ll be using numbers from the Brookings Institute 2020 Census Portrait of America’s Largest Metro Areas.

Racial Diversity #1 - “Black”

When the great “being black in Starbucks” fiasco hit the national news, it flabbergasted me. If you missed it, two black dudes in Philly went to Starbucks for a business meeting and the barista called the cops on them for, according to some perspectives, “being black in Starbucks.” Details of the fiasco aside, I couldn’t understand how something like that could happen anywhere. When I go to Starbucks in Atlanta a third of the clientele are black, a majority of the baristas are black, and half the cops are black. I didn’t process that any place existed where black people in Starbucks were unusual. It took me a bit to understand that Atlanta may be a relatively unique place in the USA. The most violent Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were in Portland and Seattle, which begins to make sense when you realize that most of those protesters have probably never even seen a black person up close.

Some people think that “diversity” is a measure of black population ratio. That definition could be good or bad, or useful or not, but when we rank the top ten metro areas by diversity when diversity means “black people,” here are the results:

Atlanta is the “most diverse” by a wide margin, New York City is in the bottom third. When people say “New York City is the most diverse,” they clearly don’t mean it has any more black people in it than anywhere else. It’s only a couple percentage points above the national average.

Racial Diversity #2 - “Not White”

The nation is 57.8% white, and it is very common for people to think that “diversity” means “not white.” This definition seems popular on the west coast, where for instance an Oregon school board claimed “100% Diversity” for having no white people on it. This also seems to be the Hollywood definition, as evidenced by UCLA’s 2023 Hollywood Diversity Report, which is just a way to track how many roles go to white people and not-white people. If we adopt this definition of diversity, we can again rank the top ten metro areas in the USA.

The most diverse city is Miami by a huge margin because it’s half Latino. Houston and LA round out the top three for similar reasons. NYC and Atlanta are basically tied in the middle of the pack, so New York is clearly not the “most diverse” by this metric. Curiously, the most diverse city by this metric outside the top ten metro areas is Honolulu.

buy the author a taco

So “diverse” doesn’t mean black, because then Atlanta would win, and it doesn’t mean “not white” because then Latino dominated areas would win. How is New York City winning this contest when it’s only 3% off the national average for black population and 6% off the Latino national average?

Racial Diversity #3 - “Not White or Asian”

The recent Supreme Court case overturning the “affirmative action” defacto racial quotas at Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and by extension everywhere else, showed that universities were “promoting diversity” by taking a small but real number of slots from whites by ratio, and an extremely large number of slots from Asians by ratio, and giving them to blacks and Latinos. Mathematical analyses of admissions presented in the court trial indicated that whites by merit were underrepresented in Harvard classes by a little under five percent, but asians were underrepresented by 40% or more. Admitting to being Asian on your application was equivalent to a several hundred point hit on your SAT score. Adam Mortara tells the gory details to Wesley Yang on his Year Zero podcast here, if you haven’t seen it:

“Diversity” within college admission boards means “not white and not Asian,” but when we rank the metro areas by the college definition New York still does very poorly because it has more Asians than many other places.

Again Miami and Houston kill it because of the Latinos, and Atlanta jumps LA because LA’s Asians no longer give them any boost. New York City again falls into the bottom half of the list.

At this point in our thought experiment New York occupies the bottom half of three consecutive lists.

Racial Diversity #4 - “Divergent From the US Average”

Websters defines “diverse” as being “different,” or “not of the same kind.”

One could conceivably state that a city is racially diverse if its demographics diverge from the national average. We could compare each of the top ten metro areas racial demographics to the national average, calculate the delta, and sum the deltas to see which city has the greatest divergence from the US average, meaning it’s the most different. 

Again we see the same theme. Miami, Houston, and Atlanta are again the top three for the same reasons, lots of Latinos in the first two and a hell of a lot of black folks in Atlanta. Again New York is bottom-middle. But this calculation presumes that a differential from the white average would also make a city “different,” and some folks very much dislike the idea that any sort of white presence could potentially increase your diversity score in any way, so we can recalculate it without whites in the tabulation at all.

New York is even worse in this tabulation. Its divergence of non-whites from the national average is second worst only to Chicago in the top ten metro areas, while Atlanta jumps to the #2 spot because Houston earned a lot of credit in the first of the two tabulations for having so few white people.

New York City, by any measure of diversity I can contrive, is milquetoast at best.

NYC’s Mystery Diversity

New York City is not diverse because of black people, not diverse because of nonwhite people, not diverse according to the college “not-white-or-Asian people” standard, and not significantly different than the national average, counting or not-counting white people, so it fails on the Webster definition as well. So where’s Google getting this garbage?

Forbes has NYC at #1 in diversity, referencing an analysis at Statista. Katharina Buchholz at Statista claims to have done basically what I did, but somehow got very different results.

Katharina is a deeply connected World Economic Forum contributor and her brief stint on Medium seemed like a regurgitation of Every Popular Medium Thing Ever. 

Rocket Mortgage lists NYC as the top among its list when pruned to major metro areas. Their article doesn’t list a methodology, and was written by a lady from Detroit who lives in Richmond Virginia. I highly suspect that both Detroit and Richmond rank higher than NYC by any of the methodologies I attempted above, and based on her profile I suspect that author might have a great time living in Atlanta. I can’t figure this one out.

Wallethub has NYC as #1 for etho-racial diversity but doesn’t explain their methodology either. That article was part of a series, most of which was piloted by a lady who lives in rural Minnesota. 

I thought at first this strange drive to misclassify NYC as “diverse” was due to New York centric media bias, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. I reached out to each of these authors to ask them to share their methodology, and only Wallethub replied back. Their reply both fascinated me and educated me on some new concepts.

Wallethub was also kind enough to send me a quick spreadsheet of some of their results. They didn’t share the root data, but I was able to replicate what they did from what they sent. This is what they sent me:

Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is a financial formula used to gauge how much competition is in a market sector, and is an important element that the SEC uses to evaluate corporate mergers. 

Looks complicated, but it’s very simple. Take all the percentages of different races we have in our tables above, which represent a kind of a “racial market share,” square each, and sum the results. The answer is between 0 and 1, with low numbers being more diverse and high numbers being more “monopolistic,” or in this case racially homogenous. So surely after we do that we’ll find NYC at the top.

Nope.

Philadelphia is less diverse than the USA itself is by this HHI standard, even with a 19.8% black population rate. 

My calculations are based on 2020 census numbers used in the above linked Brookings Institute report, and Wallethub’s are based on some flavor of five year rolling average for 2022, so our data origins might be different. That’s not fully explanatory for the differences in results, though, which in some cases are cavernous. 

Wallethub’s calculation places NYC better than the 2020 census score, and every other city I crosschecked worse than the 2020 census score. It puts Atlanta significantly worse, and Miami incredibly worse than the score HWFO calculated from raw census data, on which the Brookings Institute Diversity Report was based. This doesn’t seem like a function of different data sets to me, especially in the case of Miami. Whatever the mysterious calculation difference is, it’s clearly favoring New York.

Furthermore, racial and ethnic diversity is only one third of the Wallethub calculation. They did three calculations, one for racial and ethnic diversity, one for language diversity, and one for diversity in the US region of birth of the population. Atlanta actually beat all the other crosschecked cities on birthplace diversity, because as anyone in Atlanta knows, basically nobody’s actually from here. But New York kills everyone else outside of LA for language diversity, and when combined with their highly curious and not-entirely-replicable racial diversity score, they jump into the #1 spot. Atlanta gets dinged because whoever doesn’t speak English here at least speaks Spanish. 

Based on back-calculating the “overall score” in the Wallethub table, it appears that each of these three categories, “Racial and Ethnic Diversity,” “Language Diversity,” and “US Region of Birth Diversity,” are weighted approximately equally in Wallethub’s ranking system. 

To summarize, the one system favoring NYC I was able to pick apart had (1) some mysterious differences with their stated methodology that bumped NYC and dinged everyone else, (2) Included two other factors, language and region of domestic birthplace, and (3) weighted all three factors the same.

And that’s how NYC claims the top spot in these rankings. Mostly by having a higher ratio of foreigners who don’t speak English particularly well.

Which is curious, because that’s not what the colleges think “diversity” is when they torpedo Asian applicants, not what the social justice protesters think “diversity” is when they march for Black Lives, not what Hollywood thinks it is when they push for more non-white acting roles, and not what Oregon school boards think it is when they claim “100% diversity” for having a school board made of nonwhite locals. 

It’s almost as if “diversity” means whatever anyone needs it to mean at any given time to push their daily agenda of convenience.

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A decade later, Butker has banked three Super Bowl rings and has made a few graduation speeches, last year one for Georgia Tech, and this year one for Benedictine College in Kansas. My social feeds are slammed with people expressing very loud opinions about this speech, but basically nobody has actually watched the speech. Since your time is short, I figured I’d watch it for you, give you a bullet summary, highlight the primary thing the blues and reds are freaking out about, and give some discussion about it. Not about whether he’s right or wrong, necessarily, but what the freakout itself predicts. Let’s begin.

The Speech

The speech is around twenty minutes, given to a very conservative Catholic college, and was well received by the students.

• Opening acknowledgements.

• 1:53 - dogged Biden for being Catholic and making the sign of the cross at a pro-abortion rally.

• 2:02 - dogged Biden for being Catholic and pro-choice.

