Let's Start by Deporting One Million Illegal Migrants

Incremental wins build momentum

JD Vance, ABC News (August 11th, 2024):

Q: “But how are you going to get ten, to fifteen, to twenty million people out of the country?”

JD Vance: “Well, the first thing you have to do is to stop the bleeding. Stop the open border. Get Kamala Harris out of there. And actually reimplement the Remain in Mexico policy. Rebuild, or finish Donald Trump’s border wall. And you do that, and you stop the bleeding. Now, you’re right, once you do that, once you stop Kamala Harris’s open border policies, you gotta do something with the people who are already here. And I think that you take a sequential approach to it. You are going to have to deport some people. If you are not willing to deport a lot of people, you’re not willing to have a border when there are twenty million illegal aliens in our country.”

Q: “But ten to fifteen million people — this is like—”

JD Vance: “Well John, I think that’s the wrong attitude to take.”

Q: “Are you going to knock on doors, and ask people for their papers?”

JD Vance: “I think this is the wrong attitude towards illegal immigration. There’s twenty million people here illegally. You start with what’s achievable. You do that, and then you go on to what’s achievable from there. I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals, and frankly if you make it harder to hire illegal labor which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem… I think it’s interesting that people focus on ‘Well, how do you deport eighteen million people?’ Let’s start with deporting one million. That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.”

—JD Vance, ABC News (August 11th, 2024)

The reaction to my previous Substack essay was interesting. The proposal to create a special economic zone in America modeled after Shenzhen, China inspired a broad spectrum of feedback. It’s an exotic concept, unfamiliar to a Western audience, and would be unprecedented during the living memory of American citizens. 

Some of the responses were dumb and incoherent — critics who projected their own misinterpretations, even ignoring where I explicitly preempted their objections and explained in advance how to anticipate and solve the most common problems with this political model. I found that audience reaction fascinating, in its own way. Conventional economic wisdom has been carefully curated to support a scaffold of subtle half-truths which advocate for the benefits of globalism and managerial bureaucracy, while downplaying the costs of globalism, and obscuring political alternatives to the effeminate priesthood which governs the status quo. 

I found it instructive that some commentators informed me that the proposal to create an economic zone modeled after Shenzhen, China was a “theoretical libertarian power fantasy which could never happen in real life”, or “a horrifying Hitleresque version of America”. The facts are quite obvious — it’s a Chinese Communist strategy that was already implemented with miraculous results, not an Ayn Randian vision of a secluded Bioshock-style underwater fortress, or a German Nazi scheme to enact sinister eugenic militarism. Learn from your enemies, that’s my perspective. And Shenzhen is a real city, not some theoretical Utopian delusion. 

There’s a very ugly side to Shenzhen, China… factory workers killing themselves out of sheer despair. But I did my best to depict an honest portrayal of how this Special Economic Zone has played out — enormous value has been created for the Chinese nation, but some residents live a terrible existence beneath the shadow of enormous fortunes, which grow larger every year. 

Criticism is fine, and these interactions are amusing, but I enjoyed the anthropological and psychological angle of watching as a small handful of strangers failed to digest a simple, (yet unfamiliar) idea. What I realize is that the herd of Normie followers are dependent on a priest, a shaman, a journalist, a television broadcaster to function as their intermediary and to provide a predetermined, meticulously-curated, crisply-packaged NARRATIVE permission structure in order to confront an adversarial concept — and to digest it, internalize it, recontextualize the new message in a process of reconciliation with their old identity, in order to rationalize and justify to themselves that adopting a new idea is safe, useful, socially acceptable, and does not symbolize a betrayal of their long-cherished identity. Without external permission, without the spiritual guidance of an intermediary who grants encouragement to commit to something new, then the bewildered Normies and Midwits fall back on obsolete narrative prototypes in an attempt to decipher the chaos of the external world. 

