Over the past month or so, we have tackled some of the hardest subjects ever on this channel: race, sex, Islam, France being destroyed, moms killing their kids, and other moms saying, “I hear you.” The news has been filled with one horror show after another, and I have tried my best to remain sane. I leave it up to you to be the judge. So I thought I would reflect on some of the comments you have left on my video from a few weeks back about the situation in France and expand on the issues I’m grappling with.
Crime Is a Policy Choice
France and much of Europe remain in various states of unrest, with riots and the perennially “mostly peaceful” destruction of civilization. One viewer quoted a question I’d asked in the video, “What would my grandfather do to the degenerate and disrespectful youth?”, and answered it: “Well, let’s just say it would involve leather.”
I come from a big Italian Catholic family, so I can relate. I’m not saying you should hit your kids, but there is a point where talk gets cheap. This European insurrection makes me older- and older-school with each passing day. I have more than once joked that I should add the armor of the Crusaders to my podcast background.
Another viewer wrote: “El Salvador has proven this kind of thing can be stopped anytime the people want it to stop.” You can say a lot of things about El Salvador, Bukele’s reign, and the powers he’s used to essentially throw all of the bad guys in prison (and maybe a couple of not-so-bad innocents).
Innocent-until-proven-guilty is a cornerstone of Western civilization. Mess with it at your peril, because that sword will fall back on you real fast as soon as the tides turn. But crime does turn out to be a policy choice, at least to some extent. El Salvador essentially went from the most murderous place on the planet to one of the safest by throwing all the murderers, and everybody they hang out with, in a giant prison.
The same thing seems to be true for our own problems with illegal immigration. It turns out that all you actually need to do is have a president who comes in and says, “We’re going to deport you if you come here. You’re not welcome.” Without changing the text of any law, illegal immigration collapses.
France sure could use a Trump when it comes to the people burning their society to the ground.
Even the things I’ve often felt are excessive, like the MRAPs our police departments got as military surplus from the War on Terror, at least mean that our local law enforcement doesn’t drive around in Smart cars that can be smashed by just a handful of teenagers like in Europe.
Our cops have tanks. So if you want to attempt a Islamist, communist revolutionary takeover, you’re going to run into some Tiananmen Square trouble pretty fast. I didn’t used to think I’d be on the side of the tanks, but this is the world we’re in now.
What Democracy Actually Means
France more or less invented the modern Democratic platform. They were the Jacobins. They went for the utopian, secular humanist version of “liberty, equality, fraternity” and it hasn’t worked out so well there.
They did all the things we’re told we need to do to be more progressive, and they’re still burning their cities to the ground because it’s not equal and fair and good enough. So maybe go in the opposite direction. Dismantle the administrative state, shrink the government, and give more power back to the people.
Take the word democracy, which has long been weaponized by progressives. Democracy is supposed to be about extending power to the people. We assume that means the power to vote, but I’d say voting is actually the least powerful thing we get to do. The least amount of influence I have over anything in my life is when I go and pull the lever. I’m not saying it isn’t worth doing anyways, but I have a lot more power in every other choice I make in the private sphere of my life.
The French ultra-administrative style of governance strips the people of power. True power to the people, and therefore democracy, would involve shrinking the state so that more power is with more people: more rights to use your property as you see fit, engage in contracts, and form associations with whoever you want. Real democracy means I can vote with my feet. I can make more decisions. I’m more empowered in my life.
Order Is a Tradeoff
“Just consider: these riots wouldn’t be allowed in China, Korea, or Japan. The former Shah of Iran once stated the West has a permissive society, not necessarily a democratic society,” wrote another viewer.
It is true that China, Korea, or Japan wouldn’t tolerate anything like the kind of nonsense going on in Western Europe. They have more respect for authority, for better and for worse. They are ethnically homogeneous and have no interest in changing that. As we watch the West allow barbarians to burn it to the ground, there’s something to admire about that kind of order.
There is a trade-off though. China, Korea, or Japan have all demonstrated a high level of technological capability, but America is still the most free-market, free-spirited society in the Western world. We were the frontier. We were the New World. Our dynamism is why we are still the world’s inventor, as we have been for over a century. China’s one giant copy machine. When I talk to engineers and technologists about the difference between the kind of innovation you get out of the dropout class in Silicon Valley and what you get from people educated in the tiger-mom universities of China, they say it just isn’t the same. The tradeoff appears to be order versus creativity.
But that permissive liberalism of the West is a weakness when you have people willing to pull out their curved swords and stab you in the stomach. Think about inviting in 10-20% of your population who never assimilate and develop a multigenerational hatred of your society, while also feeling estranged from the homeland of their ancestors. How far will we let them go? It’s a continual test we keep failing. The line of acceptable behavior moves, we get used to it, and when things kick up again, we act like the line never moved in the first place. The line is close to the edge right now in Western Europe. Will they just fall?
The Natural Experiment
Western liberalism can be destructively permissive, in the case of France, but also creatively liberating, as in America. The line between the two, though, is not just about technocratic public policy and material wellbeing. France is already far in the policy direction American progressives are demanding. Both countries would benefit from all sorts of reforms in the direction of a more free-market society to bring down the cost of everything and improve real wages for everyone, but that doesn’t solve the “I hate you people and want to burn it all” problem.
One of the most important counterexamples is the far poorer former Eastern Bloc countries like Poland and Hungary. They don’t have any of these problems, at least not at scale. They didn’t let in people who hate them, and they haven’t acquiesced to the people who want to. Of course, it’s not just the migrants. It’s also the golden children, the privileged Jacobins itching to burn it all down. That’s not happening in Poland.
Everything France, we have to reject. All of it. France is a failed vision of progressivism. Knock it off with the Francophile stuff. We’re done with that.
Pray for France-emptying their hearts and minds to what faith left them so long ago had been a lesson to watch for the US
What happened to the France that was so up about the invention of the internet and having to use with new words (some of them foreign) that they invented a new term for email?
un courriel