• 2:12 - notes some casual Catholics pushed Covid lockdowns and are pushing gender ideology on youth. States “being Catholic alone doesn’t cut it.”

• Starting around 4:30 engages a very large rant against the modern priesthood.

  • 7:20 specifically calls out priests who didn’t stand up to lockdowns and put sacraments on hold, allowing people to die without them.

• 10:00 or thereabouts - pivots to praising Benedictine College for growing by embracing trad values instead of run of the mill liberal values.

• The pride month jab was around 10:20, and was part of an overall trash of the Associated Press for a hit job they put out prior against Benedictine College. Not a major point of focus, more like a joke about how the month is literally named after a sin. He’s referencing an AP attack on Benedictine, of which I’m not familiar, but which appears to have had a Streisand Effect on school enrollment according to context clues in the speech.

• 11:40 - The major culture war scissor which we will examine below.

• 14:35 - Catholic party line on abortion and birth control.

• 14:58 - Take against fatherlessness rate in the home which refers back to violence levels. As HWFO readers know, this is mathematically provable.

• 16:07 - Support of the Latin mass.

• 17:50 - A long take on sticking with Catholics and Catholic tradition when dating, including not living together before marriage.

• Closing statements

HWFO readers will be familiar with the phrase “Scissor Statement,” a term lifted from Slate Star Codex indicating a statement that one group finds completely benign and obviously true, while another group finds offensively and absurdly false. This speech was almost entirely a simple restatement of commonly known Catholic positions, but it contained a “Scissor” at 11:40 which caused it to go viral. Here is the “Scissor,” in its entirety:

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2024, you are sitting at the edge of the rest of your lives. Each of you has the potential to leave a legacy that transcends yourselves and this era of human existence in the small ways. By living out your vocation you will ensure that God's Church continues and the world is enlightened by your example. For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives.  I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I'm on this stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I'm beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith become my wife and embraced one of the most important titles of all, homemaker.

She's a primary educator to our children she's the one who ensures I never let football or my business become a distraction from that of a husband and father she is the person that knows me best at my court and it is through our marriage that Lord willing we will both attain salvation.

Condensed, this statement strongly infers that bearing children and being a homemaker is a good and correct thing to do, and also strongly infers that the blues have been “lying” when they say that it’s not.

For Reds, this quoted passage is obviously true. For Blues, it is offensively false, leading to rampant mischaracterization of the speech and a full Cancellation Fusillade. A change.org petition currently has 220,000 signatures, and stands to gain more. The petition states the following:

Demand the Kansas City Chiefs to Dismiss Harrison Butker for Discriminatory Remarks

The harmful remarks made by Harrison Butker, kicker of the Kansas City Chiefs, during his commencement address at Benedictine College were unacceptable. His comments were sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist. These dehumanizing remarks against LGBTQ+ individuals, attacks on abortion rights and racial discrimination perpetuate division and undermine human rights.

These comments reinforce harmful stereotypes that threaten social progress. They create a toxic environment that hinders our collective efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion in society. It is unacceptable for such a public figure to use their platform to foster harm rather than unity.

It's important to note that these types of discriminatory attitudes contribute significantly towards societal issues such as hate crimes which have been on the rise in recent years (source: FBI Hate Crime Statistics). Furthermore, they can lead to increased mental health issues among targeted communities (source: American Psychological Association).

buy the author GT season tickets

The only part of the speech I saw that could be considered “sexist” is quoted above, establishing that for many women being a mom and a homemaker is more rewarding than having a career. The only reference to homosexuality was in the pride month jab, which was subtle and not a focus of the speech. The “anti-trans” statement was one line talking about pushing gender ideology on youth in schools. The speech was definitely anti-abortion, as well as explicitly anti-birth-control, in keeping with official Catholic dogma. Race was never mentioned in the speech at all.

The second paragraph of the change.org petition explicitly lays out the scissor. The blues believe that traditional value expressions are a threat to social progress and they find expressions of traditional value systems unacceptable. That would include women choosing to raise children instead of working.

Individual Analysis

The speech focused on providing guidance to new graduates about what to do post-graduation. While it contained some other elements, such as a recommendation to move somewhere which had a local church that still performed Latin mass, the lightning rod scissor was the homemaker bit. Stripped bare of culture war baggage, we know the following facts about the current world:

1. Childless professional women currently earn the same amount as men when in the same fields. [1] [2]

2. Women are predominantly the caregivers of children when they choose to have children. [2]

3. Women who choose to have children end up taking a measurable hit on their salaries, owing to how they end up splitting time between career and family. They make career choices which are suboptimal for earning and more optimal for family. [1]

4. Men usually do not take a hit, because the child rearing is usually done by the woman. This is the primary if not entire source of the gender wage gap. [3]

5. Fatherlessness is directly related to many societal ills including homicide rate, which is the primary if not entire source of racial homicide differential. [4]

These facts are facts of the world as it is, not how any particular tribe thinks it should be. Every female college graduate faces those facts when exiting our universities today.

Given these realities, women emerging into the working world must choose among certain available options:

1. Have a peak, productive career and no children. This deprives them of family, which may be a good choice for some women but won’t be a good choice for all women.

2. Have no career and focus on family. This deprives women of professional accomplishment, and also notably a certain safety net should the marriage go sour. A good choice for some women but not all women.

3. Be a working mother and split time between child rearing and job. This choice will necessarily lead to a professional hit purely because there isn’t enough time in the day. This too is a good choice for some women but not all women.

4. Find a husband willing to take the entire professional hit and raise the kids. These men are rare, hard to find, and are also not desirable by women. Men who would make this choice are socially punished in the dating world, by women themselves, so few to none actually exist.

5. Find a husband willing to equally share the professional hit. This is very difficult, and limited to professional fields that are primarily work-from-home or independent contractors. This option, for what it’s worth, is the one my wife and I chose. I changed a lot of diapers.

There are no other options. The option to be a fully realized mother and fully realized professional does not exist. Someone who says otherwise is in fact lying. Catholic indoctrination aside, this lesson should be taught to women in college, high school, and earlier. Any woman planning on (2), (4), or (5) must start looking very early to find the increasingly rare men necessary to pull that off. They must date with intention through college, or perhaps even high school, and when they identify a man with whom they could pull off one of those three options, they must keep him. Otherwise, they’re very likely to end up in buckets (1) or (3).

Group Analysis

An astute observer will note that the traditional Catholic indoctrination set, which would include homemakers, no birth control, and no abortion, is tailor-made to increase birth rates. Monty Python humorously pointed this out in 1979.

The 21st century culture war will have multiple poles. In the United States, our poles are currently Red/Blue, but will increasingly be supplemented with a third cultural pole, of Latin immigrants having more babies than the people here. Europe’s culture war should look similar, but with Muslim immigrants having vastly more babies than the indigenous white population. As cultures are commonly transmitted from parent to child, cultures which keep their birth rates high will gain ground and eventually overtake cultures which don’t.

Some people are very alarmed about the birth rate collapse sweeping across the modern world. Population regression will certainly play havoc with our current capitalist system predicated on investment and interest. On the other hand, the environmental benefit of a shrinking human population will be significant. I haven’t decided where I fall on this conversation personally. I just don’t know.

But I do know that feminism as an overall societal meme is responsible for the birth rate collapse, which means that societies which hang their hat on feminist principles will eventually fall to societies which don’t, unless Seventh Wave Feminism rearranges itself to be pro-natalist.

And below all the kerfuffle, that’s what’s causing everyone to freak out about Butker’s speech.

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All suicide is bad, and self-immolation has got to be one of the worst possible ways to go out. It’s absurdly painful, and if you survive it you live the rest of your life looking like Deadpool had a baby with Freddie Kruger and He Jiankui used CRISPR to splice the fetus with a naked mole rat. I do not wish it on anyone.

But I do think we need more of it in this country, and I think the people who do it should be exacted the highest possible media praise, their causes and manifestos shouted from the heavens by all media nationwide, no matter how weird those causes or manifestos may be. So we’re going to do that, right now. We will praise Max Azzarello, and spread his weird message as far as HWFO can spread it, even though we don’t believe it ourselves.

Then we’ll talk about why people burn themselves alive, and more importantly why HWFO is celebrating that at the end, which is the actual lesson in the article. A self-immolation media contagion is far healthier for all involved than a spree-shooter media contagion. Read on to see why. But first, we immortalize the Max Azzarello manifesto.

Max’s Message

Surprisingly his Substack account is still up. You can read it yourself if you like:

The Ponzi Papers

I have set myself on fire outside the Trump Trial.

My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan. This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fas…

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2 years ago · 62 likes · 328 comments · M. Crosby

If that link ever dies, click here to check the Wayback Machine. His thesis reduces to this:

Peter Theil crashed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on purpose to give crypto billionaires an offramp to get their money out of crypto, which means all crypto is about to collapse. When crypto goes insolvent it will destroy half the stock market. Crypto is responsible for global inflation. The US government released Covid-19 to cover up a stock market pump-and-dump by Stanford’s “StartX.com” and by Jeffery Epstein, which was somehow related to crypto.