The global American Empire has long promoted Communist China as a valuable trading partner. Globalism betrayed American workers by offshoring factories, and allowing industrial espionage in every college, political branch, tech company, and military contractor. For decades, America’s ruling class obscured their blatant treason by arguing that providing jobs to China would create a massive expansion of wealth that would be funneled into an educated, emergent Chinese middle class… and that the wealthy, educated Chinese middle class would overthrow the Chinese Communist Party in order to live under the same kind of democracy which has blessed America. 

China has not been properly explained to the Normie mind — therefore, when confronted by an in-depth examination of a minor aspect of China, some of these strangers groped for the familiar ideological terrain of libertarianism, Hitler, and other irrelevant non sequiturs. 

The vast majority of comments were more intelligent, and thought-provoking.

Today’s America is quite different from yesterday’s China, and it’s reasonable to point out that America lacks some key ingredients of Shenzhen’s success: one billion surplus rural peasants, the national patriotism which developed in response to European and Japanese conquests during the Century of Humiliation, global labor arbitrage assisted by a caste of cosmopolitan parasites selling off the assets of the richest empire in history, rapid technological modernization based upon the proven infrastructure and machinery of Western Civilization… the list goes on. 

Significant differences exist. Without question. 

The most interesting questions, and criticisms, were related to the next phase of the strategy — assuming that America could build a thriving, innovative hub of economic productivity, what would happen next?

I intentionally omitted this line of thought from the previous essay, in order to deliver a suggestive and evocative tone, to stimulate the imaginations of readers — because the possibilities are endless. 

But the deeper vein of skepticism here lies in the realization that America is dysfunctional… the managerial elite will do their best to suffocate any alternative vision to the status quo. If somehow an alternative ecosystem could survive the inevitable rounds of lawsuits, persecution, and extrajudicial sabotage that would be aimed at an American Shenzhen — a seemingly miraculous outcome — then the result would simply be one functional city stranded in a dysfunctional global empire. One tiny outpost of aspirational productivity, surrounded by misery and despair. 

What happens next?

So, here we turn to the debate between the forefront of FrogTwitter intellectuals, or Dissident contemporaries, or RW philosophers, or whatever we might call the philosophical divide between two of the most prominent critics of the American Regime.  

The split between Curtis Yarvin, and Christopher Rufo. 

Yarvin’s position is that America is hopelessly corrupt, that America suffers coup-complete problems, and that a total rejection of the American Empire’s civic mythology is required in order to save Western civilization.

Christopher Rufo’s position is that local political reform can accumulate cultural, legal, and ideological momentum which conquers America through a prolonged campaign of island hopping through every major node of the diffused bureaucratic power structure. 

These positions are not necessarily incompatible, but an obvious divide lies between Yarvin and Rufo. One man advocates for a patient, passive acceptance of tyranny until an opportune moment arrives to demolish the American Regime in a single blow (Curtis Yarvin). The other man is racking up small, insignificant wins in Republican state legislatures, and systemically besieging the American bureaucracy on a thousand fronts. 

For decades, Curtis Yarvin has argued that any explicit resistance to America’s entrenched Leftist bureaucracy will merely strengthen the corrupt status quo, by providing a convenient scapegoat for the American Regime to punish. And a fun target for frenzied Lefist footsoldiers to beat like a piñata.

Donald Trump is a good example of how far the Regime is willing to go — ostracism, slander, lawsuits, Russian Pee-Pee Dossiers, FBI raids on Mar-a-Lago, mysterious snipers who just so happen to find themselves atop unguarded roofs. 

The imprisonment of the January 6th political protestors highlights what Curtis Yarvin has been saying for close to twenty years — if you don’t win after attempting to challenge the Regime, the rest of your life will be persecuted miserably. 

ZeroHPLovecraft, Messianic Onlineism and the Spirit of ‘16:

“Donald Trump is not a political radical in any reckoning prior to 2016. In fact, he’s very much a liberal, but he isn’t a leftist. Moreover, he’s a normie; it’s pretty clear to watch him and listen to him that he’s running on pure vibes. What makes him stand out, what makes him so threatening to the regime, is how confidently and arrogantly he violates all their little pieties. He gets on a stage and he says mean things about people who deserve it. Where others shrink in fear of social opprobrium, he stands tall and tells the whole world that he doesn’t care what some finger-waggling schoolmarms think. Curtis Yarvin wrote that Trump was a television king, not a real king, merely an actor who is very good at playing one. And that seems to be true. But then again, we live in a theater-kid-ocracy, and no one can tell the difference between play-acting and authentically-being.

What’s the most world-historically significant thing that could have happened on January 6th? Keep in mind that the people who entered the Capitol brought no guns. They peacefully milled around and stayed in the cordoned pathways designed for tourists, mostly. No government employees or police were harmed. One of the—pardon the euphemism—peaceful protestors was shot to death by a security guard. A not-insignificant proportion of them were covert federal agents or paid actors. But supposing Trump had marched in with them and declared himself the King of America in perpetuity —what then? Suppose he called on all military men in the vicinity to arrest the corrupt and traitorous bureaucrats, suppose he issued an ultimatum to the vast invisible leviathan— could it have worked? Such a thing sounds preposterous and yet the reaction from the regime itself suggests that it fears this possibility. Is it only that the Jan 6 protestors violated the sanctum sanctorum of the imperial cult of the USA, or is it something more?

The big mistake people make when they imagine these kinds of victory scenarios is that they stop thinking one second after they win. Life isn’t a movie, it’s an endless series of sequels, and even if we had Trump as the king, that’s only the first step. The bureaucracy, however corrupt it is, still mostly works even today, and our goal isn’t just to put our guys in at the top, it’s also to make it work better. All those banal administrative tasks that the leviathan performs still need doing. You still have 42 million feral blacks milling around. The women are all still emancipated, and most people still think that’s a good thing. True, normies are highly malleable to power and propaganda, but both of those things need to be exercised at a mass scale. It’s much easier to imagine revolution than it is to imagine governing, but revolutions are destructive and brief even in the best cases, and governance is slow and boring and it’s what we actually need.

…

Donald Trump is a normie, but he’s also a king. This isn’t the conservative think piece that winds you up and blueballs you, a diagnosis without an answer. The answer is that we need a Donald Trump, and no other Trumps are forthcoming, so we have to work with the one we have. But the answer is also that Donald Trump is necessary but not sufficient, and no one really knows what else we need. Donald Trump has the power, through the sheer force of charisma, to charm the Normie into going along with the spirit of ‘16. He doesn’t have the power to actually change what the Normie believes, but his masculine defiance of the overbearing mommy state is empowering to the great mass of men in this country who are downtrodden and browbeaten by a system that despises them.

…

In 2016, the brief, bright, hot fire of reaction drew some independent and unconventional thinkers, and it also drew a much larger mass of people who are psychologically normal. Independent thinkers don’t cooperate well, which is why they are independent in the first place. As a result, they can only share a group identity and a group being as long as there’s a Schelling point like Trump to smooth over all of their differences. Trump was always the president of poasting, and when they ritualistically banned him from Twitter on January 8th, all the heat started slowly draining out of us. The normiecons scattered. The right-revolutionary thinkers—the poasters—no longer had a center. But everyone still remembered what it was like to have a center, to have a Trump. In the intervening years, we have mostly forgotten.

…

Donald Trump is necessary but he’s not sufficient, and the spirit of ‘16 is the answer to the spirit of ‘68, for those who have the courage embrace it. For the moment, Donald Trump is essential to the spirit of ‘16, and although he could be replaced, it won’t be with any lifelong GOP stuffed suit, someone who was groomed to be a politician, pushed through WEF pipelines, the USA version of Komsomol. The regime declared war on everyone who voted for Trump, on everyone who supported him, on everyone who participated in January 6th or who dared to help him in any way. To vote for Trump again is to enlist as a soldier in that war, even though it’s not clear at this time how you’re going to coordinate and fight. It won’t be enough to sit around waiting for Trump to save you. Winning in real life isn’t like winning in Christianity. You don’t just give your heart to Christ (vote) and then wait for the salvation to roll in.”