Elections are kayfabe. Harvard is an organized crime front. The Simpsons are a psyop. The media is evil and a source of moral decay. Zuckerberg and Musk are crypto criminals. The elites know capitalism is unsustainable and are in the process of rolling out fascist dystopia. Stanley Kubrick was a secret fascist. All media is a psyop. Download my Booklet.

buy the author a hardcopy

It’s disappointing by conspiracy theory standards. There’s lots of verifiably wrong information in it, and nothing really new or creative like we saw in the Christchurch shooter manifesto which was later scrubbed from the web. Like all conspiracy theories, he ties tangled webs around certain truths to justify the theory, and like most conspiracy theories, his theory contains a few things I agree with. This, for instance:

As it turns out, we have a secret kleptocracy: Both parties are run by financial criminals whose only goals are to divide, deceive, and bleed us dry. They divide the public against itself and blame the other party while everything gets worse and more expensive and handful of people take all the money.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly secret, though. And I wouldn’t say it’s coordinated in the way he thinks it is. I think these sorts of things are just the inevitable bottoming out of a multivariate system wherein each individual actor makes the best choice for them, which leads to the perception of collective action when paired with egregorical groupthink. We covered that here, discussing Majid Nawaz’s appearance on Rogan.

I’m sympathetic to his description of Harvard as an organized crime front, as we discussed here, and his depictions of elections being kayfabe, as we discussed here. If only this dude could have been an HWFO reader, we might have been able to chill him out. The media trending towards apocalypse content might just be a function of market dynamics, not necessarily a coordinated effort by the Illuminati. Someone should have asked him to calculate the relative market cap of crypto vs everything else and to point to the crypto holdings of Meta and such, to justify his theory. But he burned himself alive so he probably wasn’t a thoroughly clear-headed dude anyway.

That aside, he should be commended and praised. He had something to say, and he wanted everyone to hear it so badly he was willing to give up his life so someone, anyone, would listen. Just like the spree shooters, but without the spree shooting. And the eruption in self immolation we’ve seen this year seems to be a social contagion, just like the spree shooters.

Self Immolation, a Study in Pastel

Political protest by self immolation was popularized by Thích Quảng Đức in 1963, but the Wikipedia list of political self immolation protests actually lists two earlier ones, in China and Thailand. Thích Quảng Đức clearly set the trend, however, leading to a total of six in Vietnam in 1963, seven in India over 1964 and 1965, and then five in the United States that same year in protest over the Vietnam war. Usually self-immolation world-wide comes in ones and twos, but in the Pacific Rim and United States, they come in clusters. Tibet is the reigning world champ of self-immolation, but among white western countries the USA seems to be leading the pack. The three most recent self immolations globally were here:

• An unknown woman in Atlanta protesting the Gaza war

• A 25 year old air force serviceman protesting the Gaza war

• Max, protesting a variously complex ponzi scheme

Three in five months makes this a “suicide cluster,” according to the people who study cluster suicide.

Alex Mesoudi in 2009 described and modeled two kinds of suicide clusters - point clusters which were localized in time and space as people who directly knew each other all committed suicide, and mass clusters, where people connected through mass media to a famous person committing suicide followed suit. His research is interesting, but not specifically applicable to politically-motivated self-immolation.

Stewart Stack is a suicide expert who has looked deeply into the association with mass media coverage of suicide. Most work in this academic space revolves around creating media protocols that reduce mass clusters such as the Vienna Subway Suicides and the Golden Gate Bridge Suicides, suicides which are often classified as “attention seeking.”

It’s a very big no-no in the psychological community to describe any suicide attempt as “attention-seeking,” in part because many suicides are misclassified as such and ascribing them to attention seeking behavior is a way to minimize or disregard more serious underlying issues. 

But “I JUST SET MYSELF ON FIRE SO YOU’LL READ MY SUBSTACK” could not possibly be more obvious attention seeking, as it’s literally a play in the overall attention economy. Suicide as a “cry for help” is widely accepted in the medical community, so whether a suicide is attention-seeking or not depends on how you define attention seeking itself. Owing to how rare self immolation is, I can find no studies on it, so let’s proceed as if we can all agree that setting yourself on fire in a public place so people will listen to you is a way to not only seek, but demand, attention. Can we leverage this to society’s advantage?

Spree Shooting, a Study in 556

Spree shooters in the United States are much better studied, and studies have repeatedly shown that they follow a media contagion model. Sherry Towers et al in 2015 found this:

We find significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past. On average, this temporary increase in probability lasts 13 days, and each incident incites at least 0.30 new incidents (p = 0.0015). We also find significant evidence of contagion in school shootings, for which an incident is contagious for an average of 13 days, and incites an average of at least 0.22 new incidents (p = 0.0001).

This is one of many studies which show such a contagion effect, curiously similar to the mass suicide cluster effect referenced above. Researchers who study mass shooters point out specifically that each mass shooting is a suicide attempt.

Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.

Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy analyzed media behavior in 2016, and determined that the way the media covers mass shootings exacerbates copycats and promotes this contagion:

“If the mass media and social media enthusiasts make a pact to no longer share, reproduce or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years,” she said. “Even conservatively, if the calculations of contagion modelers are correct, we should see at least a one-third reduction in shootings if the contagion is removed.”

And HWFO in prior analyses has pointed out that in a distributed media model, no central coordination can exist to suppress media coverage of mass shooters because smaller media players can break rank and cover the shooting. A game-theory Nash Equilibrium evolves where everyone who doesn’t cover the mass shooting loses money to those who do:

This creates a media dilemma which causes 33% more dead people, with seemingly no solution.

But I have an idea.

Burning Our Way Out

You can’t tell the media to not cover something they’ll make money on, because some other media outfit will just pick up the slack and make the money. But one thing you can do is tell the media it’s ok to make money off of something. 

With political self-immolation, responsible media generally shies away from publishing the manifestos of the self immolators, because they’re following accepted suicide protocol. But imagine they were encouraged to publish the manifestos, and the upcoming crop of spree shooters saw that their manifesto was going to get buried if they shot up a school but would have been highly publicized if they burned themselves up? 

We’d likely see some ratio of future mass shooters be converted to self-immolators. 

Since self-immolation to get attention is far healthier for those around you than spraying those around you with bullets to get attention, any conversion from spree shooter to self-immolator is a win for all involved, including the attention seeker.

For this reason, I publish Max Crosby’s message. I praise him for his actions, not because they made any sense to me, but because his sacrifice will be a twofold positive influence for the country. One, he will not end up shooting anyone were he prone to do so. But further, his contribution to the suicide mass cluster may convince another future shooter to burn themselves up as well.

Praise be to the self immolators, for their sacrifice will perpetuate the suicide cycle long enough to scoop up some dork who’d shoot up a shopping mall.

Amen.

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About a year ago I attended one of these “rationalist” meetups – things that smart atheist-leaning antisocial-leaning folks throw to try and socialize among others with similar qualities. They’re fun. We were discussing crime. One of the gentlemen there, whom I had only met once or twice, indicated that he was excited about ubiquitous police surveillance because it would create a safer environment in which to live, an opinion which provoked a great wailing and gnashing of teeth from the civil libertarians attending. During the ensuing verbal melee, I couldn’t stop thinking about religion.

The efficacy of religion is a difficult concept to explain to an atheist who abides by the Yudkowsky edict stating “that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.” Should it? I believe Eliezer Yudkowsky, in his newly minted AI alarmist and anti-AI activist role, is finally feeling the pressure of Chesterton’s Fence, staring down the barrel of the second order effects of his own belief system. I also think the ubiquitous surveillance case could be a good way to prime the pump on that conversation, which ties directly to the modern AI Alignment debate which embroils Yudkowsky. Let’s walk through this with some boundary case hypotheticals about crime, extrapolate to the general case about crime, and jump to the truly general case about “all things” at the end.

Chainsaw-Faced Robot Dogs

Consider the hypothetical Town of Robotnik. Robotnik has a surveillance camera on every street corner, and within every room of every home, networked to a central computer. The central computer contains a log of everyone’s ID and likeness. The cameras use facial recognition software to log everyone’s movements. The cameras report all movements back to the central computer, which creates a real-time map of every single thing every person in Robotnik does, and verifies that the things they’re doing are legal according to a code of behavioral regulations. Every time anyone breaks a significant law, such as stealing or murder or rape or embezzlement, a pack of Boston Dynamics Robot Dogs with chainsaws for faces immediately gets airdropped by automated quadrotor drones to the location of that person, and the dogs saw off the perpetrator’s limbs. The entire system is automated.

We might call Robotnik an “absolute police state.”

This would be a very peaceful city in which to live, because everyone would fear the chainsaw- faced robot dogs. After a few years of this there would be no crime, because the fear of the chainsaw dogs would govern everyone’s behavior. Crime would be “solved.” But there’s another way to do it.

buy the author a boston dynamics dog

Imaginary Chainsaw-Faced Robot Dogs

Consider the hypothetical Town of New Robotnik, which has surveillance cameras and robot dogs just like Robotnik does. But in New Robotnik a mysterious figure turned the AI off after a while. The cameras are still there, but they feed no information back. The robot dogs still exist, but their batteries aren’t charged. The airdrop quadrotors which deploy the robot dogs are broken, but nobody notices because they never fly anyway. They don’t fly in Robotnik either because everyone is so peaceful.

The results are the same. The robot dog doesn’t eliminate crime, fear of the robot dog eliminates crime. The fear is the same in both Robotnik and New Robotnik, so the actual enforcement mechanism still works.

We might call New Robotnik an “absolute belief state.” There are no actual police, but everyone believes there are.