—ZeroHPLovecraft, Messianic Onlineism and the Spirit of ‘16

MESSIANIC ONLINEISM AND THE SPIRIT OF ‘16 - The Asylum (asylummagazine.ca)

Until recently, any sign of disobedience to the status quo would be ruthlessly crushed by the Global American Empire. 

Even now, it’s a mistake to be caught protesting in public. But lately the pressure on ordinary men has eased up, to a noticeable extent. 

What’s changed?

The answer is that a series of ongoing and incessant humiliations has discredited the ruling caste of the American Empire, resulting in a fracture between their separate factions. Rampant inflation… the Israel-Gaza war… Houthi piracy near the Suez Canal… China threatening Taiwan… the botched retreat from Afghanistan… the Russia-Ukraine proxy war… 

Problems are mounting. 

Many elites have lost confidence in America’s institutions, which seem to be fueled more by inertia than any clear vision. 

Elites are defecting, en masse. 

A major dispute has emerged into plain view. On one side, you have Silicon Valley, the Pentagon, Wall Street, Erik Prince’s mercenary veterans, Zionists, and the Trump MAGA coalition. These are groups with some kind of interaction with the real world; industries and professions and individuals which suffer immediate, measurable physical consequences when mistakes occur. The new counterelite. On the other side, an ideologically poisoned coalition has assembled in favor of continuing the process of managed decline, recruiting anyone who is insulated from physical reality — NGOs, the State Department, career bureaucrats, Email Caste white-collar professionals, wine aunts, Big Pharma, Hollywood, news media, Google, Antifa, teachers and librarians, the judicial system. 

It’s a civil war, and civil wars are messy. 

Boundaries blur together.

But why now?

Questions of timing are always difficult to answer. The best theory I’ve come across is that the Biden-Harris administration’s proposal to seize the assets of Silicon Valley created enough fear in the tech industry to prompt an organized rebellion. 

Elon Musk is attacking viciously every day against the grandiose NARRATIVE, this opulent castle of illusions which upholds the myths of democracy; equality; promiscuity; homosexuality; liberation from all rules and responsibilities. The media is straining, exhausted. Fissures are spreading, vast yawning crevices splitting any semblance of normalcy. The Normies are spooked, and so are America’s elites. 

Bennett's Phylactery, This week: 25% For the Big Guy; Side Hustle Summer; NatalFest:

“Biden budget calls for 25% tax on unrealized capital gains:

Last week, the Biden Administration released their latest budget proposal, which raises the top marginal tax rate on capital gains to 44.6%, and includes a 25% annual minimum tax on unrealized capital gains for anyone with a net worth of over $100M.

For starters, this essentially kills tech investing, since the entire business model depends on a handful of stratospheric wins financing dozens of failed experiments.

It would introduce absurd distortions as companies brace for massive sell-offs every year so that investors can liquidate their portfolios to pay taxes. The act of selling alters the value of the asset — Elon Musk owns “$100B worth” of $TSLA, but he can’t sell it for $100B. Even small insider moves generate big fluctuations in the stock price.

If this rule had applied in 2020 during $TSLA’s massive bull run, Elon would have owed $66 billion in taxes — equivalent to 23% of his ownership stake in the company (assuming he liquidated near the top), and one-third of his current fortune. And that’s just the bill for a single year.

And it doesn’t even touch the complexities of startups and other assets that have never been sold and therefore have no objective valuation. Enforcing a tax on unrealized gains would mean empowering the IRS to investigate and make creative judgments about gains that are (by definition) not grounded in any market reality.

Imagine having to fight the county assessor over your home value every year, only its the feds, and it’s everything you own.

It gets even crazier when you think about ownership and executive control at startups.

Many tech founders hold a 51% stake in their startups to ensure they retain executive control — but investors often insist on the right of first refusal (to buy your stock before you sell it on the open market).

If your startup goes 100X, and you suddenly owe a tax bill 25 times greater than the total value of the company a year prior, congratulations — you are now a 38% shareholder-employee.

The proposal is so insane and destructive that I keep re-reading it, assuming I must have missed something. Every year, you have to give them a quarter of anything you build. And there’s no rebate if you lose your shirt the following year.

The administration’s justification for this is that too many investors are “inefficiently lock[ing] in portfolios of assets and hold[ing] them primarily for the purpose of avoiding capital gains tax on the appreciation, rather than reinvesting the capital in more economically productive investments.”

In other words: as the dollar collapses, they can’t have you holding capital and only paying rapidly-inflated USD taxes on rapidly-inflated USD revenues. They need the people who own productive assets to liquidate their actual, real-world shit and hand it over.

…

The proposal genuinely seems to have radicalized the reactionary-curious tech money.”

—Bennett's Phylactery, This week: 25% For the Big Guy; Side Hustle Summer; NatalFest

This week: 25% For the Big Guy; Side Hustle Summer; NatalFest

Cthulhu swims slowly, but he always swims Left.

For the past three hundred years, Leftism has been in constant advance — with rare exceptions, like Franco’s Spain. 

“My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.”

― Julius Evola

Conservatives have gotten accustomed to losing every battle, and keeping their heads down, like infantry who know that the enemy army has achieved air superiority — at any moment, the media, bureaucracy, and judicial system threaten to stomp on anyone with the courage to speak out. 

The current equilibrium is a sharp departure from the general trend of the past three centuries. 

Leftism is in retreat, stumbling backwards, groping for balance. A wild, frantic battle is playing out. 

The current counterelite has almost nothing in common, and is fundamentally untrustworthy and unreliable — Zionists care about Israel, Wall Street cares about profits, the Trump MAGA coalition cares about blue-collar jobs — this is not a coalition built to remain cohesive long-term. When incentives diverge, this alliance will dissolve, or shatter. Expedience and self-preservation make for strange bedfellows. But for the moment, America is a sinking ship, and the battlefield is split between a Leftist death cult steering towards the nearest iceberg in search of some kind of spiritual atonement for the inherited sins of colonialism… versus a loose network of survivors wrestling for control of the damaged, sinking vessel. 

Amid this chaos, during this temporary equilibrium, the passivity of Curtis Yarvin no longer makes sense — protesting on the front lawn of the White House is a terrible idea that might land you in prison, but there’s a brief window to seize tiny wins… and then build on that foundation. 

Let’s Start by Deporting One Million Illegals. 

The name of the game here is, “Death by a thousand cuts”.

It’s a siege. 

Belief in the traditional Narrative State of America is fading… withering… eroding… atrophying under the accumulated pressure of a thousand incongruent explanations for why the world is the way it is, under the accumulated pressure of geological layers of deceit and fraud and deception piled atop each other. 

It’s time to start thinking about the logistical problems of the future. For decades, every minor reform has been a Coup-Complete Problem. Now America’s traditional power structure has collapsed on itself. A ritualized civil war is playing out among complacent white-collar professionals. Bitterly, resentfully, the American Empire sinks into poverty. The ruling castes of GloboHomo are starting to feed on each other in a desperate struggle to retain their own sinecures. None of the elite factions are willing to sacrifice. They’re too busy fighting each other to pay attention to what’s happening on the ground.

There was a funny moment during J. D. Vance’s CNN interview on August 11th, when he subtly taunted the interviewer and entrapped her in a rhetorical snare which she pretended not to understand:

JD Vance: “I think Kamala Harris clearly owns the policies of the Biden-Harris administration, especially when we consider the fact as we’ve learned over the past few months, Joe Biden clearly isn’t capable of doing the job. So I think that drives home that Kamala Harris has been calling the shots. I mean, how could she not? I think Joe Biden doesn’t really know where he is.”

Q: (incredulous) “Kamala Harris has been calling the shots? Says who?”

JD Vance: (smirks) “Well, I think she has to have been. Right? Because if she’s not calling the shots Dana, then who is? And I do think that it drives home something that’s fundamentally dishonest about the way that Vice President Harris and also a lot of Senior Democrats have approached this. If you remember, for months, even years, the argument was that Joe Biden was sharp; he could clearly do the job. And the minute that he performed poorly in that debate and he became political deadweight, you have Kamala Harris and everyone else trying to throw him overboard. But the more troubling question is: Why did so many senior Democrats, including the Vice President, cover for him? And if Joe Biden wasn’t capable of doing the job, as even a lot of Democrats say now, was Kamala Harris in charge? Or was somebody else in charge? And that’s a real, real issue.”