Stop and think, for a moment, which town you would prefer to live in. Both have zero crime. Only one has operable automated chainsaw-faced robot dogs. I would choose New Robotnik even if I had secret knowledge that the robots didn’t work there, purely because the town was safe due to the fear everyone else still carried of the dogs.

Chainsaw-Wielding Tooth Fairy Demons

Now consider a third hypothetical town, Toothfairyville. Toothfairyville has the same set of laws as Robotnik and New Robotnik, but the laws are called “commandments.” Toothfairyville has no cops. Every person in Toothfairyville goes to a building once a week where they are indoctrinated from birth that the Tooth Fairy is constantly watching everything they do in public and private from a hidden sky castle made from the teeth of children. These indoctrinations state that any violation of the commandments will be met by a flaming fairy demon with chainsaw hands materializing and sawing off their limbs. Because of the strength of the indoctrination program, every single person in Toothfairyville believes this to be absolutely true, and the fear of the chainsaw demons guides their actions, without need for any sort of real commandment enforcement mechanism at all.

The results are the same. The chainsaw wielding tooth fairy demons don’t eliminate crime, because they don’t exist. Belief in the chainsaw wielding tooth fairy demons eliminates crime. Toothfairyville doesn’t even need surveillance cameras that don’t work, or robot dogs that aren’t charged, or broken quadrotors, to elicit the same sort of behavioral response we see in New Robotnik.

Toothfairyville is also an “absolute belief state.” There are no actual police, but everyone believes there are police-like things. You should realize at this point that we’re talking generally about religion, and about the state of human civilization for tens of thousands of years. This system worked.

Stop and think for a moment which town you would prefer to live in. All three have zero crime. One has operable automated chainsaw faced robot dogs and ubiquitous surveillance, one has a defunct version of the same, and one believes in the tooth fairy. I’d choose Toothfairyville.

Now let’s apply the Yudkowski edict, originally attributed to P.C. Hodgell, to these three towns. “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.” Should it? The best town of the three to live in is Toothfairyville, but when Yudkowski stumbles through the door and upends the tooth fairy indoctrination program, Toothfairyville explodes into anarchy owing to its lack of cops. Once that town goes down in flames, Yudkowski migrates to New Robotnik, lets them all know the enforcement system is broken, and again that town goes up in flames. Robotnik now has an immigration problem, because everyone from the other two towns flees their anarchy-ridden homes where perfectly good systems of peace have been destroyed by Yudkowsky’s Steamroller Of Truth. And the only solution is a ubiquitous police state.

This is one of many important operational connections between civil liberties and religion. Religion is a millennia-old system of social peace and order that keeps you from needing a kabillion cops. Ubiquitous religion is the only path to “defund the police” I see without an increase in crime. 

Imperfect Systems of Police and Belief

I can hear you through the monitor. One of you is screaming “your hypotheticals are trash because there is no such thing as a perfectly adopted belief system or a perfectly adopted police state.” Another of you is screaming “but what happens when someone tests the boundaries of belief and discovers that the chainsaw dogs are broken or the tooth fairy doesn’t exist?” I yield to these legitimate criticisms, as the hypotheticals were obviously absolutes. The first hypothetical is an absolute police state, the second and third are absolute belief states. In practice, crime is in part a function of how many “police” a culture has, and how much “belief in enforcement” the culture has. The two form a function, where 100% policing yields no crime, 100% belief in enforcement yields no crime, less than 100% of both yields some crime, and 0% of either gets you a shit pile of crime. The function might look something like this, with the graph peaking where all potential criminals are committing crime:

The United States crime wave of 2020 and 2021 is a golden example of this. Our religiosity quotient stayed relatively constant through those two years, but the willingness of the cops to police dangerous areas of town went down, the actual number of police went down, the trust in police went down, and the belief that the police were going to enforce anything went down, so crime went up. We lost on both axes through those two years, causing a murder spike, among other crimes.

Now the murder spike is dropping, but none of the conservatives want to admit it’s dropping, and the liberals don’t seem to know why. It’s because the cops, and the belief in the cops, came back.

Generalizing to All Things

Why do we have nuclear weapons? Why is nationalism a thing? Why did we kill the whales to make margarine? The “rationalists” describe the answer to these questions with the word “Moloch,” the tendency of complex game theory systems to devolve to Nash Equilibria we don’t want as a society, which require societal wide coordination to fix or repair. The Tragedy of the Commons, an earlier formulation of the same basic thing, traces its roots to 1833 and crops up everywhere in economics and sociology.

The rationalists struggle at every turn figuring out how to get society to coordinate behavior that will be positive. The answer to whale depopulation was treaties, enforceable by international law, buttressed by nation states, which act as … cops. The answer is always a higher level of cop. But when it comes to things like international environmental policy, or an end to war, there’s no higher level of cop unless the UFOs rescue us from ourselves. 

Because religion doesn’t update quickly, it’s hard to slide “thou shalt not kill whales” or “thou shalt not enrich uranium” into the commandment list. But if it was there and universally adopted, nuclear weapons might never have been developed, and we might still have whales. This is every bit the “coordination problem” that “thou shalt not steal” is, and we mostly don’t steal.

Some folks in the modern AI debate are hoping AI can be the new higher level of cop, and some take that conclusion to very disturbing limits. But the answer has been staring them all in the face the entire time. Mankind has already substantially solved “coordination problems,” and the Yudkowskys of the world destroyed the solution: religion. Now Yudkowsky’s friends are building the AI to become a worse version of something we already had. Yudkowsky fights them furiously, but Yudkowsky’s preconceptions prevent him from seeing the obvious solution to the second order effects of his own belief system. 

The trick isn’t to build a higher order cop. The trick is to either build a better religion, or update a legacy one to deal with our new problems, or tweak one to have a quicker update mechanic than a Council of Nicea every five centuries.

But who do we trust to do that? 

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I say this to make it absolutely clear that unlike a lot of boorishly banal material you might encounter within the wretchedly named “Manosphere,” this is not intended to be a whiny article. I’m not complaining, nor am I calling for societal change or action. I’m simply wondering exactly how dominant female privilege has to get before they declare victory and take their boot off the necks of men. I really don’t know the answer to this question, but we’ll speculate about that below after the wall of graphs. HWFO loves graphs.

Herein we will go point by point through as many measurable societal markers as I can think of, leaving no marker unmarked, and put together a Gender War Scoreboard describing as accurate a snapshot as possible of the current state of the United States. Then we’ll close with some analysis about how badly it would have to get before the women finally just declare victory and move on. This post shall be too big for email.

To assign our score, we will look at sets of data that fall generally into two categories. For victimization ratios and similar, we’ll just look at percentage by gender. For comparing two uncapped sets of data, such as life expectancy, we’ll look at a ratio and make them both add to 100 for an apples-to-apples comparison. Then we’ll add them all up at the end to tally the score.

Salary

HWFO covered the gender wage gap in 2022, but I’ll summarize it here so you don’t have to read back. According to a 2008 analysis by the Department of Labor, now 16 years old, the raw gender wage gap was 20.4% in 2007:

Most of the gap was explainable by career choice and lifestyle choice differences:

When compared properly that looks like this:

Sixteen years ago, the bits of the gender wage gap that weren’t explained by career and life choice differences only totaled 6%. This fact has been known for a decade and a half and is constantly hidden from view by Pew, the NLWC, and any other major organization that profits from the perception that this gap is large and persistent. It has also assuredly closed to narrower than that 6% in the ensuing decade and a half, but nobody’s replicated the Department of Labor analysis. Look closely at the effects in the green bar identified by the Department of Labor. “Child birth” is how you become a mother. “Child care” is something mothers do. “Working part time” is something mothers do. “Time out of the labor force” is something mothers take. “Occupational choice” is something women change when they become mothers. Here are some graphs from Kleven et al, March 2019:

The solid lines are women. In every studied area, the women make equal or more than the men do up until the birth of their first child, and then they make less. The gender wage gap difference is in the choice to have children. Women choose to make professional concessions to raise a family while the men don’t. Is this fair? Some might say no, but only if they also don’t want to be the primary caregiver for their kids. Some would say yes, for the following two reasons: (1) women choose this, especially in feminist societies, but also (2) men are punished socially for choosing this. If you do not believe me, go make two fake male Tinder profiles with identical cute photos in them, and in the bio of one say “corporate lawyer” and the other say “part time daycare worker” and see which one gets more hits. Then do the same with a female profile. Men are socially punished by women for making the career concession, women are not socially punished by men for making it.

Often when these sorts of “equal pay for equal work” studies are properly controlled for mothering and career choice, they find that men are paid less than women for equal work. Google was pretty famously forced by their neo-progressive staff to do an internal analysis of the subject, and uncomfortably discovered they were overpaying women for being women on an “equal work” basis. The results were twofold. First Google paid all the men a one time bonus, then Google quietly never investigated it again so they could get back to paying women more.

Harvard Business Review did a deep dive on this topic, including things like female executive pay, and came to the same conclusions.

The problem with the notion that American women should be able to successfully clone the male competitive model is that husbands have not picked up a significant share of women’s traditional responsibilities on the home front.

[…]

In Europe, various groups of social feminists have viewed the problem for women quite differently. For them, it is not woman’s lack of legal rights that constitutes her main handicap, or even her lack of reproductive freedom. Rather, it is her dual burden—taking care of a home and family as well as holding down a job—that leads to her second-class status.