—JD Vance, CNN (August 11th, 2024)

The joke, of course, is that America is governed by a diffused managerial bureaucracy which is insulated from the popular input of representative democracy. And America’s priests are losing track of their own deceits. Under the current fiction which is promoted by institutional consensus, Joe Biden was elected President in 2020 with more votes than Barack Obama — supposedly Biden was the most popular politician in all of American history. In reality, Biden is a senile figurehead who began his career as a puppet for the Du Pont dynasty which rules Delaware as its private fiefdom… and he spent his entire political career as a reliable, unimaginative machine politician who voted the way he was told to vote. Likewise Kamala Harris is a transparently awkward, robotic social climber who traded in personal relationships for decades. She lacks any ideological conviction, or ethical compass. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were apathetic political mercenaries who were willing to mouth fashionable slogans, to preen and strut according to the approved taboos and strictures of the party apparatus… as long as the money flowed, and their lifestyle remained comfortable. Kamala’s Vice President Tim Walz is not particularly ideological, either. He’s a sex pervert, and his political positions are designed to facilitate his sordid private hobbies. 

J. D. Vance smirks as he blames Kamala Harris for mismanaging the Biden administration, because he understands all these private truths. He knows the woman interviewing him will be forced to play dumb, because any public admission of these open secrets would end her broadcasting career.

It’s a fun schoolboy taunt, delivered with mock seriousness and a straight face.

We’re winning so much, we may even get tired of winning.

Let’s reconsider the proposal to cultivate an American Shenzhen, in defiance of the status quo. 

Assuming that America could build a thriving, innovative hub of economic productivity, what would happen next?

If somehow an alternative ecosystem could survive the inevitable rounds of lawsuits, persecution, and extrajudicial sabotage that would be aimed at an American Shenzhen — a seemingly miraculous outcome — then the result would simply be one functional city stranded in a dysfunctional global empire. One tiny outpost of aspirational productivity, surrounded by misery and despair. 

What happens next?

The answer is a lesson from Starcraft: “What do you do when you’re ahead of the opponent? Get more ahead.”

Never stop pushing an advantage, even if this necessitates a steady accumulation of marginal, insignificant, and unimpressive gains. 

If affirmative action was legally ended tomorrow, if feminism no longer gave favorable job opportunities, scholarships, internships, and promotions to women at the expense of better qualified men, we would have a fair(er) economy. Legal discrimination would end. But everyone hired under the old system of nepotism, or the ideology of grievance politics, would remain in their current positions. It’s likely women would continue to hire women… Indians would hire Indians… the formally prohibited systems of racial and sexual discrimination which have been painstakingly constructed by the Civil Rights Regime would not simply disappear. 

But on some level, that’s unimportant. 

Ignore the data; focus on the trendline. 

America is an exhausted, dying empire ruled by a sterile eunuch caste, and perverse incentives dictate that an effeminate priesthood will kneecap domestic competitors who could grow in power, prestige, and productivity in order to usurp their cozy sinecures. Any movement or industry perceived as a potential future threat will be strangled in the crib.

Elon Musk never would’ve been provided subsidies and federal contracts with Tesla and SpaceX if America’s ruling caste could have foreseen that he would someday challenge their authority.

All that’s needed to escape this ossified, decaying Regime is to create a pressure valve, where aspirational young men can find a path outside the credentialed gatekeepers. 

There’s a natural momentum, a peculiar gravity to these alternative pathways… the strength and confidence of life during ASCENT.

We are going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning. Someday this struggle will be triumphant, the rebellion will be concluded, and a new faction will assert itself over the destiny of America. 

Our challenge, until then, is to prepare for victory: by stacking small wins on a consistent basis, and by planning and strategizing for the headaches that accompany victory — the burden of managing this dying Empire, and finding creative answers to revitalize a hollowed-out husk of the American heartland.