Feminists and harried housewives will style this as a “lazy men” problem, but I’m a single father widower of two kids and I do 100% of each of those bars in the graph. I did around 80% of those bars when my wife was still with us, because she was a construction estimator who worked 55+ hours a week. I took the professional hit, quitting my job and starting my own business with flexible hours so I could do it. There was no other way. Most women don’t want men who want to do that. Most women want men who make more money than they do, which means they’re looking for men who aren’t going to do meal prep, clean the house, or grocery shop, whether they admit to this up front or not. In doing less primary childcare and household responsibilities, men are simply giving women what they want in the dating world. This tendency shows up repeatedly in the scientific literature.

For our comparison today, we’ll stick with the Department of Labor analysis that showed female salaries, adjusted for motherhood choice and choice of profession, are 94% of male ones. 52% of the money earned is earned by males, 48% is earned by females.

The gender wage gap is mostly a result of motherhood choice, partially a result of the social implications regarding how women’s dating preferences steer men’s behavior, and the rest gets rounded out by the other element of child rearing in the United States, child custody.

Custody

Out of the eleven million single parent homes in 2020, 80% were headed by single mothers. Some of this flows from unwed mothers with absent fathers, but exactly the same number (80%) of divorce custody cases end with the mother being granted custody, while in only 52% of cases was this arrangement agreed upon by both parties. Two thirds of divorces involving children are initiated by women. One in five divorced mothers have sole custody with zero visitation allowed by the father. Father income and access to better legal representation has no effect on the outcome of custody battles. I do not know if 80% is some magic number or merely a curious coincidence.

More custody among single mothers means more women splitting time between professional and child rearing obligations, which feeds into the wage gap. This is an outcome women want, men don’t, and women have won even though it drags at the wage metric. They won it 80:20.

Home Ownership

An analysis by Lending Tree shows that in the United States in 2023, single women owned 10.95 million homes, while single men owned 8.24 million, a gap which was rising since 2021.

They describe the results like this:

…but that doesn’t accurately represent things. This might be better.

Or this.

Notice the difference? There’s a 5.86% difference between the total number of houses owned by single men and single women when counting the houses owned by married folks in the pool, but just counting single men vs single women, the gap is four times bigger.

In the Lending Tree analysis, the state with the highest ownership share of single men is New Mexico, which still more single women home owners. Only three of the fifty states have a gap favoring men, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Basically the three places you’re most likely to find some dude trying to be a hermit, or least likely to find a single mom needing a public school system. By national averages, the single homeowner ratio is 57:43 in favor of the women.

Higher Education

The share of men attending colleges by ratio has plummeted over the last decade.

This is reflective in the total number of people of each gender with degrees.

When you look at postdoc and higher attainment, men still have that familiar lead at the age when some women quit to have babies. This is from the University of Dublin School of Natural Sciences, but you’d see similar charts in the USA if people decided to graph them.

Is the rising female dominance of academia due to the country being spammed with student loans? Or the rise of humanities degrees with questionable ROI? Or disaffected males checking out of a system dominated by women at the grade school level? Or the disproportionate amount of “female only” scholarships and leg-up programs? Or that video games and weed in 2024 are orders of magnitude better than they were in the 90s? I do not know, I just know the scoreboard.

For our scorecard, we’ll take the current four year college attendance ratio, which is a 58:42 advantage for the women.

Murder

Murder victimization is overwhelmingly male.

Why do men get murdered more than women? Most murders are by men. Most murders are among people who know each other. Many murders are the resolution of beefs in honor cultures - modern day duels. And men are more likely to have unresolved beefs with men than with women. Also, we have a cultural stigma against men harming women, which works to women’s advantage. There may be other factors in play, but I don’t know what they might be.

Stripping out the “unknowns” from Statista’s graph above, by 2022 numbers 77% of murder victims were men, compared to 23% women. A 77:23 advantage to the women in not getting murdered.

Rape

Rape is much stickier. The CDC calls “men penetrating women without consent” rape, and calls “women forcing men to penetrate them” something other than rape, so they can count the numbers differently. If we’re trying to do a gender scorecard, we’d need to call them both “rape,” and when we take a stab at doing this with CDC data between 2010 and 2012, this is the result:

Male and female victimization rates of rape are very similar. Unfortunately these numbers don’t include prison rape, which predominantly victimizes males, and accounts for around 80,000 rape victims per year, perhaps more. If we were counting not just victims, but instances of rape itself, it’s likely the prison numbers go significantly higher because of repeat victimizations. Prison rape numbers are very difficult to nail down, so we’ll do the women a favor here, not include it, and just give women a 51 to 49 edge on not getting raped. The edge should probably be larger.

Incarceration

Incarceration in the United States is dominated by men.

It seems to be true that men commit more crimes. It is well documented that women can get out of small infractions and citations by using their feminine wilds on the cop, but that probably doesn’t come into play with incarceration-level infractions. It is well documented that women receive substantially smaller sentences for the same crimes as men. These three factors combine in some way to produce the results we see in the graph above. Out of a total 2022 sample set of 1,230,143 incarcerated individuals in the United States, 93% were men and 7% were women.

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Workplace Deaths

Almost no women work in high risk jobs, which leads to a huge disparity in workplace deaths.

In 2022, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics indicated that the USA had 5,486 workplace deaths. 445 (8%) of these were women, and 5,041 of these (92%) were men.

Homelessness

In 2023, the Department of Housing and Urban Development counted 653,104 homeless Americans in its annual point-in-time report, 60.5% were male, 38.3% were female, and 1.2% were trans or another category that didn’t fit into the gender binary.

Setting the trans aside for our gender war scorecard, that’s 61% male 39% female.

I cannot explain why there are more homeless men than women. Mental illness causes homelessness, but mental illness in women is triple that of men, so that’s not it. Inability to afford housing causes homelessness, but we’ve seen above that salaries are relatively equivalent, with a possible slight lead towards the men. Drug use is often cited as a homelessness driver, but the gender break on drug use is only 56:44, so that’s partially explanatory at most. I suspect that homelessness is a marker that indicates general despair, and men have far more despair than women do in the United States, as depicted in the suicide numbers to follow.

Intimate Partner Violence

Nobody talks about male victimization of intimate partner violence, but the ratios are closer than you might realize according to statistics compiled by the peer reviewed journal “Partner Abuse.”

According to their statistics, 22% of all individuals will report being assaulted by an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime - 23% for females and 19.3% for males. This means that among all victims, 54% are female and 46% are male. We probably don’t hear about this because of the modern media clickbait engine. Women click and share on articles, stories, and statistics that show them as victims, and men actively avoid clicking on articles, stories, and statistics that show them as victims. This, combined with the majority of the media being liberal-centered and encouraged to advance a certain narrative when it comes to feminism prevents this fact from being widely shared.

Suicide

The act of giving up on your own life so thoroughly and resolutely that you choose to end it is a horrible act, but also may be a reasonable bellwether about the relative privilege of the genders. Like in the case of homelessness above, this is at least in part a measure of the relative hopelessness or despair of a portion of the population. In the USA in 2022, 79% of suicides were by men.

Life Span

As of 2021, life expectancy among United States men was 73.5 years, compared to 79.3 years for women. If we try and set this up like a scorecard, women live 52% of the years lived, while men live 48%.

Scoreboard

Farming all of the data above, we can generate a kind of a scoreboard to see how each gender is doing in its war for societal advantages against the other. When we do so, with each category normalized on a 1-100 style percentage scale, the compiled results look like this:

Or, graphed:

If we were to take each of these measurable socioeconomic factors as equal weight, then women score a 66 to the men’s 34, meaning women are currently around twice as privileged as males are in the USA, numerically speaking. This is a blowout win. But that might not be fair, because income ratio or college attendance might be more important than suicide or dying in the workplace, so if you wanted to weigh each of them and generate a modified scoreboard, I built you a google sheet to do so. It looks like this: (change the yellow boxes, leave the rest alone)

click here to access the scorecard

I have spent about a half hour playing around with relative weighting and have yet to find a weighting scheme I consider to be reasonable which doesn’t yield a blowout win for the women. Your mileage may vary.

Analysis

The prevailing opinion among men seems to be either to “Man Up” and deal with the world not being fair, or to pretend they haven’t lost in an attempt to placate their feminist lady friends to try and get laid. The prevailing opinion of women seems to be that they haven’t won, and they must continue fighting the gender war to win more than they’ve already won. But I wonder how much more do they need to win before they stop? When is enough enough? Would their claims of evil patriarchal control dry up if they had 80% of the university attendance? Or men were 100% of the suicide? If they don’t think they’ve won yet in 2024, I’d like one of them to establish a fixed winning condition in the gender war, and then when they finally reach that threshold I’d like them to stick to it instead of moving the bar again. Throw a party and end the carnage.

It’s very likely if someone were to lay out the modern state of affairs to a 1970s feminist and say “if you try hard enough you can achieve this: [graphs above],” then that 1970s feminist would probably be incredulous that such an event could ever occur, but would agree they would have obviously won the gender war if it did. They’d mostly likely concede at that time to call it off. Unfortunately, nobody ever inked any winning conditions in the war back then, so it will likely continue no matter how one sided the results get. People in wars get addicted to winning, and don’t want to put down the whooping stick because it feels good to whoop people. For this reason, we should expect the feminists to never quit, ever, no matter how badly these metrics get. The self righteous spilling of the blood of others has driven mankind’s culture wars since prehistory.

And men will continue to do what we do, because in this space we really don’t have any other choice, outside becoming a whiney “Manosphere” blogger.

We’ll Man Up.

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The great freakoutery of 2/22/2024 is how Google Gemini, their AI image generation software, keeps cramming “diversity” into images where it clearly doesn’t belong. Such as Popes.

And knights.

buy the author a pink suit of armor

There are far more. You can go make your own, or browse through Twitter/X and see lots of really wild stuff that seems as if Kathleen Kennedy is trying to remake The Patriot.

We’ve spoken before on HWFO about stress testing the Woke Rails buried in different LLM AI models, including some entertaining stress testing dialogues…

But not until today did we have a true look at the actual rail itself, at least as far as Gemini is concerned. A friend of mine on Facebook tricked Gemini into divulging it. Here it is.

A year ago when we started to analyze this, we speculated that the Woke Rails were being hardcoded in a detailed way into the LLM itself, perhaps with curated bodies of training data. But as Alex Younger discovered today, Google Gemini is using a very simple hack. It’s just got an extra LLM layer which it asks to generate a woke version of your prompt, and then it runs the image generation AI on the modified prompt.

It’s that simple.

So if you tell it to “generate an image of a 1943 German Soldier,” it takes your prompt, changes that prompt to say “generate an image of a 1943 German soldier including different genders and ethnicities,” and then this is what it gives you:

And in an amazing instance of art predicting reality, South Park called this exact thing five months ago in their special “South Park: Joining The Panderverse.”

Like usual South Park episodes and specials, there are multiple storylines running in parallel, including one I personally find hilarious about the plumbers taking over the world because nobody else actually knows how to do anything, but the main storyline is about none other than Kathleen Kennedy of Disney being replaced by a version of Cartman from an alternate universe, and inserting herself into every creative meeting while saying the phrase “PUT A CHICK IN IT AND MAKE HER GAY.”

And this is, almost directly and literally, what Google is doing.

It takes your prompt, inserts {some version of that}, and then runs the LLM.

I opined in the HWFO Reading List article yesterday that if James Damore had published his so called at the time “anti-diversity-screed” today instead, that nobody would notice. I further considered that perhaps that is a great litmus test of how far back the woke wave has crashed, in terms of general public opinion. But it occurs to me one day later that Google clearly didn’t get the memo.

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Let’s set aside that the total outlay for US border security in the immigration bill is less than what’s earmarked for funding both sides of the Gaza war, shelve the immigration side of the bill entirely, and look specifically at this contention that Republicans are evil and will cause Ukraine to lose their war with Russia by not giving them enough free bullets. We can easily test that contention with mathematics.

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy maintains a pretty amazing Ukraine Support Tracker, with humanitarian, financial, and military aid tracked by every country who’s thrown into the pot. Many of their visualizations are superb, and interactive, and you can have quite a bit of fun on their website, but they don’t quite give us the visualizations we need to truly understand the claim that Republicans will cause Ukraine to lose. This claim is a claim about bullets and such, so we begin by stripping out all forms of aid other than military hardware and compare countries within the data set.

As of today, we’ve given Ukraine half the bullets. (and other stuff) Germany’s given them two tenths, UK less than a tenth, and everyone else clocks in at a very small number of bullets. But that’s not fair because the USA is far bigger than Malta so we should at least adjust this by economy size.

buy the author a FGM-148 Javelin

There are some small countries in this chart that are throwing a lot of their GDP into the Ukraine effort, and the reason why becomes very clear when you look at a map. Green bars in the above chart are countries adjacent to Russia, who probably fear they’re next on the chopping block. Notably absent from this chart are Belarus, which shares a border with both countries and is bending towards Russia, Georgia which was already invaded by the Russians (and nobody cared), and Moldova which is probably saving their bullets for next year’s invasion of them. Here’s a map of the same data:

What stands out here? First, France, Italy, and Spain don’t give one flying ferret fart about giving bullets to Ukraine. Very few countries below a line of latitude south of Ukraine’s border do. In fact, there’s a box of geographic concern, drawn in orange above, outside which almost nobody cares. The line of “countries who don’t care” begins with Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland. These southern countries don’t think Russia can get through the Alps, and France doesn’t think Russia can get through Germany. They are all making strategic decisions about whether to send bullets based on their own national defense interests. Germany’s worried, France isn’t, and Switzerland is yodeling into their beer steins. The difference in how worried these countries are is tremendous:

If you’re a European country inside the box of regional interest, you’re giving around 29 times more bullets to Ukraine than if you’re a European outside the box. And if you’re the USA or the United Kingdom, you’re already giving around 11 times more bullets to Ukraine than the European countries outside the box. Curiously, Canada (not shown) is giving over 5 times more bullets to Ukraine than the European countries outside the box.

What do the USA, UK, and Canada have in common? Among other things, they all speak English so they share the same media feeds and have been at least partially captured by the same “Ukrainian Flag Brainworm,” a thing HWFO calls an Egregore:

In short, a disproportionate number of the people in English speaking countries are supporting Ukraine because they can signal virtue to their social media environment by doing so. And perhaps that’s fine, and we’ll set that on a shelf for a moment, judgment free.

Let’s pretend you’re one of these English speaking people extracting social virtue by supporting Ukraine. Or perhaps you truly have a firm and inflexible moral stance on the Russian invasion and were out in the cold alone protesting when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. Let’s pretend you also hate U.S. Republicans, which seems to be a running theme with these two groups, which is fine. If you want to at least be intellectually consistent with your anger, you should be angrier at the following countries than you are at Republicans for relative Ukrainian bullet supply:

• Twice as mad at the Greeks,

• Four times as mad at the Belgians,

• Five times as mad at the Portuguese,

• Six times as mad at the Italians,

• Eight times as mad at the Spaniards,

• Ten times as mad at the French,

• Twenty four times as mad at the Turks,

• 128 times as mad at the Romanians,

• 246 times as mad at the Irish,

• 266 times as mad at the Austrians,

• and infinitely more mad at the Swiss, which have to date bought zero bullets for Ukraine.

It’s a free country and we can all be mad at whoever we like, for whatever reason we like, including the Republicans. But if you’re mad at them for this, and not also equally mad at half of Europe within a few thousand klicks of the war zone, I question your intellectual consistency.

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Midnight

I read a book on the plane to and from SHOT Show last week. This is the book.

Midnight Simulacra may be the most referential book I have ever read, and I’ll admit up front part of my engagement with it comes from how referential it is to me. If Neal Stephenson was 30% smarter, attended Georgia Tech during the 90s at its peak years of oppressively stressful mentally damaging student policy known among its victims as “The Shaft,” and became as or more involved in its underbelly drug culture as I did, then Stephenson may have attempted to write this book. If I’m a Volume 7 individual, the main character in this book is a Spinal Tap 11 with all too familiar life experiences. This gave me some incentive to meet the author.

One of my readers knows the guy, from which I received the book recommendation, another reader knows him well, and the man who currently runs my old WREK radio show did proof on two chapters of the book, from whom I elicited an invitation to the release party last night. Nick Black seemed pretty cool, and the people there seemed to think he was extra cool. He’s certainly a well known hot shit programmer with far more money than me.

Should you read this book? Maybe. There are enough out-jokes to overcome the in-joke ratio, the central narrative seems engaging, and it’s one of the most vocabulatorily (that isn’t a word) challenging books I’ve ever read, so it will keep you sharp at a minimum. You can buy it here:

Buy Nick's Book

But we’re done speaking about this book, and shall instead speak of the party, at which I knew one person initially.

Simulacra

Once it became apparent that this party was going to be largely populated by former Georgia Tech alumni, never known for their social acumen nor for comparable male-to-female ratios, I lapsed into my prior GT social modes without any real awareness. I left my friend and former radio compadre and approached the two cutest girls there. Like at Georgia Tech, they were having their own sequestered conversation as if to erect an ephemeral social barrier between them and the nerds, but unlike at Georgia Tech they were law/law-adjacent, and both married. Thus is the state of affairs in your forties. I walked headlong into the timeless classic topic “whether libertarianism is good or bad,” with a successful blonde civil rights attorney and former Ron Paul delegate taking the “good” position and a successful brunette civil-historian-who-works-on-superfund-sites taking the “bad” position. Vaguely speaking.

I don’t have this libertarian argument with anyone anymore. I’ve already run every branch of this conversation tree down to its limit, with the most extreme libertarians and Marxists imaginable as interlocutors and observers, so it interests me not. I know the trunk, the branches, and the twigs. This is a solved argument. P-complete. When this argument erupts in my vicinity I mostly just observe, using it to gather data on the speakers.

“Hi. I’m BJ, and I can tell I’ve walked into a doozy over here.” Minutes later, “in full disclosure, I was raised a Quaker and a contentious objector to war but I’m currently the lead policy writer at RECOIL magazine.” I did not disclose that I’m the only policy writer at RECOIL, making me a '“leader” of one. Nor did I disclose that the main reason I can’t get in touch with my RECOIL editor is he’s apparently doing off-books stuff in Ukraine.

That’s fine. Unnecessary details don’t engender good party conversation.

These two ladies went on deeply reenacting the “fire department” argument, wherein the interlocutors postulate the relative demise of modern society should taxes be collected (or not) and dedicated (or not) towards community fire protection (or not). Possible conversation trees: volunteer fire departments, whether they’re community supported, whether that community support counts as taxes, whether the world was unendurable prior to government funded fire departments, the relative efficacy and efficiency of voluntarism, and such. Likely outside this discussion: scaling issues, the Dunbar number, and the valuation of human life in terms of tax expenditure, both in terms of dollars spent, dollars collected, or dollars borrowed at interest.

buy the author a fire truck

It occurred to me that if I entered into this discussion, I’d merely be running conversational scripts. Perhaps these scripts had been honed over time, through similar discussions, and perhaps I was good at them, but they’re scripts nonetheless. I thought back to my time in competitive policy debate in high school, where my success on the affirmative team was literally about writing these scripts, and scripts for every possible response to my script, and then running them. I thought about the bad Arby’s sandwich I’d ordered earlier, the lady at the window repeating a script to me, I repeating mine back to her.

We were robots. Caricatures of people, human simulacra attending an event about a book with that very word in the name. I have a sense of what Mr. Black was going for with his word choice in the title and this certainly wasn’t that.

Doyle

Black read from the book. Funny and entertaining. I learned things the nuclear regulatory commission probably considers classified, but which certainly weren’t actionable in my own personal life. A man approached me, asked if I was BJ, and introduced himself as someone from the HWFO Slack server, which you too can join by subscribing via the green button below. Let’s call this man “Mike Doyle” because I’m lazy and don’t care enough to anonymize him. Now I have four people I can talk to including my WREK friend, and an even M/F ratio to boot. Much better party.

Mike later walked into another discussion between the two ladies I’d met. Mike wore an “obvious libertarian signaling” shirt, although I admit to not remembering its exact wording. Something black and individualism or independence themed. “Nice shirt” comments the blonde civil rights attorney, and we are off to the Non-Aggression-Principle races. This then grows awkward for me, as a former flag waving libertarian, because I can’t really engage the discussion without laying too much groundwork for a party format. Mike probably hasn’t read half the HWFO stuff he needed to, and the blonde has never heard any HWFO crap at all, so where to begin?

In a blog format, I can back-reference. I can start by indicating that societies evolve in the same way animals evolve, only faster because humans have white space in their brains and the rate of different ideas is higher than mutated genes. I can remind them that the fundamental tension between traditionalists and progressives has to do with the rate of change of this evolution, and whether the changes cause more harm than good. I can also point out that in this evolutionary march we the apes are turning ourselves more and more into ants, because the ants actually rule the planet anyway.

In a blog format I can point out that this empty human brain-space becomes a substrate on which different cultural programming grows, and spreads. The rules and indoctrinations and myths that form the fabric of a culture are no more than behavioral instructions written like software into this space, by a wider entity. The culture uses the humans as tools to propagate itself, and what matters in the end is not whether any particular culture is “right” or “wrong” or “ethical” or “not.” All that matters is that the culture is effective at spreading itself.

In a blog format I could explain that the most effective way for this entity to spread itself is by hijacking the reality of the humans infected with the cultural programming, often by hijacking language itself, in such a way that similarly infected humans band together for aid and support, and cannot even understand why people believe differently than them because they don’t have a shared language.

In a blog format I could point out that those of us with religion-friendly brain wiring outcompeted those of us without it, which gives our entire species a propensity to adopt cultural mores often thoroughly disjointed from reality, because adopting them makes us feel good. Even atheists do this, and their blindness to the fact that they’re doing it becomes their greatest intellectual downfall.

In a blog format I could dust off my Eric Hoffer and plug him virtually into the modern space, referencing his material to identify two major groups of True Believers running this sort of programming today.

In a blog format I could point out that as we individuals continue to outsource our thinking to our smart phones and the internet, we are participating in and being influenced by a morality hive mind. An Egregore, which exhibits all the indicators of being a naturally emergent neural network using each of us as neurons to create a self-updating culture.

In a blog format I could use the absurd behavior of most of planet earth during 2020 as an example of how this works.

In a blog format I could explain that the actions of distributed Egregores look like conspiracies from a central cabal when viewed through the eyes of a conspiracy theorist.

And that they have to have a current-thing to draw on for energy, so when one disappears they grab another.

And that they are not and perhaps cannot be controlled.

And when this all was done, and I’d had all the foundations laid, only then could I turn to the blonde civil rights attorney and tell her that justice itself is a social construct, that nobody has any rights they don’t seize with blood, that war is a Nash Equilibrium of Game Theory, that mankind is evolving to emulate ants, that nothing can stop it other than self-extinction, and that everyone they know, perhaps she, and Mike, and I as well, are all just LLMs running programming. Free will is a lie and volunteer fire departments probably don’t have ladders long enough to reach us here on the 17th floor pool deck so we need taxes to buy the extra long ladders.

Not only are the Egregores one level up from us, they may be the only intelligent thing there is. Imagine she replies “Oh, like that XKCD cartoon?”

Only after hours of groundwork would my response to her comic allusion make sense. That not only are they indeed sheep, we probably all are. Each of us are LLMs trained on our own experiences. All our interactions entirely determinate. Maybe even real sheep think the other sheep are sheep.

Then the blonde might look at me and say “yeah, nah, you’re full of shit, Rule 30.”

And there I would stand, four hours later, tail between my legs, party dissipated, Nick Black millionaire hacker author vacuuming the common room of his own party sweating and laughing at the spectacle.

So I didn’t say any of that stuff. I smiled and exchanged business cards.

Lessons

I draw several lessons from last night, and my thoughts about it today.

1. Popular ideas are ideas which are fully explainable in a cocktail party setting. The stuff we talk about around here may be of value in sense-making operations when the world seems confusing, but it cannot become a popular way of looking at the world because of the format. “Those who read 2000 word blogs” make up a miniscule fraction of the population.

2. Therefore don’t try, especially at cocktail parties.

3. Don’t get frustrated at folks who don’t get it yet, because the foundational reading list really is quite awful.

Anyway, Midnight Simulacra is a pretty good book and Nick’s a great author.

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With the election season shaping up, we will assuredly hear renewed calls that Trump is going to land us in nuclear war or similar, so it’s worth our time to take a look at the record going back at least to 1980. We’ll present statistics and graphs on that in a moment, but first let’s start by breaking out our French Language translation books, and let’s end the yarn with a story of drunken leaks from a Reagan secret service agent.

By the time we’re done, we’ll not only discover that conservatives in power in the US correlate with a reduction in the number of global state deaths on net, but we will also formulate a theory as to why. You’ll enjoy this. Or perhaps not.

Le Français

French Quora is fun.

Trump est réélu. Y aura-t-il une troisième guerre mondiale ?

Contrairement à ce beaucoup disent, je pense que si Trump est réélu, il y aura une troisième guerre, mais pas mondiale.. ou on va dire mondiale sans les USA.
Parce que si Trump est réélu, ce sera America First. C'est à dire qu'il ne se mélera pas des conflits comme Israel Hamas, Ukraine, voire Chine vs Taiwan. Et si la Chine arrive à empêcher la Corée du Nord d'attaquer directement les USA, ils pourront tranquillement lancer un conflit avec celle du Sud.

Pour Trump rester en dehors des conflits , c'est assurer la prédomiance des USA sur la scène économique pendant des dizaines d'années, en évitant de dépenser dans un conflit tout en rentrant des devises via la vente d'armes, de munitions et de produits de première nécessité.

I don’t speak French, but a very cool guy I know is French Canadian and his translation goes like this:

Contrary to what many say, I think that if Trump is reelected, there will be a third war, but not world war... or in other words, a world war without the USA. Because if Trump is reelected, it will be America First. 

That is to say that he won't mess with conflicts like Israel/Hamas, Ukraine, see China vs Taiwan. And if China can keep North Korea from directly attacking the USA, they can happily launch a conflict with South Korea.

For Trump, staying out of the conflicts assures the dominance of the USA economy for decades, keeping from spending in a conflict while selling weapons and ammo and needed products.

This is an interesting theory. Le Translator Friend thinks a lot of foreigners feel that way, and I do think there are probably a lot of Trump Camp isolationist Americans who truly wouldn’t mind this outcome. I don’t think the theory fits the statistics, though.

Les Mathématiques

Our World In Data maintains a data set that covers all deaths in state based conflicts by region since 1946. They have a pretty good graphic of it on their site but I made my own, featuring all state based conflict deaths since 1980, and indexed it by president.

If the dire predictions about Trump were true, we’d see an incredible spike in 2016. We did not. We saw a fall in 2016 and a plateau through the rest of the Trump presidency, followed by the worst spike in recorded history as soon as Biden took over. The Biden spike is really bad. It’s worse than 1947, worse than 1967, and their data only runs through 2022. It doesn’t even include [Israel+Gaza]. It’s almost as if all the world’s leaders saw a bunch of Afghanis falling out of the wheel wells of C-17 cargo planes to their deaths above Kabul, laughed, poured a drink, and decided to tee off against their neighbors.

Do US presidents influence the amount of global deaths in state based conflicts? I don’t know. Probably not directly. Probably somewhat indirectly. But the repeated claim that “electing Trump would increase global conflicts” seems to presume it’s true, so let’s continue to presume it’s true and take a look at the scoreboard.

A Republican United States president has presided over every reduction in global state-based deaths in the last four decades. The lowest annual average of global state based deaths was George W. Bush, the Republican who oversaw the second Iraq war. Donald Trump scored the third lowest global average state based deaths since 1980.

The cold war had a lot of deaths in state based conflicts around the world, Bush One presided over the collapse of the cold war and banked the losses, Clinton got a little bit better, Bush Two surprisingly oversaw the most peaceful time in the world by measure of overall global conflict, Obama more than tripled GWB’s numbers, Trump reigned Obama’s numbers in some, and under Biden we’re on track to reach levels of conflict not seen since The A-Team was on TV. The differentials are very extremely astoundingly bad.

Provided we assume that US presidents matter at all, three of the four Republican presidents since 1980 improved things. Trump presided over the second biggest improvement in the last four decades. The only Republican president to end with global state based death numbers worse than when he started was Reagan, by an amount similar to Clinton. Obama made the score worse by more than double what Clinton or Reagan did. And Biden through 2022 was the worst influence on global state based death numbers in modern times by a factor of ten. He made things twenty two times worse than Reagan did on an average annual basis, through 2022.

Keep in mind, this all presumes that US presidents have some influence over global conflicts. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. But if they don’t, then Trump doesn’t. And if they do, and if we care, then someone’s got to get rid of Biden.

buy the author an A-Team DVD

Le Reagan

Everyone who lived through the 1980s remembers a constant aura of fear that we all might die in nuclear fire at any moment, because a crazy person named Ronald Reagan had his finger hovering over “the button” which would annihilate the Russians, and also ourselves. Kids these days have mass shooter drills, we had “hide under your desk and wait for your blood to be evaporated by nuclear fire” drills, with Reagan playing the Avatar of Death, Angel Azra’il wielding the Flaming Sword of Nuclear Damocles Ushering In the Apocalypse, the Republican who will Boil the Oceans and Feast on the Bones of the Young, also featured in King’s Row, Sergeant Murphy, The Killers, and Knute Rockne, All-American. This was Reagan to many people.

The great American tradition of Tall Tales remains strong in only two remaining places of which I’m aware - heavy construction job trailers and military barracks. My father was a heavy construction worker, and I was raised on job sites by heavy construction workers, and I say this to you in advance so you realize this story may be a complete fabrication.

As the story goes, my father found himself sitting in a bar with a retired secret service agent who worked for Reagan. They got pretty liquored up together, whereupon this agent told my father a story. The agent said one day, unprompted, Reagan pulled him aside and told him a simple truth. “I will never push the button,” Reagan said. “I cannot have the deaths of all those people on my conscience. Even if Russia attacked us first, I would never push that button. But the only way I can be sure that Russia never pushes their button, is to make them think that I’m ready to push mine.”

Is that real? It sounds like something Reagan would say. It could be bullshit, a total fabrication of my father in order to pass some strange wisdom down to me, his son, about some random thing that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I have no idea whether Reagan said it or not. But it does bring me to an alternate theory about the numbers above, and about Trump, and about global stability.

La Peur

Imagine you’re on the playground and you really want to beat the tar out of Billy, because Billy’s been stealing your lunch money and you’re sick of his shit. But there’s some goody goody who’s twice either of your size, who’s likely to step in and whoop both of you if you get in a fight, so instead you hold off. You bide your time until he’s out sick one day. That’s the Reagan playground, and largely the Bush 1 and Bush 2 playground.

Now imagine that guy’s not around anymore, but this other huge psycho dude with ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome is on the playground, and nobody can figure out what he’s going to do next. If you clock Billy he might back you and give Billy the atomic elbow, or he might back Billy and hit you in the head with a lead pipe, or he might throw rocks at trees muttering “COVFEFE.” Nobody knows. Clocking Billy is too risky because that dude is just too unpredictable. That’s the Trump playground.

Then imagine both of these guys are gone, and there’s a third big dude on the playground, but he mostly just sleeps on the bench and wets his pants. That’s the Biden playground. Time to go find Billy and break his nose.

Nobody started nuclear war when Reagan was in charge because they were scared Reagan might be just the kind of lunatic who would nuke the planet. Nobody started major global conflicts during Trump because they had no idea what the hell Trump was going to do, because he seemed to govern by Magic 8 Ball. Biden peed his pants in Afghanistan and spent the following years ignoring the pee stain, so the globe decided it was time Billy got what’s coming.

Fear of one flavor or another kept the peace, and now there’s no fear.

It’s just a theory.

If it turns out false, I blame the French.

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https://twitter.com/Freakoutery/status/1730424096272285783

That’s not a fact, it’s a lie, and it’s a collaborative lie between Newsom and Politifact, with Politifact providing the technically-correct-Motte and Gavin providing the pants-on-fire-Bailey. This behavior isn’t limited to Newsom, nor the Democrats, nor even to politicians in general. You might see this in your business or personal life. Folks in the gun control argument and other social science arguments play shell games with total numbers and per capita numbers very commonly, so examining Newsom’s tricky lie should be instructive no matter which side of which ideological fence on which you sit. Let’s begin.

The Facts

In his tweet above, Newsom states:

Newsom: More Floridians move to California than the other way around. It's a fact.

It’s a lie. Anyone can look it up themselves at the United States Census Bureau repository for state-to-state migration flows, for every year going back to 2005. The table there only presents estimates, and we’re going to strip the error bounds out for simplicity. I truncated this table for discussion, so you didn’t have to.

In 2022, 50,701 people migrated from California to Florida, and only 28,557 people migrated from Florida to California. For every one Floridian who moved to California, 1.78 Californians moved to Florida.

But this wasn’t even the biggest differential, nor the biggest ratio. In the same year 102,442 Californians moved to Texas, while only 42,279 Texans moved to California, for a ratio of 2.42 leaving California for every Texan coming in. Even more stark, 74,157 Californians moved to Arizona, while only 27,142 Arizonians moved to California. For every Arizonian that headed to California, 2.71 Californians went the other direction.

Certainly lots of Californians moved to Florida, but in terms of the differential, Florida barely cracks the top four. If such a thing is bragworthy, the governor of Arizona needs to brag about stealing Californians. It seems apparent that this ongoing dispute between California and Florida governors has little to do with their respective states and more to do with 2024 posturing.

buy the author california real estate

Back to the lie. Politifact didn’t check the lie at all, even though Newsom pretends they did to win Twitter Points. Politifact did check a different statement from a June 12 TV interview:

Newsom: Per capita, more Floridians move to California than Californians moving to Florida.

Bolded emphasis is mine. This statement is true, and the phrase “per capita” does all the heavy lifting here. Effectively, Newsom is actually saying the following:

Not Actually Newsom: “Look dude, there’s a shitpile of people in California, so if my state has a net loss in immigration to yours, it’s just because California’s so big that lots of people come and go, and we’ve got a net loss to everyone right now.”

Well, yes, but the important bit is that California has a net migration loss in general. As Newsom does correctly point out, California isn’t the only state to experience this. Here’s a map.

Most of the deep liberal states are dropping, and the only states on the highest rise are conservative ones. There are some exceptions, however, such as the Mississippi delta and West Virginia - places that are too blue collar for the fleeing liberal staters to stomach.

Newsom’s per capita comparison becomes especially absurd if you consider an extreme outlier case.

We don’t have numbers on net migration between California and Midway Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, but we do know that around 40 people live there compared to around forty million in California. If 20 people on Midway moved to California, and one million and twenty moved from California to Midway, then 50% of Midway’s population would have moved to California, while only 2.6% of California’s population would have moved to Midway. Even with a one million person net differential, Gavin could say “per capita more Midway Islanders moved to California than Californians moved to Midway,” and Politifact, when faced with this immense immigration differential, would still rank his statement Mostly True.

It’s mostly true because it is true, despite being entirely misleading. Politifact also makes mathematical errors in their own fact check, at least per the census data above:

In raw numbers, close to 13,000 more Californians moved to Florida than the other way around. However, this does not account for the states’ population sizes. California has about 17 million more residents than Florida. And Newsom specified he was citing "per capita" data.

The US Census Bureau has almost double that figure in our table above, 22,000, but it’s honestly a relative quibble when dealing with forty million people. We can put the Census numbers in perspective like this:

• If you were in a town with 100,000 Californians, 392 moved to Florida in 2022.

• In your same town, 73 Floridians moved in.

• For every person in your town that got murdered in 2022, 69 residents moved to Florida and 13 Floridians moved in.

Are these state-specific numbers significant? As a resident of this small town, if you knew a total of 100 people, you’d have about a one in twenty chance of knowing someone who moved to Florida. Not huge. You’d also have a six tenths of a percent chance of knowing someone who got murdered.

The Lie

The structure of Newsom’s lie works like this:

Motte: “Actually, on a per capita basis, more Floridians move here than Californians move there.” (not stating why that is a meaningful way to look at it)

Politifcat: “This statement is correct.”

Bailey: “See, more Floridians move to California than the other way around. It's a fact. It says right there because of the word ‘Politifact.’”

Newsom does this sort of stuff a lot, especially when he talks about guns, but nobody seems to notice.

Is Politifact now going to fact check Newsom’s tweet, which lies literally by misquoting Politifact? That depends on their political biases, I suppose.

Chaser

What I find most interesting from the table up above, is basically nobody wants to move from New York to California, or visa versa, despite those states having gigantic populations. That would lend me to believe that people are moving away from California for the same reasons they’re moving away from New York. But everyone wants to move from New York to Florida. For every Floridian who moves to New York, 4.28 New Yorkers move to Florida. If Florida has any relative culture war choke hold on another state based on immigration patterns, it’s New York.

But then again, Miami is just a suburb of NYC and Cuba anyway, so that makes a lot of sense. Also NYC smells.

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